The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America
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51 Hurrell and Stine, Hurrell Style, 127.
52 Zeitlin, “Day on the Set with Shirley,” 78; Joseph F. Dinneen, “Shirley Acclaimed by Boston,” Boston Globe, July 30, 1938, 1. For similar views, see, for example, Ruth Biery, “We Disagree with Shirley’s Mother,” Modern Screen, September 1935, 26–27ff.; Michael Jackson, “Protecting the Future of the Greatest Little Star,” Photoplay, March 1937, 26–27, 99–100.
53 Norman J. Zierold, The Child Stars (New York: Coward-McCann, 1965), 23.
54 David Emblidge, ed., My Day: The Best of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Acclaimed Newspaper Columns, 1936–1962 (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001), 27–28; Black, Child Star, 236–37 (emphasis in original).
55 Theodore Taylor, Jule: The Story of Composer Jule Styne (New York: Random House, 1979), 67, 69, 71.
56 “George F. Temple, Father and Manager of Shirley Temple,” Washington Post, October 2, 1980, C4; Black, Child Star, 83.
57 Black, Child Star, 156–57.
58 Black, Child Star, 52; Cary, Hollywood’s Children, 142. “You Are the Ideal of My Dreams” was written by Herbert Ingraham and published in 1910. Oliver Hardy popularized it in Laurel and Hardy’s 1931 film Beau Hunks.
59 Cary, Hollywood’s Children, 134.
60 Wilson, “Answer to Shirley Temple’s Future,” 69.
61 Foster, “Mrs. Temple on Bringing Up Shirley,” 23.
62 Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 97–112; Jacobson, Raising Consumers, esp. 56–92.
63 Cary, Hollywood’s Children, 242–43.
64 “Coogan a ‘Bad Boy,’ His Mother Testifies,” New York Times, April 19, 1938, 24; “Cinema: Kid,” Time, May 2, 1938, 41; “Coogan Says Stepfather Bet $100 as He Risked $2,” New York Herald Tribune, April 13, 1938, 16.
65 Black, Child Star, 80–83; Ben Maddox, “What Insiders Know about Shirley,” Screenland, August 1939, 91. For reassurances of George Temple’s careful stewardship of Shirley’s earnings, see, e.g., Temple, “Bringing Up Shirley,” 93–94; Temple, How I Raised Shirley Temple, 30; Sargent, “New Slant on Shirley,” 82; “Peewee’s Progress,” 44; “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1940, 12. Jackie Coogan’s father had made similar assurances as early as 1923. Diana Serra Cary, Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King: A Biography of Hollywood’s Legendary Child Star (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 99.
66 Gladys Hall, “Is Shirley Temple Going to Leave Us?” Movie Mirror, May 1940, 83.
67 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 7; Hochschild, Managed Heart, 20th anniv. ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 199–207.
68 Milton Berle with Haskel Frankel, Milton Berle: An Autobiography (New York: Delacorte, 1974), 44, 67; Tom Goldrup and Jim Goldrup, Growing Up on the Set: Interviews with 39 Former Child Actors of Classic Film and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 65.
EPILOGUE: SHIRLEY VISITS ANOTHER PRESIDENT
1 Shirley Temple Black, Child Star: An Autobiography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 324–26, 340, 347–50; Gladys Hall, “Mrs. Temple Tells What Shirley Will Do,” Movie Mirror, October 1940, 48.
2 During production of Since You Went Away in 1943, for example, David Selznick wrote, “I’m anxious to get the accent off this as a Temple vehicle and start hammering away at its tremendous cast.” Rudy Behlmer, ed., Memo from David O. Selznick (New York: Viking, 1972), 327.
3 T.S. [Theodore Strauss], review of Miss Annie Rooney, New York Times, June 8, 1942, 11.
4 Bosley Crowther, review of Kiss and Tell, New York Times, October 26, 1945, 16; Crowther, review of “Honeymoon, New York Times, May 19, 1947, 27; Crowther, review of That Hagen Girl, New York Times, October 25, 1947, 13. Reagan testified before the committee on October 23, 1947. Cooper also testified on October 23, and Menjou on October 21, 1947.
5 Bosley Crowther, review of Adventure in Baltimore, New York Times, April 29, 1949, 27.
6 Black, Child Star, 377–79, 381, 383–84.
7 “And They Lived Happily,” Newsweek, October 1, 1945, 32; Black, Child Star, 382, 385, 446; Dan Ford, Pappy: The Life of John Ford (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 217.
8 “Remembering Charles Alton Black,” Stanford Magazine, November–December 2005, http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2005/novdec/classnotes/black.html; Black, Child Star, 449, 458–60, 475.
9 Black, Child Star, 479–87.
10 Black, Child Star, 486.
11 “Shirley Temple Pays a Call on President,” New York Times, May 15, 1953, 19; Black, Child Star, 514; John Updike, “How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time,” in Problems and Other Stories (New York: Knopf, 1979), 44. The story first appeared in the August 19, 1972, issue of The New Yorker. Among the many books on postwar mass consumption, see esp. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003). Philip Rieff, review of The Organization Man, by William H. Whyte Jr., Partisan Review, Spring 1957, 305.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND PERMISSIONS
Many individuals and institutions helped to make this book possible. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, my professional home for more than forty years, provided support of numerous kinds, including a Spray-Randleigh Fellowship, research and travel funds, library services, and encouraging colleagues in the Departments of History and American Studies, especially Lloyd Kramer. I advanced this project considerably at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, supported in part by a John Medlin Jr. Senior Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. For scholars, the center is, quite simply, the happiest place on earth, made especially so because of its immensely helpful staff and stimulating fellows. To enumerate all of their individual contributions would be impossible, so let me simply express my profound gratitude to each and every one.
In conducting research for this book, I benefited greatly from the help of Michael Beck, Sara Bush, Angelica Castillo, Jennifer Donnally, Joey Fink, Rosalie Genova, Elizabeth Gritter, Rachel Hynson, Greg Kaliss, Jason Kauffman, Kimberly Kutz, Pamella Lach, Elizabeth Lundeen, Blake Sloanecker, Sarah Thomson Vierra, and Jessica Wilkerson. Rachel Hynson also translated Spanish-language articles, and Emily Taylor translated Japanese newspapers. Alison Robins gave me the benefit of her dance scholar’s eye in analyzing Bill Robinson’s numbers with Shirley Temple. Wanda Wallace lent me her cache of Shirley Temple films, and Charlene Regester called my attention to other films and essays. For other kindnesses and suggestions, I am indebted to James W. Cook, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Lawrence Glickman, Elliott Gorn, Karen Halttunen, Michael Hornblow, John Howard, Mary Kelley, Lary May, Michael O’Malley, Sharon O’Brien, Joel Pfister, and Charles Weinrab.
I wish also to thank the crucial aid of archivists at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the Harvard Theatre Collection, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the National Portrait Gallery, the Stanford University Library, the State Library of New South Wales, The Strong, and the Cinema Arts Library Special Collections at the University of Southern California, where Ned Comstock was especially obliging. The staffs at Corbis Images, Culver Pictures, and Photofest considerably eased the process of obtaining illustrations.
This project began as an essay in honor of Lawrence W. Levine, and his memory and example have propelled me along the way. At every opportunity I have pelted audiences with the fruits of my research, and, instead of flinging back fruit of their own, they have consistently responded with thoughtful questions. Such generous listeners include faculty and students at American Studies Association annual meetings, the College of William and Mary, Doshisha University, Indiana University, the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin, Kin
g’s College London, the National University of Singapore, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Sydney, the University of Ulster, Virginia Tech, and public audiences in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
I contributed early versions of portions of this book as essays in “Behind Shirley Temple’s Smile: Children, Emotional Labor, and the Great Depression,” in James W. Cook, Lawrence Glickman, and Michael O’Malley, eds., The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present, and Future (©2008 by the University of Chicago, all rights reserved) and “Shirley Temple’s Paradoxical Smile,” American Art 25, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 16–19 (©2011, Smithsonian Institution). I am grateful for permission from the University of Chicago Press and the Smithsonian Institution to republish them here.
As I drafted this book, several people gave me their discerning criticism, including my good friends William Leuchtenburg, a prodigious scholar of twentieth-century political history, and Peter Filene, a sensitive historian, novelist, and photographer. My brilliant editor at W. W. Norton, Alane Salierno Mason, vastly improved the book by her many discerning suggestions. As editorial assistant, Anna Mageras guided the process from manuscript to book. My meticulous copy editor, India Cooper, saved me from numerous slips and stumbles, as well as a few pratfalls. Another good friend, Richard Hendel, devised the book’s spirited design. My daughter, Laura, first brought Shirley Temple movies into my life, and as adults both she and my son, Peter, have cheered me onward. My wife, Joy S. Kasson, helped most of all, from her initial idea that I write about Shirley Temple through numerous archives, many drafts, and much handwringing to the very end. I cannot imagine writing this book—or, indeed, so much of my life—without her. Needless to say, the imperfections that remain are all my own.
INDEX
Entries correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
Abyssinian Baptist Church, 112
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 88, 167
Adler, Alfred, 136
Adventure in Baltimore, 238–39
advertising, 48
African American stereotypes in, 89
cuteness used in, 157
ST used in, 137–38
African Americans:
in American entertainment culture, 88–113
assessment of Robinson by, 110–13
effect of Depression on, 27, 29, 35, 87, 89, 90, 111, 113
in films, 52, 87, 88–89, 93, 110–111; see also specific entertainers
prejudice and discrimination against, 32, 72, 91, 94, 96–97, 110, 113
stereotyping of, 88–89, 91, 93, 95, 98–100, 104, 106–7, 110–12, 113
ST’s appeal to, 114, 117–18
Agar, John, 239–40
Agar, Linda Susan, 239, 241, 242, 243
Ager, Milton, 26
Alger, Horatio, 222
allowances, 230–31, 239, 240
Americana revue, 55
Angly, Edward, 13
“Animal Crackers in My Soup,” 173
Appalachia, Depression in, 18
Arno, Peter, 29, 257n
Astaire, Fred, 162
As Thousands Cheer, 58
Atlanta Constitution, 22, 107
“Auld Lang Syne,” 169
Australia, 124, 128, 147
Babes in the Woods, 53
Babes in Toyland, 53
Baby Burlesks series, 48–50, 50, 81, 127, 139, 159, 162, 163
Baby Take a Bow, 78–79, 80, 82, 83, 123, 152, 155, 213
“Baby Take a Bow,” 56–57, 56, 73, 171, 194
Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, The, 237
ballet, 182–83
bank holidays, 31, 37
Bank of United States, 12–13
Bara, Theda, 152
Barnes, Howard, 169, 172, 179, 191–92, 196
Barnum, P. T., 163, 202
Barrie, James, 86
Barrymore, Lionel, 99, 103
Bartholomew, Freddie, 214
financial exploitation of, 231
Baruch, Bernard, 10
Bateman, Kate, 53
Baum, L. Frank, 189
Baxter, Warner, 58, 61, 152
Bayard family, 200
Bell, Nelson, 183–84
Bennetto, Eileen, 128
“Be Optimistic,” 176
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 133
Berkeley, Busby, 57
Berle, Milton, 234
Berlin, Irving, 58, 282n
Berlin Wall, fall of, 244
Bernstein, Arthur, 231
Best, Willie, 89, 106
Bierbower, Jennie Cockrell, 224, 250n
Big Broadcast of 1936, The, 95, 97
“Big Five” motion picture conglomerates, 65–66
Biograph Girl, 202
Birth of a Nation, The, 104
Bisquick, 138
Black, Charles Alden, 239–40, 242, 243
Black, Shirley Temple, see Temple, Shirley
Blackbirds of 1928, 93
blackface minstrel tradition, 89, 91, 93, 97–98, 100, 100, 101, 104, 105, 111, 164–65
Blue Bird, The, 53, 155, 186–95, 187, 217
Blum, Edwin, 194
Blumer, Herbert, 127
Boles, John, 161
Bolger, Bridget, 131–32
Bonus Army, 55
Borglum, Gutzon, 15
Boston Globe, 64, 215
Bow, Clara, 204
Brandeis, Louis, 200–201
Breen, Joseph Ignatius, 69
Bright Eyes, 79, 82–87, 84, 152, 153, 190, 214
British common law, 231
Broadway theater:
child actors in, 53
Robinson in, 93
Brooklyn Eagle, 27
Brooks, Phyllis, 175
“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” 55–56
Brotherhood of Dining Car Cooks and Waiters, 110
Brown, Herman J., 86
Brown, King Rastus, 101
Brown, Lew, 56
Bruce, Nigel, 209
Bryan, William Jennings, 38–39
Buffalo Evening News, 43
Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 53, 181
Butcher, Edward, 153
Byers, John, 208
California Bank, 9, 206–7, 207
Campobello Island, 23
Cantor, Eddie, 162, 204
Captain January, 87, 120, 155, 161, 194
Captains Courageous, 214
“Carefree” (Bennetto), 128
Carter, Benny, 271n
Cary, Diana Serra (“Baby Peggy” Montgomery), 46, 48, 53, 229–30, 255n–56n
Cash, James Bailey, 212
Catholic Church, 131–33
in film censorship, 69, 70
censorship:
of fan magazines, 122
of films, 67–71, 155
Census Bureau, U.S., 255n
Cermak, Anton, 29
Chaplin, Charlie, 98, 134, 198, 204
Chase National Bank, 75
“Chasing Rainbows,” 26
Chicago Daily Tribune, 64, 184
Chicago Defender, 94, 107, 113
child actors:
abuses against, 4, 50–54, 173
and consumerism, 134–38, 230
eclipsed by adolescent stars, 198
emotional perils of, 199, 224, 234–35
financial ignorance and exploitation of, 230, 231–32, 240–41
financial value of, 53–54
Ford, J. and, 167–69
history of, 53, 104
kidnapping and extortion threats to, 213–15
labor restrictions on, 218
perceived as natural and unspoiled, 226–27
popularity of, 161–62
punishment and physical endangerment of, 52
rationale for, 53–54, 58–59
stage/screen mothers and, 46–47
in theme of Stand Up and Cheer!, 57–59
on TV, 243
Child Actors Bill (1939, Coogan Act), 232
Child and the Home, The (Liber), 225
childhood, children:
African American, 99–100, 147
age and gender division in, 136
allowances in, 230–31
as consumers, 4, 135–49, 199–200, 230, 233, 235–36
cuteness and, 156–59
as distinct stage of life, 156
effects of films on, 68, 126–29, 137
emotional expectations of, 234–35
fears of, 212
imitation by, 126–28
media exploitation of, 212–13
sentimentalization of, 53, 78, 85
ST as embodiment of, 115–16, 119, 125–26, 156–63, 200
as ST fans, 117, 128–31
ST fashions for, 139–41, 140
as unspoiled, 199–200, 205, 219–22, 225–27, 235
child labor:
emotional toll of, 234–35
laws on, 4, 54, 58–59, 156, 218, 234
Child Life, 125
child psychology, 136
child rearing:
Gertrude Temple perceived as expert in, 222–23, 225–26
of “new type of child,” 137, 199–200
“normality” concept in, 217
ST as model for, 125–26
Childs, Marquis, 257n
Child Star (S. T. Black), 224, 233
China, ST’s fame in, 115
Christmas:
merchandising at, 143
in ST film formula, 83–85, 190
Cinema and Theater, 133
Civil War, U.S., 19, 99, 103–5, 244
Clare, Sidney, 85
Cobb, Irwin S., 88
Cocoanut Grove, 270n
Coe, Richard, 197
Cokain, Ralph, 166
Colbert, Claudette, 121
Cold War, 243, 244
Colescott, Robert, 106
Collins, Eddie, 190
Columbia Pictures, 65
“Come and Get Your Happiness,” 176
Commerce Department, U.S., 66–67
Communists, 71, 238, 243
Congress, U.S.:
in FDR’s recovery strategy, 31, 32, 37
Hoover’s address to, 11
consumer envy, 147
consumerism, 78, 83, 114–15, 126
by children, 4, 135–49, 199–200, 230, 233, 235–36