Shirley Temple

by Anne Edwards

  *Although Temple was later to use the name Shirley Jane Temple, her birth certificate shows no middle name.

  2 THE TEMPLES were staunch Republicans. Through his connections with the bank, George was allied to the rich, inflexible Old Guard members of the party. When Herbert Hoover won the Republican nomination for president in 1928, they were not pleased, and neither was George. Hoover had served under President Wilson—a Democrat. He had favored membership in the League of Nations. The Old Guard called him “Sir Herbert” because they believed he was pro-British. Nonetheless, his reputation as a great humanitarian while secretary of commerce under Calvin Coolidge had made him especially popular with women voters. He had played a central role in helping the jobless, even during the heady years of Coolidge prosperity. He had been “remarkably sensitive to the plight of Indians, blacks, women, and children,” and he had handled relief operations during the disastrous Mississippi flood of 1927 with tremendous zest and with quick aid to the million people made homeless by it.

  Hoover had not needed the Temples’ votes (although he received them) to defeat New York Governor Alfred E. Smith’s second try for the presidency. In addition to the bigoted responses to the governor’s Roman Catholicism, there was his “urban provinciality.” Al Smith had a New York accent, and “thanks to radio, listeners far beyond New York were able to hear him for the first (foist) time, as the governor spoke to them personally (poisonally) on such matters as work (woik) and research (resoich). And there was snobbishly cruel prejudice in those upper-class drawing rooms where all it took to provoke laughter was for someone to say, ‘Can you imagine Mrs. Smith in the White House?’”

  Radio had a great influence on Gertrude’s life. She listened to its dramas (immediately called soap operas because of their commercial sponsors), like My Gal Sunday, the lead-in for which was, “Can a coal miner’s daughter find happiness married to an English lord?” And Myrt and Marge, about a close relationship between a mother and her daughter. George was doing well at the bank, and the Temples were considering the purchase of a second car. Gertrude avidly read a spectrum of popular magazines, from Good Housekeeping to Photoplay to Vanity Fair. A good seamstress, she copied the clothes she saw on modish women and their children for Shirley and herself. And when Shirley’s blond, gently curling hair grew to abundance, Gertrude studied photographs of the young Mary Pickford and recreated Pickford’s hairstyle on her daughter. A morning ritual entailed dampening Shirley’s thick hair with watered-down waving solution, winding exactly fifty-six separate ringlets around her forefinger, securing each with a bobby pin until it was dry, carefully removing the pins and finally brushing the curls loosely in place again over her finger. Gertrude had saved several dolls from her childhood and had kept them propped up on her bed during the seventeen years she had been married to George. These she now gave to Shirley,* no longer having need herself for an inanimate doll. She called Shirley “Presh” for precious, and she doted on every clever thing the child did.

  Being a girl and so much younger than her brothers, Shirley was coddled by all members of the family. “When Mom and Daddy went out evenings, they’d hire a baby sitter to stay with me,” she was to recall. “Jack [her older brother] always got in a tizzy for fear she’d neglect me, so finally the family solved the problem by leaving Jack in charge. If I cried, he’d put on Mom’s bathrobe and go in to pick me up, to deceive my youthful innocence into thinking it was Mom in person.”

  Gertrude concentrated on Shirley. With the boys in school all day, her daughter quickly became the focus of her life, and as Gertrude listened to the music from the radio she would sing and dance with Shirley, who pranced around the room with great agility. When Shirley reached the age of three, Gertrude decided that she should have dance instruction, claiming she planned to give Shirley the fun she herself had missed.

  During the twenties, the high-pressure efforts of promoters who were devoted to making prosperity and California synonymous in the public mind forced the state’s economy to giddy heights. By 1930, the population of California had increased 65 percent over the previous ten years, outstripping any other state in the Union during the same period. Los Angeles, surrounded by fast-expanding suburbs, became a manufacturing, oil-refining, fruit-shipping and movie-making center. But with the Crash late in 1929, the bubble burst. Jobless newcomers thronged in by the hundreds of thousands, creating an immense burden on California’s economy.

  Although George was compelled to take a cut in salary, the bank he worked for remained sound. Fortunately for the Temple family, their house and car were paid for. Purchase of a second car was forgotten, and they pulled their belts a bit tighter. George’s innate conservatism, his refusal to be swept into any high-risk investment, had kept them solvent, whereas many of their neighbors and friends were not so fortunate and had their investments wiped out. Gertrude had little spare time for the local afternoon bridge games. As neighbors were forced to sell their homes, she became more and more aloof, private, devoting her days to Shirley’s care and early education, which included teaching the child the words of songs she played on the phonograph. To her amazement, Shirley had almost perfect pitch, extraordinary in a child of three, an ability to bring expression to her words, to move to the music gracefully and, when shown by Gertrude, to repeat a simple dance step.

  The movie Skippy, made in 1930, propelled the eight-year-old Jackie Cooper to stardom. Magazines were filled with stories about “America’s Boy—blonde, hazel-eyed, clear-skinned, brave, fearless, loved by mother and father—.” Actually, America’s Boy was the illegitimate son of a Jewish father and an Italian mother, but Gertrude would not have found that information in the magazines she read. They did, however, print stories of how the child was brought by his mother’s whim to an audition at Paramount, where out of three hundred boys he was chosen for the role. Articles about other new child stars were frequent—beautiful “Little Mitzie” Green, who had been cast as Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer and with Cooper in Skippy; Mickey McGuire (soon to be Rooney), the young star of the series that carried his name; and Spanky MacFarland, signed at age three to star in the Our Gang comedy series.

  Hollywood’s “baby boom” came into full swing with the Depression, where every asset a family had was used to put food on the table. Promoters saw gold in this, and “beautiful baby” contests abounded. All parents hoped a published photograph of their darling would catch the eye of a Hollywood casting director. Dancing schools provided another opportunity for a child to be seen while being taught how to take direction. Many mothers enrolled their children in these schools across the country, not to attain a bit of grace but to qualify eventually in the school’s ultimate bait—a local performance in an auditorium or theater that might be covered by the press (especially likely in small towns). Class lessons in most such schools cost a parent fifty cents an hour (the median hourly wage in 1930–33). Parents also purchased tap shoes and costumes for their children from the school.

  Santa Monica had several of these children’s dancing schools, and one of them was owned by a depositor at George’s bank. “She told him how healthy it was for a child to dance,” Shirley recalled her father telling her. “I was allowed to be a baby for about two years. So I had a couple of years as a lazy baby. I thought every child worked, because I was born into it.” After only a few of these local lessons, Gertrude felt Shirley deserved better instruction. The Los Angeles-Hollywood area boasted two of the most professional dancing schools in the country: the Ernest Belcher School of the Dance on Western Avenue and Ethel Meglin Studios, which occupied a building on the Mack Sennett studio lot (leased at this time to a company called Educational Films). In addition to his nationally syndicated column on dance techniques, Ernest Belcher trained fifteen hundred to two thousand pupils a year in a studio that boasted thirty thousand square feet of floor space and a teaching staff (trained by him) of twenty-five. The studio had been financed by Cecil B. DeMille, who relied on the impresario to teach his hundreds of e
xtras how to get through a dancing sequence.

  When Ethel Meglin opened her establishment in the summer of 1930, she had only thirty dance students, all children of a range of ages. With a monthly rental of twenty-seven dollars to meet, drastic measures were necessary. Annually, during Christmas week, Franchon and Marco, producers of the Los Angeles Loew’s State Theater’s lavish stage productions, presented a huge kiddie revue of one hundred youngsters, “the O’Neill Children from San Francisco.” Meglin, who was perhaps even a better promoter than Belcher, approached Franchon and Marco and got them to agree to hire the Famous Meglin Kiddies, an act with more than one hundred kids—for which she would charge 20 percent less than the O’Neill Children (after all, being local, she did not have to pay housing and travel costs). When they parted, one condition had been set forth: Mrs. Meglin’s kiddie act would have to audition in six weeks. If the producers liked what they saw, the act was in.

  Ethel gathered together her present students and offered free lessons to their sisters and playmates in exchange for helping her pad out the act. “The place was bedlam for a solid week,” Mrs. Cary reports, “children running in and out at all hours, mothers waiting in cars up and down the street, and rehearsal rooms so few and small, Ethel had to take students in shifts.” By audition time, the Famous Meglin Kiddies numbered one hundred and one. Only eight of her best students did solo work, two of them boys, but Mrs. Meglin had taught her small female charges enough basics to form lines, work in unison and, with nymphet legs bared, execute a high and somewhat provocative kick. The group was booked and ran for two weeks over Christmas, 1930, to much publicity and full houses.

  Ethel Meglin Studios was besieged with new applicants, almost all with mothers anxious for their children to appear in the next year’s Christmas kiddie revue or to be seen by one of the several movie talent scouts who now appeared regularly at Mrs. Meglin’s whenever a child was needed for a film.

  Several articles about Mrs. Meglin and her school’s great popularity with casting directors appeared in the Los Angeles newspapers during the spring of 1931. Gertrude made inquiries and found that lessons were an expensive one dollar for a forty-five-minute class. The dance studio was also twenty-two miles from the Temples’ home in Santa Monica. When Gertrude first consulted George about enrolling Shirley, he made it very clear that he thought the price extravagant and that he did not want Shirley to be exposed to the motion-picture environment. Gertrude persisted. A short time later, she and her three-year-old daughter were traveling—not once but twice—weekly to the school in the Temples’ Graham-Paige, after Shirley proved at her audition to have an uncanny and extraordinary talent for learning a dance step by looking away, or closing her eyes, listening to the sound and rhythm of the taps of her teacher’s feet and then repeating them with her own.

  Despite what has always been written about the Temples’ disinterest in their daughter having an early film career, Gertrude, at least, never considered another alternative. Had she only wished to develop Shirley’s dancing skills to help her daughter attain more grace and some playmates, she would have selected a neighborhood school. But she was determined to enroll Shirley, who was only a tot at this time, at Mrs. Meglin’s highly competitive studio. Shirley would also be one of the youngest in her class, for Mrs. Meglin did not like to take students under the age of five. Without question, Gertrude was—through Shirley—acting out her own fantasies; and the little girl—who had danced to please her mother from the time she was aware of the approval it gained—held on to that love and approval the only way she knew how, by continuing to dance while her mother watched.

  Judy Garland was later to recall her own experience at Meglin Dance Studio in 1931, when she was nine years old and still Frances Gumm, one of the three Gumm sisters. Low on funds, her mother, Ethel, played piano for the classes in exchange for lessons for her three daughters. Each one was lectured solemnly beforehand that she was to listen closely to what her fellow classmates had to say (in the event that one would leak some information about an audition) but that she herself must remain aloof, lips sealed about any similar information they might have.*

  Later, in publicity interviews, Gertrude always claimed that Shirley was accidentally “discovered” in dancing class (just an innocent recreation for Shirley) and that she had never seriously considered a career for her daughter. But from the beginning, she had made the rounds with Shirley to various casting directors. The big kiddie series at the time was the Our Gang comedy series. By 1931, many members of the cast had grown into adolescence, and a call went out for new young faces. Hal Roach, the producer of the Our Gang comedies, recalled; “About Shirley Temple, her mother brought her in five or six times . . . and nobody’d let her get beyond the outer office. But bear in mind there would usually be dozens of kids out there every single day. You couldn’t see them all, and the casting director apparently didn’t think Shirley Temple had anything to offer the gang so she didn’t get chosen.”

  Educational Films was established by Earl Woolridge Hammons in New York in 1919. They soon were “a virtual factory for comedy shorts” and did well with such stars as Buster Keaton and Harry Langdon. The combination of talkies and the Crash had nearly bankrupted them, forcing them to close their eastern studios and rent space at Sennett’s on the Coast. Jack Hays, a local entrepreneur, was put in charge of production, and Charles Lamont, a director who had made some shorts for Mack Sennett, was hired as director. The idea of putting sound to some of their short silent comedies was abandoned in favor of making a kid’s series that might compete with Our Gang, but with a difference. The comedies, to be called Baby Burlesks, would have small children doing takeoffs of motion pictures by mimicking the adult stars. The original plan was to dub in adult voices, which would have given the shorts a satirical edge.

  Still operating from offices in New York, Hammons telegraphed Lamont that he was on his way west on the Twentieth Century and wanted at least twenty-five kids, preferably age five or younger, to begin shooting. Lamont called the Meglin school, which was on the same lot, to say he was coming over in a few minutes. Taking advantage of the short time before his arrival, the mothers swarmed in to primp their daughters’ hair and change them into more eye-catching costumes.

  The previous week, another scout had come. A notice had been posted on the bulletin board, but Gertrude hadn’t seen it. “There was a lot of excitement [on] that day and the whole class was dressed up in their best clothes,” Shirley remembered. “I arrived in an old dancing dress. When Mom discovered they expected a movie scout . . . we left [Gertrude feeling Shirley was not dressed correctly]. . . . She had the car started, ready to go home, when my teacher came out and asked her if she would let the movie scout see me.” Gertrude had to stay outside the classroom with the other mothers “while 30 or 40 of us paraded up and down before the movie scout.” Shirley had not been selected, a fact Gertrude blamed on her careless attire. Since then, Shirley had attended classes dressed in her best dancing outfit. Still feeling the pain and guilt of the last rejection, caused because she had not looked right, Shirley could think of nothing else to do but hide when Charles Lamont, tall and tanned and wearing puttees in the DeMille manner, swaggered in with two assistants. She and another little girl slipped behind the piano.

  Most of the children in the class were too old (the script called for these children to walk around in diapers). Lamont was ready to leave when he saw Shirley’s and her friend’s tiny feet beneath the piano and asked them to come out. Both children were then asked to audition the next day.

  George was strenuously opposed to the whole thing. Shirley was just a few months past her third birthday, and he felt she would not be in a position to know if this was what she wanted or not—just that she was doing what pleased her mother. Finally relenting, with Gertrude’s insistence and without her parents investigating the content of these one-reelers, which were “exploitative, racist and not necessarily intended for children,” Shirley went for an interview.r />
  “And then the fun started,” Shirley says. “You never saw so many children in your life . . . children yelling and children having their noses blown, and children getting into fights with one another.” She adds that “Mom and I sort of stayed on the sidelines.” But Earl Hammons noted, “I was walking across the grounds of the studio talking to Charlie [Lamont]. A lot of kids were waiting. One little girl caught my coat and pulled it a little bit and I looked down and saw the most beautiful little thing, and I picked her up in my arms and I said, ‘What’s your name?’

  “She said, ‘Shirley.’

  “I said, ‘What are you doing here?’

  “ ‘I’m going to work for you,’ she answered.

  “So I told Charlie, ‘You want to watch her. She knows what she wants.’”

  Lamont asked all the mothers to walk away and leave the children alone with them for ten minutes.

  “Mom gave my curls a few twists with her fingers,” Shirley recalled. “She whispered to me, ‘If he asks you to dance, or asks you to sing, just do the way you always do, Presh.’”

  With Jack Hays, Lamont talked briefly to each child. Twenty-five were selected and the rest told to leave. The mothers of those who remained were called back. “Mr. Hays wanted us all [the children] to get undressed,” Shirley remembered. “In the picture they were going to make [we] had to wear . . . diapers, with great big safety pins in front. So all the mothers undressed their children, and Mom undressed me, and we all ran around in our panties. . . . I had to stand in front of the camera in [them], and smile, and wink my eye, and shake my shoulder two or three times.”

  But she did not get the lead role of Charmaine in the movie titled War Babies, a takeoff on the World War I film What Price Glory?, which had starred Dolores Del Rio. Audrey Rae Leonard, a pretty English child, was chosen. Shirley was to play a minor role. When Lamont and Jack Hays, the man who was the active producer on the series, saw the rushes, they decided to scrap poor Audrey, who was too stiff on camera, and called the Temples to tell them they had decided to cast Shirley as the vest-pocket Dolores Del Rio. (Shirley adds, “As soon as I made the screen test [Dad] wanted me to get a part more than Mom did. He was so happy when Mr. Lamont finally called up and said that he was giving me the part of Charmaine.”)