Shirley Temple

by Anne Edwards

  Shooting schedules for Shirley’s films were six to seven weeks. The law now required she “attend school” three hours a day. She seemed more alert in the morning, and so, when possible, her most difficult scenes were filmed then. She would break for lunch in her bungalow with Gertrude and Klammie (a half hour), take a nap (a half hour—she hated this), then put in an hour or two of studies before she went back to the set, returning to the bungalow in the late afternoon to complete her schoolwork. Between films, she was still expected to be at the studio for six seven-hour days a week for interviews, costume fittings for upcoming pictures and photographic sessions.*

  George Hurrell, one of Hollywood’s most distinguished photographers, did a series of portraits of Shirley in his studio in 1935. Their first session was lengthy and Shirley never complained, but he could see how exhausted she had become. “I remember once she fell asleep when I was changing a background.” Hurrell was moved by this and “photographed her that way. She must have been tired all the time because of her hectic schedule.” At the next sitting, when Gertrude sharply disciplined her for squirming when Hurrell was photographing her, and he tried to intervene, he was warned sharply by Gertrude, “You tend to your photography, Mr. Hurrell, and I’ll tend to my daughter.”

  Looking back, Shirley claimed, “To me [making movies was] always a great big gorgeous game of let’s-pretend. Children spend most of their time pretending to be somebody else anyhow. . . . I had a studio full of people to play with me and all the costumes and scenery I needed.”

  Her studio “friends,” with the exception of Mary Lou, were all adults who depended upon her or her services for their livelihood. There was Klammie, a tall woman in her thirties, protective, intelligent, and mildly martinet; Grif, the guard (so tall that Shirley couldn’t talk to him when he stood up), who “carried a marvelous pair of handcuffs in his pocket” that she could “beg” away and “handcuff people to chairs”; and there were her directors, who would from time to time enter into the spirit of childhood games with her. Most of her co-performers claim she was “whisked away” by Gertrude after a scene was completed and marched directly back to her bungalow. She listed as great studio games “looking through the camera, and listening to sound through the ear phones, lots of fun.” Joseph LaShelle, the assistant cameraman who had to measure the distance from the camera to the actors, would let her guess the yardage. “Sometimes he pretended I was wrong . . . and then I’d get even by snarling it up.” Klammie invented a game in which she was Shirley’s age and co-pupil, “a droop of a girl named Mergetroid who was barely able to read and write.” Klammie would give a wrong answer as Mergetroid, and Shirley would correct her. Doc Bishop, the studio’s top publicity man, taught her to ride a bicycle, and then, fearing she might fall off, ran beside her for ten minutes to an hour (suffering huge blisters from the effort). Hulda Anderson (“Ande”), the wardrobe mistress, cut doll clothes for her in her free time. One boon was that almost all of the staff working on the Temple films remained for years, so that there was a continuity.

  Saturday was her “big day.” Lessons were abandoned, so she had an extra three hours. During that time, Klammie read her stories, or Shirley engaged the crew in games.

  Gertrude and George had made arrangements to take Shirley from time to time to a house they rented in Palm Springs “to have a complete rest from all studio photographers and publicity men.” When Doc Bishop discovered this, he decided that doing a photo layout at Palm Springs would be a good way to show how America’s princess relaxed. “After the studio sent down their publicity man, I had to stop playing hide-and-seek and riding my pony and going swimming so that they could take pictures of myself playing hide-and-seek and riding my pony and going swimming.”

  Sonny was sent to military school in Arizona in the fall of 1935 and came home only for the holidays, and Jack was attending Stanford University. Gertrude remained Shirley’s constant companion. David Butler has said that the two no longer had to exchange words to communicate. All it took was a look from Gertrude, a nod of the head, and the child would react appropriately.

  On February 27, 1935, Shirley was presented with a miniature Oscar “in grateful recognition of her outstanding contribution to screen entertainment during the year, 1934.” For the first, and only, time, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had thrown the voting open to write-in ballots, and Shirley had received an overwhelming number of these votes for her performances in Little Miss Marker and Bright Eyes. Child actors had not previously been recognized by the Academy at awards time. They therefore decided to give her a special award. She attended the evening ceremonies with her parents, and fell asleep before her turn came. Gertrude woke her up, and she instantly bounced down the aisle and up onto the stage, and later joined hands with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, who had won the Best Actor and Best Actress awards for It Happened One Night.

  By now, Shirley was virtually unable to appear in public. Hordes of people would wait at the gates of the studio for a glimpse of her getting into or out of her car. The same was true at the gates of her home. There was no opportunity to go down to the beach and play in the sand occasionally as she had done in Santa Monica. Enterprises such as setting up a lemonade stand in a back alley were ended. Such open exposure was believed to be far too dangerous. There was talk of kidnapping threats, but no concrete evidence was ever revealed. Nonetheless, these were hard times, and Shirley was a natural target for ransom, and she recalls numerous times when she was ordered by Gertrude or the chauffeur to ride crouched on the floor of the car as there had been threats to her life.

  The famous came to the set to meet her—the great writer Thomas Mann had his picture taken with her, as did the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. Other stars valued publicity shots with her to plug their own new films or to boost their popularity. Later in 1935, she traveled to Washington at FDR’s invitation. The Temples were Republicans and not Roosevelt supporters, but the honor of being asked to the White House was not to be dismissed. For Roosevelt, with the Depression still grinding on and an election coming up the following year, Little Miss Bright Eyes was a definite crowd-pleaser to have on his side.

  “I liked the President a lot,” Shirley later commented. “I had lost a tooth just before I met him. Franklin said, ‘I’m concerned! Shirley Temple is supposed to smile a lot.’ Well, I wouldn’t smile, because I was trying to cover up my lost tooth, because I was embarrassed by it.” The Roosevelts invited Shirley and her parents to Hyde Park. The Temples went grudgingly, but once there, were charmed by Franklin and greatly impressed by Eleanor.

  “Mrs. Roosevelt was bending over an outdoor grill cooking some hamburgers for us,” Shirley remembered. “I was in my little dress with the puffed sleeves and white shoes and had this very feminine lace purse—which contained the slingshot I always carried with me. When I saw Mrs. Roosevelt bending over, I couldn’t resist. I hit her with a pebble from my slingshot. She jumped quite smartly and the Secret Service men assigned to her were extremely upset for a while. But no one saw me do it except my mother, and she didn’t blow the whistle on me until we got back to the hotel. Then she let me have it in the same area I’d attacked the First Lady.”

  Shirley’s films in 1935 all proved to be crowd-pleasers. The Little Colonel, a story of the Old South, had her up against crusty old Lionel Barrymore (again as the grandfather who had disowned one of her parents), this time with better results. As her sidekick, she had the legendary “Bojangles,” Bill Robinson, and the two of them were sheer magic together. This is the film in which they executed their famous staircase dance.* After the first rehearsal, Robinson sat down and “kissed each of her dancing feet. . . . Uncle Bill doesn’t tell her feet where to go, her heart tells her,” he is claimed to have said.

  Unfortunately, the film has a long story to tell that is both sentimental and predictable, and the best scenes with Robinson are toward the end. Until that time, Shirley pouts a lot as she attempts to show she is of the same crusty
fiber as Barrymore. Of course, she patches things up between her mother (Evelyn Venable) and her grandfather, and in so doing saves her father (John Lodge) from bankruptcy and an attempt on his life. The finale takes the form of a “pink party” given by the grandfather, and is photographed in Technicolor, one of the few times Shirley’s films used color. This film had been begun while Sheehan was still at the studio, as was Our Little Girl, released only two months later (May 17, 1935), in which the story and Shirley’s character are both undeveloped. In it, Shirley runs away to the circus when her parents fight. Joel McCrea portrays the father in this least interesting of Temple vehicles that year, but the scenes with Shirley and Poodles Hanneford the clown are extremely winning. Shirley’s name alone made this picture pay off at the box office.

  To understand just how constantly Shirley was working and how fast the studio was turning out her films, one only need note that her next feature, Curly Top, was released on August 7, less than three months later. This was the first of four Temple remakes of Mary Pickford silent films, and one of her most winning movies. In this, she and her older sister (Rochelle Hudson) are orphaned (a frequent Temple story device) and rescued from an asylum by a rich bachelor (John Boles), who eventually marries the sister. The score is lively and the musical numbers well choreographed. Shirley sang “Animal Crackers (in My Soup)” with a chorus of sixty orphans, as she danced up and down the aisles of the orphanage dining room, on and off chairs, with incredible expertise. She performed a hula and tapped to John Boles’s accompaniment of “Curly Top” on the lid of a white baby-grand piano. In “When I Grow Up,” she performs an entire tabloid with several changes of costume from small child, to teenager, bride and old woman. Her diction is perfect, her phrasing excellent, and her voice changes (especially as the elderly lady) in fairly astounding fashion. Curly Top is the quintessential Temple film. She is bright, always surprising you with her tricks. She makes you laugh and shed a tear even though you know perfectly well all will end happily. The arch and delightful Arthur Treacher was Boles’s butler and Shirley’s cohort. Although he had left the studio long before its release, Curly Top was the last Temple movie to have been supervised by Winfield Sheehan, and it was a gratifying end to their relationship.

  Released during Christmas week, 1935, The Littlest Rebel was a Civil War story, produced personally by Zanuck and directed by Shirley’s old friend David Butler. She was again teamed with Bill Robinson. The film was based on a successful play by Edward Peple. Her father (Boles again) goes to the front to fight, and Shirley is left in the care of her ailing mother and the family’s black servants: Robinson, Willie Best, and Bessie Lyle as Mammy. In The Little Colonel, Robinson had proved himself “a well-behaved, mannerly negro attendant,” as he glided up the stairs with Shirley saying, “Now, Honey, all you gotta do is listen with your feet.” His “good old Bill” stood patiently by as the old Southern Colonel Lionel Barrymore “cursed and cussed and fussed at him.” He was presented as the definitive Uncle Tom who “knew de ole massa didn’t mean no harm.” His character in The Littlest Rebel was at least a trace more dignified.

  Bill Robinson was called the “Brown conqueror of a white world,” but this was not exactly true. Without question, “Bojangles” had received more recognition from white organizations and societies than any other black man in the United States at that time, and he was “tremendously proud of this triumph over race prejudice.” But he remained cast in the stereotypical roles of the Jim Crow Negro. When appearing in theaters across the country, he had to enter through rear doors, could not eat in the same restaurants as other members of the cast (although he was the star), or use the same toilets. He liked to tell the story of how on one tour the predominantly white company, when told that “Bojangles” had to ride the service elevator, got in and rode it with him, a sad comment on his “triumph over racial prejudice.”

  He had been raised in Richmond, Virginia, by his grandmother, an emancipated slave. At the age of six, he was already earning nickels and dimes in Richmond beer gardens. By 1906, when he was twenty-eight, he was a star earning thirty-five-hundred dollars a week in theaters and nightclubs. Zanuck had signed him to a five-year contract that paid him sixty-five hundred dollars a week when he worked in a film and gave him the right to also appear in theater and nightclubs, an unusual studio concession. Critics showered him with praise. He was the greatest dancer in America and a tremendous box-office attraction. Still, he met with much prejudice on the Fox lot (as did black performers at most studios).

  In The Littlest Rebel, Robinson remains the good-natured servant, but with a difference. In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett must protect and care for the black servants in her household when the Yankees invade her plantation, but in The Littlest Rebel Shirley turns to Uncle Billy (Robinson) for safety, and he provides just that. When her mother dies and her father is captured by Union troops and hauled off to a Northern prison camp, he becomes her guardian-companion. They trudge off to Washington to see President Lincoln, street-dancing on the way to raise funds while sleepy-eyed Willie Best passes the hat.

  Throughout most of her films, Shirley was surrounded by black servants who were willing to lend a helping hand. As they shared good times together, often through tears or in the face of adversity, Depression audiences came away feeling that if everyone could be kinder to one another, they might survive the bad times.

  “During this period of bread lines, of labor problems, of fireside radio chats from President Roosevelt, and of W.P.A. Programs, of intellectual Leftist activities, blacks in films were used to reaffirm for a socially chaotic age a belief in life and the American way of living itself,” says black historian Donald Bogle. An “inside” industry joke was that a Temple picture was incomplete without at least one “darky.”* It was with the “black low-lifers—the livery keepers, the faithful old butlers, the big bossy maids, the doormen, the cooks . . . and the pickaninnies . . .” that Shirley’s character could relax and be herself, to kick up her heels and have some good clean fun (although The Little Colonel had her making mud pies with her small black friends). While the world looks bleakest for her, Shirley and Robinson have a rollicking time doing a sidewalk dance to “Pollywolly Doodle” in The Littlest Rebel.

  Both Boles and Robinson nearly drowned while shooting a Civil War escape scene for this film. A deep fifteen-foot rushing stream, part of the old Tom Mix ranch, existed on the back lot. The two men were to cross the stream on an enormous log, to which the bare branches were still attached for purposes of camouflage. But their combined weight caused the log to overturn, and Robinson’s hand somehow was caught in a branch. He shouted for help as he went down. Still clinging to the whirling limb that was being carried quickly downstream, he was jerked up and his head struck the log with such force that he was knocked unconscious. Boles managed to swim to the bank, but Robinson’s hold was broken and he went to the bottom. A special-effects man at the scene ran along the bank, jumped in and finally pulled a terrified Robinson to safety. Badly bruised, Robinson nonetheless returned the next day for a scene with Shirley.

  Halfway through the year, Shirley topped the box-office charts as the most popular star in the world. Her films grossed unheard-of sums in India and Japan, as well as in North America. And her pictures had solved Zanuck’s and Twentieth Century-Fox’s financial problems and made the studio competitive with Metro and Warner Brothers. Gertrude had fulfilled part of her dream. Shirley was as big a star as Mary Pickford had been. Now her position had to be maintained.

  Zanuck’s influence on Shirley’s films can be seen in the margin notes he made on the script of The Littlest Rebel. “Perfect Temple formula,” he inked on the first draft—“real sincere drama or comedy, then put her in it and tell it from her point of view.” He suggests that the film “[o]pen on an old Southern plantation—birthday party for Virgie (Shirley Temple)—6 years old—all children from neighboring plantations—twenty kids—old costumes—cut cake—music—dancing—chance for comedy as kids
waltz and change partners—Sally and Negro kids love Virgie—they bring presents—ten kids—she thanks them—then go into dance—at height of comedy—rider arrives—news of war—party broken up at once—parents hurry kids home—kids bewildered—what is war—all festivities close—everybody leaves—adults nervous—women start to cry—men worried—Virgie left alone with huge empty ball room—partly forgotten—she feels like crying—scene with Bill (Robinson)—‘What is War?’—Fade.”*

  The script was not written by Zanuck, but the writers merely fleshed out what he outlined above. Zanuck also altered history a bit by having Virgie present (“Leave her here. She may be an inspiration.”) when Lincoln thoughtfully begins to write “Four score and seven years ago . . .”

  Within a year, the house in Santa Monica that had seemed so grand to Gertrude proved too small to accommodate the gifts of dolls and toys being sent to Shirley. Besides, its design would never allow Shirley protection and privacy, as fans peered into windows and knocked at the front door. Gertrude found her family a suitable home at 227 North Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood Heights, next door to her old acquaintance ZaSu Pitts. A massive stone wall was erected around the property, with an iron electronic gate that could be operated from the house. No matter what the time of day, fans stood pressed against the bars of the wrought iron waiting for a glimpse of America’s first little princess.

  The house was of a French-Normandy design, its front hidden from the road and its rear looking down across a slope of hills to the Will Rogers Memorial Polo Grounds. There was a shallow swimming pool on the property (so Shirley would be safe). Next to the pool was a glass-brick playhouse, the gift of “a modernist construction company.” The estate also contained a badminton court and a stable where Shirley’s new ponies, Spunky and Little Carnation, and a horse for Sonny were kept.* Corky, a Scotty dog, Rowdy, a Cocker Spaniel and Ching-Ching, a Pekinese (Shirley’s favorite), completed the menagerie.