Shirley Temple

by Anne Edwards

  “I do not let Shirley get the idea that she is too important in our scheme of existence,” Gertrude stated. “At home she feels everything revolves around her father.” Then she added, “The mother of a famous star has a difficult road to travel. No mother can know how difficult until she has a small celebrity in her own home.”

  While Gertrude was being interviewed on the set of Poor Little Rich Girl, Shirley strolled over. “Why don’t you talk to me?” she asked the reporter. “I’m the star.”

  Footnotes

  *Some of the classic films Zanuck produced and in some cases also adapted for Warner Brothers were: Disraeli (1929, producer); Little Caesar (1930, screenplay, producer) The Public Enemy (1931, producer); The Mouthpiece (1932, screenplay, producer); I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932, screenplay, producer); 42nd Street (1933, producer). Zanuck had also written dialogue for the first successful talking film, The Jazz Singer (1927).

  *At University of California, Los Angeles

  *This suggests that Shirley was returning from the studio after dark.

  †Islieb was Temple’s stand-in from the time of Bright Eyes, and was to work with her for fifteen years. Marilyn Granas, the child who had appeared with her in the Baby Burlesks films, had been an earlier stand-in.

  ‡Islieb stood in front of the cameras when lights were being set up for Shirley or when the cast was rehearsing. Shirley seldom did more than one rehearsal, except for musical numbers.

  *Mrs. Temple later stated Shirley was photographed on the average of fifty times a day, six days a week, during the years of her contract with Fox.

  *Robinson claimed he originated the dance after he awoke from a dream in which “I was being made a lord by the King of England and he was standing at the head of a flight of stairs. Rather than walk, I danced up to get it.” He also claimed he soaked his feet in hot water and two quarts of strong liquor nightly, “until they are drunk.”

  *The major black performers in Temple’s films were Stepin Fetchit, Stand Up and Cheer; Bill Robinson, Hattie McDaniel and several children, The Little Colonel; Willie Best, Little Miss Marker; Hattie McDaniel, Robinson, Best and Bessie Lyle, The Littlest Rebel; Fetchit, Dimples; Robinson, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm; Robinson, Just Around the Corner; McDaniel, Since You Went Away; and Lillian Randolph, The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer.

  *There is a strong possibility that Margaret Mitchell, when writing Gone With the Wind, could have been influenced by the opening of The Littlest Rebel—the party, the advent of the Civil War intruding upon it and the young Southern child’s dilemma about and boredom with war. Although the main body of Gone With the Wind was complete by early 1935, the opening had not been written and was not done until late that year. Mitchell was a moviegoer, and Temple films among her favorites.

  *Spunky, who was bred on one of Great Britain's finest horse and pony farms, owned by Lady Hector MacNeal, was a gift from Zanuck and had been brought from England by boat and presented to Shirley by the breeder’s daughter, Carolyn Wainwright.

  *Baby Peggy’s family name was Montgomery. Baby Peggy, Peggy Montgomery and Diana Serra Cary are all the same person. Girls’ Dormitory starred Herbert Marshall and Simone Simon and featured Tyrone Power.

  *Tellers in the same bank drew a weekly salary of approximately forty dollars.

  *The figures quoted come from information released in the year 1938 (for the previous year) by the Treasury Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. All salaries at Twentieth Century-Fox had to be reported because they were a publicly held stock company. Zanuck’s salary does not take into consideration his share of the profits of the studio.

  †In 1935, 1936 and 1937, the Motion Picture Research Project reported that Temple films “earned over $20,000,000 in profits for Twentieth Century-Fox.” That is an accumulative figure for eleven films. Bright Eyes, made in 1934, was released Christmas week: Its profits were therefore reflected in 1935.

  ‡George’s position as Shirley’s financial adviser attracted other people who wanted to invest conservatively, and soon he had a thriving career as a business counselor.

  6 FROM A BUSINESS VIEWPOINT, the studio found many advantages in the star system. A person could be marketed and sold as a standardized product that a movie audience, banks and exhibitors could understand and regard as security for large profits. Studios stood to have a better chance with a film if they could promise the exhibitors a Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper or Clark Gable movie. One contemporary film historian claims this was the case because the star system gave “a psychological security to men who know little about the art of storytelling. It is therefore, logical, from the point of view of studio executives, to build up and exaggerate the star system.”

  The stars who enjoyed the longest tenure at the time were usually those who could appeal to both sexes. Male stars with a strong masculine personality were able to do this more successfully than females. The popularity of certain child actors, like Baby Peggy, Jackie Coogan and Jackie Cooper, may well have been due to a great extent to the fact that their fans included both sexes and all ages. For this reason, Shirley’s scripts were never geared toward the kiddie audience. A love story was always a part of the script, and to mitigate the possibility of women audiences only, Shirley’s cuteness was paired against the strongly masculine or brusque personalities of actors like Warner Baxter, Lionel Barrymore, Arthur Treacher and, later, Frank Morgan and Victor McLaglen. The same approach had worked in teaming both Jackie Coogan (The Kid) and Jackie Cooper (The Bowery) with Wallace Beery.

  Darryl Zanuck was working hard to hedge his bets, being well aware that Shirley could at any minute turn from the dimpled darling that the audiences adored to an awkward preadolescent. In little girls particularly, the years eight to eleven could be difficult, and eleven to fourteen disastrous. The studio’s many resources could not reverse the aging process, and the studio was busily developing other potential contract stars—Tyrone Power, Loretta Young, Alice Faye, Don Ameche and Robert Young. And Zanuck had just signed the Norwegian ice-skating champion, Sonja Henie, and was bringing her to Hollywood.

  Shirley was oblivious to the fact that despite her tremendous popularity, Nature could play tricks on her and end her career without any real warning. When you are eight years old, it seems life will keep on going exactly as it has been. This child’s innocence kept her safe from the fear of losing what she had, whereas Alice Faye knew she could be affected by the studio’s signing Betty Grable.

  Natalie Wood, one of the very few child stars who held her position as an adult, once said, “We [child stars] had an inordinate sense of being responsible and guilty. Guilt, that was the universal feeling [among her peers].”

  Jane Powell adds, “We all knew we had a duty to perform and we were trained to follow orders.”

  Dickie Moore says that he was aware of the fact that his star days could be numbered. “When I came down with scarlet fever, I overheard Mother tell Dad that Freddie Bartholomew, a stranger from England, had won the role of David Copperfield (1935). He was now the hot new boy in town under contract to M.G.M., and I was by then [at ten] reduced to going out on interviews for parts. . . . I also felt keenly competitive with Bobs Watson [Delmar’s brother, who had starred with Tracy and Rooney in Boys Town] and Darryl Hickman [The Grapes of Wrath], neither of whom I really knew.”

  The catalyst for Moore’s film decline at age ten had been scarlet fever. Mathew Beard (Stymie in the Our Gang comedies), at ten “outgrew the other kids and that didn’t work.” Edith Fellows, who played “rotten but nice roles,” had been receiving twelve hundred dollars a week when Jane Withers, who had a similar feisty quality but was three years younger, entered the scene, and Fellows was let go from her studio.

  But if Shirley was not aware of the treacherous factors of her “play world,” Gertrude was; and she knew as long as her daughter was the studio’s number-one box-office attraction, she did not have to worry about competition. She therefore put up no objection to the hour
s Shirley had to work.* Posing for still pictures was one of the tasks that Shirley disliked most. At that time, a picture took a full second to catch, and the subject had to sit absolutely still or ruin the shot. “A whole second,” Shirley remembered, “that’s longer than you would imagine. . . . I used to pose for about 30 stills every day [between takes of her scenes], and it was difficult to hold my pose, then hold it again for more shots. And then take another pose and do it all over again.”† In addition, there were the fashion shots of the dresses that carried the Shirley Temple label and that were a great source of income. “Each dress would be photographed four times and since there were some 25 dresses [each three-month season], that made one hundred shots, sometimes more, in an afternoon. Mom wouldn’t let a dress be advertised with the Shirley Temple name unless I’d tried it on and we all liked it.

  “Seasonal stills always had to be done ahead of time. About August I’d be posing, in all that California sunshine, for Christmas pictures.” Then there were the fittings for her costumes to be worn in each film. After making a movie, Gertrude took the costumes home, and one entire wardrobe in Shirley’s dressing room was filled with them. Shirley also had to pose on the set with her distinguished visitors; Eleanor Roosevelt came twice, Henry Morgenthau, Harry Lauder, John McCormick, Rosa Ponselle, Edwina Mountbatten, Ilya Tolstoy.

  Gertrude loved to travel, but trips with Shirley seldom worked out well anymore. They had made a pleasant family excursion to Erie, Pennsylvania, to visit George’s family just before Little Miss Marker had been released, and a few months later they had a mostly untroubled vacation to Hawaii. Now, Shirley’s great celebrity made travel difficult. Crowds followed wherever she went, and Grif and the Twentieth Century publicity man, Doc Bishop, always accompanied her. In whatever city she visited, she was expected to pose with local dignitaries and to say a few “cute” words. In Seattle in the summer of 1936, while she was en route to Canada for a premiere of one of her films, three thousand fans blocked her way as she went to leave the hotel. “The hotel people formed a kind of flying wedge around us, and Daddy put me on his shoulders and we went through the lobby,” she recalled.

  In Victoria, they had an even worse time with the crowds. In order to get out of the hotel, “the police took a rope and made a circle around us, and then they actually started to kick and club people out of the way.”

  The normal loss of a baby tooth was a trauma in Shirley’s life. A dentist made porcelain copies of all her teeth, and if one fell out during filming, it could be quickly replaced with a replica in a plate that Shirley had to wear in her mouth. Zanuck once hurriedly left an important financial board meeting and ran to Shirley’s set when he heard she had lost a tooth. Unless it was immediately replaced, a day’s shooting could be wasted. When her own tooth would grow halfway in, the plate would be removed and a cap sealed into place with dental powder. Gertrude always carried “two or three spare teeth and some dental powder for emergencies.” And if Shirley was wearing a false tooth or cap, it had to be removed when she ate, kept in a glass of water and then replaced again when she went before the cameras.

  She followed Captain January with Poor Little Rich Girl, which took five authors to script and co-starred Alice Faye, Gloria Stuart and Jack Haley. “We all loved our director, Irving Cummings,” Faye says. “He was a real gentleman and very good with Shirley and her mother. We were all aware that to be an adult in a Shirley Temple film was a pretty thankless job. You had to work to hold your own.” Though the film had been made as a silent by Mary Pickford, little of the former movie remained. Shirley was the neglected poor-little-rich-girl daughter of a soap tycoon (Michael Whalen). When her nurse is hit by a car as she and the child are on the way to her private school, Shirley wanders off and follows an organ grinder (Henry Armetta) home. In the same apartment building lives the vaudeville team of Dolan (Alice Faye) and Dolan (Jack Haley). Shirley joins the act. This leads to a radio contract advertising the soap of her father’s chief competitor. The end finds the two merging into one happy company, and Shirley’s dad with a new mom (Gloria Stuart) for her. A long dance routine that Alice Faye, Shirley and Haley execute in the film was “nothing less than marvelous.” Shirley also sang the Harry Revel and Mack Gordon song “Oh My Goodness,” which was thereafter always identified with her.

  The acerbic critic Frank Nugent (who had a running battle of quips with Zanuck) wrote in The New York Times when Dimples, her next film, opened, “The Shirley Temple-for-President Club reconvened yesterday at the Roxy and displayed flattering attention to their candidate’s latest assault upon the nation’s maternal instinct. . . . Why they bother with titles, or with plots either for that matter, is beyond us. The sensible thing would be to announce Shirley Temple in ‘Shirley Temple’ and let it go at that. Or to follow the example of the authors of children’s books and call them ‘Shirley Temple in Dixie,’ ‘Shirley Temple at Cape Cod,’ or [as he suggested for Dimples] ‘Shirley in Little Old New York.’”

  Dimples is an orphan, the granddaughter of a slightly addled and often gruff actor (Frank Morgan) in the 1850’s. Stuck with the child, Morgan casts her in his company’s first production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to play Little Eva and she becomes a big success, wins over her grumpy gramps and plays her usual Miss-Fix-it between two young members of the company (Robert Kent and Astrid Allwyn). A portent of what might be heading Shirley’s way can be found in Louella Parsons’s negative review of the film. “The Golden Temple baby is growing up—both taller and broader—but her million-dollar personality remains the same fortunately and she needs it for Dimples.”

  Christmas week, Stowaway was released, and to Zanuck’s and Gertrude’s relief, it regained whatever ground Dimples had lost. “No exhibitor’s] worrying necessary for this one,” Variety reported. “It’s a nifty Shirley Temple comedy with musical trimmings.” As the orphaned child of missionaries in China, Shirley spoke forty words in Chinese, imitated Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson (the latter singing “Mammy”) and, with a full-size male doll painted to look like Fred Astaire strapped to her toes as she danced, pretended she was Ginger Rogers. Somehow Stowaway charmed critics despite an incredible script. Shirley’s parents are murdered by Chinese bandits and she escapes with her dog (her own Ching-Ching) grasped in her arms to the dockland area of Shanghai. Here, she picks up with a youthful American millionaire (Robert Young) and follows him to find herself on board a round-the-world ship as a stowaway and then proceeds to act as cupid between Young and Alice Faye (also on board). Shirley played very well with Faye, and the director William Seiter seemed to hit the right chord with Shirley. “Whether or not due to Seiter’s efforts,” Variety commented, “[Shirley] does not appear to have outgrown . . . the ‘Little Miss Marker’ stage in this one as she had in her last pictures.”

  Her ninth birthday was approaching, and she was losing the pouting, baby look. She had been tested and found to have an IQ of 155, which is in the genius classification. Her lessons with Klammie were not sufficiently challenging, and Gertrude knew it. Publicity releases bragged that in school Shirley was “a year-and-a-half ahead of the average child of her age.” However, the studio, the public and Shirley herself believed she was eight, not nine. Once again, she had topped the box-office charts. Zanuck had the studio on a profit-making climb, and he was not ready to let go of their little gold mine. His hope was that Shirley would develop into a popular preadolescent in classics the way Freddie Bartholomew had done at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and he assigned his writing staff numerous old favorites to adapt for her.

  Gertrude, who had been disconcerted when Zanuck produced The Country Doctor, starring Jean Hersholt and the five adorable and world-loved Dionne Quintuplets, was doubly concerned when he scheduled a sequel for the following year. Her life remained wound around her daughter. Evenings they still studied the scenes to be shot the next day. They drove together to the studio, and she continued to work with Shirley on the interpretation of her parts and remained with her in the bungalow between sc
enes. They ate lunch together every day, and when Shirley was called to perform in front of the cameras, Gertrude would give her last command by the director’s side, “Sparkle, Shirley, sparkle!” Then she would sit down in the chair marked “Mrs. Temple” by one side of the camera and watch intently as her daughter went through her paces. Shirley was her world and she was Shirley’s. But somehow, a certain amount of spontaneity had been lost. The play had become, quite frankly, hard work, and she was fearful the same might be the case for Shirley.

  Although it would be two years before it ever reached the screen, what the film people were talking about in 1937 was Gone With the Wind. Since the publication of Margaret Mitchell’s bestselling book in June 1936,* Rhett-and-Scarlett fever had swept the country. Shirley has said that David O. Selznick, the man who had bought the film rights, had considered her for the film. In the final script for the movie, Bonnie Blue (Scarlett and Rhett’s daughter) emerged as the only fair-sized child’s role, and Shirley, even in 1936, was too old to play the character. However, in Margaret Mitchell’s book, Scarlett had two children, Wade Hamilton and Ella, by a previous marriage. Selznick had originally planned to develop Ella but abandoned both the two earlier children almost from the start of work on the script. Selznick might have had the role of Ella in mind for Shirley. The only other possibility, Scarlett’s younger sister, Careen, was too mature in the Reconstruction scenes for Selznick to have considered Shirley.

  Shirley remembers yearning for the glamorous dresses earmarked for Alice Faye and Loretta Young she saw hanging in the wardrobe department, aware that her fitting form was flat at the chest and theirs were not. Her babyishness was fast disappearing. But her popularity and box-office appeal were as strong as ever. In 1937, once again she reigned supreme. Gertrude had Zanuck to thank, because of his commercial choice of story material. Only two Shirley Temple films were released that year, both classic children’s stories: Rudyard Kipling’s Wee Willie Winkie, and Johanna Spyri’s Heidi. Zanuck believed “whole-heartedly in the theory that stars didn’t make pictures, but pictures made stars.” Shirley was no exception.