by Anne Edwards
The Little Princess went before the cameras in October 1938. Co-starring with Shirley were Richard Greene, Anita Louise, Ian Hunter, Cesar Romero, Arthur Treacher and ten-year-old Sybil Jason, who had been brought to Hollywood in 1935 from Great Britain by Jack Warner as his studio’s answer to Shirley Temple. Most of Sybil’s films for Warners had been clones of Shirley’s movies.* Young Sybil, a beautiful dark-haired child, had a quaint charm. She sang, danced and did imitations. But although vastly talented, she failed to ignite the degree of popularity Jack Warner had anticipated. Aware of Shirley and “envious of her beautiful golden curls,” Sybil had not been permitted by Warner to see Temple’s films “just in case she started to copy her.” After she made Comet Over Broadway with Kay Francis in 1938, Warner Brothers did not renew her contract. She was nine years old, about the same height as Shirley, and Zanuck hired her to appear in The Little Princess as Shirley’s friend, the servant girl, Becky.
Sybil Jason remembers the day that she was scheduled to shoot her first scene. “It occurred to Anita [her older sister and guardian] that in the book, the character of Becky was a Cockney girl. Well, no one had mentioned that I was to talk with an accent. But Anita thought she should check it, anyway. You never saw such panic in your life. The studio assumed that since I was British [she had been born in Capetown, South Africa, and moved to Great Britain as a small child], I could speak in a Cockney accent. First of all, I had never heard a Cockney accent in my life, and by this time I had been in America for five and a half years. No time to get a dialogue coach in, and they couldn’t change the schedule due to the fact that the sets were already [built]. We had a real problem. However, my sister, knowing that I had a good ear, asked if they could run a movie where someone spoke with a Cockney accent. Before I knew it, I was rushed into a projection room and was watching the wonderful Wendy Hiller in Pygmalion, and by the next morning I was all ready with the accent.”
Also cast in the film was Marcia Mae Jones, who had played the crippled Clara in Heidi. This time she was to portray the mean girl in the story. “I remember that I received as much [fan] mail as Shirley did from Heidi because I received mail from crippled children everywhere. They felt if I could walk, they could walk. People said that Mrs. Temple probably would not let me do another movie with Shirley because of [my popularity] in Heidi. But I was told that Mrs. Temple did request me for The Little Princess.
“The scene I remember filming most vividly was when Shirley dumps ashes over me. They had made two dresses for me and two dresses for Shirley, in case the scene could not be done in one take. After Shirley dumped the ashes on me, I screamed and they yelled, ‘Cut!’ Shirley stood there for a moment, and then she walked over to the director [Walter Lang] and she said, ‘Can we do that again?’ She just loved doing the scene, and I was scared to death that they would do it again. The ashes were made out of [ground] corn flakes and flour and were not very pleasant to be covered in.”
The Little Princess ran twenty days over schedule and, to Zanuck’s distress, this required costly additions to the original budget. But the film, when it was released in 1939, was successful, and Shirley’s performance in it—her curls drawn back in a new, more mature hairstyle, the petulance tempered, her acting never better—gave Zanuck new confidence that she would be able to make the transition from child star to adolescent performer.
About the same time that The Little Princess was released, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was preparing The Wizard of Oz. Mervyn LeRoy had been so impressed with Shirley’s most recent film that he offered Zanuck double her salary to star her as Dorothy. For weeks, he held out hopefully, raising his offer to the absolute limit that the budget could afford. LeRoy’s enthusiasm only convinced Zanuck that Shirley had made it over the most difficult time in her career and that she would “go on endlessly.” He turned LeRoy down, and the role went to Judy Garland, while Susannah of the Mounties was prepared for Shirley.
The choice of this story, which had Shirley, as the lone survivor of an Indian massacre, rescued by the Canadian Mounties (led by Randolph Scott), was a miscalculation on Zanuck’s part. The story was banal, and Shirley’s character the least sympathetic she had ever played. Despite the popularity of The Little Princess, Shirley went from number-one box-office favorite in 1938 to number thirteen the following year, while Judy Garland zoomed from nowhere to number five after the release of The Wizard of Oz. Zanuck interpreted this as a sign that children’s fantasies were “hot.” Shirley’s next film, he announced, would be an adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird, and would be photographed in Technicolor.
What Zanuck had not anticipated was that the summer of 1939 would see the advent of war. For a decade, the rhythm of daily life had been set by a depression whose grip seemed unbreakable. Complete recovery appeared remote. Over ten million workers were unemployed, and many had so succumbed to despair that they no longer bothered to seek work. In this atmosphere, the movies thrived. For fifty cents, a man or woman could be transported for at least ninety minutes by Astaire’s and Rogers’s nimble feet into a world of ocean liners, bouncy music and designer clothes, with the airiest problems solved in the happiest fashion by the final scene.
Shirley’s films, too, had offered the quintessential escape. The plots were simplistic. No one went to see her movies expecting to be intellectually stimulated. People went because they knew they would be guaranteed a view of a naive world where happiness and fortune could come with a little girl’s dimples. If Shirley’s ability to appeal seemed “endless” to Zanuck, it was because the Depression, which, after all, had already endured a full decade, also seemed endless. Then, almost completely unexpectedly, the German-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance was signed on the night of August 23, 1939. On September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany. The evacuation of women and children from London had begun. Americans wanted desperately for their country to stay out of war, but they knew that they would eventually be drawn into the fight. This war, the people were convinced, would be truly global, the worst that had ever been fought.
Like a sponge, the war absorbed every other topic of discussion. “Newspaper circulation soared . . . Street-comer orators thrived.” Two of the most popular songs in the winter of 1939–40 were the World War I favorite “Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line” and Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s nostalgic look at pre-Nazi France, “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” People rushed to the movies to see the latest newsreel coverage of the war—the sinking of HMS Royal Oak in Scapa Flow, the German invasion of Poland, then Norway, Denmark and France. The war news was bad. The brutal reality America saw in the newsreels was in direct contradiction to the flippant, superficial films they had formerly enjoyed. They flocked to Gone With the Wind (the Civil War), applauded The Dawn Patrol (World War I), laughed at Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (a satire of Adolf Hitler).
An unsuspected cause of the success of The Little Princess might have been the Boer War background and the scenes of Shirley searching frantically for her father among the survivors brought back to a London hospital. Unintentionally, Zanuck had struck a topical theme: trepidation that one’s kin might be killed or maimed by war. The Blue Bird, which had a Grimms’ fairy-tale setting, could not have been more inappropriate. The screenplay, by Ernest Pascal, was an imaginative and often chilling retelling of Maeterlinck’s fantasy about the two children (Shirley and Johnny Russell) of a poor woodcutter who seek the bluebird of happiness in the past, the future and the Land of Luxury, but eventually find it in their own backyard. Far less human than The Wizard of Oz (which was really a variation on the same theme), lacking a musical score and with a role for Shirley that, unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, was necessarily unsympathetic (the story, after all, was about children with misplaced values), The Blue Bird was doomed from the start. With war in 1940 a daily reality, with British casualties and losses mounting, audiences had little patience for allegorical fairy tales. Happiness meant stamping out evil (suc
cessfully accomplished in The Wizard of Oz when, however accidentally, Dorothy kills the wicked witch), while the only scourge in The Blue Bird was a child’s lack of wisdom.*
On the release of The Little Princess, columnist Hedda Hopper snidely reported a rumor that because of Sybil Jason’s outstanding performance in the film, the studio would not reunite her with Shirley again. She was, however, signed to play the one truly sympathetic child’s role in the film—the crippled girl, Angela Berlingot. Sybil claims, “Everyone kept an eye out for an attitude or any sign of competition that might have arisen between us two little girls. But that’s just what we were—two little girls [Shirley was eleven, Sybil, ten] who worked well together. No doubt about that.”
She remembers Shirley being very supportive in their scenes together, presenting her with gifts of pastel-covered chocolates and colored chalks. They both liked to draw. Sybil sketched pictures of tropical islands, and Shirley made portraits of her Pekinese dog. Regardless of Shirley’s overtures, a real closeness never developed between them. After a scene, Shirley would return to her bungalow, while Sybil remained in the small private area on the set that was reserved as her dressing room. “We rarely came in contact with each other outside the studio. I did get to meet and know her brother [Jack was working at the studio], adored her father [who came often on the Blue Bird set], but somehow or other could never make friends with Mrs. Temple.” And it was Gertrude and the studio whom Sybil blamed for any unpleasantness she experienced during the filming.
“In preproduction tests, they made me read Shirley’s lines while they tested for the other players,” she remembers. “Even at that age, I knew it wasn’t right for me to have to do that, but I did what I was told.”
At the start of the film, Shirley’s character, Mytyl, is obdurately selfish. When the crippled Angela asks her to trade a bird that Mytyl has caught in the woods for Angela’s most prized possession, Mytyl refuses. By the end of the movie, through a series of dreams that she experiences, Mytyl becomes generous, and the very first thing she does after discovering that the blue-bird of happiness has been in her backyard all the while is to take the bird and present it to Angela. The crippled girl is so happy that she determines she can walk and, rising from her wheelchair, succeeds. This sequence was Sybil’s most dramatic in the film, and she and her sister Anita had great hopes that it would give Sybil’s career a needed boost.
“About one week before the premiere,” she recalls, “Walter Lang, the director of both The Little Princess and The Blue Bird, called Anita and me to his office and said he felt we should know something before the date of the premiere of the movie. He said it was very hard for him to tell us, because he personally felt it was one of the best scenes in the movie, but he had been made to edit out the sequence where I received the bluebird and got up from my wheelchair and walked. Mrs. Temple had said if it was not cut out, she and Shirley would walk out of the studio. He said, ‘My hands are tied. I want to explain to you. It’s cut out of the movie. I had to do it.’
“The finished film didn’t make sense at all. One moment Angela is crippled, and the next minute, without explanation except for Mrs. Berlingot’s amazement, Angela is pictured outside her house standing up and talking to Mytyl.
“Mrs. Temple had the right to say who was in the movie, how it was cast and to choose the director and the cameraman. But regardless of who was responsible for this decision, as an adult I can almost understand the studio’s thinking in cutting the scene. Shirley had been the biggest money-maker at Fox for many years, and they were protecting their interest.
“Shirley never realized any of this. I knew something was happening. . . . The premiere was held at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, but after hearing the sad news that most of my work would not be shown on the screen, the decision was made [by us] that Anita and I would not attend. Shirley and I were never to work together again.”*
Gertrude’s victory in protecting Shirley’s stardom in The Blue Bird was Pyrrhic. Although Shirley’s personal reviews were not bad, the film, termed “leaden” and “dull,” failed at the box office. Shirley’s next picture, a show-business saga called Young People, cast her as the daughter of ex-vaudevillians who have trouble resettling in a rural community. The picture fared even worse than The Blue Bird. Rumors circulated that Zanuck “would not stand in the way of Mrs. Temple if she wanted Shirley to leave the studio.” Nancy Majors Voorheis remembers George Temple about this time sitting in the Temple library bar and telling the Majors family that since Shirley, after taxes, was making only five cents on a dollar,* he and Gertrude thought they should pull her out of movies for a few years. Certainly he might well have suspected her career at Fox was drawing to a close. Several months went by without a script being developed for her. Under the terms of her contract, her salary and Gertrude’s continued to be paid. Gertrude played a waiting game. Finally, a call came from Zanuck asking if she would meet with him.
“Zanuck didn’t look at me once during our meeting,” Gertrude later confided to Dickie Moore. “He carried on the entire conversation with a golf club in his hand and never looked up from the ball he was putting on the carpet. I told him if he wanted to get rid of us, he would have to pay off every penny that was called for in our contract.”
Zanuck agreed only to continue to pay Shirley’s salary for the unlapsed year, but flatly stated that with the losses on her last two films, he would not cast her in another movie. Gertrude was furious. After the dismal failure of The Blue Bird, if Shirley was kept off the screen for a year, her career could well be ruined. Two weeks later, her lawyers had exercised a right to buy back Shirley’s contract from the studio. After a week of hard negotiation and for a figure in excess of $250,000, paid for out of Shirley’s earnings, her contract with Fox was severed.
It was August 1940. Shirley had spent half her life at the one studio. She had made twenty-two films there, saved Fox from bankruptcy, and earned them over thirty million dollars in profits. Zanuck, the studio patriarch to the end, gave Shirley a retirement party in the Chez Paris and “presented her with an upright piano, a rack of her old costumes and some glowing speeches.” Within a week, the famous Shirley Temple bungalow had been renovated, all traces of her tenure removed and the premises reassigned as a small office complex.
Footnotes
* Much of Coogan’s settlement was lost in legal and court costs and to a divorce settlement to Betty Grable, his bride of one year. Grable was only an aspiring starlet at this time. She was to be signed by Zanuck, and became a Twentieth Century-Fox star. Coogan did not work in films for a decade. He then appeared in small roles until the mid-sixties, when he was cast as the bald, grotesque Uncle Fenster in the successful television series The Addams Family. Some years after Arthur Bernstein’s death, Coogan and his mother reconciled.
* A year later in 1939, when Zanuck released The Grapes of Wrath, Nugent did a turnaround and declared this Zanuck film a screen classic. Two months later, Zanuck hired him at $750 a week as “a sort of resident critic and script doctor,” Nugent later recalled. “Zanuck told me he didn’t want me to write, that he just thought the studio would save money if I criticized pictures before they were made.” He worked four years for Zanuck and never returned to criticism. He formed an alliance with John Ford and wrote, among other films, the screenplays of Fort Apache, (ironically, starring Temple), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man and Mister Roberts.
* Jason’s The Little Bigshot (1935) was patterned after Little Miss Marker. “Shirley’s name was Marker, mine was Gloria Gibbs,” Jason recalls, “otherwise the two pictures are interchangeable . . . Changing of the Guard was Wee Willie Winkie. . . The Captain’s Kid [1936] bore a striking resemblance to Captain January and even had Guy Kibbee in a role as a New England sea captain.” Jason also made The Singing Kid with Al Jolson; The Great O’Malley with Pat O’Brien and Humphrey Bogart and I Found Stella Parish with Kay Francis.
* The Blue Bird was remade in 1976 in the first widely tou
ted Russian-American co-production. Despite a star cast (Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, Cicely Tyson, Jane Fonda, Harry Andrews and Mona Washbourne), the film failed—“a flabby script, unsuitable casting and unresolved production problems” were cited. But it might be added that too little emphasis was given to the children in the story.
* Cut drastically for re-release a few years later, the only existing prints now open with confusing abruptness as well. Ironically, the cast of The Blue Bird included numerous former child stars in bit parts, each struggling through the nadir of careers; Dickie Moore, Scotty Beckett, Juanita Quigley, Gene Reynolds and Ann Todd (not the English actress).
* George Temple was incorrect. The highest tax bracket for that year was 75 percent of earnings.
8 ALTHOUGH THE STUDIO publicity department released a story to the effect that Mr. and Mrs. Temple had decided Shirley should retire and live a normal life, Gertrude apparently had no such plans for her daughter. She immediately set up meetings with several other studios. To her shocked surprise, the offers for Shirley’s services were few and, by her standards, insulting. Without a home studio or even a film in sight, she was forced to review Shirley’s future. There would be no private protector, no bungalow classroom. Shirley would have to attend school; and since fall classes had already begun, there was no time for an extensive search for a school. Marion and Nancy Majors, however, both attended Westlake School for Girls, as did John Boles’s daughter, Janet, June Lockhart, actress daughter of Gene and Kathleen Lockhart, and Phoebe Hearst, granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst. Feeling Westlake was the right school, Gertrude went to see the headmistress, Carol Mills, and Shirley was enrolled.
