by Anne Edwards
“She was not athletic, but she was very well-coordinated. During the war years, we had military drill and Shirley prided herself on becoming a sergeant, and boy! she marched herself and others strong and hard!”
The athlete in the Temple family had always been her brother Sonny. When he joined the marines in March 1941, he was over six feet tall, weighed two hundred ten pounds and had aspired to be a professional football player. Before sending him to the South Pacific, the marines had turned him into a highly competitive amateur wrestler. After years of feeling like the nonachiever in his family, Sonny had been proud of his new accomplishment. He had fought at Pearl Harbor, and his subsequent war record was viewed by his family with great pride.
Jack had graduated from Stanford in 1937. After three years as a production assistant at Twentieth Century-Fox, he had returned to Stanford in the fall of 1940 (at the same time that Shirley had severed her Fox contract) to work for his master’s degree in their School of Speech and Drama. A few months later, he married Miriam (“Mimsy”) Ellsworth of Los Altos, California, but continued his studies. Shortly after America entered the war, Mimsy gave birth to a son.
The absence of her brothers from home did not affect Shirley’s life. The vast age differences, the demands of her career and her overwhelming closeness to Gertrude had always distanced them. Now, Westlake made a strong impact upon her. Suddenly, she was aware of what Gertrude and her child-star status had caused her to miss. This experience was to alter dramatically her perspective of her future. “My heart was at Westlake, not in the movies,” she wrote of the years she attended the school.
For the eighteen months that followed the filming of Miss Annie Rooney, Shirley was allowed to be as normal an adolescent as her celebrity permitted. Never had she been happier. Although Gertrude was always hovering close by, Grif was in constant surveillance and Miss Mills and a few others at Westlake treated her as “Shirley Temple,” she discovered her own identity. She developed a surprising interest in medicine and science, her grades improved and she juggled her dual fascination with books and boys. One of her new friends was Robert “Bobby” Haldeman,* and she would go with Nancy and Grif to his San Fernando Valley estate to swim, ostensibly visiting his sister Betsy. Young men found her attractive. She had slimmed down and bloomed. She had also attained, on her own, a measure of independence from Gertrude and a sense that her life could one day belong wholly to herself. Then, almost unexpectedly, she was signed to a seven-year contract by David O. Selznick to begin work immediately in Since You Went Away, his first production since his Academy Award-winning classics Gone With the Wind and Rebecca.
Most of Selznick’s recent female discoveries had become international stars in his films; Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo, Joan Fontaine in Rebecca. He had been anxious to sign Shirley for Since You Went Away to play the younger sister of his most recent discovery, Jennifer Jones, because they bore a strong resemblance that would lend credibility to the film. Gertrude made no secret of her hope that Shirley was on her way to adult stardom. She had good reason for her optimism. Selznick agreed to financial terms about equal to her old Fox contract, and Gertrude was retained by the studio for her former salary of one thousand dollars a week. Selznick talked about starting Shirley in roles “that were young and light,” and grooming her for future romantic parts while keeping her from becoming typecast. Also, Selznick’s films were made on large budgets, were given the most lavish productions and employed the finest technical and artistic talents available. Whether or not it was Shirley’s decision to interrupt her newfound happiness at Westlake, she nonetheless returned to work in the fall of 1943 in the full glare of a massive studio publicity campaign.
“Please be careful,” Selznick instructed his publicity department, “to . . . use the casting [in releases] as stated . . . i.e., (Claudette) Colbert first, (Jennifer) Jones second, (Monty) Woolley third, and Temple fourth. . . . I’m anxious to get the accent off this as a Temple vehicle and start hammering away at its tremendous cast.”
Since You Went Away was a simple, direct, contemporary story of an American family living from day to day under the restrictions and dramatic effects of the war. Like Gone With the Wind, it dealt mainly with the homefront and women whose men were away fighting. But unlike Margaret Mitchell’s classic, the picture contained no real spectacle.
Selznick had been so successful with his press campaign for Gone With the Wind that he dealt with this new film in much the same way. Publicity releases went out with the casting of even the most minor roles, along with announcements of the large budget and the uniqueness of the movie.* There were 205 speaking parts in the picture. Selznick adapted the script himself from a book by Margaret Buell Wilder.
Claudette Colbert portrayed the mother, Anne Hilton. Jennifer Jones and Shirley were her two daughters, Jane and Brig. The absent serviceman father was represented on the screen only by a photograph (of actor Neil Hamilton†). A brilliant bit of casting was Monty Woolley as the family’s acid-tongued boarder. His shyly courageous grandson, Robert Walker, is killed in action, a tragedy that reveals Woolley’s sentimental side and Jennifer Jones’s love for the young man. Hattie McDaniel (Mammy in Gone With the Wind) was once again the jovial, understanding black servant. Joseph Cotten was cast as the devoted family friend. In telling vignettes were Lionel Barrymore, Agnes Moorehead, Lloyd Corrigan, Guy Madison, Dorothy Dandridge, Ruth Roman, Albert Basserman, Nazimova, Keenan Wynn, Craig Stevens, Jonathan Hale and one of Shirley’s early co-stars, Theodore von Eltz (Change of Heart, Bright Eyes). Wounded veterans portrayed themselves in the hospital and rehabilitation-room scenes.
“Mrs. Temple was always on the set, of course,” one of the crew remembers, “but she remained in the background. John Cromwell was not the kind of director who would have allowed otherwise. And if he had been, Mr. Selznick would have fired him just as he had done with George Cukor on Gone With the Wind when [Vivien] Leigh and [Olivia] De Havilland began to run the show.”*
To Gertrude’s despair, and in the face of Shirley’s tears, Selznick insisted Shirley have her hair cut and shaped after he claimed she looked like “an O-Cedar mop.” He also insisted she wear no makeup; in fact, that she should scrub her face until it shone. “He said that if I didn’t do it,” Shirley admitted, “he’d come on the set with soap and a washcloth and scrub it himself.” She kept in daily contact with her school friends during the filming of Since You Went Away. Arrangements were made by Miss Mills for her studio tutor, Mrs. Choate, to be sent all her school assignments so she could keep up with her class. The film was previewed at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles on July 11, 1944. Shirley was escorted by Andy Hotchkiss, now Private Andrew D. Hotchkiss, Jr., of the U.S. Army.
“Selznick placed a big bet on Shirley Temple’s comeback,” the Time reviewer wrote, “and she pays off enchantingly as a dogged, sensitive, practical little girl with a talent for bargaining . . . chief reason U.S. cinemaddicts have breathlessly awaited Since You Went Away was to see Miss Temple in her first grown-up role. She is charming.”
Selznick felt confident about Shirley’s performance as soon as he saw the early rushes. He cast her in I’ll Be Seeing You (originally titled Double Furlough) with Ginger Rogers and Joseph Cotten. The picture went before the cameras only six weeks after the end of photography on Since You Went Away. Her role in I’ll Be Seeing You was that of a seventeen-year-old girl with romantic yearnings for the much older Cotten, who played a returning shell-shocked veteran. Rogers and Cotten meet during a ten-day furlough they each have, Cotten from an army hospital, and Rogers from prison, where she is serving six years for manslaughter (a crime committed while defending her honor).
Dore Schary, who had recently left MGM, was engaged by Selznick as producer. “Some of the MGM executives thought that Dore was more interested in trying to sell his causes than in making pictures. Dore was a big message man, but I thought more of him as a picture man than apparently they did at th
at time,” Selznick wrote.
“He made I’ll Be Seeing You for me. It sounded like a good idea and I told him to buy it. After a few months he sent me the script. I dictated all day long on it. (My criticism was as long as the script!) Dore came to see me and told me we had reached the crossroads, and this would prove whether or not it was possible for me to leave anybody alone . . . he felt he could not agree with . . . half of the comments; that perhaps . . . we were both right. . . but unless I was prepared to leave the details as to how the story would be told to him, it would be my picture and not his. He was so reasonable and made such good sense, that I told him to go ahead and make the picture.”
After he saw the first rough cut, Selznick had doubts about this decision. He asked Schary for permission to re-edit. They reached another impasse, but Schary finally won the major control of the print. The film was not to gain the artistic or commercial success of Since You Went Away, but Shirley did well in her role.
“Shirley is exceedingly hot at the moment,” Selznick wrote Reeves Esny, a studio executive, at Christmastime, 1944. “We can’t commence to fill demands for interviews and other press material on her. . . . At the preview of I’ll Be Seeing You* . . . Shirley’s name was received with the biggest applause of all three [stars] despite the fact that the Gallup Poll shows that Cotten is the great new romantic rage and that Ginger is one of the top stars of the business. . . .
“Shirley’s coverage in the New York press both in connection with this appearance and in connection with her prior trip East to sell bonds [this appears to be the time of her invitation to the West Point dance] received more publicity—including, astonishingly, big front-page breaks in the middle of a war—than I think has been accorded the visit of any motion picture star to New York in many, many years . . . her visit received more space than that of General de Gaulle! . . . her fan-mail is greater than that of any other star on our list—actually exceeding by a wide margin that of Ingrid Bergman, Jennifer Jones and Joan Fontaine, who are the next three in that order.”
At this juncture, the Temples had confidence that Shirley was in the second phase of a career that just might eclipse her celebrity as a child star. Two factors would dash those hopes.
Unlike Twentieth Century-Fox, Selznick International was a small studio that operated mainly as a one-man company. Only two films a year were made under Selznick’s direct supervision, not enough to feature Bergman, Jones, Fontaine and Shirley, who were all under personal contract to him.* Therefore, outside films had to be found for whomever he could not cast in his own work. The majority of such pictures were not equal to the quality of Selznick’s productions.
Second, Selznick had fallen deeply in love with Jennifer Jones. He had discovered and renamed her (she had been Phyllis Isley) and had guided her career. Jones divorced her husband, Robert Walker, also under contract to Selznick in 1945, and she and Selznick formed a liaison that would, four years later, lead to marriage. Soon after Shirley completed I’ll Be Seeing You, Selznick became obsessed with establishing Jones as one of Hollywood’s immortals. Most of his energies and talents were channeled into developing and producing her films.
If Selznick picked up Shirley’s option for the next year, he would be obligated to pay $185,000 (including Gertrude’s salary) even without the two pictures called for in her contract. The best alternative was to loan out Shirley’s services to a major studio for a lead role in a suitable film at an equitable if not equal fee. This way, the momentum of her career would continue, and her next film could then be under the Selznick-International banner.
Columbia Studios had recently purchased the movie rights to the Broadway hit comedy Kiss and Tell, by F. Hugh Herbert. Selznick, who had a strong instinct that the role of the teenage Corliss Archer was ideally suited for Shirley’s talents, approached the film’s producer, Sol Siegel. Columbia had already signed a young New York actress, Patricia Kirkland, who had been brought to Hollywood expressly to star in Kiss and Tell. But Siegel, who was regarded as a low-budget producer, could see the potential of casting Shirley in his film. After Selznick agreed to take over Kirkland’s contract, which was only a fraction of what he was committed to pay Shirley, he signed an agreement to loan Shirley to Siegel for a fee of seventy-five thousand dollars. A heated controversy arose between the two men when Selznick prematurely announced to the press the proposed casting of Shirley as Corliss Archer along with the claim that he had been “accorded the privilege of approving the screenplay and the rushes [photographed scenes] each day.”
After reading F. Hugh Herbert’s screen adaptation of his own play, Selznick had found it “in part too sexy, and therefore unsuited for the sixteen year old Miss Temple.” The script was rewritten to meet Selznick’s approval. Negotiations began anew. When the contract was signed on January 20, 1945, Selznick retained the right to view the rushes. Shirley had been farmed out, but she was still under Selznick’s protection. Kiss and Tell turned out to be Shirley’s best film as a young adult. Selznick’s involvement had contributed to the upgraded budget that gave her superb backing: an excellent supporting cast (including Walter Abel as Shirley’s father, Katherine Alexander as her mother, Porter Hall, Robert Benchley, Tom Tully, Virginia Welles, Darryl Hickman, and Jerome Courtland as Shirley’s youthful boyfriend, Dexter Franklin), a literate script and a well-photographed picture.
The plot was outrageous but reasonably probable. Corliss lets her parents and just about everyone else in the film believe she is about to become an unwed mother to guard the secrecy of the marriage of her soldier-brother to her best friend. The friend, two years older than Corliss, discovers shortly after her husband has gone back to his base that she is pregnant. Corliss’s visits with her to her obstetrician cause the plot’s complications. Kiss and Tell abounded in sophisticated adult comedy and double entendre.
“I’ve about decided the picture’s superiority to the average Hollywood affair can be traced to the fact that . . . every situation, each line, has been tooled and refined . . . until hardly a dead spot remains,” wrote the Los Angeles Times critic Philip K. Scheuer. Howard Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune lauded Shirley’s performance as “quite extraordinary . . . the film is delightful, pertinent and hilarious . . . [and she] has no end of know-how.” Variety added, “In case you’ve had any doubts regarding Shirley Temple as an adult star, you can dispel them now. For Shirley’s very curvaceously in the groove in Kiss and Tell, and she’s a luscious sight for laughter. As the precocious Corliss Archer almost sixteen and frequently kissed, she gives a performance that the most veteran comedienne might well envy.”
After they catch her kissing her boyfriend, Dexter, at a booth she is running at a USO charity bazaar, twenty-two soldiers line up to buy kisses from Shirley as Corliss. Shirley announced on the set, “of course I’ll kiss them on the mouth. That’s the only kind of kisses worth paying for. Kisses on the cheek are gratuities.” Gertrude insisted the young men being kissed by Shirley be checked by a doctor and have their throats sprayed with disinfectant. (One participant was rejected “for garlic on his breath.”)
Shirley filmed Kiss and Tell during her last term at Westlake. The pressures upon her were enormous. Here she was back to a six-day-a-week grind at a studio while attempting to keep up her grades and to take and pass all the tests required for graduation with her class. Inevitably, she was missing all the events and good times associated with being a high-school senior. Secretly, she thought she was in love with a handsome soldier (John Agar) whom she had recently been dating (which certainly added a touch of realism to her role), a situation she knew would bring her mother’s disapproval. Strong resentment began to build from the start of Kiss and Tell. Within six weeks, it took the form of inner rebellion. With the upward surge Shirley’s career had taken, Gertrude’s dedication had become more intense, and Shirley, now sixteen and far more worldly about such things, knew her mother was not likely to loosen her hold or to push less. Gertrude was determined to prove that Shirley was not
just one more child star who had outgrown her usefulness. Once she had completed her high-school studies, Shirley could be expected to devote herself full time to her career.
One reason Shirley, as a child, appeared natural on the screen was her own similarity to the characters she portrayed. Buoyant, fun-loving and bossy by nature, she adored her father and could relate to all her adult leading men. Because most of her films presented her in the role of a motherless child, her co-stars were usually father figures, and she played winningly with them. Seldom was there a great rapport between Shirley and the women cast in her pictures as her mother or as a mother-substitute. In The Little Colonel, The Littlest Rebel and Wee Willie Winkie, she had a mother. But in each film her attachment was to the men—Lionel Barrymore, Bill Robinson, John Boles, Victor McLaglen and Cesar Romero, and her scenes with them were her most memorable. How many people could recall her mothers in the same movies (Evelyn Venable, Karen Morley and June Lang)?
Gertrude was always right there by her side, at home and at whatever studio at which they were employed, and she believed that “being a good girl” meant that Shirley did exactly as she told her. On her part, Shirley loved and resented Gertrude, who represented both extreme loyalty and devotion while holding the key—guilt—that kept the young woman from ever really being free. Gertrude was never one to discuss sacrifices. But it was clear that she expected Shirley to make the most of her mother’s consistent help to her. Shirley’s time at Westlake had given her a taste of what true freedom could be like. Yet even there, Gertrude had the power to pull her out at the signing of a contract, and her watch guards, Grif and Miss Mills, were ever-present. Shirley joked and romanticized about marriage with the Majors sisters and with Phoebe Hearst. But as Christmas, 1944, approached, leaving only six months until her graduation, marriage loomed as her one escape. She was only sixteen, which meant Gertrude could control her life for another five years. Marriage would change that, for it would prove she was adult, and if her husband was older, he would be able to take command. “What I wanted more than a career [at sixteen] was marriage and children,” Shirley told an interviewer many years later, “because you can get awfully lonely with scrapbooks. . . . I made decisions . . . one of them was to get married when I was seventeen.”
