by Anne Edwards
The age she chose—for what she thought would be her liberation—had been selected because Gertrude had married at seventeen and Shirley believed her mother could not, therefore, rationally stop her from doing likewise. After all, her parents had been married over thirty years—a good record for a marriage—and there was no evident hostility between them. Shirley attributed the Temples’ marital compatibility to her father’s five-year seniority to her mother and to his lack of involvement in the film industry, where divorce was prevalent.
Her school friends say that at fifteen Shirley would look at each young man she met as a potential husband. She was searching for someone who was not in movies, at least five years older than she, good-looking, smart, and someone who didn’t care about—or better yet, had never even seen—Shirley Temple in a picture.
Joyce Agar had entered Westlake in Nancy Majors’s class in the fall of 1943. The daughter of an affluent Chicago meat-company executive, John George Agar, Joyce had moved with her mother, Lillian Rogers Agar, to Beverly Hills, California, that previous summer, shortly after Mr. Agar’s death. Beverly Hills had not been a random choice. Lillian, who was a great beauty and a woman of exceptional taste, had many friends there, one of whom was the Temples’ neighbor, ZaSu Pitts. Shirley had met Joyce at ZaSu’s and liked her so well that she had persuaded her to attend Westlake. One day Joyce brought her oldest brother, John, to Shirley’s to swim along with her two younger brothers, James, thirteen, and Frank, twelve.
Shortly after this meeting, John Agar enlisted in the Navy Air Corps and was sent to Texas for basic training for seven months before being transferred as a physical-training instructor to March Field, California. On a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1943, ZaSu’s daughter, Ann Gallery, held a small swimming party at her home. Agar, home on leave, attended, as did Shirley. Agar claims he thought Shirley was “very pleasant,” but recalls that he gave her very little thought. At the time, he was twenty-three and she was only “a fifteen-year-old kid, although quite pretty.” Immediately after this meeting, Shirley began to romanticize about the six-foot-two-inch Army (he had transferred from the Navy) Air Corps private with the all-American physique, charming manners and auburn-haired good looks, and managed to be at ZaSu’s house when she was told that John (or Jack, as he was also called) was to be there.
Shirley confided to a friend that they seemed to be fated. Agar carried both her brothers’ first names—Jack and George—and he was exactly one foot taller than she, which was also the difference between her and her six-foot-two-inch brothers. And Agar and George, Jr., both had attended military schools and were good athletes. Agar’s father had been his role model. The senior Agar had held a record for the fifty-yard dash and had been on the football and track teams at the University of Chicago. The younger Agar’s athletic coach at Lake Forest Academy, Illinois (which he had attended from 1935 to 1937), Emerald “Speedo” Wilson, has remembered that “[h]e was a tough kid who used to pester me to let him play with the older boys. When I let him, he’d often get banged up but always came back for more.”
After Lake Forest, Agar had gone to Pawling Preparatory School (1937–39) in Dutchess County, New York. Upon graduation, he returned to Chicago. He was eighteen, and did not have good enough grades to enter college. Wishing to stand on his own, he took a job as a messenger for a chemical laboratory. Women found his square-jawed, blue-eyed good looks, easy charm and athletic bearing irresistible, and he concentrated on the social side of his life. Then came the war and his enlistment in the Naval Air Corps. Two years later, he had transferred from the Navy to the Army Air Corps.
Another of Agar’s attractions for Shirley was his seemingly total disinterest in movies. This certainly could have been the case in 1944, when films meant little more to him than a display screen on which to view a parade of beautiful women. Agar says their meetings were “infrequent” during the year that followed. At the time, Shirley was working in pictures with a strong patriotic flavor (Since You Went Away and I’ll Be Seeing You), and attending wartime school classes; a relationship, no matter how tenuous, with a serviceman was romantic.
“War reached down into the most exalted private schools and had the preppies learning close-order drill, motor mechanics, navigation, map reading and aeronautics,” historian Geoffrey Perrett has chronicled. Westlake did not go quite that far, but the girls formed corps, drilled, and the focus of their education was quite definitely the war: “Spelling lessons mixed military terms with everyday words. English classes [stressed war themes for compositions], arithmetic problems used airplanes where once they used apples.” There was one scrap drive after another. And air-raid drills occurred two and three times a week. Los Angeles is on the coast and had strategic naval and air bases flanking it. At night there were blackouts. After the assault on Pearl Harbor, the fear of a Japanese air or submarine attack was constant.
Military schools, whose enrollment had languished in the thirties, became popular as boys prepared for a service in the armed forces. Shirley and her classmates at Westlake were guaranteed sufficient escorts for all their cotillions. But these young men were only playing at war. Most of the older girls had boyfriends in the services with whom they corresponded, a letter to a soldier being a patriotic as well as a romantic gesture. Shirley wrote to John Agar, and he replied. He obtained a ten-day furlough for Christmas, 1944, and during that time they did meet often. Agar felt that, at sixteen, Shirley was less experienced but a great deal more sophisticated than the majority of young women he had been dating. By the end of the furlough, they were very much in love.
Shirley confided her feelings for Agar to her parents, and his for her. Gertrude insisted the couple wait until after the war to make any plans. “You were married at seventeen,” Shirley replied. “I promise we won’t get married before I’m seventeen.” That date was less than four months away. In Europe, the fighting in the Ardennes raged on, taking a toll of American casualties “that eclipsed the Battle of Gettysburg and the bloodiest encounter in the history of American arms; 55,000 killed or wounded, another 18,000 taken prisoner.” In the Pacific, the struggle at Iwo Jima “seized people’s imaginations as no other battle of the war had done, largely thanks to a memorable photograph of a handful of Marines raising the [American] flag on Mount Suribachi.” But the cost of that “victory” in terms of American casualties was painfully high. “Please, for God’s sake, stop sending our finest youth to be murdered in places like Iwo Jima,” one distraught woman wrote her congressman in February 1945. “It is most inhuman and awful—stop, stop!” That same month, Agar was transferred to a base near Spokane, Washington, from which he was scheduled in the very near future to be shipped overseas.
With each passing month, events filled with so much sadness and fear and horror took place that to see anything in its proper perspective was difficult for those left at home. The Russians took Warsaw; Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at Yalta to make postwar plans; Shirley’s old friend and one of America’s most memorable presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, shortly after his unprecedented reelection to a third term. The hardly known Harry Truman took office. Buchenwald was liberated and the bones of thousands of gassed and murdered inmates were found in open graves; Mussolini and his mistress were executed in Milan; the Germans surrendered; and Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun, committed suicide. How were the people on the home front to react to this frantic acceleration of historic events? Everyday happenings seemed almost embarrassing to relate in letters to the men at the front or in hospitals, or preparing to be sent to the Pacific, where the Japanese doggedly fought on. In this climate, simple lives took on a drama they would not have assumed in peacetime. Women married men they knew little about, and servicemen became responsible for families from whom they would be separated.
In mid-April 1945, shortly before Shirley’s seventeenth birthday, the senior class at Westlake held a luncheon for their forty-three members. The previous
night, Agar, in Los Angeles on a three-day pass, had presented Shirley with a two-and-a-half carat, square-cut diamond ring. His first night in town he took her dancing to Freddie Martin’s Orchestra at the Cocoanut Grove. The next evening, they went for a drive. “There I was, in a parked car, out on Sunset Boulevard. Nothing was elegant and we weren’t all gussied up,” she recalled. “Do you know where we were? . . . Midway between Engels Drugstore and the Eastern Star Home, just kitty-corner from a gas station . . . [when Agar proposed].”
Gertrude had insisted that they keep the engagement a secret, and Agar promised they would not marry for two or three years at least. Nevertheless, Shirley wore the ring to the luncheon the next day. (“Somehow, I wanted them [the senior class] to know, so I told them all about it.”) Her mother reproached her for not holding to her word. Realizing that the newspapers would find out soon, Gertrude notified Selznick, who called a press conference at the Temple house with Agar and Shirley present and holding hands. “Shirley and John have promised not to get married for two years, possibly three,” Gertrude told the reporters, adding that what she liked best about the newly promoted sergeant was his “sincerity.” She did not, of course, mention what might have displeased her.
Lillian Agar had been left as a widow with large family responsibilities and too small an estate to care for her family as she would have liked. Realistically, she could not count on her oldest son to contribute amply to the Agars’ support. He had always been a rebel, his preparatory-school grades had not been of college caliber, and except as a physical-training instructor he had no job qualifications. He was a good athlete, a talent immediately put to good use by the Air Corps. He could have found a place for himself in his father’s meat-packing business in Chicago, but as he says, “The war interrupted no future plans.” Gertrude and George could not help but wonder how Agar was going to support a wife. They made it sufficiently clear that her money would not be available to Shirley before the age of twenty-one, and then it would not come all at once, but over specified periods of time. If the couple chose to marry early, they would have no funds except those that the two of them could earn, and even then, the court would be obligated to set aside, until her majority, fifty percent of Shirley’s earnings.
Gertrude was more concerned over Shirley’s contract with Selznick. Despite her tremendous showing in the two films under his supervision and the good word that was spreading on the soon-to-be-released Kiss and Tell, Selznick had no immediate plans for her, no scripts that he was developing; nor was a major-studio loan-out being considered. With Spellbound, starring Ingrid Bergman, now completed, he was totally committed to Jennifer Jones’s next film, a huge Technicolor spectacle titled Duel in the Sun. Suddenly, after Shirley’s career had moved into high speed, a boulder had rolled into its path. With no film to occupy Shirley’s time and energies, Gertrude feared her daughter would concentrate on her romance with Agar, who had just been notified that he was soon to be sent into the South Pacific theater. And Gertrude was right. After her graduation from Westlake, with no commitment to either a film or college, in late July 1945, Shirley insisted her parents give her permission to marry. Fearing that Shirley might elope, the Temples must have felt they had no alternative. Agar requested and was granted a ten-day furlough.
In less than two weeks, on August 6, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and on August 9, on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered five days later. The Second World War had ended. Agar learned he would not be sent overseas, but it was too late to stop or postpone the wedding, which was slated for Wednesday evening, September 19, news that received major national coverage. Shirley appeared deliriously happy. And the world, after so many years of death and casualties, found some small release in the daily coverage of the approaching marriage of America’s princess to her Prince Charming, who now would not be wrenched away to go to war. After all, which of us does not enjoy a happy ending to a fairy tale?
Footnotes
* “Miss Temple . . . is ingratiating” (Variety, 11/12/41). “No emotion is too difficult for this child to convey” (Hollywood Reporter, 11/11/41). “There is a new dignity and poise in her acting” (Los Angeles Times, 3/27/42).
* Designated to be one of the following stories: Little Annie Rooney, Secret Garden, Lucky Sixpence or Stella Marris
† Swarts and Tannenbaum, then located at 650 South Spring Street, Los Angeles
* The same Robert Haldeman of the Richard Nixon Cabinet and of Watergate
* Invited guests at the premiere were given elaborate printed programs that had been patterned after those made for the premiere of Gone With the Wind and the large cast had been delineated in the same manner, according to their family, location or wartime affiliation.
† Hamilton was a stalwart American leading man of silent films who had not made a successful transition to talkies. He had played small character parts in low-budget movies. Although his character in Since You Went Away was never presented in person, the plot revolved around his absence. He received no credit. He did very little film work over the next twenty years. In the 1960’s, he was cast as Police Commissioner Gordon in TV’s Batman series.
* Cukor had been replaced on Gone With the Wind by director Victor Fleming.
* The preview was held at the Fox Wilshire Theatre on December 15, 1944.
* Vivien Leigh was also under contract to Selznick, but had returned to England and was at the time attempting to break her legal ties with his company.
9 AT THE VERY OUTSET, Shirley had put down her foot and said firmly, “I want an old-fashioned marriage. I don’t want a Hollywood circus.” In the end, it turned out to be an “intimate” wedding with five hundred of the two families’ “closest friends” invited to see the couple married by Pastor Willsie Martin in the vast sanctuary of the Wilshire Methodist Church before a reception on the grounds of the Temples’ estate. During the six short weeks between the day she had set the date and the wedding, Shirley was caught up in a frantic schedule of prenuptial preparations and parties. There were fittings for her gown, being made by the celebrated Hollywood couturier Howard Greer, his bridal design for “the wedding of the decade” a guarded secret. With Joyce Agar and Gertrude in tow, Shirley shopped for her trousseau. The wedding service was carefully planned and the bridal party chosen.* Many gala, glittering affairs were given in her honor.
“I gave my first big party, a bridal shower for Shirley,” Nancy Majors Voorheis recalls. “I had just completed my first year in an eastern college and came home to spend the summer. When Shirley asked me to be a bridesmaid, I extended my stay. There was also a wonderful party that the two Lloyd sisters, Harold Lloyd’s two daughters, gave in their palatial palace in Bel-Air. Our bridesmaids’ dresses were made by designer Louella Brantingham, and they were an absolute dream. They resembled shepherdess costumes and were a periwinkle blue [renamed by the press “Temple blue”] gathered up in little puffs, each puff with a small blue velvet ribbon in its center. We wore open-crowned cartwheel hats of blue, shirred net, with scatterings of the same tiny blue velvet ribbons, and we carried old-fashioned bouquets that were just out of this world. The dresses were really, really beautiful, and each one cost a bundle. I recall being staggered by the price. But the nicest thing was that the Temples presented the dresses to the bridesmaids as a gift along with handsome leather-bound books depicting the wedding with our names, Shirley’s and Jack’s and the date engraved. The whole thing was like a fairy tale except for the terrible crush of the crowds.”
On the afternoon of September 19, the public started gathering at three o’clock in the afternoon in front of the Wilshire Methodist Church. The wedding was scheduled for 8:30 P.M., and by then nearly twelve thousand people lined the streets, held back wherever possible by Los Angeles policemen assisted by a military motorcycle squad. Traffic down Wilshire Boulevard was so hopelessly snarled that the service had to be delayed fifteen minutes until all members of the wedding party (who had been scheduled to arrive two hours ear
lier) were there. Just as Darryl Zanuck had been seated, and David Selznick came in late and out of breath, Shirley stepped out and into the aisle on her father’s arm and paused momentarily under one of the church’s massive crystal chandeliers. An audible gasp from the gathered guests accompanied her appearance. From the small crown made of corded satin loops that topped her long ash-blond hair, to the very full, twelve-foot-long white satin train of her gown, Shirley looked like the most regal and beautiful of royal brides.
The round low neck of her gown was edged by a looped cord of satin studded with seed pearls, which also decorated the tight-fitting bodice. The “Little Infanta” skirt was held out at the side by panniers. From the coronet atop her head a silk-net veil billowed behind her as she walked. She wore wrist-length white satin gloves, also trimmed in seed pearls, and she carried a spectacular bouquet of mixed white flowers with trailing seed-pearl ribbons. (For “something borrowed” she had tucked into her floral display a sheer lace handkerchief given to her by Nancy’s mother, Helen Majors; for “something blue” she wore a blue garter; for “something old” her own small diamond cross around her neck; and for “something new,” her wedding ring. In her shoe was a penny for good luck.)
