Shirley Temple

by Anne Edwards

  On cue, the lights dimmed and the organist began to play Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. The procession made its way in slow rhythm down the center aisle, which had blue satin ribbons stretched along each side. The altar and church bloomed with thousands of pink roses and daisies dyed to match.

  Shirley performed her role “with the deftness of an Academy Award winner.” She knelt gracefully at the altar beside her handsome bridegroom in his specially tailored Army Air Corps uniform, and rose again to her feet without his assistance. Her “I will” could be heard in the rear of the huge church. Neither of them missed a cue or muffed a line. At the conclusion of the ceremony, the sergeant gave his bride “a long, resounding kiss which brought a ripple of laughter from the audience.” (Selznick commented that it “was longer than the movie censor would allow”).

  With eyes only for each other, Shirley and Agar walked back up the aisle of the church. The front doors were thrown open, and the couple stood in the aperture. To the guests’ horror, as the mob outside caught their first glimpse of the wedding couple, they broke through the cordon of police who “were tossed helter-skelter like ninepins,” and rushed toward the church doors, clambering over about fifty photographers, who went down in the melee. Women inside the church screamed as the crowd drew close to Shirley and Agar, who stood stunned in the bright lights of the flashing cameras of the remaining erect photographers. For a moment, it looked as though the mob would reach the Agars, then the groom pulled his bride abruptly back and into the shelter of the church. The doors were slammed shut, but not without some minor injuries to a few of the front members of the advancing throng, who fell and were almost trampled.

  Added police arrived, but it was a while before enough order had been restored for the church doors to be reopened. Even then, the danger had not passed. The police had roped off a three-foot-wide lane to where the cars waited to take the newlyweds and the wedding party to the reception at the Temples’ house.

  Shirley, held close by Agar, her train caught up over her arm, made a rush for their car, a police guard of twelve men moving with them. Although tousled, they made it to their vehicle safely. The bridesmaids did not fare so well. They were pushed around and mauled by the mob.

  “There seemed to be tons and tons of policemen trying to hold back the crowds, but they somehow could not get them in control,” Nancy vividly recalls. “We [the rest of the bridal party] had to work our way down steep steps from the church into the waiting limousines. People grabbed at our dresses; they were actually shredding us. They tore off pieces of mine and others. I think that was one of the only times in my life that I felt true panic—when you absolutely have no control, when you are a victim of what’s happening. [The police] finally got us into the limousines, and miraculously no one had been seriously injured. But it was scary. We had been roughed up, our hair was in disarray, our gowns torn, our bouquets pulled apart. We were all shaky, but grateful to be safely in the cars even though people ran alongside of them for a part of the way.”

  When the wedding party reached Rockingham Road, they were greeted by another milling mob. Now forewarned, the police had managed to cordon off a pathway for the procession of limousines so that they could reach the steel gates safely. Though shouting and pressing forward, the crowd offered no danger. Once safely inside, Shirley and her bridesmaids repaired themselves as best they could and then joined the reception line.

  Huge canopies of green leaves attached to canvas had been raised. A myriad of lights had been strung between trees and buildings to turn night into day. Nancy remembers “particularly that the rose garden, which was right before the arbor where the wedding party stood to receive guests [along with California Governor and Mrs. Earl Warren, who were honored guests], had thousands of beautiful pink roses wired to the rose bushes so that there was just one mass of blooms.” Although some famous Hollywood names appeared in the guest list, they were relatively few. Most of Shirley’s co-stars were conspicuously missing. No other former child performers were present. In fact, ZaSu Pitts was one of the few actors invited. Movie folk were represented mostly by producers and a large contingent from the technical crews—cameramen, designers, wardrobe people—who had worked on Shirley’s many films. The entire senior class at Westlake was present, as well as teachers and Miss Mills.

  The wedding gifts were arranged on tables in Shirley’s playhouse, “sparkling like a million dollar display at Tiffany’s.” A large table glittered with more than two hundred silver pieces—trays, bowls, candlesticks and cigarette boxes. There were several sets of sterling-silver flatware, one containing two dozen of each formal ten-piece setting, and there was crystal enough to serve the wedding guests. Cookbooks, waffle irons and electric cookware—many given by fans—were also on display.

  French champagne, which had been in short supply since the war, was served. The resplendent buffet was watched over by three large, gracefully sculptured ice swans. Strolling Spanish troubadours strummed their guitars. Not until midnight did Shirley and Agar cut their five-tiered, three-foot-high wedding cake. Agar drank a champagne toast, but Shirley consumed lemonade in a champagne glass. Finally, she tossed her bouquet (caught by Nancy Majors), and then left to reappear fifteen minutes later dressed in a dove-gray wool suit trimmed in soft blue velvet. A blue velvet beret with a gray veil completed her outfit. The bridal couple made a dash through a shower of rice, only to discover that one of the policemen on duty had inadvertently locked the keys inside their car. Two officers finally managed to break the lock, but the hinges of the door came with it. “The first ride of Mr. and Mrs. Agar,” Shirley remembered, “found me unable even to sit close to my husband. I was on the far side of the seat straining every muscle to keep the car door from falling off its broken hinges.”

  A suite for the first night of their honeymoon had been reserved at the Bel-Air Hotel in the names of Emil and Emma Glutz. When the night clerk came on at midnight, long past the time reservations were held, he gave away their accommodations, not knowing the Glutzes were the famous couple. They got an ordinary room, not the bridal suite. The next morning, their departure was held up two hours while they waited for a repair man to fix the broken hinge on the door. A quiet ocean-side hotel in Santa Barbara, California, was chosen for their five-day honeymoon. No one was told where they would be. This quest for privacy caused still another unpleasant incident attached to the wedding. Shortly after their departure from Los Angeles, a fatal automobile accident just outside the city involved the same model car as theirs. The occupants were a soldier wearing sergeant stripes and a woman in a gray suit, both dead and unidentifiable. The Temples, Lillian Agar, police and newsmen were convinced the dead couple were John and Shirley. Not until twenty-four hours later did they find out the newlyweds were alive.

  Agar returned to a new post in Kerns, Utah, directly after the honeymoon, and Shirley went back to Brentwood to oversee the conversion of her playhouse into an elegant two-story home for them. Agar’s discharge from the service was expected on January 1, 1946. They began their married life in a borrowed one-bedroom guest cottage on the estate of a friend of the Temples, and they remained there for three months until their own residence was ready.

  The reconversion had been extensive. The theater had been stripped of its stage and dressing rooms, and was now an enormous living room with the formerly chartreuse walls repainted a pale aquamarine. Large, rose-splashed chintz couches dominated. The room with the soda fountain had become the Agars’ bedroom and was decorated a sunny yellow. The kitchen had been enlarged, a dining room had replaced the bowling alley. But the cavernous doll room with its glass display cases and the wardrobe room where racks and racks of her childhood clothes and costumes hung on overhead poles remained. Shirley had not been willing to let go completely of the past. Most difficult of all, at least for Agar, was the proximity to his in-laws—especially the “strong” and competitive Gertrude—who were less than fifty yards away. The necessity of sharing a common driveway meant that the
Agars’ comings and goings could be monitored. The independence Shirley had thought she had won with her marriage was short-lived. Gertrude still hovered over her. She found herself now caught between two forceful personalities, Gertrude and Agar.

  Like so many returning veterans, Agar had no idea of what he wanted to do, although he was certain he did not wish to be associated with the meat-packing business. Shortly after his marriage, his mother, Lillian, had opened a Beverly Hills boutique, which did well from the start. No longer having to worry about assisting his family, he talked about attending Harvard Business School. But Shirley enjoyed a life-style that required a good income, and college took many nonearning years. Expenses were many: a maid’s salary to be paid, two cars to maintain, dinners at the best restaurants and rumba dancing at the Cocoa-nut Grove and other exclusive nightclubs and bistros. Gertrude had been straightforward. Since Shirley was unemployed, she had only a modest “allowance.” Her personal wealth was held in trust funds that she was not allowed to touch for almost four years. Shirley talked about quitting films, about John getting a job removed from the industry and Hollywood. She was fond of the San Francisco Bay area where Jack and Mimsy lived. She repeated to friends, “Thank God, he didn’t marry me because I was Shirley Temple.” She wanted to put Shirley Temple into mothballs, like the costumes in her wardrobe room. She called herself “Shirley Agar,” and made sure everyone else did as well. Close friends believed she was trying to convince herself that the fairy-tale wedding had evolved into “they lived happily ever after.” Her attraction to Agar was evident to them, but within a very short time they sensed a growing and unfamiliar nervousness in Shirley’s demeanor. It was no secret that Agar could be moody (but wasn’t this the case with many veterans?), that he drank and that he had not lost his appreciation of a pretty girl.

  Although Shirley was still under contract to David O. Selznick, rumors now circulated that she was being considered by Jack Warner for a co-starring role in Life with Father, an adaptation of the hit Howard Lindsay–Russell Crouse play. On February 21, 1946, Michael Curtiz, the director, and Robert Buckner, the producer, telegraphed Selznick:

  DEAR DAVID: WE UNDERSTAND FROM J.L. [WARNER] THAT YOU THINK WE CAN GET TOGETHER ON TEMPLE FOR LIFE WITH FATHER. WE GREATLY HOPE THIS WORKS OUT AND ARE ANXIOUS TO GIVE YOU ANY FURTHER INFORMATION OR ASSURANCES YOU WISH. WE PLAN TO START AROUND MARCH TWENTIETH. TEMPLE WOULD NOT BE NEEDED UNTIL FIRST WEEK IN APRIL AND WE CAN DO MUCH TO CONSOLIDATE HER WORK TO FIT YOUR NEEDS. MARVELOUS CAST SET [WILLIAM POWELL, IRENE DUNNE, EDMUND GWENN AND ZASU PITTS] EXCEPT FOR THIS PART WHICH IS MOST IMPORTANT AND YOUR GENEROSITY WOULD BE LONG REMEMBERED.

  By now, Duel in the Sun was being called Gruel in the Sun by all concerned. The project had taken over a year of Selznick’s constant attention, and because of the script’s demands and its harsh outdoor locations, the filming had given Jennifer Jones “the most terrific physical beating ever administered to an actress.” For the better part of a year, she had worked fifteen-hour days and had been exposed for hours to the intense heat of Arizona wearing thick Indian half-breed makeup, with a good deal of bare flesh exposed as she climbed mountains and crawled over rock boulders. Selznick had to cajole, nurse and be in attendance almost constantly. Shirley’s career was far from his mind, and when, in February 1946, RKO requested her services for a loan-out for a low-budget film pertinently called Honeymoon, he was only too happy to oblige. He recommended the script to Gertrude. It had been written by Michael Kanin, who had received an Academy Award for his co-authorship of Woman of the Year, and was to be directed by William Keighley, who had done The Man Who Came to Dinner. It also would reunite Shirley with Guy Madison, who had been in the cast of Since You Went Away. Nonetheless, Shirley might not have agreed to make it except for one major consideration: She and Agar needed the money to live comfortably. When the offer came from Warner Brothers for her to play the key role of the daughter in Life with Father, the ink had not even had time to dry on the RKO deal. Selznick had no other recourse than to tell Warner that Shirley was unavailable. The role went to Elizabeth Taylor.

  Honeymoon (Two Men and a Girl in Great Britain) was the kind of film comedy that needed the right director’s “touch” for it to work. Michael Kanin’s screenplay from a story by Vicki Baum contained many elements that could have had an amusing sparkle. That the finished product was “more labored than bright” could well have been the fault of William Keighley’s surprisingly heavy-handed direction. In a scatterbrained role that required the expert comedic timing of a young Jean Arthur, Shirley was lost and lackluster. One reviewer even wrote, “When Temple was a tot, legend has it, before every ‘take’, her mother would admonish her, ‘Now sparkle, Shirley, sparkle!’ Well, either Mrs. Temple was nowhere near the sets of Honeymoon or her admonishments have lost their sting.”

  Gertrude had not been on the set, by Shirley’s request. She was married and had celebrated her eighteenth birthday by the time she made Honeymoon. A co-worker had overheard her say to her mother, “You can’t boss me anymore.” Being regarded as a mature person was more of a prime objective in her personal life than in her career, which had suddenly taken on a new meaning—a job. She had never really thought much previously about money. Her work had always been equated by Gertrude to “play.” Now it was her husband’s and her livelihood. Agar had the money he had saved from the service, but after their own honeymoon and his contribution to their living expenses during their first months together that was now almost gone. She understood and sympathized with his inability to find an immediate career for himself, but her worst fears, that she would have to remain “Shirley Temple,” with all that the name implied, had taken hold of her. Her initial act on arriving on the set on the first day of shooting Honeymoon was to take down the SHIRLEY TEMPLE sign on her dressing-room door and replace it with one that read SHIRLEY AGAR.

  Gertrude’s contribution to Shirley’s performances as a child cannot be dismissed. Her assistance went much deeper than her admonishments to “sparkle.” Gertrude had discussed the psychological and physical action in every scene. She had, in effect, become Shirley’s drama coach and interpreter. When a scene called for Shirley to cry, Gertrude had taken her off to a corner before the cameras rolled and told her something sad enough to cause tears (remembering the death of her pet Pekinese was one stimulant). Gertrude had taught Shirley her lines and played out all her scenes with her. She had helped her memorize lyrics of songs with the proper inflection and, with her steady and confident (if pedestrian) piano accompaniment, worked out the tunes. And Gertrude had fought for the most advantageous camera angles, the most flattering wardrobe, and had run interference when she thought another performer was moving in too close (as with Sybil Jason in The Blue Bird). She had also acted as an ear and as a buffer to any criticism of Shirley, so that the child was never distressed when things were not going well. Money or contractual problems were simply not discussed.

  Without Gertrude, Shirley was unsure, and her lack of confidence showed. Other disturbing factors existed. Young, stage-trained actresses like Anne Baxter, Teresa Wright and Phyllis Thaxter were being brought to Hollywood from New York. Drama coaches proliferated as youthful film actors strived to learn technique. Talent and natural intelligence had been all Shirley had ever needed. In Honeymoon, she had to create a character foreign to her own personality, a light-headed character more in the style of the 1930’s screwball comediennes. Her role was that of a frivolous young woman who takes a train to Mexico City to meet and elope with a corporal (Guy Madison) stationed in the Canal Zone, but she somehow misses him and dumps herself, almost literally, into the lap of the much older, suave American vice-consul (Franchot Tone), nearly destroying his own romance (with Lina Romay). If the movie was to succeed as madcap comedy, the older man had to become titillated by the young woman and she had to almost become seduced by his charms before both of them realized where real love dwelled.

  Otis L. Guernsey, Jr., the film critic of the New York Herald
Tribune, wrote, “Shirley Temple is not likely to gain adult cinema stature on the basis of this effort. Honeymoon is too clearly a strained attempt to make an antic film without sufficient wit. . . . The erstwhile child star works just a little too hard for the quality of fresh allure.” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times chided, “The friends of Shirley Temple must be getting a little bit tired of seeing this buxom young lady still acting as though she were a kid.” Obviously, Honeymoon was an attempt to capitalize on Shirley’s recent marriage.

  Career problems, the difficulties of trying to place her new relationship with Gertrude in proper perspective and the pressures of a too-youthful marriage distracted Shirley, and Agar himself was wrestling with his own confusion over a career choice, adjustment into civilian life and to his marriage.

  In the beginning, the glamour and excitement of their marriage had been enough for him. But once out of uniform, he realized he had not returned to freedom but to new responsibilities and restrictions. Where he had formerly relaxed over a few drinks “with the guys,” now male camaraderie was missing from his civilian life. His physical desire for Shirley had overridden any consideration of their compatibility. He found that they differed in most of their likes and interests and that their basic personalities were at odds. He had no patience with her petulance. He was straightforward and believed in saying exactly what he was feeling, which could be anything from criticizing Gertrude’s oppressive nearness to Shirley’s sometimes immature, often prim responses to discussions of their problems. Her quick wit, good clothes sense, strong will and appreciation of the male sex before they had married had lent her an aura of sophistication. Now, he wasn’t sure if she was child or woman, and, he suspected, neither was she.

  Snow fell for the first time in seventy-five years on San Francisco the winter of 1947. The atomic bomb received the blame. So it was with most untoward happenings or malaise during the first years of peace. The war, or the end of it, was said to be behind each failed business or marriage. “What the veteran doesn’t want,” reported Fortune magazine, “is risk. . . . Security has become the great goal. . . . They want to work for somebody else—preferably somebody big.” Security and identity were equally important to Agar, who did not want to be “Mr. Shirley Temple” any more than she wanted him to be.