by Anne Edwards
When asked about the professionalism of her decorating, she recalled, “I’ve been interested in decorating since I was a child in the studios. They used to have miniature sets of all the pictures I worked in, and for each film there was usually a different period set. While other little girls were playing with doll’s houses, I was playing with these authentic miniature sets, prepared by some of Hollywood’s greatest decorating talents.”
The house reflected only a few reminders of her glittering past. She had leased half of her doll collection to the California State Exposition Building—a state museum.* “The funny thing is I didn’t like dolls,” Shirley had confessed when Susan was small, “and neither does my daughter,” yet the remaining half of her collection was kept in glass cases in the girls’ rooms. The white Steinway grand piano, autographed personally under the lid to her from one of the Steinways—given to her at the age of seven—occupied a prominent position in the living room. On a bookshelf in the same room, a neat row of “reddish-brown leather albums were lined up with the title of one of Shirley’s movies lettered in gold on each. The albums contained stills from and clippings about the films.” Only one photograph of her as a child was exhibited, and that was hung on the wall of little Charlie’s room.
The work Shirley had done on the house so impressed her new friends in Atherton that for a time she associated herself with a local interior-decorator’s shop. “I enjoy color psychology. But I can’t work for strangers,” she confessed when this did not turn out well. “They just want to ask me about Elizabeth Taylor.” Much of her time and energy continued to be given over to fund-raising for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (of which she was now national director) and other charities, including the Allied Arts Guild, which supported a children’s convalescent home and a rehabilitation center for the physically disabled. One day a week was spent at Stanford Hospital taking blood samples to the laboratory and wheeling out new mothers and babies when they were ready to go home. “Once,” she admitted sheepishly, “I forgot the baby.” With Charles, she joined the conservationist Sierra Club, which dealt with problems of ecology. On clement weekends, they picnicked at the ocean with the children, went snorkeling, skin diving, or played golf. She was a fair golfer, and her score ranged from 100 to 110 for eighteen holes.
She had become “a fearless conversationalist,” and since her Washington years had developed an insatiable interest in world affairs.
Television and film work had been offered her. But she refused to play roles that cast her as an alcoholic or a “fallen woman,” parts that had been submitted to her, “because of the reaction it would have” on her “children and husband. Besides,” she added, “I have no burning desire to act.” Selznick had called once to ask her to take part in a television special he was producing. “I accepted on the telephone,” she remembered, “and then little Charlie got sick and I called back and said ‘I guess I’m too much of a mother.’ But I would have done it if I had only realized that my father-in-law’s company was one of the sponsors.” James Black, however, would not have been pleased with that decision, for he made it clear to those close to him that he did not approve of Shirley returning to films.
Susan once asked her mother what she had missed in her childhood and Shirley had replied, “Darling, only the mumps!” Those came in 1955—on both sides—when little Charlie caught them and passed the disease on to Susan and Shirley. Gertrude came up to Atherton to nurse her ailing daughter and grandchildren and promptly made it a foursome by catching the mumps herself.
George had recently retired, and the Temples were considering a move to Palm Springs. The “winding down” of her formerly active life and the absence of Shirley as a central force had not been easy for Gertrude. Among her friends, it was no secret that she had not wanted Shirley to quit at a time when her popularity was at such a low point. For her part, Shirley still refused to discuss the past. “It’s senseless,” she had once said, “like talking about an operation. The sooner you stop the sooner you start feeling better.” The last years of her career obviously remained a painful memory.
Shirley was approaching her third decade. The normal life she had touched upon when she had attended Westlake School now seemed fully hers. The closest she came to movies was as a board member of the San Francisco International Film Festival. Mostly, she lived the life “of the wealthy suburban matron, caught up in a busy round of teas, balls, fashion shows and entertaining.” She had the “perfect” husband, and three children to love, mold into adults and discipline, but it had not proved to be enough. She kept adding responsibilities—demanding charity, hospital and fund-raising work and mounting involvement in campaigns to preserve the environment.
Though she could well afford live-in domestics, she insisted on hiring only part-time household help. Family dinners, which she cooked herself, remained sacrosanct. She wanted everything perfect—the happy ending to the fairy story of the little girl who was princess of the world. One relative thought she had become driven, that she was trying to prove her worth, her ability to take care of not only her own family, but all the needy.
“Somehow [among former child stars] the defense mechanism breaks down around the age of thirty. They no longer seem able to suppress their outrage at the abuse and exploitation of their childhoods,” Diana Serra Cary claims. “This [rebellion] takes different forms: erratic behavior (Patty Duke), self-destructive death wish (Jackie Cooper and race cars!), mental blackouts (Edith Fellows). In my case, I experienced unbearable mental anguish—conflicting feelings of guilt and rage.” Shirley’s guilt was at having failed in her first marriage and in the adult years of her career.
“I think it comes down to the fact that a breadwinner child feels so responsible. They can’t remember when they weren’t the family’s meal-ticket. One’s first reaction is having ‘let others down.’ You put off thinking how ill-treated you may have been, because your own sense of failure keeps the monkey on your back, and you’re so busy dealing with that, you haven’t got time to think about yourself as a victim. That keeps getting postponed until one day it’s Mount St. Helen time!” Mrs. Cary concludes. But Shirley kept right on going, with no apparent explosion.
Always the linchpin of her circle, Shirley had retained her closeness to her family, including her in-laws, whom she saw frequently. Her two marriages and the miles that separated their homes had not distanced Shirley from Gertrude. When Gertrude took ill about this time, she came up to San Francisco to have major surgery. Shirley felt responsible for and closely identified with Gertrude, who—with Sonny’s illness added to her own—was under tremendous stress. But George was in good health, and Jack was now working for the FBI.*
Shirley’s life was filled, but not complete. The Blacks ate their dinner with the children, and Charles retired early. She never got to sleep before 2:00 A.M., which gave her a very long evening alone. (“I inherit that from mother,” she admitted. “She sits in her dressing room, so as not to disturb daddy, and knits and reads and dozes far into the night.”) Her once-avid interest in medicine had faded, interior decoration had not satisfied her, her charity work did not fulfill her and the children were no longer babies.
Coincidence could have been involved; but as Shirley neared her thirtieth birthday, she decided to reactivate her acting career. Charles had recently left Stanford Research Institute and taken a job as director of financial relations for the Ampex Corporation in nearby Redwood City. Ampex, makers of both home and professional tape-recording equipment, was responsible for many technical advancements in television, and the Blacks watched more than their share of broadcasts on their set. Four of Shirley’s early films—Heidi, Wee Willie Winkie, Captain January and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm—had been released to television. Along with her own children, millions of people were seeing her as the child she had been, not the woman she now was. Shirley began to put out “feelers.” Perhaps “she couldn’t resist wanting to bring herself up-to-date publicly,” one friend explained.
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Another old-time Hollywood acquaintance comments, “I think she did it [picked up her career] to finally exorcise her feelings of failing Gertrude. This guilt always was a shadow on her present happiness. To ‘quit at the top’ meant she had to get back up there again. Then there was Charlie’s family. They didn’t think much about her Hollywood years. They would have been more impressed if she had been a Nob Hill debutante. They weren’t really snobs. In fact, they were good, intelligent people. But I suspect anyone connected with the making of movies or television—excluding the kind of research and scientific work Charlie’s company did—seemed demimondaine to them. Shirley more than likely chaffed at this and needed to prove that she could be a star and a lady.
“Then, too, I think the ‘exurban life’ as she called it, was beginning to bore the hell out of her. Charlie is what one might call ‘a quiet type,’ very solid. Life in Washington had been exciting. Atherton was a whole other ballgame.”
Work was all Shirley had known for her first twenty-one years, and it had given her tremendous self-control and self-discipline and a keen, well-trained memory. As a child star, she had learned how to concentrate on several things at once. “We had to memorize lines, go to school, and shoot scenes almost simultaneously with hammers and ringing bells and lights being set up and all the usual confusion of a movie set,” Diana Serra Cary recalls. This ability to succeed on several levels under the most pressing conditions had become part of Shirley’s life.
By 1957, she had been “retired” for eight years. The Blacks lived well, but modestly and within Charles’s income. Shirley had a great reluctance to use the money that had been invested for her by George and Gertrude and the court’s decree. And even though she wished to return to work, of one thing she was certain—she would never go back to Hollywood full time.
Lori, at three, seemed to have inherited her song-and-dance talents and prattled about “being a movie-star.”
“Yes, Lori is crazy about acting,” Shirley told an interviewer, “but because she is my daughter she is not going to lose the whole life she is living now, the love and joy and fun of being part of a warm family group, for the one-sided life of being a celebrity. Not until she is old enough to know what she is doing, anyway.” The determination behind these words glaringly exposed Shirley’s feelings of pain and deprivation in her own childhood. Why then would she want to subject herself to more of the same, only in reverse—the parent being torn away from the family circle?
Shirley’s will had always been formidable. She was convinced a Hollywood production company could be made to employ her services in Atherton, just as in her youth the Majors’ girls and Mary Lou Islieb had been induced to come to play at her house. When she was actually approached, a compromise was achieved. But she still managed to protect her active role as homemaker at the same time that she picked up the reins on her career.
At a testimonial dinner given by AFTRA,* which she attended because of Charles’s association with Ampex, she met the honoree, Henry Jaffe, a producer of Producers’ Showcase, a series of television specials that had known five years of continued critical acclaim. One of Jaffe’s most successful shows had been a production of Peter Pan. Shirley mentioned that she had once been considered for the role of Tinkerbell. They discussed the impact of fairy tales on the lives of children.
“After all,” she later mused, “as a child I lived in a storybook world; it was like living in books instead of just reading them. I was Heidi in Switzerland, Wee Willie Winkie in India, the Little Princess in England, and [in The Littlest Rebel] I got to sit on Abraham Lincoln’s knee.”
The meeting spurred Jaffe; and he and the executive producer for his company, William Phillipson, put their heads together and came up with an idea for a weekly one-hour playhouse that would retell classic children’s stories and star Shirley. Phillipson, a man of considerable persuasive charm, was on the telephone almost daily to Shirley trying to convince her to sign with them. “I had other TV offers, lots of them,” Shirley claimed, “but Bill Phillipson just kept after me until I had to at least give it serious consideration.” The idea “really appealed” to her because, as she admitted, she was “a pushover for fairytales.”
Family councils with all the children present were a continuing feature of life in the Blacks’ Atherton household. Usually, the subject of these sessions had to do with the younger Blacks’ recent behavior and their individual and current wishes. This time, the topic posed was: “Does Mommy go to Hollywood and stay there to act in a lot of television shows?” The decision was: “No, Mommy goes there once a month and only tells the story. She can only act herself in a couple of them.” Shirley claimed that Lori’s vote first went for her acting in all the stories; but when she explained this would mean her absence from home all week long, the little girl promptly reversed herself.
Shirley relayed her decision to Jaffe: She would narrate a series to be called Shirley Temple’s Storybook and would appear in no more than one of the stories every four months. Her other stipulation was that the narrations should be done in San Francisco.
Henry Jaffe dispatched another of his associates, Alvin Cooperman, to Atherton to convince her that all segments of the show had to be shot in Hollywood. “I told Shirley what we had in mind,” Cooperman recalled. “It was just the kind of show she approved of and we just sat there and talked it over.” Cooperman finally agreed on a monthly format that simulated Producers’ Showcase. Seven shows a year would be telecast as “specials,” preempting scheduled programs. Her narration would be filmed in three days, her acting parts would be separated by four months. Approval of these scripts and a generous percentage of the gross would be given her. To Cooperman’s amazement, “she got out her typewriter. We worked out a one-page contract. Shirley didn’t have an agent, and she laughingly suggested maybe she should call her lawyers. When one page sounded right to her, she just sat right down and signed it on the bridge table in her living room.”
“I’m a lawyer,” marveled Jaffe, “but if I needed a lawyer I’d take Shirley.” The final deal called for her to receive one hundred thousand dollars per episode, plus 25 percent of the profits.
Even with their mother working, the children’s lives changed very little. A live-in housekeeper, Margaret, who “did just about everything, except plan the menus,” was added to the household. Susan attended private school nearby and Lori and Charlie a local nursery school. Except for her days in Hollywood, Shirley drove them to school and Charles to the office and fetched her family later in the day. She continued her charity work and entertained as frequently as before, with buffet dinners that she supervised. Added to her former schedule were the reading and selection of stories for the series. Once the show got under way, there were fittings for the gowns Don Loper designed, the memorization of her lines and fan mail to be answered. Inclined to be a bit chubby, she had to slim down 15 pounds and maintain her weight at 102 pounds.
From January 1958 through December 1958, in a revised format, Shirley narrated sixteen and acted in three segments of Shirley Temple’s Storybook for NBC, some of which were taped while others were filmed live. “Dreams Are Made for Children,” the theme song, written by Mack David and Jerry Livingston, was sung by Shirley to open and close the programs. For each segment she wore a different fanciful ball gown—suitable for Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz—while poised on a movable bicycle seat hidden by her dress and anchored on a pole in the center of a platform designed to resemble a floating cloud.
Backed by a comfortable mixture of sponsors (Sealtest dairies, Hills Brothers coffee and Breck shampoo), Jaffe mounted the opening show, “Beauty and the Beast,” in color and with opulent care. The production starred Claire (“the Old Vic’s delicate”) Bloom and Charlton Heston. “Shirley felt that Beauty did not change character enough as the show progressed, so we did quite a lot of rewriting [of Joseph Schrank’s adaptation],” said Norman Lessing, the story editor. “We sent [the script] to her as a matter of course
. But . . . she came up with some good ideas; I don’t know whether they were intuitive or the products of her measured thinking, but they were always incisive. She had such good taste and such a sense of fitness of things that [thereafter] we consulted her on many things that didn’t concern her.” As a television series debut, the enduring moral fable had been a critical success, lauded for its faithfulness to the original and its “disarming simplicity.”
Shirley’s first acting role was in the third show of the series—“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—as the flirtatious Dutch woman Katrina Van Tassel. The show was shot live, which required ten days’ preparation, and Shirley had her lines memorized on the first day of rehearsal. Her narrations won her more praise than her performance, which received negative reviews. Several critics pointed out the poor judgment employed in her use of a low Dutch dialect. But Cooperman countered, “She had all the warmth and laughter in her voice that the series needed. She was the story-teller telling stories to her children. Nobody [could have been] better.”
Jaffe thoughtfully added, “There were unexplored depths in Shirley as an actress, dancer and singer. But to plumb those depths would take time, and Shirley didn’t want to be tied up in her new career for more than a few days a month.”
In the Christmas 1958 presentation of “Mother Goose,” Elsa Lanchester starred and Shirley appeared, pleasantly enough, as Polly-Put-the-Kettle-On. This show also provided an opportunity for her three children to make their professional acting debuts, directed by Mitchell Leisen.* These appearances turned out to be their last. Little Charlie had one line as a lookout on top of a Maypole: “I see him coming. It’s the Prince, the Prince.” There wasn’t enough excitement in his voice to please Leisen, and he asked Shirley if she could get a little more projection from him.
