by Anne Edwards
“You’ve got to act excited, Charlie,” she called out to him.
The six-year-old looked down from his position on the pole and said, “I’m getting tired sitting up here, Mamma.”
“You’re the one who wanted to be on TV,” Shirley archly replied.†
After several more wooden repeats of his line, “a pathetic, forced round of applause was led by his mother.” Gertrude, still referring to Shirley as “Presh,” hovered close by in a brief return to “stage motherdom” and was more critical, her hands remaining by her sides. During the rehearsals for “Mother Goose,” “a stagehand said the word ‘shit’ . . . and Shirley had him fired. ‘This is a show for children,’ she explained to a dum-founded cast—since no children including her own were present at the incident.”
The show was extremely successful and prompted one critic to write, “It proved once again that [Shirley Temple] could, if she wanted to, steal Christmas from Tiny Tim.”
Her renewed popularity presented her with a rare business opportunity. She persuaded the Ideal Toy Company to manufacture a new version of the old Shirley Temple doll. When a visitor was shown one of the new dolls, she said proudly, “That was my deal.”
“She drives a hard bargain,” said one business associate. “She is frugal almost, but not quite, to the point of being cheap.” B. F. Michtom, president of the Ideal Toy Company, remembered receiving a call from Shirley in 1958. “Hello, Mr. Michtom,” she said in a clear, warm voice. “This is Shirley Temple Black. Do you remember me?” She then informed him of the series she was doing for television and of the release of her old films for TV. “This strikes me as a good time to bring the doll out again,” she told him. Michtom agreed, and within six months the company had sold over three hundred thousand dolls. On behalf of her “doll interests,” Shirley made personal appearances in department stores, autographing dolls for those who bought them. Her presence in Macy’s New York store was a near riot. She also made a deal with Rosenau Brothers, a manufacturer of children’s clothing, to put out a new version of the Shirley Temple “Baby, Take a Bow” dress, and with Random House publishers for three books of collected fairy tales that carried her name.* She made two West Coast appearances in book departments of the Emporium in San Francisco and the May Company in Los Angeles. Both scenes were mayhem, with mobs of between four thousand and six thousand “hysterical fans lining her route from her car to the book department where some stood on counters just to get a look at her.” After autographing about thirteen hundred books in each store, she was escorted through the crowds by several burly detectives.
“I think Shirley’s hobby is business,” commented an admiring NBC official. Her attorney, Deane Johnson of Los Angeles, shared this view. “You only have to tell her once,” he observed. “She retains and understands everything.”
Her interest in politics returned, and in the 1960 presidential campaign she became precinct captain for San Mateo County in Richard M. Nixon’s race against John F. Kennedy. She was extremely adept at getting out the vote. Nixon won the county and California, but lost the election.
Her codes were strict and simple. Her life was led in “Quaker black and white.” When she took Lori’s third-grade class to a movie, My Dog Buddy, touted as suitable for children, she marched them out of it after ten minutes. “Right off,” she explained, “the parents of the family were killed in a head-on auto collision, their little boy seriously injured, and Buddy took off for the hills. I was furious. I blistered the manager, and wrote a letter to the producer.”
Dinner at the Blacks remained a six o’clock ritual, with all children present. “You have to arrive at five-thirty to count on a drink first,” one dinner guest commented. “We all talk together about any subject,” Shirley said, “taking turns as chairman. Puppies, politics, religion or Bach. We want our children to know the art of old-fashioned conversation.”
The well-disciplined life was natural to her. “Even as a baby,” Gertrude recalled, “Shirl had an unusual seriousness about her. I always have to ask her permission to talk to interviewers and she sizes everybody up very thoroughly.” Shirley acknowledged, “I have a mean eye. I don’t like people who read stories about me to know where the children go to school or what day the maid is off. Mixed-up fans still come around. . . . A man came to the door the other day [1961] and said he’d married me in 1940 and sold his stamp collection to get here. One of my brothers [Jack] is an FBI agent and when we called him [after the stranger had been dispatched coolly by Shirley] we found he had been a child molester.”
The last television segment she filmed for Jaffe* was completed in March 1961 and shown later that year. She made a guest appearance on The Red Skelton Show the following year singing “By the Beautiful Sea” and a few bars of “Side by Side” with Skelton, appearing opposite him as a snobbish society girl in a comic sketch. “Skelton held back his usual ribald antics during Shirley’s appearance because she seemed so poised and ladylike. I don’t think he was very comfortable,” observed one stagehand. A more successful variety-show appearance was her guest spot on The Dinah Shore Show a few months later.
Christmas, 1963, found the Blacks in a new, larger and more expensive English Tudor house that they had built on Lakeview Drive in Woodside (an area one journalist called “a hotbed of rest”), a short distance from Atherton. Shirley had brought the Oriental contents of the old house with her, and since her color schemes remained the same, the transition to the new house had not been jarring. Woodside was an elegant community, a “haven of rolling hills and shrouded woods.” The well-to-do were originally attracted to Woodside by the woodlands and hundreds of vineyard acres. In the early nineteenth century, Woodside’s old La Questa Winery exported its famous cabernet sauvignon to many of the major cities in Europe. By the turn of the century, the small town contained the mansions of coffee millionaire James Folger, spice baron August Schilling and William Bourne, heir to the Spring Valley Water Company. For the Blacks, Woodside’s narrow and private country lanes, where the children could safely ride bicycles and horses, had been a tremendous attraction. With under five thousand inhabitants, the town lay on the eastern slope of the Santa Cruz Mountains, halfway between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, and was without industries except for several commercial orchards, farms and boarding stables with riding schools.
Shirley’s last foray into television was made in January 1965, at Twentieth Century-Fox. Steel-and-glass skyscrapers had replaced the old Shirley Temple sound stages, as a new generation of film executives ground out “more footage for television than for theaters.” Her bungalow had gone through many transformations, and was now the studio dispensary. Shirley shot a television pilot, Go Fight City Hall, a situation comedy in the format of the successful Mary Tyler Moore Show featuring Shirley as a social worker employed by the Department of Public Assistance, a young woman fighting equally for her own independence and the rights of others. Her co-stars were Jack Kruschen and Bill Hayes.
When Shirley arrived at the studio for the first day of filming, she was greeted by a huge red-and-gold-lettered “Welcome home, Shirley” banner furled across the front gate. A champagne party was held in the commissary “with old friends and studio executives.” Klammie, her former tutor, was present, but, in fact, there were not too many familiar faces. Zanuck, after a boardroom war, had lost his position as head of production to his young son, Richard. A spokesman had choked out the painful truth: “If there had not been a Shirley Temple, there would not be a Twentieth Century-Fox today.”
Somebody else had stood up to remember “the party given in 1935 to celebrate the sensational merger of Fox and Twentieth Century. At one point,” the old-timer recalled, “I happened to pick Shirley up in fun, and a horrible silence fell on the room. The bankers from New York turned white. Here I was holding practically all the assets of the company in my two hands. I was so scared I nearly dropped her.”
Returning to the studio proved most difficult for Shirley, who, in f
ace of the drastic changes, was a complete stranger.
Since the show was unable to attract a sponsor, only one episode of Go Fight City Hall was filmed. Gertrude stood by on the sidelines during the last day of shooting. “[I could see Shirley] was so tired and anxious to get home—Charles always meets her. But she said, ‘Mom, I loved it. I loved it all,’ and you could see it in her eyes. Why, her eyes were dancing.” The light Gertrude detected could well have been generated by a new source of energy.
With the popularity of her television series, Shirley had been in great demand as a guest speaker at various fund-raising affairs for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and for the Republican party, as well as at college graduations, where a good, upright person—highly visible, of strong moral character and intelligence—was a requisite. At the start of this new public side of her life, she accepted only engagements close to home. But by the time Go Fight City Hall failed, she was traveling as far as Texas. The issues she chose to discuss had more to do with conservative politics than with homely matters or the subject of women’s careers: Waste in government spending and saving the environment were two of her favorite topics. Her two years in Washington had been a fine training ground for what she now considered her calling—politics. The desire came to her, she claimed, on a flight home from a speech given in Houston, Texas. She felt she had something important to say and an ability to put her ideas into action.
In October 1964, Ronald Reagan had come to San Francisco during the key days of the Republican presidential nominations to give his famous “A Time for Choosing” speech in support of Barry Goldwater. Reagan’s own political viability was attracting a great many supporters among Republican party leaders, and another of Shirley’s old co-stars, George Murphy, had successfully made the transition from actor to senator from California. The notion that she could join them as actor-turned-politician greatly appealed to her. Now, she had to sell Charles and the children on the idea. Then she had to look around for a modus operandi—a bit like an actor in search of the right role.
Footnotes
* 227 Rockingham Avenue was transferred from Shirley Temple Black to George and Gertrude Temple on April 20, 1951. It was sold a few days later to Colonel George Phelps. The Temples moved into the converted playhouse (209 Rockingham Avenue). Shirley Temple Black held the deed until it was sold to Albert Braslaw in 1963, when the Temples moved to Palm Desert. The Blacks’ home on River Road (Bradley Farms) in Chevy Chase was sold for $60,500 on March 23, 1954, after the Blacks had returned to Los Angeles.
* “From our divorce in 1950 until 1964, I paid Shirley child support,” Agar says. “In 1964, Loretta, my wife, and I were in the process of adopting our son John III, and the court required that I show proof from Shirley that I paid that support. Before I received that proof, I was served with a summons telling me Charles Black was going to adopt Linda Susan. Now I had through the years sent presents which were never acknowledged, and though I have tried many times to contact Linda Susan, I have not seen nor talked to her since she was six years old. The thirtieth of January [1988], she will be forty years old. Yes, I authorized the adoption . . . [but] I would still like to see and know my daughter.”
* For many years, Temple moved her doll collection from museum to museum, adding to it with each new exhibit. She did not receive remuneration, but the expenses of packing and transporting the collection were borne by the institutions involved.
* Jack Temple would soon associate himself with hospitals as a professional fundraiser.
* Associated Federation of Television and Radio Artists, an actors union
* More notable television debuts in “Mother Goose” were made by the young Joel Grey (as Jack of “Jack and Jill”) and Rod McKuen (as Simple Simon).
† Charlie was paid $570 for his part; Lori and Susan each the minimum $80 for one day’s work as extras.
* The first Random House book, The Shirley Temple Storybook, sold over 125,000 copies between publication date, October 6, 1958, and Christmas of that year. The two other books, Shirley Temple’s Fairyland and Shirley Temple’s Stories that Never Grow Old, sold one hundred thousand copies each over that same period. In addition to the books, the Shirley Temple dolls made by the Ideal Toy Company and the dresses by Rosenau, there were also a Shirley Temple coloring book, published by Saalfield; Shirley Temple hats (manufactured by Richard Englander); coats (Brambury); handbags for children (Pyramid); doll-clothes patterns (Advance and Simplicity); and a toy Shirley Temple TV theater. Shirley controlled the licensing rights in all these product enterprises.
* After the sixteen Shirley Temple Storybook segments had been made, Jaffe had changed the title to Shirley Temple Theater. Nine more programs were filmed with a broader format that encompassed more than adaptations of classic children’s stories.
13 SHIRLEY HAD MET Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at a reception in San Francisco during his second visit to the United States in the autumn of 1960, which perhaps had ushered in a more amicable relationship between the two powers. She remembered that after a “teary” recognition of who she was, he had roared, “ ‘I’ll have you kidnapped.’ He grabbed my arms and pulled me against his chest. I told Dick Nixon, his chest was so hard—it felt just like steel—he must have had on a bullet-proof vest.” Khrushchev had gone on to inform her that Shirley Temple films had been popular in Russia and that her name was still known there.
American-Soviet relations took a remarkable turn for the better in 1963. The new spirit was known as detente, and was born in the afterglow of the Moscow Agreement signed by President John F. Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev, which banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in outer space, or under water, and was hailed as a major step toward those goals.
Through her work with the National Multiple Sclerosis Society she had heard that the Soviets had developed advanced techniques for treating the disease. Sonny’s condition was swiftly deteriorating, and by Christmas 1964 he was confined to a wheelchair. Khrushchev was no longer the Soviet premier, but her meeting with him in 1960 had made Shirley confident that she would be well received if she ever chose to visit Russia. Plans were put into motion, visas applied for. Her aim was to find out if the Soviets had a medication not available in the West that could reverse Sonny’s illness or at worst prevent his further decline. She and Charles would travel under the auspices of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, their main goal being to interest the Russians in sharing an international research program for the disease.
A week before the Blacks were to depart, Charles’s father was taken to Presbyterian Medical Center in San Francisco when the cancer he had been valiantly fighting for over two years reached a critical stage. Shirley and Charles were set to cancel their trip, but Mr. Black insisted they not do so. They departed on March 14 for London, where they planned to spend a week before continuing on to Moscow. Shirley had never been “east of Bermuda,” and she hoped to do a little sight-seeing. To her amazement, she was greeted at the Tower of London by sixty girls in school uniforms who had seen her early films in recent reissue. Wherever she went, she was mobbed, causing her to cancel many of her planned outings. But she did have the opportunity to collect the money, and the considerable interest that had accrued on it, from her successful childhood libel action against Night and Day magazine and Graham Greene.
Moscow was like no other city she had ever visited—a great metropolis and at the same time an overgrown village—its ornate skyscrapers dwarfing its onion-domed churches, its grand-scale avenues trailing off into muddy lanes. In March, the city was bitter cold. The great walls of the Kremlin—a city within a city—emerged “like phantoms from the mist and snow.”
Khrushchev—now removed from office and replaced by Premier Aleksey Kosygin—may have recognized her name, but from the moment Shirley set foot on Russian soil, she knew winning over the Russians would not be easy. In the United States, Mr. Khrushchev, jaunty and plebeian, had seemed approachable. But in Russia, several days of attemp
ting, through diplomatic channels, to arrange a meeting with him brought no results. Taking the matter into her own hands, Shirley, with a translator’s help, prepared a card telling him of her presence in Moscow, her reasons for being there, and her wish that they might be able to exchange a few words. Then, escorted by a member of the American embassy staff, she drove to the expremier’s apartment building. As she started up the stairs, she was stopped by a caretaker-guard. Eventually, an English-speaking Russian appeared and promised to deliver her card to Khrushchev. She waited for a reply, but was finally asked to leave.
She fared better in contacting the Russian neurologist who was said to have a new method for treating multiple sclerosis. The mission, however, was disappointing; for the same methods had been used in the West for years. However, the neurologist did promise to join in an international research program for the disease.* After a visit of one week (which included a tour of a Moscow film studio), the Blacks flew to Amsterdam, where they learned that James Black had died on January 20. Since he had requested there be no funeral or memorial service, they remained abroad for a few days as planned before continuing home.
When Shirley returned from her Russian pilgrimage, she increased the number of her speaking engagements at fundraising rallies, many of them out of state, on behalf of the Republican party. Her travels seemed to have heightened her patriotism and made her more aware of her country’s “uniqueness.” Lori, her youngest, pert and inclined to mimicry, was eleven. Charlie, tall and lean at thirteen, was attending military school. Susan (now legally Susan Black, having recently been adopted by Charles), looking very much a stylish young debutante, had graduated from high school and been given a splashy coming-out party, covered by Life magazine. Shirley gave this event much personal attention, supervising Susan’s hairdo, the selection of her gown and all details of the celebration. The children were now more self-reliant. Shirley’s visibility and interests broadened, as she decided the time was right for her to embark again on a career in public life.
