Shirley might have just got her foot in the door of an outpost on Poverty Row, but Gertrude Temple imagined it as the first step on a stairway leading swiftly to the top. Anxious and excited, she seemed never to have doubted that the movies offered her daughter a golden opportunity. Hays had assured her that Shirley would have “a very good dramatic teacher,” the use of a kitchenette, and a place to nap, so that her daily routine would proceed much as usual.8
These promises proved empty, however. Far from expert dramatic instruction, Jack Hays and Charles Lamont spoon-fed Shirley and the other child actors their lines one at a time and urged them to mug broadly. The children’s job was not acting but mimicry, Shirley later observed. Gertrude coached her at home as best she could, urging her to “sparkle” and teaching her how to arch her eyebrows, round her mouth in surprise, thrust out her lower lip, and cock her head sideways with a knowing smile—gestures that would become characteristic in Shirley’s later films.9
The set of the Baby Burlesks resembled a workhouse more than a day nursery. To threaten and punish uncooperative child actors, Lamont kept a soundproof black box, six feet on each side, containing a block of ice. An offending child was locked within this dark, cramped interior and either stood uncomfortably in the cold, humid air or had to sit on the ice. Those who told their parents about this torture were threatened with further punishment. When, nonetheless, Shirley confided to her mother, Gertrude Temple dismissed her report as a fanciful tale. A half century later, Shirley would still insist on its veracity, but it was not a story that Gertrude wished to hear. Lamont was equally ruthless behind the camera. In a Tarzan film spoof, Kid in Africa, for example, he concealed a tripwire to level the “savages” played by African American children. In filming Polly Tix in Washington, a terrified ostrich pulling Shirley and another child in a surrey careened wildly about the set before crashing into a wall. “This isn’t playtime, kids,” she remembered Lamont saying. “It’s work.”10
Looking back on her childhood from middle age, Shirley Temple Black agreed. Once she started in Baby Burlesks at age three, she observed, “[I] worked for the rest of my childhood.” Though not solely the creature of the studio, “I went to work every day. . . . I thought every child worked, because I was born into it.”11
Gertrude Temple, by contrast, insisted that her daughter’s time at the studio was carefree recreation. “Motion-picture acting is simply part of her play life,” she declared in 1935. “It is un-tinged with worry about tomorrow or fear of failure.” Indeed, similar words were put in Shirley’s mouth by a journalist the same year, when she supposedly told her “autobiography” as a seven-year-old: acting “is like playing a game of make-believe. That’s the easiest game in the world to play. It is for me, anyway.”12
This justification was a common, even threadbare, defense by parents and producers of child performers.13 Such assurances constituted an implicit reply to an unnamable charge: that child acting, far from harmless play, in fact constituted a form of exploitative child labor. The defense of child acting as a legitimate activity, separate and distinct from oppressive child labor in textile mills, coal mines, glasshouses, tenements, street trades, and the like, had been fought by theatrical interests and the children’s parents for over half a century. The position of the child actor was highly paradoxical, as one who fascinated audiences in the ability both to imitate adults and to portray the unique characteristics of childhood innocence. As the sociologist Viviana Zelizer has observed, such actors “were child laborers paid to represent the new, sentimentalized view of children.”14 Even very young children could score phenomenal triumphs in such roles, as they seemed not to work but to play—and earned far more for their families than most adults. One of the first American child stars, Cordelia Howard (1848–1941), appeared onstage at the age of four in Oliver Twist and soon afterward played Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a part for which she became famous. Kate Bateman (1842–1917) began her acting career at age three in Babes in the Woods. A generation later, Elsie Leslie (1881–1960) launched her professional career as a four-year-old and achieved two of her greatest successes in dramatic versions of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1888 and Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper in 1890. In the first decade of the twentieth century, spectacular Broadway productions featuring children reached their height, led by The Wizard of Oz, The Little Princess, The Blue Bird, Babes in Toyland, and Peter Pan.15 In the 1920s Hollywood brought forth Jackie Coogan, “Baby Peggy” Montgomery, and the popular Our Gang two-reelers, and legions followed in their footsteps. Film allowed child actors greater freedom of movement and intimacy of expression than did the stage. Moreover, the introduction of sound created new possibilities for giggling, sobbing, whining, shrieking, singing, and dancing.
Nonetheless, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, defenders of professional child actors frequently battled reformers who made little distinction between child performers on the legitimate stage and those performing in circuses or saloons.16 Gradually abandoning arguments for the economically useful child, which had acquired a mercenary taint, such defenders claimed the higher ground of acting’s educational benefits for children. They also extolled the realization of the playwright’s artistic vision and the wholesome pleasures children’s performances gave to the public. A pamphlet published in 1911 by the National Alliance for the Protection of Stage Children argued for uniform laws that would eliminate children’s performances under hazardous, unhealthful, or indecent conditions while preserving their appearances on the legitimate stage. The authors sharply distinguished between “the few moments of mental effort of the stage child” and “the blind, constant and degrading toil of the little slave of the mill, whose drudgery dwarfs mind, body, and spirit.” They spoke glowingly of “the emanation of the spirit of childhood; an emanation which only a little child can convincingly give forth.” The pamphlet even leapt to the defense of stage mothers and fathers, often depicted as mercenary and demanding: “Parents of the child genius do not lose their parental solicitude by reason of their child’s unusual talents.” The wages that a child actor earned were entirely secondary, even though these children were “mostly little geniuses of the poor, or of those in moderate circumstances.”17
Others objected, however, that the professionalization of child actors turned childhood itself into a commodity. “The idea of a professional child—a child in whose case simple childhood is the sole stock in trade,” a writer protested, “is touched with sacrilege.” Learning to perform childhood innocence, the child actor lost the unself-conscious spontaneity that was its essence: “One of the most inalienable and fatal attributes of the true show-child . . . [is that] it has learnt to watch itself, and will go so far as to make a study of its own emotions.” Such critics nonetheless feared that the “capitalization of childhood’s appeal” might be an irreversible trend.18
Shirley Temple’s career proved to be a monumental step in precisely that direction, but it came within an inch of not happening at all. In September 1933 Shirley’s modest prospects with Educational Films ended abruptly when Jack Hays filed for bankruptcy.19 George Temple bought back the remainder of Shirley’s contract, or so he thought, for a nominal sum. (After Shirley’s success, Hays bedeviled him for years with legal suits.) Then, as Shirley and her mother viewed her last short for Educational Films in a Los Angeles movie theater around Thanksgiving, Shirley was spotted by or, more likely, thrust by her mother before the songwriter Jay Gorney, who was seeking a little girl to carry the song-and-dance number in Fox Film’s Stand Up and Cheer!
Gorney was a composer with a political conscience and a talent for voicing the hardships and disillusionment of the decade. With lyricist E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, he had written the plaintive hit song of the Great Depression “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (1932), based on a Yiddish lullaby he had known as a child.20 In the voice of a “forgotten man” on a breadline, it traces the broken dreams, lost sense of fraternity
, and withered pride of an American worker and veteran of the Great War, now friendless and spurned. Once he built railroads, towers, and dreams, the man remembers in a minor key. Then, brightening to a major key and a jauntier march rhythm, he recalls how, as a drummer boy, he trudged with other doughboys through the hell of the Great War. The song rises an octave to a loud, urgent C with its entreating, “Don’t you remember? I’m your pal!” before its appeal collapses, no longer addressing the fraternal brother but the more impersonal “buddy,” as he repeats the title plea, “Can you spare a dime?”21 Introduced in early October 1932 in the Shubert brothers’ Americana revue, the song also represented a moving rebuke to the violent dispersal three months earlier of the Bonus Army of World War veterans outside Washington, D.C. Indeed, the number served as an election-year riposte to Herbert Hoover, the figurative flip side of Roosevelt’s “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Bing Crosby’s famous rendition of the song was quickly issued by Brunswick Records, and by Election Day on November 8, less than five weeks after the song’s Broadway debut, it was the most popular record in the country.22
James Dunn and Shirley in the “Baby Take a Bow” number from Stand Up and Cheer! (PhotoFest/Fox)
Stand Up and Cheer! was already in production when Gertrude and Shirley Temple hurried to the Fox studio for a hastily arranged audition with Gorney and fellow songwriter Lew Brown. (The later report that she was among 250 children vying for the part was a publicity fabrication.) Shirley sang satisfactorily and then performed a dance routine that she had learned at Mrs. Meglin’s. Suddenly she had a bit part, replacing a less winning little girl. Yet “Baby Take a Bow,” the song-and-dance number by Gorney and Brown that Shirley performs in the film, was no paean to the forgotten man. On the contrary, all thoughts of the Depression are banished, and the carefree party of the 1920s remains in full swing. The number begins as a tribute by Jimmy Dugan, little Shirley’s fictional father, in the persona of a boulevardier, to a supposed fiancée, “the future Mrs. Hemingway,” who is the source of widespread attention. Wearing top hat and tails and carrying a walking stick, Jimmy sings the title lyric and dances with a single platinum blonde, then a cluster of scantily clad chorines. Recalling the much more elaborate dance sequences that Busby Berkeley made for Warner Bros., the camera moves to a series of close-ups on the chorines’ faces and then, disorientingly, to doll-like figures in frilly dresses that turn out to be their knees and legs. Prepared for by this miniature scale, little Shirley, in a frilly, very short white organdy dress with red polka dots, emerges from her father’s spread legs to become the new “baby” who is the source of everyone’s tribute. With beaming smile, chest out, hands clenched, shoulders and arms moving to the rhythm, she returns the song’s compliment, inviting her daddy to take a bow in turn. The two then perform the tap dance that Shirley brought from Mrs. Meglin’s, and Jimmy scoops her up in his arms for a final embrace and kiss. In the course of the number, eroticism has been supplanted by cuteness, and the father-daughter bond is evidently sufficient protection from Shirley’s flirtatiousness.
Shirley’s place in the dance number is justified, as is the position of child actors generally, within the very storyline of Stand Up and Cheer! An important official must decide whether little Shirley Dugan’s performance in her father’s song-and-dance act should be exempt from a ban on child actors under the age of seven. “Shirley doesn’t really work,” protests her fictional father, played by James Dunn, an ex-vaudevillian himself. “She just sort of comes on at the finish, and she really loves it.” Even here, however, his motives are decidedly mixed. He explains that his wife, who used to be in the act, has died, and little Shirley has taken her place. “Besides, I got to have her in the act with me,” he insists. “She helps me over the rough spots. . . . And look at her . . . she thrives on it.” Winding up his appeal, he asks, “How’s chances?” It was a catchphrase of the day, made all the more popular by Irving Berlin’s song of the same title in the hit Broadway revue As Thousands Cheer (1933). Pressing her father’s plea, Shirley fixes the official with luminous eyes and disarmingly lisps, “How’s chances?” He can only scoop her up in his arms and reply, “I think chances are great.” The conquest of an influential man’s heart in this way would be a recurrent theme in Shirley Temple films.23
Arguments for the exceptional situation of child actors ultimately prevailed under the New Deal. The codes of the National Recovery Administration, one of the monuments of Roosevelt’s Hundred Days, which sought to place limits on child labor, made an exception for children in motion pictures, and, in any case, the Supreme Court struck down the codes as unconstitutional in 1935. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 became the administration’s most effective and enduring weapon against child labor, and it too made exceptions for children working for their parents outside of mining and manufacturing and for children less than fourteen years of age working in agriculture or newspaper distribution, or performing in motion pictures and the theater.
“How’s chances?” Shirley and Warner Baxter (with James Dunn in background) in Stand Up and Cheer! (Photofest/Fox)
Anticipating Roosevelt’s signature on this legislation, with its lustrous loophole for child actors, Twentieth Century–Fox arranged a brief meeting between Shirley Temple and President Roosevelt at the White House. He signed the bill the next day, June 25, 1938. Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s wife, had already met Shirley the previous spring in Hollywood and wrote in her syndicated column how impressed she was by Shirley’s “natural simplicity and charm.” “Why aren’t you smiling?” FDR asked after Shirley was escorted into the Oval Office, trailing her tongue-tied Republican parents. “I thought you were famous for your smile.” He spoke as one trouper to another. She was keeping her lips in place, she explained, because she had just lost a tooth.24
Not only did FDR and Shirley have the two most famous smiles in the country, but ever since the release of Stand Up and Cheer! hers had been associated with his confident leadership.25 Together, they fought and licked the Great Depression. At least that was Hollywood’s version of what happened. Fox released Stand Up and Cheer! in April 1934, just over a year after Roosevelt’s inauguration, and it aimed to show how the entertainment industry was dispelling the gloom of the Depression right alongside the president. The face of the fictional president in the film is never shown, in compliance with White House policies protecting FDR’s dignity. Nonetheless, speaking with unmistakably Rooseveltian inflection and cadences, and advancing Roosevelt’s most famous theme, he earnestly tells a theatrical producer named Lawrence Cromwell (played by Warner Baxter): “Our country is bravely passing through a serious crisis. Many of our people’s affairs are in the red, and, figuratively, their nerves are in the red.” As he endeavors “to pilot the ship past the most treacherous of all rocks, fear,” the president intends “to dissolve that destructive rock in a gale of laughter.” Accordingly, he appoints Cromwell to a new cabinet position, secretary of amusement, “whose duty it shall be to amuse and entertain the people—to make them forget their troubles.”26
Shirley leaving the White House after her meeting with FDR, June 24, 1938. Gertrude Temple and Shirley’s bodyguard John Griffith stand at left. (Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress)
This premise, of course, was a transparent Hollywood self-justification. The fictional president regards commercial amusement not as frivolity in the face of the Great Depression but as a necessary and vital force in combating it. Hitching its wagon to Roosevelt’s star, the film extolled innocent laughter as the best medicine for the economy, and healthful amusement as one of the highest forms of patriotism.
Opposition to the patriotic work of the new cabinet secretary in Stand Up and Cheer! comes from two quarters: conspiratorial businessmen reaping vast profits from the crisis, and stuffy senators placing their sense of dignity above the needs of the nation. Ultimately, the progressive forces of amusement triumph over the gloom and lift the country out of the Depression, emotionally and ec
onomically, but not without a struggle. Just when Secretary Cromwell’s efforts appear defeated, the news comes, like a deus ex machina, that the Depression is over: “There is no unemployment! Fear has been banished! Confidence is reborn! Poverty has been wiped out! Laughter resounds throughout the nation! The people are happy again! We’re out of the red!” Special credit for this sweeping victory goes to the Children’s Division of the Department of Amusement. The smiling faces of Shirley Temple and other children have evidently done the trick.
Stand Up and Cheer! ends with vast parades through the streets of the nation—emulating the Roosevelt administration’s determination to declare victory over the Great Depression. In summer and fall 1933, General Hugh Johnson, head of the National Recovery Administration, a major agency of the early New Deal, publicized reemployment efforts in various cities with spectacular parades of newly hired men and women, garbed in the attire of their trades. One such event in New York attracted nearly two million people. Using Fox’s studio lot, Stand Up and Cheer! surpassed even Johnson’s Blue Eagle ballyhoo as reemployed workers and civic and military organizations jubilantly celebrate national recovery. They include chorines, forest rangers, sailors, nurses, firemen, policemen, locomotive engineers, farmers, milkmen, housewives, office staff, miners, chefs, maids, schoolgirls, sanitation workers, postmen, men in kilts, soldiers, marines, railroad porters (led by Stepin Fetchit in top hat and tails), Boy Scouts, and others. Shirley Temple appears twice in close-up as she leads portions of the marching throng. What’s good for the country, the film suggests, is good for Hollywood, and vice versa.27
The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America Page 6