To an extraordinary degree, those with any money to spare in the Great Depression spent it at the movies. During the golden age of Hollywood, between 1930 and 1945, the movie industry received eighty-three cents out of every dollar spent on entertainment. Furthermore, precisely because moviegoing was such a popular activity, those who could not afford a ticket often found themselves socially isolated. “Two people can’t be friends when one is working and making money and the other is unemployed,” said one man in 1935 who had long been out of work. “It just don’t work out. The people who have the money don’t want to stay at home and do nothing all the time. They want to go to a movie or take a ride, and they can’t be expected to treat the other couple.” A similar “shadow of humiliation” fell on the children of the unemployed. For instance, rather than confess to his moviegoing friends that his mother did not have a cent to give him, a boy of eight said, “Mother doesn’t want me to go to movies, but she gave me some money for candy instead.”46
Movie theater design itself shifted in the direction of egalitarianism. The ornate motion picture palaces of the 1920s, built in styles evoking aristocratic and oriental fantasies, with exotic trappings, boxes, balconies, loges, and differential ticket prices, now acquired the taint of the profligate capitalist order that had led to economic collapse. Theater designers in the Depression favored smaller, sleeker, self-consciously “modern” structures, in which, literally and figuratively, everyone sat on the same level. Movie theater names changed too, expressing the new democratic and nationalistic ethos. Popular 1920s names, such as Alhambra, Granada, Tivoli, and Rialto, gave way to Roosevelt, Washington, Lincoln, and Liberty.47
Shirley Temple exerted a special appeal on this expanding movie market in small towns and rural areas as well as big cities. Yet even after she won the part in Stand Up and Cheer!, Fox Film was not quite sure what to do with her. Right after filming the “Baby Take a Bow” number, the rotund head of Fox studios, Winfield Sheehan, pressed a minimum contract onto George and Gertrude Temple for Shirley. They happily signed, with Shirley earnestly printing her own name, four days before Christmas 1933. Shirley would now receive $150 a week, plus an additional $25 a week for her mother’s assistance, with an option to renew the arrangement for seven years. Soon thereafter, Sheehan had Shirley’s birth certificate altered, subtracting a year from her age, a common practice with child performers, so that she would seem still younger and more prodigiously talented. This deception fooled not only the public but Shirley herself, who discovered her true age from her mother only in 1941, when she turned thirteen.48
Gertrude, Shirley, and George Temple beam over a lucrative new contract with Fox, July 1934. (© Bettmann/Corbis)
The contract itself lasted only half a year. Almost immediately after the release of Stand Up and Cheer!, various figures from Educational Films and elsewhere laid claim to Shirley’s earnings. With the help of a lawyer, Loyd Wright, and after a good deal of public bluffing, the Temples negotiated a new seven-year contract with Fox in July 1934. Under its provisions, Shirley would receive $1,000 a week, and Gertrude Temple $250 a week for her services as hairdresser. In addition, bonuses for each completed picture beginning at $15,000 and rising to $35,000 would accrue in trust accounts on Shirley’s behalf. Perhaps to make this agreement attractively tangible to a six-year-old girl, Fox also provided her a scooter, a doll carriage, a skipping rope, picture books, blocks, and a game of jacks.49
Preserving the image of little Shirley as mistress of her own destiny, a Newsweek article showed her signing the contract and beaming at the camera as her parents smiled approvingly. In a drawing for Vanity Fair the caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias imagined still more smiles, as a confident Shirley signs the contract with a large X, thus exaggerating her childishness, to the rapacious delight of toothy film moguls. The golden-haired girl with precisely fifty-six curls appeared to have the Midas touch.50
Fox Film executives were eager to secure an exciting new child actress, even if she proved to be only a shooting star. Under pressure from their chief creditor, the Chase National Bank, they needed to make appealing movies under tight budgets. And so Winfield Sheehan, eager to exploit his new gold mine before it petered out, placed Shirley Temple in as many feature films as he could. After Stand Up and Cheer!, he quickly lent her to Paramount for major roles in Little Miss Marker and Now and Forever, in addition to assigning her brief appearances in other Fox films. The hectic pace continued with two more starring roles in Fox productions, all released before Christmas 1934.
Stand Up and Cheer! gave Shirley Temple the break her mother had dreamed of, but the movie that established her as a star was the first of her two Paramount pictures, Little Miss Marker. Based on a Damon Runyon short story, it revolves around the question, what is a little girl really worth? Once again, Shirley plays a motherless little girl, but this time she almost immediately loses her father too. A well-spoken man, now destitute and desperate, he pleads with an off-track bookmaker to take his little daughter as security for a twenty-dollar bet.51 In the argot of bettors, she is his “marker,” his IOU. The bookmaker Sorrowful Jones (played by Adolphe Menjou) at first turns him down flat. But Shirley’s Marthy instantly pierces through his callous facade to see into his emotional depths. Looking intently at him, she says, “You’re afraid of my daddy. Or you’re afraid of me. You’re afraid of something.” She has identified fear as the chief obstacle to a healthy sentimental economy as Roosevelt did for the financial one. Sorrowful lifts her up and returns her searching gaze. “Take his marker,” he tells his astonished assistant. “A little doll like that is worth twenty bucks, any way you look at it.” The clerk, nicknamed Regret, replies sardonically, “She ought to melt down for that much.”
Adolphe Menjou as Sorrowful Jones appraises Shirley as Marthy in Little Miss Marker. (Photofest/Paramount)
When her father loses his wager, instead of reclaiming his daughter, he turns on the gas in his room and kills himself. Little Marthy, an unredeemed IOU, becomes Little Marky, punning on the word “marker.” A sweet little girl left to the custody of hardened men is a situation rich in comic possibilities. Sorrowful quickly wins his money back by joining a betting pool in which each of his cronies guesses Little Marky’s weight. As the men pass her around and heft her, the explicit comparison is with picking up and fondling a voluptuous woman. The “little doll” is thus also a marker for a grown-up one. But one might see this as an attempt to place Marky on the scales by which these men customarily determine value—in terms of money and, at times, sex, but not sentiment. Sorrowful wins the bet when, on her own initiative, Marky conceals a large saltshaker in order to confirm his estimate of her weight. Then, reluctantly contemplating turning over Marky to the police, Sorrowful sees a way to get still more money from the girl: he makes her titular owner of a racehorse, the true owner, Big Steve, having been temporarily suspended from racing because of infractions.
Sorrowful might be said to be not just a bookie but a comic version of the disillusioned, untrusting economic man of the Depression, with a single worn suit, no family, and no woman on whom to lavish gifts or affection. The film has already suggested that his stinginess sank his romance with the beautiful nightclub singer Bangles Carson (played by Dorothy Dell). Emotionally as well as financially, he is a tightwad.
As Little Marky, Shirley melts his frozen feelings and also loosens his purse strings. When Bangles orders new clothes for her, Sorrowful pays for them without complaint. Soon he moves out of his spare apartment (a “fleabag” in Runyon’s story) to a spacious new one with a modern kitchen, a large living room, and at least two bedrooms. Still later, he buys a new suit (Menjou himself had the reputation of being the best-dressed man in Hollywood) and makes a resplendent appearance. The economics of consumer spending and sentiment turn together.
In Runt Page and, to a large extent, in the “Baby Take a Bow” number in Stand Up and Cheer!, the “make-believe” of Shirley Temple’s characters had been in the service of adults
. But in Little Miss Marker her capacity for make-believe is part of her distinguishing childish innocence. Orphaned by her father’s suicide, she is sustained by a book of Arthurian legends. She projects their titles and attributes onto the raffish characters about her, with unintentional mock-heroic effect. The gamblers pin their hopes on Dream Prince and similar horses, or, like Sorrowful, Regret, and Bangles, they no longer truly dream of anything. When Marky starts to adopt their tough talk and to give up on her fairy tales, they avidly seek to restore her faith and sense of wondrous innocence by arranging an elaborate Arthurian ball. These doubly depressed adults need the emotional qualities of childhood, including the ability to play and pretend, every bit as much as children do. In staging a costume ball for Marky, they ironically pay tribute to her priceless innocence as many American parents did with their own children—by lavishing her with treats in order to relish her response.52 The plot contains still more twists and turns, but ultimately Marky repairs the broken relationship between Sorrowful and Bangles—and even turns the gangster Big Steve from a heel into a hero.
The work of emotional repair of adults’ relationships, and especially the repair of the sentimental economy of men, became a strong and abiding theme in Shirley Temple’s films. In the midst of the Depression a consecrated sense of childhood as a refuge from the anxieties of adulthood held immense comfort. The image of an adorable girl helped adult men and women to recall nostalgically their own childhoods and savor a vision of domestic bliss. In Shirley Temple’s feature films in 1934, including Little Miss Marker, Now and Forever, Baby Take a Bow, and Bright Eyes, caring, often emotionally wounded men receive a second chance to resume upright lives and to gain the love and admiration of a child—and the love and admiration of a woman as well.
Contributing to Shirley Temple’s popularity in the Great Depression was the widespread sense of shame and humiliation that her movies addressed. Vivid instances of this shame, especially as it related to the loss of male authority, emerged in one study of the effects of unemployment on fifty-nine white Protestant families in a metropolitan area near New York City in the winter of 1935–36. All the men had been out of work since 1931. “The hardest thing about unemployment,” one man said, “is the humiliation within the family.” He felt “very useless to have his wife and daughter bring in money to the family while he does not contribute a nickel. . . . He feels that there is nothing to wake up for in the morning and nothing to live for. He often wonders what would happen if he put himself out of the picture. . . . Perhaps she and the girl would get along better without him.” The same man “intimates that they have fewer sex relations—‘It’s nothing that I do or don’t do—no change in me—but when I tell her that I want more love, she just gets mad.’ ”53
Another out-of-work man in the same study said, “Before the depression, I wore the pants in this family, and rightly so. During the depression I lost something. Maybe you call it self-respect, but in losing it I also lost the respect of my children, and I am afraid I am losing my wife.” “There certainly was a change in our family,” a third unemployed man confided, “and I can define it in just one word. I relinquished power in the family. Now I don’t even try to be boss. She controls all the money, and I never have a penny in my pocket but that I have to ask her for it.”54
Pride thus became an overarching issue in the face of economic hardship. Surveying the plight of the poor around the country for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, a key New Deal agency, the former journalist (and confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt) Lorena Hickok repeatedly encountered the reluctance and often refusal of people to register for the relief they so desperately needed. “God, how they hate it,” she wrote of unemployed white-collar workers applying for relief in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1934. An engineer confided, “I simply had to murder my pride.” An insurance man added, “We’d lived on bread and water three weeks before I could make myself do it.” “It took me a month” to apply for relief, a lumberman told her. “I used to go down there every day or so and walk past the place again and again. I just couldn’t make myself go in.”55 Although these people and their families may not have seen Shirley Temple’s movies, they nevertheless expressed feelings that were pervasive in this decade and that accentuated the sense of vulnerability of all but the most financially and emotionally secure.
Thus, viewers of even a slight Shirley Temple movie, Baby Take a Bow, might find in it aspects of their own defeats and dreams. Eager to reunite Shirley Temple and James Dunn after their success in Stand Up and Cheer!, Fox’s Sheehan cast them in a remake of the studio’s 1928 silent comedy-mystery Square Crooks. Two ex-convicts, Eddie and his friend Larry, are determined to go straight, work hard, and attain their visions of domestic happiness, which for Eddie and his wife, Kay, means a dream house in Yonkers and a child in the nursery. Yet their shameful past dogs the two men. They are hounded by a suspicious detective, who gets them fired from their jobs, and tainted by the unwelcome return of a ruthless criminal with the ominous name of Trigger Stone. The emotional anchor and radiant source of unconditional love in the movie is Eddie’s daughter, Shirley. Affectionate and trusting, she effortlessly penetrates her parents’ emotional evasions. She can tell when her mother is worried, she confides, because then “you look sick, and, when you look that way, it makes me want to cry.” In the sort of emotional grooming that characterizes so many of her films, Shirley coaxes a smile from her mother, confident that happy feelings will quickly follow. It is a lesson that Kay applies in the very next scene with Eddie, chasing away her own tears with a smile as he says approvingly, “Now it ain’t gonna rain no more.”
With her father, Shirley is a fount of affection and an eager playmate. At her birthday party, they perform a song and dance, “On Account’a I Love You,” in which they celebrate the foods and pleasures they enjoy together. In the number Shirley is always the center of the camera’s attention, and her father’s upper body is at times cropped from the picture frame. Wearing a very short, frilly dress and with her chubby legs and full cheeks, she seems scarcely more than a toddler, making her dancing ability seem almost preternatural. As Eddie, James Dunn heightens this doll-like quality, lifting her effortlessly and, at one point, pretending that she is his ventriloquist’s dummy. Even so, he in no way upstages her, as he performs elementary steps, falls over, and closes their song flagrantly off-key. As she sings, Shirley kisses and hugs him repeatedly, and the number ends in a further shower of smooches. Baby Take a Bow, like Little Miss Marker, proved to be among the most popular movies of the year.56
It is a striking measure of shifts in cultural attitudes that such flamboyant cuddling between Shirley and the fathers and father-figures in her films, deeply suggestive of pedophilia and incest to many critics today, clearly delighted Depression audiences. Even though Shirley’s first film shorts, the Baby Burlesks, outrageously played on her infant coquetry, the English novelist Graham Greene was unique among 1930s critics of her feature films in pointing to their scarcely sublimated erotic appeal to middle-aged men. “Watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity,” Greene wrote in 1937. “Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin deep. . . . Her admirers, middle-aged men and clergy-men, respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.” Determined to silence such scandalous sneers, Twentieth Century–Fox officials sued Greene, contending that he libeled the child and accused them of procuring Shirley for immoral purposes. The company knew that if Shirley’s flirtatiousness lost its veil of innocence, her career would be ruined. Their highly paid counsel Sir Patrick Hastings refused even to read the “beastly publication” in court, remarking that it was “one of the most horrible libels one can imagine about a child 9 years of age.” Lord Chief Justice Gordon Hewart agreed, calling Green’s article a
“gross outrage.” Not only did he require the weekly Night and Day that published the offensive piece to pay £3,000 in damages, he also ordered Greene personally to pay an additional £500, as well as threatening him with criminal prosecution.57
A fan letter from a self-described “two-time loser” just out of the penitentiary when he saw Baby Take a Bow testified to a much more protective fatherly response. “I knew it was hokum all the time I was looking at it, but Kid, you got to me,” he wrote. “This can’t be such a tough world as long as there is people like you in it.” Shirley gave him an emotional and moral center, he said: “I just wanted to tell you you taught me a guy can go straight if he has got a reason for it, and you are going to be my reason from now on. I am going to see every one of your pictures just like you were my little girl.”58
The tumultuous year of 1934 concluded with the release of Bright Eyes just before Christmas. The story was especially written for Shirley, unmistakable tribute to her star status. So too were the simultaneous introductions of various products licensed in her name, including the first Shirley Temple dolls by Ideal Novelty and Toy Company. For movie exhibitors and merchandisers alike, the Christmas season represented their best hope of the year to get truly out of the red, and Shirley could help them do so.
As in Stand Up and Cheer!, Little Miss Marker, and Now and Forever, Shirley is already half-orphaned at the beginning of the movie, and in time she loses her mother as well. The questions propelling the story are, where will she live and who will care for her? Such a plot had a long history in sentimental melodrama but an especially sharp pang in the Great Depression. After the death of Shirley’s acclaimed aviator father in a plane crash, his fellow pilot and best friend, and Shirley’s godfather, Loop Merritt (played, in his third pairing of the year with Shirley, by James Dunn), strives to take her father’s place as the little girl’s protector and pal. A bachelor, he was once jilted by the socialite Adele Martin, and the wound has never healed. In order to provide a home for her little girl, Shirley’s self-sacrificing mother, Mary, has taken a job as a live-in maid with a loveless, snobbish, mercenary family, J. Wellington and Anita Smythe, their insufferably bratty daughter, and Mr. Smythe’s rich, irascible Uncle Ned.
The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America Page 8