Bill Robinson’s specialty number in Paramount’s The Big Broadcast of 1936 is, if anything, still more exuberant than “Living in a Great Big Way.” As a stylish patron in a barbershop brought to his feet by the infectious taps of the Nicholas Brothers and a swinging band version of the Ralph Rainger and Richard A. Whiting tune “Miss Brown to You,” he becomes the Pied Piper of Harlem, leading everyone into the street in joyous dance. Here his authority comes not specifically from his office, as in “Living in a Great Big Way,” but from the entirety of his dress, demeanor, and expansive emotions and gestures, and he has an unmistakable masculine allure. Although such scenes are carefully circumscribed within their films and undoubtedly contain stereotypical elements, they nonetheless suggest what the emotional possibilities of full citizenship in America might be.
Robinson had brought tap-dancing up on its toes, making the older flat-footed buck-and-wing style seem leaden. Holding himself upright and making little use of his hands and arms, he danced principally from the waist down but with a clarity, precision, and intricacy to his steps that defied imitation. Though he occasionally leapt upward, he was not acrobatic. Instead, he often concentrated on close rhythms in which his feet came only an inch above the floor. Although he devised no new steps, he arranged them superbly. The jazz historians Marshall and Jean Stearns have described his footwork in his stage shows:
Sandwiched between a Buck or Time Step, Robinson might use a little skating step to stop-time; or a Scoot step, a cross-over tap, which looked like a jig: hands on hips, tapping as he went, while one foot kicked up and over the other; or a double tap, one hand on hip, one arm extended, with eyes blinking, head shaking, and derby cocked; or a tap to the melody of a tune such as “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers”; or a broken-legged or old man’s dance, one leg short and wobbling with the beat; or an exit step, tapping with a Chaplinesque waddle.
Instead of metal taps, he danced in split clog shoes, which had raised wooden heels and wooden half-soles, loosely affixed for greater flexibility and tonality.15
Adding to the virtuosity of his feet, Robinson projected a radiant, joyful personality, especially with his eyes and smile. About five feet seven inches tall, he retained a well-proportioned figure throughout his life, despite his daily regimen of quarts of ice cream. He also dressed sumptuously. In his stage appearances, he favored top hat and tails. His personal wardrobe would have furnished a small haberdashery. In 1936 it reportedly included “forty or fifty suits, numerous shirts made to order . . . thirty pairs of shoes . . . six overcoats . . . dozens of hats,” and “dozens of walking canes that are gifts from all over the world.” He wore a ten-carat diamond ring and affixed his tie with a six-carat marquise diamond. “There’s no use in going through life as if you were in a funeral procession,” he told a New York Times reporter. “After all, there’s a lot of fun in it, so why grump and grouse? Why not dance through life?”16
Robinson’s success led to more integral roles in three Twentieth Century–Fox films of 1935, but bigger roles meant placement in scenes dominated by whites. He is stripped of his power, prestige, virility, and belonging. He can still sustain a smile and embroider the most mundane domestic task with elegant and exuberant virtuosity, but a sense of white supervision is never absent. The genealogies of these performances are as palpable as if the ancestors’ portraits hung on the walls. His impeccable dress is now the uniform of his office as butler and a tribute to the wealth of his white employer, harkening back to the Uncle Tom of the Tom shows, in which the radical message of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was quashed. And when white onlookers cluster around Robinson’s dances, regarding him as an exotic figure, there emerge the ghosts of a hundred blackface minstrel performers going back a century to Thomas D. Rice.
Bill Robinson leads the dancing throng in the “Miss Brown to You” number from The Big Broadcast of 1936. (Photofest/Paramount)
Producers for In Old Kentucky with Will Rogers and revivals of The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel with Shirley Temple cast Robinson not in a black metropolitan present but in a mythic white southern rural past, in which all African Americans are servants and either formally or practically enslaved. These films’ music emphasizes not uptown swing and sophistication but down-home folk tunes—at least as mainstream whites understood them, for in fact they leaned heavily on blackface minstrel material. Indeed, both In Old Kentucky and The Littlest Rebel include scenes of racial masquerade, in which Will Rogers’s and Shirley Temple’s characters black up. The scent of magnolia blossoms contains the sting of burnt cork.17
As a house servant in the film In Old Kentucky, Bill Robinson lifts the simplest of tasks in kitchen and dining room to an elegant performance, the sort to which Charlie Chaplin might have aspired if he could tap. Yet, instead of Chaplin’s dreamy lyricism, Robinson suggests a man for whom dance is as natural as breathing and rhythm as basic as a pulse. There is no ignoring the fact that he restrains the expansive mood and movements of his Harlem dances. He may caper, but he does not swagger. Unselfconscious and unobserved, except by the camera, he nonetheless retains the demeanor of a servant in a white man’s home. When his employer, a horse trainer named Steve Tapley, played by Will Rogers, walks into the kitchen at the end of the scene, Robinson’s bubble is instantly popped.
Later in the film, when Robinson’s character is brought from the kitchen to perform before white ball guests, he is introduced as the “boy” of “Mr. Tapley’s.” The smile he affixes and holds throughout his dance has a labored, almost ghastly quality, unlike his smiles in “Living in a Great Big Way” or “Miss Brown to You.” The ballroom remains the property of the formally dressed white men and women who stiffly watch his performance, and, under the circumstances, his effort to please and placate them becomes an eloquent measure of the continuous emotional deference demanded in the Jim Crow South—and interracial scenes in Hollywood. How much more circumscribed, then, should we expect the performances to be when Robinson dances with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel?
In these two costume melodramas Robinson aided Shirley as she mended not only individual hearts but implicitly the heart of the nation. Ostensibly concerned with cleavages between North and South during and after the United States’ greatest calamity, the Civil War, the films provided both refuge and resilience for those experiencing the national ordeal of the Great Depression.
Although the war is over in The Little Colonel, it remains an emotional wound in need of healing. Based on the 1895 story by Annie Fellows Johnston and set in postbellum Kentucky, the film is, in the words of one critic of the day, “all adrip with magnolia whimsy and vast, unashamed portions of synthetic Dixie atmosphere.18 The stony heart that Shirley’s character must soften in this melodrama is that of cantankerous ex-Confederate Colonel Lloyd, who clings to the planter vision of the Old South and vows “confusion to all her enemies.” Such enemies include his daughter’s fiancé, who is doubly damned in the old colonel’s eyes as not only a Yankee but a former Union soldier—and one bearing the name of Sherman at that. When she defies her father’s command and leaves with her lover, Colonel Lloyd melodramatically declares his door forever barred to her. Played by Lionel Barrymore, the colonel embodies all of the stereotypes of the Kentucky gentleman, including white suit, walking stick, and luxuriant white locks, eyebrows, mustache, and goatee, as well as a violent temper, brutal racism, and the status to indulge both freely.
Six years later, as Sherman pursues investments in the West, Colonel Lloyd’s daughter returns to a cottage near her father’s house, now with her own young daughter, Lloyd Sherman, the “little colonel,” played by Shirley Temple. The child’s honorary rank has been bestowed by a western general in recognition of her conquest, “completely unarmed, except for . . . [her] golden curls, brown eyes, and dimples,” of the hearts of an army regiment. Back in Kentucky, the little girl, proud of her honorary title, swaggers around the plantation. It is amply staffed with an array of African America
n servants, for whom life seems unchanged since slavery. She orders the young black children about in her games. Stereotypical pickaninnies, they serve as foils to her imperious defiance of old Colonel Lloyd and innocent targets of his wrath. The girl’s mammy, played by Hattie McDaniel, generously dispenses cookies, folk wisdom, spirituals, and simple piety. Yet she remains a lovable inferior, comic in her illiteracy and great girth.
Shirley blacks up to hide from a Union soldier in The Littlest Rebel. (Photofest/Twentieth Century–Fox)
As Colonel Lloyd’s butler, Walker, Robinson preserves much of the tradition of blackface minstrelsy in which he had served his theatrical apprenticeship. Still, he remains more the author of humor than the object of it. Certainly he had little opportunity for self-assertion in his lines, but he expressed himself eloquently with his feet. Indeed, when he dances, his authority, artistry, and wit are supreme. In the most memorable scene in the film, the justly celebrated staircase dance in which Walker aims to coax the colonel’s granddaughter up to bed, Robinson adapted his signature stage routine from a collapsible set of stairs with five steps on each side to a flight of fifteen steps up to a landing and then ten more to the top. He gave each step a different pitch, so that the stairway became, in effect, a drum set on which he could create elaborate rhythms and patterns. Robinson gave various accounts of his inspiration for his stage version. At times he said it originated when, as a boy, he danced up the wide steps of a Richmond house in which his mother worked. At others he said the idea came in a dream, when the king of England was awaiting him at the top of a flight of stairs, and he danced up them to receive a crown. Robinson undoubtedly told these stories to bolster his claim to have originated a dance that, in fact, long antedated him, and that King Rastus Brown claimed he stole, though Robinson gave it his inimitable stamp. But such stories also point to the way in which the dance could be at once the exuberant delight of a maid’s son and an assertion of nobility.19
Stock minstrel materials pervade the sequence, from the anthology of tunes Robinson hums as he dances (including “Old Kentucky Home,” “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” “Old Black Joe,” and “Year of Jubilo”) to the dancing couple’s abrupt retreat when Colonel Lloyd appears. Yet Robinson’s virtuosic dance on the master’s flight of stairs is also an improvisational flight of freedom.20 In his ability to endow a simple nursery rhyme and hackneyed minstrel tunes with dazzling artistry and vitality, he shows his refusal to be defined as simply a servant. Indeed, he suggests an alternative to Colonel Lloyd’s authority, one based on the power to delight rather than denounce. Instead of commanding, he charms. Instead of stamping his foot in exasperation (a gesture shared by Colonel Lloyd and his granddaughter), Robinson’s Walker teaches her how to tap it. “I want to do that too,” the little girl says after Robinson’s solo dance. He takes her hand with courtly grace and leads her in a stair dance exquisitely attuned to her talent.
Bill Robinson and Shirley join hands in a production still for the staircase dance from The Little Colonel. (Photofest/Fox)
By every indication, Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple had great respect and affection for one another. She cherished his warmth and talent, and he never lost a chance to praise her. Photographs of her took pride of place in his dressing room and in his apartment. Nonetheless, as the African American jazz pianist Hazel Scott later recalled, “He had no illusions about a Black man’s privileges. He knew that only as her butler, her trusted servant, could he take the hand of the little golden haired child and teach her to dance.”21
In teaching Shirley the dance, Robinson pared it down and showed her how to keep her steps close and precise. To gain an extra tap or step, he had her kick the stair riser with her toe. As an adult, she remembered, “Every one of my taps had to ring crisp and clear in the best cadence,” and she repeated her routine until she got each tap just right. Yet this was the opposite of drudgery. “The smile on my face was not acting; I was ecstatic.”22 Robinson’s recording of the pair’s taps for the soundtrack perfected the performance, here as elsewhere giving her steps a precision that they lacked.
Ultimately, the little girl proves to be fully her grandfather’s equal in courage and his instructor in forgiveness. Together, they foil dastardly swindlers, bent on extorting the deed to her father’s valuable land, and Colonel Lloyd, softened by his granddaughter’s blend of honey and vinegar, is reconciled with his daughter and son-in-law. In the closing scene, as the black-and-white film bursts into pastels and the soundtrack plays “Dixie,” the family is joyfully reunited in a Technicolor embrace.23
The New York Times’s Andre Sennwald, while chiding Fox’s “ruthless . . . exploitation of Miss Temple’s great talent for infant charm,” still noted that the Radio City Music Hall audience “applauded ‘The Little Colonel’ for eleven seconds after Miss Temple faded out in Mr. Barrymore’s arms.” Small-town audiences were equally enthusiastic, as exhibitors reported in the “What the Picture Did for Me” section of Motion Picture Herald. “The color sequence left the audience gasping it was so beautiful,” J. R. Patterson of the Majestic Theatre in Fort Mill, South Carolina, wrote, and exhibitors from Oscoda, Michigan, Montpelier, Idaho, Tilbury, Ontario, and Lebanon, Kansas, all agreed.24
In setting and theme, The Little Colonel was a prelude to Shirley Temple’s last film of 1935, The Littlest Rebel. Having reunited her unreconstructed grandfather and his Union veteran son-in-law in the earlier film, she was ready to patch up the ultimate American family quarrel, the Civil War. As a theatrical property, The Littlest Rebel was already old-fashioned in 1911 when Edward Peple created it as a four-act melodrama, starring the child actress Juliet Shelby (later known as Mary Miles Minter). By November 1935, when Twentieth Century–Fox released its film version, it had become “a claptrap skeleton,” calculated to serve as a sequel to The Little Colonel by reuniting Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson in another moonlight-and-magnolias story of sectional cleavages set in the South.25
Edward Peple’s version of The Littlest Rebel is another reminder of how the road to reunion between North and South was paved on the backs of African Americans. As Peple wrote in the foreword to the novelized version, “This story deals, not with the right or wrong of a lost confederacy, but with the mercy and generosity, the chivalry and humanity which lived in the hearts of the Blue and Gray, a noble contrast to the grim brutality of war.” As for the enslaved portion of humanity whose condition lay at the heart of the conflict, Peple appeared to think freedom was a great mistake. As another of her slaves prepares to run away to the Union army, the noble plantation mistress tells her faithful but feckless house slave, Uncle Billy, that her chief concern is for their welfare: “It makes me sad to see them leaving one by one. They are such children, Uncle Billy; and so helpless without a master hand.”26
Following Peple’s play, a generation of silent films, including D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and a version of The Littlest Rebel, plowed this fertile ground of racism, well fertilized with the manure of nostalgia. The coming of sound amplified the message with unconvincing southern drawls, blackface dialect, and minstrel music. King Vidor’s So Red the Rose, based on Stark Young’s novel and released less than a month before the Fox production of The Littlest Rebel, included slaves enthusiastically cheering their master as he leaves to fight the infernal Yankees.27 The climactic and most lucrative production of the decade was David Selznick’s version of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, released in December 1939. More than these films, The Littlest Rebel was calculated to please northern and southern whites alike, while offering the barest crumbs of consolation to African Americans. As the trade paper Variety observed, “All bitterness and cruelty has been rigorously cut out and the Civil War emerges as a misunderstanding among kindly gentlemen with eminently happy slaves and a cute little girl who sings and dances through the story.”28
The Littlest Rebel was a romance on several levels, and the terms of these romances reveal much about the emotional needs of the f
ilm market in the midst of the Great Depression. As the country faced widespread unemployment, want, and uncertainty, the film reminded moviegoers how Americans had endured far worse in the Civil War and recovered. Shirley plays the part of Virginia, the devoted daughter of invincibly honorable Confederate Captain Herbert Cary, and Bill Robinson serves as their steadfast enslaved house servant Uncle Billy.
In the waning months of the Civil War the Confederate cause is all but lost, but, as little Virgie, Shirley wins the heart of every good man she meets. Apart from her doting father, her first great conquest is the Union commanding officer, Colonel Morrison, who captures her father, despite her best efforts to conceal him. Even so, he is deeply touched by news that her father only returned to attend Mrs. Cary in her final illness. Morrison has, he reveals, his own little girl much like Virgie, and the father-daughter bond is stronger than sectional division or the dictates of war. Instead of taking Virgie’s father prisoner, Morrison tells his foe how he might find a spare Union officer’s uniform and transport his daughter safely to Richmond, pledging him only not to spy on Union operations in the process.
The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America Page 10