The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America
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This status of universally beloved child was one that the studio and its representatives assiduously cultivated. Almost from the moment of her 1934 breakthrough, Shirley served as a goodwill ambassador for Twentieth Century–Fox and the Hollywood film industry in general. In this capacity, she met President Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt (the latter twice), the Australian prime minister, the daughter of a Japanese ambassador, the son of Benito Mussolini, the Chilean navy’s chief of staff, who named her an official mascot, three Russian polar flyers, and Prince Purachatra Jayakara of Siam, among many others. She greeted the most celebrated thinker of the century, Albert Einstein, a Jew who fled his native Germany in 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler came to power. When she met the distinguished conductor Leopold Stokowski, he held her face in his hands and pronounced her “a divine instrument.” After meeting her, the British novelist and historian H. G. Wells declared, “She totally disarms you—she lifts you off your feet.” To visit her was to commune with the radiantly cheerful embodiment of American girlhood, and many made the pilgrimage.3
The ultimate honor that the studio could bestow was to have Shirley sit on the lap of visiting dignitaries. Shirley sat on hundreds and became a connoisseur. California governor Frank Merriam’s lap was “surprisingly bony,” the powerful financier and future New York governor and United States vice president Nelson Rockefeller’s not the most comfortable, but Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover’s “outstanding as laps go. Thighs just fleshy enough, knees held calmly together, and no bouncing or wiggling.” The two formed an unlikely friendship that lasted for decades.4
Just as celebrities in many fields basked in the glow of Shirley Temple’s attention, others shivered in her shadow. The great composer Arnold Schoenberg, another Jewish émigré from Nazi Europe, was incensed that the neighboring Temple family house was a featured attraction on a tour of Beverly Hills homes, but not his own. In modern celebrity culture, a diminutive child star easily dwarfed even a giant of modern art music.5
Beyond such celebrities, and far more important to Shirley Temple and Hollywood, lay the vast moviegoing public. She was a consistent favorite among children. Indeed, one reporter noted that “Shirley Temple would play to more persons if children would leave the theater after seeing one show. They stay all afternoon, while hundreds stand in line outside.”6
Yet she was also a favorite among American adults. A 1937 poll published in Fortune magazine provides the best snapshot, however blurred, of the character and extent of this audience. Respondents to an opinion poll placed her overall as the second-most-popular movie star, a hair’s breadth behind Clark Gable. Women as a whole declared her their absolute favorite, and among men she ranked second, right behind Clark Gable and ahead of William Powell. Among moviegoers between the ages of twenty and forty, her ranking slipped to fourth (still placing her first among actresses and ahead of Norma Shearer and Myrna Loy), but among those over forty, she soared to number one. Further sifting the poll data, Fortune concluded, “Shirley Temple is the darling of the Middle West, Northwest Plains, Southeast and Southwest, also of rural districts and cities of 2,500 to 25,000. Housekeepers (of course), proprietors, farm labor, and retired gentlemen like her best of all. Her strength is appearance and personality.”7 Not surprisingly, she exerted her greatest attraction not on younger adults living in cities but among those living in the small towns and rural areas of the American heartland. These were the “unsophisticated” audiences to which independent movie exhibitors catered, the sort who celebrated their successes and lamented their disappointments in Motion Picture Herald’s “What the Picture Did for Me.”
Although half of all Americans in the mid-1930s attended the movies on a regular basis, the poorest Americans were unlikely to see Shirley Temple movies. Yet it is a testimony to her cultural centrality that even they, black and white alike, might admire, even cherish, her image. An interviewer for the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project visited Gabriel Meyers, a black laborer and grandfather of twelve, in his unfinished four-room cabin, built of rough lumber, near McClellanville in the South Carolina lowlands. Holding pride of place in the modest but neat home where he lived with his wife and one grown daughter were two photographs, one of Gabriel, the other of Shirley Temple. Another such interviewer saw a picture of Shirley Temple on the mantle of the tumbledown house of a fifty-five-year-old white textile mill worker and his wife, John and Lizzie Pierce, in Wake Forest, North Carolina. Asked if she liked to see the child actress’s movies, the woman replied, “Hon, I’ve never saw her. . . . I never did take up no time with picture shows and amusemints of that kind.” The couple was childless, and the husband confided, “When I see the fine young girls of today I wisht I had a daughter of my own.”8
The wish to have a daughter like Shirley Temple swept American families in the 1930s, and many expressed those wishes in naming their newborns. When Gertrude Temple chose the name of Shirley for the daughter that she hoped would be a star, that name ranked as the tenth most popular for girls in the United States. This ranking changed little until 1934, the year of Shirley Temple’s sudden popularity, beginning in late April with the release of Stand Up and Cheer! Then the name rose to number four. In 1935 and 1936 it was the second-most-popular girl’s name in the country, and it remained in the top five through 1939. Its popularity strikingly accorded with Shirley Temple’s reign as box-office champion.9
The desire for a personal link with a figure of radiant confidence and cheer also drew countless parents and children, as well as those wishing for a child, to Shirley Temple movies. Since the establishment of Hollywood as a movie capital in the second decade of the twentieth century, women in particular had formed the backbone of movie culture, and they represented the heart of Hollywood’s fans. By the beginning of the 1920s, Hollywood stars were far more than merely actors: they were models of modern selfhood, transcendent personalities to be admired and emulated. Although the Great Depression dimmed many women’s (and men’s) own dreams, they stubbornly retained those on behalf of their daughters. A little girl with a big personality could win their hearts and shape their ambitions. Beginning in 1934 and throughout the 1930s, Shirley Temple glowed as the supreme model of American girlhood, whose personality and appearance entranced those mothers and daughters as did no other figure in the twentieth century.10
Hollywood and the numerous media and industries that depended on it had learned how to stoke the dreams of women, men, and children in the 1920s, and they redoubled their efforts in the Great Depression. Just as there was a Shirley Temple formula to her films, so there were formulas governing publicity, all of them based on her adorable appearance and personality. Publicity campaigns operated simultaneously at multiple levels—from the intensely local to the global—to make Shirley’s presence ubiquitous and her spell unshakable.
The press played an indispensable role. Hollywood and surrounding Los Angeles was the third largest news source in the country, with more than 350 newspaper and magazine correspondents, including one from the Vatican.11 For Shirley, her popularity meant that everything that she did was news: catching a cold, losing a tooth, changing her hairstyle, traveling to Hawaii or across the country, appearing at a theater. Studio press releases papered the world, so that readers would see similar accounts and photos of the beaming star whether they lived in Hoboken or Havana, São Paulo or Singapore, Ottawa or Osaka.
Shirley Temple’s birthday on April 23—her age consistently reduced a year—provided one such occasion. The first party, held in April 1934, less than three weeks after the release of Stand Up and Cheer!, was a modest affair by later standards, but the guests invited to the Fox studio restaurant were carefully selected to ensure the greatest publicity. All were the children of newspaper reporters, and the event was chronicled even in Japan.12
After Shirley’s rapid ascent, scarcely a newspaper reader, moviegoer, or shopper could fail to miss the occasion. Indeed, all were invited to participate. In April 1936, coincidin
g with the release of Captain January, Twentieth Century–Fox orchestrated a series of events at movie theaters, department stores, and organizations around the country and abroad, more than nine hundred parties in all. “Shirley says, ‘Everybody come to my birthday party!’ ” ran a typical newspaper advertisement. Ideal Novelty and Toy Company, maker of the authorized Shirley Temple doll, proclaimed this the “biggest non-Christmas toy event in history.” In addition to dolls and dresses, merchants displayed a host of less expensive Shirley Temple items: songbooks, paper dolls, coloring books, sewing cards, soap, and other novelties. Twentieth Century–Fox publicists arranged for a torrent of congratulatory telegrams from fans to flood the Temple home in Santa Monica. Many came from entire communities: a wire from one Illinois town bore twelve thousand signatures, another ten thousand. Some fans sent presents, dolls especially, so that Shirley Temple acquired an extensive collection despite herself. Altogether, she received 135,000 greetings and gifts.13
On the big day Shirley got several cakes: one from her New York fans, a second, in the shape of the Tennessee State Capitol, from that state’s governor, and a third from the Hotel Biltmore in Los Angeles. The colossal scale of greetings, gifts, cakes, and parties blurred the border between the cute and the grotesque. To preserve a semblance of normality, publicists emphasized that the cake that Shirley actually cut at her birthday party was a homemade one and the gifts that she prized most—a pony, a bicycle, and a turquoise ring—came from her family. The Temples also announced that almost all of the gifts that their daughter received were donated to charity.14
Shirley in her new hairstyle celebrates her “ninth” birthday, 1938. (© Bettmann/Corbis)
Always welcome copy for newspapers, Shirley was the special darling of movie fan magazines, which numbered more than a dozen in the United States by 1934, the largest achieving circulation of roughly half a million each, in addition to dozens more abroad. In 1935, her first year as an established star, she garnered the most coverage in feature stories, interviews, and photographs in the top eleven fan magazines. She also appeared on nine of these magazines’ covers, surpassing all competitors except for Claudette Colbert, with ten. Like the movie industry as a whole, such magazines saw declining sales in the early 1930s, and almost all of these publications cut their price to ten cents. Also, like the Hollywood studios, they faced growing moral outcry against false and salacious stories, such as gossip about the marriages and divorces of Jean Harlow, as well as photographs of scantily clad actresses. To quell such critics, Will Hays’s Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association imposed restrictions on fan magazines similar to those of the code governing the film industry. Henceforth Hollywood studios and magazines worked hand-in-glove to preserve a star’s carefully constructed image. Studio publicists regularly supervised interviews and approved stories, and many magazine writers also served as studio publicists themselves. Magazine publishers and studio executives were keenly aware that the film and fan industries could flourish if united—and likely fail separately. Fan magazines thus embraced Shirley Temple with much the same calculation as did Hollywood producers. Her cheerful innocence gave them a welcome attraction who appealed to the widest variety of readers without a whiff of indecency.15
Indeed, so sure were they of Shirley’s impeccable purity that studio publicists and journalists often wrote with tongue in cheek as if she were a femme fatale. In this spirit, immediately after Shirley’s breakthrough in 1934, Fox launched a series of full-length ads in trade newspapers, spoofing Hollywood gossip stories. One breathlessly declared, as if probing the marriage prospects of a high-society celebrity, “Cornered by reporters here today, Shirley Temple broke the silence which she has maintained about her future plans. ‘I am going to appear next,’ she said, ‘in the Fox picture Baby Take a Bow with Jimmy Dunn and Claire Trevor.’ Declining to discuss rumors of her engagement to the Prince of Wales, La Temple rushed to the studio restaurant for an ice cream cone.” In a similar vein, an article in Modern Screen began, “Shirley Temple is due to wreck more American homes than the combined devastation of the depression and the torrid electrons of every siren on the screen today.” The threat, it emerged only several paragraphs later, was that mothers around the corner, reading about the munificent contract that the Temple family had signed on behalf of their delightful daughter, would grab their own cherished child and, abandoning home and husband, head directly to Hollywood.16
In cities and small towns, in the United States, Canada, and much of the rest of the world, Fox Film and later Twentieth Century–Fox representatives united with distributors, exhibitors, merchants, manufacturers, community organizations, and schools, seeking at every possible opportunity to create tie-ins (“tie-ups” in the phrase of the day) between Shirley and her fans. Exhibitors energetically used every bit of ballyhoo that they could imagine to draw people to the movie house. Frank H. Ricketson Jr., president of Fox-Intermountain Theaters in Denver and a veteran of Howard Hughes’s movie theater chain, filled a book with extensive advice to theater managers on how to drum up movie attendance. A manager, Ricketson insisted, must be a “showman,” one who knows how to book an attractive bill and to stimulate public desire, “to make the public believe that it is necessary to happiness.” Such demand could be achieved only by concerted appeals, including newspaper articles and advertisements, radio spots, billboards, film trailers, and the like. Managers also staged a variety of “giveaways”: premiums, contests, drawings, and similar stunts, often in tandem with local merchants and organizations.17
One of the most popular of such stunts was the Shirley Temple look-alike contest. From 1934 through the rest of the decade, Fox and later Twentieth Century–Fox publicists promoted such contests extensively, enlisting the efforts of local movie exhibitors, newspapers, department stores, and other retailers in the process. Shortly after Shirley’s breakthrough in 1934, a manager of a movie theater in Des Moines, Iowa, teamed up with a photo studio specializing in children’s portraits. Girls who sat for the photographer could have their likenesses displayed in the lobby of the theater as it ran Shirley’s latest movie, Baby Take a Bow, and moviegoers voted for the one who most resembled Shirley. At the same time, a Brooklyn manager joined with the newspaper New York American to host a Shirley Temple look-alike contest with Pekinese puppies as prizes. Other look-alike contests awarded top contestants a pass to Shirley’s latest movie and an autographed photo of the star. That fall in Sydney, Australia, Fox Film and the Daily Telegraph newspaper raised the stakes, offering contestants a first prize of a hundred pounds. Similar contests were held in other cities of the British Empire, including Bombay, India.18
Nine contestants in a Shirley Temple look-alike contest, sponsored by Fox Film and the Daily Telegraph, Sydney, Australia, October 2, 1934. (Photograph by Sam Hood, Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales—DG ON4/814 s, reproduced by permission)
Nor were such contests confined to English-speaking countries. In April 1935, still less than a year after Shirley’s breakthrough, a journalist in Havana interviewed three young Cuban veterans of Shirley Temple look-alike contests. The first of these, a five-year-old girl named Myrna with golden curls and brown eyes, had already won first prize in several competitions in which she not only had to look like Shirley but also had to demonstrate her “command of the enchanting arts” practiced by “Hollywood’s kid.” A second, only four years old, could re-create Shirley Temple’s gestures exactly. The third, despite her golden hair and an enchanting smile, possessed more of Shirley’s temperament than appearance and had a string of second-place awards in Shirley Temple contests, rather than the coveted first prize. The influence of Shirley Temple, the Cuban journalist favorably noted would serve to “de-countrify” Cuban children.19
The search for the “Cuban Shirley Temple” was reiterated in other countries around the world. In May 1936 the “French Shirley Temple,” winner of a contest sponsored by the Paris film weekly Pour Vous that attracted three thousand
look-alikes, journeyed with her mother to Hollywood as the guest of Twentieth Century–Fox to receive Shirley’s personal congratulations. Although not yet six years old, the curly-blond Parisienne and her mother confessed that they were contemplating her own film career.20
As far away as Japan, newspapers repeatedly reported on Shirley Temple look-alikes. “I’m Shirley Temple,” declared one seven-year-old actress, half Japanese and half Russian. Two other Japanese articles warned of a scam in which a man tricked several families out of their money by telling parents that their child could become a child actor more popular than Shirley Temple.21
Thus, in a great whirling circle, spun by publicists, journalists, eager parents, and their daughters, Shirley Temple became a global standard of what a little girl should be. A chart, carried by newspapers and purportedly devised in consultation with leading California educators, invited readers to “Test Your Own Child” in the ability to live up to Shirley’s sterling example. Among ten questions, it asked: “Does your child receive praise without being spoiled? seem at ease in the presence of strangers? admit errors without trying to blame others? lead in group activities? make friends quickly?” In a decade in which “personality development” became the prime concern of child-rearing advice, not only Shirley’s appearance but her personality demanded imitation. In a similar spirit the movie fan magazine Silver Screen reported that many readers had found that they could “only make their daughters willingly eat their spinach, or drink their milk, because Shirley Temple does so.” Older sisters taught younger ones “good manners and neatness . . . by setting Shirley up as an example.” Teachers instructed pupils in obedience by the same tactics. Accordingly, the magazine invited readers to “write a letter telling us how Shirley Temple’s influence has helped in the up-bringing of some little girl you know.” First prize was a Shirley Temple doll, with a carriage and accessories. As a final thought, the magazine added, “Neatness will be considered.”22