The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America
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All of these Shirley Temple contests—and the broader desire to imitate Shirley Temple—linked girls and their families throughout the world with Hollywood and the consumer industries surrounding it. Such imitations vividly demonstrate the active engagement of moviegoers with their favorite actors. They also indicate the emotional needs that viewers brought to the theater and the stories that sustained them.
In actively encouraging imitation of Shirley Temple, promoters exploited a fundamental appeal of movies for children. Even before the onset of the Great Depression, the desire of children and adolescents to imitate, consciously and unconsciously, the characters, plots, and gestures of the movies had attracted notice—and considerable concern from moral guardians. The most extensive investigation of the impact of movies on youth, the famous Payne Fund studies, stressed how powerfully the influence of film permeated the imagination and everyday play of children. Although the studies were flawed in many respects, their fundamental finding that movies deeply enthralled the young has never been seriously questioned. In one of these studies, Our Movie Made Children (1933), Henry Forman wrote, “The mirror held up by the movies is gazed into by myriads of adolescents and even young children in their secret thoughts, in their broodings, their daydreaming and fantasies—they want to be like the people in the movies.” Drawing on the studies’ extensive interviews and questionnaires describing how children imitated the movies in their play, from cowboys-and-Indians games to Rudolph Valentino’s torrid seductions, Herbert Blumer observed, “For the time being the child assumes a new role. All phases of his make-up thoughts, intentions, interests, vocalizations and gestures reflect the role which he is acting.” Thus, if we consider play as a kind of acting, movies made performers out of most children. From this perspective, we may see Shirley Temple as leading a vast throng of child actors, imitating the little girl who began her own career parodying adults in Baby Burlesks.23
Imitation took many forms. Tap-dance schools in the 1930s bulged with would-be Shirley Temples. Fred Kelly, a brother of the great dancer Gene Kelly, recalled the legions of such girls in the family’s dance studios in Pittsburgh and Johnstown, Pennsylvania: “Every time Shirley Temple made a movie, our studio enrollment doubled.” Soon “we had one hundred girls in our studio who all looked exactly like Shirley Temple! . . . In one of our shows we did a big ‘Shirley Temple’ finale number. Mother went down to the local department store in Johnstown and talked to the owner of the store. She bought a gross of dresses, different colors. When the finale of the show happened, every girl came out in a dress that had a big bow on the back, all with their hair in bouncing curls, and they all looked just like Shirley Temple!”24
The journalist and essayist A. J. Liebling satirically imagined the grim traffic of little Shirley Temple look-alikes and their belligerent mothers to the offices of voice, dancing, and theatrical instructors: “Often several of the Shirleys and their mothers find themselves in a[n elevator] car together. The mother’s upper lips curl as they survey the other mothers’ patently moronic young. The Shirleys gaze at each other with vacuous hostility and wonder whether their mothers will slap them if they ask to go to the bathroom again. All the Shirleys have bony little knees and bitter mouths and . . . will undoubtedly grow up to be ax murderesses.”25
Such caricature aside, emulation of Shirley Temple sprang from many needs. Shirley’s charm, courage, cheer, and charisma delighted countless children and their families, and by imitating her they could momentarily bathe in the glamour of Hollywood, however remote their homes. In her sunny reminiscence “Carefree,” Eileen Bennetto recounts how, growing up in a small country town in northeast Victoria, Australia, she eagerly anticipated movie matinees on Saturday: “It was our own special world, the theatre filled with screaming, whistling kids, and not an adult in sight, except occasionally the manager who came down to threaten us.” Of all the actors, “Shirley was our undoubted favourite, and the streets were filled with Shirley Temple look-alikes, with sausage curls, short frocks with puffed sleeves, and patent-leather shoes with taps on them.”26 Here imitating Shirley Temple appears to be as joyous a pleasure as watching her onscreen, and one spontaneously enacted by children without mediating adults. Under Shirley’s spell, everyday sidewalks could become Hollywood sets.
Yet “carefree” is not the word that characterized most people’s lives during the Great Depression. The economic crisis, as we have seen, carried massive emotional ramifications, and among the children drawn to Shirley Temple in the 1930s were those who most craved a portion of her indomitable spirit. Shirley’s repeated triumphs of healing, of building new families out of once broken hearts, spoke to audiences everywhere. Her feats carried special power for those yearning for deliverance from their families’ miseries: poverty, prejudice, divorce, abandonment, alcoholism, derangement, sexual abuse—all of the woes of childhood. The darkest of these troubles, of course, never appeared in Shirley’s films, but viewers in need could easily adapt her plots to fit their individual circumstances.
Reminiscences prepared decades later reveal precisely how individual girls invested Shirley Temple with their own deep longings, often in collaboration with their mothers. Such accounts, of course, are interpretations as much as recollections, but common patterns clearly emerge across region, nation, religion, ethnicity, class, and individual circumstances.
The painter Ruth Kligman, who first became famous as the muse and mistress of the action painter Jackson Pollock, gave special prominence in her 1974 memoir to her experience in a Shirley Temple look-alike contest. One of twin sisters, Ruth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1930, to a mother still in her teens. Her father, a local con man, never lived with the family, and her mother’s Russian Jewish parents spurned them. She remembered a childhood racked with sadness and paranoia: “My mother was always crying, always unhappy about facing the outside world . . . wanting to be something else. She cried, I cried, and my twin sister cried, we all cried in a kind of horrible unison. I never knew what was wrong. But the outside world represented terror.”27
From such misery the local movie house provided a rare haven of happiness, and Ruth, who later acquired the dark beauty of a Hollywood star, attended avidly. Once her mother learned of a statewide Shirley Temple look-alike contest, sponsored by the Newark News. To enter, aspirants needed to provide a photograph, and, it went without saying, it had to include some semblance of Shirley’s famous curls. So Ruth’s mother laboriously curled her dark-eyed twin daughters’ dark-brown hair, garbed them in Shirley Temple dresses, and had them photographed at Bamberger’s massive Newark department store, “our big faces smiling and our bodies back to back in the pose making us look like Siamese twins.” The next week Mrs. Kligman proudly escorted her curly-coiffed daughters to a large hall for the preliminary judging. Four decades later, Ruth Kligman still ached from the episode: “I think it was the biggest room and the largest assortment of people together I had ever seen. . . . Every little blonde girl in the state of New Jersey was there that day, from all the hundreds of suburbs, all those sweet-looking little girls with curls and thin bodies and gold lockets around their necks, and the mothers looked so good, so wealthy and well dressed.”28
Ruth’s mother pushed her twin dark-eyed brunettes forward, certain that they would win, only to be blocked by an official who refused even to let them enter. “But my daughters are beautiful, and twins,” she protested. “Come on now, you’re not being fair.” “Now, lady, be reasonable,” he replied firmly. “They’re not the type.” Across an immense chasm, Ruth longingly viewed those contestants who were the type: “Girls who had fathers that loved them and mothers who didn’t work. They lived in homes and had back yards and roller-skated and had brothers. We were foreign. Our grandmother couldn’t read or write and spoke with a heavy accent. . . . And the screaming at my grandmother’s home every day; these people talked sweetly to each other, they didn’t scream and hit and cry.” Furious, Ruth’s mother left the hall with her rejected daught
ers. She cursed “the goddamn bastards, and we didn’t feel anything except utter sadness and confusion and somehow ashamed, ashamed of being Jewish and dark and chubby and different. It was somehow clear: the world was for them, not for us.”29
At roughly the same time, halfway across the continent in Omaha, Nebraska, Dorothy Coomer (later Dorothy Weil) similarly longed for the happiness that Shirley Temple embodied. A year and a half younger than Shirley, Dorothy was the daughter of a dreamy, at times depressed middle-class mother who, in her family’s eyes, had married beneath her, and a tough, distant father with a body scarred from fights. He had worked on the river boats, sold patent medicine, and in the Great Depression often fruitlessly searched for a job. Dorothy’s mother had flirted with suicide, and their marriage had fallen apart. Living with her two children in an Omaha hotel, she turned to the Muse Theater across the street to sustain her spirits. Both Dorothy and her mother succumbed to Shirley Temple’s spell. “I saw every Shirley Temple movie that came to the Muse,” Dorothy Weil wrote. “Shirley was so adorable, the ideal every little girl compared herself to.” Dorothy cherished her modest collection of Shirley Temple products like icons: “I had Shirley Temple paper dolls with ermine coats and muffs and ruffled skirts. I had a Shirley Temple mug: blue glass with Shirley’s image in white.” Blind to the gulf between her daughter’s appearance and Shirley’s, “in a totally misguided moment,” Dorothy’s mother “curled my lank locks and entered me in a Shirley Temple look-alike contest, in which I received the twenty-fifth and last prize.” Her mother also insistently displayed Dorothy to her friends, dressed in a full-skirted taffeta frock. Yet “the clothes were not what I envied about Shirley Temple.” Rather, “it was the way that, in story after story, through the sheer power of her personality, she brought her parents together and mollified crusty grandfathers who had cut their daughters off for marrying the wrong man.”30 Viewing Shirley’s films through the lens of her own desires, Dorothy saw her own story and the promise of deliverance.
Meanwhile, in North Dakota, Kathy Plotkin stood uncomfortably before a gas stove as her mother styled her hair into Shirley Temple curls using a marcel iron. The device “was held over a gas flame until hot enough to curl hair—and sometimes burned it, causing an aroma not unlike scorched chicken feathers.” Kathy fared better in her Shirley Temple look-alike contest than Ruth Kligman or Dorothy Weil did in theirs, winning an honorable mention and her picture in the fan magazine Photoplay.31
Shirley Temple’s pin curls created an international fad, and at times it marked a cultural divide between the power of Hollywood and moral authorities. When she was a Catholic schoolgirl in Dublin, Ireland, Ita Bridget Bolger remembered, “there was one great hairstyle . . . the imitation of Shirley Temple, a mass of little ringlets all over the head.” As in many other cities, the local newspaper, the Evening Herald, held a Shirley Temple look-alike contest: “There were rows of photographs of girls every night—they all had the hair in curls but very few of them looked like Shirley Temple.” One of Ita’s friends made the mistake of carrying her imitation to school. She arrived one morning with her normally straight hair in a Shirley Temple permanent. “Oh, consternation,” Ita remembered, “the nuns didn’t like it one bit. Terrible show of pride; so the mother was sent for, and she arrived in the next day with the hair all frizzy, because it had been permed, but no longer quite like Shirley Temple’s.”32
Yet the great majority of retrospective accounts testified to the myriad ways in which imitating Shirley Temple provided relief from hardship. One of the most striking comes from Beatrice Muchman, who fled from Berlin to Brussels with her Jewish family, the Westheimers, to escape Nazi persecution. In 1939 her parents were living in cramped quarters, working illegally, and arguing frequently as they desperately tried to find a way to the United States. In Berlin Beatrice’s mother had been a fashion designer and, perhaps expressing her own thwarted ambitions, dreamed that her daughter would become a movie star. She made beautiful clothes “seemingly from nothing” for six-year old Beatrice and “would wrap my hair around thick wooden rollers to give me curls in the style of Shirley Temple.” For Beatrice, as for millions of other girls, “Shirley Temple was the person I most wanted to be.” Her example stimulated Beatrice’s own play-acting. “During those tension-filled times, my world of make-believe was a warm refuge that my mother encouraged.” All too soon Beatrice had to put such acting to use, as she became one of the “hidden children,” Jews passing as gentiles, in order to escape the Holocaust, in which her parents died. Masquerading as the niece of a Catholic woman in a Belgian town, she assumed a new name and a Catholic identity. “Although having to change identities was a bit confusing,” she wrote, “I enjoyed the idea of playing a real game of pretend.” At age nine she took her first Catholic communion. She basked in the attention and the pleasure of a special dress, veil, and patent leather shoes. “I felt like a little movie star,” she wrote.33
Another star-struck Jewish girl who cherished Shirley Temple’s smiling example as she hid from the Nazis was Anne Frank. Her family had fled Frankfurt, Germany, in 1933 and established a new life in Amsterdam. Then in 1940 the Nazis occupied the Netherlands and initiated increasingly repressive policies targeting Jews. These included, beginning in January 1941, a prohibition against their attendance in movie theaters. Anne had avidly gone to the movies, including Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin films, and she dreamed of becoming an actress. No longer able to see films directly, she devoured each week’s issue of Cinema and Theater magazine that her family’s confidant Victor Kugler bought for her. In July 1942 the Frank family went into hiding in a secret annex of an office building, where they remained for more than two years, until they were betrayed and shipped to concentration camps. “Our little room looked very bare at first with nothing on the walls;” Anne wrote in her diary, “but thanks to Daddy who had brought my film-star collection on beforehand, and with the aid of a paste pot and brush, I have transformed the walls into one gigantic picture. This makes it look much more cheerful.” Prominent among these pictures was the beaming smile of Shirley Temple.34 Anne Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, only weeks before the British liberation.
Imitating Shirley Temple as a film personality frequently involved imitating her as a consumer. Hollywood had long served as the handmaiden of modern advertising and of consumer culture more generally. From the dawn of the star system in the second decade of the twentieth century, the film capital became the center of new fashions and a new ethic of self-expression. Actors capitalized on this prestige by endorsing products, thus conferring the luster of their personalities. Beginning in 1916, Mary Pickford, the star with the most famous curls prior to Shirley Temple, appeared in a series of advertisements for Pompeian skin cream, chocolates, and cigarettes. By the 1920s Hollywood stars, fashions, and decor exercised a considerable influence on American buying habits.35
Winsome Jackie Coogan, among the most highly merchandized movie stars of the 1920s. (© Bettmann/Corbis)
Child stars, as well as adults, cast a spell that captivated consumers. Jackie Coogan, the most popular child actor of the 1920s after his success in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), leased his name and image to a host of products, including dolls, lunch boxes, peanut butter, pencil sets, an Erector set, records, stilts, and a line of clothing. Woolworth’s dime stores hawked piano sheet music with theme songs from his silent movies, his winsome face on the cover, in one instance beseeching, “Buy me and take me home. I’ll be a good little boy,” above his signature. Anticipating the Shirley Temple craze of the 1930s, Jackie Coogan look-alike contests became a staple of Saturday movie matinees—with first prize often a Coogan product.36
The onset of the Great Depression did not stifle such efforts. On the contrary, advertisers and merchandisers tightened their alliances with Hollywood, determined to get consumers spending once again. Marketers hungrily eyed the juvenile market as a vast frontier, hitherto hazily mapped and fit
fully explored. By some estimates children under the age of eighteen affected a third of all merchandise sold in the country. During the 1920s advertisers and merchandisers increasingly realized that children held both the keys to the juvenile market and a hand on the door to purchases by their families. If children could be coaxed to open these doors, vast fortunes lay ahead. Yet prior to the 1930s merchandisers conceived of the child as a smaller and less independent customer, not as a unique type of consumer whose perspective needed to be carefully cultivated. They noted children’s delight in premiums and clubs but did not concentrate on the psychology of children as they did on mothers. In the 1930s this situation changed dramatically, so much so that one historian has declared this a turning point in the history of childhood. Manufacturers, merchants, advertisers, and others, including many in the movie industry, sought to make the perspective of the child a vital element in consumer markets. Mothers and other adults were not ignored in this effort, but no longer would the child consumer be addressed principally through them. Rather, at every turn, marketers celebrated the “natural” and “healthy” desires of the autonomous child—and used these qualities as the basis for a new commodification of childhood.37
A key text in this effort was E. Evalyn Grumbine’s Reaching Juvenile Markets: How to Advertise, Sell, and Merchandise through Boys and Girls (1938). As assistant publisher and advertising director of Child Life magazine, a twenty-five-cent monthly with a circulation of more than 150,000 that addressed a “quality market” of children up to age thirteen, Grumbine could speak authoritatively on the subject. By selling to and through children, she emphasized, advertisers and merchants could vastly expand their sales and raise a new generation of consumers. Grumbine built on Alfred Adler’s theories of child personality development as well as Progressive notions of active learning, stemming from the work of John Dewey, and adapted them for marketing purposes. Whereas Adler and Dewey sought the realization of the child’s full potential and growth into a democratic society, guided by wise parents and teachers, Grumbine concentrated on the child’s sales potential and development into a consumer economy, guided by helpful marketers. Building on the work of child psychologists, she minutely divided the child market into age groups (infancy to three, four through six, seven through nine, and so on) and, beginning at age ten, by gender as well. From age three onward, she contended, each group had characteristic psychologies that marketers could use to their advantage, especially if they addressed children directly. Grumbine justified such appeals not as crass exploitation but rather as nurturing children’s growing sense of independence. Encouraging their desires for heroes of their own age, and satisfying their instinct for collecting, for membership in clubs of their own, for the lure of a reward, for choosing their own clothes and the like—all might be seen as progressive activities. She took for granted that the consumer economy would be integral to their health and happiness.38