A few independent exhibitors agreed with Crowther. “Oh, why wait till Shirley’s last picture to give her a story,” sighed one from Brooksville, Kentucky. “Good picture and story. . . . Too bad they did not give her better stories in the past,” an exhibitor from Roaring Spring, Pennsylvania, lamented. Nonetheless, most exhibitors reported poor business.83
Zanuck’s formula for a good Shirley Temple movie, which he had inherited from Winfield Sheehan, was fashioned in response to the demands of movie audiences in the midst of the Great Depression. For five years it sustained Shirley Temple’s unprecedented popularity, buoying up spirits of children, women, and men in the United States and worldwide at a time when cheer and the promise of happiness were badly needed. That it finally lost its appeal is hardly surprising. What is most remarkable is its immense staying power. Unquestionably, it confined Shirley to a relatively narrow series of roles, but it might equally well be argued that it gave her special talents extraordinary prominence. Several factors conspired to bring her reign as a child star to an end: the onset of her adolescence, the exhaustion of the formula, and the changing context of the emotional needs and desires of the moviegoing public. By 1940 war had erupted in Europe, the international movie market had contracted significantly, action and adventure movies had gained new popularity, and even family audiences hungered for different fare, such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. The abundance of young child actors, so prominent in Hollywood films of the early 1930s when Shirley achieved her breakthrough, lost the spotlight to a formidably talented group of adolescent stars, including Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and Deanna Durbin.
Twentieth Century–Fox, too, had arisen from the financial disarray that surrounded its union to an impressive stature, measured both in profits and also in its best films, including a much more searing examination of the Great Depression than any Shirley Temple movie, The Grapes of Wrath, released in January 1940. By this time the little girl had burst into adolescence, President Roosevelt was increasingly preoccupied by the looming war, and neither the studio nor the nation needed saving by her cute ways and adorable smile.
CHAPTER 6
WHAT’S A PRIVATE LIFE?
Onscreen, Shirley triumphed fundamentally as a personality. Many admirers believed that she was simply portraying herself. Still, they wished to authenticate the shadow on the screen with testimonials to the flesh-and-blood little girl. For the success of Shirley’s career, this reassurance was fundamental. For Darryl Zanuck, film reviewers, and small-town movie exhibiters, a pressing question throughout the 1930s remained: how long could Shirley’s box-office magic last? For many of her fans, however, the most urgent and abiding question that they combed fan magazines and newspaper articles to answer was, would success spoil Shirley Temple?
The image of the spoiled child—pampered, willful, unfeeling—remained a prominent concern for parents, and the abnormal terms of child actors’ lives appeared to place them at special risk. Suspicions about the emotional perils of the professional child actor, a charged issue earlier in the century, still lingered in the 1930s. Acting might encourage artifice, success breed self-importance, studio and public pressures lead to a warped personality. Child-rearing experts in the 1920s and 1930s enshrined the concept of the normal child and stressed parents’ responsibility for that development.1 Many parents were themselves torn between older values of thrift, self-control, and deferred gratification and the rising consumer values of self-expression and indulgence. In addition, many middle-class parents and child experts worried about the seductive pleasures of commercial amusements, movies especially, that pulled children away from the home. Shirley embodied many of those pleasures. She helped to transform merchandising to children. She influenced the ways that little girls dressed, wore their hair, and shopped with their families, and the dolls, toys, and games they played with, as well as the films that they watched. Still more profoundly, she shaped their own personalities, desires, and dreams, and those that their mothers and often fathers had for them. The question of whether Shirley was spoiled, then, held enormous stakes. She represented the ideal child. How did she, her family, and the film industry in which she worked—or played, as her mother always insisted—manage to balance her acting career and her private life, her integral participation in the media that transfixed children and her own moral development as a child? If she was spoiled, might others also be tainted? If she was not, what could others learn from her example? Was she abnormal? Unique as was her situation, the answer to such questions contained important implications for millions. If Shirley was truly as good as gold, if she could pass reporters’ acid tests and not expose base metal, then the consumer market in which she was so deeply enmeshed might be safe for all children and their families.
The boundaries between public and private life have always been porous, but beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, the pressures of an emerging celebrity culture eroded them considerably. In fact, the right of personal privacy as a modern legal concept was first formulated to protect individuals from the prying intrusions of celebrity-chasing journalists. It was famously articulated in an 1890 article by Samuel Warren and his law partner the future United States Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis as “the right to be let alone.” Warren had married into the socially and politically prominent Bayard family, whose weddings, funerals, and social doings attracted persistent press coverage, and so his complaint had a personal dimension.2 “Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life,” he and Brandeis wrote, “and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.’ . . . Gossip . . . has become a trade,” they lamented, “which can only be procured by intrusion upon the domestic circle.” Warren and Brandeis argued that this breach was not only a domestic intrusion but an act fundamentally at odds with American law. They conceived of the “right to privacy” as “a part of the more general right to the immunity of the person,—the right to one’s personality” shielded from public exposure.3
Thus, two understandings of “personality” emerged around the turn of the twentieth century in dialectical tension with one another, and the contest between them held momentous implications for modern life. The legal assertion of privacy defended the “personality rights” of individuals to pursue their personal lives and domestic arrangements free from intrusive regulation or exposure. A quite different understanding of personality, however, emerged at the same time as part of a new concept of self in modern consumer culture. Here personality meant the personal qualities that distinguish an individual from the crowd, such as charm, poise, magnetism, charisma. These were the qualities of a performer, and the supreme exemplars of such performers were movie stars.4
More than any other child star of the Great Depression, perhaps more than any other Hollywood star of the twentieth century, Shirley Temple carried this performative notion of personality into the private lives of many families. Yet the public fascination with her personality meant that her own family’s private life was rocked as well. This was the ironic outcome of Gertrude Temple’s ambitions for her daughter. Mrs. Temple could not have imagined the scale of Shirley’s ultimate celebrity when she groomed her as a child performer, for the magnitude of that success was unprecedented. Nor could genial George Temple have anticipated that his daughter would become the family business, turning his own role as breadwinner topsy-turvy.
It was her fans, not Fox Film, that initially made Shirley a star, and she depended on her fans to keep that star brightly shining. Yet the nature of fan culture and of the movie industry in the golden age of the Hollywood studio system made it especially difficult to place limits on admirers’ desire to pierce beyond the shadows on the screen and encounter the “real” Shirley Temple, as much as the Temples strove to maintain a wall of privacy. Fame required that the line between public and private life be minimized. In a
n interview with a fan magazine writer, Shirley supposedly asked, “What’s a private life?” The interviewer replied, “When you’re not acting” and “just having fun.” “Dimples dawned at the corners of her mouth. ‘I’m just having fun when I’m acting too,’ she chuckled. ‘So I guess my whole life’s a private life.’ ”5
Film publicists kindled the flames of fans’ fascination with the stars and did everything they could to keep them burning. Indeed, the origins of movie fandom may be dated to a publicity stunt. In March 1910 Carl Laemmle’s Independent Moving Pictures Company (IMP) leaked a story that their leading actress, “the IMP Girl,” previously known as the Biograph Girl for her work with that studio, was in fact Florence Lawrence and that she had been killed in a streetcar accident. A few days later, IMP piously protested that Lawrence’s death was a lie perpetrated by a rival studio and that “very shortly some of her best work in her career” would be released. It was the kind of hoax to make P. T. Barnum wink in his grave, and it launched an endless succession of Hollywood stunts intended to tantalize fans’ appetites for news of movie actors’ offscreen lives. Yet the stunt triggered a genuine threat to Florence Lawrence’s safety—one that was also a portent of future threats to other stars. When Lawrence appeared in St. Louis to reassure admirers that she was alive and unharmed, she was nearly crushed by a mob, consisting mainly of women and children, “that swept toward her . . . like an avalanche.”6
Henceforth, movie fans persisted in delving into stars’ private lives, and occasionally other mob scenes erupted. When in 1920 two of Hollywood’s most celebrated stars, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, celebrated their honeymoon in London, a frenzied horde almost pulled Pickford out of a moving convertible and nearly crushed her at a garden party. As the New York drama critic Alexander Woollcott wrote, “The public passion was to see, in the flesh, these two mimes whose dancing shadows had played so large a part in the humbler public’s festivities for many years—to see (if possible to touch) Douglas Fairbanks and more especially to see, touch, and kiss Miss Pickford. The intention was amiable and the process may sound agreeable; but when, on the way from the station to your rooms, ten thousand people approach you with beaming countenances but a none-the-less grim determination to pet and fondle you or die in the attempt, it is a trifle dismaying.”7
Similar mob scenes, teetering on the edge of riot, came to represent the ultimate seal of popular approval at movie palace openings and film premieres. The opening of Sid Grauman’s Metropolitan Theatre in Los Angeles in 1923 earned this dubious accolade. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the police were joined by militia forces armed with rifles, who at times “struggled for the possession of the guns” with unruly fans. “The police had to be continually on guard to keep the crowd from storming the theater so great was the spectators’ desire to obtain a glimpse of the stars and of the interior of the house.”8 Premieres of such films as Rosita, with Mary Pickford (1923), The Thief of Bagdad, starring Douglas Fairbanks (1924), and The Trespasser, in which Gloria Swanson had her first talking role (1929), sparked similar crowd frenzy.
In 1927 in New York City still larger crowds of women, men, and children pushed and shoved one another as they pressed toward the Broadway funeral home where the matinee idol Rudolph Valentino lay in his silver-bronze coffin. On several occasions the crowd surged forward, breaking large plate-glass windows and trampling onlookers. When the funeral home flung open its doors, the throng swept up even the mounted police in its tide, and officers repeatedly charged into the mass to break it up. Ultimately, over a hundred people suffered injuries, and the street was littered with torn hats, shoes, umbrellas, and other personal belongings.9
During the Great Depression unruly crowds continued to swell movie premieres in Los Angeles, New York, and other cities for films such as Little Caesar (1931) and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). The 1937 Los Angeles premiere of one Shirley Temple film, Wee Willie Winkie, nearly erupted in riot. On that occasion an estimated five thousand fans paid fifty cents apiece to perch on backless seats for up to eight hours, eagerly awaiting a glimpse of the diminutive star. Another five thousand standees joined the throng. The appearances of stars such as Eddie Cantor, Tyrone Power, Sonja Henie, and Sophie Tucker merely whetted their appetites. Then, just as the Temple family arrived, many of the luminaries and their parties turned stargazers themselves, forming a wall that eclipsed Shirley’s appearance from the view of the multitude. The outraged roar of the crowd could be heard for miles, as frustrated spectators surged against the ropes. It took fifty police to restore order.10
Less menacingly, waves of fan mail also poured over Hollywood stars. Such letters began with the advent of the star system, and the flow quickly became a torrent. In 1920, at the peak of her career, Clara Bow received forty-five thousand letters a week. Some stars hired their own secretaries. Mary Pickford’s mail became so voluminous that the Los Angeles post office asked her to cancel her own stamps. Hollywood studios also organized fan mail departments to respond to the intense demands. In 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression, some 32,250,000 letters flooded the Hollywood film studios, which spent over $2 million dealing with them.11
Despite the need to pinch every penny in the Great Depression, ordinary citizens wrote public figures—politicians, entertainers, journalists, and others—in greater numbers than ever. They often claimed a personal relationship with these celebrities, confiding their own stories and difficulties. In addressing movie and radio actors, they frequently assumed continuity between the fictional characters such actors portrayed and the performers’ own personalities. Shirley Temple’s fan mail began pouring in immediately after her success in Stand Up and Cheer! in 1934. At first, she and her two older brothers enjoyed the novelty of slitting open the envelopes, but the correspondence quickly amounted to a deluge. By early 1935 her mail was reported as four thousand letters a week, demanding a full-time secretary to handle it.12
None of these letters appears to have been preserved, but a few that were published at the time suggest the range of correspondents as well as the diversity of their attraction to Shirley. They included messages from girls and boys, women and men, seeing in her an adored sister, friend, sweetheart, or daughter. “I think you are very cute,” a seven-year-old girl wrote, “and I’d like to be like you. You dance so much better than I do.” A grade school boy mixed adulation with a dash of caution (shared by many, as we shall see) that Shirley might lose her unaffected innocence: “I think you’re swell and when I grow up I’m going to marry you if you haven’t been spoiled by then.” Mothers often included photographs of their daughters, nominally asking Shirley but really Gertrude Temple to confirm the striking likeness of their offspring and wondering how to get into the movie business. (Rarely did Gertrude Temple see any resemblance to Shirley.)13
Shirley herself never read these letters, but other attentions could hardly escape her notice. Much as Gertrude Temple had worked to achieve her daughter’s success, the intrusions on their family life that immediately followed Shirley’s sudden celebrity overwhelmed them. “Overnight, we, who had lived an inconspicuous and very modest life in our bungalow at Santa Monica, found ourselves in the floodlight of motion-picture publicity,” Mrs. Temple said. In addition to the torrent of mail and unsolicited gifts, “people knocked at our doors. Bolder ones pressed their faces against our windows. The telephone rang from morning till night. It simply was too much for us, not to speak of the child, who was tugged at, fondled, gushed over, and followed.” One evening as the Temple family sat at dinner, the doorbell rang and eight tourists rushed into the dining room. “We’re from Pennsylvania,” they explained, “and we just had to see Shirley before we went back home.”14
When strangers recognized Shirley in public, they often flocked around her. As early as the summer of 1934, only months after she had become a celebrity, the Temple family discovered that they could no longer enjoy the beach near their home in Santa Monica, as in previous years. “We expected to
stay at the beach all summer, but it is impossible,” George Temple told a reporter. “People came swarming down here like a cloud of locusts. I believe youngsters came from a hundred miles around to play with Shirley and she can’t play with so many at one time. We have been besieged by tourists, salesmen, autograph collectors and people who were just plain curious so we have to move.” By August 1934, less than four months after Shirley’s breakthrough, the Temples were making plans to leave their Santa Monica bungalow for a house in Hollywood or Beverly Hills, surrounded by a high wall or hedge. “We have to have that,” George Temple said, “to protect our little girl.”15
Even in shopping for a new house, the Temples found themselves pestered by real estate salesmen—from “subdivision promoters to depression millionaires who would sacrifice their Bel-Air mansion for a paltry $50,000,” as one fan magazine reported. California Bank, where George Temple had risen from teller to assistant branch manager prior to Shirley’s breakthrough, quickly discovered that employing the father of a child star was excellent publicity. The bank displayed life-size photographs of Shirley handing her paycheck to her father around its numerous branches in the Los Angeles area and made him manager of a branch in the heart of the neighborhood where major motion picture companies maintained distributing offices. With no secretary to act as a buffer, he sat prominently at a desk and shook hands with dozens of new customers eager to meet the father of the adorable child star. Within a few months, the bank’s receipts had risen a reported 20 percent. Still, not only did salesmen besiege him here, but “even my own bank picked on me!” he said with rueful amusement. “The trust department tried to sell me one of the Hollywood show places—with about 10 bedrooms, 6 garages, and at least a dozen baths. It was too much for me. I’m not going in for that kind of thing.”16
The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America Page 20