by Ann Hulbert
In September of 1929, after arriving on the West Coast from Hawaii several months earlier, Helen left Barbara, now fifteen, with family friends to serve as chaperones and signed her up for junior college in Pasadena. Instead, Barbara fled. She headed north to join a friend she had met in San Francisco, planning to get work as a typist and write. The “girl novelist” runaway made national headlines. “I came away because I felt I had to have my freedom,” she told the Los Angeles Times reporter who interviewed her after her arrest at a San Francisco hotel.
I felt utterly suppressed, almost frantic, under the plans that had been made for me. I did not want to enter college nor live the standardized existence. I have never been to school in my life. Perhaps I might like it—I do not know. But this I know: I do not want to like it….Why are older people crushing us this way? It seems to me I cannot wait six whole years until I am twenty-one in order just to be free.
To her mother, she had written from Pasadena as she left, “I want to be alone with my Disillusion or my Fairytale—as the case may be.”
A decade earlier, in his Harper’s article, Wilson had in passing acknowledged the risk that their vigilantly child-focused solicitude—which wasn’t a license to run wild, he had stressed, but a spur to dream boldly with words—might lead to “a more painful disillusionment” with a dreary adult world. He never imagined how responsible he would be for propelling Barbara into that world prematurely—just in time for the Crash, it turned out. Hand-wringing by him, in any case, would have infuriated her. The last thing she wanted was to grant her father any more power over her fate—or to feel responsible for rescuing her mother either. Barbara was now impatient to chart a fearless path beyond her parents and their effete self-delusions.
Too impatient, it is possible to feel, looking back at what the next decade, a grim one for the whole country, had in store for her. Barbara’s parents, in the name of sparing her any hindrances and being her “playmates,” had for years subtly steeped their daughter in their romantic notions of imaginative girlhood—and then stopped. Off-kilter and in crisis, they gave up on guidance “at a very critical time in her life,” as a worried family friend wrote, “when she needs to be associated with sane and well-balanced people.” While Nathalia finished high school and lucked into the college education her mother and father had never had, Barbara balked.
But what she said she didn’t “want to like” might have supplied the freedom she needed. By eighteen, she was tired of dull typing jobs. She had been feeling trapped since rejoining her mother and her sister, Sabra, in 1930, helping Helen get Magic Potholes done and keep the household going. Barbara noted that a college degree would be an asset in a terrible job market (overlooking another benefit: four years of paycheck-free time to read, a boon to any writer). Even so, the professor’s daughter wasn’t going to follow in those footsteps. She felt not “the faintest ray of desire or enthusiasm—in fact, I feel a decided antipathy.”
Barbara wanted to be audaciously independent. She also tried to be clear-eyed—as her parents had never been—about the barriers, burdens, and obstacles that a free spirit had better be ready to deal with. The strain is evident in the pages she left and in the paths, and people, she pursued. “The only thing that makes me unhappy now is that my dreams are going through their death-flurries,” she wrote in 1930 to an older writer with whom she had become friends during her California layover. Barbara doesn’t sound sixteen.
I thought they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heart-strings twinge. I mean no particular dream, you understand, but the whole radiant flock of them together—with their rainbow wings, iridescent, bright, soaring, glorious, sublime. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money.
A restless quest to keep sight of the gleam, and of its elusiveness, is there in the intense correspondence she began with an older sailor whom she had met on the schooner from Hawaii. He was a “bulwark, oasis, anchor—what-you-will,” she said. “Mysterious, too, in his comings and goings, as the sea with its tide.” By 1932 Barbara broke off what had become an epistolary romance, having found a less exotic countercultural kindred spirit on land and closer to her age. With a recent college graduate named Nickerson Rogers, she set off on mountain trips in New England and then adventures in Europe.
They married on their return, and both of them scrounged for jobs. As her twenties unfolded, Barbara welcomed his “calm poise” and steady progress at Polaroid in Boston, feeling more restless and stuck by comparison. “I am likely to weep and gnash my teeth with envy,” she wrote a friend about her sister, Sabra (who went on, in 1961, to become the first female graduate student at Princeton). At fifteen, “she is happy, well poised, gets along with everybody…gets fun out of every situation”—a stunning contrast, Barbara noted, to herself at that age. Almost a decade later, she hadn’t escaped secretarial work, but Eepersip’s spirit stirred: Barbara made time for lessons in interpretive dancing.
She had stopped talking about her writing, but assorted unpublished stories, sketches, and a novel about a shipwrecked couple show Barbara struggling, again and again, to capture that radiance and the awareness of its transience. She arrived at moments of expressive brilliance, and got stymied by trite scenes and characters. Striking hints of originality appeared in brief scenes of ugliness and despair. But she hadn’t yet outgrown her long girl-writer apprenticeship in wondrous beauty, and didn’t dare look more closely.
In life, she also turned away. Overwhelmed at twenty-five by a marital crisis, her own this time, she left her Brookline apartment on the evening of Thursday, December 7, 1939. Barbara was never seen or heard from again.
CHAPTER 4
Performance Pressures
· 1 ·
“Your Child, Too, May Be a Shirley Temple,” promised an article in the Los Angeles Times in July 1934. It was based on an interview with Gertrude Temple, “still a little dazed” by her daughter’s swift rise into the ranks of top box-office draws, and it went on in a light vein to “Give Recipe for Making Super-Star Out of Lively Youngster.” First step: marry a banker named George and eat raw carrots, not candy, while pregnant. Make sure to give your growing baby wholesome fare soon as well—soup, cooked fruit, chocolate pudding or ice cream, no cookies. To encourage a “sense of rhythm and aid imagination,” have her memorize nursery rhymes with mother and read bedtime stories with father. Above all, she should be sent to dancing school just as soon as she starts jouncing in her playpen, up on her tiptoes. No mother should delay on that crucial exposure. Ahead for your twirler, once spotted by talent scouts, lies a debut in a short film. Then a few small roles could be the prelude to the big break, a show-stealing song-and-dance number in a full-length feature. Suddenly famous, at barely five, she will sweep the whole family into a new world of wealth and attention along with her. Now the challenge, to be tackled “with fearful optimism,” is to keep your little performer modest.
Gertrude, a shy beauty from the Midwest who had become a quiet Santa Monica wife, had read her share of such articles before and after Shirley was born. She knew what “mammas everywhere” wanted to hear. So did the reporter, who happened to be a woman. She was working in a genre by then familiar in Hollywood environs and never out of style since. It has thrived on lurid tales about very young showbiz stars, and more recently on subtler fare aimed at uneasy parents eyeing “the rug rat race”: tips on handling the child-as-superstar—a precious family investment whose potential, touted at home, is to be promoted by well-timed, outsourced opportunities to excel every step of the way. (Your baby needn’t be walking yet to qualify for early music classes—billed as good for baby brains and parent-child bonding, not just a sense of rhythm.)
In the midst of the Depression, the draw was obvious. The utter unlikelihood of producing “a super baby star of Shirley Temple caliber” only added to the democratic appeal. Because the odds against any success on the movie lots were so long, it was impossible to pr
edict who would get lucky—and it was lovely to fantasize that such a rapid rise might be “phenomenally easy.” The rush of aspiring stage mothers and their children to Hollywood had been gathering momentum ever since Jackie Coogan’s big break in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid in 1921. One estimate claimed that as the talkies took off, a hundred children from all over arrived every fifteen minutes, hoping to be more than extras.
When Shirley struck gold, the moment was more propitious than usual. “Hollywood with the gong from the cleanup squad ringing in its ears…is making a desperate effort to locate more child stars,” an article reported as the revised Motion Picture Production Code clamped down on unseemly fare in the summer of 1934. “Reasoning seems to be that stories about children will set things right.” That was precisely the plot of Shirley’s breakout film early that spring. In Stand Up and Cheer!, a Secretary of Amusement is appointed by the president to distract people from their woes. Thanks to the child entertainers he recruits to the stage, a country where “nerves are in the red” recovers hope, and the Depression vanishes. Shirley, almost six but billed as four, was the perfect emissary. In an era of virtuosic performing prodigies (Yehudi Menuhin was thronged after concerts), she was the vigorous democratic version. Superlative acting talents weren’t required, but she had perfect timing, a great memory, and tenacity. As she tapped and sang, she exuded something even more alluring, in bleak times, than imaginative innocence. In her first full-length movie, as she proceeded to do in life, she projected utter confidence—in her own, and everyone else’s, performance. And for the ebullient curly top, it seemed a breeze. “Oh, Shirley doesn’t really work,” says Jimmy Dunn, playing her vaudevillian father in Stand Up and Cheer!. (An absent mother was to become a staple in her films.) “…Look at her, she thrives on it.”
On the opposite coast, a mother named Josephine Cogdell Schuyler didn’t join the California-bound “flock of hungry locusts,” in Hedda Hopper’s metaphor. She was, however, following her version of Gertrude’s recipe. Proudly self-exiled from her wealthy and racist white Texan family, she had made her way (via Hollywood and San Francisco’s bohemian scene) to Harlem, lured by its renaissance. There she married a man named George who was not a banker. George Schuyler was a prominent black journalist, an editor at the socialist magazine The Messenger as well as at the weekly African American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, and a provocative columnist.
Josephine went well beyond a carrot-and-no-candy regimen. Long before getting pregnant, she had sworn by vitamin-rich vitality through nutrition. Her daughter, Philippa—born in 1931, three years after Shirley—was reared on a sugar-free and totally raw diet (which meant uncooked meat, too). Reciting poems with her mother and playing letter games on her blackboard with her father began early. Word of her spelling prowess at two and a half made its way to a film scout, in the form of an enterprising Pathé News reporter curious to see the Harlem marvel. He found an adorable child with, in George’s words, the “dark liquid eyes of a fawn, and eyelashes like the black glistening stems of maiden hair ferns”—and skin the color of “lightly done toast.”
Philippa’s hue—the reporter had hoped for more like burnt toast—proved a deal-breaker for Pathé News. So did the parentage that produced it, as would have been true in Hollywood as well. In the movie industry’s campaign for social uplift and decency, the cleanup squad could find room for an Our Gang–style vision of integrated childhood, stocked with pickanniny stereotypes and naughty hijinks. But high on the list of the Motion Picture Production Code’s prohibitions was any portrayal of “miscegenation,” particularly between blacks and whites. Even Harlem, as the Schuylers were well aware, offered a wary welcome to marriages like theirs—which only spurred Josephine on. She had a truly ambitious Miss Fix-It role in view for Philippa. The fruit of her and George’s rare union was a remarkable child. Philippa was a compleat prodigy in the making—precocious student, prolific girl writer, notable composer, and accomplished pianist, all rolled into one and wrapped in plucky public charm (and beauty) that got her called “the Shirley Temple of American Negroes.” What better example of “hybrid vigor” could there be to confirm her parents’ vision of “the permanent solution” to the nation’s biggest problem of all? Philippa embodied the promise of interracial harmony.
A pendulum swing away from sensitive girl writers, Shirley and Philippa were troupers, too sturdy to inspire mere escapist flights of fancy. FDR got it wrong when he famously paid tribute to Shirley as a cheap opiate of the masses: “It is a splendid thing that for just fifteen cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles.” Her distinctive gift, rooted in her brash assurance, was shared by Philippa, who was more bashful: to remind grown-ups—in Shirley’s case, those on-screen with her as well as her adoring audience—that woes had cures. Like prodigies in the spotlight before and since, only more so, both owed their allure not simply to exceptional talents. They were inspirational figures, harbingers of a future that could be very different.
Shirley, the ultimate Hollywood asset, and Philippa, the outsider, were worlds apart as they worked their morale-boosting, trouble-shooting wonder. But close to home, they each had what was almost always missing in the rags-to-riches, by-their-own-gumption tales that fueled the child star boom: a full-time Mrs. Fix-It. Gertrude and Josephine carved out (and got paid for) the role not of imaginative collaborator or mentor, but of omnipresent personal and professional manager. Even, or especially, the most promising stars needed businesslike intermediaries as they made their way in a fiercely competitive entertainment realm where the real codes bore little relation to the child-friendly displays. Not least, luck wasn’t randomly distributed. As if Shirley didn’t already get all the breaks, she also landed the most famous African American tap dancer, Bill Robinson, as her teacher. And a crucial ingredient in an endeavor that was anything but “phenomenally easy” got left out of that superstar recipe: mother and daughter had to have a great deal of confidence in each other. The real marvel is that in one of the pairs, the partners actually did.
· 2 ·
“There are two themes to my story,” Shirley Temple told a Hollywood historian who paid her a visit soon after she published her memoir, Child Star, at sixty: “the great love I had for my profession and the great love I had for my mother.’’ It was classic Shirley Temple, dispelling dark clouds—in this case, the inevitable suspicion that she had been the victim of a scheming stage mother and an exploitative film industry. Shirley presented a different view. Whether or not she was fully aware of it, the message of her five hundred pages—crammed with memories and details—is also classic Shirley Temple: all along, Gertrude was the comparative naïf, with an “ingrained awe of authority,” and Shirley was the spunky, take-charge realist. Her version rings unexpectedly true.
The key to their success was that Shirley was ready to make the most of whatever deals came her way—even if the deals weren’t “fair and square,” as she sensed was often the case with the bigwig insiders (in Hollywood and elsewhere) who courted her. As long as Shirley felt sure in her relations with the two social outsiders who mattered most, she could stay sane—“at peace with myself,” she said, “…no emotional hang-ups.” Or to put it another way, she could draw on a deep sense of fun that sustained what was, after all, a lot of work. The main outsider, of course, was her mother. But she counted on someone else, too, the man who used the phrase “fair and square” (well aware of the rarity of such treatment), Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.
Gertrude Krieger had been seventeen, two years out of school and helping to support her family as a file clerk in Los Angeles, when she married twenty-three-year-old George Temple in 1910. He had quit school at fourteen, and was living with his widowed mother and siblings and working for the electric utility company. Gertrude was a dreamer, in her way, who had yearned to be a dancer. She was also a woman who didn’t like leaving things to chance—though what she truly had a knack for was timing. In 1927,
when her sons, Jack and George Jr., were twelve and eight, and George had recently become an assistant bank manager, she was restless in Santa Monica. Her two best friends had just had curly blond-haired daughters. As her thirty-fourth birthday approached, Gertrude decided she wanted one too. George was feeling flush enough to agree—and to get the tonsillectomy their doctor claimed upped the chances of fathering a girl. Along with eating carrots (good for instilling self-discipline in her unborn child), Gertrude sought out cultural experiences she hoped would leave their imprint on her fetus: art, literature, dance, music, movies. A bald daughter arrived on April 23, 1928, and a hint of blond curls soon appeared.
There were two themes to Gertrude’s story for Shirley. “I wanted her to be artistic. I was determined that she should excel at something.” The aims implied an accompanying subtheme. Gertrude—echoing the basic tenets of the no-nonsense behaviorist child-rearing expert of the hour, John Broadus Watson—was also determined “not to let my affection make me too lenient” or get in the way of teaching a self-sufficient daughter “not to be afraid of anything.” Jack and young George were otherwise occupied, and soon the Crash curbed adult socializing. Gertrude seized her moment. She began dancing to music with Shirley a captive audience in her playpen and was thrilled when the baby “ran on her toes, as if she were dancing.” Blessed with a great ear (utterly unlike her father), Shirley could hit the right notes when her mother practiced with her. She was also a deft mimic.