by Ann Hulbert
As her first phrase—“Don’t do ’at”—indicates, Shirley wasn’t always eager to obey. Her imitative phrase also suggests a penchant for bossiness on both her and her mother’s part. Yet the two of them figured out a form of give-and-take that (mostly) dispensed with punishment and respected high spirits. “Love, ladled out in equal measures of encouragement and restraint,” was how Shirley described Gertrude’s formula, emphasizing that her mother, though strict, “seldom tried to dominate.” As for the charismatic and feisty baby of the family, she didn’t even need to try. Shirley fully appreciated her considerable clout, which only grew. “Secret best friends” with her father, she was a routine scene-stealer from her tolerant older brothers. Gertrude was vigilant, of course, but Shirley’s lack of docility, however much it may have surprised her, didn’t displease a mother whose own determination was more demure.
Gertrude had her eye on a new and approved route to excelling artistically. Though George had been spared the worst of the downturn, he was reluctant in 1931 to spend a dollar a week on lessons at the Meglin Dance Studio, a recent and already prestigious addition to a national dancing school boom. But Ethel Meglin knew how to pitch hard-pressed parents. She offered the “finest exercise to build up health and bodily vigor” and “an exceptional entrée into the entertainment field, with all its rich financial rewards.” Gertrude emphasized the first part to George, who was wary of the Hollywood ambience.
As for the second part, mercenary ambition just wasn’t Gertrude’s style, according to Shirley. But professional-level performance opportunities clearly were on her agenda, and every student automatically became one of the “Famous Meglin Kiddies,” participating in a revue during the week of Christmas at the Loew’s State Theater in downtown Los Angeles. At three, Shirley was young (Mrs. Meglin generally took students at five), but Gertrude had her in good shape. Shirley gave her all in class, dancing with books balanced on her head. Gertrude sat knitting on the sidelines with the other mothers, getting her fill of talk about talent scouts.
Shirley wasn’t plucked from the preschool crowd because she stood out in the traditional, proto-adult way of prodigies—or in a lyrical, girlish way either. Quite the opposite. The day before Thanksgiving in 1931, when scouts from Educational Films Corporation arrived at Mrs. Meglin’s to cast a series of Baby Burlesk shorts, Shirley’s curls weren’t fixed and her outfit was plain—Gertrude had been in a hurry that morning—and they were on their way out of class. A teacher called them back, only to have Shirley hide under the piano. She was repelled by one of the men, whose “moon-shaped, jowly, and moist-looking” face she still hadn’t forgotten many decades later. But small size was a key requirement (for shorts featuring three-to-five-year-olds in oversize diapers doing mostly unsavory spoofs of movies), and she fit the bill. Lucky timing, in short, was crucial—even if Gertrude, writing to her mother, decided that “little old Shirley,” with her jaunty cap and elkskin play shoes, had “evidently knocked them for a loop.”
The pair were in turn knocked for a loop by a movie business that right away failed to conform to Gertrude’s vision of developmental enrichment. After signing Shirley’s contract for the burlesks, she wrote to assure her own mother that Shirley’s “daily routine will not be upset very much,” thanks to a good dramatic teacher, a nursery, and a kitchen in the studio. Gertrude quickly discovered the promises were hollow. She wasn’t about to pull out, yet she remained wedded to her wholesome expectations—and she wasn’t faking it. At any rate, Shirley never doubted that her mother truly had her best interests at heart, and a sense of Gertrude’s “underlying streak of naiveté” empowered, rather than embittered, her as a girl.
Gertrude began managing—insofar as she could—a version of what legislators, as well as Hollywood moguls and unionizers, were strategically mandating: an experience on the movie lots that was, in the terms Gertrude favored, “a training ground for later life, a school where common virtues could be instilled and emphasized.” The 1930s spelled the end of child labor, with an exception for underage movie entertainers. New Deal reforms included regulatory oversight to ensure (at least in theory) that young performers were engaged in educational work rather than merely onerous toil—and that their rewards were safeguarded rather than squandered by greedy elders.
Reality, of course, didn’t match the lofty vows. “This business of being mother to a budding star is no joke,” Gertrude wrote to her mother a month or so later. She had dragged a sick Shirley to the shoot of the first burlesk, The Runt Page, after the poor girl had battled a “raging cold” for more than a week and then, the day before the shoot, landed in the hospital with an eardrum in need of piercing. Gertrude had gone “almost crazy” with pleas for rescheduling, all for naught. But Shirley, “game little soul,” got through the eleven-and-a-half-hour day, with the help of a couple of naps, and delivered her lines “as if nothing had happened.” Gertrude, by contrast, was strung out, excited about the film’s prospects, anxious about George’s money worries, exhausted: “I think I look ten years older and have lost quite a little weight.”
Without Shirley’s phenomenal toughness, it is safe to say that their mother-daughter alliance would have gone nowhere. And both of them were acutely aware of that, which was essential to a sense of solidarity that Shirley characterized this way: “We each knew who we were, with or without each other.” Shirley’s home lessons in independence paled in comparison to the on-set training she got immediately, about which Gertrude was largely clueless. The Baby Burlesk star had to navigate a world of unfamiliar signals—lights, chalk marks, timing—and baffling terms (“bring in the dolly” raised her hopes), not to mention dangers.
When parents were ushered off the set and child welfare supervisors were shooed away for a coffee break, Shirley’s bravery was brutally tested. An ostrich pulling her in a cart got spooked, and a lucky catch saved her from a bad fall. Undeterred, she was ready to ride an elephant, her next assignment. When a donkey tried to kick her, she ducked and then kicked him back. But even Shirley had her limits. Playing a missionary in the racist and most tasteless burlesk of all, Kid in Africa, which included a cast of black preschoolers, she had to exclaim, “These cannibals must be civilized!”—and watch in panic as the children raced right into a trip wire, installed to create more chaos in a jungle scene. Bloody mayhem ensued. She burst into tears.
Dealing with the adults, never mind animals and her cast mates, drummed in the sense that—much as she counted on her mother—she had better be able to fend for herself. “Kids, this is business,” the director barked at his diapered cast. “Time is important. Don’t waste it. This isn’t playtime, kids. It’s work.” For those who didn’t listen up, there was the “black box,” a windowless sound room with a block of ice to sit on—perfectly designed to terrify, and to induce ear infections. Squeal to a parent, the kids were warned, and it was back on the cold seat for them. Shirley went ahead and told Gertrude, who credited the bizarre report to her daughter’s overactive imagination. So Shirley, at all of four, came up with her own satisfying solution: pay attention and get it right the first time.
By the time Shirley, now five, stumbled into what proved her big break—getting cast at the last minute in Stand Up and Cheer! at the end of 1933—she was not fazed by much. On the two-day shoot, Shirley recalled that she “found the pressure exhilarating.” Gertrude had been busy, not just coiffing her ringlets (fifty-six of them) but sewing a selection of dresses for Shirley’s Fox Film handlers to choose from. (Her daughter needed her own clothes, Gertrude insisted, to be comfortable.) The two of them had gone over the script at home—before bedtime, as was their private, and patient, routine by now. “She reads and reads and reads,” Shirley explained. “I talk and talk and talk.” Gertrude was well aware that she didn’t need to push. And her directorial staple was simple: “sparkle,” which basically meant conveying natural expression with focused energy. “Just being herself,” not acting, was Shirley’s job, Gertrude firmly felt, in ste
p with the general Hollywood prescription for young stars.
Yet arriving well prepared to do that was only the half of it. Proving, on the spot, to be resilient, resourceful amateurs as they made their way among the bumbling professionals was the more unusual skill the pair displayed already in their first bout of rehearsal and filming. When Shirley saw Jimmy Dunn sweating as he tackled some song-and-dance moves in his role as her vaudevillian father, she didn’t hesitate to step in, leading him through the Meglin routine the studio decided to use. Meanwhile, Shirley herself had been left in the lurch, without the lyrics to her “Baby Take a Bow” number, though she had learned the tune. During breaks, she memorized them with Gertrude. She was crushed when her voice broke on the last word, but they had no time to agonize as they hurried off to lunch. Shirley tripped on the stairs and got a bloody lump on her forehead. Gertrude spit on a curl and used it as camouflage. Shirley was hustled back onto the set, feeling unhappily bedraggled—only to be entranced by the new tap shoes she had been loaned. Plus she truly loved to dance, and it showed. She had to lip-sync at the same time—a new task, but as a practiced mimic, she rose to it with ease. She never heard anything about her “flub,” which everyone had decided was adorable. This child, Fox informed the Temples, had potential.
Shirley landed a contract in 1934 that awed the country: $1,000 a week for her, $250 for Gertrude. Between 1935 and 1938, she was the top box office star, dropping back to the top-ten in 1939. She helped save 20th Century Fox (the two companies merged in 1935)from near bankruptcy. At the height of her six-year Hollywood reign, she made more money annually than anyone in Hollywood besides MGM’s Louis Mayer (and more than General Motors’ president), $307,014 in 1938. She was photographed more often than anyone else on the planet, Time magazine reported in 1936. She received over three thousand fan letters a week. She moved mountains of merchandise—Shirley Temple dolls in all sizes, as well as dresses, soaps, watches, jewelry, sewing cards, hair bows, books. She endorsed products from Bisquick and Corn Flakes to Sunfreze ice cream and Vassar Waver hair curlers. In her prodigy domain—a child whose fame no grown-up could match—Shirley had only one predecessor: Jesus.
But what was it, in her case, that accounted for the acclaim? A puzzling question from the start, it became more vexed once she soared into the stratosphere. As Shirley said later, and perhaps her sharp-eyed younger self was aware of it, too, she “could sing, dance, act, and dimple, but probably there were others around who could do equally well and far better in some categories.” From the studio’s perspective, that was an important part of the allure they were peddling: Shirley wasn’t an anomaly. She was a natural who had a great time excelling at suitably wholesome endeavors and—this was crucial—conveyed that delight. The Hollywood publicists fudged her bio. A year got shaved off her age, to emphasize innocent vivacity, not precocity. Her Meglin Studio experience disappeared from her résumé. A cover story in Time was the conduit for the desired message, reporting that Shirley’s “work entails no effort”—after describing a daily regimen that began at seven and ended at five-thirty.
SHIRLEY TEMPLE Credit 6
Gertrude joined in, doubtless at Fox’s urging, but she also believed that Shirley did love what she was doing, even if it was hardly the breeze that the world was given to think. “She just has a natural tendency toward acting. If it was hard on her, if she didn’t like to do it, I’d take her out” was how Gertrude put it in an interview shortly after Stand Up and Cheer! opened. She sounded like Jimmy Dunn’s hoofer character reassuring the bureaucrats that his daughter thrived on the routines, except that Gertrude added an educational twist, in step with the emerging developmental wisdom of the day. A drama teacher at Shirley’s dancing school, she noted, felt “it would be wrong to discourage her as long as she enjoys it. She’d wilt, he said.” At other times Gertrude suggested that what Shirley did wasn’t acting at all, but “simply part of her play life.”
If that was plainly wishful, Gertrude wasn’t just airbrushing either. After all, the studio promptly decided to fit roles to Shirley’s personality and capacities—one of which was, as Shirley put it, “a knack for projecting myself into make-believe situations without abandoning the reality of my true self.” She was a sponge when it came to learning her lines, thanks not just to youthful brain cells but to her intense focus and a fierce desire to impress. At the same time, she was an upstart charmer quite unlike her somber mother. Shirley took real pleasure in her prowess and very soon was a savvy operator on the set. She didn’t hesitate to give others cues, and she loved being the cut-up—a mix of pleaser, provocateur, and kid eager to have pals. She had a habit of wandering off to hang out with her favorites among the cast and crew, who were generally the least earnest.
The studio PR materials didn’t accentuate this not-so-sweet-and-malleable side, but Shirley’s roles were a clue to it. Though the girl on-screen got held up as an ideal of compliance whom other children should imitate, that wasn’t the whole story at all. There was, as a critic noted, “something rude and rowdy” about her character that was also key to her appeal, especially to males. She played a wheeler-dealer, telling adults where to get off. The real Shirley modeled just that kind of cheekiness, and her power could be discomfiting. Adolphe Menjou, who starred as a disillusioned bookmaker transformed by her flirtatious charm and imaginative assurance in Shirley’s even greater triumph of 1934, Little Miss Marker, emphasized her uncanny mastery. “This child frightens me. She knows all the tricks,” he marveled, noting that she was an expert scene-stealer. “…Don’t ask me how she does it. You’ve heard of chess champions at eight and violin virtuosos at ten? Well, she’s an Ethel Barrymore at six.”
But of course Shirley, the incarnation of can-do innocence, wasn’t supposed to be a seasoned pro or a self-conscious celebrity, much less an exploited commodity. The mission to keep her “unspoiled,” and at the same time to reassure her fans that she was getting special care, soon had everyone in knots, and Shirley nonplussed. A scene in her memoir has Gertrude, “agitated and talkative,” sharing her anxieties about Hollywood’s influence with Shirley herself—not exactly shielding her from studio machinations. Fox’s chief of production, Winfield Sheehan, had just unnerved Gertrude with a warning from a child welfare supervisor that “there is no antidote to the corroding effect of Hollywood hubbub. It is impossible for children to remain impervious or unchanged.” Eager to cow Gertrude into clamping down on Shirley, Sheehan declared that too much exposure to an admiring cast and crowds would swell her head and spell later maladjustment. He blew right past Gertrude’s suggestion that growing self-confidence, not ego, was on display. “She can’t get spoiled, Mrs. Temple,” Sheehan lectured as Gertrude got more rattled. “She gets spoiled, it shows in the eyes.” Gertrude didn’t tear up in telling Shirley of the encounter, but she had earlier.
The upshot was a display of corporate, and cooperative, solicitude. A very New Deal spirit informed the studio arrangements elaborated in Shirley’s contract: well-regulated security, portrayed in the press as the envy of any free-range child, was the touted priority. Shirley was the beneficiary of “a series of conferences between Mr. and Mrs. Temple and the Fox executives, all eager to safeguard the health of the child and keep her unspoiled,” as an article put it. She had her own three-room bungalow on the studio lot to retreat to. There she met daily with a tutor, ate nutritional food without distraction, and took the naps she needed. She had a personal bodyguard and mandated vacations. She also had medical advisers who, with her mother, worked out a “system of relaxation” (which did not include watching movies, for fear they would taint her style).
This wasn’t about pampering, the press liked to emphasize, or about curtailing childhood independence. Instead, here was a cutting-edge supervisory approach for all those interested “in rearing their children to be like prodigies.” Not to be mistaken for indulgence, it offered a new and steady form of discipline. “Her routine of living,” one account of Shirley’s situation ad
vised, “would make a very healthy child out of any baby who is normal, and a well balanced and trained little youngster as well.” Another story about screen starlets judged the loss of “rough-and-tumble neighborhood play,” and the risk of excess attention, a price well worth paying. “The average youngster on Main Street” would be lucky to have such close “care and chaperonage” by parents and state child welfare officials. Individual tutoring was a real advantage, and “the challenge of a job” gave the movie child rare character-building lessons. “Almost from the cradle it has been obvious to him, as it seldom is to the child supported by his parents, even in a moderately poor home, that effort ‘gets you somewhere.’ ”
A vision was taking shape of a protected, and carefully directed, childhood in which play blurs into work (a very familiar notion by now). The Temples weren’t paranoid in feeling vulnerable. Since 1932, the whole country had been following the Lindbergh kidnapping case with rapt anxiety, and the accused went to trial in January of 1935: among alluring potential hostages, Shirley surely ranked high. (In 1936 the Temples received an extortion threat—from a farm boy, it turned out.) Still, the studio deal was a far more coercive case of paternalistic control than advertised.
Shirley’s arrangements meant she didn’t get to share the studio schoolhouse with the other young actors. Her food was boring. Her lessons and rest times were tailored to filming schedules, not her needs. Vacations, given the mobs of fans, were impossible. For Gertrude and the family, barricaded behind the massive walls and electronic gate of a big new house in Brentwood Heights in 1936, constant studio and promotional business was now out of their hands. Perhaps Shirley can be forgiven, as the 1930s progressed, for behavior of just the sort her setup was purportedly designed to nip in the bud. Her voice coach later described audible tantrums from the studio cottage. He also reported that on a house call, Shirley demanded they play badminton first, whirling on her father when he suggested she start rehearsing: “Look, I earn all the money in this family. Don’t tell me what to do.”