Off the Charts
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“comrade of trail and river”: B. N. Follett, The House Without Windows, p. 54.
“I want as long as possible”: Barbara Follett to Edward Porter St. John, February 4, 1923, BNFP, Box 1, Folder 4.
“dressing up in a green dress”: Barbara Follett to Holdo Teodor Oberg, October 16, 1922, BNFP, Box 1, Folder 1.
“pink tongue lapped the water”: Barbara Follett to Edward Porter St. John, October 22, 1922, in Cooke, Barbara Newhall Follett, p. 34.
Mr. Oberg later joined in: Barbara Follett to Holdo Teogor Oberg, April 19, 1923, BNFP, Box 1, Folder 2.
“this vile apartment house”: Barbara Follett to Edward Porter St. John, February 4, 1923, BNFP, Box 1, Folder 2.
“Talk about something!”: Barbara Follett to Helen Follett, early 1923, in McCurdy, Barbara, pp. 41–42.
“so lonely that she went away”: Barbara Follett to Edward Porter St. John, February 4, 1923, BNFP, Box 1, Folder 2.
“tawdry” urban apartment living: B. N. Follett, The House Without Windows, p. 54.
“one of the loveliest books”: Barbara Follett to Mrs. Coleman, February 4, 1923, BNFP, Box 1, Folder 2.
“For hours every day”: B. N. Follett, The House Without Windows, p. 8.
“amazed at the way in which”: Ibid., p. 10.
“In the sky Nature still flung”: Ibid., p. 49.
“save those few”: Ibid., p. 52.
“of what is in a normal, healthy”: Ibid., p. 56.
“Nothing ever happens”: Barbara Follett to Wilson Follett, July 18, 1925, in Cooke, Barbara Newhall Follett, p. 145.
“Daddy and I have been correcting it”: Barbara Follett to Holdo Teodor Oberg, February 7, 1925, BNFP, Box 1, Folder 4.
Nathalia’s novel The Sunken Garden: The typescript of a review of The Admiral and Others by Peggy Temple mentions The Sunken Garden, BNFP, Box 5, Folder 2.
Barbara fell on the floor screaming: Barbara Follett to George Bryan, mid-April 1926, BNFP, Box 2, Folder 22.
Blanche Knopf liked her manuscript: Blanche Knopf to Barbara Newhall Follett, April 14, 1926, BNFP, Box 2, Folder 18.
“We cackled over”: Howard Mumford Jones, “New Child Genius,” World, n.d., BNFP, Box 3, Folder 3.
Moore was the exception: Cooke, Barbara Newhall Follett, p. 224.
Barbara’s vocabulary should be a model: May Lamberton Becker, “Barbara Follett Writes a Book,” The American Girl, June 1927, p. 51.
“There can be few”: Henry Longan Stuart, “A Mirror of the Child Mind,” New York Times, February 6, 1927.
“extraordinary single-mindedness”: Margery Williams Bianco, “New Horizons: The Voyage of the Norman D.,” Saturday Review of Literature, June 9, 1928, p. 943.
“It surely is very rash”: Barbara Follett to Anne Carroll Moore, March 28, 1927, BNFP, Box 1, Folder 7.
“I am wild over PIRATES”: Barbara Follett to Edward Porter St. John, January 20, 1927, in McCurdy, Barbara, pp. 87–93.
Treasure Island, which she had first read: “Magic Portholes History,” n.d., HFP, Box 3, Folder 8.
David Binney Putnam: See, e.g., “Boy Is Author at 12,” New York Times, July 23, 1925; David Binney Putnam, “Greenland Ho!,” Youth’s Companion, August 26, 1926; “Putnam to Explore Arctic in Summer,” New York Times, April 25, 1927; “Game Hordes Await Boy Scouts’ Safari,” New York Times, June 10, 1928; “Boys’ Expedition Sails for Iceland,” New York Times, June 20, 1931.
“gay, piratical” romanticism: Barbara Newhall Follett, The Voyage of the Norman D., as Told by the Cabin-boy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), p. 93.
“Some looked as though”: Ibid., p. 143.
he was leaving her mother: Cooke, Barbara Newhall Follett, p. 273.
misery from the start: Helen Follett to Anne Meservey, n.d., probably June 12, 1928, in Cooke, Barbara Newhall Follett, p. 289.
“worshipped her father”: Helen Follett to Oxford Meservey, April 1928, HFP, Box 1, Folder 1.
“This is the time of year”: Barbara Follett to Wilson Follett, March 7, 1928, in Cooke, Barbara Newhall Follett, pp. 274, 276–77.
“has changed terribly”: Helen Follett to Oxford Meservey, April 12, 1928, HFP, Box 1, Folder 1.
Magic Portholes: McCurdy, Barbara, pp. 103–4.
“bad condition spiritually”: Helen Follett to Oxford Meservey, April 12, 1928, HFP, Box 1, Folder 1.
If Wilson could assert: Helen Follett to Anne Meservey, November 20, 1928, HFP, Box 1, Folder 1.
“I believe there’ll have to be”: Wilson Follett to Helen Follett, August 5, 1928, HFP, Box 1, Folder 2.
“To the world it is”: Helen Follett to Anne Meservey, September 12, 1928, HFP, Box 1, Folder 1.
“A happy trip, a trip of gaiety”: “Magic Portholes History,” p. 28.
“playmate idea”: Helen Follett, interview by Cal Warton, “Herald Headlines,” Boston Herald, February 28, probably 1933, HFP, Box 6, Folder 1.
“It was a piece of real continuity”: “Magic Portholes History,” p. 28.
“its unquestioning confidence in itself”: “Adventurer in Life and Education,” brochure for William B. Feakins, Inc., HFP, Box 6, Folder 2.
“I allow her to do so”: Helen Follett to Anne and Oxford Meservey, November 9, 1928, HFP, Box 1, Folder 1.
“If you knew how extraordinarily wild”: Barbara Follett to Ellen Meservey, February 28, 1929, BNFP, Box 1, Folder 8.
romantically pursued by an islander: Cooke, Barbara Newhall Follett, p. 422.
“Barbara has gone to pieces”: Helen Follett to Anne Meservey, May 10, 1929, HFP, Box 1, Folder 1.
The “girl novelist” runaway: “Girl Novelist Held in San Francisco,” New York Times, September 21, 1929.
“I came away because I felt”: Floyd J. Healey, “Freedom Lures Child Novelist,” Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1929.
“I want to be alone”: Barbara Follett to Helen Follett, n.d., BNFP, Box 2, Folder 22.
“at a very critical time”: Ralph Blanchard to Anne and Oxford Meservey, 1929, HFP, Box 1, Folder 5.
“the faintest ray of desire”: Barbara Follett to Alice Dyar Russell, March 12, 1931, BNFP, Box 1, Folder 9.
“The only thing that makes me unhappy”: Barbara Follett to Alice Dyar Russell, June 16, 1930, in McCurdy, Barbara, p. 107.
“bulwark, oasis, anchor”: Barbara Follett to unnamed man, October 4, 1930, in McCurdy, Barbara, p. 126.
“calm poise”: Barbara Follett to Alice Dyar Russell, November 1, 1938, in McCurdy, Barbara, p. 141.
“I am likely”: Ibid.
But she hadn’t yet outgrown: “What I rebel against is—is—well, giving in to ugliness, that puts it in a nutshell,” says Barbara’s protagonist in a draft of her shipwreck novel, Lost Island, p. 141, BNFP, Box 4, Folder 1.
Chapter 4. Performance Pressures
Where not otherwise indicated, biographical details are drawn from Shirley Temple Black, Child Star: An Autobiography (London: Headline, 1989), and Kathryn Talalay, Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
“Your Child, Too, May Be a Shirley Temple”: Alma Whittaker, “Your Child, Too, May Be a Shirley Temple,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1934.
“mammas everywhere”: Ibid.
“the rug rat race”: Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey, “The Rug Rat Race,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 15284, August 2009.
“a super baby star”: Whittaker, “Your Child, Too.”
“phenomenally easy”: Rosalind Shaffer, “The Private Life of Shirley Temple, Wonder Child of the Screen,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 9, 1934.
a hundred children from all over: Norman J. Zierold, The Child Stars (New York: Coward-McCann, 1965), pp. 56–57.
“Hollywood with the gong”: Rosalind Shaffer, “Hollywood to Do More Films About Children,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 8, 1934.
“nerves are in the red”: From Stand Up and Cheer! (1934), directed by Hamilton McFadd
en.
Yehudi Menuhin was thronged: Marie Winn, “The Pleasures and Perils of Being a Child Prodigy,” New York Times Magazine, December 23, 1979, p. 143.
“Oh, Shirley doesn’t really work”: From Stand Up and Cheer!
“flock of hungry locusts”: Jeanine Basinger, Shirley Temple (New York: Pyramid, 1975), p. 24.
via Hollywood and San Francisco’s bohemian scene: Carla Kaplan, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), p. 100.
“dark liquid eyes of a fawn”: Talalay, Composition in Black and White, p. 14.
a deal-breaker for Pathé News: Ibid., pp. 46–47.
any portrayal of “miscegenation”: See the MPPA’s Production Code of 1930, http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-code.html.
a wary welcome to marriages: Kaplan, Miss Anne in Harlem, p. 86.
“the Shirley Temple of American Negroes”: “The Shirley Temple of American Negroes,” Look, November 7, 1939, p. 4.
“hybrid vigor”: Talalay, Composition in Black and White, p. 13.
“the permanent solution”: Kaplan, Miss Anne in Harlem, p. 87.
“It is a splendid thing”: Anne Edwards, Shirley Temple: American Princess (New York: Berkley Books, 1989), p. 63.
“There are two themes”: Aljean Harmetz, “What Makes Shirley Run, in Her Own Words,” New York Times, October 25, 1988.
“ingrained awe of authority”: Temple Black, Child Star, p. 54.
weren’t “fair and square”: Ibid., pp. 123–25.
“at peace with myself”: Ibid., p. 62.
“I wanted her to be artistic”: Basinger, Shirley Temple, p. 100.
“ran on her toes”: Anne Edwards quoted in an undated article in Parents Magazine, p. 11.
“Don’t do ’at”: Temple Black, Child Star, p. 7.
“Love, ladled out”: Ibid., p. 62.
“seldom tried to dominate”: Ibid., p. 46.
“Secret best friends”: Ibid., p. 52.
“finest exercise to build up health”: Ibid., pp. 5–6.
mercenary ambition just wasn’t Gertrude’s style: Ibid., p. 12. Temple Black tells, and dismisses, the story circulated by Hal Roach that Gertrude Temple tried several times to get Shirley an audition for Our Gang but never made it past the front desk.
“Famous Meglin Kiddies”: Diana Serra Cary, Hollywood’s Children: An Inside Account of the Child Star Era (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1998), p. 201.
Baby Burlesk shorts: See Temple Black, Child Star, pp. 12–14, for the quotations in this paragraph.
“daily routine will not be upset”: Ibid., p. 15.
“underlying streak of naiveté”: Ibid., p. 49.
“a training ground for later life”: Ibid.
The 1930s spelled the end: John F. Kasson, The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), pp. 58–59.
“This business of being mother”: Temple Black, Child Star, p. 15.
“We each knew who we were”: Ibid., p. 46.
“bring in the dolly”: Ibid., p. 19.
“Kids, this is business”: Ibid.
“found the pressure exhilarating”: Ibid., p. 34.
Her daughter needed her own clothes: Edwards, Shirley Temple, p. 41.
“She reads and reads and reads”: Philip K. Scheuer, “Being Mama’s Little Elfy One of Those Things Child Prodigy Must Put Up With,” Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1934.
“sparkle”: Temple Black, Child Star, pp. 20–21.
“Just being herself”: Ibid., p. 188.
When Shirley saw Jimmy Dunn: Ibid., p. 34. Dunn even credited Temple with rescuing him from “his own personal and private depression.” Grace Kingsley, “Jimmy Dunn Credits Recent Good Luck to Shirley Temple,” Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1934.
her “flub”: Temple Black, Child Star, p. 35.
the top box office star: Basinger, Shirley Temple, p. 79.
$307,014 in 1938: Zierold, The Child Stars, pp. 71–72.
photographed more often than anyone else: “Cinema: Peewee’s Progress,” Time, April 27, 1936.
She moved mountains of merchandise: Lorraine Burdick, The Shirley Temple Scrapbook (Middle Village, N.Y.: Jonathan David, 2001), pp. 10, 34; Kasson, The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression, pp. 5, 137–49.
“could sing, dance, act, and dimple”: Temple Black, Child Star, p. 106.
“work entails no effort”: “Cinema: Peewee’s Progress.”
“She just has a natural tendency”: Scheuer, “Being Mama’s Little Elfy.”
“simply part of her play life”: Edwards, Shirley Temple, p. 63.
“a knack for projecting myself”: Temple Black, Child Star, p. 106.
“something rude and rowdy”: Ibid., p. 107. The critic is Gilbert Seldes.
“This child frightens me”: Basinger, Shirley Temple, p. 34.
“agitated and talkative”: Temple Black, Child Star, p. 55.
“She gets spoiled.”: Ibid.
“a series of conferences”: Nelson B. Bell, “Little Shirley Temple Beneficiary of Contract Unique Among Movie Documents,” Washington Post, August 9, 1934.
“system of relaxation”: Shaffer, “The Private Life of Shirley Temple.”
“Her routine of living”: Ibid.
“rough-and-tumble neighborhood play”: Eunice Fuller Barnard, “What Price Glory for Screen Starlets?,” New York Times, October 11, 1936.
“Look, I earn all the money”: Kasson, The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression, p. 228.
“as a human entity”: Temple Black, Child Star, pp. 177–78.
“to cope with the gaping hole”: Ibid., p. 178.
“a blood-and-thunder mentor”: Ibid., p. 165.
“raise the gooseflesh”: Ibid., pp. 90–91.
“I am a race man!”: Kasson, The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression, p. 111. Kasson quotes from Earl J. Morris, “Morris Interviews ‘Bojangles’; Learns He Is Real Race Man,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 31, 1937.
“windup toy”: Temple Black, Child Star, p. 58.
“is an utterly unnatural skill”: Ibid., p. 130.
“to elevate my ability”: Ibid., p. 190.
Robinson made the stair dance: Jim Haskins and N. R. Mitgang, Mr. Bojangles: The Biography of Bill Robinson (1988, reprinted Linus Multimedia, 2013), p. 225.
the first interracial couple: Temple Black, Child Star, p. 98. See also Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 41; Brian Seibert, What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015), pp. 255–56.
He deftly choreographed around the problem: Joan Acocella, “Not a Pink Toy,” newyorker.com, March 18, 2014.
“imperturbable and kind”: Temple Black, Child Star, p. 92.
Robinson knew how it felt: Robinson sometimes played the role of “natural” for white journalists. “I don’t know how I do it,” he said to S. J. Woolf of The New York Times. “I just dance, I hear the music and something comes into my head which I just send down to my feet. And that’s all there is to it.” Quoted in Kasson, The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression, p. 109. See also Karen Orr Vered, “White and Black in Black and White: Management of Race and Sexuality in the Coupling of Child-Star Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson,” The Velvet Light Trap 39 (Spring 1997): 52.
“a final moment of elation”: Temple Black, Child Star, p. 92.
the only real grown-up: Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, pp. 40–42.
“and there is a definite expansion”: Edwards, Shirley Temple, p. 92.
“life with other girls and boys”: Eliza Schallert, “Shirley Out of Pictures,” Los Angeles Times, May 12, 1940.
“honoring family unity over material cupidity”: Temple Black, Child Star, p. 487.
“There’s no use in going through life”: Kasson, T
he Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression, p. 96. He cites S. J. Woolf, “Bill Robinson, 60, Taps Out the Joy of Living,” New York Times, May 22, 1938.
“Our White Folks”: George S. Schuyler, “Our White Folks,” American Mercury 12, no. 48 (December 1927): 388–89.
“spiritually depleted”: Jeffrey B. Ferguson, The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 145.
“He needs to be cherished”: Ibid.
“Do you know, Josephine”: Ibid., p. 148.
“dropped completely out of sight”: Talalay, Composition in Black and White, p. 42.
Josephine touted “extra vitality”: “Child Pianist Gets ‘Extra Vitality’ from Raw Foods, Mother Says,” Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky.), May 12, 1941.
“a splendid example of courage”: Anonymous, “The Fall of a Fair Confederate,” Modern Quarterly (Winter 1930–31): 528–33.
“the peace of humility”: Ibid., p. 536.
“go to extremes”: G. Schuyler, “Our White Folks,” p. 391.
“too much mother love”: On John Broadus Watson, see Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), chap. 5.
The newspaper sent Joseph W. Alsop: Joseph W. Alsop, Jr., “Harlem’s Youngest Philosopher Parades Talent on 3d Birthday,” New York Herald Tribune, August 3, 1934. Quotations in the next two paragraphs come from this article.
“have learned how to enjoy themselves”: G. Schulyer, “Our White Folks,” p. 391.
“Jo,”…“Daddy,” “God damn”: Talalay, Composition in Black and White, p. 13.
“exceptional sense of humor”: Ibid., p. 14.
“go crooked to bed”: Ibid., p. 47.
“Everywhere your Daddy goes”: Josephine Schuyler, Scrapbook, August 12, 1934, ibid., p. 50.
“You are stubborn and self-willed”: J. Schuyler, Scrapbook, November 2, 1934, ibid., p. 57.
“Beat me and then love me”: Ferguson, The Sage of Sugar Hill, p. 145. Ferguson notes that there is no sign that George complied.
“Your respect for and confidence in”: Ibid., p. 150.
“You and Philippa are growing together”: George Schuyler to Philippa Schuyler, October 20, 1935, in Talalay, Composition in Black and White, pp. 74–75.