by Anne Edwards
The idea of going to California—that legendary land of perpetual summer, of orange groves in sight of snowy peaks, of explorers who came in pygmy galleons by sea looking for fabled El Dorado and the gold rushers centuries later who proved the legend true—was intriguing. Fired by the tales she read and her own dreamy nature, Gertrude anticipated great adventure when she reached her destination. The train journey fired her imagination as the vehicle crossed the vast, spreading plains and climbed up thick-forested slopes, traveled across narrow bridges that spanned wild-currented rivers and paused in bleak towns where tough-skinned, wizened old Indians performed war dances for pennies.
Upon their arrival, the Kriegers went directly from the low white stucco, red-tile-roofed buildings that formed Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal to the home of a fellow Chicagoan. An enterprising man, Mr. Krieger soon moved his family into the second floor of a frame building at 2022 Bonita, and opened a jewelry and watch-repair shop below. Gertrude’s life in Los Angeles did not differ significantly from her life in Chicago, apart from the dry and temperate climate. She was enrolled in school and was obliged to help care for Ralph in her free time while her mother joined Mr. Krieger in the store. Gertrude’s romantic adventure had been reduced to taking a round-trip Angel’s Flight, a miniature cable railway that traversed 315 feet up and down the steep slope of nearby Bunker Hill. For the two-cent fare, she used the money she earned tending neighbors’ children along with her brother.
Soon after the family had set down roots in Los Angeles, Otto Krieger’s health declined further, and in 1908, when Gertrude was fifteen years old, he died. For a time, Maude tried to keep her husband’s business afloat, but watch repairing had always been the mainstay of the business. Krieger’s Jewelry Shop was forced to close, and Gertrude, resentment festering, left Polytechnic High School to help her mother support the family. Still mesmerized by stories she read in books, Gertrude had nurtured ambitions of becoming an actress or a ballet dancer.
These were dark days for the Kriegers. Both mother and daughter took what odd jobs they could find: Maude did sewing at home, and Gertrude became a file clerk. Ralph, only eleven when his father died, still required some supervision. Gertrude was a withdrawn young woman, but her dark good looks set her apart, and when she was encouraged to speak, her natural intelligence and a radiant smile would surface. When George Francis Temple, age twenty-one and five years her senior, met her, he was immediately captivated. Here was just the wife he had been looking for: pretty, hard-working, conservative, well-mannered, unspoiled and intelligent. George was employed by the Southern California Edison Company as a clerk, but he had ambitions for which a supportive wife would be an asset. He wasted no time in proposing marriage. Maude thought Gertrude was too young. The couple waited until late summer, 1910, when Gertrude had celebrated her seventeenth birthday and George his twenty-second, by which time he was earning enough to support his new wife and her family.
George Francis Temple was born in Fairview, Pennsylvania, in May 1888, of Dutch, German and English descent.* His ancestors had come to America before the Revolutionary War from England and the western region of Germany to seek economic and religious freedom, settling first in the area of Lancaster. George's father, Dr. Francis Temple, had been born in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, in 1850, and graduated the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia in 1884. He began his practice in Mercer, Pennsylvania, where he had married Cynthia Yaeger in 1876. Their first two children, Grace and Herbert, were born in Mercer, where Dr. Temple and his family lived with his elderly aunt, Nancy Flake. Upon her death, Dr. Temple inherited a small amount of money and moved his family north to Fairview, near the shores of Lake Erie, where two more sons, George and Francis, Jr., were born.
Dr. Temple was a flamboyant man, and stories about him soon made him legend in the county. George was later to write another old-time Fairview resident: “Our home in Fairview, as I well remember, was a two story house and the doctor’s office was on the first floor . . . I also remember the shooting incident. My father had purchased a revolver, in case of burglars, and one night he awoke and saw a figure passing through the bedroom, took the pistol from beneath his pillow, and shot at the figure, which just happened to be my mother, the bullet just missing her head. I also remember when he was chopping wood out behind the house one day, and mother placed her finger on the chopping block and said, ‘Chop this off.’ He did just that and the finger fell in the snow. He picked up the finger, and took mother Temple in the house, and sewed the finger back on again. And there were many times that she showed us the scars and told us to never goad a person into doing anything like this, as people will call your bluff.”
Dr. Temple was on the staff of the County Coroner, and his many activities, “driving through storms [to tend the sick], performing operations on kitchen tables,” may have taken too much from him, for on June 18, 1896, at the age of thirty-nine, he died of pneumonia. Mrs. Temple and the children moved back to Mercer, where they lived with her family until 1900, when she bought a house in Erie, Pennsylvania. George’s only sister, Grace, soon contracted tuberculosis, and Mrs. Temple sold their home in 1903 and set out for the sunnier climes of Los Angeles, California. The family resettled in a house at 2519 Powell Street, where Grace’s health improved. Herbert, who was five years older than George, became the man—and the protector—of the family and saw that his two younger brothers received a fair education (although neither George nor Francis attended college).
A dapper young man, short of stature but trim, broad-shouldered and quick-stepping, George compensated for Gertrude’s aloofness with his affable personality and sense of humor. He tended to tease Gertrude, to her embarrassment, but they made a handsome couple, about equal in height, his lighter hair and hazel-brown eyes complementing her darker good looks. Their first home was a five-room apartment at 1907 West Forty-first Place, which they shared with Mrs. Krieger and Ralph. Marriage had not won Gertrude the independence for which she had longed. Since George refused to have his wife work, she once again was taking care of her family and their home, and all too soon, an ailing mother and a baby. On January 3, 1915, John (Jack) Stanley Temple was born. George was delighted to have a son. Small boys were hardly a novelty to Gertrude and she nurtured a wish for a daughter in the future.
His many responsibilities kept George safe from the war. They also gave him the opportunity to advance while others in the company went off in 1917 to fight overseas with the Allies against the Kaiser’s German forces. George Francis Temple, Jr., (thereafter known as Sonny) was born on January 24, 1919. The Temples moved to 263 Kenilworth Street in the more suburban area of Eagle Rock. George was no longer just a clerk, but an accountant (so designated on Sonny’s birth certificate), with the Southern California Edison Company. Gertrude’s life had spun around full circle as she cared for her two small boys and still sublimated her fantasies of being “in the theater” by enacting the characters in the storybooks she read aloud to her sons. But about this time a new art form—the “flickers”—had entered her life.
Movies were being made practically in Gertrude’s backyard as motion-picture companies opened their studios in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Glendale and, finally, in Hollywood. The trek to the Pacific by film hopefuls began in 1912, when Pearl White, saucer eyes fixed upon the camera, golden curls askew as she landed rudderless sky balloons and jumped from the rooftops of tall buildings, became the heroine of thriller serials. Any girl could get a job if she would ride along in the cab of a runaway locomotive. Not being daring enough for such stunts, Gertrude contented herself with taking the boys to the “flicks” whenever she could, especially to see Pearl White and “the cute little girl with the curls”—Mary Pickford. “Little Mary,” as she was often called, was the same age as Gertrude, but she continued playing the innocent, lovable child-woman who became America’s and the world’s sweetheart. For example, in 1918, at the age of twenty-five, she appeared in three films—The Poo
r Little Rich Girl, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and The Little Princess, in which she portrayed a youngster with blond curls and a dimpled smile. The stories Gertrude read her children now featured heroines who could all have been played by Mary Pickford.
Ralph was now able to take care of their mother, and so Gertrude, always the romantic, persuaded George to rent a house at 125 Breeze Avenue in Venice, a section of Los Angeles fronting on the Pacific Ocean. Venice had been the dream of Abbot Kinney, a real-estate tycoon with cultural interests. To recreate the glory of its Italian namesake, world-famous architects and engineers set to work in 1900 to build an elaborate system of canals, each four feet deep and forty feet wide. Ocean water was forced in by high tide and retained by locks, the main canal connecting with the ocean at a spot that was appropriately named Playa del Rey. Kinney imported a fleet of graceful gondolas from the original Venice to pick up and discharge passengers from Italianate stucco-built bungalows along the watery streets. He had visualized his Venice as becoming a great art center attracting world-famous opera stars, painters and poets. The enterprise failed to do so, and by the end of World War I, Venice had dissolved into a West Coast Coney Island. Nonetheless, a Venetian ambience was maintained as the gondoliers continued to pole their gondolas through the canals, singing snatches from opera. But soon seaweed drifted into the canals, fungus took root, and an aroma of dying kelp and dead fish filled the air.
About the same time, 1925, as George left the utility company to work as a bookkeeper for the California Bank, the city of Los Angeles incorporated Venice and immediately began to fill in the canals and turn them into paved streets. The Temples moved farther west to Santa Monica, first renting a small house at 334 Twenty-fifth Street. They bought a Spanish-style bungalow at 948 Twenty-fourth Street in 1927. George had been promoted to assistant manager of his bank’s branch at Washington Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, and Gertrude had felt they should have an appropriate standard of living to make better contacts. Throughout these years, Gertrude had not lost her fervent interest in the movies, and followed the careers of all the former child stars.
Baby Peggy* had become a star in short comedies at two, and continued her popularity in successful features such as The Darling of New York (1923) and Captain January (1924). More gamine than “Little Mary,” Baby Peggy did charming imitations of Charlie Chaplin and other great comedy stars. She had quickly won the hearts of the movie-going public, and by 1924 was so popular that the Democratic party brought her as a mascot to the Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden to vigorously wave the flag as Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a presidential-nomination speech for New York Governor Alfred E. Smith. With Baby Peggy and Jackie Coogan, who cried real tears with Charlie Chaplin in The Kid (1919), leading the way, child stars had burst upon the movie firmament like fireworks on the Fourth of July. Gertrude was not without hope that one of her boys might be the next Jackie Coogan.
Movie magazines proliferated. “‘Your child should be in pictures!’ became as commonplace a phrase as ‘What an angelic-looking child!’ had been a generation earlier,” Diana Serra Cary, the mature Baby Peggy, recalled. “In 1921 the Los Angeles Herald Tribune headlined a thought-provoking article with: ‘Has your baby charm?' and went on to pierce every ambitious mother to the marrow of her soul. ‘Baby Peggy has charm! It has opened the door of the movies to her and enabled the young lady, while still a child, to earn a salary of a million dollars a year. Maybe your child could do likewise.’
“This was heady stuff, and women from every walk of life were reading such articles every day. As they washed the dishes and shelled peas, they wondered how they could parlay their own penniless son or daughter into a pint-sized millionaire before another month had passed.” And then, with great understanding of women with Gertrude’s dreamy nature, Mrs. Cary adds, “Sometimes they did not even realize how far their plans had gone in their imagination until someone or some item in the newspaper triggered the almost ready-made blue print, drawn up in idle moments during the day’s routine. A handful of such parents made the impressive jump from day-dreaming of stardom for their child to putting it into action, without realizing what had been accomplished by their own well-defined schemes.”
Gertrude held the dream, but since neither Jack nor Sonny showed any interest in or talent for becoming performers, she had no child who could fulfill it for her. Soon, even her story-times did not command their attention; for by the time they were both school age, they preferred street games with other boys their age to stories by their mother’s knee, and they had aligned themselves more closely with George than with Gertrude. By 1927, eight years had passed since Sonny’s birth. At thirty-three, Gertrude already considered herself “middle-aged,” and she decided that before it was too late, she and George should have a third child—a girl this time. Of course, there was no way to be certain, but the odds seemed good to Gertrude.*
The new house had absorbed all of George’s savings, but he was convinced that real-estate values would only go up and that the investment would be sound. Moreover, his wife was happier than he had ever seen her. To Gertrude, the house was the beginning of the realization of her vision. Not only did it have an attached two-car garage (which currently housed only one car—George’s gleaming Graham-Paige sedan) and a large backyard, but on breezy days the wind brought the scent of the nearby sea. Bougainvillea covered part of the red-tiled roof. Tropical plants flowered along the front path. The doors, including those of the garage, were of heavily carved wood. A massive, tiled fireplace dominated the living room. The Temples had not lived there long when neighbors came to call. Gertrude soon became a member of a local women’s bridge club that met once a week.
The film studios had long ago left Santa Monica in favor of the more central regions of greater Los Angeles, where shooting time was not limited by the early-morning and late-afternoon fogs that rolled in from the sea. But the ocean air suited Gertrude, and within a few months of their move she became pregnant. His savings depleted, George borrowed $150 from the bank to cover medical expenses. Gertrude believed strongly in the hypothesis of prenatal influence. Desperately hoping for a girl, she also wanted her daughter to be musically talented and inclined to the arts, especially dancing, a desire of her own which she had suppressed. Therefore, the phonograph spun records endlessly, and Gertrude attended dance recitals and concerts and read and reread her favorite books. At 9:00 P.M. on Monday, April 23, 1928, she and George became the parents of a six-pound eight-ounce baby girl delivered without complications at the Santa Monica Hospital by Dr. Leonard John Madsen. They named the child Shirley.*
Shirley spent the first year of her life in a crib placed in a corner of the living room a short distance from the record player. To lull the baby to sleep, Gertrude played the records she enjoyed most, the popular music of the period. At eight months, Shirley was standing in her crib swaying to the rhythm of the songs. In an early article, Gertrude exclaimed, “She looked like a little dancer, even as a baby . . . she began to walk when she was one year old, as most children do. It was then that the most extraordinary thing appeared in her. She walked on her toes. From the time she took her first step, she ran on her toes, as if she were dancing.”
Gertrude believed with enormous pride that her daughter was exceptional and that somehow she was fated for a grand and glorious future. The boys were growing fast (Sonny was nine and Jack thirteen when their sister was born), and didn’t require much of her attention, or at least Gertrude convinced herself this was the case. Life in the Temple house on Twenty-fourth Street was centered upon the comely golden-haired, dimpled child who crooned “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” along with Rudy Vallee and whose chubby but shapely legs seemed constantly in rhythmic motion. When not playing music, Gertrude read her storybooks, enacting the characters (boys’ voices deep, girls’ pitched higher) as she had once done for Ralph and more recently her two sons. To her delight, Shirley began to mimic her.
It started as a child’s
game, but soon Gertrude as well as Shirley became wholly caught up in this divertissement.
Footnotes
*George Temple later wrote to Mrs. Robert Hetz of Fairview, Pa. (March 19, 1976): “My daughter [Shirley Temple Black] tells everyone that I am Penn. Dutch. I personally think that we are more English. We consider General Amberson as one of the famous people connected with our family. I have some old land grants showing that we owned land in Fort Pitt, which is now Pittsburgh, Pa.”
*“Baby Peggy” was born Peggy Montgomery in 1917. She is known today as author Diana Serra Cary.
*“My mother was kind of afraid to have a third child,” Shirley Temple was later to recall, “because she wanted a girl but was afraid she would have another boy. So my dad went to the family doctor, and he said, ‘If you have your tonsils out, you will have a girl.’ So they removed my dad’s tonsils, and they grew back. He had to have them out a second time, and nine months after the second operation I was born. There is no medical reason for the story, but I think it’s funny.”