Shirley Temple

by Anne Edwards

  I couldn’t even talk to her. . . . Later, our director, David Butler, said he always felt his hands were tied and he had a gag in his mouth through that whole movie. He told me, “You stole the picture. When we were working with you, we knew it would happen and we knew it was going to be absolute misery for all of us.”

  I was not permitted to talk to Shirley at all. I even was told to go and wash my hands before I went into a scene with her. That upset Mother a lot. She wanted to go and talk with Mrs. Temple.

  She told the studio people, “Jane is a very clean child. And don’t worry. I’ll make very sure that her hands are washed before she goes into a scene with Shirley.” And she did. But they wouldn’t let Mother talk directly to Mrs. Temple.

  The camera operator on this (and many Temple films), Joseph LaShelle, recalled that Gertrude “was on the set all of the time, leaving only at short intervals—five minutes or so—when necessary. During those short moments, Shirley could be a little devil. I remember her jumping on the camera seat and saying, ‘I’m going to shoot this scene myself.’ I told her to come down from that camera and she did.

  “In one scene Shirley was told to slap Jane [Withers]. Shirley said, ‘I can’t!’ David Butler told her she had to—Shirley again said, ‘I can’t!’ Finally, Butler said, ‘Shirley, you’ve got to, now do it!’ Then Shirley, wincing, slapped her so hard poor Jane burst into tears and so did Shirley.”

  “I wanted desperately to know her,” Withers says. “I didn’t know if she was afraid because of what her mother said or what. . . . Naturally, Shirley was the star of the picture, but we were the only two children in the film. When the shooting ended, they had a little party. I wasn’t even invited to it. But when . . . Lois Wilson* finished her part in the film, she brought this beautiful doll to Shirley. . . . I’m sure she didn’t realize what it would do to another child but we were both there, you know.”

  The film came out Christmas week and was Shirley’s best and most successful to date. Sheehan had calculated right. The two children played well off each other. Fox now had a second child star. Withers says:

  . . . after Bright Eyes was released and we were getting telegrams and wonderful letters congratulating me . . . We saw Shirley and Mrs. Temple on the lot and Mother said, “Oh, we must go thank her and tell her how much this means to us.”

  She saw us coming and she crossed the street and started down the other way with Shirley. Shirley kept looking back and smiling and waving. I was saying “Hi” to her, and Mother was bound and determined to say thank you. So she crossed over and we ran and got in front of her, so she had to stop. I remember this as though it were yesterday.

  My mother said, “Hello, Mrs. Temple.” She replied, “Hello,” and was very curt. Mother said, “I have been trying to talk to you all through the film . . . I just wanted to thank you for the great opportunity that Shirley’s picture afforded Jane . . .”

  . . . Mrs. Temple said, “Come, Shirley, we must be going.” then she grabbed Shirley. Shirley looked a little bewildered and she started to say something. Her mother literally jerked her away. I never saw her again [when they were children].

  This was, in fact, to be one of the last times Withers was on the Pico Boulevard lot.* From that point, all of her films (also very successful) were shot at Western Avenue.

  Bright Eyes had Shirley as an orphan whom James Dunn battles to adopt. Dunn this time was a flier, and in one dramatic scene he is forced to parachute out of his plane (the “ship” of “On the Good Ship Lollipop, ” the song that Shirley sang in the film) with Shirley grasped tightly in his arms.

  The child’s life could not be measured by any normal comparison. (“Well, I started in Baby Burlesk films at about three,” Shirley once commented, “and worked for the rest of my childhood. The studio didn’t control my life, but I went to work every day. . . . I thought every child worked, because I was born into it.”) Shirley could no longer go anywhere without a bodyguard, and even then there was danger of her clothes being torn from her by fans in search of a memento.

  “I don’t have many memories of other children or their parents,” Shirley claims, “because I didn’t socialize with my peer group at the studio. . . . I had a lot of concentration to do. I just didn’t have that experience. . . . I was going back to the studio, back to the set, back and forth to lunch, to home.” And she thoughtfully adds, “[Acting] was something I did during the day, along with school. Then I came home at a certain time and went to bed. I liked the work, especially the dancing, and I knew I was good at it.”

  All other child stars had agents and studio personnel directing their lives. After Stand Up and Cheer, Gertrude claimed “practically every agent in town had been after us, and we didn’t know which way to turn.” One day, Arthur Bernstein, Jackie Coogan’s manager and stepfather (who was to use up all the former child star’s huge earnings), came to see the Temples, “and walked up and down waving a check for a million dollars in my face. He told me he had just gotten that much for Jackie and we ought to let him handle Shirley, because we didn’t know anything about the picture business. . . . Bernstein declared he could handle the Fox contract for us. . . .”

  When Bernstein would not give up, George, a great admirer of the medical profession, called their family doctor, who came right over and advised them to sign no paper with Bernstein or anyone else. The Temples did not employ an agent or a manager (although attorney Loyd Wright was placed on retainer). George now began carefully to invest his daughter’s money for her future; Gertrude dealt with the studio, and Wright handled the final contractual arrangements.

  By now, the entire Temple family, even Sonny and Jack, had been “drawn into the vortex of Shirley’s fame.” Despite George and Gertrude’s disclaimers, La Temple, as her brothers teasingly called Shirley, was the breadwinner in the family. Shirley was responsible for her mother’s salary and her father’s raise at the bank. Her money, after all, supplied the many comforts they had never known and the celebrity that they could never have imagined.

  Footnotes

  *Little Miss Marker was remade three times: Sorrowful Jones (1949) with Mary Jane Saunders in Temple’s role and Bob Hope as the bookmaker; Forty Pounds of Trouble (1963) with Claire Wilcox and Tony Curtis; Little Miss Marker (1980) with Sara Stimson and Walter Matthau. Each of the remakes was compared unfavorably with the original, and none of the children playing Marky found it a stepping stone to stardom.

  *Even this contract would be renegotiated for much higher terms by Joseph Schenck, chairman of the board when Twentieth Century and Fox merged.

  *The first Shirley Temple dolls, books, clothes, etc., were sold in stores the fall of 1934.

  *This would have been Heidi. Temple was nine when this picture was made.

  *Dorothy Dell, who had played with Temple in Little Miss Marker, was first cast in this role, but was killed in a car crash after only three days of shooting.

  *Lois Wilson played Temple’s mother in Bright Eyes. Wilson was the same actress whom Temple had satirized in one of her Baby Burlesks—Pie Covered Wagon.

  *In 1944 (age seventeen), Temple wrote. “Some writer started a story about a deadly feud between Jane Withers and me. . . .Jane and I, as a matter of fact, got along fine.”

  5 HOLLYWOOD’S BOLDEST and most enterprising producer in 1934 was Darryl Zanuck. He began his career in 1923 as a scriptwriter for Fox Films. Two years later, he had moved to Warner Brothers, where he created the highly successful Rin-Tin-Tin series. Zanuck swiftly rose to head his own production company while supervising the studio’s production schedule. Under his aegis, Warner Brothers emerged with one of the most efficient and profitable film-making formulas—fast-paced, action-packed, good scripts, top names, low budgets. Recognizing his contribution to Warner Brothers’ success, Zanuck battled Harry Warner for higher stakes. The dispute reached an impasse, and in 1933 Zanuck accepted an offer from Joseph Schenck of United Artists to form a new company, Twentieth Century Pictures, which would distrib
ute his films through United Artists.*

  He realized that without major stars Twentieth Century Pictures would never be able to compete with either Warners or MGM. What he had going for him was one of the best story minds in Hollywood and the shrewdness to know that a great role would attract a major star.

  His top writer, Nunnally Johnson, said later, “Darryl always thought of himself as a writer although he wasn’t. He could hardly spell cat. He was an ideas-man pure and simple. We would go to the Brown Derby at two in the morning and look through the early editions of the papers, and he would tear out a story and say, ‘How about that?’ and it would be a story of the suicide of Kreuger, the Swedish match king, and he would say, ‘How about that?’ . . . and by the next morning he would have an outline ready to be turned into a script and handed to a director.”

  Twentieth Century, with stories that were first class, attracted such stars as Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper (The Bowery, 1933), George Arliss (The House of Rothschild, 1934), Ronald Colman (Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, 1934), Colman and Loretta Young (Clive of India, 1935), Charles Laughton and Fredric March (Les Misérables, 1935), and Clark Gable (Call of the Wild, 1935). In the short space of two years, Zanuck’s company had become extremely successful. What was needed now were greater studio facilities and a distribution system more far-reaching and less money-grabbing than United Artists. Schenck joined forces with Zanuck, and a merger with Fox Films, which remained in dire financial trouble because of mishandling, bad movies and double dealing (Sheehan against Fox), got under way. When the deal was finally negotiated and Twentieth Century-Fox established, Sheehan, realizing his days were numbered, agreed to retire, having been paid a million and a half dollars for his share of the takeover. “They didn’t buy the Fox studio,” Sheehan said. “They bought Shirley Temple.”

  The story is told that “the first time Zanuck and Schenck drove through the Pico Boulevard Fox studio, it was a secret and unofficial visit. Schenck looked over the ninety-six-acre lot, with its five miles of streets, its twelve stages, its complex of one-story administration buildings and said scornfully, ‘It looks like a bunch of stables, and we’ve got a lot of shit to sweep out of them.’” But Zanuck, measuring this studio against Warner Brothers, found this one “bigger, richer, better equipped territory than Warners ever had been.” And he was now, at the age of thirty-three, its boss.

  Hollywood, he felt, was waiting for him to fail, and all he had to rely upon at Twentieth Century-Fox were the two proven money-makers, Will Rogers and Shirley Temple. Within six weeks of Zanuck’s takeover, Will Rogers was tragically killed in an air crash in Alaska. Shirley became the focus of Zanuck’s production schedule.

  Quite simply, after four films, Little Miss Marker, Stand Up and Cheer, Baby, Take a Bow and Bright Eyes, the public had fallen in love with Shirley. Her success had been the combination of her own charm, Gertrude’s ambition, the world’s condition, good exposure and film stories that had accidentally placed the child in a position of being “Little Miss Fix-It” in the lives of adults. This was mid-Depression, and schemes proliferated for the care of the needy and the regeneration of the fallen. But they all required endless paperwork and demeaning, hours-long queues, at the end of which an exhausted, nettled social worker dealt with each person as a faceless number. Shirley offered a natural solution: to open one’s heart. In all of the feature films she had made since Stand Up and Cheer, she turned “like a lodestone toward the flintiest characters in her films [the grouchy Warner Baxter in Stand Up and Cheer], the wizened wealthy [the Smythe family in Bright Eyes], the defensive unloved [Dorothy Dell as the moll in Little Miss Marker], the bratty [Jane Withers in Bright Eyes], and tough criminals [again, Stand Up and Cheer; also, Little Miss Marker, Now and Forever and Baby, Take a Bow].” Zanuck’s first move at Twentieth Century-Fox was to call a story conference with his best writing talent. Top priority, he told them, would be given to develop projects for Shirley that followed this formula. He added one more—Shirley melting “figures of cold authority like Army officers.”

  The Twentieth Century-Fox archives* list nineteen writers who were assigned to develop eleven original stories called simply “Shirley Temple Story Development.” Adaptations of some classics were also delegated. Vera Caspary was the first writer to be given Daddy Long Legs (to become Curly Top in the hands of two other writers). By March 1935, Zanuck had writers exhuming Baby Peggy’s big hit, Captain January. The work on Shirley Temple projects was a veritable factory.

  The scripts finally selected for Shirley’s pictures all had one driving and cohesive theme. As one filmographer wrote, “She assaults, penetrates and opens [the flinty characters] making it possible for them to give of themselves. All of this returns upon her at times forcing her into situations where she must decide who needs her most. It is her agon, her calvary, and it brings her to her most despairing moments . . . Shirley’s capacity for love . . . was indiscriminate, extending to pinched misers or to common hobos, it was a social, even a political, force on a par with the idea of democracy or the Constitution.” President Roosevelt had even made the statement, “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.”

  Shirley was unaware that she was the central force in so many machinations of power, money and Depression-bred neuroses. The only other children whose lives were as pivotal to either big business or political stratagem were both of royal birth and close ascension to the crown. But in the mid-thirties, even England’s little princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, were able to lead more normal existences than Shirley. The word normal, of course, has to be placed in proper context. The princesses had been born into their royal life, which involved from their earliest memory a public and private persona. They may not have understood why throngs of people cheered as they rode past in an open coach, but they were not surprised by it. Until Edward VIII’s abdication in 1938, when Elizabeth was closer to the teenage years than childhood, they had far less responsibility and far more personal freedom as small children than Shirley had been given.

  A cover article for Time in 1935 stated that “[Shirley’s] work entails no effort. She plays at acting as other small girls play at dolls. Her training began so long ago that she now absorbs instruction almost subconsciously. While her director explains how he wants a scene played, Shirley looks at her feet, apparently thinking of more important matters. . . . When the take starts, she not only knows her own function but frequently that of the other actors. . . . She is not sensitive when criticized . . . In one morning . . . tap dancer Bill Robinson [during The Little Colonel] . . . taught her a soft shoe number, a waltz clog and three tap routines. She learned them without looking at him, by listening to his feet.”

  Gertrude was quoted as saying, “Motion picture acting is simply part of her play life. It is untinged with worry about tomorrow or fear of failure. A few times when we have left the studio together, she has looked up at me and said, ‘Mommy, did I do all right?’ . . . I have replied, non-committally, ‘All right.’ That was the end of it. . . . Her playing [acting] is really play. She learns her lines rapidly, just as any child learns nursery rhymes or stories. . . . We usually go over the script the first time with enthusiasm. Sometimes when it is issued, Shirley cannot wait until we get home to hear her lines read. ‘Turn on the dashboard light,’ she said one night, ‘and read my lines while you drive.’”*

  During any drive, Shirley’s new bodyguard, Grif (who frequently drove the car), would accompany mother and daughter. Grif’s real name was John (Johnny) Griffith, and he had been a childhood friend of Zanuck’s. Shirley was seldom alone. From the time she began The Little Colonel in February 1935 (still under Sheehan’s aegis), until many years later, unless traveling, she would spend every day but Sunday at the studio, arriving “on the dot of nine,” whether she was filming or not. One of Sheehan’s last gestures before he resigned was to have a bungalow built for Shirley on th
e lot, supposedly to provide her a normal environment. Painted white and trimmed in a blue scalloped and polka-dotted design, the four-room bungalow (living room, bedroom, kitchen and schoolroom/office) had on its grounds a garden, a picket fence, a tree with a swing and a rabbit pen. Furniture in Shirley’s bedroom (including a white “baby grand” piano) was scaled to her size. The ceiling was sky blue with silver stars. On one wall in the living room was painted a mural of Shirley in fairy-tale princess costume, a gold shiny star atop her curly head. The furnishings in the room were cherry red and white. A studio set designer had conceived it “as outside Hansel and Gretel’s cottage—inside pure Sleeping Beauty.”

  Shirley’s days were spent going between the bungalow, the set and the recording room. Her stand-in, Mary Lou Islieb, † was not able to join her for lessons in the bungalow “because our schedules were exactly opposite.”‡ During Shirley’s early films, her teacher had been Lillian Barkley, a tall, handsome, strong-minded woman. Shirley’s contemporary, child star Edith Fellows, recalled that for the five years she had been under Mrs. Barkley’s tutorage, “Lillian was not just my teacher. She was my psychiatrist, my Friend, mother, sister—she was everything. She kept me from blowing to pieces. I didn’t learn my three R’s, but I survived. She knew that it was more important that I have someone to talk to than learn my lessons.” But with Gertrude ever present, Shirley could not share that same kind of familiarity with a teacher. Toward the end of 1935, Barkley was replaced as Shirley’s private tutor by Frances Klampt, a younger and less authoritative woman. Shirley was fond of “Klammie,” who knew how to make games out of lessons, but Gertrude remained her real confidante.

  Although her contract called for three pictures a year, Zanuck prevailed upon Gertrude in 1935 to add a fourth film. (She would make four movies in 1936 and 1937, as well.) To sweeten the request, he agreed to double Gertrude’s salary to one thousand dollars a week and to increase Shirley’s bonus arrangement.