Shirley Temple

by Anne Edwards

  Shirley’s bedroom on the second floor had a wall of windows that looked out to the ocean. Adjoining the bedroom was a mirrored dressing room and a lighted makeup table, which, though inappropriate for a child of eight, was where Gertrude set and combed her hair. The interior of the playhouse looked “like a department store display window the week before Christmas.” By now, Shirley had one of the largest doll collections in the world, with Gertrude’s dolls as a part of it.

  About this time, the Majors family and the Temples were reunited as close friends (the difficult schedule of Shirley’s first two years at Fox had disallowed social relationships). Nancy was appearing (with a monkey named Chico) in an amateur charity production of The Little Princess at the Santa Monica Children’s Little Theater, and her mother asked the Temples to attend. “They arrived—Shirley, Gertrude, George and Shirley’s bodyguard [Grif]—in the family’s mile-long black limousine. The limousine must have been half the size of our tiny [theater]. They all wanted to meet me (or probably Chico!) when it was over. I believe Shirley was intrigued with two things: first, that I got to handle a real monkey . . . Shirley was always drawn to adventure and she was definitely attracted to my little Chico [who] had been loaned to us by the world-famous explorers Osa Johnson and her husband. The other thing that interested Shirley was our lines. In the movies, Shirley never had to memorize more than a handful for one ‘take.’ In the play, we had to remember line after line after line. . . .

  “From that point on, we were invited to the Temples’ home every single Sunday. This was their one ‘social’ time, and I know it was a sacred time for them. There were never any celebrities—it was always a family affair . . . and we [the Majorses] became family . . . George Temple and Daddy became fast friends, while mother and Gertrude became intimate . . . [Sundays were] very, very private and low key. . . . Katie always left a gorgeous chocolate cake made the day before.

  “This went on for about five years until I began to resist. I wanted to do ‘other things.’ [Nancy Majors would have been fourteen by then.]

  “One vivid memory was that Shirley always had her hair in pin curls. Her mother always washed her hair on Sunday morning and kept it in pin curls all day to dry to be ready for an early set call on Monday morning. Because we were all so close, this didn’t seem like a big deal to us. We entertained ourselves [with Shirley’s many toys] . . . the Temple grounds [in Brentwood Heights] really did resemble a miniature Disneyland. It was all there—anything you could dream was there—the junior-grade roller coaster, the real merry-go-round, the real live ponies, the large glass brick playhouse and, of course, the swimming pool. Shirley never ever swam [because of her hair set] . . . and so we weren’t allowed to either.

  “Shirley was . . . exactly like her wisecracking dad and so unlike her ever-so-serious mom [who] was . . . a bit forbidding. . . . I guess that she probably scared me a little. . . . [From about this time] she always wore her huge rings—one a fine ruby, a very large diamond and a star sapphire. She had told us these were good investments, so even at our family gatherings she always wore them.

  “Jack [Shirley’s brother] . . . was very, very nice—fatherly and kind to his little sister and her friends—like his dad, he was fun, too, and so we loved to be around Jack. Sonny was very serious—so much so that I felt I could never talk to him. He never tried to be friendly with us. I suspect he was just terribly shy.”

  The Sunday sessions with the Majors family, although spent in a controlled environment, proved a great release for Shirley, although the Majorses going to her house—never she to theirs—was an understood axiom of the friendship. She did not attend other children’s gatherings or parties, although Jane Withers (who was the most personally popular child performer among their peers) claimed Shirley was often invited by the children who played in films with her.

  Zanuck had begun his reign at Twentieth Century-Fox skeptical about the genuineness of his prized “kidlet” star, but he soon was won over by her. “What a shame it is that she has to grow up,” he would say. On her part, Shirley soon transferred her affection for Winfield Sheehan to Zanuck, who she claimed later had been like “a second father” to her. George Temple also looked up to Zanuck, who gave him advice—business and personal—from time to time. Zanuck often told the story of how George came to see him at the studio one day. “He hemmed and hawed . . . ‘I’ve had some letters . . . from women.’ Long pause. ‘They make propositions. They want me to father a child for them.’”

  “Can you guarantee you’ll give them a girl?” Zanuck asked. “Or even another Shirley?”

  “Nope,” said Mr. Temple.

  “Then don’t be unfaithful to your wife,” Zanuck advised.

  One of the rare excursions the Temples took with Shirley was to the Zanuck ranch in Encino. Unlike his own children, who were awed by him, Shirley called him “Uncle Pipsqueak” (because he often referred to her as Pipsqueak) and would joke with him. But in 1935-36, Shirley alone stood between the studio and bankruptcy: In each year, her films brought in over six million dollars in profit.

  “[My father] was a very scary person to me,” Richard Zanuck later admitted. “I wasn’t a shy little kid hovering in a corner or anything, but I did find his presence overwhelming. I was always aware of my father’s need to compete [with] and dominate everyone with whom he came in contact [directors, stars, writers who came to the house]. Sometimes he didn’t even look at them when he was talking to them, but just rasped out words at them while he busied himself with something else. And they took it. They were big stars, big names, and they let him push them around. And I sensed that everyone feared him, was afraid to stand up to him, and capitulated to his domination.”

  “You know that Darryl was mad about women,” Milton Sperling, a screenwriter and producer at Fox (previously Zanuck’s secretary) said. “Everybody talked about it in Hollywood, and the rumor was that his prowess as a cocksman was just unbelievable. . . . I knew that every day at four o’clock in the afternoon some girl on the lot would visit Zanuck in his office. The doors would be locked after she went in, no calls taken, and for the next half-hour . . . headquarters shut down. Around the office work came to a halt for the sex siesta. It was an understood thing. While the girl was with Zanuck, everything stopped and anyone [in the offices, not on the sets] who had the same proclivities and had a girl to do it with, would go off somewhere and do what he was doing. . . . Any pretty and willing extra was picked . . . and after her erotic chore was completed, she departed by a side door, with or without a little present or promise from her temporary lover. Only then would Zanuck’s door be unlocked again. The telephones would begin to ring, work would be resumed, and conferences would be called.” Gertrude kept Shirley isolated from studio gossip in a successful effort to retain her daughter’s naïveté.

  But Jane Withers was not as protected as Shirley and confesses that “Darryl Zanuck was the only man I’ve ever met in my entire life that I didn’t like. I didn’t respect him, his attitude, or the way he treated people. I felt strange around him, like I wanted to take a bath. Luckily, I didn’t usually have to worry about him, because I was in ‘B’ pictures.

  “I had to go to conventions for exhibitors because they demanded to see me [Withers’s films were very popular in 1935–38]. It would make Zanuck so mad, and it used to tickle me to death. Those guys would say to me, ‘Hey, kid, we can always count on your movies to save us from those tacky things he [Zanuck] puts out.’

  “When they introduced Shirley Temple, of course, she’d get thunderous applause. But when they mentioned my name, those exhibitors would get up and scream. And Zanuck would be furious. He would get red in the face, he’d be so angry. Instead of being thrilled and proud that mine was another film from his studio, it just killed him when they carried on so.”

  Zanuck was “a health fanatic, worried about his lung power, his weight, his muscles.” One of his biographers, Leonard Mosley, wrote that “after a session on the trapeze or a half-hour
boxing with his trainer, Fidel La Barba, he would spend some time in front of the full-length mirror in the [studio] gym, scrutinizing his body.” He devoted a good part of the night at the studio to seeing rushes and movies, arriving home in the early hours of the morning, slept until nine, breakfasted on yogurt and fruit while a teacher gave him French and Spanish lessons. “Then he was off in his Zanuck Green Cadillac to the studio, driving at breakneck speed over the hills to Westwood [the location of Twentieth Century-Fox], where he arrived promptly at 11 A.M. Everybody else had to be in the studio by eight o’clock [including Shirley] and work was already in progress, but somehow the atmosphere of the place subtly changed as the Cadillac swerved through the gate . . .”

  The first items on Zanuck’s agenda were his story conferences, and Shirley’s scripts had top priority. In July 1935, while Shirley was filming The Littlest Rebel (and Our Little Girl and Curly Top and The Little Colonel were still in general release), screenwriters Sam Hellman and Gladys Lehman were working on the script for Captain January, the same film Baby Peggy had made in 1924. Shirley was to play “Star, a waif cast ashore by the sea.” Captain January, who rescues Star when her parents’ boat capsizes and they are killed, is a gruff old sea captain in charge of a lighthouse at Cape Tempest, Maine. The salty Captain January then proceeds to raise the spunky child. The earliest script, dated July 30, 1935, concludes with “the arrival of relatives who will take Star away from the captain. January, aware that his days are numbered, pleads with them to let Star remain with him a while longer. On their final evening together, [he] allows her to light the lamp in the lighthouse [something she had wanted always to do]. She is unaware that . . . the Captain has suffered a massive heart attack and is unable to carry out his duties. January sees the lamp lit and dies.” Star, nescient of this tragedy, goes off singing with the lighthouse inspector to join her relatives. Zanuck found this script, because of the death of January, unacceptable, and made extensive suggestions—“a chase scene in which January and Star manage to hide for a time from the authorities. The relatives appear, but turn out to be . . . wealthy . . . wonderful people.” The relatives end up giving Star a yacht and hire Captain January to be at the helm.

  The second script, dated August 5, 1935, followed Zanuck’s notations but added a parrot who could say “Why, shiver my timbers!” The parrot was excised by Zanuck. Captain January went into production in late October and was ready for postproduction work in time for Shirley to have two weeks off at Christmas time. Guy Kibbee was cast as January. Tall, lanky Buddy Ebsen, who carried the slender love interest lead opposite June Lang, was Shirley’s new dancing partner, and they did a stunning turn to “At the Codfish Ball.”

  June Lang (her schoolteacher in the film) was one of the few contract players on the lot. (The other major studios kept several dozen performers under contract, but Twentieth Century-Fox was still borrowing players when they needed them.) She felt that Shirley “was not a normal child, due to her outstanding talent at such an early age. She had a mature personality and yet a darling baby face and voice. She was never late on the set, never fluffed her lines . . . Shirley was never allowed to associate with anyone. After every scene, if the director [David Butler] didn’t want to talk to her or redo the scene, Shirley would always go to her mother, who sat in a director’s chair with her name on it just to the side of the camera. If not needed, they would go to Shirley’s dressing-room suite. There was never a time actors could talk to Shirley between takes.

  “[I remember hearing] that one day Slim Summerville [an actor in the film] said to Mrs. Temple, ‘So you’re the goose that laid the golden egg,’ after she asked him for her director’s chair, [which] he happened to be sitting in when she came on the set.”

  While Shirley was shooting Captain January, its original star, Baby Peggy (Diana Serra Cary),* had a “small bit-part” in the film Girls’ Dormitory, a Twentieth Century-Fox movie. She recalls that “someone responsible for publicity on that opus got the bright idea he could make a little hay with me by photographing Shirley and me together. I agreed because I was sixteen and very determined to make a comeback in films so that I could set my parents up in satisfactory lives of their own [they had, through bad investments, used up her vast early earnings]. I had it in my head that if I could have even ten years of success . . . I could earn enough to enable me to walk away, as I longed to do, and start living my own life.

  “Shirley was entirely alone . . . There was a daybed [in Shirley’s dressing room] with a white phone beside it, and she stood up there in her famous high-topped white shoes. Pretending she was her mother (which I am sure fooled no one!) she ordered ice cream sent in from the Chez Paris [the commissary]. . . . I think I mentioned to her having made Captain January in an earlier version. I was just a little ill at ease, feeling a bit out of it. I was also disappointed when someone from the portrait gallery came in and said they couldn’t do the pictures that day. I felt it was a lost opportunity for me. I recall thinking how in control Shirley seemed to be, how much ‘bossier’ than I had ever dared to be at her age [eight]. I remember thinking what a precocious child she was (not surprisingly). She was very mature in expressing her sympathy that we couldn’t do the pictures, and treated me with great courtesy and in a very ladylike manner.”

  Captain January proved to be another Temple hit, but with its release began an ill-fated relationship between Shirley, the studio and the English author and critic Graham Greene. He saw in Shirley something of the nymphlike coquette that she had portrayed in the old Baby Burlesk shorts. In his review of Captain January in The Spectator, he wrote, “Shirley Temple acts and dances with immense vigour and assurance, but some of her popularity seems to rest on a coquetry . . . and on an oddly precocious body as voluptuous in grey flannel trousers as [Marlene] Dietrich’s.” He also called the film “sentimental, a little depraved, with an appeal interestingly decadent.”

  Not long after, he visited Hollywood and met Shirley on the set where she was filming. He carried away the same mature image of her. These impressions would soon create an international stir. But whatever maturity Graham Greene might have attributed to Shirley, it applied only to her role as a performer. In her private life, she was, in fact, kept very young and naïve.

  George’s salary at the bank in 1936 was ninety dollars per week, considered substantial for those times.* The house in Brentwood Heights had been bought with Shirley’s money and the proceeds of their former home. The studio also provided several “perks,” including Grif, the car and Shirley’s private schooling. Their housekeeper, Katie, ran the house single-handedly. Nonetheless, there was a laundress, two Japanese gardeners, a pool man and a cleaner who came in twice a week to do the heavy chores.

  For a comparative view of how very much Shirley was earning, consider that Darryl Zanuck’s salary at Twentieth Century-Fox in 1937 was $265,000 yearly, and the chairman of the board, Joseph M. Schenck’s, $106,000. Shirley earned in the same year $307,014 in salary alone. This did not include the monies she received for the licensing of her name to products.* Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s three top stars, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo and Spencer Tracy, drew yearly paychecks of $272,000, $270,000 and $212,000, respectively. Over at Warner Brothers, James Cagney took home $243,000 and Errol Flynn $181,333. And at RKO, Fred Astaire made $266,837 and Ginger Rogers $208,767. These stars had very little additional revenue from the commercial use of their names. A study called the Motion Picture Research Project, begun in January 1939 and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, found that only nine Hollywood actors earned three hundred thousand annually, and that Shirley Temple “earned fifteen times as much [$4.5 million] from her sponsorship of by-products as from her acting.”†

  Clearly, with the huge sums Shirley was earning, the money could not be allowed to slip away through mishandling and high taxes. Shirley was in the 70 percent tax bracket, but another 10 to 20 percent could be saved from taxes with good management and investment. Gertrude remained strong in her feelings th
at outsiders (agent or manager) should not be brought in. To begin with, she believed that they would take a percentage of Shirley’s earnings equal to or more than what they might save her. Moreover, she did not trust these people. This left only one alternative. George resigned from the bank to set Shirley up as a corporation, and then he was “hired” by the company to handle all financial investments at approximately the same salary that the studio was paying Gertrude. The amounts the Temples now made meant that they could personally pay for all the family housing expenses. George then began investing Shirley’s own money in United States government bonds, annuities in old-line insurance companies and guaranteed trust funds with several strong banks as trustees.‡

  The arrangement was conservative and the yields comparatively low, but George felt that safety should be their first consideration. The annuities were so arranged that the first returns from the insurance companies would not come to Shirley until she was twenty-one. For each of the five years thereafter, a considerable amount would be paid her.

  Shirley Temple, the business, was now protected and secure, but what of Shirley Temple, the child?

  For what was actually her eighth birthday, though she celebrated it as her seventh (April 23, 1936), Zanuck instituted what would become for the next four years an annual birthday party, inviting as many as a hundred children—other performers on the lot and children of actors, directors and other personnel—“who came all dressed up, dived into the mountains of cake and ice cream . . . watched the entertainer,” and posed for cameramen. “They were children of people at the studio, newspaper reporters and editors,” she later said. “It was fun but impersonal.”

  Delmar Watson adds, “I felt so darned sorry for her. She seemed so lonely. . . . There she was, a big star, and no chance of having any fun. I always felt she was almost like the character she . . . played in . . . Poor Little Rich Girl . . .”