by Anne Edwards
When Shirley came down the gangplank of the ship that had brought them to Honolulu, she was carried on the shoulders of Hawaiian swimming star Duke Kahanamoku. The two of them were surrounded by a dozen policemen who tried to steer them through the eight thousand people who had come to greet Shirley. The progress was slow and the shouting (in Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and English) deafening.
Jackie Cooper recalls, “The first crowd that shoved around me frightened me a little. I didn’t know what they wanted. My mother said nobody wanted to hurt me. They just wanted to see me. That was a concept you might expect a child would have difficulty in understanding. But [I had been told] I had a job to do and it was all part of that job. I was different from other kids—not better, just different. And the key to that difference is that I had a job . . . I had to work at the studio; that meant I couldn’t go to regular school but had to study with my tutor . . . [Facing crowds] was simply another facet of that same situation.”
Gertrude employed similar psychology. She could not satisfactorily explain to Shirley why all the people wanted to see her. She could only tell the child that this was the way things were for her, and that she had to accept them.
The Temples remained in Hawaii for sixteen days. Almost immediately upon their return, Shirley was back at work doing advance recordings of the song numbers for her next film, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
Zanuck’s remake of the Kate Douglas Wiggin children’s classic bore little resemblance to the original book or to the Mary Pickford silent based on it. But it did reunite Shirley with Bill Robinson, and the two of them updated their stairway routine to Raymond Scott’s engaging number “Toy Trumpet” (based on “The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers”), during which she had to handle some tongue-twisting lyrics that demanded expert enunciation.* The film could well have been called The Big Broadcast. The story has Randolph Scott as a young radio executive desperately searching for a child performer for his top sponsor. Shirley, an orphan being raised by a crotchety stepfather (William Demarest), auditions and is accidentally turned down. Demarest takes her to Sunnybrook Farm and leaves her there in the care of her equally gruff aunt (Helen Westley) and her pretty and sympathetic cousin (Gloria Stuart). Robinson is a farmhand who befriends Shirley. Scott’s country retreat fortuitously neighbors Sunnybrook Farm. He finds Shirley and falls in love with Stuart. They all return to New York, and Shirley becomes a radio star along with Robinson.
“The national No. 1 box office star seldom has shone so brilliantly in her singing, dancing and repartee. That means she is going right ahead to bigger and better grosses,” Variety proclaimed. But Zanuck was not taking any chances. The competition that Gertrude had so feared did not come from another child star (not even the five quints), but from the Norwegian ice-skating champion, Sonja Henie, who he said “. . . looks and acts like the girl-next-door’s ugly sister . . . But on the rink, she [is] a princess, a flying angel, a quick-silver goddess, and she hit everyone who watched her right in the heart and the stomach.” He cast her in a bland story called One in a Million, which made a fortune at the box office. Next he cast her in the equally successful Thin Ice. When preparing her third film, Happy Landing, he exhorted his writers at every script conference, “for Christ’s sake keep the dame on ice.” Henie’s films made so much money in 1938 (her three films doubling the gross of Shirley’s two) that “the studio had a surplus at the bank for the first time in twenty years.”
Twentieth Century-Fox was riding high, and Henie and Shirley were not its only commodities. Tyrone Power’s career had taken off (Zanuck had commented, “It couldn’t have happened to a duller guy”) with starring roles opposite Henie in Thin Ice and Alice Faye in In Old Chicago and Alexander’s Ragtime Band. The following year, Don Ameche’s star would rise with the release of The Story of Alexander Graham Bell. But if Gertrude sensed that Shirley’s days of celebrity might be numbered, her quote to a reporter on the set of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm did not reveal it. “My secret ambition is to take a leisurely train trip across the continent and let Shirley greet people at railroad stations. Then anyone could see her and it would not be necessary for people to pay admission to see her.” And she reminded the press, “There is a Shirley Temple fan club of 625,000 members in upper England and Scotland alone, and 135,000 persons sent gifts or greetings for her eighth birthday.”
Shirley was actually approaching her tenth birthday when this was said. Her films continued to be successful, and miraculously there was still no hint of encroaching adolescence. Yet for four years, she had been doing the same things over and over on the screen; the public now was very familiar with what she could do, and they were beginning to expect her films to be a little more real and considerably more artistic. Zanuck was a clever producer, a brilliant showman. But having done well with children’s classics for Shirley enhanced with music and dimpled charm, he decided to stick with that formula, a choice that was to set Shirley, the studio and the box office on a three-way collision course.
Footnotes
*Mondays through Fridays, school-age child actors worked five hours and had classes for three hours. But on Saturdays and all school holidays, they could be expected, if necessary, to work a full eight hours. Studios, therefore, whenever possible, scheduled pictures featuring child stars for summer production. Shirley almost always worked on Saturday, and from 1933 straight through to 1939 made one film, and sometimes two films, during the summer months.
†Most of Temple’s stills at Twentieth Century-Fox were photographed by Anthony Ugrin.
*A small first edition of Gone With the Wind dated May 1936 was distributed to publicity sources, newspapers and store book buyers, but the books marked June 1936 were the first to go on sale.
*The case appeared before the King’s Bench on March 22, 1938, and May 23, 1938. Greene, who was in Mexico on assignment, did not appear (in absentia). Night and Day, referred to as the “beastly publication” in court, also had on its staff Elizabeth Bowen as film critic and Evelyn Waugh as chief book reviewer. The magazine was intended as a British counterpart of The New Yorker, and Greene’s reviews were often acerbic or tongue-in-cheek. The case was won by Temple and the two branches of Twentieth Century-Fox. Temple received £2,000 plus costs, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation New York £1,000 and the British film company £500. The settlement remained in trust for Shirley in England. The trial transcript and Greene’s article are in the appendices of this book.
†Lesser (1890-1981) had begun his career as a film exhibitor. In 1919, he established himself as an independent producer in Hollywood. He joined forces with child star Jackie Coogan’s father, Jack Coogan, and presented the boy actor in several silent films. Diana Serra Cary says, “Lesser was one of the first men in the industry to recognize that even though a child star’s career was necessarily brief, a great deal more money could be extracted from those few years than might be surmised.” Baby Peggy was at the top in 1923 and earned $1.5 million in salaries and product endorsements. As an independent producer, Lesser made a fortune during the 1930’s with the Tarzan films.
*The dream sequence had Temple as a Dutch girl singing and dancing with a group of other children to the Lew Pollack and Sidney D. Mitchell song “In Our Little Wooden Shoes,”
*Freda Jones was to have a small movie career of her own later in life, and appeared in a featured role with Kirk Douglas in The Moneychangers.
*Heidi gave Shirley greater dramatic opportunities than she had had in Wee Willie Winkie, and for the third straight year, and with only two pictures in release in 1937, she was box-office champion.
*Temple’s songs in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm were “If I Had One Wish to Make,” “Crackly Grain Flakes,” “Come Get Your Happiness,” “Alone with You” and, with Robinson, “Toy Trumpet.” She also sang a medley of her earlier hits, including “On the Good Ship Lollipop. ”
7 ON APRIL 11, 1938, at the age of twenty-three, Jackie Coogan filed suit against his mother and stepfather to recover what
he could of the estimated four million dollars he had earned in the 1920’s as a child star. The case was front-page news and remained so for many weeks in Great Britain, Australia, Canada, France and the United States. Arthur Bernstein, Coogan’s stepfather (the same man who had tried to pressure the Temples into letting him represent Shirley), retaliated by announcing, “He’ll not get a penny from us, the law is on our side. Lawyers tell his mother and me that every dollar a kid earns before he is twenty-one years old belongs to his parents.” Lillian Coogan Bernstein, Coogan’s mother, added, “There never has been a cent belonging to Jackie. It’s all mine and Arthur’s . . . No promises were ever made to give him anything.”
Bernstein had been hired by John Henry Coogan, Jackie’s father, in 1923 as “efficiency man to keep down expenses of production [on Jackie’s films.]” The senior Coogan had been killed in a car crash in 1935, just three months short of his son’s twenty-first birthday. His widow had married Bernstein three weeks later, and they had taken over the estate. The Bernsteins had spent a sizable portion of Jackie’s money on a palatial ten-acre Van Nuys estate, two Rolls-Royce limousines and another lavish estate in Palm Springs, as well as on assorted real-estate and security holdings, which were purchased in their names. What was left had been dissipated by Bernstein’s huge gambling losses at the racetrack. The long, embittered battle for a share of his childhood earnings did not end for Coogan until August 1939, when the court settled the suit giving him one half of what remained of the estate left by his father. The Bernsteins were forced to liquidate their holdings. But by this time Bernstein’s real-estate investments had proved to be almost worthless. Coogan received $126,000.*
Other child stars had been the center of court disputes over their earnings: Freddie Bartholomew’s case was almost as well known as Coogan’s. Young Freddie had been raised from the age of three by his Aunt Cissy, his legal guardian. Between the years 1934 and 1937, Bartholomew was in court at least twice a month as some twenty-seven separate lawsuits were filed by members of his English family, each trying to get a percentage of his earnings. The expense of these hearings stripped the young man of virtually every cent of the one million dollars he had earned as a child star. Edith Fellows was caught in a three-way custody battle among her paternal grandmother (who had raised her), her mother and her maternal grandmother, each fighting for a portion of her one-thousand-dollar weekly salary. The judge ruled in favor of the grandmother with whom she lived, but the legal battle had proved costly for the child, and she was never to regain her early and highest earnings. Although Judy Garland never took her grievances to court, her mother, Ethel, and her stepfather, William Gilmore, lost all her childhood earnings in a series of ill-fated promotions and land schemes.
When Jackie Coogan had been at his height as a child star, his father had given out in interviews, just as Gertrude Temple had, that the child’s millions were safely invested, and that the youngster would be well taken care of as an adult. Shirley’s future was subject to great speculation by the press during the Coogan court case. “The Temples naturally adore Shirley, and such a thing as ever fighting with her over money seems now as remote and impossible as the end of the world,” Louella O. Parsons wrote, and then lauded Winfield Sheehan, Joseph M. Schenck and Darryl Zanuck, who, she claimed, “inserted in Shirley’s contracts at their insistence, where and how much of her earnings shall be invested in a manner to safeguard them for her maturity.”
Because of Jackie Coogan’s plight, the future of all child film performers was made secure. Ten days after his case was filed, Superior Judge Emmett H. Wilson, who approved most of the screen contracts between minors and studios, announced inauguration of a court move to require all who employed juveniles to pay at least half of the minor’s income into a trust fund. As a result, the State Assembly in Sacramento, California, passed a Child Actors’ Bill, commonly known as “The Coogan Act,” under section 36 of the California Civil Code. The bill gave the court the authority to demand that the studio or other employer pay one half of the minor’s earnings directly into a trust fund established for the minor’s benefit and subject to the court’s approval. Singing star Deanna Durbin was the first child to become subject to the new bill when she signed a long-term contract with Universal Studios. “The Coogan Act” unfortunately was not retroactive, which meant that existing contracts between child actors and studios were not affected and left the majority of the children, including Shirley, unprotected. Within a year, the act was extended to cover past contracts still in effect. This addendum was called “The Shirley Temple Amendment.”
Each child performer who signed a new contract was now obliged to enact a similar ritual. “The documents had all been read and approved by lawyers for both sides, but the legal traditions had to be upheld,” Jackie Cooper remembers. “A judge had to give his official approval to the arrangements. One phase of that ceremony was, as I remember it, always the same.
“The judge would peer at me over his glasses and summon me up to sit beside him on the bench with a wag of his finger. My mother would pat me on my shoulder and send me on my way—‘Be nice, Jackie’—and I would smile my way up to the bench and shake the judge’s hand.
“ ‘Well, Jackie,’ the judge would say, ‘tell me. Do you like what you are doing?’
“ ‘Oh, yes, sir.’
“ ‘Good, good.’
“And that would be that for another few years. I hadn’t lied. I did like what I was doing. By and large.”
Despite the commercial success of several of Twentieth Century-Fox’s films in 1938, not one was well received critically, nor was any one of the thirty-five movies made by the studio that year likely to be rediscovered one day as a classic. The list included two of Shirley’s least interesting efforts: Little Miss Broadway and Just Around the Comer. Zanuck’s biographer Leonard Mosley states, “Looking at some of [Zanuck’s 1938 films] nearly fifty years later is a revelation of the kind of trash movie fans so easily swallowed two generations ago, when twice-a-week visits to the movies were a national habit and hunger for entertainment was more easily appeased.”
Zanuck is said to have written most of the final screenplay of Little Miss Broadway, which had Shirley yet another time as an orphan, adopted this time by George Murphy, the owner of a theatrical hotel. Prune-faced Edna May Oliver was “the mean old pumpkin” who tries but fails to send Shirley back to the orphanage. Shirley not only plays cupid in this one (between Murphy and Phyllis Brooks), but single-handedly saves the hotel from bankruptcy, while giving all the vaudevillians who live there, including the irrepressible Jimmy Durante, a new lease on life.
With Little Miss Broadway, Darryl Zanuck’s great instinct for casting was more evident than his talent for screenwriting. Whatever its story cliches, Shirley and Durante’s song-and-dance duets were surefire entertainment and bound to succeed at the box office. Yet even reuniting Shirley and Bill Robinson and casting the brilliantly comedic Bert Lahr as a foil could not save her next film, Just Around the Comer (adapted from Paul Gerard Smith’s book Lticky Penny). Using the pseudonym Darrell Ware, Zanuck collaborated on this script with “J. P. McEvoy,” who turned out to be none other than the director of the film, Irving Cummings.
The plot had Shirley’s widowed, Depression-hit father (Charles Farrell), an architect forced by reverses to live with his motherless daughter in a dreary basement flat, confiding to her that “a harassed Uncle Sam is doing all he can to help the country, but he needs the cooperation of every citizen.” Above them, in the penthouse, lives a grumpy old financial czar, Samuel G. Henshaw (Claude Gillingwater), whom Shirley overhears being called Uncle Sam by his nephew. She assumes this is the “harassed” gentleman of whom her father spoke. To help “Uncle Sam,” Shirley runs a benefit show and collects nickels, which she presents to the old codger. Henshaw is so touched, he begins a massive construction project to employ thousands, with—you guessed it—Shirley’s dad as architect.
Frank Nugent, the movie critic on The Ne
w York Times, continued his acerbic attacks on Shirley’s films. “Fee-fi-fo-film, and a couple of ho-hums . . . have you heard that Shirley has ended the depression? . . . Certainly nothing so aggravating as this has come along before,” Nugent accused in his review of Just Around the Comer, “nothing so arch, so dripping with treacle, so palpably an affront to the good taste or intelligence of the beholder. . . . Shirley is not responsible, of course. No child could conceive so diabolic a form of torture. There must be an adult mind in back of it all—way, way, way in back of it all.”*
Gertrude requested a meeting with Zanuck shortly after the release of Just Around the Comer, the first Shirley Temple film to founder at the box office. Shirley had always loved the Frances Hodgson Burnett children’s classic The Little Princess, and wanted to play the lead role of Sara Grewe, motherless daughter of a captain in Her Majesty’s Army, who is placed in an exclusive girls’ school when her father goes off to fight the Boers. Little Sara is treated like a princess until word comes that the captain has been killed in action and his fortune lost (at which time she is relegated to servant girl). Sara never gives up hope that he is still alive, and thereby hangs the suspense of the melodramatic but warming story. Zanuck read both the book and the play adaptation of it (the same play produced as an amateur production in which Nancy Majors had appeared). Agreeing with Gertrude that it would be a splendid vehicle for Shirley, he secured the rights. So solidly did he agree about the property’s potential that he budgeted the picture for $1.5 million, double the cost of Shirley’s previous film, and scheduled it as her first to be made fully in Technicolor.