by Anne Edwards
The term at Westlake, which was located in Holmby Hills, only a short drive from Brentwood, was already in session when Shirley attended her first classes.
“Mom was sad,” Shirley wrote, “because she was going to leave me at Westlake for the day and go away while I learned to get along by myself. But I felt wonderful.”
The school took both boarding and day students. Shirley and the Majors sisters lived at home. Grif had been put on salary by the Temples, who still feared kidnapping, and drove the three girls to school in the morning, remaining close by until it was time for him to return them to their homes in the afternoon.
“Every morning the Temples’ mile-long limousine pulled up to our home to pick up my sister and me,” recalls Nancy Majors Voorheis. “ . . . I remember that we were all prematurely boy-crazy, or maybe just plain crazy, for we laughed, giggled, whispered secrets about absolutely nothing but boys, boys, boys! There never was a conversation about school, classes or even other girls. It was really boys—all the way! An example: After my first year at Westlake, Shirley wrote in my school yearbook:
‘To Nancy, you know the most interesting people. Lil Bug’
[Lil Bug was Shirley’s favorite nickname, given to her by the girls at Westlake.] She meant when she said ‘people,’ boys—boys to whom I could introduce her.”
Shirley later added, “Because I was the only student in my class until I went to a real school, I learned a lot quickly: sex, and all the things people did that I’d never known.”
“Westlake was a beautiful, serene campus,” Nancy Majors Voorheis reflects, “more like a lush green estate than a school. Classes were small, and thus intimate. On sunny days, lunch from brown paper bags was eaten on the lawn. There were only forty-eight or [forty]-nine girls in each grade. When Shirley entered, I was in the eighth grade, Shirley in the seventh and Marion in the sixth. Harold Lloyd’s two daughters were classmates. But Shirley was the only real celebrity, not the daughter of someone. Everyone knew everyone else. It was a sheltered, cloistered, perfect little world. We wore uniforms, flat shoes and no makeup so there could be no one-upmanship.
“We had chapel every morning before classes, and after chapel we had to file by a senior inspection line. If anyone was caught wearing makeup, demerits were given, and the penalties were stiff. You had your special privileges taken away. [Study hall was substituted for elective classes like dancing, or the girl was confined inside during lunch hour.] For the longest time, Mrs. Temple put rouged lipstick on Shirley. I can still see an officious senior scrubbing it off with a piece of Kleenex. Mrs. Temple did Shirley’s hair and got her ready in the mornings, but finally, after Shirley had been restricted a few times, she took care of these things herself and so passed inspection.
“Miss Mills, our beloved principal, was also our English teacher. She became very, very close to Mrs. Temple, and she adored Shirley. My recollection is that she thrived (more than we kids) on the celebrity of Shirley’s fame.
“I remember the thrill of Shirley’s twelfth birthday, which turned out to be her thirteenth [April 23, 1941]. This was a dinner for about thirty girls held on a Saturday night at the Bel-Air Country Club a few days early. This was the first time any of us wore a long party dress. I vividly remember Shirley’s, and how perfect it was . . . white peau d’esprit with an accent of dubonnet velvet ribbon. [She wore] tiny white satin shoes, (she always was much smaller than the other girls) and dainty real pearls. Her famous curls were pulled back, giving her a new look of sophistication. She was particularly excited because her biggest birthday surprise was being told she was one year older! That made her a teenager. She was really thrilled.”
Shirley’s retirement was short-lived. Before her first year at Westlake ended, Gertrude had completed negotiations with Louis B. Mayer at Metro for Shirley to star in a film called Kathleen, at twenty-five hundred dollars a week. The terms were low when compared to her former Fox remuneration. But Gertrude was also to receive one thousand dollars a week, and the contract carried the stipulation that if Shirley’s option was picked up for a second film, a 30 percent increase would be put in effect. Gertrude must have believed that at Metro, which had a host of teenage stars, Shirley had a chance to make the transition from child to juvenile lead. It is now apparent that Mayer was using Shirley’s name to make a better package for a low-budget film.
“It seems to me,” one of Shirley’s co-stars in the film, Laraine Day, reflects, “that considering the kind of production given Kathleen, Mr. Mayer wasn’t expecting too much. The film did not have a top cast with big-name stars to support Shirley. The budget was small. It was just an ordinary picture, and heaven knows, MGM had a lot of top stars who could have been in a picture with Shirley Temple and have provided her with a better background and a better vehicle.”
Kathleen was being shot at the same time as, but on a budget less than one third that of, the Judy Garland–Mickey Rooney musical Babes on Broadway, which featured Virginia Weidler in a role that Shirley had previously been offered by Mayer, who had originally felt Shirley could not carry a major film. It could not have made Gertrude feel better that back at Shirley’s home studio, Fox, Jane Withers had been starred in the successful Her First Beau, and thirteen-year-old Roddy McDowell had been cast in the John Ford film How Green Was My Valley. Universal was grooming fourteen-year-old Gloria Jean to replace the maturing Deanna Durbin. In two years, a twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor would startle movie audiences in National Velvet, and she and Margaret O’Brien (Journey for Margaret) and Natalie Wood (Miracle on 34th Street) would become Hollywood’s reigning child stars. The vogue for young actors, either tots or teenagers, was far from over. The special charisma Shirley had as a child had not survived into adolescence. Still somewhat chubby, she possessed a budding bosom and features that retained their cherubic innocence. In these qualities, she much resembled Judy Garland. With its low budget and the Temple name, Mayer believed Kathleen would recoup its cost and at least make a small profit. To his surprise, it did neither.
“I think it would have been a better picture for Shirley,” Laraine Day suggests, “if she had someone other than Herbert Marshall and me [as co-stars], I had just finished playing Herbert Marshall’s daughter in Foreign Correspondent, . . . he was too old [fifty-three] to be playing a sweetheart or a love story with me, and I felt I was much too young [twenty-four] to be playing a psychologist for Shirley.” In the film, Kathleen was a lonely girl whose father (Marshall) was too engrossed with business and his personal life to realize that his daughter needed him. To compensate for this lack of affection, Kathleen lived in a dream world. Psychologist Day is hired to move in and study her. The obvious happens: Marshall and Day fall in love and the three live happily ever after.
The plot was predictable, the characters over-familiar. Still, that had seldom hindered the success of a Temple film. Judy Garland’s earliest movies, made when she was about Shirley’s age—Pigskin Parade and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry—also had weak, predictable scripts and low budgets. But Garland as a teenager had an appealing child-woman vulnerability, and the roles she played underscored this quality. The young woman in Kathleen was willful, confident and often stronger than her adult co-stars. Instead of Garland’s tender expression, soulful eyes and tremulous voice that tore at your heart, Shirley resembled a spoiled but self-assured youngster, whose life had contained snags but no real pain. Roger Edens had written many of Garland’s songs and made all her musical arrangements, and Mayer assigned him to the film. Edens gave Shirley “a Garlandesque and beautifully melodic” song, “Just Around the Corner.” Shirley sang it in a dream sequence where Kathleen imagines she is a musical-comedy star, complete with a male chorus. Her performance rated good personal reviews,* yet the old box-office magic was missing. The picture was released shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The country was at war. Film themes had taken a more serious turn. Mayer did not pick up the option, and Shirley returned to Westlake School for Girls.
Her gr
ades in her first year had been barely passing. She now applied herself, although her main interest remained “boys! boys! boys!” Nancy Majors Voorheis says, “She had her own little private court consisting of Phoebe Hearst, very strong and very aloof, and [another girl] Minerva Floor. Perhaps they were the real rulers, the king-makers. I, being one year ahead, was always more like the big sister, though still very close. As far as I remember, Shirley never talked about her future in movies at school. She was always terribly interested in the present, and boys seemed to dominate that.
“Grif, Shirley’s bodyguard, took us to and from school every day, and he stayed there to protect Shirley . . . [and] when the school had dances he attended, too, [but] we didn’t like that much.
“The dances were held in what we called the Great Hall. Our partners were recruited mostly from local boys’ schools such as Harvard and Black Fox [both schools are Los Angeles military academies]. I remember Shirley was about fourteen and I was probably fifteen, and I was very smitten with a handsome Black Fox cadet, a blond boy by the name of Bill Curtin. Our dances were heavily chaperoned by parent volunteers. I remember Mrs. Temple was on duty that night. At certain points in the evening, we would have intermission and were allowed to go outside and to walk on Westlake’s beautiful grounds.
“I got Bill outside, and as we walked along he leaned over to kiss me. At just that point, Grif sprang out of the bushes, got into our path and halted the action. I was humiliated, and I’m sure my date was, too, as Grif led us both back into the Great Hall. But Shirley was far smarter than I. She was always able to get away from Grifs heavy scrutiny.”
Gertrude had become tremendously involved in Westlake activities. “Mom did more than I did,” Shirley later confessed. “She was a Mothers’ Club officer. I sang in the glee club and wrote a secret gossip column for the school paper [her name did not appear on the masthead], and I had small parts in the various school entertainments.”
Shirley’s second year at Westlake was interrupted when Gertrude signed a contract for her with Edward Small Productions that guaranteed her $65,000 for her first film under their aegis,* star billing and a dressing room on the set. The picture was to have an eight-week shooting schedule. An independent producer who released through United Artists Films, Small had made many successful commercial films, including The Man in the Iron Mask, My Son, My Son and The Last of the Mohicans, and was best known for action and adventure films. Shirley’s contract gave Small a two-picture option with a pay increment of ten thousand dollars for the second film. No sooner had Gertrude signed, using an agent to represent Shirley for the first time, than Shirley revealed her strong desire to remain at Westlake. The Temples’ agent, Frank Orsatti, was forced to telephone Small stating Shirley “had no intention of appearing on January 5th [the starting date] . . . unless the director was satisfactory to her . . . and unless certain other details concerning the production were approved [by her.]”
Shirley and the Temples were notified by Small’s attorneys† that either Shirley would advise them in five days that she would live up to the terms of her contract or a suit for considerable damages would be filed. Shirley began work on Miss Annie Rooney on February 16, 1942. The screenplay, a fairly free adaptation by George Bruce of Mary Pickford’s silent film Little Annie Rooney, presented Shirley as a teenager, attracted to boys and “hep to the jive” of her peers. The plot leaned heavily on the old Temple formula: the motherless daughter who must save an adult from misfortune and unhappiness. Annie’s father (William Gargan) is jobless, and conjures up a crackpot idea for brewing synthetic rubber out of milkweed. Both Shirley and Gargan live with his father (Guy Kibbee), who fortunately has a pension. Annie meets the teenage scion of an aristocratic family (Dickie Moore) and he invites her to his sixteenth birthday party with all his rich friends. Just when Annie wins over the snobbish group, in walks Gargan, who takes the opportunity to display his rubber process to her beau’s millionaire father (Jonathan Hale). The chemical procedure gasses everyone present and mortifies Annie. Nonetheless, she stands behind her dad, and in the end his invention turns out to have credibility.
The film’s publicist managed to obtain far-reaching press coverage on Shirley’s first screen kiss. Former child star Dickie Moore, for whom this film was also a comeback, was to bestow the kiss. “Photographers from every major wire service, newspaper, and magazine visited the set to record the event,” he recalled. “My suit was soaked with sweat. Also, the script called for me to jitterbug with Shirley . . . [who] was a superb dancer, while I stumbled over curbs.
“In a last desperate bid to keep the film on schedule, the studio [United Artists] made a rubber mask of my face, and put it on a real dancer, who doubled for me in the musical numbers . . . when I kissed Shirley I hoped the world didn’t know my secret; I had never kissed a girl before . . . let alone the Princess of the World. What if I got an erection while Hymie Fink and a wall of other cameramen recorded my first sin?
“Adding to my consternation, Shirley’s breasts pressed hard against the party dress . . . her legs, firm and round, covered in this scene but well-remembered from the days preceding, were suggestively outlined beneath the skirts she wore . . . I was seized by a paralysis of fear . . . Edwin Marin, the director, called me over. He wore a tight little suit and tight little collar, with a tight little knot in a tight little tie. ‘You seem very self-conscious, Dickie. Have you any inhibitions about kissing Shirley?’” he asked. Moore lied and said he did not. The kiss ended up being no more than a peck on the cheek.
Moore added, “I liked Gertrude Temple, I wondered why she was so nice to me when I knew I was so terrible in her daughter’s picture. . . . She treated Mother and me cordially and invited us one day to their home.
“There, after lunch, we toured the grounds and inspected the Doll House, a bright, farmhouse-style pool-side bungalow larger than our home. Entirely separate from the main house, it held Shirley’s vast doll collection, which reposed inside glass cases.”
The Doll House that Moore refers to was not the glass-brick building presented to Shirley as a playhouse when she was a child. In 1940, the Temples had built a two-story dwelling styled after an English cottage, half-hidden by trees and shrubs on a steep slope behind the main house, as a place where Shirley could relax, find privacy, entertain friends and display her dolls and other memorabilia. When the Majors sisters or Mary Lou Islieb visited on Sundays, they played there. The cottage also contained a movie theater complete with projection booth. The upper floor housed a little theater (decorated in scarlet red and chartreuse), complete with stage and dressing rooms, as well as a bath and kitchen. Downstairs was a full drugstore-style soda fountain (Shirley’s pride), a small bowling alley, a room filled with racks of all of her film costumes, and the doll room (her collection now contained fifteen hundred dolls in glass cabinets that lined the walls of this huge room, which also displayed a fine array of doll houses and miniature furniture).
When Moore met Shirley many years later, she told him that Miss Annie Rooney “was a terrible picture.” Critic John Mosher of The New Yorker described it as “not much, about not much.” Variety reported, “Shirley is still a conscientious worker in any role that comes her way, even though her appeal remains limited to less sophisticated tastes.” Not only was the script inane, the movie was outdated. Teenagers in 1942 did not use the argot employed in the film (closer to 1930’s slang), and a fourteen-year-old girl would not have tied a ribbon in a bow around her hair. Young audiences did not identify with the movie. The film fared no better at the box office than had Kathleen. Edward Small did not pick up Shirley’s option. Shirley, delighted to be back at Westlake, was unconcerned, and when no offers for her services were forthcoming, she settled in to become a real—not a movie—teenager.
“By her sophomore year,” Nancy Majors Voorheis recalls, “she was going steady with Hotch, whose name was Andy [Andrew D.] Hotchkiss, from a boarding school nearby. Then he transferred to Thatcher in the Ojai Vall
ey . . . and we would drive up [a ninety-minute ride] for a big dance in her car with Grif [and Gertrude] and we would spend Saturday, and Saturday night [at a nearby hotel], and come back Sunday. This was the biggest thrill in our lives.”
Shirley recalled having her “first real dates” when she was a sophomore. “They didn’t seem terribly thrilling . . . because I’d been going to our [boy-girl] school parties.” Her most vivid memories were of a hop at West Point, June 1943. “There were four hundred or five hundred stags and they cut in on me so fast that finally they all just lined up and had me go down the line and dance a few steps with each one.” Five formal Westlake cotillions were given each year, sponsored by the Mothers’ Club, each class taking turns as hostesses. In the spring, every girl in the school would look forward to a new dress to wear at an upcoming cotillion, always held in the school’s impressive “Great Hall, a big beautiful ballroom with two staircases. I always envied girls who lived at school, because they could float down those stairs so effectively in their evening dresses while I and the other girls who lived at home just had our dates call for us in the usual manner and came in wearing our wraps.”
Nancy recalls that Shirley “dressed exquisitely. Her mother had the bulk of her wardrobe created by the then-famous designer Adrian. Needless to say, none of the rest of us wore three-hundred-to-five-hundred-dollar creations. Shirley seemed extremely sophisticated boy-wise, or perhaps ready or eager. Why she was so much more worldly than the rest of us I don’t know. She smoked [when she was about fifteen], very sophisticated, we thought. She just seemed to know what she wanted, while the rest of us hadn’t a clue. What she wanted [at fifteen] was to get married and go to some far-off romantic place. . . . She was always strong-willed. . . . There wasn’t a passive bone in her body. Whatever she did she did with gusto. This was catchy, so when you were with Shirley you found yourself [following her lead].