by Anne Edwards
When David O. Selznick had met Agar for the first time at the wedding reception, he had been taken by his rugged good looks and the assured way in which he moved. Published photographs proved Agar was incredibly photogenic, and convinced Selznick that with training, he had potential as a film actor. A few months later, while Agar was still in the service, Selznick had telegraphed him at Kerns Field, Utah, asking if he would be interested in making a screen test upon his discharge. Shirley had not encouraged this idea, but while Honeymoon was being filmed, Agar decided to accept Selznick’s offer. Selznick was pleased with the outcome, and Agar was signed to a contract at a starting salary of six hundred dollars a week, and was immediately given intensive coaching in diction, acting and voice.
No one in the Temple family was overjoyed at Agar’s decision to become an actor. Two acting careers in one household were seldom a solid basis for a marriage. Shirley had adamantly declared she would never marry anyone in films. But the Temples had their own returning veteran to worry about. After two years of action as a marine in the South Pacific, and many months of floundering after his discharge, Sonny had decided to become a professional wrestler, a career that was not generally looked upon as being respectable. Wrestlers played to their wild “grunt-and-groan” fans. They often dressed in bizarre costumes and were accused of throwing a match for the large stakes that were bet. Weighing 210 pounds, barrel-chested and muscular, Sonny wore nothing outlandish and used his own name (George Temple). “Why shouldn’t I?” he demanded. “This is my game and it’s what I want to make my name in. Shirley’s a swell kid, but I’m not riding along on her name, thank you!”
“He’s good looking enough to be a picture star and smart enough to be a professor,” Shirley declared. “But wrestling’s what he wants. He doesn’t need me to get along either. He’s good. If I could possibly get there I wouldn’t miss one of his bouts for anything.” Not much time was left on her schedule to attend Sonny’s matches. Selznick loaned her to Dore Schary for another RKO film, this time a more promising vehicle, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (Bachelor Knight in Great Britain), to costar with Myrna Loy and Cary Grant.
Though the film was produced at RKO, where Schary was the new head of production, Selznick did oversee some part of its early development. “Dore . . . convinced me to do the film,” Myrna Loy later admitted. “The two roles were really Cary Grant’s and Shirley Temple’s but the script [written by Sidney Sheldon] amused me, the pay was good, and playing a judge for the first time seemed like fun.” Shirley was cast as Loy’s younger sister, and her responsibility since the death of their parents. Grant was a famous artist whom Loy had set free when he was charged with assault and battery. When he gives a lecture course at Shirley’s high school, she becomes (unknown to him) infatuated. In some “wild manipulations of the plot” Loy sentences Grant to keep company with her sister until her crush is over. During Grant’s frequent visits to the judge’s house, he and Loy fall in love, and after several “reasonably funny scenes,” Shirley realizes the middle-aged Grant is more suited for her sister than for her.
“The ‘fun’ picture got off to a miserable start,” Loy has recalled. “Cary was uncomfortable with the young director, Irving Reis, whose previous output consisted mostly of B pictures. In those days Cary was very persnickety about such things, wary of newcomers lacking proper credentials . . . The fact that I liked and worked well with our director threatened my insecure co-star even more. When I asked Irving to redo my first scene twice, Cary got his back up and left the set to phone Dore. . . . Dore came down on the set and Irving walked out.”
Schary told her that Grant had suspicions that she and Reis were “trying to put one over on him.” This was smoothed out, but Schary played intermediary throughout the production.
“Playing [Shirley’s] older sister wasn’t easy because I had to treat her rather severely on the screen,” Loy complained. “You had to be careful in pictures about being too hard on dogs, children and Shirley Temple; otherwise you could really alienate audiences. Perhaps I was too convincing in the role, for the little devil began to needle me. Among her tricks was blocking the movie-camera lens with the still photographer’s used flash bulbs during my close-ups, which ruined the shots . . .
“She was eighteen on our picture and already married to John Agar—not very happily married, I suspected.”
Myrna Loy was right: Trouble had brewed in Paradise; but then, Paradise has always been an imaginary location.
With Cary Grant’s charm and box-office magic and his meticulous sense of timing in comedy, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer could not have failed, but without his presence, it is doubtful if Myrna Loy or Shirley could have salvaged this contrived and often implausible story.
While filming The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, Shirley was also having to cope with Agar’s “surprising decision” to take up an acting career. Shirley was always to attribute her marital troubles. to this. The public, fed by Shirley’s interviews to the press, were to take her side in the matter. Agar remained silent. He admits his own transgressions, drinking and a roving eye, but says, “I was taught to be a gentleman, and a gentleman does not discuss his wife in public.” In truth, his problems at home were not the sort that were easy to discuss. Shirley had led a uniquely protected existence. She was used to getting what she wanted and being the center of attention. Material comforts were expected as part of her everyday way of life. She smoked (but never in public), dressed smartly, carried herself with authority and had met some of the most famous and interesting people in the world. Shirley equated this with maturity, and before they had married, so had Agar. Now, he discovered he was wed to a willful teenager with overblown and romantic storybook notions of marriage.
In her family, Shirley had not seen disharmony because George took Gertrude’s lead almost from the time of his daughter’s birth and had never challenged her decisions. Shirley wanted life two ways: to be Shirley Agar, wife of a dominant, masculine man, and for that man and herself to live an idealized life as she saw it. Had she and Agar been cut from the same cloth, that might have worked. He might then have found a job in a large firm—manufacturing, research, securities—through any number of her parents’ friends. And he eventually could have established himself and left her free to quit films. Westlake had prepared her for the country-club, Junior League sort of life. Her classmates had mainly been the pampered daughters of rich, influential men, and were expected only to marry well and conduct themselves with dignity. Being who she was singled Shirley out as “different.” This same situation existed in her working world. Gertrude’s insistence on Shirley’s aloofness from other child performers had alienated many in their ranks and left Shirley with a sense of not belonging. Of the two lifestyles, she had chosen the world of the Westlake debutante. According to her interviews at the time, Shirley thought Agar’s seven-year age advantage compensated for her inexperience and meant that he was ready to settle down.
Her husband’s background might well have supported this theory. He had been brought up in an affluent household, his father had been a successful business executive and his mother was a socially prominent matron. He had attended private schools. Had the war and his father’s death not disrupted Agar’s life, he might very well have followed Mr. Agar into the meatpacking business after a normal period of rebellion. But during his years in the service, he had lived, worked and spent his off-time hours with men from all walks of life. He had not been an officer and had quickly become “one of the guys.” He had resented not having been sent overseas. The air force had believed his athletic and physical-fitness skills could be best used to train others for harsh fighting conditions. With the war’s end, his four years of vocational training seemed useless.
So much has been written about Agar’s drinking problem during and just after his marriage to Shirley that his character has been distorted. Agar was, and remains, a well-bred, innately good-mannered man. People who knew him then and those who have met him fair
ly recently portray him as soft-spoken, polite and respectful of women and the elderly. He had much charm, but very little talent for self-promotion.
An early friend says, “Johnny was inhibited, uptight. Alcohol helped to free him. The tighter Shirley bound the ties, the more he had to struggle to get loose. I don’t think he ever wanted to be an actor, but that was one way of showing Shirley—and Mrs. Temple—that he wouldn’t let them lead him around with a ring through his nose. Making money, lots of it, right away, was also very important. He had to prove that he could take care of Shirley, that he would not be looked upon as a fortune hunter. I don’t believe he considered the repercussions—that very soon—and without wishing for it to happen—he would be placed in the position of competing with Shirley for public attention, that with his good looks, once he became a movie star (and he was certainly as big as Reagan was in his early films, bigger, because he appeared in class productions), women would make fools of themselves over him. Also, a funny thing happened. Johnny began his career just as Shirley was reaching the end of hers. He was looked at as ‘a star of tomorrow,’ and she was considered a has-been.”
Once again, Shirley fell prey to the overwhelming demands of David O. Selznick’s personal life. He was now involved in the unpleasantness of securing a divorce from his wife, Irene (Louis B. Mayer’s daughter), to marry Jennifer Jones. Duel in the Sun had not met with good critical notices (although Jones’s performance had won her an Academy Award nomination), and their present venture together, Portrait of Jenny (for which he had once considered Shirley), demanded all his creative skills. He therefore continued to welcome loan-outs for the performers who were under personal contract to him.
“Jack Warner called me in one day,” Alex Gottlieb, a former Warner Brothers producer, recalls, “and told me that some agent had pawned off a property on him [a novel by Edith Roberts] and he wanted me to have a screenplay prepared. I read the book, which was about an adopted, illegitimate child taunted by the people in the small town in which she was raised and who ended up, at seventeen or so, in the arms of a man old enough to be her father—in fact, believed by the town to be exactly that. It was a lot of soap for an audience to swallow.
“Well, Warner was the boss, and so I got Charles Hoffman to do the screenplay, which everyone thought was pretty good. I went back to Warner and asked him who he thought we should cast in the picture. He said, ‘Well, the guy is easy, we’ll get Ronnie Reagan or one of those guys. The girl is tough. Who do you have in mind?’
“I said, ‘What about Shirley Temple?’
“ ‘Shirley Temple!’ he said.
“ ‘Well, she’s eighteen or nineteen now.’ He seemed to like the idea.
“ ‘I understand she’s under contract to Selznick. I’ll let you know tomorrow what happens.’
“The next day Jack [Warner] told me that Selznick would loan us Shirley Temple at a sizable profit [to Selznick], but we also had to take Rory Calhoun, who was also under contract to Selznick. So we wound up with both of them [in the picture].
“Shirley had not done much real acting lately, and Selznick’s supervision had not turned her into a good actress. I was surprised to find she was frightened and very nervous when I first met her. She just couldn’t face the camera. We got her without any hitch or trouble. Her acting capabilities were quite limited. The director of the picture, Peter Godfrey, felt the same way, but he did what he could. We needed a trained actress like Anne Baxter, who had recently done Guest in the House, or someone like Teresa Wright, who had just played the daughter in The Best Years of Our Lives. I, somehow, had thought that all those years in films meant Shirley could act. She never really understood the character she was playing. I had made a terrible error in judgment, and all through production I knew it would turn out a terrible picture and, boy, was I right.”
When Ronald Reagan read the script, he went to Jack Warner and asked not to be cast in the film. Warner insisted, and since Reagan’s wife, Jane Wyman, was five months pregnant at the time,* he could not afford to risk suspension (off-salary) by refusing. Production began June 4, with a seven-week shooting schedule. Problems plagued the company. Reagan took seriously ill with pneumonia and was hospitalized. For three weeks, he was out of the cast. Scenes had to be shot around him. By now, Shirley knew she was pregnant, and her more active scenes had to be either curtailed or played by a double.
Gertrude was recalled to Shirley’s side to help her through this difficult period. “I love to have mother with me when I’m working,” Shirley explained. “It’s always been that way and I’m lost without her. She’s a wonderful influence. We’re really like partners and work like a team . . . she’s hyper-critical . . . She doesn’t believe in flattery. I have to earn her praise.”
Gottlieb dryly recalls, “Mrs. Temple maintained quiet vigil on the sidelines, always within calling distance of her celebrated child, who was a child no longer.”
Gertrude’s vigilance did not help the fortunes of That Hagen Girl, which probably destroyed any chance Shirley might have had to move from child to teenage performer. “To add to the awfulness of the film, Reagan and Temple had no chemistry together.”†
Alex Gottlieb states that “Shirley was ladylike, always cooperative, knew her lines and was very easy to work with, but the picture turned out as I predicted, badly.” How badly could be measured by the deadly tone of the reviews, which called it “uninspired soap opera,” “wooden . . . monotonous” and “a foamy dud.” Reagan’s premonition of disaster must have been equally obvious to Shirley. He, at least, was cited for “struggling valiantly in a thankless role” and doing “his level best under the worst of circumstances.” But never had Shirley received such dismal notices. “Balderdash isn’t helped a bit by the wooden acting of Miss Temple,” “Shirley’s acting is, to say the least, ‘restrained,’” “Miss Temple smiles so winsomely in most of her appearances [in the film] that she rarely makes one believe in her predicament.”
Shirley did not publicly announce her pregnancy until she had entered her fifth month. By that time, That Hagen Girl had been sneak-previewed and she had begun work on Fort Apache, co-starring not only John Wayne and Henry Fonda but John Agar. The film was to be directed by John Ford. “Mr. Ford knew I was going to have a baby more than a month before I announced it,” she told one reporter. “I had informed him, naturally, in discussing his picture. But he did not tell a soul. He has assured me that he will have me ‘carried around on a feather cushion’ if necessary. I won’t have to ride horseback or do anything else that could possibly hurt me.”
Selznick happily loaned her out once again to RKO. John Ford had agreed to pay one hundred thousand dollars for her services, which gave Selznick a 25 percent profit. Agar was also on loan-out for this, his first film. Fort Apache was based on Massacre, a short story by James Warner Bellah, “a romantic chronicler of the cavalry during the American-Indian Wars.” Ford had been drawn to it because “it seemed to articulate all his wartime emotions, his fascination with the American military tradition, and the special nobility he felt was born of combat.” But Ford was knowledgeable enough about box-office returns to know that pictures needed a love story, and that films with all-male casts were usually doomed to failure. Frank Nugent adapted the screenplay, and under Ford’s direction he added two characters: Philadelphia Thursday (Shirley as Henry Fonda’s daughter) and Lieutenant Michael O’Rourke (John Agar), a West Point graduate whose father is the post sergeant major (Victor McLaglen). Ford wanted Fort Apache to be a big, commercial picture, and to get the $2.5 million budget required, he loaded the cast with major stars. He hired Shirley not just as a sentimental gesture, but because he believed she and Agar would supply the necessary romantic “glow” while adding considerable publicity value.
Fort Apache was filmed in Monument Valley, “a spectacular region of desert plateaus and majestic rock formations” located on the huge Navajo Indian reservation in southern Utah, where Ford had also shot Stagecoach and My Darling Cleme
ntine. Conditions were rough. The Agars were housed at Goulding’s Lodge, a comfortable ranch-style inn. But since the lodge could only accommodate a fraction of the huge location company, most of the cast and crew had to live in tents pitched outside. The August temperature reached 115 degrees at midday, cooling only to 90 degrees at night. The period of the film required a pregnant Shirley to wear uncomfortable, long-sleeved, floor-length dresses with numerous underskirts. She was not feeling well, and the strain of working in the same film as her husband was telling on her. Agar was nervous and unsure of himself and needed encouragement for his first film, which was not easy at this difficult time for her to give.
Matters grew worse. High winds and desert storms continually delayed shooting. The film went behind schedule, and Ford’s mood turned “brittle, his temper short, and his sharp, barbed tongue spared no one. His principal target,” claimed his grandson, Dan Ford, “was . . .John Agar. [Ford] chastised him for his halting delivery and his awkwardness on horseback, and delighted in calling him ‘Mr. Temple’ in front of the cast and crew.
“At one point, Agar rebelled and stormed off the set, vowing to quit the picture, but John Wayne took him aside and convinced him to stick it out. He explained some of the pressures [Ford] was under and said, ‘You’re the whipping boy now, but give him time. He’ll get around to the rest of us soon enough.’ Agar didn’t have long to wait.” A few days later, actor Ward Bond was flown up to Monument Valley. He announced his arrival by having the pilot buzz the company, which was set up out in the middle of the valley. He destroyed one take and forced Ford to wait until he landed before he could resume shooting.