by Anne Edwards
Weiner shifted gears in his handling of McCloskey after he watched Shirley’s original press conference on television. “In the few seconds allotted [McCloskey] on the network coverage, Pete had violated every tenet of television . . . his head was characteristically cocked to one side, he scratched his ear, he looked alternately amused and disdainful, and he was magnificent! Whatever the camera angle, it was impossible to obtain a bad shot. McCloskey’s natural restraint and manner and speech were superb for that medium.” Weiner now moved from his original “grass-roots” concept (door-to-door visits, trips by the candidate to factories and supermarkets) to presenting McCloskey on televised debates and in prominent public appearances that would draw the attention of television newscasters.
Weiner immediately drafted a memo to McCloskey and the executive committee of his staff advising them not to attack Shirley Temple for being a movie star, and to remember that George Murphy’s and Ronald Reagan’s “good-guy” images onscreen had helped them. “If Shirley Temple was allowed to become a political princess, she would win.” Therefore, her lack of qualification was the area to be attacked.
He went on to suggest they “exploit the female jealousy factor,” further noting that “the female voter is apt to resent a glamorous figure doing and accomplishing things she would like to do herself.” His other directives included:
1. “The image of McCloskey as the only moderate Republican in the race should remain.”
2. “McCloskey should corner Shirley Temple on the issues of Vietnam, Civil rights, riot control, juvenile delinquency.”
3. “McCloskey should be cast in the role of the underdog.”
4. “All press releases . . . should stress McCloskey as the number one challenger [including Democrats] to Shirley Temple.”
5. “She should be hit hard with the ultra-conservative label.”
6. “Finally, in all planning it should be remembered that whereas Reagan and Murphy still looked and appealed to people as the actors they once were, Shirley Temple no longer looks like ‘The Good Ship Lollipop.’”
Weiner’s intent was to portray her as a rich, moralizing society matron. His next move was to hire a full-time press representative with media contacts outside the county and to raise an additional fifty thousand dollars in campaign funds. McCloskey already had secured one hundred thousand dollars in pledges, while Shirley at this juncture had about half that amount. Though she certainly could have managed to finance part of the campaign herself, Shirley was determined that all funds would come from pledged support.
With no personal experience of the scruffy tactics of a political campaign, and surrounded by a well-meaning but uninformed staff, Shirley began her congressional race hip-high in troubled waters. Charles did not so much run his wife’s campaign as back her up and carry through her ideas while balancing the campaign budget. Based on the premise that her film career not be recalled to the voters’ minds (the Shirley Temple Black being her only concession), her literature and brochures “depicted a glacial-faced, black-haired, austere clubwoman. Her red, white, black and blue color theme had her name superimposed with the slogan, ‘Let us work to create, to build, to inspire.’” Weiner had been absolutely correct. The personality she projected to voters was not the effervescent, loving goldenhaired child they fondly remembered. That image had been replaced by a wealthy society woman who “lectured people on immorality.”
In her speeches and brochures, Shirley emphasized four main issues—escalation of the Vietnam War to ensure a swift victory, an end to crime in the streets, reduction of taxes for homeowners and a halt to the spread of pornography. She launched her campaign in something less than main-line splendor by appearing at local supermarkets and shopping centers and simply shaking hands. Her presence did not draw crowds, but Shirley was unconcerned. She had one advantage the other candidates lacked—instant recognition. Seldom had a congressional race received such broad-scale national coverage even though no new or revolutionary issues were at stake. The mere fact that Shirley Temple was a political aspirant was newsworthy enough to elicit major coverage in leading national weekly magazines, with photographs old and new of Shirley abounding. Along with the local San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and newspapers abroad all reported on the campaign. The Hub, a San Francisco movie house, ran a month-long Shirley Temple festival, Shirley’s old films occupying just half of a nightly double feature. The second show each evening was Night Games—a choice that raised arch editorial comment in the press and on television. A San Francisco toy store displayed a window of the newest vinyl version of the Shirley Temple doll with the sign: “You wind it up and it runs for Congress.”
By the end of September, Pete McCloskey’s local TV spot commercials were being shown with frequency. The tall, dark, lean, good-looking candidate scratched his ear and smiled winningly as he peered directly into the camera and accused “Mrs. Black of wanting to escalate the war.” When he stepped forward, one detected a slight limp, a token of his war injury. “I seek a meaningful negotiation.” Voters were reminded of his service record and his moderate Vietnam position.
In contrast, when interviewed by a reporter from Look magazine, Shirley expounded her views on the sums of federal funds spent for rat control. “Is rat control really a job for the Federal government?” she asked, and quickly noted, “I’d like to know who counted the rats, anyway. It would be a wonderful cartoon, a little man ticking off a procession of scurrying rats. One. Two. Three.”
Protest letters came pouring into Look’s editorial offices, and the editor printed a number of the most condemning. “Shirley Temple Black seems quite concerned about morality. She might begin by questioning the morality of. . . making jokes about controlling rats that bite hundreds of slum-dwellers’ children each year.” Another reader bluntly wrote, “The children in our slums may still await a spokesman, but fortunately the rats have found one.”
Despite her statistical cramming and her abiding interest in medicine, Shirley seemed not to know that some 12,500 Americans infants living in slum conditions had been bitten by rats, that many of them had died from those attacks, that an estimated four hundred million dollars worth of foodstuffs had been ruined by the vermin. The rat problem was a most serious and growing national concern.
Shirley’s attitudes exposed “a basic indelicacy born of insulation that stood glaringly revealed.” Something had to be done quickly. “Charles pushed for backing Shirley up with some famous and well-loved celebrities,” one of Shirley’s campaign staff recalls. “We all thought that was wise, and Shirley agreed.”
Bing Crosby was asked to join her finance committee. The Crosbys were nearby neighbors and members of the same golf club. The fact that Bing was helping in her campaign was not likely to downplay Shirley’s Hollywood connections, but wherever Bing publicly appeared, press photographers were also present, and journalists did not have to look hard for a humorous quote.
Crosby was “a freshly registered Republican.” One of his first endeavors as such was to host a hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner for Shirley at the Thunderbolt Hotel in a San Francisco suburb. Attended by over four hundred supporters, the affair, called “A Party With Shirley,” was nationally covered, with photographs of the old crooner, pipe in mouth, horn-rimmed glasses slung low on his nose. Crosby “sidled up for a solo tune at the microphone,” and after removing his pipe cracked a typical Crosby joke.
“On the way in a guy asked me ‘Why don’t you do what Ronald Reagan and George Murphy and Shirley Temple are doing?’ I said, ‘You mean get into politics?’ and the guy said, ‘No, get out of show business.’” After he made some “mellow, serious, and sincere” comments about Shirley’s accomplishments in and out of the entertainment world, Shirley, her hair lacquered in a towering bouffant coiffure, made her way to the podium in stiletto-heeled black pumps and declared, “John Public . . . is the forgotten man. But he’s the one I seek to represent.
” Once again she espoused increased United States involvement in the Vietnam War and her belief that “the country ought to leave it to the military experts to accomplish what we have determined as our practical objectives.”
She had written her own script and insisted on sticking to it. Though her coverage had been more than that of any other candidate and her fund-raising abilities once again proved (her campaign coffers were augmented by nearly fifty thousand dollars within three weeks time), she remained behind McCloskey in opinion polls. Convinced, finally, in the last week of September, that she had to find a professional campaign-management organization to take over her race, she settled upon Whitaker and Baxter, the most venerable of such firms.
Whitaker and Baxter had been in the business of selling candidates since the Depression, and numbered among their past clients Earl Warren, Eisenhower, Nixon and former California Governor Goodwin J. Knight. The firm had successfully spearheaded the American Medical Association’s campaign against Truman’s proposed public-health program. “Ideologically, as well as by reputation, Whitaker and Baxter appeared to be a perfect firm for Shirley . . . [they] had enjoyed [their] greatest success in the Joe McCarthy-early Richard Nixon era when the technique of personal attack was much fancied. After their entry into the campaign, Shirley’s press statements and remarks toward McCloskey took on a more personal accusatory tone.” Weiner could not have been more delighted. After October 13, when Charles had been replaced by Whitaker and Baxter, the contest became a head-on fight between Shirley and Pete. “Whitaker and Baxter had played right into our hands,” Weiner recalled.
McCloskey challenged her to a debate, but she refused, which proved to be one of the most devastating decisions of her campaign. Her opponent accused her of placing herself above the main issues at stake. Still feeling confident that visibility was the key to her success, Shirley remained on the run seven days a week from early morning to late at night, going door-to-door, greeting workers as they came off night shifts and catnapping whenever possible during rides to and from engagements. Fashion had no place in her schedule; she carried “only a sweater, a coat, a pair of heels and a pair of flats (‘because you have to move fast’).” Women’s Wear Daily reported her hemline was too long, her heels too high, her hair “too PTA conventional, [she is a] very proper matron in a very proper suburb,” and added, “Hollywood’s former baby princess accepts responsibility like true royalty . . . that’s why she decided to run for Congress.”
Nonetheless, she was always gracious and patient, and showed no sign of artistic temperament. She was assiduous about doing her homework. She read five papers daily and used statistics like “an old political pro.” The rat incident would not recur.
Wherever she appeared, her views on Vietnam were questioned. Asked once how she thought the war could be shortened, she replied, “It would only take four hours and two planes to mine Haiphong harbor.” She constantly stressed her expertise as a mother in the area of morals and inspirational leadership.
Whitaker and Baxter were trying to parlay her sex and maternity into a bid for the woman’s vote, and her hawkish views (although she once said she was not “hawk or dove but owl”) into an appeal to the ultraconservative bloc, and their plan did have an impact on her vote-getting ability. By the first of November, with only two weeks remaining until the primary, Shirley had risen in the opinion polls and was running on the Republican ballot only about five percentage points below McCloskey.
Weiner and McCloskey’s executive staff set up a television interview between their candidate and the local press. The questions were tough, but the faster and harder they came, the more passionate and knowledgeable were McCloskey’s replies. As the allotted thirty minutes neared its end, he was asked if he would support Mrs. Black should she win the election. McCloskey rubbed his chin, shifted his weight from his bad leg and stared unrelentingly across the space between himself and his questioner. Finally, he replied, “I don’t know. I thought I would when this campaign started, but when you run for the great debating society of the United States and you won’t debate your own opponents in front of the electorate, it gives me great pause, and I don’t think I want to vote for any candidate until I can see her or him under cross-examination such as you gentlemen have put me through today.”
A reporter had one last question: “Would not San Mateo county receive national recognition with Mrs. Black as its Congresswoman?”
McCloskey leaned in close to the microphone. His voice was intimate. “I think we shall draw a great deal of attention if we should choose to elect a lady who will not come forward and state her views and respond to questions.”
“Whitaker and Baxter almost did something right,” Weiner commented wryly. “They got her into a debate with nothing but Democrats.” The event was scheduled for November 10, four days before countdown. Two days earlier, on her own initiative, she paid a surprise visit to the state capitol at Sacramento. An aide reported that she was there “to be briefed on congressional reapportionment plans before the state legislature. She was introduced to both houses. She gave the appearance of taking things for granted . . . that she believed herself [already] to be the winner.” The visit brought her additional unfavorable press. Undaunted, Shirley prepared for her debate with the Democrats.
South San Francisco, where the debate was to be held, was Democratic party territory. Shirley was walking right into the enemy camp. Whitaker and Baxter made sure she did not go unescorted. Wearing a lacquer-red tunic dress, she appeared at the cavernous El Camino High School gymnasium, where two thousand persons had gathered. She entered on Charles’s arm, while a band of cheerleaders, girls with red, white and blue sashes, led the way shouting their cheer: “S - H - I - R - L - E - Y, SHIRLEY! B - L - A - C - K, BLACK! SHIRLEY BLACK! GO! GO! GO! SHIRLEY!” As she mounted the podium, they raised placards with her photograph on them. In the audience, several hundred of her supporters held up red balloons with the same matronly picture of Shirley stamped on them. Noisemakers passed out to the audience by her staff made a cacophonous yowl.
Shirley’s organization had approached the debate as if it were a political convention. None of the four Democrats she was to face had equipped their representatives with gimmickry such as balloons and baton-twirling cheerleaders. But Republicans were outnumbered three to one in the audience, and in response to Shirley’s rallylike tactics, those attending began to stamp their feet. Outside, another Republican candidate, Sheriff Whitmore (whose chances were slim), campaigned by shaking hands as people entered, a sound truck nearby blaring, “Vote for Whitmore!”
The format had been arranged so that Shirley was to open the debate and to speak for fifteen minutes. Each of the Democratic candidates then had ten minutes. Rebuttal time had been limited to five minutes for each participant, after which the debate would be thrown open to the press for forty minutes of questions to be answered by the candidates. Her four opponents were Edward M. Keating, a forty-two-year-old lawyer, a leading dove and former publisher of Ramparts magazine; Roy Archibald, forty-seven, a former mayor of San Mateo and the frontrunner on the Democratic ballot; Daniel J. Monaco, forty-five, a lawyer and former Democratic county chairman; and Andrew Baldwin, a schoolteacher.
“The number one issue in this district and in the country is Vietnam,” Shirley began her speech. Her view, she said, was that the United States was conducting an “off-limits, part-time war” and she then reeled off statistics about how much of the enemy’s territory had not yet been devastated. Chiding her dove opponents, she asked, “How can you say stop the bombing when a case can be made that it hasn’t really started?” At that point, boos rang out in the huge room, and people in the audience jumped up and started popping hundreds of Shirley’s red campaign balloons.
She took the assault well, waiting a minute or so and then asking the chairman, “You are timing this, I hope?” Then she sailed right back into her speech. The audience quieted as she went on to stress that the country was losing the “war on
pornography.” When she said “the thing to do about drug pushers is to put them in prison and throw away the key,” noisemakers were shaken and shouts of “Go, Shirley, go!” rang out from her supporters.
“I feel Mrs. Black and I live in two different worlds,” Keating said when his turn came. Proclaiming himself “the only genuine peace candidate,” Keating ranked high among student voters, and this statement was met with a loud roar of approval. Smiling, Keating nodded toward Shirley and said, “Sorry about that, Mrs. Black.”
When all the candidates had finished their speeches and rebuttals, Shirley appeared clearly the loser. Undeterred, her staffers, just before the press was to have the question period, passed out copies of her speech and led a large group in cheering and applauding their candidate. At this point, one reporter rose to his feet and said, “This is no rally, this is a press conference. Who are these people anyway?”
“I don’t know,” Shirley smiled, as she grabbed the microphone, “but I’m awfully glad to see them here!”
Asked if she thought she had enough experience to be in Congress, she replied, “No one is experienced . . . until he gets there.” Her qualifications, she said, were that she was “an honest, hard-working woman who will do an honest job. I have lived [in this district] over thirteen years; people know what I’ve been doing since I was three.”
On the following night, national television’s most popular news team, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, devoted a large portion of their NBC evening newscast to the San Mateo election. McCloskey was gaining in strength during the last days, but so was Shirley; and almost all the preelection media coverage on a local and national level was centered on Shirley’s colorful appearance at the debate. Shirley obviously felt confident, for on election day not one of her workers, as was the usual rule, was dispatched to help get out the vote, while McCloskey volunteers assisted people in reaching the polls, providing car pools and baby-sitting services when required.