The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (18 page)

In cities and small towns, in the United States, Canada, and much of the rest of the world, Fox Film and later Twentieth Century–Fox representatives united with distributors, exhibitors, merchants, manufacturers, community organizations, and schools, seeking at every possible opportunity to create tie-ins (“tie-ups” in the phrase of the day) between Shirley and her fans. Exhibitors energetically used every bit of ballyhoo that they could imagine to draw people to the movie house. Frank H. Ricketson Jr., president of Fox-Intermountain Theaters in Denver and a veteran of Howard Hughes’s movie theater chain, filled a book with extensive advice to theater managers on how to drum up movie attendance. A manager, Ricketson insisted, must be a “showman,” one who knows how to book an attractive bill and to stimulate public desire, “to make the public believe that it is necessary to happiness.” Such demand could be achieved only by concerted appeals, including newspaper articles and advertisements, radio spots, billboards, film trailers, and the like. Managers also staged a variety of “giveaways”: premiums, contests, drawings, and similar stunts, often in tandem with local merchants and organizations.
¹⁷

One of the most popular of such stunts was the Shirley Temple look-alike contest. From 1934 through the rest of the decade, Fox and later Twentieth Century–Fox publicists promoted such contests extensively, enlisting the efforts of local movie exhibitors, newspapers, department stores, and other retailers in the process. Shortly after Shirley’s breakthrough in 1934, a manager of a movie theater in Des Moines, Iowa, teamed up with a photo studio specializing in children’s portraits. Girls who sat for the photographer could have their likenesses displayed in the lobby of the theater as it ran Shirley’s latest movie,
Baby Take a Bow
, and moviegoers voted for the one who most resembled Shirley. At the same time, a Brooklyn manager joined with the newspaper
New York American
to host a Shirley Temple look-alike contest with Pekinese puppies as prizes. Other look-alike contests awarded top contestants a pass to Shirley’s latest movie and an autographed photo of the star. That fall in Sydney, Australia, Fox Film and the
Daily Telegraph
newspaper raised the stakes, offering contestants a first prize of a hundred pounds. Similar contests were held in other cities of the British Empire, including Bombay, India.
¹⁸

Nine contestants in a Shirley Temple look-alike contest, sponsored by Fox Film and the
Daily Telegraph
, Sydney, Australia, October 2, 1934. (Photograph by Sam Hood, Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales—DG ON4/814 s, reproduced by permission)

Nor were such contests confined to English-speaking countries. In April 1935, still less than a year after Shirley’s breakthrough, a journalist in Havana interviewed three young Cuban veterans of Shirley Temple look-alike contests. The first of these, a five-year-old girl named Myrna with golden curls and brown eyes, had already won first prize in several competitions in which she not only had to look like Shirley but also had to demonstrate her “command of the enchanting arts” practiced by “Hollywood’s kid.” A second, only four years old, could re-create Shirley Temple’s gestures exactly. The third, despite her golden hair and an enchanting smile, possessed more of Shirley’s temperament than appearance and had a string of second-place awards in Shirley Temple contests, rather than the coveted first prize. The influence of Shirley Temple, the Cuban journalist favorably noted would serve to “de-countrify” Cuban children.
¹⁹

The search for the “Cuban Shirley Temple” was reiterated in other countries around the world. In May 1936 the “French Shirley Temple,” winner of a contest sponsored by the Paris film weekly
Pour Vous
that attracted three thousand look-alikes, journeyed with her mother to Hollywood as the guest of Twentieth Century–Fox to receive Shirley’s personal congratulations. Although not yet six years old, the curly-blond Parisienne and her mother confessed that they were contemplating her own film career.
²⁰

As far away as Japan, newspapers repeatedly reported on Shirley Temple look-alikes. “I’m Shirley Temple,” declared one seven-year-old actress, half Japanese and half Russian. Two other Japanese articles warned of a scam in which a man tricked several families out of their money by telling parents that their child could become a child actor more popular than Shirley Temple.
²¹

Thus, in a great whirling circle, spun by publicists, journalists, eager parents, and their daughters, Shirley Temple became a global standard of what a little girl should be. A chart, carried by newspapers and purportedly devised in consultation with leading California educators, invited readers to “Test Your Own Child” in the ability to live up to Shirley’s sterling example. Among ten questions, it asked: “Does your child receive praise without being spoiled? seem at ease in the presence of strangers? admit errors without trying to blame others? lead in group activities? make friends quickly?” In a decade in which “personality development” became the prime concern of child-rearing advice, not only Shirley’s appearance but her personality demanded imitation. In a similar spirit the movie fan magazine
Silver Screen
reported that many readers had found that they could “only make their daughters willingly eat their spinach, or drink their milk, because Shirley Temple does so.” Older sisters taught younger ones “good manners and neatness . . . by setting Shirley up as an example.” Teachers instructed pupils in obedience by the same tactics. Accordingly, the magazine invited readers to “write a letter telling us how Shirley Temple’s influence has helped in the up-bringing of some little girl you know.” First prize was a Shirley Temple doll, with a carriage and accessories. As a final thought, the magazine added, “Neatness will be considered.”
²²

All of these Shirley Temple contests—and the broader desire to imitate Shirley Temple—linked girls and their families throughout the world with Hollywood and the consumer industries surrounding it. Such imitations vividly demonstrate the active engagement of moviegoers with their favorite actors. They also indicate the emotional needs that viewers brought to the theater and the stories that sustained them.

In actively encouraging imitation of Shirley Temple, promoters exploited a fundamental appeal of movies for children. Even before the onset of the Great Depression, the desire of children and adolescents to imitate, consciously and unconsciously, the characters, plots, and gestures of the movies had attracted notice—and considerable concern from moral guardians. The most extensive investigation of the impact of movies on youth, the famous Payne Fund studies, stressed how powerfully the influence of film permeated the imagination and everyday play of children. Although the studies were flawed in many respects, their fundamental finding that movies deeply enthralled the young has never been seriously questioned. In one of these studies,
Our Movie Made Children
(1933), Henry Forman wrote, “The mirror held up by the movies is gazed into by myriads of adolescents and even young children in their secret thoughts, in their broodings, their daydreaming and fantasies—they want to be like the people in the movies.” Drawing on the studies’ extensive interviews and questionnaires describing how children imitated the movies in their play, from cowboys-and-Indians games to Rudolph Valentino’s torrid seductions, Herbert Blumer observed, “For the time being the child assumes a new role. All phases of his make-up thoughts, intentions, interests, vocalizations and gestures reflect the role which he is acting.” Thus, if we consider play as a kind of acting, movies made performers out of most children. From this perspective, we may see Shirley Temple as leading a vast throng of child actors, imitating the little girl who began her own career parodying adults in Baby Burlesks.
²³

Imitation took many forms. Tap-dance schools in the 1930s bulged with would-be Shirley Temples. Fred Kelly, a brother of the great dancer Gene Kelly, recalled the legions of such girls in the family’s dance studios in Pittsburgh and Johnstown, Pennsylvania: “Every time Shirley Temple made a movie, our studio enrollment doubled.” Soon “we had one hundred girls in our studio who all looked exactly like Shirley Temple! . . . In one of our shows we did a big ‘Shirley Temple’ finale number. Mother went down to the local department store in Johnstown and talked to the owner of the store. She bought a gross of dresses, different colors. When the finale of the show happened, every girl came out in a dress that had a big bow on the back, all with their hair in bouncing curls, and they all looked just like Shirley Temple!”
²⁴

The journalist and essayist A. J. Liebling satirically imagined the grim traffic of little Shirley Temple look-alikes and their belligerent mothers to the offices of voice, dancing, and theatrical instructors: “Often several of the Shirleys and their mothers find themselves in a[n elevator] car together. The mother’s upper lips curl as they survey the other mothers’ patently moronic young. The Shirleys gaze at each other with vacuous hostility and wonder whether their mothers will slap them if they ask to go to the bathroom again. All the Shirleys have bony little knees and bitter mouths and . . . will undoubtedly grow up to be ax murderesses.”
²⁵

Such caricature aside, emulation of Shirley Temple sprang from many needs. Shirley’s charm, courage, cheer, and charisma delighted countless children and their families, and by imitating her they could momentarily bathe in the glamour of Hollywood, however remote their homes. In her sunny reminiscence “Carefree,” Eileen Bennetto recounts how, growing up in a small country town in northeast Victoria, Australia, she eagerly anticipated movie matinees on Saturday: “It was our own special world, the theatre filled with screaming, whistling kids, and not an adult in sight, except occasionally the manager who came down to threaten us.” Of all the actors, “Shirley was our undoubted favourite, and the streets were filled with Shirley Temple look-alikes, with sausage curls, short frocks with puffed sleeves, and patent-leather shoes with taps on them.”
²⁶
Here imitating Shirley Temple appears to be as joyous a pleasure as watching her onscreen, and one spontaneously enacted by children without mediating adults. Under Shirley’s spell, everyday sidewalks could become Hollywood sets.

Yet “carefree” is not the word that characterized most people’s lives during the Great Depression. The economic crisis, as we have seen, carried massive emotional ramifications, and among the children drawn to Shirley Temple in the 1930s were those who most craved a portion of her indomitable spirit. Shirley’s repeated triumphs of healing, of building new families out of once broken hearts, spoke to audiences everywhere. Her feats carried special power for those yearning for deliverance from their families’ miseries: poverty, prejudice, divorce, abandonment, alcoholism, derangement, sexual abuse—all of the woes of childhood. The darkest of these troubles, of course, never appeared in Shirley’s films, but viewers in need could easily adapt her plots to fit their individual circumstances.

Reminiscences prepared decades later reveal precisely how individual girls invested Shirley Temple with their own deep longings, often in collaboration with their mothers. Such accounts, of course, are interpretations as much as recollections, but common patterns clearly emerge across region, nation, religion, ethnicity, class, and individual circumstances.

The painter Ruth Kligman, who first became famous as the muse and mistress of the action painter Jackson Pollock, gave special prominence in her 1974 memoir to her experience in a Shirley Temple look-alike contest. One of twin sisters, Ruth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1930, to a mother still in her teens. Her father, a local con man, never lived with the family, and her mother’s Russian Jewish parents spurned them. She remembered a childhood racked with sadness and paranoia: “My mother was always crying, always unhappy about facing the outside world . . . wanting to be something else. She cried, I cried, and my twin sister cried, we all cried in a kind of horrible unison. I never knew what was wrong. But the outside world represented terror.”
²⁷

From such misery the local movie house provided a rare haven of happiness, and Ruth, who later acquired the dark beauty of a Hollywood star, attended avidly. Once her mother learned of a statewide Shirley Temple look-alike contest, sponsored by the
Newark News
. To enter, aspirants needed to provide a photograph, and, it went without saying, it had to include some semblance of Shirley’s famous curls. So Ruth’s mother laboriously curled her dark-eyed twin daughters’ dark-brown hair, garbed them in Shirley Temple dresses, and had them photographed at Bamberger’s massive Newark department store, “our big faces smiling and our bodies back to back in the pose making us look like Siamese twins.” The next week Mrs. Kligman proudly escorted her curly-coiffed daughters to a large hall for the preliminary judging. Four decades later, Ruth Kligman still ached from the episode: “I think it was the biggest room and the largest assortment of people together I had ever seen. . . . Every little blonde girl in the state of New Jersey was there that day, from all the hundreds of suburbs, all those sweet-looking little girls with curls and thin bodies and gold lockets around their necks, and the mothers looked so good, so wealthy and well dressed.”
²⁸