The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (21 page)

Shirley plays with her look-alike doll: “I have such fun curling my dolly’s hair. Now I can always keep her looking nice.” (Photofest/Twentieth Century–Fox)

Of course, in the grip of the Great Depression, many children and their families could not afford such dolls. Some entered contests, hoping to win a Shirley Temple doll by coloring a drawing of the child star or writing a short essay. In 1934 two hundred children wrote letters to the manager of the Republic theatre in Brooklyn, New York, saying why they would like to win a life-size Shirley Temple doll for Christmas. They poured out tributes to Shirley and vividly imagined themselves in her roles. “She is the littlest girl that can do the biggest things in the movies,” one of the winning contestants wrote. Nine-year-old Amelia Ungolo, who won first prize, said, “Shirley acts so as to make everyone in the audience dance, sing and laugh in his seat. Shirley Temple has a beautiful smile. When I see her smile I can’t help but smile back at her.”
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Other young girls who could not afford a doll wrote directly to Eleanor Roosevelt, to whom they also felt a personal bond, cultivated by newsreels, radio, magazines, and newspapers, beseeching her help. In 1935 a Chicago girl wrote:

Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,

You have nieces and sons who were young and some still are wanted a thing very much but tried hard to get it and can’t. I a girl from Chicago have tried so so hard to get five suscriptions to get a 22 inch Shirley Temple [doll] which the Daily Chicago Tribune is giving away. It is cheap for at 65 cents a month you get daily paper. You have millions of friends couldn’t you please ask them to take for one year at 65 cents a month the Daily Chicago Tribune. I don’t know how I’d ever thank you if you got them. I know one thing I’d pray with all my heart in Holy Mass and when receiving Holy Communion pray to God to bless you and all. Please please do help me. Here is a picture of the Shirley Temple. [A cutout picture was enclosed.] If you do get them send them as soon as you can.

Yours truly,

[Signature]
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A few months later, in spring 1936, a younger girl wrote Mrs. Roosevelt with a similar request:

I am 6 years old this is my first year in school i am a little colored gi
^rl
my name is B. J. R. I wish you wood please send me a Sherley temple Doll because my doll got broke i will take good care of the doll if you sen me one please Answer. My daddy helped me to writ you yours with lots of kisses XXXXXX

B. J. R.
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In such ways the ache for consumer goods affected virtually all children in the Great Depression, whether they could afford them or not. A Shirley Temple doll was certainly not a physical necessity, but it could serve as a psychological comfort, a transitional object assisting the child’s developing independence from her mother. In this respect, it may have been most needed by those most exposed to the insecurities of the Great Depression. Yet the transition led two ways: from the elemental comforts of family and toward the consumer comforts of the market economy. The letters also remind us that the obverse side of consumer pleasures in the 1930s, which Shirley Temple embodied, was the deep ache of consumer envy.
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Like her films and fashions, Shirley Temple dolls achieved international distribution. Ideal sold doll molds to companies in Canada, Australia, and Latin America. In some other countries, companies produced authorized Shirley Temple dolls from different materials: a cloth body and pressed felt face mask with painted features in Great Britain and France, two composition versions in Germany, a celluloid version with a mohair wig in Poland, and similar versions in Holland and elsewhere. Japanese manufactures made a number of unauthorized composition Shirley Temple dolls and exported them for the American market, underselling Ideal.
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Yet the biggest threat to Ideal’s sales was not its domestic and foreign competitors but Shirley’s waning luster. In 1937, as Shirley took on more dramatic roles in
Wee Willie Winkie
and
Heidi
, Ideal’s doll sales slumped. Varying the Shirley Temple formula in dolls much as Darryl Zanuck was doing in her movies, Ideal allowed her to grow up slightly. The dolls acquired a higher forehead, slimmer, rosier cheeks, more defined eyebrows, darker lips, and a side-parted wig with less distinct curls. She also wore longer, more modest skirts. None of these innovations revived sales, however, and neither did lowered prices. By the late 1930s Ideal had other film stars in their stable of dolls, including Judy Garland, Deanna Durbin, Pinocchio, and Snow White. The company finally announced the Shirley Temple dolls’ retirement in December 1940, half a year after the Temple family ended Shirley’s contract with Twentieth Century–Fox. By this time the public had spent an estimated $45 million on Shirley Temple dolls. The most popular doll to that time in history took her final bow, not to return for almost twenty years.
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Shirley Temple’s films, products, and endorsements collectively stimulated the American consumer economy at a crucial time, so much so that to some she appeared to be a relief program all by herself. With his tongue only partly in cheek, Frank Dillon, writing in the fan magazine
Modern Screen
in December 1935, recalled how “a year ago when things looked bleak and hopeless all over the country, when no conversation was ever concluded without a few groans over the depression, Washington held out helping hands in the form of the AAA [Agricultural Adjustment Administration], NRA [National Recovery Administration], SERA [State Emergency Relief Administration], and many other alphabetical combinations.” Still, he observed, “one depression cure has made greater strides toward a complete mental and financial recovery than all the other remedies put together,” and that was the TRA, a program originating in Hollywood rather than Washington, and one that the Supreme Court could not declare unconstitutional. The TRA, he explained with mock solemnity, stood for the Temple Recovery Act, led by Shirley Temple. “Not content with cheering up half the civilized population of the world,” the writer continued, “she has done a man’s size job of bringing about financial recovery for a great many people,” from her coworkers in Hollywood to film distributors to the manufacturers of dolls, dresses, and other Shirley Temple products. Dillon did not attempt a comprehensive estimate of how many workers could trace at least a part of their jobs to Shirley Temple, for that would have been incalculable. Certainly within the United States alone they would have numbered in the tens of thousands. A grand parade of their legions would have easily dwarfed the extravagant parade of workers that ended Shirley’s 1934 breakthrough film,
Stand Up and Cheer!
As is so often the case, life imitated and surpassed art.
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CHAPTER 5 KEEPING SHIRLEY’S STAR ALOFT

When Shirley Temple’s beaming smile and indomitable spirit first seized the public fancy in 1934, most film industry observers thought that she would be a shooting star, flaring briefly and then vanishing. When in 1935 she soared to the position of top American and international box-office attraction, they were astounded. That she retained this position for three more years, setting a record never equaled, confounded all expectations. Fox producers, distributors, and exhibitors worked energetically to keep her star aloft, but they were never sanguine they could do so. For them, the most exciting and suspenseful Shirley Temple story concerned how long her charmed life as a child star could last. They feared two things above all: the fickle nature of the moviegoing public and the perishable character of Shirley’s cuteness. They tried to preserve both as long as possible.

In the golden age of the studio system, movie stars were popularly imagined as made in Hollywood, the “dream factory,” as surely as American automobiles were made in Detroit.
¹
Yet among Hollywood stars, far more than automobiles, there were thousands of potential models to choose from, and public response determined which would become most popular and profitable. Whether the studio strenuously prepared a potential star, changing her name, teeth, hair, makeup, wardrobe, place of birth, parentage, and life history, or, as in the case of Shirley Temple, left her for audiences to discover, they could only launch careers, not determine their course. Actors’ images and personae circulated in a complex, multidirectional chain linking producers and publicists, distributors, exhibitors, journalists, retailers, and moviegoers in first-run and small, independent theaters, with numerous other interests all along the way. Stars might be conceived in Hollywood, but they were born in the collective responses of the moviegoing public.

That public was far from passive. Although it never spoke with one voice, it expressed its preferences powerfully. It did so most obviously in box-office receipts and more articulately (if less reliably) in praise and complaints to local movie exhibitors, opinion polls, fan mail, and the like. The challenge for the film industry, then, was both to follow that public and to lead it, to anticipate its desires, to satisfy its expectations, and to expand its dimensions. Sustaining Shirley Temple’s place as a star thus involved continued negotiation between moviemakers and moviegoers as to what a Shirley Temple movie should be.

The two men most responsible for devising and perfecting the Shirley Temple formula were Winfield Sheehan, head of production at Fox until its merger with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935, and Darryl Zanuck, who succeeded him. Both knew the necessity of keeping this public always in mind—and the impossibility of consistently satisfying it. By the time Sheehan met and signed a contract with Shirley Temple and her parents shortly before Christmas 1933, he had amassed considerable experience in gauging public sentiment. A former reporter for the
New York World
, he began working for William Fox in 1914 and quickly became his “right-hand man.”
²
He played a significant role in expanding the Fox empire overseas, establishing Fox branches in forty-nine countries. In addition, as head of production for Fox studios beginning in 1926, he early sensed the potential of sound to transform the movie industry. From his first years at Fox, he helped to develop a veritable galaxy of stars, including Theda Bara (born Theodosia Goodman), Tom Mix, Will Rogers, Janet Gaynor, Paul Muni (born Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund), Alice Faye (born Alice Jeanne Leppert), and Warner Baxter.

Even though Sheehan had sensed Shirley’s extraordinary film presence in making
Stand Up and Cheer!
, her spectacular success stunned him. After her breakthrough, he immediately lent Shirley to Paramount for
Little Miss Marker
and
Now and Forever
while he scrambled to find suitable vehicles for her talents. She starred in
Baby Take a Bow
, released on June 30, 1934, and then in
Bright Eyes
. Soon most of Fox’s associate producers were wearing paths to his door with story ideas for his young star. Before Fox Film’s merger with Twentieth Century Pictures in May 1935, three more Shirley Temple films followed:
The Little Colonel
,
Our Little Girl
, and
Curly Top
.
Our Little Girl
, which placed Shirley within a troubled marriage, played poorly, but the other two films pressed closely behind Will Rogers’s
Steamboat Round the Bend
and
In Old Kentucky
as the studio’s most profitable in the domestic market in 1935.
³

When the two companies united as Twentieth Century–Fox, Sheehan formally retained his title—but within two months he was gone. Young Darryl F. Zanuck in effect shoved him aside and assumed the position of vice president and head of production. For the next five years, until August 1940, when Shirley’s parents severed her contract, Zanuck closely supervised her movies for the studio and was the master wizard concocting the Shirley Temple formula.

Sheehan and Zanuck were a study in contrasts. Fat and jolly, with blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and a square jaw, Sheehan needed only a white beard to look like Santa Claus, Shirley Temple Black later wrote. Extravagant in both his professional and personal life (his Beverly Hills mansion included thirty-three servants), he spent lavishly on old-fashioned epics, allowed directors to consume film prodigally, and frequently exceeded his budgets. He regally presided over Fox’s decentralized system of production, a common practice at Hollywood’s major studios by the 1930s, and relied heavily on associate producers, such as Sol M. Wurtzel for
Bright Eyes
, Buddy DeSylva for
The Little Colonel
, and Edward Butcher for
Our Little Girl
. Among the films starring Shirley between
Stand Up and Cheer!
and the time of his ouster, Sheehan personally produced only the last,
Curly Top
.
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