The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (7 page)

To an extraordinary degree, in the early days of the New Deal it was Roosevelt’s cheerful confidence, above all his smile, that people praised and emulated. “Smile like Roosevelt,” a New York minister urged his flock: “The infectious smile of President Roosevelt should set the example for the entire people of the United States.” Indeed, Roosevelt’s smile became so fixed in the public mind in the early days of the New Deal that when in 1934 a painter bowed to the president’s wish and removed a smile from his official portrait, the event made news. The artist, Ellen Emmet Rand, had “felt that the President did not look ‘just right’ without one.” Pushing such a desire to the point of absurdity, in October 1933 the magazine
Vanity Fair
published a full-page photomontage of the grinning Roosevelt, so refracted as to assume a hallucinatory effect. Under the title “A Laughing Cavalier,” the caption read, “For the first time in many years the Nation’s Chief Executive is a man who understands the value of a grin.”
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FDR’s deep laugh also became celebrated. In contrast to Hoover, who never laughed aloud, Roosevelt easily burst into boisterous peals of mirth. “There never was another laugh like Franklin Roosevelt’s,” the writer Fulton Oursler remembered. “Over the chasm of the years I can hear it now clearly and distinctly—as joyous, hearty, rolling, thunderous laughter as ever was heard on this sorrowful globe.” Such laughter, too, had its uses. His devoted secretary Marguerite “Missy” LeHand spoke of his infectious “political laugh,” by which he could make everyone around him similarly erupt in mirth, even if the joke was a weak one.
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The leading Republican congressman Joseph W. Martin, a vigorous opponent of the New Deal, knew how beguiling FDR’s smile could be and stood vigilant to revive fellow Republicans who fell under its spell. At one reception when Roosevelt turned on all of “his radiance,” Martin recalled, “I could see the face of one of my men from Ohio lighting up like the moon. As quickly as I could manage I took him aside. ‘Get rid of that moonglow,’ I told him. ‘Remember what we’re up against in this fellow. Don’t swallow all that hokum.’ ”
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In time some journalists voiced similar complaints. James L. Wright of the
Buffalo Evening News
grumbled, “Mr. Roosevelt is a man with the air of candor, but lacking in candor. He adroitly sidesteps and dodges. Unless one is hypnotized by being called by his first name, and will trade a presidential smile for a piece of news, he must admit that is so.”
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For many of his opponents, indeed, Roosevelt’s smile was especially galling, like that of a Cheshire Cat. The caustic critic H. L. Mencken referred to it as Roosevelt’s “Christian Science smile,” for him a damning epithet. Satirists quickly penned ditties such as “His Enigmatic Smile”:

Twinkle, twinkle little Grin

Up above the world of din.

Never worried, so serene,

How I wonder what you mean.

In a similar vein, in 1935 the
Northwestern Miller
published:

I’m tired, oh, so tired, of the whole New Deal,

Of the juggler’s smile and the barker’s spiel,

Of the mushy speech and the loud bassoon,

And tiredest of all of all our leader’s croon.
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Roosevelt, in turn, mocked his critics at a Gridiron Club dinner in December 1936, shortly after his overwhelming reelection, in which the Republican candidate, Alf Landon, carried only two states. Remarking on the newspaper caricatures of him, he said, “One morning, about the middle of October, I became curious about this man Roosevelt and I went to a beautiful, old mirror of the early Federal period and took a careful look at him in the glass. He smiled. I remembered that one of the most damning indictments that had been brought against him was that self-same smile. I smiled back. And after a careful examination I decided that all that this villain looked like to me was a man who wanted to be re-elected President of the United States.”
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And where precisely were Roosevelt’s smiles and friendly salutations leading? The adulation that showered Roosevelt, a response massively intensified by his masterful control of radio, alarmed opponents and concerned some observers, who saw in his emotional appeals the presence—or at least the potential—of a master manipulator bent on sinister, perhaps dictatorial ends. On the occasion of Roosevelt’s second fireside chat in May 1933, the
New York Times
remarked appreciatively, “A wonderful new political instrument is placed in the hands of the President of the United States.” Yet even while praising his use of radio to instruct and reassure the public, the writer observed, “He might use the radio to agitate or inflame. In the hands of an unscrupulous demagogue it might become a public danger.” The ability to forge and shape public opinion, to invite a personal relationship with unseen listeners through impersonal means, the slippage between speaking
to
and speaking
for
the “people”—all carried disquieting implications at a time when the distinctly unsmiling Hitler had made radio a central instrument of Nazism. Roosevelt triumphantly claimed that through the bundles of mail he received daily, he was closer to public opinion than other politicians or reporters. (“Hoover got 400 letters a day,” he said; “I get 4000.”) Yet Father Charles Coughlin, the controversial and anti-Semitic “radio priest” who achieved significant political influence almost exclusively through his popular radio broadcasts in the early 1930s, made similar claims based on the letters he received. “I am not boasting when I say I know the pulse of the people.” Similarly, Huey Long defended his autocratic control of Louisiana government, saying, “A man is not a dictator when he does the will of the people.”
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The material and emotional needs of the Great Depression, together with the enhanced power of new media to reach a broad public, created new possibilities for charismatic leaders in the United States and abroad. Even as it inspired millions, the very power of Roosevelt’s warm voice and broad smile remained controversial. Under his administration the federal government, once a distant force for most American citizens except in time of war, massively extended its presence into their lives.

Yet while Hitler and Mussolini employed radio and other media to inflame, Roosevelt used them to inform. Mussolini’s arrogant boast “The crowd does not have to know; it must believe” would have been regarded by FDR as the vilest sort of profanity. Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin saw themselves as supreme embodiments of the popular will and taste.
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Roosevelt never did. Instead of using the powers at his command to raise himself above his constituents or to stir their darker emotions, he embodied confidence in the ability of the democratic process to meet the greatest economic challenge the country had ever faced. To be sure, he could infuriate opponents with his mixture of cheer and calculation, patrician charm and democratic warmth, irrepressible optimism and immense emotional effort. But fundamentally, Roosevelt reasserted a broad emotional spirit that transcended partisan division. To return to Frances Perkins’s phrase, he “made people feel better” when they greatly needed to do so. Hollywood provided considerable help in this effort, especially with its golden-haired discovery Shirley Temple.

CHAPTER 2 SUCH A HAPPY LITTLE FACE!

While banks failed and Hoover frowned, Gertrude Temple delighted in dressing and grooming her baby daughter. After Shirley lost her blond baby curls, her mother gave her weekly peroxide washes and set her hair in ringlets each night.
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Then, when her daughter was barely three, Gertrude Temple enrolled her in Ethel Meglin’s nearby dance studio, a magnet for mothers who were eager to launch their offspring into show business. Children at the studio automatically became “Meglin Kiddies,” a talent pool that the former Ziegfeld Follies dancer exhibited in her annual Christmas revue and booked for stage and movie appearances. Three years earlier, Ethel Gumm had taken her three daughters to the studio, playing the piano to pay for lessons, and delighted in their movie debut the following year. The youngest of the sisters was the future Judy Garland.

Burning brightly as they did, the dreams of the vast majority of such mothers and their children faded and died, sometimes with agonizing slowness. The former child star “Baby Peggy” Montgomery, Diana Serra Cary, one of the most popular and lucrative child performers in 1920s silent movies, later observed that in the years when the child craze reached its height, approximately a hundred children and their families “poured into the Hollywood marketplace every fifteen minutes.” Probably only one in fifteen thousand of these hopefuls earned as much as a single week’s expenses in a year, she estimated. Roughly half packed their bags and went back home within a few months. A small fraction, “perhaps grubstaked by a husband’s salary or a relative’s nest egg . . . , might hold on for a year before giving up the fight. That left a small, fanatical corps of iron-willed survivors, women who preferred starvation and death to abandoning their dearly won positions before the very gates of fame.”
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Shirley Temple’s initial break was a small one. Shortly before Thanksgiving 1931, two men scouting for talent spotted Shirley at the dance studio. They were Jack Hays and Charles Lamont of Educational Films Corporation, one of the lesser movie studios collectively known as “Poverty Row” scattered along outer Santa Monica Boulevard west of Hollywood. After a screen test, Hays offered the Temple family a contract, under which little Shirley would make a series of one-reel comedy spoofs. She would be paid ten dollars a day, but only for the days of actual film shooting, two per short. Rehearsals were unpaid. Gertrude Temple would earn five dollars a week during filming for her services as Shirley’s seamstress, hairdresser, and chauffeur. The contract bound Shirley to the studio for two years. If Educational Films lent her to other studios, the Temples would receive a percentage of her earnings. “Maybe by that time she will be worth a lot of money,” Gertrude wrote her mother, Maude. “This all sounds like a fairy story.”
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Gertrude and Shirley Temple. (Photofest/Fox)

Little girls do not always fare well in fairy stories, however, and if the men at Educational Films were not wolves or ogres, neither were they fairy godmothers. Between December 1931 and early 1934 Shirley made eight one-reel movies (running ten to eleven minutes each) in the Baby Burlesks series and four in the two-reeler Frolics of Youth series. The casts consisted entirely of Meglin Kiddies, and the children were also obliged to pose for publicity photographs and advertisements. So Shirley Temple first smiled on the broad public anonymously from cornflakes boxes, candy-bar and chewing-gum wrappers, and cigar bands.
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In addition, she acted in minor roles in several feature-length films, earning altogether only around a thousand dollars before her appearance in
Stand Up and Cheer!
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The Baby Burlesks were aimed at adults rather than children, and Shirley’s roles teetered on the cusp between innocence and flirtatiousness, characteristics that clung to her film persona. In the tradition of earlier children’s impersonations of famous adult actors, such as those by “Baby Peggy” Montgomery in the early 1920s and by Jane Withers performing (beginning at age three) as “Dixie’s Dainty Dewdrop” on Atlanta radio in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the shorts spoofed well-known feature-length movies, with young children caricaturing adult roles.
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To heighten the absurdity of their mimicry, Jack Hays dressed the boys in huge diapers secured with giant safety pins.

The initial film of the series epitomized its brand of farce.
Runt Page
lampooned the tough-talking film comedy
The Front Page
(1931), which was based, in turn, on Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play of 1928. The comic short begins with well-dressed adults drinking, talking, and laughing around a dining table as they appreciatively discuss
The Front Page
. Shirley Temple plays a little girl sitting in her high chair behind the table. As they talk, her head topples in sleep, and a compressed version of
The Front Page
unfolds in her dream. The scene is the press room of the county jail, where reporters play cards as they wait for a condemned man’s execution, necessitated not so much by his guilt as by the rivalries of Chicago politicians. Little boys in diapers, collars, neckties, and hats stand in for adults who speak their lines in deep voices on the soundtrack, in many cases in thick ethnic accents. The effect is to provide viewers with absurd juxtapositions of image and sound: they see children and hear adults, so that the children seem like adult dwarfs and their doings provide ludicrous analogies to the tough-talking hard-boiled action. So when the character playing ace reporter Hildy Johnson (the name is burlesqued as Bilgy) speaks of taking a drink, the toddler playing his role takes a swig from a baby bottle. When the same character starts to leave the room with his suitcase and it falls open, baby clothes and paraphernalia spill out. Shirley appears relatively late in the action and has very few lines. The film purports to give viewers her dream, but it actually presents an adult fantasy about children who have nothing childlike about themselves except their bodies. The children literally go through the motions of adult characters without, presumably, comprehending anything about the drama they are enacting.