Shirley Temple Read online

Still under contract to Hays, Shirley made two more films for Educational in 1933, Merrily Yours and Dora’s Dunkin’ Doughnuts, both shorts but with longer (twenty-two-minute) formats. Her role in the ZaSu Pitts film had given Hays (as Pitts had predicted) a new image of Shirley as a mischievous little girl with an angelic face. Now five, she was able to handle dialogue and developed scenes. Both these shorts were simple comedies slanted toward family entertainment. Merrily Yours was the first of four stories (part of a series called Frolics of Youth) that Shirley would do about the Rogers family, teenage Sonny (Junior Coughlin), Mary Lou (Shirley) and their parents (Harry Myers and Helene Chadwick*). The Rogers family series had all the earmarks of latter-day television situation comedies, and Shirley was winning as, with innocent guilelessness, she poured water over the kid (Kenneth Howell) who bullies her older brother. In Dora’s Dunkin’ Doughnuts (which also featured the Meglin Kiddies Band), she effectively played second banana to bumbling comedian Andy Clyde’s absent-minded teacher, sabotaging his radio appearance to advertise the doughnuts made by his sweetheart, Dora (Florence Gill).

  Gertrude saw no future in the short comedies Hays was making. Hays, however, still had a contract for Shirley’s services. Her salary with Educational was now fifteen dollars a day, but she had been paid fifty dollars a day for Out All Night, the difference going directly to Educational. Hays saw Shirley’s potential, and hearing of a feature western at Paramount that had some kids’ roles in it, went to see the director, Henry Hathaway, whom he had known for years.

  The film, a Zane Grey story, To the Last Man, was to star tall, rugged Randolph Scott and vivacious, blond Esther Ralston as star-crossed lovers in a war between two western families. A small girl was needed to play Ralston’s little sister. “[Hays] came to me,” Hathaway recalled, “and said, ‘Henry, I have this kid under contract and her mother won’t let me off the hook [to find parts for her, but] she’s getting too big to play these kids in diapers.’” He showed Hathaway some photographs of Shirley and asked him to audition her. She bore a resemblance to Ralston, and Hathaway readily agreed. After seeing her, he gave her the part. For the first and only time, she was listed in the credits as Shirley Jane Temple, Gertrude’s choice, perhaps to distance her from the Baby Burlesks.

  Cast as her brother was another child actor, Delmar Watson, one of nine Watson children who all appeared in films. “The family lived near Mack Sennett’s studio, so when they needed a child they’d say, ‘What size kid do you want, boy or girl? Go down to the Watsons,’” fellow child-actor Dickie Moore remembers. The Watsons were managed by their father, Coy Watson, who had been a propman, assistant director, a special-effects artist and a cowboy (and often an Indian) in early western films. “Many of us [child actors] felt Coy would go to any length to advance his kids’ careers,” Moore adds. “You had to watch your ribs when you were in a scene with them,” Moore says Jackie Coogan told him, “[or] they’d poke you out of the way with an elbow.” Coy Watson had a rough manner. “He wore plaid shirts with striped ties, blue socks with green pants . . .” but he knew movies inside and out, and especially what had to be done to protect and promote the financial resources of the children in his charge.

  Gertrude was quick to see that she could learn a lot from Coy Watson and, despite his reputation, became friendly with him. Watson advised her to take a year off Shirley’s age* at all job interviews to prolong her juvenile status. He did not believe in signing a child to a studio contract, since the studio usually profited more from this than the child. “I was seven and Shirley four or five [actually she was five] when we made To the Last Man, ” Delmar Watson recalls. “She was fun and had true charisma—and she went after whatever she wanted. Once she pushed me off my father’s lap and sat there herself. Whenever she could she would try to run off and hide from Gertrude. It was supposed to be a game. I remember Gertrude then as being matronly. She wore hats and had no sense of humor. She was very protective of Shirley, called her Shirt in a tone that meant behave, and usually Shirley did.”

  Henry Hathaway had memories of a scene that “called for Shirley to be playing by herself at a little table in a barn, having a tea party. Close by, we had a mule. As Shirley, following the script, poured tea for herself and a pretended guest, the mule wandered over, attracted by the sugar the propman had placed on the table, and began to lick at it.

  “Now this wasn’t in the script. Shirley was irritated and tried to shoo him away. I ordered the camera to keep going, because this began to look good. The mule refused to move and kept on eating the sugar. At this point, Shirley got up from the table and, with her two small hands, tried to push him out of the way.

  “This got the mule irritated. He turned around, and with his two back legs he hauled off at her with a kick. She ducked back and he missed, but instead of stopping or running away, and before we could rush in and grab her away, she strode over and kicked the mule back. She gave one hell of a boot in the ass. This surprised the mule, who ran away . . . She had a magic you couldn’t define . . . an unpredictability . . . inventive, rare for a youngster that age.”

  The film was previewed at the Hollywood Paramount Theater on Thursday, September 7, 1933. “Pair of kids, Delmar Watson and Shirley Jane Temple, are swell troupers,” Variety reported the next day. “Boy’s saving some pups in the height of battle is an effective piece of hokum.”

  Shirley was not yet on her way to stardom. But Gertrude had learned a lesson from Coy Watson: Make sure no other kid in a film is able to steal a scene from your own. In her next picture, As the Earth Turns, * a Warner Brothers potboiler about two warring families, that axiom was put to immediate use, because the cast included fifteen youngsters along with the stars of the film, Donald Woods, Sarah Padden and Russell Hardie. One of the children, Cora Sue Collins, was to become a child star within a year, and had the main child’s role in the movie. Shirley was cast as Betty Shaw, the youngest of the Shaw family’s ten children. Gertrude signed the contract, which paid two hundred dollars for two weeks’ work.

  As Christmas, 1933, approached, Shirley was steadily employed, first with Pardon My Pups (released in 1934), and then Managed Money, and What to Do?, all part of the series on the Rogers family. Educational had gone bankrupt. With the bill collectors at his heels, Jack Hays had vanished. Charles Lamont had been signed as a director by Universal, but Shirley and Gertrude were on their own, making the rounds.*

  The House of Connelly by Paul Green had been a successful Broadway play. Fox Pictures bought it as a vehicle for Lionel Barrymore (as Bob Connelly, titular head of the Southern Connelly family) and Janet Gaynor (as the Yankee farm girl he does not want his son, Robert Young, to marry). Set in post-Civil War times, the story, retitled Carolina, was a romanticized vision of a fading South and a family’s restoration to its once proud and supercilious state. Shirley was hired by director Henry King for some tag scenes at the end of the film, which showed Gaynor and Young happily married and the parents of a crinolined, curly-topped daughter,†

  “Shirley was too young to read,” Robert Young recalls. “In order for her to learn her lines, her mother would read the script to her . . . so eventually in this process . . . she literally learned all of the lines, which wasn’t particularly unusual or outstanding, but everyone thought it was somewhat miraculous. Her mother coached her on which way to look when a person spoke, and so forth. You might say the direction was done by her mother and not by the film’s director.

  “In this one scene she was in with Lionel Barrymore, she was told to stand by the rocker he sat in. He suffered with severe arthritis, so painful he couldn’t walk except with a cane and with difficulty. Anyway, I was standing behind Shirley and there was a nice little casual scene—not terribly important—and Lionel (who was on drugs, pain killers and things—’cause he was in a great deal of intense pain) got stuck, couldn’t remember his lines.

  “Shirley, in that sweet, wonderful, innocent naïveté of a child, told Mr. Barrymore what his line was—‘Mr. Barr
ymore, you’re supposed to say so-and-so here’—having no idea of what impact that would have on him. Well, he let out a roar like a singed cat, and people came running. I grabbed her by the arm, because I thought surely if he ever got his hands on her, he’d crush her head or choke her to death. I don’t think he would have. But . . . this was a dramatic moment. There was a great deal of scurrying around on the set. Finally, the director [King] came, and they talked for quite a little time and eventually Barrymore calmed down and the scene went on from there. I’ll never forget that moment. . . . It was never photographed, but it was a memorable moment in the shooting of that film.”

  With stars of the caliber of Barrymore and Gaynor, and with Henry King’s recent great success with State Fair, Shirley’s small role in Carolina seemed to be that big break for which Gertrude had been praying. But Gertrude’s hopes were smashed when Carolina opened at the Music Hall in New York on February 20, 1934. Not only had Shirley’s name been omitted from the credits, her scene with Barrymore had been severely cut, along with some nice footage with Gaynor and Young. She appeared in two short scenes, but the child who knew everyone’s dialogue never uttered a word on screen.

  Footnotes

  *Gertrude’s dolls became the first in Shirley Temple’s famous doll collection and remained with it when the collection was placed on display in Los Angeles at the California Museum of Science and Industry in Exposition Park in 1960. The collection was moved to the Stanford Children’s Convalescent Hospital in Palo Alto in 1979.

  *The author of this book was raised in Los Angeles and recalls attending Meglin Dance Studios at age six in 1933 and being taught a rather titillating version of “Oh, You Nasty Man” to sing and dance to. She can also remember another child her age who collapsed in dance class in pain and with a high fever and who died a few days later of a ruptured appendix. A talent scout was expected the day of the class, and the story that circulated was that the child’s mother insisted she attend although obviously not well. Whether true or not, the story points out the atmosphere at the school during the early thirties.

  *Her first payroll invoice, dated January 9, 1932, and signed by Jack Hays, notes this amount included overtime.

  *This same routine was religiously followed as Temple’s career progressed and the scenes and dialogue became much more complicated.

  *Theodore von Eltz was to gain recognition as a shady pornographer-blackmailer in The Big Sleep (1946) and as the star of the 1950’s television serial One Man's Family. He also appeared in three more films with Temple: Change of Heart and Bright Eyes (1934) and Since You Went Away (1946). Grant Withers appeared again with Temple in Fort Apache (1948).

  *The 1924 silent version (made the previous year) of the movie Temple remade as a talkie in 1936.

  *George White made three Scandals films in 1934, 1935 and 1945. Temple is referring to the 1934 George White’s Scandals (filmed in 1933) which starred Alice Faye in her film debut singing “Oh, You Nasty Man,” a lavish production number that did include some small girls.

  *Chadwick had been a leading lady in silent films, but had not weathered the transition to sound.

  *Until 1936, when an enterprising reporter sought out her birth certificate, Temple was believed to have been born in 1929. The studio still gave out the later birth date so that the general public, and even Shirley herself thought she was younger. Not until Shirley’s twenty-first birthday, on April 23, 1949, did she publicly admit she was one year older than the original printed record.

  *Previously unknown as a film in which Temple appeared, As the Earth Turns was made at Warner Brothers in November 1933. Temple’s contract is dated October 31, 1933, and holds Mrs. Temple responsible for her daughter’s attire in the movie. The contract is in the Warner Brothers Film Archives at the University of Southern California.

  *Two years later, in 1935, Hays reappeared and, claiming that he still had Temple under contract, attempted to sue for a percentage of her earnings, but Educational Films’ bankruptcy had invalidated the contract, and the case was dismissed.

  †All prints of this film have been lost. Robert Young has reconstructed the plot printed here as he recalled it. He also places the Barrymore-Temple confrontation as occurring during the making of Carolina. and not in a later film. as has been previously reported.

  3 THE BETTER PART of two years had passed since Shirley had made her first short film. She could now be called “a screen veteran,” and had appeared in four feature films. But, unlike Dickie Moore, who had played the title role in Oliver Twist (1933), and Jackie Cooper, who starred with Wallace Beery in The Bowery (1933) and as Peck’s Bad Boy (1934), Shirley was a bit player. Gertrude was beginning to despair. Her fortieth birthday had just passed and Shirley was approaching her sixth, and would soon have to be enrolled in the first grade.

  The country boasted a new president, a Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a new Cabinet. For the unemployed, whose condition was desperate, there was federal relief. The New Deal had gone to the rescue of the farm population. Prohibition, after a reign of nearly fourteen years, had finally been repealed. Because the five-day week had been begun to appease workers whose pay had been drastically reduced, millions of people, rich and poor, found themselves with Saturdays free. The capital investors in the movies preferred to steer clear of awkward issues, not to run the risk of offending audiences abroad or at home. In the first three years of the decade, Paramount had been on the verge of bankruptcy, Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) was in receivership, and with the exception of Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, all the other film companies were struggling to remain solvent. Now, movies became the great escape. And they prospered.

  More pictures, some of them excellent, were produced in 1934 than in 1932 and 1933 combined; comedies like It Happened One Night and Twentieth Century, historical dramas like Cleopatra and Catherine the Great, adventure stories like Treasure Island with Jackie Cooper and Wallace Beery and Viva Villa! with Beery as Pancho Villa, and musicals, musicals, musicals—Astaire and Rogers in The Gay Divorcee, Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald in The Merry Widow, Al Jolson in Wonder Bar, Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell in Dames, Eddie Cantor in Kid Millions, Bing Crosby in Here's My Heart, Rudy Vallee and Alice Faye in George White’s Scandals (the film to which Shirley had gone on “call” while it was in preproduction). Gertrude stepped up Shirley’s dance lessons and taught her all the popular songs of the day.

  Studios often did two-reel featurettes (running time: about twenty minutes) that served as screen tests for a newcomer with promise. Shirley’s musical ability had not been proved. What singing she had done in the Baby Burlesks had been parodies of adult stars. With Henry Hathaway’s help, she was placed in a Paramount two-reeler titled New Deal Rhythm with Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Marjorie Main. Rogers was under contract to Paramount as a light, romantic lead. Between movies, he sang with and led his own band on tour. New Deal Rhythm was filmed with a threefold purpose—to see if Rogers was suitable for musical leads, if Marjorie Main (who had been playing dramatic character parts) had comedy appeal, and to test Shirley’s ability. The darkly handsome, dreamy-eyed Rogers was known to be having an affair with the decade-older Mary Pickford, still married at the time to Douglas Fairbanks. (Asked by a columnist if he ever intended to marry, Rogers had replied, “No, the woman I love is already married.”) Shirley came alive in this short film. She radiated charm, sang one song alone and one in a duet with Rogers, followed by one of Ethel Meglin’s tap routines. Paramount was impressed. They had a Damon Runyon story, Little Miss Marker, in development that had a girl her age as a main character. But studios were wary of signing a child for a film not scheduled for immediate production. A great many changes could take place in a moppet’s appearance over a few months—size, missing teeth, weight loss or gain. With their finances still shaky, Paramount did not want to encumber itself with a salary for a performer who might be idle for many months. Once again, Gertrude was left to make the rounds of the studios. />
  Her spirits were lifted when a call came for an audition at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank for a role in a Kay Francis film, Mandalay. After they had made the hour drive over the mountains in teeming rain from Santa Monica to the valley, she and Shirley found the huge, barnlike audition room crowded with other little girls, many of them Meglin tots. Shirley won the role, but it turned out to be little more than a walk-on (she played the child of a couple* who ran a boarding house), and was not included in the cast credits.†

  George had begun to lose heart in Gertrude’s enterprise. He did not doubt Shirley’s intelligence or her ability to “sparkle” on screen, but he saw the situation more realistically than his wife. The auditions and the work experience were not child’s play. Shirley’s Alice-in-Wonderland view of film-making could quickly become a child’s nightmare if a lack of success made her feel responsible for her mother’s disappointment. Then there was his own guilt. The money Shirley had earned in the two and a half years she had been acting had not been a large enough sum to cover much more than the cost of the costumes Gertrude made for her, her lessons, and the running of the car. The eight Baby Burlesks had paid an accumulative $320 over two years; the four Frolics of Youth (the Rogers-family films) $240; the four appearances in feature pictures a scant $500 and the featurette at Paramount $75: a total of $1,135. He asked Gertrude to give up, enroll their daughter in the first grade (she would be six on April 23); and if Shirley eventually decided to become an actress, then they could reconsider.

  On the night of January 29, a Monday, Shirley’s last Frolics of Youth, What to Do?, was being shown at the Fox Ritz Theater along with the Warner Baxter-Dick Powell-Ruby Keeler musical 42nd Street. Short subjects and newsreels were always first on the bill (to allow patrons time to buy popcorn, find their seats and go with the kiddies to the bathroom). The Temples took Shirley to see herself on-screen. They left directly after the short. Because it was raining, Gertrude and Shirley waited under the marquee while George went to fetch the car.