Shirley Temple Read online

  At precisely this time, songwriter Jay Gorney entered the theater with his wife. Gorney had wanted to see 42nd Street(released several months earlier), since he had just been signed by the Fox Film Company to write the music for Baxter’s next musical, then titled Fox Movietone Revue. As he and Mrs. Gorney stepped up to the box office, he noticed Shirley looking at the display photographs of Ruby Keeler dancing in 42nd Street. As she studied them, Shirley hummed out loud and did a few tap steps.

  Gorney recalled:

  I stopped and said to my wife, “Have you ever seen a cuter child?”

  “She’s adorable,” she said.

  I looked around to see who was accompanying her, but saw nobody. Well, I don’t usually talk to strange little girls, but this one was just charming, so I went up to her.

  “Hello,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Shirley.”

  “What’s your last name?’

  “Temple.”

  “Where did you learn to dance?”

  “I go to school.”

  “Are you here alone?” I asked.

  “My mommy’s over there.” I saw a tall attractive woman a few feet away. I went over to her and said I had been talking to that little girl (pointing to Shirley) and she said you are her mommy. “I am,” she said.

  “Has she ever been in the theater or done anything in pictures?” I asked.

  The woman explained that her daughter had been in a number of shorts but nothing more.*

  “Would she like to be in a major film?” I asked.

  “I think so. Certainly, certainly.”

  “Cer’nly would,” Shirley chimed in.

  The mother was a charming woman and she did seem very eager. So I asked her to bring Shirley to my office at the studio the following day. She asked what time, I told her two o’clock. She said she would have her there.

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  I went back to Shirley, who was still looking at the pictures.

  “Your mommy said she will come to my office at the studio and you will come with her,” I said.

  She gave me a big smile.

  Shirley’s version of the meeting at the theater eliminated the element of chance. She claimed Gorney came to see the short, not the main picture, and that he had been brought by Leo Houck, the assistant director from the Scandals audition, with the idea that she should be considered for a part in Fox Movietone Revue. “[Mr. Gorney] asked Mom if I could sing, and she said she guessed so.” Gertrude appeared at the gates of Fox Movietone Studio lot in Hollywood, but the guard told her no one by the name of Jay Gorney worked there. This supposedly went on daily for three days. Finally, Gertrude located Gorney’s home telephone number and called him that same night. It turned out Gorney had been so newly signed by Fox that the news had not yet reached the front gate.

  “If it wasn’t for [Mrs. Temple’s] astuteness and drive, that little thing might have been lost to the world,” Gorney mused. Gertrude appeared at the studio the next day. “I had a little cottage on the lot, with a big grand piano . . . The doorbell rang . . . There stood mother and daughter. ‘We haven’t got much time,’ I told them. ‘I want Shirley to learn this song quickly.’

  “I went to the piano and hoisted Shirley on top and ran through the words just twice [Shirley recalled the song being ‘St. Louis Blues’]. Well, she amazed me. She sang it through perfectly . . . I asked her, ‘Can you dance to that rhythm?’ She said she could, so I told her to stand on the piano and I played a little introduction, ta-da, ta dum-dum-dum, and she went into a tap routine for two choruses.” Shirley remembered doing a buck-and-wing and that Lew Brown, who collaborated with Gorney on songs and had written the screenplay and would co-produce the movie, was also present. They asked her to sing again and she sang a new Rudy Vallee song that Gertrude had rehearsed with her.

  Brown was enthusiastic, and Gorney was ecstatic. They had auditioned close to 150 little girls for the picture, and none of them had been right. Shirley was exactly what was needed. The absurd story of Fox Movietone Revue had the president appointing a secretary of amusement (Baxter) to cheer people up during the still-current Depression. Baxter books touring companies of performers (to be paid by the government) to entertain the population. Somehow gangsters put a snag in the plan, but in the end they are found out, and happiness prevails throughout the land. The song Shirley was to sing, if she got the role, was the big number at the end of the movie. Since Lew Brown had given Jackie Cooper his first featured part in another Fox Movietone Follies (1929), Gertrude was convinced Shirley’s break had finally arrived.

  Gomey had written the music (E. Y. “Yip” Harburg the lyrics) for one of the most popular songs of the Depression, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” and the studio had great hopes that “Baby, Take a Bow” would be equally successful. What the song required was a natural child who could light up the screen with cheer and hope. Gorney went right to the telephone and called Fox’s production head, Winfield Sheehan, and asked him to come over to his bungalow to hear Shirley. Sheehan, a man who considered himself God to his employees, refused; but because Gorney was so insistent, Sheehan finally agreed to be there in fifteen minutes.

  “As we were going through the number again,” Gorney remembered, “the door to my cottage opened and Mr. Sheehan came in. Shirley, still on top of the piano [went through the song and her improvised dance] for him.”

  Sheehan was won over and Shirley was signed for the film (now called Fox Movietone Follies of 1934), to be paid twenty-five dollars a day for a minimum of five days work. Gertrude, wanting to make sure that Shirley felt comfortable, insisted she wear one of her own dresses and brought several in for the approval of the costume department.* Her name appears for the first time on the daily cast call sheets for the picture on February 9, 1934, under Specialty Numbers.

  That day, she claimed, “was the start of my great romance with Jimmy [James] Dunn,” who was one of the supporting players in the picture and was to work with Shirley in the “Baby, Take a Bow” number. “I came in at the close of it,” she remembered, “making my appearance by crawling out from between Jimmy’s legs and joined him in the finale. The studio decided that it would be easier for me to teach Jimmy the dance routine I knew already than for me to learn something different, so my first job at Fox was givingjimmy Dunn dancing lessons.” For the next five working days, she and Dunn rehearsed their routine between the few nonmusical scenes she had to do. When Sheehan saw the daily rushes, he became as enthusiastic about Shirley as Gorney had been, and additions were made to her role and a scene (considered an outtake, to be disposed of) where she fed Dunn his lines (a repeat of the disastrous incident in Carolinawith Barrymore, except that Dunn was amused) was kept in the film.

  Because of the problems of sound recording, musical numbers have always been filmed with the performers going through the motions of singing a song before the camera. The orchestra and voice have been prerecorded in a soundproof studio. Sound and action are then put together in a mixing room.

  Shirley rehearsed all morning on the day they were to record the music track and then film the production number. Around 1:00 P.M., she and Gertrude went to their small portable dressing room to wait to be called to do the recording. After an hour, the child fell asleep, exhausted. “I hadn’t been asleep fifteen minutes,” Shirley remembered, “when they called for me, so up I got, all sleepy-eyed, and we went over to the recording room. [It] was enormous, and the orchestra was enormous, and there were 50 chorus girls in slinky black costumes sitting [on the floor against] . . . the walls. This was the first time I had ever seen an orchestra.

  “They stood me on a table in front of the microphone I was to sing into. We rehearsed once and then made two recordings and in half an hour it was over. . . . Mom and I thought it was all quite ordinary, but apparently everyone, including the director [Hamilton MacFadden], was impressed because I had made two okay recordings after a single rehearsal.”
r />   That evening, after Winfield Sheehan viewed the rushes of the scene, he called Gertrude and asked if she and George could come in to see him the next morning to discuss a long-term contract for Shirley.

  Gertrude remembered Coy Watson’s warnings about signing such a contract with a studio, and George feared that Shirley might lose control over her own wishes. Sheehan offered $150 a week starting salary for a seven-year contract, with incremental raises commensurate with her progress. “I almost fainted from the shock,” Gertrude was quoted as saying a short time later. “I sensed rather than saw, that all this would mean a great change for Shirley. I couldn’t give an answer right then, because I wanted to talk it all over with Mr. Temple.” Sheehan gave them some additional time to think about it. Gertrude convinced George of “the vista of enormous opportunity that was opened to Shirley—the priceless training it would give her, the certainty of a solid financial background when she grew up.” Two days later, they came with Shirley to Sheehan’s office and signed a contract. “We took a taxi all the way [there and] home.” Though the trip was expensive, Gertrude said they could afford to “celebrate.” “Fox wasn’t quite sure how to handle me after Stand Up and Cheer [the final title of Fox Movietone Follies],” Shirley later explained. “. . . [I]t wasn’t easy to find good parts for anyone my age and size. Mr. Sheehan took a personal interest in me and protected me with special orders in the studio. He wouldn’t let me eat in the Fox commissary for fear the other actors would spoil me.” (Actually, she was a bit chubby, and Sheehan and Gertrude were monitoring her meals and did not want her tempted by seeing others served ice cream or french-fried potatoes.)

  Winfield Sheehan was always to be remembered by Shirley as her great protector, the man who made her a star and who kept her safe from danger (kidnapping, overzealous fans) and any undue bad influences. Sheehan was perfectly cast in this real-life role. Once a police reporter on the New York World, he had in 1910 become secretary to the New York fire commissioner and shortly after secretary to the police commissioner, and involved but never indicted in several police-graft cases (one that ended in an unsolved murder). He entered the film industry as strong-arm protection for William Fox, who was fearful of gangster retaliation because of his fight against the Motion Picture Patent Company.* In 1914, Fox rewarded Sheehan with a hundred-dollar-a-week job as his personal secretary. Within two years, Sheehan was made Fox Company’s vice-president and general manager at twenty thousand dollars a year. In 1927, his salary soared astronomically when he became head of production and established distribution centers in London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Rome and Australia.

  William Fox, Sheehan’s mentor and boss, in 1929 acquired the Gaumont chain of theaters in Britain and attempted to take over Loew’s, Inc. (the parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). The bid failed because of the Wall Street crash and the intervention of the Justice Department, which ordered Fox Film Corporation to divest itself of 660,900 newly acquired shares of Loew’s, Inc. In an emotional state, his personal finances near bankruptcy, the film tycoon was to find his problems were not yet over. At this point, he suffered temporary but severely disabling injuries in a car crash. The bankers who held notes on Fox (he had quite recently controlled a three-hundred-million-dollar film empire) deposed and replaced him with Winfield Sheehan (“the same man,” Fox told author Upton Sinclair, “whom I had picked up in 1912 . . . and had rescued from the murder charge they were making against him as Secretary to the Police Commissioner.”)

  Sheehan’s salary leaped from $130,000 a year to $250,000 (within a year this figure would double). Having divorced the Ziegfeld beauty Kay Laurel, he married Metropolitan Opera soprano Maria Jeritza. They lived on a scale considered lavish even for Hollywood, with thirty-three servants employed to care for a forty-room Mediterranean-style palace in Beverly Hills, with its ceilings, doors, grillwork, furniture and art treasures imported from castles in Spain, Italy and France. He kept a five-room suite at the Savoy Plaza in New York, the Savoy in London, and the Ritz in Paris (all paid for by his company).† Glendon Allvine, who was director of advertising and publicity for Fox from 1927 to 1932, claimed Sheehan was “loved, feared and hated, he was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” in all those cities.

  “He was a complex character: affable, sentimental, suspicious, cynical, ruthless, and a squat dynamo of energy. His baby-blue eyes popped out from a florid face that was seldom relaxed . . . Sheehan loved to play God . . . Discovering new talent was one of his favorite preoccupations, for the Fox studios had few big stars under contract, and were not in the same name league witn Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (‘more stars than there are in heaven,’ was their publicity slogan).”

  Sheehan had paired Janet Gaynor with Charles Farrell in the days of the silents, and both were under contract to Fox, as was the ever-popular Will Rogers. But this still left Fox in a position of having to borrow stars from other studios at high loan-out fees. To circumvent this problem, Sheehan set out on a path of “manufacturing new young stars to his own specification.” Allvine recalled that about 1929 Sheehan had “dreamed up the name Dixie Lee and asked me how I liked it. I said it was short, sweet, memorable and would look good in electric lights. . . . He said that he wanted a red-headed blues singer to flush out his Dixie Lee, and told me to run a display ad on the theater page of the [New York] Daily News asking blues singers with red hair to audition . . . Some sixty girls showed up—a few with the red hair dye still wet—and sang their blues. . . . One little girl seemed to have a youthful flair and said she had been in the chorus of Good News . . . I asked her if she would mind changing her name [Wilma Wyatt] . . . to Dixie Lee. For a hundred dollars a week she said that would be O.K.”

  Dixie Lee made several films, then fell in love with and married Bing Crosby, and retired from the screen, but Sheehan had not given up trying to bolster Fox’s star roster. About the same time as Shirley’s association with Fox, the company had signed Alice Faye, James Dunn, Loretta Young and Warner Baxter. But none of these performers had the box-office power of Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Jeanette MacDonald and Norma Shearer—all at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Or Bette Davis, James Cagney, Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson and Barbara Stanwyck, who were at Warner Brothers.

  Fox was, in fact, reliant financially on one man, Will Rogers, who had won the love of moviegoers around the world in such films as A Connecticut Yankee (1931), State Fair (1933) and David Hamm (1934). Sheehan was not yet sure what to do with Shirley, but he had an instinct that she could follow in Jackie Coogan’s and Jackie Cooper’s footsteps as a major child star if the right format could be found and if the public became familiar with her face and personality.

  Within six weeks of Shirley’s appearance in Stand Up and Cheer, Sheehan had cast her in two Fox films already in production, Now Fit Tell, a melodrama about a gambler (Spencer Tracy) who becomes associated with gangsters, and Change of Heart, which once again paired Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell (along with Ginger Rogers and James Dunn). Shirley’s appearances in both these films are brief, and the parts seem to have been written into a final script. She doesn’t sing in either picture. Published credits of the movies in most film books list Shirley as playing Tracy’s daughter in Now I'll Tell. She does not. Her role is that of Mary Doran, daughter of Tracy’s lawyer, character-actor Henry O’Neill. In Change of Heart, she appears as James Dunn’s neighbor’s kid and has a scene playing with a paper airplane that is used as a dissolve to get Dunn on the real thing. However small the roles, Sheehan made sure that the camera caught Shirley in a charming, full-frame close-up. (“Shirley Temple sparkles in a brief bit,” Variety reported in their review of Now I'll Tell. None of the trade papers were to mention her in their future reviews of Change of Heart.)

  Gertrude had hoped for more immediate rewards. Her fear was that Coy Watson had been right and that Shirley would be relegated to bit roles for the next seven years. On one of her daughter’s free days, Gertrude decided to do something about it. “Mo
m remembered a man who had been especially nice to us [Henry Hathaway] when I’d taken a part in a Western picture [at Paramount]. She asked me if I’d like to drop in and say hello. . . . So in we went [to Hathaway’s office at the studio] and while we were there somebody suggested that we see . . . the director Al Hall.” Gertrude had read items that Paramount had decided to go ahead with the Damon Runyon story Little Miss Marker, to be directed by Hall. Though Shirley was under contract to Fox, a loan-out was always possible, so “on the theory that we had nothing to lose but five minutes,” Shirley went to Hall’s office, virtually down the corridor from Hathaway, while Gertrude waited outside. Hall took very little persuading that Shirley was right for little “Marky” in his film. He gave her what Shirley called “a three-word test—aw nuts! and Scram!”

  Negotiations between Paramount and Fox over loaning Shirley out for the film began. Despite the uncertainty, Shirley and Gertrude trekked over to Paramount several times to have her costumes fitted. With Gertrude coaching her, she learned the entire part. Still, Fox had not agreed to terms. Finally, a weekly fee of $1,000 payable to Fox was established (Shirley received $150 weekly, as her contract stipulated). But Sheehan wanted her to do Change of Heart first. There were innumerable delays in the shooting of Shirley’s few scenes in this film, and Gertrude was terrified they would lose Little Miss Marker. Finally, “at long last,” Fox put Shirley on call for her last scene, the indoor paper-airplane shot to be done that next Monday—if it rained. “Mom prayed for rain all day Sunday,” she recalled. Monday it did indeed rain, and Shirley began work on Little Miss Marker.

  Stand Up and Cheer was premiered the week of April 19, while the Paramount film was just finishing production. “If nothing else,” Variety led off in its review, “ ‘Stand up and Cheer’ should be very worthwhile for Fox because of that sure-fire, potential kidlet star in four year old Shirley Temple [the age Fox had given Shirley in all publicity releases]. She’s a cinch female Jackie Cooper and Jackie Coogan in one, excepting in a more jovial being. She’s the unofficial star of this Fox musical.”