All About Shirley

This post will be looking at the phenomenon that was, and in a way still is, Shirley Temple. (And no, not referring to the drink, which by the way according to Temple had nothing to do with her – it was created in the 1930s as a non-alcoholic substitute for cocktails and according to Temple herself, 'looked like diluted blood and tasted worse'. *not an ad)

Now, there are many layers to the role Shirley played in America in the 1930s and the way in which that role is viewed is definitely different now than it was back in the day. It's always difficult, if not impossible, to try to look at things through the lens of their time without having lived through it yourself and it definitely applies when discussing Shirley and her career in film.

Growing up, Shirley had two older brothers so being the only girl, her mother Gertrude was very eager to live her own passion of dancing through her and so, Shirley was enrolled into dance school at a very young age and was initially discovered there. She then went onto star in a show reel called ‘Baby Burlesks’. I mean, that sounds normal yes?

In ‘Baby Burlesks’ toddlers acted out famous scenes from films of the time and portrayed famous stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. In one of the reels called Kid N Hollywood (1933), Shirley plays a scrubwoman called Morelegs Sweet Trick (I know right!), explicitly modelled after Marlene Dietrich. Shirley has compared being a starlet to being a girl scout; always cheerful and obliging, particularly to directors, producers and cameramen. From a very young age, she had an extremely professional and mature approach to acting, which is quite crazy as she was literally a toddler when she started.

So, for about four years during the Great Depression, approximately from 1935 to 1938, Shirley Temple was celebrated as Hollywood’s most profitable star. As she says in her autobiography, at that time she had greater name recognition than either Amelia Earhart or Eleanor Roosevelt. And although children helped make her no1 box office draw she was also remarkably popular with adults. Men and women of means and power, including the Roosevelts and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover seemed absolutely infatuated by the little, curly-haired girl. Congress reportedly declared her ‘the most beloved individual in the world’ and President Franklin D. Roosevelt celebrated her as ‘a universal antidote to the nation’s predicament’.

"When the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time during this Depression, it is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget their troubles." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1935

In the 1930s, during a period of national and international crisis, the entire world seemed to take comfort in the mass-produced image of a little girl. It seemed as if Shirley’s job was to reflect what was good and decent in America and to brighten the lives of Americans in the process. In effect, she helped make America happier and more optimistic.

Shirley is almost invariably the darling of men – and in the films, no man seems able to resist her charms, not even the grumpiest ones. It could be said that Shirley’s films worked to excite and satisfy the paternal gaze. She is indeed the centre of the universe in her films, surrounded rarely if ever by females. The mothers are more often than not killed, or absent right from the beginning of the film. For example in The Littlest Rebel (1935), in addition to appealing to pretty much an entire army of men, she also manages to use her charms to convince Abraham Lincoln himself to release her father from prison.

Film theorist Jeanine Basinger notes in her book ‘A Woman’s View’ (1993) that much has been made of Shirley’s ‘sexy, little body, her pouty mouth and her flirtatious ways’; there has been criticism over the scenes in which Shirley plays wife to her widowed film fathers, sitting on their laps, nestling against their chests, stroking their cheeks and singing them alluring songs with lyrics like ‘In every dream I caress you, marry me and let me be your wife’ as she does in Poor Little Rich Girl (1936). I mean, when watching the film the lyrics definitely sound a bit strange in the context of a little girl singing to her father but again, times were very different back then and this was arguably viewed very differently at the time. Basinger herself views that the sexualisation of Shirley is much ado about very little. She insists that all she really did was 'tap her guts out in a series of well-made, unpretentious, and entertaining little films designed to lift a Depression audience out of its worries’. According to John F Kasson, who’s written a book on Shirley, the father-daughter bond is evidently sufficient protection from Shirley’s flirtatiousness. He says that ultimately 'delight cancelled out desire and cuteness was the antithesis of eroticism'.

So if you think about the representation of Shirley Temple and look at this picture of her and Jack Haley from 1936, contemporary viewers are likely to find the image somewhat perverse. I mean, if we look at it what is your initial response? Would we see something like this today? Or if we did, what would we make of it? I mean for example, you probably wouldn't see a picture of Dakota Fanning on top of Tom Cruise as part of promoting War of the Worlds (2005) without causing quite the stir, and not the positive kind.

The picture has been criticised throughout the years and it’s been questioned why it was not seen as a pedophilic fantasy of domination and submission? However for Depression-era audiences, the photograph is likely to have produced an entirely different set of meanings. Today, we tend to understand children to be imperilled by adult male sexuality. By contrast, during Shirley’s reign as Hollywood’s top box-office star, childhood innocence seemed inviolable. Although it may be difficult for us to see anything but pedophilia in that picture, it would have been difficult for early twentieth-century audiences to see the same image as anything but benign. The two are posed as though caught in the act of ‘playing horsey’, a game that Temple played with adult male co-stars in several films. The photograph was designed to represent child loving rather than pedophilia. The photograph produces two entirely different sets of meaning because our culture has undergone a paradigm shift regarding childhood innocence. Each interpretation could be seen as equally true because our paradigms are the frameworks through which we evaluate the veracity of a claim.

More than any other quality, Shirley seemed to signify ‘cuteness’ and her on-screen image was constructed to highlight this central feature. The numerous films she made in the 1930s worked to solidify her star persona. In her article, Lori Merish has stated that Shirley’s cuteness derived from a combination of precocity and powerlessness.

"Her size is crucial in defining her acts as cute; her diminutive physical stature literalises her subordinate status". - Lori Merish, 1996

Merish has also described cuteness as 'the roundness of form, thickness of limbs and largeness of eyes', so pretty much the attributes of a human infant. So by this definition, Shirley was the epitome of a cute child during the 1930s. Kasson argues that she was the ultimate product of the time; her managers capitalising on the mania for cuteness. Kasson says that cuteness invited the beholder’s response on various levels; aesthetic delight, moral protection and possessive desire. Children wanted both to have and to be Shirley. In her autobiography, Shirley describes the studio’s strategy as ‘keep her skirts high and have co-stars lift her up whenever possible to preserve babyhood – an illusion that was selling so well’.

Even though Shirley was loved in the 1930s, not everyone felt comfortable with the way Hollywood capitalised on her youth. At the time, few dared suggest that Shirley may not have brought joy to every American, it was pretty much just assumed that all audiences received her the same way. Much of the critical commentary and scholarly debate on Shirley and her films has centred on her sexuality (quite shockingly *cough*). In the 1930s, the British novelist Graham Greene was the rare critic who called attention to what he perceived to be the perversity of Shirley’s performances, identifying her appeal as dangerous rather than transformative. In his notorious review of Shirley’s 1937 film Wee Willie Winkie, he described the child’s appeal as erotic and identified her interactions with men as implicitly sexual.

"In Captain January her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance; her eyes had a sidelong, searching coquetry. Now, in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short skirts, she is a complete totsy. Watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Her admirers, middle-aged men respond to the signal of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because of the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire." - Graham Greene, 1937

This prompted Shirley’s parents and 20th Century Fox to sue Greene, accusing him of ‘procuring Shirley for immoral purposes’. The presiding judge agreed, calling the article a ‘gross outrage’ and ordered Greene and the magazine to pay £3500 in damages, and also driving Greene out of the country. It is more than likely that the suit effectively silenced other, like-minded reviewers. Greene’s reviews anticipated the current perception that there is something perverse about Temple’s popularity. However, in the 1930s, his seemed to be a minority or at least one easily squashed by the studio.

All in all, Shirley’s film career stood at the juncture of two very different paradigms of childhood. It was built upon the fairly stable conception of the child’s innocence as transformative - capable not only of deflecting adult sexuality but of transforming adults for the better. However, it risked being undone by an emergent discourse of pedophilia that framed men’s interest in child stars as sexual, a discourse that gained traction with ascendance of Freud’s theories of sexuality and the unconscious.

As the star of more than thirty films, and later as a diplomat and politician, Shirley has certainly been a genuine American icon for almost a century. In 1969 Richard Nixon appointed the 40-year-old Shirley to the US delegation to the United Nations; in 1974 Gerald Ford made her ambassador to Ghana and in 1976 she was made chief of protocol. And I mean, you can only applaud Shirley for her achievements and capability of pushing past the stigma of being but a child star and we have seen it so many times that things can take a very tragic turn when you've been involved in the show business from a very young age, take Judy Garland for example, but that's a whole other story.

And clearly, the popular understanding of Shirley’s appeal has undergone a significant transformation. These very different interpretations of her career – one being that her popularity relied on the inviolability of her innocence, and the other that it was built around her paedophilic appeal – point to a significant shift in the definition of childhood innocence. It wouldn’t be until the mid-twentieth century that our current understanding that children’s sexual innocence is vulnerable to adult interference would come to underwrite children’s film roles and shape the discourse about child performers.

A number of things about Shirley’s stardom most likely seem a bit perverse to contemporary audiences. But be as it may, more than anything else - Shirley Temple was a product of a specific moment in American history, a period overshadowed by a disastrous economic depression. She certainly remains one of the most recognisable child stars in the history of Hollywood; and one of the best remembered stars of the 1930s. Shirley certainly lived a full and diverse life up until 2014 when she passed away at the age of 85.

"Any star can be devoured by human adoration, sparkle by sparkle." - Shirley Temple

*by the way, Shirley's mother Gertrude used to tell her to 'Sparkle!' before filming, prompting a particular type of behaviour and body language from her.