From the perspective of 2020 it seems pretty hard to believe that nearly a century ago there was a little girl who danced, sang and smiled her way into the heart of America, and played an important role in somehow making everyone believe that a better day was coming. That little girl was Shirley Temple and she became one of the biggest sensations in show business history.

John Kasson, author of the biography The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America, points out that the thirties were the beginning of public opinion polls, which would reveal exactly what people wanted to know about and, not surprisingly, how people responded to things commercially. While box office figures were available, the great revelation was the identity of the child they admired most in the world, who also happened to be a motion picture star.

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“Shirley Temple was not only the top box office star in the world for four consecutive years, but she was also particularly popular not only with kids, not only with women, but with men over 40 and with people in regional areas outside of the cities,” Kasson points out. “So she had a phenomenal following, and in terms of name recognition, she was one of the most famous people in the world. She was also the most commodified child, who did more product endorsements than anyone next to Mickey Mouse, from kids fashions to automobiles and publicity campaigns for things like the March of Dimes. She was the child that other little girls imitated, formally in look-a-like contests and informally. People would say things like, ‘Every day I’d get up and think, ‘What would Shirley do?’ or ‘She was my best friend and I played with her doll.'”

Why is Shirley Temple famous?

Pop culture historian Geoffrey Mark, who is also the author of The Lucy Book and ELLA: A Biography of the Legendary Ella Fitzgerald, muses, “I don’t know if Shirley Temple could have become a star at any other point other than the Depression. Movies were ridiculously inexpensive to get into at that time. In some theaters, it was a nickel or a dime for two hours or two-and-half-hours, because in those days they had cartoons and short subjects and sometimes a double bill.

“It allowed you to get away from not being able to pay the rent or thinking about the question, ‘How am I going to buy shoes for my kids?’ or the fact there wasn’t enough to eat for dinner,” Mark adds. “Shirley’s films, which I believe were lovingly crafted by 20^th Century Fox, gave people that respite from their troubles, and we were a very troubled society at that moment. And for a very small child that becomes the number one box office sensation — well, there have been children in films almost since films began. I won’t say that she was the best or the best known, but she was the best and the best known of her day. And her day was the moment when talking picture were really the thing. It’s what everyone talked about the next day. You know, ‘Oh, I saw Shirley Temple in …’ whatever it might be.”

Asks Kasson rhetorically, “How can we track her popularity? When she was born in 1928, the name Shirley was the 10th most popular name for girls. She started appearing in short films from the age of three. We might just say she was this cute little kid doing endorsements, until Bright Eyes in 1934. By 1935, Shirley was the second most popular name for girls in the country. Then it stays at the top for the rest of the ’30s. The correlation is extraordinary.”

The real question, though, is why this child achieved the level of success that she did. Kasson’s pursuit of the answer to that question began with the development of the approach he was taking with his book.

“I began by wondering how and why Americans became noted for smiling — something that people from other countries have long observed,” he notes. “I considered writing a history of the smile in America and its relation to the rise of modern consumer culture. But the subject seemed to float like bubbles in the air, so I decided to bring it down to Earth by studying Shirley Temple, FDR, Bill ‘Bojangles Robinson’ and the Great Depression. My daughter had watched a great many Shirley Temple movies as a child, but I hadn’t paid them much attention. Now I did.”

What was Shirley Temple’s childhood like?

Shirley Temple was born on April 23, 1928, in Santa Monica, California, and was the third child (two boys, John and George, Jr, preceded her) of housewife Gertrude Temple and banker George Temple. In some ways, you could say that Shirley was destined for stardom, with Kasson sharing, “Even when Shirley was in utero, Gertrude dreamed that this daughter would somehow be famous as a movie star or something. She entered her in Meglin’s Dance School located in Los Angeles, where Judy Garland and her sisters went. It was known as a place from which kids would get modeling jobs and stage and screen opportunities.”

Proclaims Mark, “Shirley Temple was a genius — there’s no other word to describe her. You cannot teach someone star quality. You cannot teach someone how to sell a song or how to truly act. You can teach craft, but you have to have that certain something. For her to be able to do that from being a toddler, in diapers … she’s a genius.”

“In her autobiography, Shirley said how from that time she worked every day of her childhood,” Kasson interjects. “Although her mother and Hollywood publicists stressed how movies were simply play acting for Shirley, she was a hard worker — in many respects a child laborer, and the highest paid one in the world. But no one really wished to acknowledge that fact, not her parents, not 20th Century Fox, not even Eleanor Roosevelt. All of them emphasized that she was simply doing what came naturally.”

Her Early Years

While Shirley was attending Meglin’s, a casting director for Educational Pictures named Charles Lamont stopped by and immediately saw her inherent talent and signed her to a contract when she was just 3-years-old in 1932. Her first appearance was with other kids in 10-minute shorts known as Baby Burlesks, which were designed to parody recent events in the news and of films. Right from the start, people recognized her potential.

“Of course she had tremendous dancing talent, but she had to take lessons to do that,” Mark says. “She had to take singing lessons. She had to learn how to lip sync — all of the technical parts of filmmaking. That she could learn that at that age is amazing. She was a sponge; she just learned everything around her. And you watch her going from short subjects, where she’s in diapers, to these major, major films where she is the star of the show, probably best remembered for the films she made with Bill Robinson, Bojangles. It was a very strong message that was being sent that this little white girl was joyfully tap dancing with this African American man on screen. That is enormous culturally back then. They both carried it off so well that you don’t think twice about it. In lesser hands, that would not have worked at all.”

Kasson points out, “Her breakthrough came in April 1934, the month that she turned six. The nation was then in the depths of the Great Depression. Although FDR had launched his New Deal a year earlier, jobs, wages, and spirits remained at a low ebb, and there was even talk of revolution. The Great Depression gripped the Hollywood film industry as well, and it was scrambling for moral cover against charges of indecency from numerous civic, religious, and legislative quarters.  So, we might say that Hollywood and the nation needed Shirley as never before. She received only seventh billing in Stand Up and Cheer!, but it was the movie that first made her famous. For the first time, Shirley’s beaming smile and serene confidence captivated the public.”

Making Connections

It may sound like an exaggeration, but there was something about the smiles and performances of Shirley Temple that seemed to make a genuine connection with the approach of then-president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

“Roosevelt identified the double character of the Great Depression as both economic and emotional,” Kasson observes, “when he said in his first inaugural address, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ Before he could do anything substantive to revive the economy, he had to instill new confidence and cheer — something his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, was notoriously incapable of doing. FDR made the face of his administration a beaming smile and reassured people that positive change was coming.  Shirley’s breakthrough movie, Stand Up and Cheer!, hitched its wagon to FDR’s star, showing how entertainment could help lift the national mood of fear and gloom and end the Great Depression. Virtually overnight, her smile became as famous as FDR’s. When they finally met at the White House in 1938, FDR asked her, ‘Why aren’t you smiling? I thought you were famous for your smile.’ She was keeping her lips in place, she explained, because she had just lost a tooth.”

He elaborates, “She made more than 20 feature films in the 1930s, and in each one her task was emotional healing. She especially softened the hearts of father and grandfather figures and restored them to their best selves. Amid gloom, she encouraged everyone to keep on the sunny side of life. Also, because Shirley usually lacked one or both parents in her films, a driving question was who will adopt her? Who will care for her? She invited moviegoers to take her to their hearts. She is seen, of course, as epitomizing a natural and people made the equation between the person they saw on screen and the person they imagined she was. Everyone is more complicated than their film roles.”

Why did Shirley Temple turn down ‘The Wizard of Oz’?

Shirley was the top box office star in the world for four consecutive years, from 1935 through 1938, and, as noted, was also the celebrity to endorse the most merchandise for children and adults. “She transformed children’s fashions,” states Kasson, “popularizing a toddler look, including Big Sister versions, for girls up to the age of twelve. Ideal Novelty and Toy Company began making Shirley Temple dolls in October 1934, and soon they accounted for almost a third of all dolls sold in the country. She plugged breakfast cereals, toy sets, dresses, shoes, puzzles, and games, large cabinet-sized radios, even expensive cars. She became the model child consumer that no parent could deny.”

All of that notwithstanding, Mark points out that Shirley’s biggest problem was the fact that she was aging and all the attempts to keep her in curls couldn’t change that fact. There had been talk of her starring as Dorothy Gale in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, which would have, he notes, been the project to take her into puberty and allow her to grow up a little bit.

“It just never happened,” he says. “Fox and MGM couldn’t agree on terms. I believe 20^th Century Fox had the first dibs on the book, let it lapse, MGM bought it, couldn’t get Shirley over to their studio and revolved the film around Judy Garland. And now Judy Garland became the number one child star in the country. Right when Wizard of Oz hit, Shirley’s career changed. As you saw more of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland and Donald O’Connor, Jackie Cooper and other child stars, as we began to go into World War II and get out of the Depression, Shirley’s films had become old-fashioned. And as we found out, while Shirley absolutely could act, she was not the actor Judy Garland was or Mickey Rooney was.”

Details Kasson, “[Fox head] Daryl Zanuck knew that if they abandoned what we might call the Shirley Temple formula, and the films are quite formulaic, they would not do well. But if they played the formula straight, people would say, ‘Oh, it’s just the other same old, same old,’ which some people did. They tried to have less singing, say as in Wee Willie Winkie, and more acting, and it didn’t do as well. By the late 30s, Gertrude is essentially saying that Daryl Zanuck doesn’t know how to make pictures, but she does. He did know how to make pictures. He was very good at it, but I can see what her frustrations were.”

“As she aged,” admits Mark, “she wasn’t really star quality anymore. Luckily for her, she grew into a very pretty young woman as a teenager who could handle comedy well. Who could do a dramatic scene well, but she was no longer the star of the show. She was playing the star’s daughter or a younger sister. She did it well, but it wasn’t a Shirley Temple film. It was a film with Shirley Temple.”

And when it came to her films of the 1940s, while there are some people who truly enjoy them, Kasson finds them a little tiresome and that some are actually embarrassing: “In some of them, the theme of childhood flirtation with men, the way she’s emotionally healing men; grandfather figures and father figures and putting people together and playing Cupid for couples and healing broken hearts and even larger politics — in Wee Willie Winkie she essentially solves the border crisis in India and heals the Civil War. By the 1940s, the theme of inappropriate relationships with adult men becomes more avert. It all starts to make you a little uncomfortable.”

Success Can Be a Poison

And while her film career was slowing down, there were a number of issues brewing behind the scenes, much of it having to do with the psychology of the effect her success was having on the family dynamic. Says Kasson, “Shirley Temple really needs to be understood as part of a team, especially in the ‘30s. And the team is with her mother and her mother is her coach, her hairdresser, her agent, in some ways unofficially her manager and so on. They work together and the emotional bond between them is very strong. I don’t think you have to go too deep into your psychology to say there’s a kind of narcissistic bond. If your kid does something well, it’s hard to separate that from yourself doing well or allowing your own frustrations to play out in your child. Her mother certainly had that, with Shirley Temple saying that she was her mother’s pet project.

“But meanwhile,” he continues, “George, her father, was a banker who became a brand manager on the strength of especially his daughter, but he was a kind of front man who people opened an account with because he was Shirley Temple’s father. In fact, there was a sign in the bank that said, ‘Meet Shirley Temple’s Father.’ He eventually quit his job and essentially his career, because he was really in her shadow and emotionally that’s difficult.”

Child Star Syndrome

And with all of that, Shirley also had gotten married to film actor John Agar in 1945, with whom she had their daughter, Linda Susan. But it was not a happy union with the two of them getting divorced in 1949 and Shirley being awarded custody of Linda.

Observes Kasson, “Diana Serra Cary, who was known as Baby Peggy, was a major star of the silent era from 1921 to 1923. She died earlier this year at 101. She, more than any other star of that era, wrote very sensitively about the dilemma of child stars and their families, including how emotionally damaging it could be, because the child star is also a child laborer. We might also say that she is fulfilling the emotional needs of her own family as well as their material needs. In the case of Shirley Temple, she’s doing that on multiple fronts. She’s supposed to cheer people up, but also really keep the family afloat. She’s the kid with the Midas touch and that’s a kind of power that’s very destabilizing in the family political and psychological economy.

“She was going down the career of the former child star: disastrous first marriage, a has-been in her films by the late 40s, her husband John Agar was abusive to her, because he resented her whole prominence and so on. He was drinking and womanizing and physically assaulting her. And then she met Charles Black, who said he’d never seen a Shirley Temple film. She liked that, as well as the fact he was tall, handsome a war hero.”