The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (37 page)

39
Vasey,
World According to Hollywood
, 204–5.

40
Martin Quigley,
Motion Picture Herald
, February 22, 1936, as quoted in Vasey,
World According to Hollywood
, 205; Martin Quigley, “Radicalism—an Industry Peril,”
Motion Picture Herald
, December 11, 1937, 18.

41
Cantril and Strunk,
Public Opinion
, 485.

42
John Trumpbour,
Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. And European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–
1950
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 227.

43
Margaret Farrand Thorp,
America at the Movies
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), 2–3.

44
Lary May,
The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 122.

45
May,
Big Tomorrow
, 122–24, 130–31; Kevin Corbett, “Bad Sound and Sticky Floors: An Ethnographic Look at the Symbolic Value of Historic Small-Town Movie Theaters,” in
Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing
, ed. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 241–44. Thorp noted that movie theaters specifically catering to African Americans amounted to only one for every twenty thousand people. Thorp,
America at the Movies
, 9.

46
Trumpbour,
Selling Hollywood to the World
, 73; Mirra Komarovsky,
The Unemployed Man and His Family: The Effect of Unemployment upon the Status of the Man in Fifty-Nine Families
(New York: Dryden Press, for the Institute of Social Research, 1940), 124, 127.

47
May,
Big Tomorrow
, 110–21, 127–28.

48
Black,
Child Star
, 33, 39, 330.

49
Black,
Child Star,
80–81.

50
“Just Pretending Nets Shirley Temple $1,250 a Week,”
Newsweek
, July 28, 1934, 24; Miguel Covarrubias, “Miss Shirley Temple Signs a New Contract,”
Vanity Fair
, November 1934, 33.

51
Runyon’s short story first appeared in
Collier’s
, March 26, 1932, 7–9, 40, 43, 44. In an earlier dialogue script (February 24, 1934, pp. A17–19), Marthy’s father speaks more like a racehorse tout. Cf. later dialogue in script of May 9, 1934, Paramount Pictures Scripts, Special Collections, MHL.

52
See Gary S. Cross,
The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

53
Komarovsky,
Unemployed Man and His Family
, 27, 28.

54
Komarovsky,
Unemployed Man and His Family
, 41, 45.

55
Richard Lowitt and Maurine Hoffman Beasley, eds.,
One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 206–7.

56
On the success of
Baby Take a Bow
, see Douglas W. Churchill, “Taking a Look at the Record,”
New York Times
, November 25, 1934, X5. Shirley Temple ranked eighth in the
Motion Picture Herald
’s 1934 annual survey of “The Ten Biggest Money Making Stars” in the period beginning September 1, 1933, and ending September 1, 1934, even though her first major film,
Stand Up and Cheer!
, did not open until April 1934. See
1935
–36 Motion Picture Almanac
(New York: Quigley Publishing, n.d.), 94.

57
“Shirley Temple Wins,”
New York Times
, March 23, 1938, 18; Janet Shprintz, “Tarnishing Temple’s Image,”
Variety
, January 27, 2006, A7; Black,
Child Star
, 184–85. For more recent criticism in this vein, see Robert M. Polhemus,
Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women’s Quest for Authority
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 253–80; Geraldine Pauling, “The Psychohistorical Significance of Shirley Temple Films: Images of the Sexualized Female Child in Relation to Depression Era Group Fantasy,”
Journal of Psychohistory
30, no. 3 (2003): 306–9; Ara Osterweil, “Reconstructing Shirley: Pedophilia and Interracial Romance in Hollywood’s Age of Innocence,”
Camera Obscura
24, no. 3 72 (2009): 1–39. On the larger shift in attitudes and behavior, see Ian Hacking, “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse,”
Critical Inquiry
17, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 253–88.

58
Robert Eichberg, “Lines to a Little Lady,”
Modern Screen
, February 1935, 48.

59
Review of
Bright Eyes
,
Motion Picture Daily
, November 23, 1934, 10.

60
From 1935 to 1940 Withers was one of Twentieth Century–Fox’s top five most lucrative actors. Geoff Gehman,
Down but Not Quite Out in Hollow-weird: A Documentary in Letters of Eric Knight
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 25 n. 4.

61
See Mae Tinee, review of
Bright Eyes
,
Chicago Tribune
, December 23, 1934, pt. 7, 5; review of
Bright Eyes
,
Motion Picture Herald
, February 16, 1935, 69.

62
“Peewee’s Progress,” 40; Edward Foote Gardner,
Popular Songs of the Twentieth Century: A Charted History,
vol. 1,
Chart Detail & Encyclopedia, 1900–1949
(St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2000), 25, 216.

63
Motion Picture Herald
, February 16, 1935, 69.

64
Motion Picture Herald
, November 30, 1935, 85; December 19, 1936, 81; December 31, 1938, 60; December 30, 1939, 58.

65
On this scene and the larger issue of the affirmative role of commercial culture, see Lawrence W. Levine, “The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences,”
American Historical Review
97 (1992): 1369–99; T. J. Jackson Lears, “Making Fun of Popular Culture,” ibid., 1417–26; Levine, “Levine Responds,” ibid., 1427–30; and Joel Pfister, “Complicity Critiques,”
American Literary History
12, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 610–32.

CHAPTER THREE: DANCING ALONG THE COLOR LINE

1
“Cinema: Academy Awards,”
Time
, March 11, 1935, 52.

2
Robinson also appeared in
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
(1938) and
Just around the Corner
(1938). He devised the choreography but did not perform in
Dimples
(1936).

3
Among the many books on this topic, see esp. M. M. Manring,
Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); Grace Elizabeth Hale,
Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940
(New York: Pantheon, 1998); Ralph Ellison in conversation with Robert O’Meally, Robert G. O’Meally, “Checking Our Balances: Ellison on Armstrong’s Humor,”
boundary
2 30, no. 2 (2003): 120.

4
Harvard Sitkoff,
A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade
, 30th anniv. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 44.

5
Sitkoff,
New Deal for Blacks
, 27–28, 42, 31, 71.

6
“Players Aid Roosevelt,”
New York Times
, October 24, 1930, 15; Nanette Kutner, “Hollywood Friendship No. 1,”
Modern Screen
, November 1936, 91; Bernice Patton, “The Sepia Side of Hollywood,”
Pittsburgh Courier
, November 30, 1935, A6.

7
James Haskins and N. R. Mitgang,
Mr. Bojangles: The Biography of Bill Robinson
(New York: William Morrow, 1988), 106.

8
Haskins and Mitgang,
Mr. Bojangles
, 26–28, 42–44, 50–53.

9
Bushrod Barnum, “Bojangles,”
Cue
, August 14, 1937, 35. In one of Robinson’s versions of the story, the soup was oyster stew, and an oyster went wriggling down the customer’s neck. S. J. Woolf, “Bill Robinson, 60, Taps Out the Joy of Living,”
New York Times
, May 22, 1938, 117. For the contention that Marty Forkins concocted the story, see Haskins and Mitgang,
Mr. Bojangles
, 95–96.

10
Haskins and Mitgang,
Mr. Bojangles
, 212.

11
Robinson first appeared in the short
Hello, Bill
(1929) and performed a specialty number in RKO’s feature-length
Dixiana
(1930).

12
Robinson was voted “best dressed” man as well as favorite tap-dancer in a 1935 Harlem poll. Ted Yates, “This Is New York: Popularity Poll,”
Afro-American
, May 11, 1935, 8. A white journalist noted with patronizing wonder Robinson’s “primitive taste for fine feathers” and jewelry (Barnum, “Bojangles,” 7).

13
The honorary title was conferred in 1934 by the New York League of Locality Mayors, an unofficial philanthropic and boosters organization. Richard Strouse, “At 70, Still Head Hoofer,”
New York Times
, May 23, 1948, sec. SM, 17. The title was adopted by African American newspapers. See, for example, “Bill Robinson Is Mayor of Harlem, Hero of Broadway,”
Chicago Defender
, July 6, 1935, 9.

14
Tommye Berry, “Kansas City Likes the Film, ‘Hooray for Love,’ ”
Chicago Defender
, August 17, 1935, 8. Despite black moviegoers’ approval, within the context of the storyline of
Hooray for Love
, “Living in a Great Big Way” is being performed for the entertainment of whites. The number is supposedly being rehearsed as part of the revue that the lead character, Doug Tyler (played by Gene Raymond) hopes to produce. The number begins with a parting of the theater curtains, and a quick shot in the middle of the number and a second at its conclusion furnish the approving seal of the white director and producer, a synecdoche for white approval in general.

15
Marshall Winslow Stearns and Jean Stearns,
Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance
(New York: Macmillan, 1968), 187. For reminiscences of Robinson and his distinctive qualities as a dancer, see Rusty E. Frank,
Tap! The Greatest Tap Dance Stars and Their Stories, 1900–1955
(New York: William Morrow, 1990), esp. 66, 72–73, 97–98, 180–82.

16
Bernice Patton, “Bill Robinson Overcame Two Broken Legs to Become Greatest Tap Dancer,”
New Journal and Guide
, February 22, 1936, 18; Barnum, “Bojangles,” 7; Woolf, “Bill Robinson,” 117.

17
In Shirley Temple’s 1936 film
Dimples
, to which Robinson contributed choreography, Frank Morgan’s character blacks up as Uncle Tom to elude pursuers. The movie ends in a full-scale black minstrel number, with Stepin Fetchit as Mr. Bones. Will Rogers sparked protests from African Americans when on January 21, 1934, in a radio broadcast he repeatedly used the phrase “nigger spiritual,” instead of “Negro spiritual” and “spiritual,” the words he had prepared in his notes. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC), which carried Rogers’s program, was immediately deluged with telegrams and telephone calls protesting the racial epithet. Roy Wilkins complained on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Rogers defended his good intentions, saying, “If the colored race has a more sympathetic friend than I have always been, I don’t know who it is.” Steven K. Gragert and M. Jane Johansson, eds.,
The Papers of Will Rogers,
vol. 5,
The Final Years
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), esp. 455–56, 460 n. 2, 461, quotation normalized from telegram style. Tali Mendelberg,
The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 69; see also Taylor Branch,
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 51.

18
Andre Sennwald, review of
The Littlest Rebel
,
New York Times,
December 20, 1935, 30.

19
“You Ain’t Seen Nuthin Yet, Says Papa of Staircase Dance,”
Pittsburgh Courier
, December 29, 1934, sec. A, 8; Woolf, “Bill Robinson,” 117; James Haskins,
Black Dance in America: A History through Its People
(New York: Crowell, 1990), 54; Constance Valis Hill,
Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 63–64. Cf. Robinson’s staircase dance in
Harlem Is Heaven
(1932).

20
Here I adapt a phrase from Jacqui Malone, “Jazz Music in Motion: Dancers and Big Bands,” in Robert G. O’Meally, ed.,
The Jazz Cadence of American Culture
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 284.

21
Shirley Temple Black,
Child Star: An Autobiography
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 91–93; Kutner, “Hollywood Friendship No. 1,” 91; “Bill Sorry He Couldn’t See Shirley,”
Chicago Defender
, April 29, 1939, 21; Karen Chilton,
Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist from Café Society to Hollywood to HUAC
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 73.

22
Haskins and Mitgang,
Mr. Bojangles
, 225–26; Black,
Child Star,
92.

23
This scene was Fox Film’s first venture into Technicolor. Douglas Gomery,
The Hollywood Studio System
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 95.

24
Andre Sennwald, review of
The Little Colonel
,
New York Times,
March 22, 1935, 26;
Motion Picture Herald,
May 4, 1935, 64; June 1, 1935, 69; July 6, 1935, 87; October 5, 1935, 59.

25
Sennwald, review of
Littlest Rebel
, 30.

26
Edward Peple, foreword to
The Littlest Rebel
(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1914); Edward Peple,
The Littlest Rebel: A Play in Four Acts
(London: Samuel French, 1911), 9.

27
Andre Sennwald, review of
So Red the Rose
,
New York Times,
November 28, 1935, 39.

28
Review of
The Littlest Rebel, Variety
, December 25, 1935, 15. Like
The Little Colonel
and Shirley Temple’s film
Dimples
,
The Littlest Rebel
was notably popular in white southern theaters, such as those in Birmingham, Alabama. It was also the most profitable of Twentieth Century–Fox’s films for the 1935–36 season. Gomery,
Hollywood Studio System
, 1986 ed., 93; Gomery,
The Hollywood Studio System: A History
, rev. ed. (London: BFI, 2005), 72.