The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (39 page)

35
Barbas,
Movie Crazy
, 38–39, 52–53.

36
Diana Serra Cary,
Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King
: A Biography of Hollywood’s Legendary Child Star
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 62, 86–87.

37
Grumbine,
Reaching Juvenile Markets
, 6; on the transformation of marketing to children in this period, see Cook,
Commodification of Childhood
, esp. 66.

38
Lisa Jacobson,
Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 46; Grumbine,
Reaching Juvenile Markets
, 288–90, 21–22, 32–53.

39
Grumbine,
Reaching Juvenile Markets
, 17, 28, 21.

40
Albert Darver,
Children’s and Infants’ Wear,
May 1937, as quoted in Grumbine,
Reaching Juvenile Markets
, 354–55.

41
Grumbine,
Reaching Juvenile Markets
, 387–88, 357.

42
Grumbine,
Reaching Juvenile Markets
, 342–44, 346, 351, 109, 6–7.

43
Grumbine,
Reaching Juvenile Markets
, 6–7; Quaker Oats advertisement,
Ladies’ Home Journal
, April 1937, 119. For an example of a Quaker Oats advertisement directed to the mother’s point of view, see the October 1937 advertisement “Suppose Shirley Temple were your little girl . . .” reproduced in Grumbine,
Reaching Juvenile Markets
, 290.

44
Grumbine,
Reaching Juvenile Markets
, 26;
Ladies’ Home Journal
, September 1936, Clippings File—Shirley Temple, MHL; advertisement,
Parents Magazine
, April 1936, author’s collection.

45
Grumbine,
Reaching Juvenile Markets
, 387–88.

46
“Conference with Mr. Zanuck [on Temporary Script of Jan. 19, 1938],” January 24, 1938,
Little Miss Broadway
, Twentieth Century–Fox Scripts Collection, Cinema Arts Library, USC.

47
Pictorial Review
, June 1935, 20, as quoted in Cook,
Commodification of Childhood
, 92.

48
Boris Emmet and John E. Jeuck,
Catalogues and Counters: A History of Sears, Roebuck and Company
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 5; see also Sanford M. Jacoby,
Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 99–101; Sears, Roebuck catalog, Fall/Winter 1935, 75; on the Sears catalog as a wish book, see Harry Crews,
A Childhood: The Biography of a Place
(New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 54.

49
“Morris Michtom, 68, Toy Manufacturer,”
New York Times
, July 22, 1938, 17; Flossie Flirt doll advertisement, Sears, Roebuck catalog, Fall/Winter 1926–27, 652.

50
Playthings
, October 1934, 6;
Playthings
, November 1934, 3.

51
Tonya Bervaldi-Camaratta,
The Complete Guide to Shirley Temple Dolls and Collectibles
(Paducah, KY: Collector Books, 2007), 6–7; Ian Fleming,
Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996), 40.

52
Playthings
, April 1935, 13; Bervaldi-Camaratta,
Complete Guide to Shirley Temple Dolls
, 20, 25.

53
Bervaldi-Camaratta,
Complete Guide to Shirley Temple Dolls
, 92.

54
Ann Reebok, transcript 36, September 15, 1987, 7, 8; Joanne Wasenske, transcript 47, September 29, 1987, 24, 3; Lois Green-Stone, transcript 53, October 12, 1987, 16; Esther Zannie, transcript 35, September 14, 1987, 3, 4, Doll Oral History Project, Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play, The Strong, Rochester, NY.

55
“200 Letters Show Shirley Temple’s Grip on Children,”
Motion Picture Herald
, February 16, 1935, 54. For an instance of a contest in which children colored a drawing, see “Concursa Shirley Temple” (Shirley Temple Competition),
Bohemia
, [Havana, Cuba], August 4, 1935, 27.

56
Robert Cohen, ed.,
“Dear Mrs. Roosevelt”: Letters from Children of the Great Depression
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 187–88.

57
Cohen,
“Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,”
188–90.

58
See D. W. Winnicott,
Playing and Reality
(London: Routledge, 1971). Lisa Jacobson speaks of consumer envy in
Raising Consumers
, 7.

59
Bervaldi-Camaratta,
Complete Guide to Shirley Temple Dolls
, 78.

60
Bervaldi-Camaratta,
Complete Guide to Shirley Temple Dolls
, 60; Black,
Child Star
, 85.

61
Frank Dillon, “Shirley Temple, Saver of Lives,”
Modern Screen
, December 1935, 26–27, 78–79.

CHAPTER FIVE: KEEPING SHIRLEY’S STAR ALOFT

1
This phrase was popularized by Hortense Powdermaker,
Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1950).

2
“Amicable Settlement,”
Time
, July 29, 1935, 46.

3
“All Fox Producers Fighting for Shirley,”
Variety
, October 22, 1934, 3; Aubrey Solomon,
Twentieth Century–Fox: A Corporate and Financial History
(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988), 217.

4
Shirley Temple Black,
Child Star: An Autobiography
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 36; “Amicable Settlement,” 46; Geoff Gehman, ed.,
Down but Not Quite Out in Hollow-weird: A Documentary in Letters of Eric Knight
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 11, 21.

5
Alva Johnston, “The Wahoo Boy,”
The New Yorker
, November 10, 1934, 24–25; George F. Custen,
Twentieth Century’s Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood
(New York: Basic Books, 1997), 10–11, 173. I have drawn on Johnston’s two-part profile (November 10 and 17, 1934) and Custen’s book for much of the following material on Zanuck.

6
Quoted in Johnston, “Wahoo Boy,” November 17, 1934, 27.

7
Johnston, “Wahoo Boy,” November 17, 1934, 25; Custen,
Twentieth Century’s Fox
, 251.

8
Custen estimates the costs as between $200,000 and $400,000 (
Twentieth Century’s Fox
, 207). Aubrey Solomon agrees with the larger point, although his estimates of costs are between $400,000 and $700,000 (
Twentieth Century–
Fox
, 29).

9
Custen,
Twentieth Century’s Fox,
211.

10
Cartoon,
The New Yorker
, April 13, 1935, 29. For criticisms of the subject matter of
Little Miss Marker
and
Baby Take a Bow
, see “What the Picture Did for Me,”
Motion Picture Herald
, September 8, 1934, 50; September 22, 1934, 49; October 13, 1934, 82; October 20, 1934, 65; October 27, 1934, 69; November 10, 1934, 63; November 17, 1934, 67; December 8, 1934, 75; December 15, 1934, 60; “Reich Bans ‘Baby Take a Bow,’ ”
New York Times
, September 13, 1934, 26.

11
See Gary S. Cross,
The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Lori Merish, “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple,” in
Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body
, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 185–203.

12
Cross,
Cute and the Cool
, 60–61, 69–70.

13
Konrad Lorenz, “Part and Parcel in Animal and Human Societies,” in
Studies in Animal and Human Behaviour
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 2:154; Michael C. LaBarbera, “The Biology of B-Movie Monsters,” 2003,
Fathom Archive,
http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/; Merish, “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics,” 187.

14
Tino Balio,
Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939
(New York: Scribner’s, 1993), 97.

15
Black,
Child Star,
116, 211.

16
Black,
Child Star
, 20; “While Shirley Plays in Her Sandbox,”
Motion Picture Herald
, July 21, 1934, 18; “[Shirley] Temple’s Physical Condition,”
Screen Guide
, undated article [1938], Shirley Temple scrapbook, vol. 1, Constance McCormick Collection, USC; “
Life
Goes to Shirley Temple’s Birthday Party,”
Life
, May 15, 1944, 116–18, 121.

17
The first three Shirley Temple films in which Treacher appeared, in each case playing a butler or valet, were
Curly Top
,
Stowaway
, and
Heidi
.

18
Around 1936 an English newspaper reported that Shirley Temple was a thirty-year-old “midget” with two children. Shirley Temple Black, “Tomorrow I’ll Be Thirty,”
Good Housekeeping
, November 1957, 134; “Peewee’s Progress,”
Time
, April 27, 1936, 37. In 1937 Silvio Masante, a Sacramento pastor and special correspondent for the Vatican newspaper
Osservatore Romano
, interviewing Shirley Temple and her mother, told them, “In Italy as in other countries in Europe there is the persistent rumor that Shirley Temple is no child at all; but that she is a midget.” He thought that the rumor “was so vigorously spread, because many of the common people are unable to understand how such a child could do as many different things as Shirley does in her pictures.” George Shaffer, “Shirley Temple Interviewed by Papal Journal,”
Chicago Daily Tribune
, March 2, 1937, 14; see also Edith Lindeman, “The Real Miss Temple,”
Richmond Times-Dispatch
, October 31, 1937, Sunday magazine sec., 7; and Michael Jackson, “Protecting the Future of the Greatest Little Star,”
Photoplay
, March 1937, 27.

19
A. H. Saxon,
P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 124–30; P. T. Barnum,
The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself
(New York: Redfield, 1855), 263. The link between Shirley Temple and the exhibition of people with dwarfism is insightfully developed in Merish, “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics.” The comic confusion between Shirley and a diminutive adult was made explicit in
Little Miss Broadway
(1938), in which a detective confuses her character with that of Olive Brasno, an actress with proportional dwarfism.

20
Review of
Baby Take a Bow
,
New York Times
, June 30, 1934, 17.

21
“
Dimples
conference with Mr. Zanuck,” December 9, 1935, 8, Twentieth Century–Fox Scripts Collection, USC.

22
On her dimples, see Black,
Child Star
, 141.

23
Black,
Child Star
, 141, 142.

24
Review of
Dimples
,
Time
, October 19, 1936, 80–82; Frank S. Nugent, review of
Dimples
,
New York Times
, October 10, 1936, 21.

25
Nugent, review of
Dimples
, 21.

26
Review of
Dimples
,
Variety
, October 14, 1936, 15.

27
“What the Picture Did for Me,”
Motion Picture Herald
, December 5, 1936, 6; January 2, 1937, 92.

28
“Conference with Mr. Zanuck on Treatment of July 25, 1936,” and Zanuck’s notes on treatment outline of
Wee Willie Winkie
by Howard Ellis Smith, July 30, 1936, Twentieth Century–Fox Scripts Collection, USC.

29
Mel Gussow,
Don’t Say Yes until I Finish Talking: A Biography of Darryl F. Zanuck
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 70.

30
Black,
Child Star
, 169–77, 179–80.

31
Review of
Wee Willie Winkie
,
Time
, July 19, 1937, 44; Howard Barnes, review of
Wee Willie Winkie
,
New York Herald Tribune
, July 24, 1937, 4.

32
“What the Picture Did for Me,”
Motion Picture Herald
, November 27, 1937, 74; September 25, 1937, 64; December 25, 1937, 50.

33
“What the Picture Did for Me,”
Motion Picture Herald
, December 4, 1937, 66; November 13, 1937, 74; January15, 1938, 59; August 20, 1938, 60; October 23, 1937, 79; February 5, 1938, 73.

34
Peter Bogdanovich,
Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer
(New York: Praeger, 1971), 108.

35
Howard Barnes, review of
Heidi
,
New York Herald Tribune
, November 6, 1937, 8.

36
“What the Picture Did for Me,”
Motion Picture Herald
, February 12, 1938, January 1, 1938, 45.

37
“Conference with Mr. Zanuck,” June 24, 1937; “Conference with Mr. Zanuck,” July 7, 1937,
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
, Twentieth Century–Fox Scripts Collection, USC.

38
Alexander Kahn, “Shirley Temple’s Coiffure Taxes Filmdom’s Brains,”
Washington Post
, December 5, 1937, sec. TS, 1.

39
Review of
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
,
Variety,
March 9, 1938, 14; Frank S. Nugent, review of
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
,
New York Times,
March 26, 1938, 12.

40
Review of
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
,
Motion Picture Daily
, March 9, 1938, 4.

41
W.R.W. [William R. Weaver], review of
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
,
Motion Picture Herald
, March 12, 1938, 36–39.

42
Review of
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
,
Time
, March 21, 1938, 42.

43
Ed Sullivan, “Looking at Hollywood: Zanuck in Person,”
Chicago Daily Tribune
, November 12, 1937, 19; “Conference with Mr. Zanuck,” January 24, 1938,
Little Miss Broadway
, Twentieth Century–Fox Scripts Collection, USC.