Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s

2. Shirley Temple: Making Dreams Come True

44 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 2 Shirley Temple Making Dreams Come True KATHRYN FULLER-SEELEY Just six months after her brief appearance in Fox’s Stand Up and Cheer, Variety declared Shirley Temple to be the “one box office sensation of 1934, the tot . . . who jumped to stardom and became a potent screen factor over night” (1 January 1935, 1, 36). Six-year-old Shirley (whom Fox claimed was only five), forty-three inches tall and weighing forty-three pounds too, pulled in such huge returns at the Depressionstricken box office in 1934 and early 1935—in loan-out appearances in Paramount’s Little Miss Marker and Now and Forever, in Fox’s Baby Take a Bow, Bright Eyes, and The Little Colonel—that in March 1935 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded her a special miniature Oscar statuette for her “outstanding contributions to the industry.” The exhibitor Shirley Temple. Movie Star News. trade journal Motion Picture Herald crowned Shirley1 the top box office star in the United States for four straight years—1935, 1936, 1937, and 1938. Not just another child actress, she was an icon, a star beloved by multitudes around the globe. Her fame was intensely commodified through the sale of lookalike dolls, clothes, toys, books, and ephemera geared to appeal to children and their mothers. Her face sold millions of movie fan magazines and newspapers as people everywhere eagerly read the latest stories about her. Yet Shirley’s films were dismissed for their formulaic nature and made no Photoplay or Film Daily annual “best of” lists in the 1930s. Nor do they garner much critical acclaim today. Contemporary accounts, however, describe with astonishment the devotion of Shirley’s fans, and the huge sums that her films earned at theaters in the depths of the Great Depression —in terms of box office earnings exclusively, Shirley Temple was by far the most important star of the 1930s. Tensions and contradictions arose in the construction of Shirley’s star image in the film exhibitor trade press and in promotional and publicity materials, showing how the Fox film studio, exhibitors, critics, and fans struggled to shape and control this box office phenomenon. How did these groups try to manage her enormous appeal across different segments of the audience—women, children, and men, urban and small-town viewers? How did they negotiate between Shirley’s appeal to adult emotions and her innocence, or between her doll-like cuteness and amazing professional talent and drive? To young viewers, Shirley may have represented the ultimate realization of their ambitions, to have adventures in a world of adults. To women in the audience she may have sentimentally symbolized a tiny creature to care for, protect, and love, and a model of perfect childhood to which their own little girls might be made to conform with much effort and enough hair curlers. Showing too tender a fatherly affection for Shirley, however, was frowned upon. Child-raising manuals of the era decreed that proper patriarchs were strong, distant, and unemotional. Acknowledging that grown men could be Temple fans came dangerously close to broaching topics that were taboo in American culture—pedophilia and sexually aware children. The era could not discuss (if it could imagine) child sexuality, so all talk of it was suppressed. But such concerns remain just under the surface in any examination of Shirley Temple’s stardom, especially as she was a product of an industry that emphasized glamour, beauty, and sexual attractiveness. It is important to remember the context of Shirley’s 1930s stardom, a time carefully constructed to appear innocent, especially where children were concerned. Encompassing and balancing all these tensions and contradictions was the job of little Shirley Temple. SHIRLEY TEMPLE 45 ★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩★ ✩ Prosperity Incarnate Hollywood reporters noted that Shirley’s sudden, enormous popularity did not come from the usual sources, for she was not a studio creation. Fox had “found itself with a new star: a star not of their own making or selecting, but a star thrust upon them by the public” (“Cinema Season ’s Four Cinderellas Elevated to Royal Rank by Prince Public,” Atlanta Constitution, 13 January 1935). The studio happily patted itself on the back, anyway: “Fox is mighty proud of its tiny star . . . Proud of her sensational, overnight success. Proud because she proves that clean entertainment is the best paying entertainment. Proud because you can hold your head high when...