In Graham Greene’s review of “Wee Willie Winkie”—which was so lascivious that Greene was forced to flee to Mexico—he wrote, “The owners of a child star are like leaseholders—their property diminishes in value every year. Time’s chariot is at their back; before them acres of anonymity.” But the “Winkie” star Shirley Temple endures; nearly a million DVDs of her work are sold a year, according to 20th Century Fox. The actress will turn eighty-five on April 23rd, and few people on earth have coexisted for so long with their own memorabilia.
You’d think that Temple’s five-hundred-and-seventeen-page autobiography, “Child Star,” could be tossed, with a thunk, atop that unholy mountain of dolls, dresses, muffs, soap bars, cereal boxes, and cobalt-blue cups. Celebrity autobiography has been a denigrated genre since at least 1982 (when Orson Welles and Gore Vidal spent most of the year poring over Rudy Vallee’s memoir “like a pair of Talmudic scholars” ). But “Child Star”—published twenty-five years ago, and lamentably out of print—doesn’t register as an autobiography so much as a little-girl classic that ought to be shelved alongside “Anne of Green Gables,” “Little Women,” and Laura Ingalls Wilder. It’s a bildungsroman scaled to the intellectual limitations of a child, a book that takes six months to read and becomes part of your life.
I remember lugging it around like a Teddy bear in the mid-nineteen-nineties, shortly after a revelatory Hanukkah during which my sister and I received a Shirley Temple videocassette every night. Thanks to our villainous, unstable Grandma Ruth, we became suckers for Shirley—for the mouth that always seemed numb from ice-cream sundaes, for the scene in “Curly Top” where she smuggles a pony into the orphanage, and for the finale of “Pardon My Pups,” in which her pregnant dog slurps up a cardigan’s worth of yarn and the puppies all come out wearing sweaters. Shirley Temple’s movies were sublimely empty-headed—and yet so many details from them remain “stuck like gum to the roof of my mind,” as James Wolcott wrote of Elvis’s movies.
“Child Star” is similarly memorable. The book was as formative as Judy Blume for me, the first I’d heard of perverts and assassination attempts and groping. Temple seemed to believe that recording every single detail of her life was more important than any urge she had to retain glamour, and her book is intoxicatingly dishy as a result. (Excerpts were serialized in the National Enquirer.) We learn that Shirley met Amelia Earhart, and that they discussed feminism and “Hamlet” and chewing gum. We hear that on her honeymoon, Shirley accidentally stuck in her tampon with the cardboard container still on. And apparently, studio makeup artists used “mucilage” to fasten a teen-age Shirley’s ears back during a scene with Cary Grant, but “the glue gave way…. Out popped one ear, trailing looping, goopy strands.” But there are also hypnotically detailed passages about filmmaking that inspired Kirkus Reviews to declare “Child Star” “one of the most inward pictures of child genius since Mozart’s letters.” Here’s my favorite:
Her Hollywood is one where the soundstages are riddled with bookies, where if producers are barefoot it means they’re going to make a pass at you, and where the propmen are all named Jonesy. Temple is an extraordinary noticer—it’s what made her such a gifted mimic—and she can be forgiven if she does almost nothing else as an author. When the book came out, Temple proudly told the Los Angeles Times that she was uninterested in writing about “all that psychological stuff—who am I? Where am I going?” Her messy 1949 divorce meant abdicating her position as America’s Sweetheart, and she made no films afterward—but “Child Star” gives us no sense that it fazed her. Her father hemorrhaged all but eighty-nine thousand dollars of her fortune, but Temple describes his financial ineptitude with total dispassion. (“For reasons some may find inexplicable,” she writes, almost apologetically, “I felt neither disappointment nor anger.”)
But Shirley’s roboticism only makes it easier for a child reader to take possession of her—the woman’s emotional world is a vast, abandoned Millennium Falcon that you can cozily snuggle into the cockpit of. It’s also proof that Temple worked without a ghostwriter, who would have souped things up a bit. Janet Malcolm has observed, “If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue what you could call memory’s autism, its passion for the tedious.” However, in “Child Star,” it is the very tedium of Shirley’s every thought that brings her flashy, extraordinary career to life. Tedium somehow transforms junk into loot. Temple mentions that her first baby tooth fell out right before she pressed her hands in cement in front of Grauman’s, and recounts that at the seventh Academy Awards, she “collected crumbs from nearby partially eaten hard rolls and made symmetrical little piles on the tablecloth.” Great children’s books let their readers bask in lazy, copiously detailed descriptions of physical acts, and the passages about Shirley’s loosening tooth and crumb-work are talismanic and absorbing.
True, we might wish that Temple’s eventful life had been experienced by someone with a more interesting mind. As People magazine observed, “Usually her appraisal of a stranger was directly related to the softness of his or her lap.” To her credit, Temple offers a sensitive portrait of Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, her African-American dance partner in four films. She describes Robinson’s benevolence, his “brilliant” diamond ring (which directors made him take off before every shot, since he was playing slaves and ex-slaves and servants), and chronicles her repeated, oblivious requests to visit his house (“No way, darlin’. Just no way,” he finally said). But the book remains bizarrely mum on the hideous racial stereotyping in the films Shirley made with Robinson; they make “Song of the South” look like a guiltless romp.
In his 1973 study “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks,” the film historian Donald Bogle puzzled over the fact that no other star from Hollywood’s golden age produced such a consistently racist body of work. (Bogle even claims that “there was an inside industry joke that a Temple picture was incomplete without at least one darky.”) In the short “War Babies,” cannibalistic African children capture Shirley and pop her in an enormous stewpot; in “Little Miss Marker,” night-club singers glide atop stage flats pulled by black children in harnesses and epaulets; in “The Littlest Rebel,” an antebellum Shirley asks her slave (played by Robinson) what it means to “free slaves” and he solemnly responds, “I don’t know what it means myself.” Later in the film, Shirley dons blackface and splits an apple with Abraham Lincoln.
In the best films of the thirties, you can feel the cosmopolitan instincts of filmmakers (many European, many gay) duking it out with the fuddy-duddy moralistic strictures of the Production Code. (Murderers had to get their comeuppance, and during wartime every jokester had to eventually sober up and start driving an ambulance.) Movies like “The Philadelphia Story” remain terrific because they managed to delay their Code-mandated descent into awfulness until the last possible moment—so we get headstrong Katharine Hepburn pledging to be meek and “yar” in the final reel—but Shirley Temple’s movies are full-throated odes to the Code, jerry-built to delight the most primitive minds of 1936. Two of those minds were Shirley’s parents: her father cracked the same three or four puns for years, and in “Child Star” there is a stupefying moment in which Shirley’s mother turns down Helen Hayes’s offer to play the nurse to Shirley’s Juliet by scoffing, “But that’s a story about suicide, isn’t it? Besides, she’s going to do “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” next.” Shirley certainly had no sophisticates guiding her choices at 20th Century Fox, which the historian Ethan Mordden once dubbed “the most rural lot in town.”
“Little Miss Marker”—made in 1934 at Paramount, and based on a wily Damon Runyon story about horse-doping hoods—is closest Shirley got to sophistication. It’s the only one of her films where the jokes aren’t pitched to the kind of people who buy commemorative plates. And even if it eventually bows to treacle (Shirley needs a transfusion, her curls are obscured by a surgery turban, and her chaperone, Adolphe Menjou, prays, weeps, and smashes the horse’s death-pill in his fist), at least everyone in the movie strains to resist “going sappy.” “Will you kiss me?” asks Shirley at one point to Menjou. “I ain’t running for mayor,” he says.
Shirley never appeared in a good film again. The Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck realized they didn’t need to be good to make money, and the studio was too busy trying to beat out puberty to order second drafts. I wish Zanuck had had a little ambition and cast her as Little Eva in a redemptive, racially sensitive Cukor-directed version of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or perhaps in a glossy Howard Hawks action film based on the Annie comics. But Fox refused to exert Shirley, and—worse—tried to sanctify her screen image. As Little Miss Marker, she cussed and stole salt shakers with abandon, but by “Young People,” from 1940, she could be seen hectoring another child to “drink every bit of your milk,” her voice as crisp as a hall-monitor sash. Fox dropped her after that film. Shirley Temple made movies for nine more years, but in anything post-Pearl Harbor she is unrecognizable—shellacked, stunned, and mousy. We’re used to child actors going through murderous, disfiguring puberties, but Shirley’s the only one who got snuffed.
Even if Temple worked to eliminate “psychological stuff” from her book, “Child Star” still functions as a fascinating map of that snuffing process. You can see her becoming boring; you can see Republicanism encroaching on her. (Temple claimed that she became a Republican at age ten, when she saw a Democrat push a kid aside as he entered his limousine—though you’d think she’d have reëvaluated at some point.) Her childhood observations—that Eleanor Roosevelt in shoulder pads “resembled some medieval figure from a playing card”—are wonderfully odd, but it’s painful whenever she tries to slather her heavy-handed diplomat’s conception of wit onto the past. The book presents the psychodrama of a dull middle-aged woman remembering the riveting thoughts she once had. And as soon as Shirley departs her 20th Century Fox bungalow the book becomes unreadable. The last two hundred pages are consumed by endless descriptions of bougainvillea. (Temple has spent the past quarter century threatening to write a sequel about her “wild” post-Hollywood years as a U.S. Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia, but publishers haven’t bitten.)
There is darkness in “Child Star,” of course. The passage that I clung to as a child, like a favored, glamorous nightmare, was about a woman whose daughter died the hour Shirley was born. In 1939, the woman tried to assassinate Shirley while she was singing “Silent Night” on a live radio show, under the logic that the star had swiped her daughter’s soul and shooting her would unleash it. “The tale seemed understandable to me,” Temple writes. When I first read “Child Star,” perched by the cold cuts at one of my sister’s swim meets, I loved the idea that Shirley Temple’s soul was endlessly transferrable, and as sought-after as the Maltese Falcon. I remember eating a slice of ham so ribbony and translucent that you could bird-watch through it, and wondering whether couples across America were timing their childbirths to synch with Temple’s death.
Of course, Hollywood has been trying to forcibly reincarnate Temple for sixty years—in Hayley Mills, Mara Wilson, the various Annies, and in every post-“Heidi” kiddie movie where the villain slides across an eighty-foot floor slick with soap. In 1956, even “The Diary of Anne Frank” joined the fleet of retroactive Temple vehicles: the film presented a sugary, Americanized vision of Frank, and the director George Stevens wrote that he’d hoped to cast a Shirley Temple type. I recently mentioned this blasphemous bit of dream casting to a friend, who said that he’d always pictured Shirley as the adorable Nazi youth who points to the attic and yells, “They’re in there, Mister Hitler!” He was right, in a way. If Anne Frank’s continual appeal is rooted in every child’s sense of his own powerlessness (along with the selfish hope that his papers will be published in redemptive, posthumous volumes that are hailed as classics and haunt his surviving family members), Shirley Temple movies satisfy a child’s fantasies of tyranny, of being able to make grownups tap dance and marry each other on command. Temple’s fellow child star Jane Withers observed that her films were intended as propaganda (“Mothers especially would take their kids to say, ‘Now, this is what you should be!’”), but what they really taught us was that adorability is a kind of weapon.
So my sister and I joined the legions of Shirley mimics—like Andy Warhol, who became obsessed with her after seeing “Poor Little Rich Girl” and (according to his biographer Victor Bokris) aped her mannerisms “for the rest of his life…folding his hands in prayer and placing them next to his cheek, or twisting them together and holding them out to the right just below his waist.” This remains Temple’s peculiar feat: she makes children want to be adorable and sickly sweet and dull, to flatten their emotions out. It’s hard to imagine any subsequent child star surviving an assassination attempt and thinking simply, “The tale seemed understandable to me.” (In 1981, Jodie Foster would respond to the Hinckley incident by sinking into depression, demanding to read all her hate mail, and ironically hanging an enormous photo of Reagan getting shot in her kitchen.) “Child Star” charts Shirley Temple’s triumph over experiences that almost seem to have been conspiring to make her interesting—but the book preserves them so perfectly, and offers such a trove of loot, that children will read it in a state of Ali Baba greed.
Matt Weinstock lives in Brooklyn.
Photograph by John Kobal Foundation/Getty.