In the early nineteen-eighties, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Shirley Temple movies were shown on Sunday mornings, on cable TV. When we got our first VCR, in 1982, my father would set the timer to record the movie, and it would be waiting for me and my younger sister when we got home from church. Sometimes, he would stay home from church so that he could use what we called “the pause control” to excise the commercials. Even then, at age nine, I knew that this had as much to do with his love for us (and for new technology) as it did with his ambivalence about church.
I adored Shirley Temple. I wanted to be a child star, and, even nearly a half century after the height of her stardom, Shirley seemed to me to be the paradigm of one. I knew that she was the youngest person ever to win an Oscar (though this fact was asterisked, because it was a special children’s Oscar, not a real one), and that during the Depression she had been a top-grossing performer. I knew that her stand-in was named Mary Lou Isleib, and that Shirley had been considered for Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.” I knew that she’d had trouble transitioning into roles for young women; that she’d had an early, brief first marriage and a longer second one, during which she’d had breast cancer and had become the Ambassador to Ghana. I knew all this, and more, because I read everything I could about Temple, including two books that remain on my shelves: Robert Windeler’s “The Films of Shirley Temple,” its spine now white, its cover still hot pink, and “The Shirley Temple Story,” a silver-jacketed hardcover I bought in the biographies section at Schuler Books on Twenty-eighth Street.
While I liked Shirley’s movies, I wasn’t especially moved by the story lines or the interactions between characters (with the exception of “The Little Princess,” in which Sara Crewe desperately searches the wards of the wounded soldiers for her father). I was stirred by Shirley herself—stirred by the fact of this little girl onscreen. There was enormous power in watching her doing what I wanted to do—a little girl who I knew had been at the center not only of these films but also of the culture. There was something about the movies being old that mattered, too. There was a feeling of discovery, a feeling that Shirley was mine.
I rarely revisit Shirley’s movies as an adult, and no doubt if I did all kinds of weird stuff would pop up, including lots of daddy issues (often, he’s missing), and, also, what is up with the slave-owning family in “The Littlest Rebel”? If Shirley was sexually objectified, I didn’t pick up on it; to me, her wholesomeness was part of her appeal. My mother said that Shirley was one of the few child stars who had grown up to be normal, meaning both that her life had not turned into a soap opera or a tragedy, and that she seemed to have made the choice to leave Hollywood behind.
In our back yard, I belted Shirley’s songs the same way I belted the songs from Annie. In fourth grade, I sang “At the Codfish Ball,” from “Captain January,” in the school talent show. That was the same year I wrote Shirley a letter. Some weeks after I sent the note, I received one from her, a three-by-five card on which, in black ink, she wrote a few short lines and signed her name, “Shirley Temple Black.” My mother put the card in a Lucite frame that I placed on my dressing table.
My sadness at hearing of Shirley Temple’s death has much to do with the reminder of that far-gone time when I was her fan. When I was nine, my parents were still married (four years later, they divorced); I was still their little girl in my original house. My parents indulged my Shirley Temple interest. One day after school, my mother took me to a dark, musty used bookstore I'd found in the Yellow Pages. I also loved Judy Garland, and the proprietor of the store told me, “I have a another customer just like you, someone who is interested in those same two, Shirley Temple and Judy Garland.” I still sometimes think about this person in Grand Rapids who was my double.
The year I was nine, I received a set of newly reissued vinyl Shirley Temple dolls for Christmas. But my favorite present was something my father bought for me in a used-book store in Ann Arbor, on the other side of the state. Used-book stores were my father’s churches, and at this one, the Dawn Treader, he’d found a Shirley Temple scrapbook from the nineteen-thirties. Onto its blank pages, someone from that same era—it seemed to me like a woman, because the work was too neat for a little girl—had pasted articles about Shirley Temple that she’d scissored out of movie magazines and local Michigan newspapers. I felt I knew this woman somehow, knew her across time and across the state, knew the thrill of a fellow-fan opening the newspaper to see a story about her favorite star. I was amazed that my father had found this scrapbook in a mysterious store with a fantasy-novel name, and I was moved that he had known what its stiff pages and yellowed articles would mean to me. It’s a very Shirley Temple-movie ending, a moment of tenderness between a daughter and a father, but what can I say? I still have that scrapbook.
Susan Burton’s memoir, “The Invention of the Teenage Girl,” will be published next year by Random House.
Shirley Temple, 1928. Photograph by Hulton Archive/Getty.
