The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (30 page)

The new house testified not only to the Temple family’s new social standing among the Hollywood elite but also to their effort to protect their daughter from benign and sinister attention. An eight-foot-tall chain fence ringed the property on three sides, and a massive fieldstone wall faced the street, allowing admission only through an imposing iron gate that was electrically operated from the house.
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A photoelectric eye monitored Shirley’s bedroom door, and electric alarms linked every window of the house to the local police station. Armed security guards patrolled the property at night, and if one failed to reach any of a series of keyed time clocks on schedule, the police were automatically summoned.

The large house staff included Shirley’s personal bodyguard and chauffeur, burly John Griffith. He had saved Darryl Zanuck from drowning when he was a boy, and Zanuck depended on the former carnival roustabout to keep his precious charge safe. “Watch the kid like a hawk,” Zanuck told Griffith. “If anything happens to her, this studio might as well close up.” The portly, mustached bodyguard was true to his charge. He hovered near Shirley, squinting suspiciously at all and sundry, his holstered .38 caliber pistol bulging under his armpit, a pair of folded handcuffs at the ready. On most days Griffith drove Shirley and her mother to the studio in a shiny Cadillac—the modest family cars were now a thing of the past. With his wife, Mabel, who worked as Gertrude Temple’s maid, he lived in an attached apartment with the Temple family.
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The new Temple house immediately became a major tourist attraction. Hollywood sightseeing buses hourly disgorged eager passengers, who clustered at the gate, taking photographs, as well as pebbles, twigs, and leaves as souvenirs, while the driver described the site and its famous resident through a megaphone. She was also becoming a ripe target for kidnappers and extortionists. Kidnappings of rich and socially prominent figures rose considerably during the Great Depression, and they riveted the attention of government officials and popular media. The famous insurance company Lloyd’s of London offered Americans ransom insurance, and Hollywood celebrities Bing Crosby and Marlene Dietrich bought policies. Yet what made the prospect of kidnapping especially dreadful was the most notorious child kidnapping case of the century, one indelibly seared on the minds of Gertrude and George Temple, and millions of other parents.
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Beginning in 1932, two years before Shirley’s meteoric rise to fame, the fate of another blond curly-haired child, twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr., held the public spellbound. The boy’s tall, handsome father had himself vaulted from obscurity to the greatest of American heroes in 1927 with his solo flight from New York to Paris. The reserved Lindbergh had always been uneasy with his celebrity, and it proved to be a curse of tragic proportions. Immense as was the public acclaim for his stupendous flight, such publicity paled in comparison to the media frenzy that followed the abduction of his son. Even before the kidnapping, Colonel Lindbergh had attempted to shield his family against persistent media intrusion. As a part of this effort, he and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, an aviator in her own right and a future author, had recently moved into Highfields, a new, rambling French-provincial-style farmhouse on four hundred acres near Hopewell, New Jersey. Despite their seclusion, right under the noses of the Lindberghs and their servants, their infant son disappeared from his nursery crib on the evening of March 1, 1932. The abduction and its aftermath became the greatest human interest story of the decade. When the child’s badly decayed and mutilated corpse was discovered ten weeks later, newspaper circulation surpassed that following the 1918 Armistice that ended the Great War. The search for the child’s murderer transfixed public attention for more than two years, and the fate of the man charged with the brutal killing, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, further gripped the public from September 1934, when he was arrested, through his trial and conviction to his execution in the electric chair in April 1936. Meanwhile, to escape the incessant publicity and possible further threats, in December 1935 the Lindberghs and their second son sailed under assumed names to England to live for a time in self-exile in a village in Kent.
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Charles Lindbergh Jr., in a photo that was widely circulated after his kidnapping on March 1, 1932. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

In his tragic death and media afterlife, the Lindbergh baby became—despite his parents’ efforts—a macabre child celebrity. Reportage of the kidnapping case established a new low in the commercial exploitation of childhood, and its dreadful details transformed the lives of children and their families across the country. The future writer and illustrator of children’s books Maurice Sendak, born only a few weeks after Shirley Temple in 1928 to working-class immigrant Jewish parents, experienced the ordeal as “a personal torment.” “I remember everything,” he later said. “I couldn’t read, but the radio was always on. I remember Mrs. Lindbergh’s cheerful voice, where she was allowed to speak on radio to say that the baby had a cold and would the man or men or women who took him rub camphor on his chest. It was a slight cold, but she didn’t want it to get any worse.” Sendak wondered, “If that fair-haired, blue-eyed princeling could not be kept safe, what certain peril lay in store for him, little Murray Sendak, in his humble apartment in Bensonhurst?”
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The Lindbergh kidnapping and other sensational extortionist child abductions in the 1930s, such as that of six-year-old June Robles in 1934, nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser in 1935, ten-year-old Charles Matson in 1937, and twelve-year-old Peter David Levine and five-year-old James Bailey Cash in 1938, pointed to another paradox in the role of media publicity in the private lives of children and their families. Child kidnappings represented the ultimate violation of the sanctity of the family and the despoliation of the innocent. In responding to extortionist demands for ransom, families were forced to participate in a criminal market, in order to redeem what was most sacred and priceless. They were compelled to participate in a media market as well, one that compounded the plunder of the lost child. The child’s appearance and distinctive traits were repeatedly described, and if the child was ultimately found dead, the assault on the body was obsessively detailed. In such ways the child became “public property,” in the words of the father of Charley Ross, the four-year-old victim of the most celebrated nineteenth-century American extortionist child-kidnapping plot. In addition, the process sharply exposed the vulnerability of the most powerful families and converted intimate details of their lives into serialized Gothic thrillers. Images of family members, servants, and strangers, together with layouts of households and neighborhoods, flooded the media. Every newspaper reader and radio listener could ponder clues and join the search for suspects. Inevitably, false leads abounded. Suspicions often whirled wildly, alighting on a hapless servant, a mysterious outsider, the lost child’s very parent. All the while, each sensationalized case intensified millions of families’ anxious concern for their own children, creating the conditions for further threats, abductions, and extortions.
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Crime stories and courtroom dramas fueled many Hollywood movie plots in the 1930s, so that the sensationalized coverage of kidnapping and murder trials, especially the Lindbergh case, assumed the character of a thrilling entertainment. Reporting the opening day of the Hauptmann trial, the novelist Kathleen Norris wrote, “We have been regaled by so many prison pictures, so many crime and detective and district attorney pictures, that as the day dawdles on and one would-be juror after another is questioned, challenged, rejected, it begins to seem like a picture. Presently the reel will end, and Minnie Mouse and her white shoes take the screen.”
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The menace of child kidnapping even loomed at the edges of several of Shirley Temple’s films in the mid-1930s, when public attention on Hauptmann was at its height. In
Baby Take a Bow
Shirley’s character is held hostage by a hardened criminal, in
Our Little Girl
police suspect a tramp’s intentions toward her, and in
Poor Little Rich Girl
a sinister man stalks her and tries to lead her away with him.
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More importantly, the broader drama of the popular fascination with child abduction—the longing to see the beloved child restored to devoted parents or protectors in a safe, secure home—remained crucial to almost all of her movies.

Meanwhile, Shirley Temple and other child stars were targets of real-life kidnapping plots and extortionist threats. In 1936 alone, the year that the Temple family moved into their Brentwood retreat, such threats were made not only against Shirley but also against Jane Withers, who catapulted to fame in her supporting role as the brattish girl in
Bright Eyes
, and Freddie Bartholomew, famous for his performances in adaptations of literary classics such as
David Copperfield
,
Little Lord Fauntleroy
,
Captains Courageous
, and
Kidnapped
.
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On May 2, 1936, a “gangling” sixteen-year-old high school student, Sterling Powell, from a farm on the high plains near Grant, Nebraska, wrote a letter to Shirley’s father. It demanded that Mr. Temple charter an airplane and drop an envelope containing $25,000 near where the boy lived. Unless Mr. Temple complied with these demands, the letter warned, “Shirley will encounter dire results.” The letter was turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the boy arrested three months later as he was plowing the family farm. He “didn’t mean to go through with it,” he told the local sheriff, and sent the letter on an impulse. A voracious reader of film and detective magazines and an avid moviegoer, Powell attended a movie with a kidnapping plot one night and, as he later told his bewildered father, “got the idea of the letter from the show.” He returned home, wrote the letter and mailed it, and then, after a sleepless night, “forgot all about it.”
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That same summer another letter arrived in the bundles directed to the Temple family, this one addressed to Shirley’s mother. It demanded that $25,000 be sent to a grocery store in Atlanta, Georgia, saying, “Get the money if you want to keep Shirley.” The FBI traced the letter to another sixteen-year-old movie-struck boy. Frank Stephens had spent six years of his young life in reform school and worked part-time in an Atlanta grocery store. The “undergrown” lad with slicked-down hair and a taste for gaudy neckties conceived of his kidnapping plot while watching a movie with his girlfriend, even adopting the name of one of the film’s characters as a pseudonym. He planned to use the money to entertain his sweetheart. Asked why he targeted Shirley Temple’s family for the extortion threat, Stephens said with a knowing air, “Because they [movie people] pay off better than anybody else.”
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Feeble as such threats proved to be, they considerably alarmed Shirley’s parents and Twentieth Century–Fox studio officials. As the FBI pursued the culprits, George Temple bought a Colt revolver and anxiously patrolled the house at night whenever he heard a strange noise. During this time, while traveling in the car with her bodyguard, Shirley had to crouch under a lap robe on the backseat.
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Yet the most serious threats to Shirley came not from movie-struck teenage boys but from the crush of crowds—and a demented woman. The throngs of tourists and fans that had flocked around Shirley beginning in summer 1934 later swelled to as many as twenty thousand. They swarmed about her not only at film premieres but on private Temple family excursions, well publicized by Twentieth Century–Fox, and trampled the boundary between public and private appearances. When the Temple family took a vacation in Honolulu in August 1935, one such crowd broke through rope barriers and shoved aside police, National Guardsmen, and a hundred Boy Scouts as it stormed toward Shirley. Retreating to the balcony of the Iolani Palace, she sang “On the Good Ship Lollipop” to mollify the throng. These were not truly vacations, as undoubtedly Gertrude and George Temple understood and Shirley came to realize, but another aspect of her work.
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In Boston three years later during another much-publicized family vacation, Shirley found herself in still greater danger. A frenzied crowd, the
Boston Globe
reported, “swept into a tumultuous fight to touch her, get close to her, shout hello to her or catch her eye long enough to have her return its smiles.” It took seventy-five policemen, eight of them on horseback, to clear a path across the street, and she was borne aloft on the shoulders of her father and then of a detective. “At first she was slightly taken back by the excess enthusiasm,” the newspaper reported. “But soon she was in the spirit of the occasion, laughing back at the sea of faces, raising first one hand and then the other in greeting and turning ever in the direction of the greatest noise.” Yet Shirley remembered the event with considerable unease. “What happened to the kids and shorter people,” she wondered, “when the crowd broke in its hysterical rush? Handclapping was one thing, but why did they tug at my shoes, hold on to my legs, and shout so unintelligibly?” “It’s because you make them happy,” her mother reassured her, trying to preserve her innocence while fulfilling the desires of Twentieth Century–Fox publicists. Yet to Shirley the crowd seemed not happy but devouring.
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