Great Second Acts by Marlene Wagman-Geller

Author:Marlene Wagman-Geller [Wagman-Geller, Marlene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633538238
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2018-09-26T02:45:34+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Mr. Bojangles (1928)

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” His words proved a self-fulfilling prophecy when the hand that penned The Great Gatsby shook so much from alcoholic tremors that he could no longer hold a pen. In contrast, other artists have reinvented themselves in their later years, a fact demonstrated by a woman who proved there was life after “The Good Ship Lollipop.”

Having given birth to two boys, Shirley’s mother, Gertrude, longed for a daughter, one who would be the dancer she had aspired to be. In 1927, her father, George, had his tonsils removed because a doctor suggested it might improve his chances of siring a girl. Ten months later, Shirley Jane Temple was born in Santa Monica, California. By the age of three, for fifty cents a week, she was taking classes at Ethel Meglin’s (a Ziegfeld Follies alumna) Dance Studio in Hollywood, where a fellow student was nine-year-old Judy Garland. When a talent scout chose Shirley and eleven other toddlers to star in Baby Burlesks, a series of suggestive one-reel shorts―shades of the future Toddlers & Tiaras―in which Temple imitated Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, and Dolores del Rio, he launched the career of one of the silver screen’s immortal stars. The producers locked any child who misbehaved in a windowless room with only a block of ice as a seat. Before each performance, Gertrude trilled, “Sparkle, Shirley, sparkle!”

Shirley’s career really began in 1934, when she starred in Stand Up and Cheer, one of the many films made during a decade in which music chased away an unhappy reality: America was in the grip of the Great Depression, and the Nazis had goose-stepped into the Rhineland. Within an hour of her completing her song-and-dance number “Baby, Take a Bow,” Fox Studios placed her under contract for a year at $150 a week. Other roles followed, such as The Little Colonel, Heidi, and Wee Willie Winkie; the world was gaga for the tot with the corkscrew curls styled in imitation of silent-film star Mary Pickford. Temple later explained the adoration: “People in the Depression wanted something to cheer them up, and they fell in love with a dog, Rin Tin Tin, and a little girl.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed, “As long as our country has Shirley Temple, we will be all right.” Yet there was a downside to fame. Ms. Temple stopped believing in Santa Claus at age six when her mother took her to see Kris Kringle in a department store, and he asked for her autograph.

Shirley’s fan mail averaged sixteen thousand letters a month, more than arrived for Greta Garbo. Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret were among her admirers. Her birthday brought 167,000 presents, all of which her parents gave to charity. Not only were mothers (like Shirley MacLaine) naming their little girls after the starlet, they dressed them in S. T. fashion, bought look-alike dolls (now collector’s items), and coiled their hair in her trademark ringlets. One mother even offered George a stud fee in the hope he would sire another Shirley.

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