Peewee's Progress

(See front cover)

Shirley Temple was cinema's No. 1 box-office attraction for 1935. She receives 3,500 letters and $10,000 in an average week. She is, outside of the 100,000 feet of screen film on which she appears every year, the world's most photographed person. Last week in Los Angeles, Shirley Temple was getting ready for her seventh birthday. All over the U. S. cinemaddicts packed theatres to see her first release of 1936 and the first picture she has made since the reorganization of the $54,000,000 company in which she is the most valuable single asset.

Captain January (Twentieth Century-Fox) is the story of a poor little foundling (Shirley Temple) washed up on the New England shore and adopted by a kindly lighthouse keeper (Guy Kibbee). Approaching her seventh birthday, the foundling is an extraordinary child. When she wakes she yodels a little song called Early Bird. When she visits the general store to buy brass polish, she pauses for a tap dance in the company of a proficient young villager (Buddy Ebsen). By this maneuver, she unhappily attracts the attention of the new & nasty truant officer (Sara Haden), and the plot begins to thicken. On the grounds that little Star is being carelessly reared, the truant officer will try to take her away from her kindly Captain January, put her in an institution.

First brush between Captain January and the truant officer occurs when Star is haled to the village school to take an examination. Here, while Captain January and his friend Nazro (Slim Summerville) stand on a rain barrel and peer through the schoolhouse window, Star distinguishes herself. She makes the young nephew of the truant officer, being questioned simultaneously, appear doltish by comparison, gains credentials for the third grade. As lighthouse inspector, Captain Nazro has the sad duty of telling Captain January that, because his light is being mechanized, he must join the unemployed. This means that poor little Star is likely to be turned out doors.

The truant officer busily seizes the occasion for renewed efforts to send Star to an asylum. Captain Nazro cleverly remembers that when Star was washed ashore a photograph album was rescued also, containing portraits of her kin. He writes to them. They appear. Kindly folk, they take Star to live with them in Boston. When she pines for Captain January, they charter a small yacht on which he is captain, Nazro first mate and the tap-dancing villager, the crew.

Adapted from an 1890 best seller by Laura Elizabeth Richards, directed by David Butler, Captain January belongs to a special class of cinema. Neither epic, romance nor extravaganza, it is designed solely as its star's vehicle. The screen play by Sam Hellman, Gladys Lehman and Harry Tugend is pleasantly salty and the supporting players comport themselves as expertly as usual. As an item of entertainment, however, the value of Captain January depends entirely upon the fact that Shirley Temple appears in almost every sequence, grinning, sobbing, dancing, singing, wriggling, pattering down stairs or spitting on her pinafore, as the scenario requires.

That this is entirely as it should be, in the opinion of U. S. cinemaddicts, was proved by the reception of the picture last week. Captain January smashed box office records in Milwaukee, Portland, Me., Dayton, Richmond, Cincinnati, Boston and Baltimore. Preparations for Shirley Temple's birthday were thus enhanced by the certainty that neither increasing age nor the loss of her teeth has yet hurt her prestige and that, in her eighth year, she was likely to exert an even greater influence upon the entertainment business and its patrons than she did in her fifth, sixth and seventh.

Debut. Unlike most cinemactresses, Shirley Temple does not conceal the date of her birth. It was April 23, 1929. Five weeks after the market crash, she uttered her first word: "Mama!" The next May she could waddle. She was a spindly child but neither sickly nor remarkable. At 3, she had measles. Soon afterward she was sent to the Meglin Dance Studio where

Hollywood children prepare to realize their parents' vicarious screen ambitions, but she did not stay there long. Dimpled, pretty, with yellow hair curled by her mother's fingers, she was picked by a scout for Educational Pictures. Her professional career started with a role in Baby Burlesks. Encouraged, Mrs. Temple worked hard submitting Shirley to all studios reported needing children. In 1934 she was cast to sing "Baby Take a Bow" in Fox's Stand Up and Cheer (TIME, April 30, 1934). The picture was feeble but Shirley was a hit. Hollywood distrusts infant performers. They are likely to be greedy, temperamental, slow to learn and quick to outlive their value. Perplexed by what it regarded as a dubious blessing, Fox gave Shirley Temple a subsidiary role in a weak picture called Change of Heart. She scored another personal success. More worried than ever, Fox decided to let someone else find the answer, loaned her to Paramount to feature in Little Miss Marker. Fox took the hint, featured her in a picture called, to remind cinemaddicts who she was, Baby, Take a Bow, then shuttled her back to Paramount for Now and Forever. When the grosses of these three pictures were recorded, it was undeniably apparent that Shirley Temple was potentially the most valuable human property in Hollywood. Now thoroughly alarmed, Fox got stage fright about stories. Director David Butler finally suggested one called Bright Eyes, released at Christmas 1934.

Regular Gross. Bright Eyes ended all doubts about Shirley Temple's future. It cost $190,000, earned that much in three weeks. Since Bright; Eyes she has appeared in The Little Colonel, Our Little Girl, Curly Top and The Littlest Rebel. Each Temple picture--the totals vary less than those of any other star--grosses between $1,000,000 and $1,500,000. They cost between $200,000 and $300,000. Story, cast and background are relatively unimportant. Temple pictures are rarely held up in production and often finished ahead of shooting schedule. She makes four a year for which she gets approximately $75,000 each. The rest of her income is derived from outside royalties with 15 commercial firms that sell underwear, coats, hats, shoes, dolls, books, toys, dresses, soap, hair-ribbons and table wear.

Since Bright Eyes Shirley Temple has grown full of honors. Her position as box-office champion last year was determined by Motion Picture Herald's poll of U. S. exhibitors. As rival to President Roosevelt and King Edward VIII for most photographed celebrity, she appears in an average of 20 still portraits daily for magazines, newspapers and advertisements. In addition to being, accurately speaking, the most popular cinemactress, Shirley Temple is the ablest song-plugger in Hollywood. Sheet music sales on her songs, like Polly Wolly Doodle and On the Good Ship Lollipop, are over 400,000 copies each. These are larger than the sales of songs introduced in the same period by Bing Crosby, Jeanette MacDonald, et al.

Honors. Outside of purely commercial distinctions, Shirley Temple has received almost every available reward of fame except an honorary college degree, which she may well get next June. She is Captain of the Texas Rangers, an Honorary Chair man of the Be Kind to Animals Anniversary Week and a Kentucky Colonel. Her offices are not limited to the U. S. She is president of the Chum's Club of Scotland (400,000) and of the Kiddies Club of England. The 165,000 moppet members of the latter swear to imitate her character, conduct and manners. Possibly the smallest of her international titles is that of mascot to the Chilean Navy. President Arturo Alessandri, an admirer, conferred this dignity on her, together with a special uniform.

Garlanded with such laurels at an age when her contemporaries become inflated with conceit about a gold star on the report card, it might seem natural for the most celebrated child alive to be in private life also the most objectionable sample of precocity, weight for age, who ever gave sharp answers to her betters. Such is not the case. Disappointing as the case may be to child psychologists of certain schools and persons judicious enough to distrust the customary vaporings of cinema fan magazines, Hollywood chatter columnists and professional pressagents, Shirley Temple is actually a peewee paragon who not only obeys her mother, likes her work, rarely cries, is never sick and keeps her dresses clean but even likes raw carrots, eats spinach with enthusiasm and expresses active relish for the taste of castor oil.

Day. Shirley Temple wakes at 7 a. m. She repeats out loud any lines she may have learned the evening before, rehearses dance steps by waving her feet in the air. After 45 minutes, she decides to get dressed. For breakfast she has fruit, cereal and a coddled egg. Her shiny Cadillac, with Chauffeur John Griffith at the wheel, is waiting in front of the Temples' Santa Monica house. In it she and her mother are whisked off to the Fox Studio. On the set Shirley is supervised by Mrs. Temple. She also does her lessons. Precocious, she has been held back as much as possible, but her I. Q. is that of a 9-year-old. She is learning French so that next year she can make the foreign versions of her pictures. For lunch she has beef or chicken, vegetables, preceded by soup and followed by ice cream or canned pears, her favorite dessert. At 5:30 o'clock her day's work is over. She goes home, plays with her father, rehearses the next day's assignment and retires.

To inborn talents and a clever child's natural aptitude in imitating her elders, three years of experience have added, in the case of Cinemactress Temple, the technique of a seasoned trouper. In Captain January she had to come down a 45-ft. lighthouse stairway while a camera crane moved beside her catching a line at each turn of the stairs. The difficulty was to time the lines exactly to the turns and simultaneously to a dance step with which she was punctuating her words. Shirley did not miss once.

Her work entails no effort. She plays at acting as other small girls play at dolls. Her training began so long ago that she now absorbs instruction almost subconsciously. While her director explains how he wants a scene played, Shirley looks at her feet, apparently thinking of more important matters. When the take starts, she not only knows her own function but frequently that of the other actors. Camerawise, she knows when she has made a mistake and will hold up her hand to stop the take. When a scene is made in which she has to cry, her mother takes her off the set and talks to her sternly for a few minutes. When they return, Shirley cries without effort. She is not sensitive when criticized. "You can do lots better than that, Shirley," said Director David Butler after a scene in Captain January. Shirley Temple winked as she has seen older actresses do. Said she: "There was a little faking in it."

Doll & Tears. In one morning, Shirley Temple's crony and hero, Tap Dancer Bill Robinson, who was in The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel, taught her a soft-shoe number, a waltz clog and three tap routines. She learned them without looking at him, by listening to his feet. She appreciates the show-business slogan, "The show must go on" so thoroughly that it serves to repress her reactions to the bumps &; bangs sustained in acting. In Captain January she fell over a lamp and hurt her leg. On another occasion she slammed a door on her hand. Neither accident made her cry. She has, however, a normal small girl's maternal instinct. When she picked up her favorite doll and the doll's arm came off in her hand, she burst into a fit of hysterical sobs. It took half an hour to calm her.

The neat, premature perfection of her character appears to extend in all directions. Her teeth fall out on schedule, one by one, and are replaced for working hours by temporary stopgaps. She wears one of these in Captain January. She is expert at such games as checkers, pachisi, casino and "squares"--connecting dots on a piece of paper with straight lines to form boxes. She recently beat Oscar Olsen, a member of the Swedish Senate, at squares twice in succession. She has a doll from every country in the world, each dressed in native costume. On the Fox lot she keeps rabbits and a flock of bantam chickens. The chickens operate with punctuality. Each night Shirley takes home an egg to eat for breakfast. In addition to satisfying constant requests for her own autograph, she collects those of other celebrities. Her contacts have enabled her to assemble one of the best collections in the world.

Family. No less startling than the effect which cinema success has had on Shirley Temple is the effect Shirley Temple's success has had on her family. The Temples have already moved once since Shirley became famed. They are now building a new house which has a hill on one side and a wide lawn on the other to prevent Shirley's admirers from pressing their noses against the windows at odd hours. Mrs. Temple gets some $500 a week for spending the days with her daughter.

Shirley has two older brothers, Jack (20) and George (17). Jack was given a job in Twentieth Century-Fox's publicity department. Feeling that he was paid solely for being a prodigy's brother, he asked to be sent to Stanford. He was promptly made manager of Stanford's dramatic club. George Temple, now at the New Mexico Military Institute, has not yet been much influenced by his sister's fame, but Mr. Temple's life has been revolutionized. From his modest job in a bank cage, he was elevated to manager of California Bank's branch at Washington Street and Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles. The bank showed a marked gain in children's savings accounts. Last week he was transferred to the more pretentious cream-colored branch at Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards. Mrs. Temple, who devotes all her time to Shirley, is dark and taller than her husband. Mr. Temple, short, plump and dimpled, looks more like his daughter. Consequently, he is considered responsible for her genius, receives occasional offers from ladies who feel that with his assistance they could produce a replica. Mr. Temple declines such invitations. He spends his time investing his daughter's earnings in sound securities.

The question about Shirley Temple which seems to disturb people most persistently is whether she is "spoiled" or "unspoiled" by her life in the cinema. She is "unspoiled." This does not prevent her from being fresh. When, preparatory to meeting H. G. Wells, she was informed that he was the most important man in the universe, she chirped: "Oh no, he's not! God is the most important and Governor Merriam's second." In Palm Springs she showed General Pershing her autograph book and asked him whether he knew the Hollywood notables whose names were in it. On learning that he knew none of them, she lost interest in him, disrespectfully inquired later how he came to be a general. She likes vaudeville jokes, frequently repeats an impudent riddle she learned from Bill Robinson: "How's the tailoring business?" "So-so." On sitting down to a game of squares, she humiliates her opponents by saying, "There're no spots on your suit, but you're going to the cleaners."

Friends, In the life of a normal child celebrity, it is not contact with the adults whom she meets in her work which is dangerous but encounters with children of her own age. Accustomed to celebrities, her studio acquaintances treat Shirley Temple like an ordinary child. Ordinary children, by being shy and filled with awe, sometimes give her an exaggerated sense of her importance.

Fortunately, in Hollywood, most of the children she knows have more or less famed parents and are therefore not overly impressed. On the guest list at her birthday party this week are Sydney and Charles Chaplin Jr.; Janet Boles; Susan and Darryline Zanuck; Sadja and Luba Stokowski; Irvin Cobb's granddaughter; the Irving Berlins' daughters; screenwriters' offspring like Donald Ogden Stewart Jr. and Peter Busch, the Temple standin, Mary Lou Islieb. The party annually occurs at the Fox Studio commissary, called the Cafe de Paris. Shirley's biggest presents will be a Shetland pony and a bicycle.

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