Since Shirley Temple died, a month ago, I’ve read tributes to her adorableness and her courage and her success. I have heard how her studio assigned her a four-room bungalow with a picket fence and a swing and a rabbit hutch, plus a bodyguard. (She barely needed one. She had a top-of-the-line stage mother who was with her all the time.) But I haven’t seen much about Temple as a dancer. She was a pretty good one, and a pioneer.
After making her début in feature films at the age of four, Temple began tap-dancing onscreen at six, and went on to dance in many more films, with various partners, including Bill Robinson, Buddy Ebsen, George Murphy, and Jack Haley. There is a wonderful photo (see above) of her with Warner Baxter in her breakthrough film, “Stand Up and Cheer!,” in 1934. She is six.
As other writers have said, her charm, like that of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, was no doubt increased by the fact that the United States, at that time, was in the maw of the Depression, and people needed something to cheer them up. Her onscreen happiness seems utterly unnarcissistic. She loves being in a movie. She loves her dress. She holds it out to show us how nice it is.
Early on, Temple appeared in movies with black people — Stepin Fetchit, for one — but she didn’t dance with them. Then Twentieth Century Fox paired her with the great Bill (Bojangles) Robinson in “The Little Colonel” (1935). The plot of this movie is corny and unself-consciously racist. I quote from “Mr. Bojangles: The Biography of Bill Robinson,” by Jim Haskins and N. R. Mitgang:
This movie was different from her earlier ones. First, she now was dancing with an African-American man. The pairing of black and white performers—especially white women with black men—was very daring at that time. (In the late nineteen-fifties, Balanchine’s ballet “Agon,” in which Diana Adams, white, danced the culminating pas de deux with Arthur Mitchell, African-American, could not be performed when his company toured the South.) You could say that Robinson’s age—he was fifty years older than Temple—might have neutralized any shock, but you could also say the opposite. One thing to consider is that Robinson, especially at that age, did not have a lot of sexual allure. (The studio would not have let Temple dance with John Bubbles.) And there was almost no physical contact between them. When Temple danced with Ebsen (white) in “Captain January,” a year later, Ebsen lifted her, carried her, rocked her in his arms. In “The Little Colonel,” Robinson did nothing more than hold her hand.
For the stair dance, so famous a part of that movie (and, even before the movie, so famous a Robinson specialty), Robinson, as Temple points out in her autobiography, basically taught her how to tap-dance—what she had done earlier was more a stab at tap than the real thing—and he treated her as a serious student. At the beginning, he said to her, “Now let’s get your feet attached to your ears”—that is, dance to the rhythm. He also instructed her that she had to be guided solely by muscle memory. As she recalled his instructions, “It must all be reflexive and unthinking, the sound of my taps telling me how I am doing, setting the pace and controlling the sequence.” He told her, too, that, in the stair dance, she should not just step on the steps but kick the risers. He was probably afraid that her little Mary Janed feet would not make a big enough sound. (At that time, the dubbing in of the clack of steps—standard, for example, in Astaire-Rogers movies later in the thirties—was not yet an established practice.)
Most children are not good dancers. They don’t have the right musculature. They can’t carry their weight in the upper body so as to free themselves to design the action of the lower body. Some choreographers, however, are able to put together steps that children can do well, and Robinson was one. The stair dance in “The Little Colonel”—or the version of it that he made for that movie—has hopping, which children love to do. They also like to go up and down stairs, and they do it endearingly on those chubby legs of theirs. At the beginning of the stair dance, when Robinson performs solo, he shows us his astonishing virtuosity: ease, precision, variety, musicality. Then, once Temple joins him and they dance in unison, he limits himself to the things that she can do. He drops to her level and still looks fabulous. In the plot of the movie, he may be the family’s servant, but in the dance he is a gentleman.
Robinson and Temple, by her account, became close friends. When she was on the road, she sent him little telegrams. (“I hope you have a nice time playing at the Palace this week.”) He kept seventeen pictures of her in his apartment. Between shows, she said, “we sat around a lot, talking, for instance, about boxing and diamonds.” (Boxing and diamonds?) Apparently, it was truly an uncle-niece sort of relationship. She called him Uncle Billy.
Not everyone thought that the studios’ presentation of Temple was entirely wholesome. Graham Greene, in a review of “Wee Willie Winkie,” wrote of “her well-shaped and desirable little body” being displayed to middle-aged men. You can see what he was talking about. Her dress often stopped just short of her panties. Before her career in feature films, she appeared in “Baby Burlesks,” a series of what we would now consider highly suggestive short films. In one, she wore an off-the-shoulder blouse. Back then, people were far less sensitive than we are to pedophiliac nuance. But they were not completely insensitive. Twentieth Century Fox and Temple sued Greene for libel, and won.
This career is a problem to think about. With most stage personalities, we have to weigh achievement against endowment. I noticed, in the obituaries for Philip Seymour Hoffman, how many writers felt obliged to say that he was fat (or euphemistic words to that effect) and exclaimed that, despite this, he was a star. So it is with Temple, though here the problem is not fatness but cuteness, or our modern recoil from it. The cuteness was stressed by the studios. In the early films, if not the later ones, she talked poutily, and, again and again in the press, readers were told just how many ringlets she had. (Fifty-six.) Still, it would be wrong to consider Temple just a pink toy. She took instruction, notably from Bill Robinson, without any prideful rebellion, and she worked like a demon, not just as a dancer but as an actress. (M-G-M offered Darryl Zanuck, the head of Fox, a lot of money to allow her to play the lead, Dorothy, in its upcoming film “The Wizard of Oz.” Zanuck turned down the offer and cast her instead in “Susannah of the Mounties.”) Temple retired in her late teens or early twenties, depending on how you count it. She was certainly the most famous child star in history, and she, or her mother, had the wisdom to stop there.
Photograph by AP.
