It was just a few days ago that I saw, on rail of some internet site fraught with clickbait, the familiar picture in pincurls, young Shirley Temple, accompanying a headline that said something like “23 Celebrities You Thought Were Dead.”
Imagine: Shirley Temple as the main picture, the lure. Maybe it’s because she began her showbiz career 80 years ago and was the biggest star in the world more than 75 years ago.
Anyway, that whole bad, cynical meme was out of date the very next day when Shirley Temple Black, as she has been known for half a century, died Tuesday at 85. (Some poor underpaid intern has to retool the meme and move up Maureen O’Hara or whoever to the top spot).
(The point of these features – and there are a lot of them, copycat stories, on sites that pride themselves on dumb celebrity stories is: Look how stupid I am. In none of these stories was I actually informed of anything I didn’t know before. But these dopes didn’t know Dick Van Dyke was still alive – he’s in an upcoming Hallmark movie for cryin’ out loud).
Anyway. The point of Shirley Temple was that she rose above such low snark her whole life. And though some of her super-Kwepie Doll cutness may seem extreme, it always brightened up people, even a whole nation during the Depression. She sang and tap danced with the best of them (Bill “Bojangles” Robinson!) and cheered up even that grumpy old Grandpa in “Heidi,” a person I resemble more day by day.
If Shirley Temple wasn’t Hollywood’s first child star, she certainly was its biggest of all time. As a kid born decades after she was, you could identify with her and want her to be your best friend.
She undid that assumption about child stars – that they all end up badly – by withdrawing from films with dignity when she learned that an adult Shirley Temple wasn’t selling, eventually became an ambassador to both Ghana and Czechoslovakia, posts she served with some distinction, from what I’m hearing in the salutes.
And yet it was while ordering the too-sweet non-alcoholic drink bearing her name that we’ve told our kids who Shirley Temple was (It was harder to get them to watch her films, given kids’ aversion to black and white in all its forms).
We can try again. It won’t be until next month that Turner Classic Movies will find time to dedicate a day or so to her classic movies.
In her time, she was sought after for ever child role, including Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.” There’s no telling how that film would have turned out had she been in that part instead of Judy Garland (she would have been a lot shorter for one thing).
But the following year, she starred in a film that was meant to build on the fantasy of “Oz,” a remake of the Russian fable “The Blue Bird,” which, if you ever saw it , still has the ability to haunt your days. I’m thinking particularly of this scene in the land of unborn children and the young lovers who will be parted forever because they will be living in different eras.
As a girl collapses in tears, the boy is dragged to the boat. It’s no Good Ship Lollipop. Here’s the scene.