Credit: Dangerous Minds / Educational Films Corporation of America
Shirley Temple wasn’t just a movie star; she was a national comfort blanket that almost the entire United States of America clutched when they needed escapism and joy. And in the 1930s, people really, really needed some joy in their lives.
The post-World War I economic boom must have had the USA feeling utterly immortal. The 1920s were roaring for a reason; everything was going spectacularly, or so it seemed. Jobs were plentiful, manufacturing was at an all-time high, not everything was perfect, but if you just focused on the line going up, you could kid yourself that everything was going to be fine. Then the year was 1929, and it all changed for the worse.
The 1930s were rough on nearly everyone apart from, strangely enough, the movie industry. It wasn’t the playground it had been a decade ago, and there was still a noticeable slump in business since no one had any disposable income. However, while people were struggling for work, movie theatres were still relatively cheap. People couldn’t go on holiday or buy houses, but they could drop a few cents for a couple of hours of escapism, so the industry just about kept its head above water.
The pressure this put on the stars of those movies would have been intense for any adult, but in the 1930s, all that pressure was put on the shoulders of a six-year-old girl. Shirley Temple became a sensation thanks to a show-stealing turn singing ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’ in the film Bright Eyes. Within a year, Temple was having entire movies built around her. While those productions presented her as a bundle of joy for whom butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, living a carefree life where good always won out in the end, the truth wasn’t quite as simple.
Now, to be clear, Temple herself was rarely a problem on set, not compared to some child stars of the time. In fact, according to many reports, she was a model professional the vast majority of the time she was on set. However, she was still a literal child being asked to keep a multi-million dollar industry alive. Anyone would act out in that scenario, and Temple would have been justified in acting out a whole lot more. The issue was, as it was for the first few decades of Hollywood, that the industry didn’t see them as children. It saw them as workers who they could bully and abuse even more than normal.
On the rare occasions that Temple did act out, she wrote in her autobiography Child Star that he was sent to the Black Box, a punishment saved for all child actors of the moment if they lost focus or, indeed, their temper on set. Since they needed to “cool off” the child was sent to a windowless, sound-proofed room where their only company was a large block of ice. They were instructed to sit on it until they learned their lesson. It can’t be stressed enough that this was the treatment reserved for children than the studios relied upon to stay alive.
What makes it worse is the fact that Temple herself didn’t seem to have much of an issue with this. “So far as I can tell, the black box did no lasting damage,” she said of the treatment in Child Star, which is already a damning indictment when you’re discussing the treatment of children. “It’s lesson of life, however, was profound. Time is money. Wasted time means wasted money means trouble,” Temple added.
One wonders whether Temple herself would have been happy with he kids having to grow up so quickly. That said, with the horrors that some child stars went through in the decades after the 1930s and beyond, maybe Temple feels something even darker than anything that went on in the Black Box. That she was one of the lucky ones.
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