However, Master Betty ran the little province of Parnassus dedicated to underage actors before Shirley Temple came along – and it's part of her talent, or maybe her moment, that almost a century later, her name is still the first thing that comes to mind when we think of child stars. Temple's autobiography, entitled simply: “Child star“, like its author, is a small American classic. Gritty, unsentimental and unexpectedly dark, more The Day of the Locust than The Good Ship's Candy, her memoir offers an insightful and often caustic portrait of Hollywood in the thirties. The voice is retrospective, but she renders her childhood thoughts so convincingly that you forget that the book was written decades later. A frequent read. as if the six-year-old girl was checking her contracts with a biased eye.
She started with Baby Burlesks, a series of short films from Poverty Row's Educational Pictures. Alas, they are easy to watch on YouTube and, once seen, not easily forgotten. With the grainy appearance of the early porn they are nauseatingly reminiscent of, these shorts depict babies in diapers and “adult” costumes from the waist up, acting out adult romances with cocktails, kissing and French lingerie. From there, Temple moved to Twentieth Century Fox, where she appeared in musicals and period pieces that helped make the Depression bearable. She was a company performer and a professional—so tireless that she could dance with Bill (Bojangles) Robinson without breaking a step. (These scenes are also on YouTube – and they are good.)
In his memoirs, Temple advises dealing wisely with the press: give them time, but don't answer their questions. She's equally adamant about what producers wanted from child stars – a repeatable product with a short shelf life. She becomes impatient with her mother's tardiness, treats her colleagues with lively professionalism, and writes with chilling composure about her powers of flirtation and control, exerted through a well-rehearsed and sometimes feigned innocence. She remembers climbing onto her lap with the practiced confidence and pride of a tiny geisha. There is a chilling scene in which Arthur Freed accosts her in one M-GM office while her mother is beaten by Louis B. Mayer in another.
The scandal arose when Graham Greene, writing in a short-lived London magazine called Night and dayaccording to the model New Yorker published an article accusing Temple of being “a complete bimbo… See how she assesses a man with sharp studio eyes and dimpled depravity.” As a result of the ensuing trial, he fled to Mexico and eventually wrote The Power and the Glory. Temple, for her part, never admitted to being “dimpled perverted,” but she did admit to having a keen studio eye and being far from prudish herself. She reports that her husband was shocked to learn that she was not a virgin, although she leaves the details vague. By the time she wrote, she had already become an experienced diplomat – a real one, with assignments abroad – playing a major role in another sphere, with its own secrets.
Sexual exploitation of child stardom is usually discussed from the girls' perspective. Nevertheless, even without incidents of outright violence, Mickey Rooney's memoirs and biographies reveal an important pathology. Trained to be predator rather than prey, Rooney was nevertheless trapped by an expectation of constant gratification – even as a teenager he was encouraged to prove himself through conquest so obsessively that it bordered on a form of self-erasure. By age nineteen, he admits, he had learned, thanks to a healthy upbringing at MGM, that “everyone wants to get fucked.” He records what looks less like a series of diversions than a constant erotic debauchery and purge, one encounter after another, indiscriminately, even when the obvious objects of his teenage attention (Ava Gardner, Norma Shearer) might have seemed impressive enough to linger on.
Little Shirley's memoirs, which could have been considered an artifact of that era, unexpectedly turned out to be a model for our time. Jennette McCurdy in particular came from the same poor white background as Temple and was guided by a similar stage mother. Temple notes that there were three social levels in Hollywood: people with money at the top, transplanted “East Coast” creatives in the middle, and at the bottom a huge group of poor whites desperate to break in—people whom Nathaniel West both captured and ridiculed. McCurdy sees much of the same structure today and describes his working-class Mormon family in Garden Grove, Calif., dispassionately: Grandfather controlled tickets at Disneyland, grandmother worked as a receptionist at a nursing home, father worked at Home Depot, mother worked as a runway beautician picking up shifts at Target. No one could make a good living; When her grandfather retired, his main bonus after getting hired at Disneyland seemed to be lifetime discounts at Disneyland. In this context, having a child who became a star was not just a chance to join the elite, but also a way to pay the rent.
So McCurdy was a lottery ticket, and a winning one at that. Her memoir details the agents and managers who specialized in child detention, whom she charmed just enough to secure an audition for Nickelodeon. These agents treated children like a commodity: “You ordered it!” this was their only expression of praise – with the caveat that no one was forced to be there and everyone knew the rules. The most important skill, other than acting, was to be smart, obedient and turnkey: ready, not needing to learn an accent or a dance step, already able to sound like an Australian or similar enough to one to pass the exam at age 5. P.M. for extracurricular audiences. (Another major gift I had was the ability to act younger than my actual age.) McCurdy also recalls how her mother, who, to be fair, was already dying of cancer, carefully coached her eating disorder, right down to the mechanics of bulimia, in an attempt to hold back puberty.
What makes a good child actor? Those who can really act—Margaret O'Brien in “Meet Me in St. Louis,” Patty Duke in “The Miracle Worker”—have the gift of emotional availability. They don't pretend; they live. What remains with us is the feeling not of personification, but of an excess of feeling. We want the children on the screen not to become someone else, but to be themselves, and even more – to overcome childhood caution, shyness, which is shared by all dependent creatures, and reach a state of direct emotions. (Henry Thomas does this in his famous screen test for E.T.). That's why we love Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, a role Temple coveted but lost, in part due to MGM's machinations. The garland conveys the thrill of entering adulthood. Shirley would dance through it, smiling; Garland inflicts pain with her unparalleled ability to walk the tightrope between childhood and adolescence without betraying either.
At the heart of every acting career is a paradox: the desire for self-recognition; the art of self-disappearance. Alyson Stoner writes movingly of how shocked she was by the roles they played and the fictional families into which they were temporarily absorbed. (Stoner was one of the kids in Cheaper by the Dozen two decades ago and felt closer to these imaginary siblings than to his own.) To be a star is to assert yourself in a role; to be a good actor is to disappear inside him. This contradiction causes a deeper wound even for the happy performer. Greatest Young Actors –Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis— seem haunted by it: having mastered the art of self-destruction, they find themselves idolized for being themselves. Hence Brando with his bongs, and Day-Lewis with his paving stones. And the ego required to overcome shyness and stage fright faces the endless rejection that defines the profession.
