My Grandmother’s First Shirley Temple Movie

Shirley Temple Black, “America’s darling of the Depression years,” died Monday night at the age of 85. This morning I got a call from my grandmother, another Shirley who was five years old in the mid-1930s. We didn’t get into everything, but she wanted to tell me about the first movie she ever saw:

The first movie I ever saw was Little Miss Marker, which was made in 1934. I was about five years old, and I was hooked on the movies ever since. My father liked the movies, which was terrific, because we used to go on Sunday afternoons into Cambridge [Mass.], to the University Theater. Little Miss Marker was based on a short story by Damon Runyon. He also wrote the short that became Guys and Dolls, which is a classic. In Little Miss Marker, Shirley was an IOU for a debt — but, please. It was a comedy.

The thing about Shirley Temple was, you never admitted to anybody that you liked her, because she was too adorable. In my little group of friends, you could only say you liked Jane Withers because she was so much cooler. Jane Withers was always the naughty bad girl. She had dark hair and she was mean. It was cool to like the bad girls. So you had to say, “ugh, Shirley Temple” — but secretly, you wanted to be her. She was really the cutest thing, and she was very much an icon. I had a Shirley Temple doll — they really were just replicas, because she looked like a doll. It was always very embarrassing because my name was Shirley and we were sort of the same age. I’d always get asked if I was named after her. And I went, “ugh, no I wasn’t named after her, obviously.”

The other movie I saw she was in was Bright Eyes. James Dunn was her father and it was her birthday, and her mother goes to get her a cake at the bakery and she gets run over by the car. And I was a wreck. It had a happy ending, but I was not much older than five years old then, and I thought it was the worst thing I ever saw.

But what I really remember is that Jane Withers was the bad girl, and you had to say you liked her. Nobody could ever admit that they liked Shirley Temple. We had that distinction even way back then.

[NYT]