Shirley Temple had already become Hollywood’s biggest box-office draw when, at age 8, she got a first inkling of her fame. Hearing adoring admirers shouting out their love for her, “I wondered why,” she later said. “I asked my mother, and she said, ‘Because your films make them happy.’”
By then, in fact, Temple had “captured Depression-era America’s heart,” said Variety, becoming “as big a star around the world as Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin.” She received 135,000 birthday cards on her 11th birthday, in 1939, when she was “one of the nation’s top wage earners.” Her success saved her studio, 20th Century Fox, and the ubiquitous Shirley Temple dolls modeled on the “dimpled, blonde, curly-headed” girl generated $45 million in sales before World War II.
Born in Santa Monica, Calif., Temple was spotted by an agent as a 3-year-old in dance class and selected to star in a series of one-reel shorts called Baby Burlesks, said The New York Times. Her feature-length career began in 1934 with Stand Up and Cheer!, “one of the many films made during the Depression in which music chases away unhappy reality.” That year alone she made eight films, including Little Miss Marker, in which she played a “wise and maternal miniature adult” who reforms a ragtag band of gamblers. She had a similar persona in Bright Eyes (1934), The Little Colonel (1935), and Wee Willie Winkie (1937). She often sang—most famously “On the Good Ship Lollipop”—and danced, most successfully with tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, becoming “the first white actress allowed to hold hands affectionately with a black man on-screen.”
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Temple’s film career faded as she became a teenager, said The Washington Post, and “she escaped the tight control of her parents by marrying at age 17.” That marriage soon ended in divorce, but at 21 she married California businessman Charles Black, who “introduced her to the world of Republican politics.” After an unsuccessful run for Congress, she was appointed a delegate to the United Nations by Richard Nixon in 1969, and “her golfing buddy” Gerald Ford named her ambassador to Ghana in 1974, then chief of protocol in 1976. Appointed U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1989, she “succeeded beyond almost everyone’s expectations.” Having been Shirley Temple “provides name identification,” she said, but in diplomacy it had “little bearing on whether I succeed or fail thereafter.”
