SHIRLEY TEMPLE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 June 1940, Page 9

SHIRLEY TEMPLE

CRITICAL YEAR AHEAD. Is the sun dimming on Shirley Temple’s! bright career? Or is it just behind a temporary cloud, ready to shine forth again with the release of her current picture, “The Young People”? For the past twelve months, Mrs Temple, Shirley’s creator —in every sense of the word, has expressed herself dissatisfied with the pictures assigned her daughter. The keynote of her annoyance has been, “Shirley is too.old for the pictures she is given to do.” Shirley was eleven years old on April 23. Early this year Shirley lost her position as head of the box-office parade. She had been top for a record four years, and dropped to fifth place. I have just come back from visiting Shirley and her mother on “The Young People” set, writes Sheilah Graham. Shirley looked very pretty and cute in man-tailored, full evening suit, white tie, tails, top hat, gloves and cane. If she knew that this year is very important for her continued screen life, she did not show it. But her mother did —with a new attitude of anxiety and a sort of passive, but not patient, resistance. “I can’t say much now,” she told me. “I’m just wainting for Shirley’s contract here to be over.” Shirley has another year to go before the expiration of the seven-year contract she was awarded after her first six months at the studio.

“Will Shirley freelance then?” I ask her.

“It’s hard to say now,” she replies. “It depends, of course, on what happens in this coming year. But one thing is certain, whatever new contract she signs will stipulate that she makes only one picture a year.” By the terms of her present contract with Twentieth Century-Fox, Shirley appears in three or four pictures a year. I also gather that any future contract will have a clause permitting Mrs Temple to sit in on choice of material. “I have no say at all at present,” complains Mrs Temple. I had' been given to understand that “The Young People” retold the story of Shirley’s life, but this Mrs Temple denied. “It’s about a little girl who is adopted by a couple of vaudeville players. In the first place, Mr Temple and I did not adopt Shirley, and in the second, we have not appeared in vaudeville —yet. If it were the true story of her life, they’d have to make her mother a housewife, her father a banker.” Another rumour that has caused Mrs Temple annoyance is the persistently printed item that Shirley is going on an extended personal appearance tour at 10,000 dollars a week. “As long as I have any say in the matter, Shirley will never do a personal appearance tour,” she told me. “She’s not that sort of a child. She’s too shy” (this latter gets truer every day. As Shirley grows older, her shyness increases).

MAKING OF STARS THE NEW WAY. In this modern age of specialisation, the film star has been one of, the last bulwarks against this trend. There has long been a Hollywood, theory that a general training was the best method of developing new personalities, and that they could only prove themselves under fire. Newcomers received a standard dramatic coaching, were given some singing ancT dancing instruction if they displayed talent in those directions, rushed into “bit” parts and then permitted to “sink or swim.”

Only recently has this haphazard method been systematised and streamlined, with interesting results. There is less chance today that another Myrna Loy will be lost in the shuffle, typed as a siren, only to reach stardom by accident rather than design, after years of struggle and disappointment, having at last found her niche in more legitimate parts. Ilona Massey, the blonde Hungarian singer, is an example of the exhaustive and scientific process by which stars are now being guided and developed. It is in no hit-or-miss manner that Miss Massey reached stardom, with Nelson Eddy, in her second Metr.o-Goldwyn-Mayer picture. Today, she bears little resemblance to the girl who sang one song and spoke a half-dozen lines of dialogue in “Rosalie” two years ago. Miss Massey has been moulded to fit a pattern. This has put Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to great expense—but since every new star is valued highly, the initial outlay, as in her case, is considered more than justified. In Miss Massey, the studio got a new star in seventeen months. Under ordinary circumstances, it might have taken years for her to have become a valuable “property,” if she had survived the struggles, which is doubtful.

It was decided to give Miss Massey a test role before passing judgment on her future prospects. Three weeks after entering the studio • gates, she appeared in “Rosalie,” with Eddy and Eleanor Powell. She sang acceptably and parroted her lines, not knowing the meaning of the English words.

A conference of studio executives reached the conclusion that she had a tremendous amount to learn, but had definite possibilities. It was agreed that she could not be expected to handle a leading role for a year, perhaps two. and that one small role badly done might ruin whatever prospects she had. Miss Massey became an experiment in determining whether or not a long course of exacting training would pay dividends. Besides her tests, the only pictures Miss Massey made were publicity stills. Then, last May, she made an elaborate test. It was compared in a showing with every previous test she had made, sixteen in all. Miss Massey was now ready for her big chance, although film audiences had seen her in less than 500 feel of film. She was assigned a co-starring role with Nelson Eddy which gave her not only a singing role but one that also demanded dramatic acting. In seventeen months. Miss Massey had won stardom without making a single picture.