The Full Biography
Shirley Temple. Actress. Diplomat. The Santa Monica child who made a dimple into a national weather, then spent four decades as Shirley Temple Black proving the second life was the one she had chosen.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a small girl with fifty-six ringlets, tap-dancing down a staircase with Bill Robinson, or standing at a railing to sing about a ship made of candy. The year might be 1934 or 1935. The pictures were The Little Colonel and Bright Eyes. What the still cannot show is Shirley Jane Temple of Santa Monica, a mother who treated curls as a profession, a studio that treated a child as a product, and a woman who would, after the last close-up, learn Czech enough to stand in Prague while a government fell.
She was born on April 23, 1928, in Santa Monica, to George Francis Temple, a banker, and Gertrude Temple, who became the first great stage mother of the sound era without asking anyone's permission. Gertrude put her in Meglin's dance school. Educational Pictures put her in the Baby Burlesks, one-reel parodies in which toddlers played adults, a file that looks, now, like what it was: a factory using children as a gag. She was three and four. The dimples were already a trademark. The work was already a job.
The door was Fox. Stand Up and Cheer! (1934) put a six-year-old in a Depression musical and the country decided it had been waiting for her. Bright Eyes, the same year, gave her "On the Good Ship Lollipop." Curly Top (1935) gave her "Animal Crackers in My Soup." She received a special Juvenile Academy Award in 1935, a miniature statuette, the first of its kind. From 1935 through 1938 she was the number-one box-office star in America, a sentence that still startles if you remember she was seven, then eight, then nine, then ten. President Roosevelt is said to have remarked that as long as the country had Shirley Temple it would be all right. The remark, whether or not every word is exact, tells you what the stills were for. They were a policy.
The Fox pictures came in a stack. The Littlest Rebel and The Little Colonel (both 1935) with Bill Robinson — stair dances that were among the first widely seen interracial dance partnerships on an American screen, a fact the studio sold as charm and that history has had to keep as both charm and document. Robinson taught her the steps; she matched him. The stills of those stairs are now in every American childhood file whether the childhood was real or rented. John Ford's Wee Willie Winkie (1937) put her in India as a Kipling girl, a serious director taking a child star as if she were an actress. Heidi (1937). Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938). Little Miss Broadway. Just Around the Corner. The Little Princess (1939), her first in Technicolor, a Victorian orphan who keeps a father's promise through a war. She was, for those years, the most famous child on earth. The salary climbed toward ten thousand dollars a week. The curls — fifty-six of them, counted, set on a schedule — were a department. Gertrude was on the set. The machine did not stop for a childhood because the childhood was the machine. A non-alcoholic drink at a restaurant, ginger ale and grenadine, took her name because a room full of adults needed something to order that sounded like innocence. She did not invent it. She could not retire it.
Then she grew. That is the sentence Fox could not change. By 1940 the box office had cooled. She left the studio that had built her. The teenage pictures — Kathleen, Miss Annie Rooney, Since You Went Away, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947) opposite Cary Grant, John Ford's Fort Apache (1948) — are a second career the nostalgia reels skip. She was trying to become an actress the way other people become adults: by doing the next job. In 1945, at seventeen, she married John Agar, an Army man the studio could photograph. They had a daughter, Linda Susan. The marriage ended in 1949. In December 1950 she married Charles Alden Black, a California businessman, and retired from acting at twenty-two. She took his name. The second life begins there, and most of the country did not notice for twenty years.
I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.Shirley Temple
Shirley Temple Black ran for Congress in 1967, a special election in California's 11th district, and lost to Pete McCloskey. The loss is part of the file. She did not treat it as a humiliation. She treated it as a door that had not opened, and she looked for another. Richard Nixon named her a United States delegate to the United Nations in 1969. Gerald Ford named her ambassador to Ghana in 1974. She presented credentials in Accra that December and served until 1976. Ford then made her Chief of Protocol of the United States, the first woman to hold the job, a Washington post that is manners and logistics and the quiet power of who stands where. George H. W. Bush named her ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1989. She arrived in Prague weeks before the Velvet Revolution. She took a short-term apartment on Wenceslas Square so she could see the street. Václav Havel's country came up under her window. She stayed until 1992, through the first years of the new state, and left when the work of a non-career ambassador in a transforming capital was done.
In 1972 she had spoken publicly about breast cancer and a mastectomy, at a time when famous women were still expected to hide the scar. The statement was not a memoir excerpt. It was a civic act. Women wrote. Doctors noticed. The child star had become, without asking the old studio, a different kind of public instrument.
Six things most people never knew
- The Baby Burlesks came first. Toddlers as adults. A factory gag. She was three and four. The dimples were already at work.
- She was box-office number one at seven, eight, nine, and ten. 1935 through 1938. Adults with more lines could not outdraw her.
- The Robinson dances are a document as well as a charm. A Black man and a white child on a staircase, in the 1930s, in a Fox picture the whole country bought.
- She lost a congressional race in 1967. Pete McCloskey won. The UN and the embassies came after the loss, not instead of an effort.
- Chief of Protocol, 1976–77. First woman in the post. The job is who stands where when a state arrives.
- She took rooms on Wenceslas Square in 1989. Not a hilltop residence only. She wanted the street during the Velvet Revolution.
The turn is the Black marriage and the retirement at twenty-two, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers the ringlets. The turn is that she walked away from the only job the country thought she had and spent the rest of the century learning a harder one. A lot of child stars become a caution. She became an ambassador. The two facts belong in the same life. The second is the one she worked for.
The later years
Woodside, California, was the house. Charles Black was the companion of the long second act; he died in 2005. They had two children together, Charles Jr. and Lori, in addition to Linda from the Agar years. The household was not a shrine to Fox. Guests who came looking for the Good Ship found a woman who would talk trade and protocol and, if pressed, the set — but who would not be the set. She wrote Child Star in 1988, a memoir that is more exact than sentimental, a woman putting the factory years on paper so other people would stop inventing them. She did not send autographs unless the envelope already had a stamp. She had learned, in Accra and Prague, that the old face interfered with the present job if you let it.
Ghana was the first embassy, and it was not a ceremonial posting. Accra in the mid-1970s was a capital under military government, a Cold War side-stage, a place that required a chief of mission who would do the cables and the receptions and the unglamorous inventory of what Washington actually needed to hear. She presented credentials in December 1974 and served until July 1976. She learned the country. She did not treat the tour as a photo of a famous American in wax-print cloth. Friends from that embassy describe a woman who read the traffic and who could be underestimated in a useful way: the other side arrived expecting the Good Ship and found a chief of mission. The Czechoslovak years are the ones the diplomatic corps still tells with something like affection. A non-career ambassador, famous for the wrong reasons, who did the cable traffic, who showed up, who understood that Havel's street was the story and that Washington needed to hear it without the Lollipop in the lead. She had been in Prague once before, in August 1968, as a private citizen when the Soviet tanks arrived; that earlier week is part of why the 1989 posting was not a celebrity stunt. She knew the square. She knew what a tank looks like on it. She arrived in August 1989, presented credentials to a government that would not last the year, and stayed through the first elected season of a new republic, until July 1992. Friends from the Foreign Service describe a chief of mission who prepared, who did not waste a representational evening, who could be tart about being underestimated and then use the underestimation as a tool. Between the two embassies she had already been Chief of Protocol, 1976 to 1977, the first woman in that job, the person who decides where a visiting head of state stands and who is in the photograph. The Protocol office is manners as power. She had been trained for it, without knowing, on a Fox set.
She collected the honors the country gives a woman it finally understands. The Kennedy Center Honors in 1998. A Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. A lifetime of banquet introductions that still began with the ringlets and then, if the introducer had done the reading, arrived at Ghana and Protocol and Prague. She accepted them as Shirley Temple Black, the full name a piece of diplomacy in itself. She kept the Woodside garden. She kept the children and then the grandchildren. She sat on boards, including the Institute for International Studies at Berkeley in an earlier stretch, and treated a meeting the way she had treated a cable: read it, decide, do not waste the table. She did not become a nostalgia circuit. She became, instead, a retired ambassador who happened to have been the most famous child in the world, and who would correct the order of those clauses if you got them wrong. When interviewers arrived for the ringlets she would give them ten minutes of Fox and then steer the hour toward Accra. The steering was the late style.
She died on February 10, 2014, in Woodside, at eighty-five, of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The obituaries led with the ship and the curls, as they had to. The better ones remembered Accra, the Protocol office, Wenceslas Square, and the 1972 statement about a breast. Charles was already gone. The children remained. The cocktail that still bears her name — ginger ale, grenadine, a maraschino cherry, no alcohol — is a child's drink invented in a room she did not control. It is the one piece of the first life she could never quite retire. She did not have to. The second life had already done the work.
What those last California years were, in the daily sense, was a widow in a house that had already held a UN delegate and a two-time ambassador, taking the calls that still came, declining the ones that only wanted the dimple, and keeping the diplomatic Christmas-card list longer than the studio one. She had already been the product. She spent the end of the file as the author of her own posting.
After she was gone
The Woodside house closed to the public. The Fox pictures kept playing at Christmas. The State Department kept her in the register of chiefs of mission. Havel's square kept the memory of a famous American who had bothered to take a short lease in order to see it. The quarter-century of diplomacy is still the chapter the ringlets try to hide, and the chapter that makes the ringlets bearable.
She came out of Santa Monica, sang on a candy ship, danced with Robinson, outgrew Fox, married twice, lost a House race, spoke about a mastectomy, stood for the United States in Accra and Prague, and died a diplomat who had once been a product. If you only remember the ringlets, you have the still. If you remember the staircase, the loss to McCloskey, and the window on Wenceslas Square, you have her.
Portrait: Unknown author · Public domain (PD-US, published 1931-1977 without notice) · via Wikimedia Commons