CHAPTER 4

Performance Pressures

· 1 ·

“Your Child, Too, May Be a Shirley Temple,” promised an article in the Los Angeles Times in July 1934. It was based on an interview with Gertrude Temple, “still a little dazed” by her daughter’s swift rise into the ranks of top box-office draws, and it went on in a light vein to “Give Recipe for Making Super-Star Out of Lively Youngster.” First step: marry a banker named George and eat raw carrots, not candy, while pregnant. Make sure to give your growing baby wholesome fare soon as well—soup, cooked fruit, chocolate pudding or ice cream, no cookies. To encourage a “sense of rhythm and aid imagination,” have her memorize nursery rhymes with mother and read bedtime stories with father. Above all, she should be sent to dancing school just as soon as she starts jouncing in her playpen, up on her tiptoes. No mother should delay on that crucial exposure. Ahead for your twirler, once spotted by talent scouts, lies a debut in a short film. Then a few small roles could be the prelude to the big break, a show-stealing song-and-dance number in a full-length feature. Suddenly famous, at barely five, she will sweep the whole family into a new world of wealth and attention along with her. Now the challenge, to be tackled “with fearful optimism,” is to keep your little performer modest.

Gertrude, a shy beauty from the Midwest who had become a quiet Santa Monica wife, had read her share of such articles before and after Shirley was born. She knew what “mammas everywhere” wanted to hear. So did the reporter, who happened to be a woman. She was working in a genre by then familiar in Hollywood environs and never out of style since. It has thrived on lurid tales about very young showbiz stars, and more recently on subtler fare aimed at uneasy parents eyeing “the rug rat race”: tips on handling the child-as-superstar—a precious family investment whose potential, touted at home, is to be promoted by well-timed, outsourced opportunities to excel every step of the way. (Your baby needn’t be walking yet to qualify for early music classes—billed as good for baby brains and parent-child bonding, not just a sense of rhythm.)

In the midst of the Depression, the draw was obvious. The utter unlikelihood of producing “a super baby star of Shirley Temple caliber” only added to the democratic appeal. Because the odds against any success on the movie lots were so long, it was impossible to predict who would get lucky—and it was lovely to fantasize that such a rapid rise might be “phenomenally easy.” The rush of aspiring stage mothers and their children to Hollywood had been gathering momentum ever since Jackie Coogan’s big break in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid in 1921. One estimate claimed that as the talkies took off, a hundred children from all over arrived every fifteen minutes, hoping to be more than extras.

When Shirley struck gold, the moment was more propitious than usual. “Hollywood with the gong from the cleanup squad ringing in its ears…is making a desperate effort to locate more child stars,” an article reported as the revised Motion Picture Production Code clamped down on unseemly fare in the summer of 1934. “Reasoning seems to be that stories about children will set things right.” That was precisely the plot of Shirley’s breakout film early that spring. In Stand Up and Cheer!, a Secretary of Amusement is appointed by the president to distract people from their woes. Thanks to the child entertainers he recruits to the stage, a country where “nerves are in the red” recovers hope, and the Depression vanishes. Shirley, almost six but billed as four, was the perfect emissary. In an era of virtuosic performing prodigies (Yehudi Menuhin was thronged after concerts), she was the vigorous democratic version. Superlative acting talents weren’t required, but she had perfect timing, a great memory, and tenacity. As she tapped and sang, she exuded something even more alluring, in bleak times, than imaginative innocence. In her first full-length movie, as she proceeded to do in life, she projected utter confidence—in her own, and everyone else’s, performance. And for the ebullient curly top, it seemed a breeze. “Oh, Shirley doesn’t really work,” says Jimmy Dunn, playing her vaudevillian father in Stand Up and Cheer!. (An absent mother was to become a staple in her films.) “…Look at her, she thrives on it.”

On the opposite coast, a mother named Josephine Cogdell Schuyler didn’t join the California-bound “flock of hungry locusts,” in Hedda Hopper’s metaphor. She was, however, following her version of Gertrude’s recipe. Proudly self-exiled from her wealthy and racist white Texan family, she had made her way (via Hollywood and San Francisco’s bohemian scene) to Harlem, lured by its renaissance. There she married a man named George who was not a banker. George Schuyler was a prominent black journalist, an editor at the socialist magazine The Messenger as well as at the weekly African American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, and a provocative columnist.

Josephine went well beyond a carrot-and-no-candy regimen. Long before getting pregnant, she had sworn by vitamin-rich vitality through nutrition. Her daughter, Philippa—born in 1931, three years after Shirley—was reared on a sugar-free and totally raw diet (which meant uncooked meat, too). Reciting poems with her mother and playing letter games on her blackboard with her father began early. Word of her spelling prowess at two and a half made its way to a film scout, in the form of an enterprising Pathé News reporter curious to see the Harlem marvel. He found an adorable child with, in George’s words, the “dark liquid eyes of a fawn, and eyelashes like the black glistening stems of maiden hair ferns”—and skin the color of “lightly done toast.”

Philippa’s hue—the reporter had hoped for more like burnt toast—proved a deal-breaker for Pathé News. So did the parentage that produced it, as would have been true in Hollywood as well. In the movie industry’s campaign for social uplift and decency, the cleanup squad could find room for an Our Gang–style vision of integrated childhood, stocked with pickanniny stereotypes and naughty hijinks. But high on the list of the Motion Picture Production Code’s prohibitions was any portrayal of “miscegenation,” particularly between blacks and whites. Even Harlem, as the Schuylers were well aware, offered a wary welcome to marriages like theirs—which only spurred Josephine on. She had a truly ambitious Miss Fix-It role in view for Philippa. The fruit of her and George’s rare union was a remarkable child. Philippa was a compleat prodigy in the making—precocious student, prolific girl writer, notable composer, and accomplished pianist, all rolled into one and wrapped in plucky public charm (and beauty) that got her called “the Shirley Temple of American Negroes.” What better example of “hybrid vigor” could there be to confirm her parents’ vision of “the permanent solution” to the nation’s biggest problem of all? Philippa embodied the promise of interracial harmony.

A pendulum swing away from sensitive girl writers, Shirley and Philippa were troupers, too sturdy to inspire mere escapist flights of fancy. FDR got it wrong when he famously paid tribute to Shirley as a cheap opiate of the masses: “It is a splendid thing that for just fifteen cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles.” Her distinctive gift, rooted in her brash assurance, was shared by Philippa, who was more bashful: to remind grown-ups—in Shirley’s case, those on-screen with her as well as her adoring audience—that woes had cures. Like prodigies in the spotlight before and since, only more so, both owed their allure not simply to exceptional talents. They were inspirational figures, harbingers of a future that could be very different.

Shirley, the ultimate Hollywood asset, and Philippa, the outsider, were worlds apart as they worked their morale-boosting, trouble-shooting wonder. But close to home, they each had what was almost always missing in the rags-to-riches, by-their-own-gumption tales that fueled the child star boom: a full-time Mrs. Fix-It. Gertrude and Josephine carved out (and got paid for) the role not of imaginative collaborator or mentor, but of omnipresent personal and professional manager. Even, or especially, the most promising stars needed businesslike intermediaries as they made their way in a fiercely competitive entertainment realm where the real codes bore little relation to the child-friendly displays. Not least, luck wasn’t randomly distributed. As if Shirley didn’t already get all the breaks, she also landed the most famous African American tap dancer, Bill Robinson, as her teacher. And a crucial ingredient in an endeavor that was anything but “phenomenally easy” got left out of that superstar recipe: mother and daughter had to have a great deal of confidence in each other. The real marvel is that in one of the pairs, the partners actually did.

· 2 ·

“There are two themes to my story,” Shirley Temple told a Hollywood historian who paid her a visit soon after she published her memoir, Child Star, at sixty: “the great love I had for my profession and the great love I had for my mother.’’ It was classic Shirley Temple, dispelling dark clouds—in this case, the inevitable suspicion that she had been the victim of a scheming stage mother and an exploitative film industry. Shirley presented a different view. Whether or not she was fully aware of it, the message of her five hundred pages—crammed with memories and details—is also classic Shirley Temple: all along, Gertrude was the comparative naïf, with an “ingrained awe of authority,” and Shirley was the spunky, take-charge realist. Her version rings unexpectedly true.

The key to their success was that Shirley was ready to make the most of whatever deals came her way—even if the deals weren’t “fair and square,” as she sensed was often the case with the bigwig insiders (in Hollywood and elsewhere) who courted her. As long as Shirley felt sure in her relations with the two social outsiders who mattered most, she could stay sane—“at peace with myself,” she said, “…no emotional hang-ups.” Or to put it another way, she could draw on a deep sense of fun that sustained what was, after all, a lot of work. The main outsider, of course, was her mother. But she counted on someone else, too, the man who used the phrase “fair and square” (well aware of the rarity of such treatment), Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

Gertrude Krieger had been seventeen, two years out of school and helping to support her family as a file clerk in Los Angeles, when she married twenty-three-year-old George Temple in 1910. He had quit school at fourteen, and was living with his widowed mother and siblings and working for the electric utility company. Gertrude was a dreamer, in her way, who had yearned to be a dancer. She was also a woman who didn’t like leaving things to chance—though what she truly had a knack for was timing. In 1927, when her sons, Jack and George Jr., were twelve and eight, and George had recently become an assistant bank manager, she was restless in Santa Monica. Her two best friends had just had curly blond-haired daughters. As her thirty-fourth birthday approached, Gertrude decided she wanted one too. George was feeling flush enough to agree—and to get the tonsillectomy their doctor claimed upped the chances of fathering a girl. Along with eating carrots (good for instilling self-discipline in her unborn child), Gertrude sought out cultural experiences she hoped would leave their imprint on her fetus: art, literature, dance, music, movies. A bald daughter arrived on April 23, 1928, and a hint of blond curls soon appeared.

There were two themes to Gertrude’s story for Shirley. “I wanted her to be artistic. I was determined that she should excel at something.” The aims implied an accompanying subtheme. Gertrude—echoing the basic tenets of the no-nonsense behaviorist child-rearing expert of the hour, John Broadus Watson—was also determined “not to let my affection make me too lenient” or get in the way of teaching a self-sufficient daughter “not to be afraid of anything.” Jack and young George were otherwise occupied, and soon the Crash curbed adult socializing. Gertrude seized her moment. She began dancing to music with Shirley a captive audience in her playpen and was thrilled when the baby “ran on her toes, as if she were dancing.” Blessed with a great ear (utterly unlike her father), Shirley could hit the right notes when her mother practiced with her. She was also a deft mimic.

As her first phrase—“Don’t do ’at”—indicates, Shirley wasn’t always eager to obey. Her imitative phrase also suggests a penchant for bossiness on both her and her mother’s part. Yet the two of them figured out a form of give-and-take that (mostly) dispensed with punishment and respected high spirits. “Love, ladled out in equal measures of encouragement and restraint,” was how Shirley described Gertrude’s formula, emphasizing that her mother, though strict, “seldom tried to dominate.” As for the charismatic and feisty baby of the family, she didn’t even need to try. Shirley fully appreciated her considerable clout, which only grew. “Secret best friends” with her father, she was a routine scene-stealer from her tolerant older brothers. Gertrude was vigilant, of course, but Shirley’s lack of docility, however much it may have surprised her, didn’t displease a mother whose own determination was more demure.

Gertrude had her eye on a new and approved route to excelling artistically. Though George had been spared the worst of the downturn, he was reluctant in 1931 to spend a dollar a week on lessons at the Meglin Dance Studio, a recent and already prestigious addition to a national dancing school boom. But Ethel Meglin knew how to pitch hard-pressed parents. She offered the “finest exercise to build up health and bodily vigor” and “an exceptional entrée into the entertainment field, with all its rich financial rewards.” Gertrude emphasized the first part to George, who was wary of the Hollywood ambience.

As for the second part, mercenary ambition just wasn’t Gertrude’s style, according to Shirley. But professional-level performance opportunities clearly were on her agenda, and every student automatically became one of the “Famous Meglin Kiddies,” participating in a revue during the week of Christmas at the Loew’s State Theater in downtown Los Angeles. At three, Shirley was young (Mrs. Meglin generally took students at five), but Gertrude had her in good shape. Shirley gave her all in class, dancing with books balanced on her head. Gertrude sat knitting on the sidelines with the other mothers, getting her fill of talk about talent scouts.

Shirley wasn’t plucked from the preschool crowd because she stood out in the traditional, proto-adult way of prodigies—or in a lyrical, girlish way either. Quite the opposite. The day before Thanksgiving in 1931, when scouts from Educational Films Corporation arrived at Mrs. Meglin’s to cast a series of Baby Burlesk shorts, Shirley’s curls weren’t fixed and her outfit was plain—Gertrude had been in a hurry that morning—and they were on their way out of class. A teacher called them back, only to have Shirley hide under the piano. She was repelled by one of the men, whose “moon-shaped, jowly, and moist-looking” face she still hadn’t forgotten many decades later. But small size was a key requirement (for shorts featuring three-to-five-year-olds in oversize diapers doing mostly unsavory spoofs of movies), and she fit the bill. Lucky timing, in short, was crucial—even if Gertrude, writing to her mother, decided that “little old Shirley,” with her jaunty cap and elkskin play shoes, had “evidently knocked them for a loop.”

The pair were in turn knocked for a loop by a movie business that right away failed to conform to Gertrude’s vision of developmental enrichment. After signing Shirley’s contract for the burlesks, she wrote to assure her own mother that Shirley’s “daily routine will not be upset very much,” thanks to a good dramatic teacher, a nursery, and a kitchen in the studio. Gertrude quickly discovered the promises were hollow. She wasn’t about to pull out, yet she remained wedded to her wholesome expectations—and she wasn’t faking it. At any rate, Shirley never doubted that her mother truly had her best interests at heart, and a sense of Gertrude’s “underlying streak of naiveté” empowered, rather than embittered, her as a girl.

Gertrude began managing—insofar as she could—a version of what legislators, as well as Hollywood moguls and unionizers, were strategically mandating: an experience on the movie lots that was, in the terms Gertrude favored, “a training ground for later life, a school where common virtues could be instilled and emphasized.” The 1930s spelled the end of child labor, with an exception for underage movie entertainers. New Deal reforms included regulatory oversight to ensure (at least in theory) that young performers were engaged in educational work rather than merely onerous toil—and that their rewards were safeguarded rather than squandered by greedy elders.

Reality, of course, didn’t match the lofty vows. “This business of being mother to a budding star is no joke,” Gertrude wrote to her mother a month or so later. She had dragged a sick Shirley to the shoot of the first burlesk, The Runt Page, after the poor girl had battled a “raging cold” for more than a week and then, the day before the shoot, landed in the hospital with an eardrum in need of piercing. Gertrude had gone “almost crazy” with pleas for rescheduling, all for naught. But Shirley, “game little soul,” got through the eleven-and-a-half-hour day, with the help of a couple of naps, and delivered her lines “as if nothing had happened.” Gertrude, by contrast, was strung out, excited about the film’s prospects, anxious about George’s money worries, exhausted: “I think I look ten years older and have lost quite a little weight.”

Without Shirley’s phenomenal toughness, it is safe to say that their mother-daughter alliance would have gone nowhere. And both of them were acutely aware of that, which was essential to a sense of solidarity that Shirley characterized this way: “We each knew who we were, with or without each other.” Shirley’s home lessons in independence paled in comparison to the on-set training she got immediately, about which Gertrude was largely clueless. The Baby Burlesk star had to navigate a world of unfamiliar signals—lights, chalk marks, timing—and baffling terms (“bring in the dolly” raised her hopes), not to mention dangers.

When parents were ushered off the set and child welfare supervisors were shooed away for a coffee break, Shirley’s bravery was brutally tested. An ostrich pulling her in a cart got spooked, and a lucky catch saved her from a bad fall. Undeterred, she was ready to ride an elephant, her next assignment. When a donkey tried to kick her, she ducked and then kicked him back. But even Shirley had her limits. Playing a missionary in the racist and most tasteless burlesk of all, Kid in Africa, which included a cast of black preschoolers, she had to exclaim, “These cannibals must be civilized!”—and watch in panic as the children raced right into a trip wire, installed to create more chaos in a jungle scene. Bloody mayhem ensued. She burst into tears.

Dealing with the adults, never mind animals and her cast mates, drummed in the sense that—much as she counted on her mother—she had better be able to fend for herself. “Kids, this is business,” the director barked at his diapered cast. “Time is important. Don’t waste it. This isn’t playtime, kids. It’s work.” For those who didn’t listen up, there was the “black box,” a windowless sound room with a block of ice to sit on—perfectly designed to terrify, and to induce ear infections. Squeal to a parent, the kids were warned, and it was back on the cold seat for them. Shirley went ahead and told Gertrude, who credited the bizarre report to her daughter’s overactive imagination. So Shirley, at all of four, came up with her own satisfying solution: pay attention and get it right the first time.

By the time Shirley, now five, stumbled into what proved her big break—getting cast at the last minute in Stand Up and Cheer! at the end of 1933—she was not fazed by much. On the two-day shoot, Shirley recalled that she “found the pressure exhilarating.” Gertrude had been busy, not just coiffing her ringlets (fifty-six of them) but sewing a selection of dresses for Shirley’s Fox Film handlers to choose from. (Her daughter needed her own clothes, Gertrude insisted, to be comfortable.) The two of them had gone over the script at home—before bedtime, as was their private, and patient, routine by now. “She reads and reads and reads,” Shirley explained. “I talk and talk and talk.” Gertrude was well aware that she didn’t need to push. And her directorial staple was simple: “sparkle,” which basically meant conveying natural expression with focused energy. “Just being herself,” not acting, was Shirley’s job, Gertrude firmly felt, in step with the general Hollywood prescription for young stars.

Yet arriving well prepared to do that was only the half of it. Proving, on the spot, to be resilient, resourceful amateurs as they made their way among the bumbling professionals was the more unusual skill the pair displayed already in their first bout of rehearsal and filming. When Shirley saw Jimmy Dunn sweating as he tackled some song-and-dance moves in his role as her vaudevillian father, she didn’t hesitate to step in, leading him through the Meglin routine the studio decided to use. Meanwhile, Shirley herself had been left in the lurch, without the lyrics to her “Baby Take a Bow” number, though she had learned the tune. During breaks, she memorized them with Gertrude. She was crushed when her voice broke on the last word, but they had no time to agonize as they hurried off to lunch. Shirley tripped on the stairs and got a bloody lump on her forehead. Gertrude spit on a curl and used it as camouflage. Shirley was hustled back onto the set, feeling unhappily bedraggled—only to be entranced by the new tap shoes she had been loaned. Plus she truly loved to dance, and it showed. She had to lip-sync at the same time—a new task, but as a practiced mimic, she rose to it with ease. She never heard anything about her “flub,” which everyone had decided was adorable. This child, Fox informed the Temples, had potential.

Shirley landed a contract in 1934 that awed the country: $1,000 a week for her, $250 for Gertrude. Between 1935 and 1938, she was the top box office star, dropping back to the top-ten in 1939. She helped save 20th Century Fox (the two companies merged in 1935)from near bankruptcy. At the height of her six-year Hollywood reign, she made more money annually than anyone in Hollywood besides MGM’s Louis Mayer (and more than General Motors’ president), $307,014 in 1938. She was photographed more often than anyone else on the planet, Time magazine reported in 1936. She received over three thousand fan letters a week. She moved mountains of merchandise—Shirley Temple dolls in all sizes, as well as dresses, soaps, watches, jewelry, sewing cards, hair bows, books. She endorsed products from Bisquick and Corn Flakes to Sunfreze ice cream and Vassar Waver hair curlers. In her prodigy domain—a child whose fame no grown-up could match—Shirley had only one predecessor: Jesus.

But what was it, in her case, that accounted for the acclaim? A puzzling question from the start, it became more vexed once she soared into the stratosphere. As Shirley said later, and perhaps her sharp-eyed younger self was aware of it, too, she “could sing, dance, act, and dimple, but probably there were others around who could do equally well and far better in some categories.” From the studio’s perspective, that was an important part of the allure they were peddling: Shirley wasn’t an anomaly. She was a natural who had a great time excelling at suitably wholesome endeavors and—this was crucial—conveyed that delight. The Hollywood publicists fudged her bio. A year got shaved off her age, to emphasize innocent vivacity, not precocity. Her Meglin Studio experience disappeared from her résumé. A cover story in Time was the conduit for the desired message, reporting that Shirley’s “work entails no effort”—after describing a daily regimen that began at seven and ended at five-thirty.

SHIRLEY TEMPLE Credit 6

Gertrude joined in, doubtless at Fox’s urging, but she also believed that Shirley did love what she was doing, even if it was hardly the breeze that the world was given to think. “She just has a natural tendency toward acting. If it was hard on her, if she didn’t like to do it, I’d take her out” was how Gertrude put it in an interview shortly after Stand Up and Cheer! opened. She sounded like Jimmy Dunn’s hoofer character reassuring the bureaucrats that his daughter thrived on the routines, except that Gertrude added an educational twist, in step with the emerging developmental wisdom of the day. A drama teacher at Shirley’s dancing school, she noted, felt “it would be wrong to discourage her as long as she enjoys it. She’d wilt, he said.” At other times Gertrude suggested that what Shirley did wasn’t acting at all, but “simply part of her play life.”

If that was plainly wishful, Gertrude wasn’t just airbrushing either. After all, the studio promptly decided to fit roles to Shirley’s personality and capacities—one of which was, as Shirley put it, “a knack for projecting myself into make-believe situations without abandoning the reality of my true self.” She was a sponge when it came to learning her lines, thanks not just to youthful brain cells but to her intense focus and a fierce desire to impress. At the same time, she was an upstart charmer quite unlike her somber mother. Shirley took real pleasure in her prowess and very soon was a savvy operator on the set. She didn’t hesitate to give others cues, and she loved being the cut-up—a mix of pleaser, provocateur, and kid eager to have pals. She had a habit of wandering off to hang out with her favorites among the cast and crew, who were generally the least earnest.

The studio PR materials didn’t accentuate this not-so-sweet-and-malleable side, but Shirley’s roles were a clue to it. Though the girl on-screen got held up as an ideal of compliance whom other children should imitate, that wasn’t the whole story at all. There was, as a critic noted, “something rude and rowdy” about her character that was also key to her appeal, especially to males. She played a wheeler-dealer, telling adults where to get off. The real Shirley modeled just that kind of cheekiness, and her power could be discomfiting. Adolphe Menjou, who starred as a disillusioned bookmaker transformed by her flirtatious charm and imaginative assurance in Shirley’s even greater triumph of 1934, Little Miss Marker, emphasized her uncanny mastery. “This child frightens me. She knows all the tricks,” he marveled, noting that she was an expert scene-stealer. “…Don’t ask me how she does it. You’ve heard of chess champions at eight and violin virtuosos at ten? Well, she’s an Ethel Barrymore at six.”

But of course Shirley, the incarnation of can-do innocence, wasn’t supposed to be a seasoned pro or a self-conscious celebrity, much less an exploited commodity. The mission to keep her “unspoiled,” and at the same time to reassure her fans that she was getting special care, soon had everyone in knots, and Shirley nonplussed. A scene in her memoir has Gertrude, “agitated and talkative,” sharing her anxieties about Hollywood’s influence with Shirley herself—not exactly shielding her from studio machinations. Fox’s chief of production, Winfield Sheehan, had just unnerved Gertrude with a warning from a child welfare supervisor that “there is no antidote to the corroding effect of Hollywood hubbub. It is impossible for children to remain impervious or unchanged.” Eager to cow Gertrude into clamping down on Shirley, Sheehan declared that too much exposure to an admiring cast and crowds would swell her head and spell later maladjustment. He blew right past Gertrude’s suggestion that growing self-confidence, not ego, was on display. “She can’t get spoiled, Mrs. Temple,” Sheehan lectured as Gertrude got more rattled. “She gets spoiled, it shows in the eyes.” Gertrude didn’t tear up in telling Shirley of the encounter, but she had earlier.

The upshot was a display of corporate, and cooperative, solicitude. A very New Deal spirit informed the studio arrangements elaborated in Shirley’s contract: well-regulated security, portrayed in the press as the envy of any free-range child, was the touted priority. Shirley was the beneficiary of “a series of conferences between Mr. and Mrs. Temple and the Fox executives, all eager to safeguard the health of the child and keep her unspoiled,” as an article put it. She had her own three-room bungalow on the studio lot to retreat to. There she met daily with a tutor, ate nutritional food without distraction, and took the naps she needed. She had a personal bodyguard and mandated vacations. She also had medical advisers who, with her mother, worked out a “system of relaxation” (which did not include watching movies, for fear they would taint her style).

This wasn’t about pampering, the press liked to emphasize, or about curtailing childhood independence. Instead, here was a cutting-edge supervisory approach for all those interested “in rearing their children to be like prodigies.” Not to be mistaken for indulgence, it offered a new and steady form of discipline. “Her routine of living,” one account of Shirley’s situation advised, “would make a very healthy child out of any baby who is normal, and a well balanced and trained little youngster as well.” Another story about screen starlets judged the loss of “rough-and-tumble neighborhood play,” and the risk of excess attention, a price well worth paying. “The average youngster on Main Street” would be lucky to have such close “care and chaperonage” by parents and state child welfare officials. Individual tutoring was a real advantage, and “the challenge of a job” gave the movie child rare character-building lessons. “Almost from the cradle it has been obvious to him, as it seldom is to the child supported by his parents, even in a moderately poor home, that effort ‘gets you somewhere.’ ”

A vision was taking shape of a protected, and carefully directed, childhood in which play blurs into work (a very familiar notion by now). The Temples weren’t paranoid in feeling vulnerable. Since 1932, the whole country had been following the Lindbergh kidnapping case with rapt anxiety, and the accused went to trial in January of 1935: among alluring potential hostages, Shirley surely ranked high. (In 1936 the Temples received an extortion threat—from a farm boy, it turned out.) Still, the studio deal was a far more coercive case of paternalistic control than advertised.

Shirley’s arrangements meant she didn’t get to share the studio schoolhouse with the other young actors. Her food was boring. Her lessons and rest times were tailored to filming schedules, not her needs. Vacations, given the mobs of fans, were impossible. For Gertrude and the family, barricaded behind the massive walls and electronic gate of a big new house in Brentwood Heights in 1936, constant studio and promotional business was now out of their hands. Perhaps Shirley can be forgiven, as the 1930s progressed, for behavior of just the sort her setup was purportedly designed to nip in the bud. Her voice coach later described audible tantrums from the studio cottage. He also reported that on a house call, Shirley demanded they play badminton first, whirling on her father when he suggested she start rehearsing: “Look, I earn all the money in this family. Don’t tell me what to do.”

Little wonder, too, that Gertrude was worried. Though Shirley, now nine, only dimly understood what was going on, her mother faced a crisis in 1937 that seemed to fortify the gumption that grounded both of them. Confronted with a medical scare, which called for surgery, an apprehensive Gertrude wrote to the old friend whom she had chosen as her maternal surrogate. Relations had already been tense with 20th Century Fox because she felt the studio wasn’t giving Shirley roles that nurtured her growth. But with her friend, she wanted to discuss Shirley’s continued thriving “as a human entity.” “Any career child,” she wrote, “is at a tremendous disadvantage,” in need of inner bulwarks against “greed, selfishness, and flattery.” Shirley had all that it took—patience, a sense of justice, tenderness, sensitivity, plus what Gertrude knew (though didn’t say) she lacked herself, “a joyous spirit, full of pranks and teasing.” Gertrude wanted to be sure those qualities were defended, not least Shirley’s bold energy. Doing that had been a challenge for Gertrude—and not just because Hollywood made it hard. Again, she didn’t say this, but Shirley intimated it: her mother had needed to overcome her own primness, and irrepressible Shirley helped her manage that. As she did in her letter, Gertrude mustered her clout to stand up for the feistiness that defined her daughter—and which, as it happened, was also a secret of Shirley’s success.

During the two weeks that Gertrude was away in the hospital, Shirley never doubted that she would come home. But in the gloom, trying “to cope with the gaping hole caused by her absence,” she sank briefly into “a swampland of confusion and helplessness.” She wept every night with regret at taking her mother’s love for granted and failing to convey hers. When a frail Gertrude returned, they rallied. Darryl Zanuck, the vice-president and head of production, decided to see how far Shirley could stretch (and to send her mother a be-careful-what-you-wish-for signal). To test Shirley’s dramatic skills, he paired her with the legendary—and famously child-averse—director John Ford, “a blood-and-thunder mentor of hairy-chested males,” Shirley the memoirist noted. In Wee Willie Winkie she was to play a valiant little peacekeeper in colonial India. The cards seemed stacked against her.

Except that Shirley hadn’t just been coasting on cuteness so far by any means. Two years of honing her dancing skills with a legendary master of that art, Bill Robinson, had made her fearless in the face of daunting calls for excellence. The man whom Shirley considered the all-important mentor of her heart and feet had shown her (against lots of evidence, in life and in her movies) that demanding adults could be counted on to deliver serious, challenging fun. As Shirley described her meeting with Robinson at her cottage door early in 1935, it was a scene out of one of her movies. They started walking across the lot together, and when Robinson realized that Shirley was trying to catch up and hold his hand, he slowed down and took hers. It was the beginning of not just a partnership but an unusual friendship. She proposed that she call him Uncle Billy. He agreed, if he could call her darlin’.

Shirley had no idea what buttons she was pushing—but that was the point. According to Hollywood lore, Sheehan had summoned Robinson thanks in part to the director D. W. Griffith’s remark that mixing blond-girl innocence with black characters would “raise the gooseflesh on the back of an audience.” Robinson knew that he roused ire in Harlem by complying with Hollywood’s racist rules, taking Uncle Tom roles and paying lucrative court to Shirley—but that wasn’t his point. Bridling at the criticism, he trusted his scene-stealing powers on-screen to contribute to a mission he once described this way to a black reporter. “I am a race man!” he insisted. “I strive upon every turn to tear down any barriers that have existed between our two races and to establish harmonious relationship for all.”

As a child, Shirley only gradually, and never completely, became aware of the Jim Crow realities that Robinson navigated in Hollywood and beyond it. But as soon as they began work together on The Little Colonel, a tale of family schisms set in the postbellum South, she made a thrilling discovery: he dealt with her as more of an equal than any other actor did—even though, or because, he was her teacher. Robinson took her seriously as a professional, rather than treating her as a pretty little “windup toy” that performed on demand (as even Gertrude could sometimes slip up and do). The singing and acting required by most of Shirley’s roles expressly didn’t call for feats of self-transformation. But tap-dancing “is an utterly unnatural skill,” she emphasized in retrospect. Getting very good at it gave an ambitious girl the chance, with Robinson’s one-of-a-kind guidance, “to elevate my ability to the height of my energy.”

Unfazed that Shirley barely knew even the basics of tap, Robinson made the stair dance, which became the virtuosic centerpiece of the melodrama The Little Colonel, work brilliantly—and on short notice. The idea dawned late that Shirley, playing the family reconciler to Robinson’s beloved family retainer, would join him in the routine that was his specialty. They were, Shirley liked to say later, the first interracial couple to dance on-screen in history—at a time when few dared do it off-screen (and when all on-screen physical contact between them had to be cut in the South). He deftly choreographed around the problem that childish body proportions make agile leg action hard, and came up with a trick to allow her to get more sound: she would kick the stair riser. Then they got busy. As Shirley later wrote, he was “imperturbable and kind, but demanding.” His key advice was “Let’s get your feet attached to your ears,” and he showed her exactly what that meant. Proud of her powers of concentration and her zeal to nail things, she thrived on his high standards for precision and clarity. With him beside her, she couldn’t get enough of the relentless practice that committed every move to muscle memory.

Perhaps because Robinson knew how it felt to be patronized as a naïvely cheerful hoofer whose feet just get to tappin’, he imparted more than technique. He was the rare adult who actually gave Shirley a chance to practice a real version of the pieties she preached on-screen. Working with him, she discovered that hard-won mastery, enabled by a sympathetic and confident ally, can deliver self-respect and joyful fulfillment. Pulling off their routines, and achieving total synchrony as he carefully matched his moves to hers, was its own reward—“a final moment of elation in a long sequence totally devoid of drudgery.” On-screen, too, Robinson’s cool authority had a way of subverting a servant role that put him on a level with a child. In their next collaboration, The Littlest Rebel (a Civil War drama), he was again the only real grown-up anywhere in sight, ready to listen and to lead. He was the first black film character, a historian has remarked, responsible for a white one.

Wee Willie Winkie offered nothing like the challenge of tap dancing, but Shirley rose to the dramatic occasion (and proudly defied Ford’s antichild prejudice in the process). Shirley is “growing up,” the New Yorker film critic wrote, “…and there is a definite expansion of personality.” Expansion of body, however, contributed to a drop in box office ratings as the 1930s ended. Good as her word, Gertrude and George bought out the rest of Shirley’s 20th Century Fox contract when Gertrude saw no worthwhile work in store. Shirley had just turned twelve, and her mother’s timing was right. As Gertrude said in a carefully crafted statement, her daughter needed a “life with other girls and boys of her own age, in school and during recreation hours, so that she will not develop an isolated viewpoint, which often brings on an unhappy outlook on life.” Through the 1940s, Shirley dabbled in movies, but mainly she was a student at the exclusive Westlake School for Girls. Soon she became a popular wheeler-dealer there, too—not least with boys.

She didn’t stick to Gertrude’s tidy, happy script. Shirley, constantly called on during her childhood to rescue adults, was now in a hurry to claim her independence. At seventeen, she thought she was doing that when, in September 1945, over her parents’ objections, she married twenty-five-year-old John Agar, the brother of a Westlake friend. George and Gertrude granted her only a small allowance as the couple moved into her renovated playhouse, hardly an ideal launching pad for a not-quite-ex-star and her insecure husband. Shirley signed a contract with David O. Selznick and was also loaned to other studios for several pictures, with mixed success. Agar drank and had affairs and, she later revealed, hit her. By twenty, Shirley had a baby, but her marriage was beyond saving. Her film career was going nowhere.

Shirley filed for divorce at twenty-one in 1949. On a recuperative trip to Hawaii, she met Charles Black, a rare specimen—an American who had never seen a Shirley Temple movie. As they prepared to marry in 1950, she made a shocking discovery: her parents had run through her fortune. A decade earlier Gertrude and George had signed a pledge to hold half of their daughter’s earnings in trust until she was twenty-one. It was a gesture in the spirit of the Coogan Act of 1939, which mandated that protection for child stars but didn’t retrospectively cover Shirley. While shocking tales of greedy relatives fleecing young actors were stirring legislators to action, no one had worried about her—the epitome of well-tended talent.

Shirley and Charles took a vow of silence on the subject, “honoring family unity over material cupidity” (and deciding that George must have been duped). There she was, bailing out her elders again. But Shirley was also asserting a confident autonomy that she had developed early. And perhaps she had in mind Bill Robinson, who had died penniless in 1949. “There’s no use in going through life as if you were in a funeral procession. After all, there’s a lot of fun in it, so why grump and grouse?” he once told a reporter. “Why not dance through life?” His acolyte stuck with that outlook. Shirley Temple Black went on to work in television, ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, and was named ambassador first to Ghana and then to Czechoslovakia as Communism was collapsing, hardly luxury posts. As her early screen years might have predicted, she found her most fulfilling vocation in diplomacy.

· 3 ·

While Gertrude Temple was cramming her fetus with cultural enrichment in early 1928, the path awaiting Philippa Schuyler was being laid. Josephine Cogdell and George Schuyler got married on January 6, in thrall to each other and to a cause: challenging racial hypocrisies in the name of future racial harmony. George had just published a satiric takedown of “Our White Folks,” which was causing a stir as the lead essay in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury. In his piece, George mocked those eager to proclaim “that the Negro is as good as they are—as if that were a compliment!—and to swear by all the gods that they want to give him a square deal and a chance in the world,” while offering nothing of the sort. He also mocked the notion of a “natural aversion” to intermarriage: Why then the need for so many laws against it? Where George was caustic, Josephine waxed romantic, a daughter of the racist South who had dramatically disowned her heritage. The white race is “spiritually depleted,” she wrote in her diary the week before she and George legalized their union. “America must mate with the Negro to save herself.”

In her bond with George, Josephine heralded the square deal that would right the racial imbalance: “He needs to be cherished and inflated as I need to be pruned.” She would “give him greater confidence in himself…make him certain of his superiority.” Under George’s firm hand, she would never “quit growing and solidify.” But they shouldn’t expect any outside help in their bold experiment, George warned the morning after their marriage, as he hurried out of town on an assignment. “Do you know, Josephine, we stand absolutely alone? We can’t count on anybody,” a remark she recorded in her diary. “The whole world is against us, the negroes as well as the whites?” Three and a half years later, they had company. Philippa arrived on August 2, 1931. She was just the youthful race-straddling recruit their cause needed—and a child-rearing project made to order for restless Josephine, who felt she had “dropped completely out of sight.” It never occurred to her and George that in counting on their daughter to win over the world, they might be giving her—as they did in her diet—a very raw deal.

The child star craze had equal opportunity allure—ordinary, middle-class Shirley soared—and Hollywood fueled the promise of upward mobility with rags-to-riches plots that celebrated America’s cooperative spirit. The Schuylers were well aware that Philippa tested any such storyline. But even before their baby began precociously talking, Josephine touted “extra vitality” as a biracial asset in the more competitive contest she faced: Philippa would have to prove herself a superior specimen, not just a sparkly girl. In Josephine’s analysis of “hybrid vigor,” heredity and history mingled. George, the key progenitor, brought emblematic black virtues to the mix. He provided “a splendid example of courage and endurance,” having “from the cradle overcome the greatest difficulties without losing his sense of humor.” Her own stock was a problem. As Josephine had recently written in an anonymous account of her racial awakening, she was the spoiled scion of a prosperous clan of ranchers and bankers who exemplified white folks’ flaws: they were unjust bigots and joyless egotists.

Josephine professed to have discovered “the peace of humility” since her marriage, but joyless egotism ran deeper than she recognized. So did a proclivity to “go to extremes,” one of the traits George ascribed to white folks—and he was rarely home to rein her in (not that he would have dared to try). Right after Philippa’s birth, he went off to investigate the Liberian slave trade, and then kept up a frenetic pace of reporting and speaking: paying the rent in the Depression wasn’t easy. Josephine leaned on the wisdom of the behaviorist John Broadus Watson (a protégé, like George, of Mencken’s). Gleefully immoderate in his book Psychological Care of Infant and Child, he blamed “too much mother love” for creating emotional cripples, and he prescribed a formula in line with Josephine’s nutritional zealotry. All toughness, next to no sweetness: that was Watson’s secret to raising a sturdy child who could be steered to any vocation and would end up, he promised, an adaptable adult able to cope in an unpredictable world. Treat her like a small adult, he lectured parents. Be scant with praise and strict about routines. Avoid cuddling and kissing at all costs.

Where Gertrude Temple merely dabbled in the brusque parenting vogue, Josephine went overboard—in private. In public, she sounded if anything more laid-back than Gertrude when, in August 1934, she took a turn in the spotlight in a New York Herald Tribune article that reads like a parody of a Hollywood child-star profile. The newspaper sent Joseph W. Alsop (the future Washington columnist was then a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate) to 321 Edgecombe Avenue to watch as “Harlem’s Youngest Philosopher Parades Talent on 3d Birthday.” The headline continued, “Philippa Schuyler Spells, Draws and Then Rushes for Her Health Ice Cream.” Also in a facetious vein, the accompanying photograph showed a small savage rather than a sage. In it, Philippa could almost be mistaken for one of the wary little cannibals on the set of Shirley Temple’s most offensive Baby Burlesk short, Kid in Africa. She is semicrouched against a backdrop of foliage, naked except for a headband adorned with leaves. Her gaze is serious, and she betrays no trace of a smile.

Noting that her writer parents “sternly deny that she is a prodigy,” Alsop wryly portrayed a child whose mother had clearly run her through her repertoire on other occasions. On the one hand, though he didn’t put it like this, here was a higher-brow, and even more wholesome, young talent than the Shirley phenomenon. Where Hollywood’s brand-new attraction dimpled and danced for a mass audience, Philippa twirled her globe and spelled:

“I want my globe,” remarked Philippa, emerging from behind her mother’s shoulder and casting herself on the floor in an attitude of which Cleopatra in her best days would not have been ashamed. The globe was produced. With a small, but unerring, hand, with which she liked to cover each indicated locality, she pointed out the continents and countries suggested to her. Asia, India, Africa, Australia were picked out, and each time she spelled the name, making a little song out of Australia.

“That’s Ceylon,” added Philippa, as a voluntary. “C-E-Y-L-O-N. And that’s Madagascar. M-A-D-A-G-A-S-C-A-R.”

This seemed to call for a certain emphasis, so she turned round twice gracefully and rapidly on the rug, ending flat on her stomach.

On the other hand, Alsop hinted at the possibility that perhaps everything wasn’t quite so effortless and unselfconscious as mother and daughter, both dressed in “bright silk pajamas,” endeavored to convey.

But he only hinted. Philippa certainly didn’t lack for energy, demonstrating her spelling prowess to “the accompaniment of violent kicking with both legs and considerable smiling.” If her performance was getting a bit tiresome by the time she climbed on a chair for recitation time—some doggerel, “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” Countee Cullen’s “What Is Africa to Me”—it was also impressive, and she was adorable as she turned to her blackboard to write, draw, and do a few sums. Her mother didn’t sound like a taskmaster. In describing her dietary regimen, Josephine emphasized fruit and fresh ice cream, not the raw meat part. Her teaching method, she said, was “to have no method,” merely to indicate her own interest and leave it to Philippa to follow. Yet Alsop also observed that Josephine had very precisely calibrated her daughter’s progress (eighth-grade level in noun spelling and fourth grade in verbs). Columbia University’s psychology department, he took note, had been alerted.

Implicitly, the article raised a question that, in addition to being condescending and racist, was real: Was this pair perhaps trying too hard? A biracial child faced extra hurdles, and Philippa’s started at home, where George, too, seemed to have forgotten one important way in which he believed black folks had it all over “Our White Folks.” They, he had written, “have learned how to enjoy themselves without too much self-consciousness and exhibitionism.” Josephine put Alsop’s article in the scrapbooks that she and George had begun keeping since shortly after Philippa’s birth.

At first the big albums had resembled a standard record of early milestones, advanced but mostly not outlandish—hesitant steps at about eight months, four recognizable utterances at fourteen months (“Jo,” as she then called her mother, “Daddy,” “God damn,” and “How do”). For the often-absent George, the progress reports were welcome. Back home, he added his own note about the “exceptional sense of humor” of his one-and-a-half-year-old. George had gotten Philippa a blackboard when she turned one, and he and Josephine now joined in her intensive letter-learning games. They kept track of her amusing wordplay: Can you say, Philippa asked, “go crooked to bed”?

George, editing at The Pittsburgh Courier, notified the black press of her early exploits. By the time the mainstream press in the form of Alsop paid a visit to their precocious three-year-old, the fast-growing trove of memorabilia was becoming a more intensely parasitic and proprietary chronicle than any Hollywood fan club could gin up for a star. The scrapbooks, which the Schuylers planned to unveil when she was older, were a record of parental hopes and hubris as much as of Philippa’s own progress. Shortly after inserting the Alsop clipping, Josephine added commentary, diary-style:

Everywhere your Daddy goes people ask about you, having read of you. When I take you to the Library on 145th Street the lady librarian makes a great deal of fuss over you. It is very nice having an accomplished daughter. I glow with pride. If only we can keep this up, darling, maybe you can be a great personality in the world. I hope so.

In the scrapbooks, Josephine was also honest about tactics that she wouldn’t have dreamed of revealing in public. She plainly felt the need to justify them to the older Philippa who would peruse the pages—and also to herself. “You are stubborn and self-willed and want to do things your way,” she wrote in the fall of 1934, describing recent hard spanks. “While I am whipping you, you often put your arms around me and say most plaintively, ‘Oh, Jody, don’t you be bad to me. Oh Jody, please be nice to me.’ ” (Philippa didn’t call her mother by the usual endearments.) Even Josephine half-recognized that her Watsonian rationale failed to add up: “I must teach you to adjust yourself swiftly to new situations (you do this well though) and to forget anger and forgive quickly (this you don’t do).” Blind to her own impulse-control issues, Josephine applied the harsh hand she felt she herself needed, or at any rate desired. “Beat me and then love me,” she had urged George, “and I’ll be as docile as a lamb.”

Betrayal, not beating, turned out to be George’s mode of causing his wife pain, as Josephine discovered before long, but in a 1935 letter he was still in full worship mode. “Your respect for and confidence in and reliance upon me,” he wrote her, were just the sustenance their union was supposed to provide. Philippa was if anything more blessed, George went on, though he was surely aware that Josephine veered between extolling her brilliant black child and fiercely pruning a daughter who mustn’t be spoiled the way she, Josephine, had been. “You and Philippa are growing together like Siamese twins,” he noted, thrilled by the development.

She is going to be a facsimile of you with the exception that she is having a much better start in life. She can become anything under your tutelage. She has already become a wonder. I often speculate on what she will become and what glory she will reflect upon us. It is a wonderful thing to look forward to. I just know she is going to be a marvelously beautiful and intelligent woman. We must do everything to preserve her, like a hothouse flower, for she is a rare and exotic breed. There are few beings like her in the world.

Perhaps George, who generally derided such excessive fussing as white-folk nonsense, was hoping to soften Josephine’s approach. (When he first spanked Philippa, Josephine wrote in the diary, it “almost killed him.”) But he doubtless also knew that his wife wasn’t to be deterred from her mission to turn out a hardy model of hybrid vigor for the world. A year earlier, Josephine had launched Philippa on a new track, eager to deflect suggestions that their preschooler was an overcultivated clone of her bookish parents. (Philippa had been churning out stories, sometimes ten a week, by hand and on the typewriter, which she was learning to use.) Since shortly before Christmas in 1934, Philippa had been very busy at their green upright piano. Josephine had engaged an African American graduate of Juilliard, Arnetta Jones, as her teacher.

Columbia University’s Child Development Institute had noted, shortly before Philippa turned three, that “she excels chiefly in her capacity for sustained attention and ability to concentrate during prolonged periods.” At the piano, as at her chalkboard, Philippa took off. Within a year, she had begun composing short pieces, too, telling stories in rhythms and notes. When she hurried up to the apartment one day to write “Men at Work” after watching a WPA construction project on the sidewalk, she didn’t shy away from boldly dissonant tones. Not long before she turned five, Philippa was the youngest of seven winners in her first music competition, sponsored by the National Guild of Piano Teachers. She pulled off four required pieces with impressive agility for her age. She also performed five that she had written, and the judges discovered a gift that had eluded the NYU assessors who had recently tested her IQ at 180: perfect pitch. (Philippa’s favorite song was her “Cockroach Ballet,” about roaches feasting and then suffering a near massacre, with a few survivors celebrating.) Scores of her songs, printed up in a booklet by her parents, were unearthed in 2011 by the musician John McLaughlin Williams. He made an informal recording, pleased to discover signs of real growth in work that he felt surely reflected some exposure to contemporary music.

Philippa, with Jones as her teacher, now had a nonparental mentor. Josephine meanwhile was assuming the role of manager as she sought out musical venues to showcase Philippa’s striking talents. The relationship that evolved between mother and daughter, though, was the opposite of Shirley and Gertrude’s mutually confidence-boosting alliance. Perhaps emboldened by working with Jones, Philippa pushed her mother to “make a better rule about whipping me.” Please, she urged as they wrote up resolutions on New Year’s in 1936, “teach me some other way….It doesn’t make me want to follow the rules. It makes me think you can’t love me as much as you say you do.” Josephine, taking her cue from her daughter, devised new rules: deny pleasures (toys, meals) rather than inflict pain, all the while applying ever greater pressure to perform.

The new disciplinary regime hardly reassured Philippa, who was in turn discovering how to unnerve her mother. “You nearly scared me to death,” Josephine scrawled next to a newspaper clipping about a recital in the spring of 1938. Philippa, not yet seven, was by then in school part-time but practicing and performing more and more (on amateur radio hours, too)—not to mention being a star participant in the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts annual notebook contests. (One of her commentaries on the season’s series, thirty-six pages long and illustrated, won her a special prize at Carnegie Hall.) The May evening of that particular recital, Philippa was evidently exhausted. Josephine, who recorded the drama in the scrapbook, described her saying, just before going on stage, “ ‘Jody, I want to do this but I don’t believe I can make it’ and smiling brightly.” Josephine took it from there:

“Good heavens! Why not?” “Well,” still brightly, “I just don’t feel like I can make it.” “Look here!” I said sternly, “You have to make it. Of course, you can! Go on out there and show ’em!” You were a trooper! You showed ’em! You signed programs till your hands were weary. Next day I said to you: Don’t ever tell me you can’t make a thing again. You can make anything you prepare for. The time to think of that is weeks before and by more practice, which determines everything.

Philippa began to make a habit of balking as concerts approached, and a frantic Josephine recruited George to weigh in by mail. A girl looking for some unconditional love from her adored father wasn’t going to find much in his chiding vote of confidence:

You can do anything if you try hard enough and do as Jodie and Miss Jones say. I am very proud of you, darling, and I know that some day you will be a great person, especially if you will take advice without resentment or irritation. Practice makes perfect. You know that.

“Love was the thing that freed me from nagging uncertainty, allowing me to do my job better than the next kid,” Shirley wrote in her memoir, evoking a child who felt bolstered even as she was buffeted by film industry demands. Philippa had a mother who was running the show and who felt she couldn’t afford New Deal–style solicitude, or the pretense of it. No child welfare inspectors, waving labor regulations, were going to pay surprise visits to their Harlem apartment. Still, Josephine wanted to explain the relentless promotion and performance, and practice, in the scrapbook that Philippa would ultimately read. “I realize, darling, that these contests are often stupid and I know many educators disapprove of them,” she began. “But here is why I persist”:

1. George and Jody have nothing to give you save opportunity. And because we have refused to be conventional in our way of life, opportunity will not come to us unsought. We must seek the best for you, go out and get it or it will pass us by. We, and especially you, are a challenge to the set notions of America on race. These prejudices, erected to justify a diabolical system of exploitation of man by his fellow man, will not easily give way. Only genius will break them down, and that you have. So I take you about as much for the education of America as for the education of Philippa.

2. Aside from all this, it is good training in social conduct for you. You learn to meet new people in a friendly, charming fashion, to do your part under all circumstances….

4. Finally, I heartily wish my parents had given me the kind of help I’m giving you. As I look back, I see how I longed to be important, to be taken seriously, to be given a way of life, pointed a road that was interesting. Instead, I was given money, social position and treated like a baby. I loathed it.

Her manifesto was far more forthright than Fox Film’s pseudo-child-friendly contract, and deeply unsettling. Josephine didn’t shrink from exposing the instrumental zeal behind elevating a child as an emissary of anything—whether racial enlightenment or uplifting (and lucrative) entertainment or a parent’s thwarted dreams. In Josephine’s case, all three were at stake. She didn’t invoke the familiar defense of child-star labor either—that it was easy and educationally approved. She knew that a biracial girl couldn’t win over a wary public with mere bubbly spirits. And lurking in Josephine’s insistence on taking a hardworking child seriously was in fact a respect that Shirley, for one, yearned for.

Yet the effect, all but inevitable, was to erode Philippa’s sense of autonomy. Not that the wider world could tell. At seven, Philippa thrived as she took composition and singing classes at the esteemed Convent Music School not far from their Harlem apartment. She also started spending several hours a day in fourth grade, the only black child at the Annunciation School, on the same campus grounds. (“If I just wanted to play games I could go to the park,” Philippa had said in choosing it over a progressive school for the gifted. “But I want to learn something every day.”) Assessing her “social relationships,” her glowing school report described a “sunny, attractive child” who was “very mature…quite a favorite in the group.” On the “mental hygiene” front, she was judged “fully secure in her home relationship, perfectly confident in her contacts with her child world.” The faculty wished that Philippa could spend more time there.

PHILIPPA SCHUYLER Credit 7

The school’s view was based, of course, on very partial exposure—which was precisely the problem. Ceding control of Philippa’s training and development to other formative figures threatened Josephine’s sense of importance and the Schuylers’ project. A succession of piano teachers counseled against so much concertizing so soon, only to be fired or to quit when Josephine flouted them. So again and again Philippa lost her chance to forge a trusting bond with a teacher and to discover for herself, as Shirley had, the rewards of discipline and a sense of independence. Arnetta Jones was no Bill Robinson. But she and the other young women teachers whom Josephine lined up were impressive.

More important, they were dedicated to a child who was, as one of them put it, “just the most delicious thing” and “musically…like a sponge,” with a phenomenal memory and extraordinarily strong, supple hands. Philippa adored them, too—yet “nagging uncertainty,” in Shirley’s words, undermined her. Josephine pushed; Philippa’s audiences applauded; her teachers pushed back, eager to help her improve not just perform. Defensive about being corrected and desperate for unqualified allegiance, Philippa tested her teachers, not just her mother. With a dramatic flair she had picked up from Josephine, one day she accused a favorite teacher of not loving her (after some criticism of her playing). Philippa then rushed out, threatening to throw herself off the roof. Josephine rolled her eyes at what she said were mere antics. The teacher resigned on the spot.

Yet in the prescribed “friendly, charming fashion,” Philippa continued to do her part in the world. Now almost nine, she played on “Philippa Schuyler Day” in June 1940 at the World’s Fair in New York, which Josephine lobbied to have inserted into a packed schedule of specially dedicated days. (Bill Robinson was the only other black American so honored.) That same month, the Chicago-based Quiz Kids radio show debuted, and she was invited to “out quiz” the brainy young contestants, submitting questions. When The New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell interviewed Philippa for a profile later that summer, he was captivated by her beauty and childish, riddle-telling verve. Her parents unobtrusively gave him a look at the scrapbooks they had been keeping, where he read of her incessant curiosity. “If there’s any pushing done,” Josephine told Mitchell as he left the apartment, “she’s the one that does it.”

When Josephine and George shared the scrapbooks with Philippa on her thirteenth birthday, she confronted fourteen portfolio-size folders that revealed her whole life to have been their scripted project. The timing couldn’t have been worse, struggling as she already was to find her voice and place. She and her mother were just back from a “sabbatical” in Mexico. There Philippa had tackled her first orchestral composition, Josephine’s new gambit for public attention. The piece, Manhattan Nocturne, was full of homesickness, the work of a girl who was feeling unmoored. Her mother had intimated that her beloved father, who had stayed behind to take care of the cats, was an unfaithful husband. En route to Mexico, Josephine hadn’t taken Philippa with her to visit her family in Texas; her exile from that clan was clear. The scrapbooks exiled her from her own life. In the nightmares Philippa kept having, she yearned for suicide. She felt that she was no one, and she had nowhere to turn for solace. She had been left stranded without intimates—except for one, the mother who was sure that she had made Philippa into Someone.

In her loneliness, Philippa drove herself ever harder, reared to “do her part under all circumstances.” The daunting obstacles that face any adolescent in the merciless world of concert performance were compounded for her. Now she recognized the “vicious barriers of prejudice” she was up against. “It was a ruthless shock to me that, at first, made the walls of my self-confidence crumble,” she wrote later. “It horrified, humiliated me.” The creative spur of turning to composition proved fruitful. Still, she suffered corrosive anxiety. She was newly aware “of the weighty importance of each concert.”

The performance of her Manhattan Nocturne at a New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert in 1945 was greeted as a remarkable composing debut, “truly poetic, the expression of genuine feeling, a gentle, soft beauty and imagination,” one reviewer wrote. For Philippa, almost fourteen, it was an ordeal that stirred up all “the uncertainties, confusion, anger, months of revision, hundreds of wee morning hours spent laboriously copying out scores and parts.” The next year, shortly before she was to appear with the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium as the soloist in Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto in G and as the composer of the Rumpelstiltskin scherzo from her Fairy Tale Symphony, a new work, she told an interviewer: “I have to work now so that when I get older I’ll be able to enjoy life really then.” Her scherzo betrayed none of her travails. It was “expertly written,” The New York Times judged, “with a broad melodic core that has genuine charm.”

Philippa didn’t let up on the work, and as she approached sixteen after a run of spectacular success, she seemed to relax. She even went on a few dates. Radiating beauty, she conveyed enjoyment and confidence as she talked to the press. Her Manhattan Nocturne and Rumpelstiltskin had won prizes and received premier exposure—played by the Boston Pops, and the Detroit, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras, along with the New York Philharmonic. Praise from the composer and discerning critic Virgil Thomson was just the kind that a maturing prodigy wants to hear. “She plays music, not Philippa Schuyler, even when she performs her own compositions,” he wrote in the New York Herald Tribune. “And she gets inside any piece with conviction.” He saw a “real gift for…saying things with music” in her Fairy Tale Symphony, which he found as interesting as the symphonies Mozart wrote at thirteen.

Philippa’s rebound didn’t last. In 1948 Josephine struggled to line up mostly black sponsors, hoping in vain for mixed audiences for the national tour she was busy arranging. “Do you know how many blacks took piano lessons because of Philippa?” the sociologist Hylan Lewis later said. Crossover allure, though, proved elusive. Josephine was also very worried about money, not just for Philippa’s lessons but for the managerial salary she had been drawing for years. “You can make anything you prepare for” was a maternal mantra that gave Philippa plenty of room to torture her mother and herself. “She sits all day at the piano, won’t eat,” Josephine wrote George from the road. “Says she is too busy, or it makes her tired or sick to eat. She plays the scales over and over….I am really low in spirit. There is no satisfaction in this for me when she is so cold and demanding, so irritable and exacting.”

George’s income had ebbed as he swerved rightward politically, but by 1949 he was worrying over Philippa’s manic practicing and her single-minded pursuit of soaring goals. “Ten hours a day is entirely too much for anybody to work at music or anything else….This is especially so where a person does nothing else,” he wrote to Josephine, who was increasingly estranged and often depressed.

Philippa is ruining her girlhood with too serious application and other fool notions. She needs to have more optimism, hopefulness and buoyancy, and stop so much damn worrying about the future. It is especially silly at 18. Success is not a career or money, it is inner peace and smiling contentment and a minimum of grandiose illusions.

If George was hoping to exert any influence or enlighten his wife, he was way too late.

It was not the last time that Philippa came close to “breaking under the strain,” as she put it. Her confidence shaken by more encounters with American prejudice, and her self-reliance eroded by her mother’s insistent demands, Philippa “adjusted,” she wrote. “I left.” In 1952, the year she turned twenty-one, she embarked on a Caribbean tour without Josephine, who was soon urging her to return to play U.S. concerts. “STAYING. AM COMMITTED. PRACTICING EIGHT NINE HOURS DAILY. EXCEEDING WORK SCHEDULE. LEARNING PIECES,” Philippa telegrammed in response. The American tour sponsor “CAN’T RULE MY LIFE….CARAMBA. THATS BEEN TROUBLE. EVERYBODY WANTED MAKE ME PUPPET.” It was the start of a peripatetic performing career abroad, which took Philippa to South and Central America, Europe, Latin America, and Africa over the next decade and a half. She plunged into mixed-race cultures, often barely skirting real danger amid political violence—and always practicing tirelessly. She found welcoming audiences, and also critics for whom her roiling style revealed more need than art. Returning home to face prejudice and maternal pressure firsthand, she would set off again.

An intrepid spirit, perhaps as much as particular talents, had marked out both Shirley and Philippa in childhood. Remarkably, neither of them lost it. Philippa lived for high drama, vainly seeking love and subsisting on little money and sleep as she struggled to assert her independence and forge an identity. Josephine never stopped hounding her, sending long letters when she was away, intruding on her daughter’s ill-fated romances, too. “Do you realize what you are expecting of me?” Philippa, now almost thirty, wrote her in 1960.

Are you aware of the pressures you put me under? Are you aware of the impossibilities you ask of me?

To be a great pianist.

To be a great composer.

To be a great arranger.

To be a great author.

To be a great journalist.

To always get marvellous reviews.

To always pull off marvellous coups no one else could do.

To get good photographs everywhere….

To always make money, and always keep within my budget….

To always be a great beauty.

This is beyond human capability.

Yet even as she and her mother continued to torment each other, Philippa refused to be constrained by perfectionist caution. That same year, in a quasi-memoir about her travels that had begun as a novel, she struck a very different note. She made a point of embracing “the turmoils, threats, hazards, uncertainties, of this age”—and of her own life so far. “I am not sorry that I was a child prodigy. There is so much to learn, and so little time in which to learn it,” she wrote. A similar declaration of mettle had been Shirley’s on-screen message, one that she had taken to heart in life. Philippa meant it, too, in the face of far more daunting lessons. She portrayed a young woman avidly taking risks, encountering strangers, crossing social boundaries.

“Youth is brave and wants to do battle,” she insisted, a sentiment the prodigies in the previous pages all endorsed, in their own way. That included combat with elders, who tended to be crusader types themselves. Philippa was very much her parents’ daughter even in her often embittered quest to chart a path beyond their vision of her as the biracial artist who would be a bridge between races. Not unlike the young Josephine in flight from Texas, Philippa was a radical shapeshifter, going so far as to shed her black lineage to try out a European onstage persona by the name of Felipa Monterro in the early 1960s. Following in her father’s footsteps, Philippa flouted caution and convention as she fit reportorial writing into her travels. Her work included two books about Africa, which shared George’s by now very conservative views and anti-Communist zeal. She wrote pro-war dispatches from Vietnam.

But she saw her country’s blindness, too. Stunned by prejudice against black GIs and Asians in Vietnam, Philippa became more disillusioned than ever about American racial attitudes. She cofounded an organization to aid “half-castes” fathered by Americans. And she was determined to help evacuate children from a Catholic orphanage in central Vietnam to safety farther south. She had postponed her return to the United States several times, despite her mother’s pleas, when the helicopter transporting her and a group of orphans went down in the South China Sea on May 9, 1967. Philippa drowned at thirty-five. Two years later, on May 2, Josephine committed suicide.

That future in which Philippa would “enjoy life really” had kept receding from her. When Shirley Temple discovered that she had been deprived of a fortune, forgiveness was her assertion of freedom. But Philippa Schuyler never escaped the sense that she was owed big, because she was. She could be exceptional, or else invisible: that was the brutal deal offered by a mother who failed to recognize a child’s need to feel that she is lovable. A bigoted country confirmed a third option: however phenomenal she was, Philippa would be a perpetual outsider. When Josephine sent her grown daughter a benediction of sorts in the early 1960s, she had no idea how heartless it sounded—or how heartbreaking it would seem in retrospect. “We have tried to make you important. We have been as diligent and sincere on this end as you have on your end,” she wrote Philippa.

However, I can see why you are tired, it was a great ordeal, a tremendous task, which you carried out with great triumph and ingenuity….YOU WERE PART OF HISTORY.

Now, we can make this the end of all such attempts to capture public interest….You have become a world figure….Now, you can do as you wish with the future.