The Golden-Haired Girl

Edition: 1 - State Section: Features, pg. 031

She really was the unspoilt child she seemed but, as FRANK CROOK reports, her stardom faded as she grew

Gertrude Kreiger was a mother of two sons and when she found she was expecting a third child, she convinced herself that the new arrival would be a daughter.

Gertrude also convinced herself that her daughter would become a household name in the entertainment world. And she vowed to help her every step along the way.

On April 23, 1928, when Gertrude gave birth to the daughter, talking pictures had become the new entertainment sensation and she set the touslehaired baby on the road to a screen career.

Her husband, a Californian bank teller called George Francis Temple, took a back seat to his wife's ambitions and watched while Gertrude took their daughter, whom they had named Shirley, to dance and acting classes almost as soon as the tot was able to walk.

Gertrude was a zealous stage mother but without the ruthlessness that stained the lives of many who followed in her wake.

So when Shirley Temple became the world's most popular film star at age seven, Gertrude basked in the glory, while keeping young Shirley's feet firmly planted to the ground.

Even today, more than 50 years after she made her last film, Shirley Temple remains the symbol of Hollywood's age of innocence, of bright eyes and a curly top, a model of the child every mother wanted and every girl tried to imitate.

At the height of her fame she became a oneperson industry, with dolls, colouring books, dresses, cereal and soap named in her image. She almost singlehandedly saved 20th Century Fox studios from bankruptcy when the Depression of the 1930s put millions on the breadline.

And when her film career came to an end, she began another career as a diplomat. No other Hollywood actor, apart from her old costar Ronald Reagan, has given so much back to the United States.

Recently Shirley Temple Black was honoured by Fox Studios in Los Angeles when the Fox child development centre was named after her. She was among the guests when Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation (parent company of The Daily Telegraph's publisher), unveiled a bronze statue of her as a girl at the entrance to the studio. Murdoch said: ``At a time when this country was desperately in need of hope and laughter, Shirley provided both''.

He was echoing the late president Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, in the 1930s, had publicly praised her ``infectious optimism''.

Shirley Temple had that magic presence the camera loved: ability to radiate sheer happiness and melt the hardest of adult hearts. She was a born trouper. Her mother claimed that her first words were a lyric to a Rudy Vallee song. She was discovered aged three and a half by a talent scout at a dance class and, after a few small film roles, was contracted to 20th Century Fox. She made her film debut in 1934 in Stand Up and Cheer and became an instant sensation.

She rose to international fame in Little Miss Marker, the Damon Runyon story of a gambler who leaves a child as security for a debt. In 1935 alone she made eight films, including The Little Colonel, The Littlest Rebel and Curly Top.

In the first two she was paired -- incomparably -- with Bill ``Bojangles'' Robinson. It was a daring combination as the times did not permit any affectionate physical contact between blacks and whites.

Curly Top introduced one of her signature songs, Animal Crackers In My Soup. She had already introduced On the Good Ship Lollipop, which sold more than a million copies, in the film Bright Eyes. Daryl F. Zanuck, then head of 20th Century Fox, put the studio's top talent to work on her pictures. The studio's Shirley Temple Development Division employed 19 writers and Zanuck assigned his own bodyguard to protect his most valuable star.

Yet she remained unspoiled during her years of stardom, mainly because of Gertrude's influence. The mother refused to allow her to eat in the studio's cafeteria because of the fuss that would be made of her and every day, after she finished work, she would be taken home to Santa Monica to play with the neighbourhood children.

Even the famous curls on her head were a creation of everambitious Gertrude, who put 50 pins in her hair every day, then washed her hair in a vinegar rinse every week.

By 1939, David O. Selznick put her in more serious, grownup roles in films like Since You Went Away and The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer. But her acting career was effectively over at the age of 22.

Her marriage to the young actor John Agar in 1946 failed three years later and she met her second husband, businessman Charles Black, during a holiday in Hawaii in 1950.

Although she continued to act on radio and television throughout the 1950s, she never made another feature film.

In the 1960s, she stood for the vacant Republican Congressional seat in her home district of San Mateo, California. She lost, but in 1968, President Richard Nixon made her a delegate to the UN General Assembly. In 1974, Gerald Ford appointed her ambassador to the African nation of Ghana.

Back in Washington, she became the first woman chief of protocol at the White House, then spent eight years at the State Department under President Reagan, her costar in 1947's That Hagen Girl.

George Bush Snr appointed her ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1989 at a crucial time in that nation's history. By the time she retired from public life, Shirley Temple had served under four presidents.

Shirley Temple is the mother of Linda, from her marriage to John Agar, and Loren and Charles from her marriage to Charles Black. She and her husband live in Woodside, California, south of San Francisco.

There is little evidence in their house of her early fame, apart from a small framed photograph on a wall behind a door.