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HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY
LEGENDARY LEADING LADIES RECALL THE STYLES THAT DEFINED THEIR IMAGES AND THEIR TIMES
SHIRLEY TEMPLE BLACK
With her golden curls and dimpled grin, Shirley Temple gave Depression-era Americans a reason to smile. "In the '30s she was the most photographed person in the world," says film historian Robert Windeler. "Little girls were rolling their hair to get her curls. They were wearing Shirley Temple dresses." As well as Shirley Temple nightgowns, socks, coats and underwear. Getting the look right wasn't always easy, even for Shirley herself. Every night her mother, Gertrude, would set Shirley's hair in pin curls--"exactly 56, so it would match the scenes we'd shot the day before," says Black, 71, who lives in Woodside, Calif., with her husband of 49 years, Charles Black. Whenever she lost a baby tooth midfilm she had to run to the dentist, who "would make a little fake tooth that I'd put in with denture powder," she says. "Then we could go on with work." And those elaborate costumes could take forever to put on. "I always loved getting dressed up for my roles, but I never liked the fussing-over-me part," she says. Yet Black--who retired from moviemaking at age 21, went on to become U.S. ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia and is now working on her second autobiography--was thrilled when studios let her keep her outfits, and she still has about 60 in storage. "They're beautiful," she says, "but old. If they were displayed, they just might fall apart."
