The 20th Century Fox of the Future

Growing up in a pleasant corner of L.A. called Beverlywood (no, I had nothing to do with that), I was quietly thrilled by the proximity of a famous movie studio. Yes, 20^th Century Fox was about a mile from my home. It was exciting to drive west on Pico Boulevard and see the gates through which celebrities entered, along with huge posters for such coming attractions as Cleopatra, The Sound of Music, and Star Wars. In later years,  my husband- to-be, along with members of my family, took part in the mammoth parade down a fake New York street that was intended to be the high point of 1969’s Hello, Dolly!

 Of course, time marches on. Starting in 1963, much of Fox’s rambling backlot was sold to developers, resulting in the building of hotels, condo towers, and a high-end shopping mall known collectively as Century City. (Such brand-new boulevards as Avenue of the Stars played into the movie-star motif.)  Then, after a series of ownership changes, most of the studio (including its intellectual property) was purchased by Disney in 2019. Today the complex is known as 20^th Century Studios: it houses Fox productions, maker of The Simpsons as well as other television favorites, and is also used as rental space for additional TV and movie projects.

 Unlike such storied Hollywood properties as Universal Studios, Fox has never been known for public outreach. Touring the lot is generally not an option, unless you have specific business on the premises. But today that’s starting to  change. A project called Fox Future is being organized to preserve and enhance the remains of one of Hollywood’s oldest studios, and the first to commit itself wholly to the production of sound films. Among the plans: the resurrection of the Fox Research Library, which—like most of the old studio libraries—had been shamefully allowed to disperse over the decades.

 In tandem with Fox Future, the heroic L.A. Conservancy devoted itself on a rain-splashed recent Sunday (yes, it does rain in  SoCal) to educational tours of the lot. We glimpsed the commissary once visited by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev (who there learned with dismay that his planned visit to Disneyland had been cancelled out of security concerns)), and were allowed inside a famous scoring stage. We gawked at giant murals commemorating the studio’s greatest hits, like Gene Wilder and Teri Garr romping through Young Frankenstein as well as Marilyn Monroe flirting with Tom Ewell in The Seven Year Itch. Perhaps most charming were the earliest buildings on the lot, from the days when Hollywood studios pampered their über-famous contract players with private cottages tailored to their individual tastes. Still standing in the so-called Artist’s and Writer’s Village are several cozy but elaborately outfitted bungalows now used as office space but once dedicated to some of the studio’s brightest stars. Will Rogers’s once-upon-a-time bungalow still has its American Southwest flair. Next door  is what originally was meant to look like a wee Irish cottage. It was apparently built for the popular Irish tenor, John McCormack, who made several films in the early 1930s. Eventually, it became the

home-away-from-home of one of Fox’s biggest Depression-era stars, Shirley Temple. Here’s one of my very favorite factoids from a tour docent: little Shirley was such a worldwide favorite that she frequently received gifts from overseas fans. One admirer in Australia sent a brace of live kangaroos. Soon they were hopping all over the lot, but ended  up being corralled  in an historic lily pond near the studio’s original main building. (You can’t make this stuff up!) 

 

Black is the Color . . . . Toni Morrison, Shirley Temple, and Blackface On-Screen

I recently saw a dramatic version of Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, not on the screen but on stage. In it, a young African American girl with a grim past obsesses (circa 1941) over her desire to have blue eyes like her idol, child-star Shirley Temple. She’s not the only one in her increasingly tragic family circle whose life-goals are shaped by Hollywood movies. Her downtrodden mother, it seems, has long brightened her own sad life by admiring such Caucasian stars as Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Hedy Lamarr on the silver screen. Tellingly, she has named her daughter Pecola, closely mirroring the name of the young Black girl who successfully—though painfully—passes for white throughout much of 1934’s Imitation of Life.

 Funny thing about Pecola’s obsession with Shirley Temple’s blond-and-blue-eyed charms. Though Temple, who starred in black & white films in the 1930s and ‘40s, was truly an adorable tyke, her hair was on the auburn side and her eyes were emphatically brown. But Pecola, longing to be a little white girl, naturally assumes that her idol has big blue eyes, unlike her own. There’s something about the power of movies that showcases our dreams of what we’d like to be, particularly if those dreams are wholly out of reach.

 On the other hand, back in the 1930s and 1940s there are many screen entertainments that highlight white performers posing as Black for public amusement. There was an era when it was controversial indeed for a Black performer to be injected into a white cast, even when playing a so-called “tragic mulatto.” As late as 1951, when Lena Horne sought to play the tragically bi-racial Julie in an upcoming version of Edna Ferber’s hit, Show Boat, she was rejected in favor of the not-Black-at-all (and not-musical-at-all) Ava Gardner. It was OK for William Warfield, in the role earlier made famous by Paul Robeson, to sit on the dock and sing “Old Man River.” But it was definitely NOT OK for a light-skinned African American woman to be shown in a love relationship with a white man.

 Still, white performers of those eras seemed perfectly comfortable smearing on blackface makeup and pretending to be “colored.” This had been happening since the era of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), when all the rapacious Black men who trash democracy and menace heroine Lillian Gish were portrayed by white actors. Later it was common for musical performers like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney to do a blackface minstrel-show turn, as they did in 1941’s Babes on Broadway, completely with Judy’s hair in “pickaninny” braids.  In 1936, the great Fred Astaire—playing a nightclub performer—darkened his face for “Bojangles of Harlem,” designed as a tribute to Black tap dance legend Bill Robinson and also to Astaire’s friend and mentor, John Bubbles, whose dancing silhouette—I’m told—backs Astaire’s on screen in this number. I’m sure Astaire’s intentions were of the best, but today such moments can make us cringe. That’s how I felt when watching the otherwise frothy Holiday Inn (1942), in which Bing Crosby’s character establishes a country inn and nightclub which builds its floor shows around holiday themes. The President Lincoln’s birthday number, “Abraham,” features not just Bing (looking like Uncle Remus) and but also an entire dance band and chorus in blackface, with co-star Marjorie Reynolds forced to model exaggerated lips and a particularly obnoxious get-up. (One curious note: a cutaway to lovable Louise Beavers as the inn’s cook; she was earlier the  mother of Imitation of Life’s “tragic mulatto” child.)

 

 

And A Little Child Shall Lead Us: Remembering Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney

Since the start of 2014, two of America’s most priceless child stars have left us. Shirley Temple passed away in February, at age 85. From 1935 to 1938, the winsome moppet was the nation’s top box-office draw, singing and dancing her way into everyone’s hearts. Then, this past Sunday, we lost Mickey Rooney, who held on until age 93. In July 2012, after an Academy screening of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,  I remember how he came out on stage and somehow pulled off a few dance steps. That was Mickey Rooney: a trouper till the end.

                              

Both Temple and Rooney found fame during the Great Depression, when Americans ground down by years of unemployment were desperate for low-cost entertainment. Films starring cute, plucky youngsters nicely filled the bill. Shirley’s wholesome family movies, in which she tap-danced with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and jousted with cantankerous Lionel Barrymore, were designed to lift people’s spirits, and so they did.  But by the time Shirley entered adolescence, the studios no longer knew what to do with her. There was serious hype around her first screen kiss, but the public wanted her to stay a little girl forever. That’s where my family came in. Why did my father’s parents—poor immigrants with too many kids and not enough money—move from the Midwest to California circa 1935? Naturally, to get the youngest daughter into the movies. She had curly hair and presumably could carry a tune, so it seemed obvious that she was bound for stardom. It didn’t happen, but eventually my father met my mother at UCLA . . . and the rest is (family) history.

Eventually Shirley Temple was smart enough to realize that there were no more movies in her future. She retired, married, raised three kids. Then, to everyone’s surprise, she got political. She was selected by Republican presidents to serve as a UN representative, an ambassador to Ghana and later to Czechoslovakia, and the U.S. Chief of Protocol. By all reports she filled these positions with grace.

I first learned of Shirley at a Brownie Scout meeting, when it was announced we’d be seeing a traveling exhibit that featured her enormous doll collection. (She’d been given hundreds of dolls by admirers all over the world.) Our leaders were amazed and amused that none of us had ever heard of Shirley Temple. But that would soon change. Television execs were soon to greenlight Shirley Temple’s Storybook, an anthology of fairytale adaptations, with the now-adult Shirley hosting as well as playing an occasional role. And old Shirley Temple movies suddenly became a TV staple. Like our parents, we Baby Boomers fell for her too.  

 

Mickey Rooney was as plucky as Shirley in his movie roles, but had a far wider range. He played Puck in Warner Bros.’ all-star Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), went dramatic in Boys Town (1938), and, as the All-American Andy Hardy, embodied everyone’s favorite kid brother. Once he grew up (but only to 5’3”) he kept at it, appearing in somber dramas, wacky comedies, family features like The Black Stallion, and even Roger Corman flicks. A friend of mine who once taped many celebrity interviews for A&E Biography explained why Rooney was a valued presence on the set. Once he was paid a substantial “honorarium,” he’d turn on the star power, improvising a heartfelt tribute to the subject at hand, often becoming dramatically tearful. But now his large extended family is battling over the old pro’s will and final resting place. Family feuds are ugly things. So let’s call up some tears, shall we?