🍹 The Story Behind Child Actress Shirley Temple:
Ever wonder how the world’s most famous alcohol-free cocktail came to be?
In the 1930s, child star Shirley Temple was attending glamorous Hollywood events with older celebrities. Bartenders at Chasen's or the Brown Derby wanted to give her a special drink that looked just as fancy as the adult cocktails, minus the alcohol. They mixed ginger ale, a heavy splash of grenadine, and topped it with a maraschino cherry.
Shirley Temple documented several instances of inappropriate behavior by adult men in the film industry, primarily in her 1988 autobiography “Child Star.” These range from the sexualized content of her earliest roles to direct advances and exposures.
Before her major stardom, she appeared in a series of short films produced by Educational Pictures. These featured toddlers (including Temple) in adult, often sexualized roles and costumes, such as escorts/prostitutes trading kisses for lollipops, vamps, or showgirls in suggestive scenarios with heavy innuendo, and simulated adult situations. Temple later described them as “a cynical exploitation of [the performers’] childish innocence.”
Many of her 1930s Fox films involved adult male co-stars holding, carrying, dancing with, or interacting closely with her in ways that later critics (and some contemporaries) viewed as having pedophilic undertones. British author Graham Greene’s 1937 review of Wee Willie Winkie explicitly commented on her “adult appeal,” “well-developed rump,” and the response of middle-aged male fans; 20th Century Fox successfully sued him for libel. Temple herself later acknowledged that studios imposed adult overtones on her costumes, movements, and gestures.
Arthur Freed (MGM producer, age 11–12, 1940): During a private meeting about a potential contract (around the time of interest in her for The Wizard of Oz), Freed unzipped his trousers and exposed himself. Temple (who said she had never seen male anatomy) reacted with nervous laughter; he ordered her out of the office. Concurrently, Louis B. Mayer made an advance on her mother in another room. Temple left MGM after one film.
David O. Selznick in a meeting, he locked the door (via a remote switch) and made physical advances; she pulled free and left. She had been warned about him.
Other unnamed producers/directors propositioned her or framed advances as “workplace formalities”; she rejected them, sometimes physically. These accounts come from Temple’s own memoir and contemporary interviews (promoting the book). No criminal charges resulted at the time, consistent with the era’s lack of protections and power imbalances in Hollywood.