What Do We Want from Our Child Stars?

Still, Master Betty ruled the little province of Parnassus devoted to underage thespians until the advent of Shirley Temple—and it’s some measure of her talent, or maybe of her moment, that nearly a century later hers is often still the first name that comes to mind when we think of child stars. Temple’s autobiography, simply titled “Child Star,” is, like its author, a small American classic. Tough-minded, unsentimental, and unexpectedly bleak, more “Day of the Locust” than “Good Ship Lollipop,” her memoir offers a shrewd and frequently mordant portrait of nineteen-thirties Hollywood. The voice is retrospective, but she reproduces her childhood mind so convincingly that one forgets the book was written decades later. It often reads as though a six-year-old were auditing her own contracts with a jaundiced eye.

She began in the “Baby Burlesks,” a series of shorts by a Poverty Row studio called Educational Pictures. They are, alas, easily viewable on YouTube, and once seen they are not easily forgotten. With the grainy look of the early porn they queasily resemble, the shorts feature toddlers in diapers and “grownup” costumes above the waist, enacting adult romances complete with cocktails, kisses, and French lingerie. From there, Temple maneuvered to Twentieth Century Fox, where she appeared in musicals and period pieces that helped make the Depression bearable. She was a trouper and a pro—so tireless that she could dance with Bill (Bojangles) Robinson without losing her step. (Those scenes, too, are on YouTube—and they’re good.)

Throughout her memoir, Temple’s advice on handling the press is sage: give them time, but don’t answer their questions. She is equally hard-edged about what producers wanted from child stars—a reproducible product with a brief shelf life. She grows impatient with her mother’s lateness, treats her colleagues with brisk professionalism, and writes with a chilling composure about her powers of flirtation and control, exercised through well-rehearsed, and sometimes faked, innocence. She recalls climbing onto laps with the practiced confidence—and pride—of a tiny geisha. There’s a scarifying scene in which Arthur Freed is accosting her in one office at M-GM, while her mother, in another, is being mauled by Louis B. Mayer.

A scandal arose when Graham Greene, writing in a short-lived London magazine called Night and Day, modelled on The New Yorker, published a piece accusing Temple of being “a complete totsy. . . . Watch the way she measures a man with acute studio eyes, and dimpled depravity.” The ensuing lawsuit had him decamping to Mexico and eventually writing “The Power and the Glory.” Temple, for her part, never admitted to “dimpled depravity,” but she did concede to possessing acute studio eyes, and she’s far from prim in her own account. She reports that her husband was shocked to find she wasn’t a virgin, though she leaves the details vague. By the time she was writing, she had become an accomplished diplomat—an actual one, with postings abroad—starring in another sphere, with its own secrets.

The sexual exploitation of child stardom is usually discussed in terms of girls. Yet, even beyond the cases of outright abuse, Mickey Rooney’s memoir and biographies reveal a not unrelated pathology. Trained to be more predator than prey, Rooney was nonetheless trapped in an expectation of constant gratification—encouraged, even as a teen-ager, to prove himself through conquest so compulsively that it verged on a form of self-erasure. By the age of nineteen, he confesses, what he had learned from his wholesome MGM upbringing was that “everybody wants to get fucked.” He records what comes across less as a series of dalliances than a perpetual erotic binge and purge, one encounter following another, indiscriminately, even when the apparent objects of his teen-age attention (Ava Gardner, Norma Shearer) might have seemed spectacular enough to linger over.

Little Shirley’s memoir, which one might expect to be a period artifact, turns out, uncannily, to be a template for our own time. Jennette McCurdy, in particular, rose from the same poor white background as Temple and was driven by the same sort of stage mother. Temple notes that Hollywood had three social tiers: the money people on top, the transplanted “East Coast” creatives in the middle, and, at the bottom, a vast pool of poor whites desperate to break in—the people Nathanael West both caught and caricatured. McCurdy sees much the same structure today, and dispassionately describes her working-class Mormon family in Garden Grove, California—grandfather a ticket-taker at Disneyland, grandmother a receptionist at a retirement home, father an employee at Home Depot, mother a runway beautician picking up shifts at Target. No one could make much of a living; when her grandfather retired, his main post-employment Disney perk seems to have been lifetime Disneyland discounts. In that context, having a child become a star wasn’t just a shot at entering the élite but a way to pay the rent.

So McCurdy was a lottery ticket, and a winning one. Her memoir details the agents and managers who specialize in kid corralling, whom she charmed just enough to secure an audition at Nickelodeon. A small moral notch above the men who chased Shakespeare’s rival boy actors, these agents treated children as merchandise—“You booked it!” was their sole term of praise—with the proviso that nobody was really forced to be there and everyone knew the rules. The essential skill, more than acting, was to be smart, biddable, and “turnkey”: ready-made, no need to learn an accent or a dance step, already able to sound like an Australian, or enough like one to pass at 5 P.M. for an after-school audience. (Another critical gift—it’s the one I had—is to be able to play younger than your actual age.) McCurdy also recounts how her mother, who was, to be fair, already dying of cancer, carefully coached her into an eating disorder, even down to the mechanics of bulimia, in an attempt to hold back puberty.

What is a good child actor, anyway? The ones who can truly act—Margaret O’Brien in “Meet Me in St. Louis,” Patty Duke in “The Miracle Worker”—have the gift of emotional availability. They don’t pretend; they inhabit. What stays with us is a sense not of impersonation but of surplus feeling. We want children onscreen not to become someone else but to be themselves, only more so—to break past the caution of childhood, the shyness that all dependent creatures share, and reach a state of unmediated emotion. (Henry Thomas does this in his famous screen test for “E.T.”) That’s why we love Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz”—a role Temple coveted but lost, partly owing to MGM’s machinations. Garland captures the tremor of coming into adulthood. Shirley would have danced through it smiling; Garland makes it ache, with a matchless ability to walk the tightrope between childhood and adolescence without betraying either.

At the heart of every acting career lies a paradox: the ambition is for self-recognition; the art is of self-disappearance. Alyson Stoner writes movingly of being overwhelmed by the roles they played and the fictional families they were temporarily absorbed into. (Stoner was one of the children in “Cheaper by the Dozen” two decades ago, and felt closer to those make-believe siblings than to their own.) To be a star is to assert yourself over the part; to be a good actor is to vanish inside it. That contradiction produces the deeper wound of even the fortunate performer’s life. The greatest young actors—Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis—seem haunted by it: having mastered the art of self-obliteration, they find themselves idolized for being themselves. Hence Brando with his bongos, Day-Lewis with his cobbling. And the ego needed to overcome shyness and stage fright collides with the endless rejection that defines the profession.