Temple Tuesday: Photoplay Fluff, February 1938

Fluff media is nothing new; back in the 1930s, instead of browsing websites, people thumbed through the monthly movie magazines to find out what was going on in Holly-weird. In the February 1938 issue of Photoplay, Shirley Temple was shown in a two-page photo spread titled “Shirley kneads the dough” attempting to make biscuits in the kitchen of her family’s Brentwood home.



With her usual verve and vitality little Miss T. tackles the higher complications of the culinary arts.



She gets flour in her eyes, but that doesn’t floor her for there’s Pekingese Ching-Ching, her all-time friend, to blink in absolute approval. Determination, self-reliance, persistence giver her, in the kitchen as before the camera—perfection.



Just in case you wanted to see the exterior of Shirley’s quaint residence…



Elsewhere in the issue was a slightly more substantial article about “high finances” in Tinseltown by writer and pop culture analyst Gilbert Seldes.



A short time ago the script on which Shirley Temple was working called for a pony. In Hollywood you can get a pony at least as easily as a rhinoceros, but the director was in a hurry—and there was a pony on the set. Miss Temple’s own pony. And she let him use her pony—at ten cents a day. That’s pleasing thing to know and gives you a warm feeling about the little girl. Older — but not necessarily better — actors and actresses earn larger sums in other ways, sometimes without showing as much business sense as Miss Temple did. They earn their pin money—diamond pin money—in a thousand enterprises. There is hardly a business, from canned goods to the prize ring, in which some player is not represented. In fact, when you see how much money they make when they are not working, you sometimes wonder why moving-picture stars trouble to act at all. This is not an invitation to any nasty remark that most of them can’t act. You, and I, and the gentlemen in the Income Tax Bureau know that Shirley Temple earns about fifteen times as much money on by-products as she gets from Twentieth Century-Fox…Yet, without the movies, little Miss Temple might have put her name on the manna from heaven, or on the original waters of the Fountain of Youth for a face lotion, and she would not have received a cent in return. And this goes for all the others.…For myself, I still think that Miss Temple’s ten cents is the best money in the world. It was earnred by straight business methods (the little girl is a rugged individualist) and she probably would be a great executive if she weren’t so busy being an actress. The other money on the side is velvet—her dime for the pony is earned—and, I hope, well spent.
 
See more photos of Shirley Temple at home at my main website.