Temple Tuesday: Shirley and Harpo

Shirley Temple certainly had a very interesting life, and because of her fame, a number of myths and legends have cropped up over the years. One of the strangest is about how Harpo Marx attempted to buy little Shirley from her parents so that he could adopt her as his own. As Groucho Marx recalled the incident in “The Marx Brothers Scrapbook” published back in 1973:

We were shooting “Horse Feathers.” It was a college picture and we had to go on location and shoot some scenes at Occidental College. A little girl would come by each day to watch us work. She was usually with her father or mother. Harpo wasn’t married at the time but he was crazy about this little girl. So crazy about her that he offered her parents $50,000 for her. But of course her parents didn’t accept. It turned out that the little girl was Shirley Temple before she got into movies.

She was beautiful and cute; Harpo wanted to buy her! When she grew up she became a real reactionary. She became as far from liberalism as you can get.

Here is Harpo with Shirley in the Paramount studio commissary during the filming of “Duck Soup,” which would have been a full year after the 1932 incident that Groucho describes.



Is the story true? Shirley made no mention of any of the Marx Brothers in her autobiography, “Child Star.” Because of the photo shown here, we do know that at the very least she met Harpo. It would also be safe to say that she charmed him as well. We also know that Harpo eventually adopted four children after he married Susan Fleming in 1936. In 1948 when George Burns asked Harpo how many children he planned to adopt, he answered, "I’d like to adopt as many children as I have windows in my house. So when I leave for work, I want a kid in every window, waving goodbye."

My take on it? Groucho was known to stretch the truth to make a good story. Chances are Harpo told Shirley’s parents that he thought their daughter was cute and may even have jokingly offered to adopt her. I have a hard time believing that a figure was ever named, and at best, it was perhaps a publicity stunt drummed up to get Shirley’s name in the papers. What do you think?

In a case of six degrees of separation, Shirley’s woodcarving grandfather would be played by Al Shean (Harpo’s uncle) in “The Blue Bird,” 1940.



See more Shirley Temple photos at my main website.