Temple Tuesday: Shirley Meets Margaret

Actress Margaret O’Brien is probably best known for the role of Tootie, the youngest sister of Esther Smith (Judy Garland) in “Meet Me in St. Louis.” She was an adorable child with just the right amount of impish trouble mixed in to keep her from being too saccharin. Margaret O’Brien met Shirley Temple on Valentine’s Day in 1945 (photo below).



She recalled the story to Time Magazine shortly after Shirley passed in 2014 in an article titled, “There Will Never Be Another Shirley Temple.”

I met Shirley Temple on Valentine’s Day in 1945. To this day, I’ve never forgotten it. I was in red, she was in black, and we enjoyed a wonderful dinner together. We didn’t immediately become best friends, but every winter, my husband and I would send a Christmas card to Shirley, and she and her family would send one back, so we kept in touch that way. She was just lovely—a very, very sweet girl. My husband always had a crush on Shirley, but he ended up with me instead. It wasn’t too bad, but you have to remember, there will never be another Shirley Temple. She will always be Shirley Temple in people’s minds, and they’ll always be showing her movies, so new generations will know who she was. Sometimes people put a stamp on the world, and Shirley certainly did. So many times, people think that child actors have a terrible life after the movies, but Shirley went on to have a wonderful life and family and career as the U.S. ambassador to Ghana and later Czechoslovakia, so it doesn’t all end tragically. It helped that we both had wonderful parents who saw that we stayed on the right path. I’d see her at functions throughout the years, and we’d say hello and talk about our families—she had married and had started on a different career by then, so we didn’t keep in touch through the movie world. We kept in touch through the friendship world, and I’ve never forgotten our first meeting. That’s why I have always kept her in my heart on Valentine’s Day, never more so than this year.

Melissa (aka “The Colonel”) attended a Shirley Temple luncheon where Margaret gave a few more details about the 1945 dinner where the two actresses met:

I’m looking a bit prissy in that photo from the event, because they served oysters at the dinner, and Shirley turned to me and said, “Those are alive, can you see them wiggling?”and I got a little bit ill over the oysters so I didn’t eat them until I was grown up. Shirley said later that she was a little bit jealous of me, but she apologized for that incident many times and said, “I don’t know why I ever said that,” so I forgave her. That’s my oysters story. So as long as we don’t have any oysters at the luncheon, I’m fine!



I can’t read the text in Shirley’s hands, but I am guessing it is some kind of script. If only the focus had been a bit sharper!

See more teenage Shirley Temple photos at my main website.