Shirley Temple The DARK SIDE of Fame

THE CHILD STAR SURVIVED DEATH THREATS, PREDATORS AND FINANCIAL RUIN

- LOUISE A. BARILE

Buddy Ebsen liked to tell the story about the time he tried to get Shirley Temple to rehearse their dance sequence for 1936's Captain January. "She got there and asked my dad, 'Is the dance set?" Buddy's daughter Kiki Ebsen tells Closer. "He said, 'No, I'm going to make a couple of changes.' She turned around and said, 'Call me when it's set and I'll learn it.' The point is, she didn't have time to learn a dance that wasn't set."

When Shirley, then 8, returned, she learned the routine in just an hour. "He was very impressed with her talent," adds Kiki.

There has never been another child star as beloved as Shirley, who made 29 films by the time she turned 10, but she didn't live a fairy-tale existence. During the years of her greatest fame, she worked punishing hours, received death threats and inappropriate advances, and retired at 22 with just $40,000 in the bank. "I stopped believing in Santa Claus at the age of 6 when my mother took me to see him in a store and he asked for my autograph," she once quipped.

At 3, Shirley began taking dance lessons and soon appeared in Baby Burlesks, short parody films that she would later call "a cynical exploitation of our childish innocence that occasionally were racist or sexist." It was an education in other ways, too. When Shirley or one of her other young co-stars misbehaved on set, they were made to sit on a block of ice in a locked, windowless sound booth. "So far as I can tell, the black box did no lasting damage," she wrote in her memoir Child Star. "Its lesson of life, however, was profound. Time is money. Wasted time means wasted money means trouble."

MISS SUNSHINE

At age 6, Shirley became a sensation singing "On the Good Ship Lollipop" in the film Bright Eyes. "She inhabited a very unique moment in the film industry," her son Charles Black Jr. tells Closer, adding that Shirley's films were popular because of their "charm" and "good family values."