She certainly was. Very classy, too.
She was wholesome and down to earth as well.
Shirley was an attractive woman. But according to her husband Charles Black it was her effervescent personality that made her exceptional. Shirley’s mother instructed her as a child actress to “sparkle, Shirley, sparkle”. And Shirley sparkled for her whole life, on and off the screen.
“The Story of Seabiscuit” bears you out.
Excerpts on search:
She then learned that her father George had squandered her $3 million in earnings- only $30,000 remained!
When she became a teenager, she even faced the advances of slimy studio bosses. David O. Selznick, according to Shirley, once chased her around his desk as he tried to bed her. Comic George Jessel was kicked in the groin by Shirley as he tried to grope her.
On her first day on the MGM lot, her mother was summoned to the office of studio boss Louis B. Mayer while Shirley was summoned to what she described as an important producer’s office.
She recalled that as she sat looking at the producer, “he seemed to be rearranging his clothes with a certain amount of flourish. He said, ‘You’re going to be my next big star.’
Although she thought he was a producer, she joked, he turned out instead to be “an exhibitor.”
“Being 12 years old, the only naked person I had ever seen was me,” she said, adding that she thought he looked so funny that she began to laugh. She continued laughing until she had tears in her eyes. The enraged producer ordered her out of his office.
When she ran into her mother at the bottom of the stairs, Black said, they were both unusually quiet. On the drive home, her mother listened to her daughter’s story and then said: “Wait until you hear what almost happened to me!” In her mother’s meeting with Mayer, Black said, Mayer made an advance toward her mother, saying: “You shouldn’t be Shirley Temple’s mother, you should be a big star.”
“So both of us,” Black said, “flunked our first day at MGM.”
Variation on that story:
One day, the twelve year-old Temple was alone with MGM producer Arthur Freed in his office when he exposed himself to her. She didn’t rush out to a microphone or call a lawyer. She looked at him for a moment … and then burst out laughing. The humiliated Freed was so incensed that he ordered her to leave immediately.
https://www.ranker.com/list/tragic-shirley-temple-stories/rob-chirico
Sounds like she put up with a lot of crap, abuse and criminal behavior.
Yet she weathered it all. What an inner strength.
and don’t call me Shirley
I met Ms. Temple in the early 1970’s while breakwater fishing in Newport Beach CA. She was very nice, generous and still hot.
Shirley was before my time
but do rememer viewing one movie on tee vee
(The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer) in which she
was a teenager. Attractive, yes she was. Unable
to remember seeing any other film with her as an
adult. Assume she met John, married and as a wife and
mother, left the business to fill another role.