For Shirley Temple Black, a Reprise of a Star Role in Pasadena 50 Years Later Brings a Parade of Memories

A youngish TV reporter settled himself opposite Shirley Temple Black in the parlor of Tournament House in Pasadena, where she was sailing cheerily through a morning of obligatory interviews, and suggested for openers, that, good grief, she’d been around forever and now she was grand marshal of the Rose Parade for the second time, after Fifty years and. . . .

To which Black, who is now 60, replied, enjoying her own joke, “Yes, I’m one of the oldest living Americans.”

An American icon at an age when most Americans aren’t yet collecting Social Security checks, Black is not one to dwell in the past. As she puts it, “Looking over my shoulder is not my style.”

In the 1930s, she was the dimpled charmer who lifted Depression-era spirits and sat on the laps of so many world leaders that, she later observed, “It’s a wonder I ever learned to walk.”

Today, she is more apt to be talking about peace, help for the homeless and the hungry, preservation of the environment, halting the AIDS epidemic.

A Nippy, Overcast Day

But on this particular morning, two days before today’s centennial Rose Parade, Black was happy to reminisce: It was Jan. 2, 1939, and the adorable 10-year-old moppet, wearing a white ermine coat with matching muff, a white hat atop her perfect curls, was riding as grand marshal at the head of the 50th Rose Parade.

She recalled: “The float I was on was spectacular, covered with roses” (2,500, shading from red to pink) with a dais of gardenias, “my favorite flower.” The day was nippy and overcast--rain would hold off until the parade had ended--but, Black said, “there was a little heater at my feet, covered with flowers. It was cozy and warm and everything smelled beautiful.

“I waved diligently for about 2 1/2 hours,” she added, noting she learned to cover the record crowd of 1.2 million along the route by adopting the “Queen of England” technique, tracing a slow, sweeping arc with one arm. “You can get a whole lot of people that way. And I love all people. There are some I don’t like, but I love all people.”

She also “loved the horses and the beautiful saddles and all the silver.” (Three years earlier, she had been given her first horse, a Shetland pony she named Spunky.)

And she “loved” being the grand marshal and wearing a big badge with a rosette even though, prodded now for more details, she summarized it like the pro she always was: “It was dark. I was taken to the float and put on it. And I did my job. My car, or truck, or whatever it was under all those flowers, didn’t break down.”

Her parents had insisted on security precautions, and safe she was, with Leo Carrillo, “one of my best friends,” riding his horse close by. He gave her a Western outfit, chaps and all, and, she says, “I still have it.” Clopping along right behind her float was Los Angeles Sheriff Eugene Biscaluiz with his mounted posse.

It was, by all reports, a spectacular parade--5 miles long, with 65 floats and 18 bands, a spectacle of such proportions that one journalist was moved to write, “The 1939 Tournament of Roses probably never will be excelled.”

The flower-decked floats had drawn gasps from spectators. Santa Barbara had entered a Taj Mahal; Laguna Beach had recreated Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” Camp Baldy’s entry had depicted Whistler’s Mother. Burbank had rolled off with the sweepstakes for its tally-ho pulled by four prancing snow-white floral steeds.

She Likes to Steer

But what was Shirley Temple thinking as she rode at the head of that parade? Well, she recalls, “I knew I was part of a very important tradition.” Then she added, “And I would have preferred to steer. I like to steer everything, trains, boats. . . .”

And, as she had earlier told the crowd at Pasadena Kiwanis Club’s 1989 kick-off luncheon, being grand marshal “has a few disadvantages. It is no job for someone who likes to march. I really loved to march.”

Besides, she observed, “You don’t get to see the parade, all that happens back there.”

Having said all that, she was, Black emphasized, “thrilled” when 1989 Tournament of Roses President John H. Biggar III came calling at the Blacks’ home in Woodside in Northern California with an invitation to be grand marshal once again. Her answer, she said, was an “instant yes.”

When Lathrop K. Leishman, tournament president in 1939, was looking for a grand marshal, he recalls in “Tournament of Roses: The First 100 Years,” a centennial history, “There was no name in America as big as Shirley Temple. . . . I decided she should be our grand marshal--if we could get her.”

They got her, thus scoring the coup of having as grand marshal the child star who had been No. 1 at the box office for four straight years, topping such superstars as Clark Gable and Robert Taylor.

And as Biggar noted at this year’s kickoff luncheon, the theme for today’s parade is “Celebration 100” and the committee wanted a grand marshal who would “express the tradition” of the parade. It also sought “a celebration-type person, cheerful, uplifting.”

Reenter, Shirley Temple Black.

‘Purple Power Suit’

But this is 1989, and this time around the grand marshal won’t be wearing ermine.

“The (anti-) fur people wouldn’t like it,” she says. Instead, she has opted to wear what she calls her “purple power suit,” bought on her recent 21-city tour to promote her autobiography, when she discovered that her black-and-white-checked number was dizzying on TV.

And, riding beside her, at Black’s request, will be her only grandchild, Teresa Falaschi, an 8-year-old who has promised her “Nana” that she will sit suitably still.

“Teresa said to me, ‘Do I have to ride in the buggy? I’d rather do gymnastics all the way.’ ” Black noted. “She’s very energetic.”

Feels Like Child Again

Two horses will pull the grand marshal’s surrey--a conveyance about which Temple said, “I guess it befits my age”--and, as it will seat three, she hoped to have her daughter, Susan Falaschi, 40, ride along. Black’s husband, businessman Charles Black, will be in the stands.

It is not hard to believe Black when she says she feels once again like “a child of 10, wide-eyed with honor.” She plunged into pre-parade festivities and duties with contagious enthusiasm, answering repetitive media questions with grace and humor, tossing one-liners, occasionally slipping in a word for her book, “Child Star.”

She is eager to know how the book reads, mentioning that author Wallace Stegner, a friend and neighbor, got her on track, telling her she needed a story line to tie together her anecdotes and insisting that she “get rid of the dangling participles.”

One of those charming anecdotes is about New Year’s Eve, 1938, when Shirley and a girlfriend, who was spending the night, were whisked off to bed early so Shirley would be rested for her role as grand marshal.

Watched Horror Thriller

But the girls were determined to crash her parents’ anniversary party, in progress below. On their third try, they managed to thwart a photoelectric beam that protected Shirley’s bedroom at the Brentwood home from intruders.

Creeping down the circular staircase, they peered into the darkened living room where guests were watching “Night Must Fall,” a horror thriller starring Robert Montgomery.

In the film, “They were carrying somebody’s head around in a hatbox,” she recalls, adding that she promptly had nightmares about a body-less head. She laughs and says, “I had all of New Year’s Day to recover.”

“Child Star” is no sordid Hollywood tell-all, though Black does write candidly about the breakup of her 1945 marriage to John Agar, describing him as a drinker and a womanizer.

She also sets the record straight on her wealth: All but $44,000 of the $3.4 million she earned has disappeared, largely as a result of mishandling by her father, George, who died in 1980.

But, she is quick to say now, she does not blame him. He was, she says, a man of limited education, “an innocent led to slaughter” by advisers. No, she has “no regrets” about the lost millions.

Unlike other celebrities, Black did not want to write about what she describes as “all that psychological stuff--who am I? Where am I going?”

Well-Adjusted Woman

She laughs and says, “I started so young, I didn’t have to ask.” (At age 3, little Shirley was plucked from a Santa Monica dancing school and cast in a series of low-budget one--reelers called “Baby Burlesks.”) Black now refers to this as her “starlet” period, before being signed by Fox at age 5.

What is perhaps most astonishing about Shirley Temple Black is that she matured into such a well-adjusted, focused woman. This, after all, was the child who taught fractions to Noel Coward, played croquet with Orson Welles, handed out Oscars to Disney’s seven dwarfs, the child whose doll look-alikes added up to $45 million in sales for Ideal Toy and Novelty Co. of New York by 1941.

How did she do it? “I had a super mother,” she says. “She kept my head on straight.” (Gertrude Temple also rolled every one of Shirley’s 56 famous sausage curls each day and, with two secretaries, answered her fan mail.)

Mother Temple “just dusted off” the adulation, Black said, always explaining to her daughter that what people admired was her work. Shirley never saw the fan letters. And, each day when she left the Fox lot, she remembers, “I’d get off the little frilly dress,” pull on jeans “and climb trees” or play cops ‘n’ robbers with the neighborhood boys.

Ran Before Horses

A self-described “tomboy” and “jock,” Black was never more thrilled than during the filming of “Wee Willie Winkie,” (1937) when, eschewing a double, she ran before a herd of stampeding horses. John Ford was the director, she says, and “he liked to direct men.” But from then on, she added, “he started treating me as a macho kid.”

She lists that film as one of two favorites among all those she made from her first in 1931 to her last in 1949, chiefly “because I got to march so much.” Her second favorite was “The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer” (1947), largely because “Cary Grant was just super to work with.”

Watching Black in action--a poised, outgoing woman in a happy second marriage of 38 years, with three grown children, a woman who refers to herself as “a good wife, that’s No. 1,” an observer can’t help but make comparisons to today’s young stars, many of whom are plagued by alcohol and drug problems and lifelong conflicts.

Asked about 1939 Hollywood, she reflected on it as “a time of innocence.” Reporters did not probe celebrities’ private lives, she says, and “everybody was idolized.” She looks back on “an enchanted childhood.”

She pauses before another interview at Tournament House and checks to see if she has remembered to remove the price tag from the new, long white sweater with a pattern of stylized red roses that she is wearing over a black leather skirt.

Practicing Spanish Phrase

Those are apt to be the only red roses she’ll get very close to. Yes, she is allergic to them, “not the pink ones,” just the red ones. Next, for an interview with a Spanish language station, she is practicing, in Spanish, how to say “Happy New Year.”

To a radio reporter from Michigan, she expresses her disappointment that her book tour did not take her to Detroit--”I’ve never been to Detroit.”

In another interview, she demurs on a question about whether she prefers Northern California to Southern California, where she was born, saying, “I like the whole state.”

Will she be rooting for USC or Michigan when she tosses the coin for the team captains before today’s game? “I’m a diplomat. However, I was born in California. . . .”

Ambassador to Ghana

Black is a professional diplomat, having been during 19 years of government service U.S. ambassador to the West African nation of Ghana, a stint she looks back on as “the best job of my whole life,” as well as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations and U.S. chief of protocol, the first woman to hold that job.

One interviewer refers to her years as an “ambassadress” and she gently corrects him, explaining she was “an ambassador. Ambassadress is what you wear.”

Soon, she is fielding another question about her, well, normalcy. “Life has been very fair to me,” she says. “I’ve had a very fulfilling life.” Yes, there have been “some bad times, some sad times,” including breast cancer surgery in 1972, a personal crisis she shared with the world in hopes of encouraging other women to have checkups.

People come and go, the room filling with pleasant, low-key banter. Someone makes a good-natured reference to her as “The Little Colonel,” one of her famous film roles, and Black shoots back, “I’m a general now, and a grand marshal. Watch it.”

Lost Congressional Race

Then she is talking sports with ABC’s Tim McCarver, telling him she’s “a good shot” (targets only).

“I don’t hunt quail,” she says later, “but I love Bush.” (A lifelong Republican, Black ran for Congress in 1967, losing in the primary to Paul McCloskey Jr. She was a first-time delegate this year to the GOP National Convention.)

Suddenly, someone asks what if--what if it rains today on her parade. It won’t, she replies. “As an ambassador, nothing perturbs you. If it rains, I’ll get wet. You’ll never know it.”