Why the Vatican dispatched a priest to investigate a 10-year-old Shirley Temple
We hear all the time about the crazy world of Hollywood. For the most part, it’s almost tough to believe as some of the rumours seem simply too wild to be true. However, for the most insane tales, you have to look back to the studio age of the 1930s when mere kids like Shirley Temple were the biggest stars.
It’s tough to understate just how famous Shirley Temple was. In 1939, when she was still only 11 years old, Salvador Dali painted her, calling the piece ‘Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time’. At the height of her fame, between 1935 and 1938, it’s estimated that she earned around $3.4million in only those three years as suddenly, the child was the most sought-after star in the industry.
It all began after Charles Lamont, a producer, saw her dancing. He cast her in the grimly named Baby Burlesks, where child actors would pay tribute to old famous movies. Between 1931 and 1933, she starred in eight of them and by the time they were done, she was starring in major feature films alongside names like James Dunn, Ginger Rogers, and making history in The Little Colonel for performing the first interracial dance in a movie alongside Bill Robinson.
However, as we know well by now, the industry, especially back then, was absolutely rife with abuse. The tale of Judy Garland and her experiences on set of The Wizard Of Oz have long since been the ultimate example of that. But Garland was 16, and Shirley Temple, at the height of her fame, was barely ten years old.
There were constant rumours about Temple. There were the inevitable and harrowing ones about potential mistreatment on set, as well as rightful retrospective considerations about the way the young girl was sexualised by the industry.
But mostly, Temple had to face up to constant rumours and questioning about her talent and abilities as seemingly no one wanted to believe that a kid could simply be that good at dancing and acting.
The most intense rumour was that Temple was, in fact, a 30-year-old woman in disguise. People genuinely believed that she was actually an adult and that she had even had her teeth filed down to look more like baby teeth. They thought she surely must be a secret adult with dwarfism, and her hair must be a wig with the perfect childhood curls concealing the adult’s hair.
The rumour was so prevalent that, seemingly, God took an interest as the Vatican decided to dispatch a priest to get to the bottom of it. Who knows why they thought that was in the realm of duty of the catholic church, but either way, Father Silvio Massante was sent to Hollywood to figure it out.
Obviously, she found that Temple wasn’t some Hollywood hoax. With a flash of her birth certificate, it was settled once and for all that she was legitimate. “Obviously, she is not,” the priest reported back to the Pope, but still, despite the divine intervention, the rumour mill persisted.
