The Good Ship Lollipop

Shirley Temple Black died yesterday at age 85. Like most of my generation, I enjoyed her movies as a child, her brightness and dancing, her timely sense of pathos or courage. Her movies were before my time but, like generations after me, we all enjoyed them via reruns or DVDs and have this shared legacy of a cheerful little girl who overcame being an orphan, a scullery maid, a kidnapped companion kept away from her goats...

If you said, "Grandfather! Grandfather" with an accent in our house, we knew just what the joke was. (For those of you who don't, it's a quote from "Heidi.")

But what if there had never been a Shirley Temple? What if, instead, it had been another little girl? What if, in fact, it had been my mother?

Here's how the story goes, according to the way my mother told it, although it's been some years since I heard it...

When she was a little girl, living God knows where (I don't remember but from the photo it looks to be in the Southwest somewhere), her family was approached by "a man from Hollywood." Probably a talent scout or a producer. He was looking for the next child star. Shirley was a no-name at that point.

My mother was tiny for her age, had a wealth of very curly red hair, and was probably pretty cute with her big green eyes. The only photo I have of her is when she's around two and she's frowning, so hard to tell from that. She was different from Shirley, but her mouth could be a similar rosebud and goodness knows it could pout like Shirley's did!

This isn't the photo I was thinking of, but I'll have to try and dig up the other one.

Anyway...this gentleman wanted to take her back to Hollywood with him. He wanted my grandparents to sign a contract. I guess he convinced them because things were set into motion and apparently everyone was ready to go. Only, just like something out of a tragic Shirley Temple movie, the night before they were supposed to clinch the deal, my grandparents' house burned down.

Mom never talked about all the stuff they lost, that wasn't part of the story. I do know that their collie, Laddie, perished in the fire. (I still can't really think about that and I wish she'd never told me, but I understand why that made such an impression on her tender, animal-loving heart.)

My grandparents, staggering under this tragedy, reversed their decision and Mr. Hollywood went to knock on other front doors.

I never understood why they didn't go ahead. I mean, yes, they'd just suffered a great loss. But on the other hand, little Kay might have been their meal ticket for years to come, and help to make up for that loss and then some. Couldn't Grandmom have climbed on the bus with her daughter and left Grandad to work on salvaging things? Maybe not. Maybe in those days it was different, and maybe it was too much.

All I know is, that was the end of my mother's shot at stardom. Shirley was found and cast, and the rest is history.

And maybe that's what started the whole deal. Maybe they recounted this twist of Fate to little Kay as a child. Maybe it made her think she was Somebody, and that she'd missed her chance to prove it. Maybe it was the foundation for all the ambition and haughtiness and desire for the Best in Life that burned inside my mother, making her a swan among the ducks, an alien changeling that didn't fit the rest of her family. Something sure did.

She hungered for celebrity, and she found it in many smaller ways throughout her life. She hit the big time in her 40s as a psychic and was even courted by the prestigious William Morris Agency. But—and here's another head-scratcher—she turned them down.

The flip side of my mom's drive to be famous was a fierce need to be in control. Of f'ing everything and everyone! It made her family crazed, it ruined her marriages, it spoiled some of her best chances. My mother would rather be a big fish in a small pond than the reverse. She feared that the William Morris Agency would "control" her, manage her, and she couldn't stand the thought.

"They'll take a big cut of everything I earn," she said.

"Yeah, but Mom, ten or twenty percent of a whole lot of money is worth it," I said. "A hundred percent of nothing is...well, nothing."

But that's what she opted for. So Sylvia Brown was all over the place with books and interviews and fame. My mom did lots of good stuff and made some impressive appearances. But her books were small potatoes, and she ground her teeth every time Sylvia came on TV. There but for Fortune...

Maybe we all make our own Fortune. We get these chances, and we turn them down, sometimes for a good reason—sometimes not. Mom could have been singing "The Good Ship Lollipop" and I could've grown up in the Hollywood Hills. We'll never know.