1936 Boston, Massachusetts

Shirley Lefkovich Handler SPH ’53
Born 1929
Boston, Massachusetts
Interviewed on January 27, 2019
by Rachel Handler

I remember seeing a movie with Shirley Temple, which, for reasons of my name, I was very anxious to see. I wasn’t quite sure exactly who she was or what she did, but I’d been hearing the name for a long time and people used to tease me and call me “Little Shirley Temple,” so I was anxious to see it. I must’ve been about seven. I think she was about a year older than me.

I don’t remember the name of the movie, but I remember a really sad part that really stuck in my mind, as will happen to children. Part of the movie was a little girl who was living with her mother—I don’t remember anything about the father—but the mother was going to make her a big birthday party, and I think the little girl was at home waiting for her to come back with the cake, and the movie showed—or hinted at, or something shadowy—that she was crossing a street in the center of the town. She didn’t have a car, as mothers didn’t in those days, but she ran to the pastry store and picked out the cake and bought this beautiful cake in a big white box, and she had to carry it across the street to get it into the [car of] whoever had picked her up when she was run over by another car. Yes, and she was killed, and it showed the cake lying on the street.

And that scene just stuck in my mind forever, and it made me afraid to go to the movies or anything for a year or so. I didn’t want to see [a movie] because I didn’t want to see a terrible scene like that, and I didn’t want anything like that to happen to my mother, since we didn’t have a car or mothers didn’t drive. But that scene really stuck in my mind. It was an awful thing to put in a child’s movie.

I don’t remember [who came with me]. I don’t remember that part of it. It was always either my mother or my sister, and I don’t think they realized how upset I was by it. We probably took the streetcar or even walked. It was a neighborhood movie house called The Oriental. And then the movie was dark, that much I remember. But it was quite near my house, so I don’t know if we took a streetcar there, or we could’ve walked. It was in Mattapan, a part of Boston, a suburb. [It would’ve been] 1936 or 1937, somewhere around there.

I don’t remember [any concessions]. I wasn’t too interested in candy until I was a little bit over seven, so I don’t remember that.

I just remember being glad to have seen what [Shirley Temple] looked like because I’d been hearing—you know, everybody did nothing but talk about her. And then the fact that I didn’t have dimples or anything like that. I did have blonde curls, and so if they saw me or if anyone met me and said, “Oh, Little Shirley Temple,”—so I had some sort of identification with her. And I think I did see some of her other movies later on, but that was the only one that scared me.

Someone just wrote me a note that that movie was called Bright Eyes. I don’t remember the title myself. I remember some of her titles—Little Miss Marker and there was one with “Daddy Warbucks” and various other ones where she did a lot of dancing and singing, but that movie was the only one that had that really sad part. And the cake, I remember the cake!

Kind of weird, I didn’t remember that part of it until I started thinking about it, and that, that really put a shadow on that movie for me. But I did go on later and see a lot [of movies]. My parents and my sister, who was almost twenty years old by then because she was so much older than me, she went to a lot of movies, and so did my, my mother used to go. And the three of us went to a lot of movies.

And we had movie houses in those days where there was a runway out from the stage, and a big movie house like what’s now The Wang Center was called The Metropolitan—and there were others in Downtown Boston—where there’d be dancers in fancy dresses and music who would do a little show down the runway before the movie, so that made it even more fun.

But one thing that I remember my mother always being annoyed about was that some of the movie houses were beautifully decorated inside, and especially the ceiling and the balconies, and they made them really all golden, like gilt, and shiny and big lights, and my mother used to keep saying, “Shirley, Shirley! Don’t keep looking up at the ceiling! The movie is over there!” And I think that also happened at that movie I saw Shirley Temple in, because I was always busy looking up at those figures on the wall, rather than at the movie.