Little Miss Christmas

No one before had ever managed to steal the great U. S. radio Christmas show from Tiny Tim. But this year Shirley Temple stole into millions of U. S. homes on Christmas Eve, twinkling after Happiness in a wide-eyed episode from Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird. She said pretty Merrys to everybody, blended her fair treble with Baritone Nelson Eddy in an unprecedented Silent Night.

Not only was this an innovation in American Christmases, it was an innovation in Shirley Temple: the first time in her six-year career that she has ever played in a radio show. They say she has turned down $3,000,000 in radio offers. They say she might have had $35,000 had she chosen to make her debut Christmas Eve with Charlie McCarthy on the Chase and Sanborn program. But for her radio coming-out, she got not so much as a lollipop.

For staging its Sunday night Screen Guild Theatre over 64 CBS stations, the late Andrew Mellon's Gulf Oil Corp. pays the living William Green's Screen Actors Guild a flat $10,000 a week. It pays other costs, too--some $5,000 for production costs, $8,350 for air time. But the S. A. G.'s weekly $10,000, for which it volunteers the talents of 90% of Hollywood's great, goes straight into a Motion Picture Relief Fund, earmarked for the construction of a cinema old folks' home.

Now, as a result of 37 broadcasts since January 1939, the Building Fund has been enriched by $370,000--and Gulf has had the most impressive guest-star parade any radio sponsor ever got for his money. By June, close of the present season's contract, the radio program will have brought in $540,000, to add to some $90,000 previously collected. So the Fund hopes to start construction this year, on the broad green pasture of the San Fernando Valley, of a building with recreation halls, a big dining room, a dispensary, surrounded by cottages, to be named after the cinema's great.

The Fund's everyday work will go on--providing bread, hope and Front for faded glamor girls, leading men gone paunchy, directors gone seedy, ailing script girls, etc.

Shirley Temple--"Presh" to her mother --now a radio actress, has long been a radio fan. She has six or eight radio sets at her command in her daily comings & goings, likes Gang Busters almost as well as her favorite, the Lone Ranger. But, because of studio and parental objections, she has never been allowed to act on a radio program before this week.

Jean Hersholt (cinema's Dr. Dafoe) got Shirley as the Screen Guild Theatre's, Little Miss Christmas, by a simple device. He cornered Jimmy Roosevelt, took him out to the Twentieth Century-Fox lot. Jimmy put the all-important question to Mrs. Termle. "How would you like it, Shirley?" mamma asked.

Squealed Shirley, "I'd love it!"

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