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Since Bright Eyes Shirley Temple has grown full of honors. Her position as box-office champion last year was determined by Motion Picture Herald's poll of U. S. exhibitors. As rival to President Roosevelt and King Edward VIII for most photographed celebrity, she appears in an average of 20 still portraits daily for magazines, newspapers and advertisements. In addition to being, accurately speaking, the most popular cinemactress, Shirley Temple is the ablest song-plugger in Hollywood. Sheet music sales on her songs, like Polly Wolly Doodle and On the Good Ship Lollipop, are over 400,000 copies each. These are larger than the sales of songs introduced in the same period by Bing Crosby, Jeanette MacDonald, et al.
Honors. Outside of purely commercial distinctions, Shirley Temple has received almost every available reward of fame except an honorary college degree, which she may well get next June. She is Captain of the Texas Rangers, an Honorary Chair man of the Be Kind to Animals Anniversary Week and a Kentucky Colonel. Her offices are not limited to the U. S. She is president of the Chum's Club of Scotland (400,000) and of the Kiddies Club of England. The 165,000 moppet members of the latter swear to imitate her character, conduct and manners. Possibly the smallest of her international titles is that of mascot to the Chilean Navy. President Arturo Alessandri, an admirer, conferred this dignity on her, together with a special uniform.
Garlanded with such laurels at an age when her contemporaries become inflated with conceit about a gold star on the report card, it might seem natural for the most celebrated child alive to be in private life also the most objectionable sample of precocity, weight for age, who ever gave sharp answers to her betters. Such is not the case. Disappointing as the case may be to child psychologists of certain schools and persons judicious enough to distrust the customary vaporings of cinema fan magazines, Hollywood chatter columnists and professional pressagents, Shirley Temple is actually a peewee paragon who not only obeys her mother, likes her work, rarely cries, is never sick and keeps her dresses clean but even likes raw carrots, eats spinach with enthusiasm and expresses active relish for the taste of castor oil.
Day. Shirley Temple wakes at 7 a. m. She repeats out loud any lines she may have learned the evening before, rehearses dance steps by waving her feet in the air. After 45 minutes, she decides to get dressed. For breakfast she has fruit, cereal and a coddled egg. Her shiny Cadillac, with Chauffeur John Griffith at the wheel, is waiting in front of the Temples' Santa Monica house. In it she and her mother are whisked off to the Fox Studio. On the set Shirley is supervised by Mrs. Temple. She also does her lessons. Precocious, she has been held back as much as possible, but her I. Q. is that of a 9-year-old. She is learning French so that next year she can make the foreign versions of her pictures. For lunch she has beef or chicken, vegetables, preceded by soup and followed by ice cream or canned pears, her favorite dessert. At 5:30 o'clock her day's work is over. She goes home, plays with her father, rehearses the next day's assignment and retires.