How the parents of Shirley Temple lost the millions she made as a star
She did not discover how wasted until she was an adult.
"As long as our country has Shirley temple , we will be fine, " President Franklin D. Roosevelt said once . With curly and elongated hair, the dance tap dance child-star was credited to have given the United States morale to cross the Great Depression and save the studio that would become 20th Century Fox to go under . Despite being the best -paid child actor of this time with dozens of films in his name, when Temple (which later went by Temple Black) went to check her income at 22, she discovered Few millions she had won as the minor was waiting for her. Read more to find out what happened to her fortune under her parents and the financial secret that she has never shared with them.
Read this then: The former teenager star reveals how much she really won - and how she lost millions .
The only person in Hollywood to have done more than they were Louis B. Mayer of MGM.
In 1934, the six -year -old child obtained a contract which It has earned $ 1000 per week as well as an additional $ 250 for his mother, according to Atlantic . She was soon the most profitable box-office star in the world with consumer goods bearing her name and An emblematic line of dolls In his image which has made their way in more than a million and a half households and made their manufacturer the most profitable company in America. At his peak, there was only one person in Hollywood who earned more money than the star child: Louis B. Mayer , the co-founder of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cinema studios (MGM).
She received an allowance of $ 10 per week.
Despite Work a report six days a week according The Washington Post , And winning an almost unknown fortune, Temple Black saw little money. In his autobiography in 1988 Child-star , she remembers having been informed by her bodyguard John "Griff" Griffith : "Everyone knows that all your money goes to a trust fund. You no longer need it." She received an allowance of $ 10 per week - an amount that was increased to $ 75 after her marriage John Agar at 17 years old. AE0FCC31AE342FD3A1346EBB1F342FCB
His father wasted his fortune.
Temple remained in the ignorance of her own finances until she meets her second husband, Charles Alden Black , son of the president of Pacific Gas and Electric and a businessman educated at Harvard himself. When she and her new husband were to prepare for joint income statements, the former 22 -year -old has finally had to examine the state of her childhood fortune. Porging the account and the books which follow the finances which should have been his, Temple only discovered a small fraction of his income. "It was only then that she discovered how disastrous her father and trading partner had wasted his income of his films, licenses and fees, "wrote John F. Kasson In The little girl who fought the great depression: Shirley Temple and America 1930 . "Of the $ 3,207,666 in profits that his family had received on his behalf, there were only $ 44,000 left on his trust account."
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She never confronted her father with what she had discovered.
It turned out that the parents of the temple had not just failed to save the majority of what she had done, but had ignored in a blatant way a mandate of the court to place half of his net revenues in trust in her name. This money had rather been used as their own to pay fantasy cars, a large cleaning staff and many failed investments of his father, according to Kasson. But she would never confront her father with what he had done. Evaluating their options, she and her husband have sworn to keep the case outside the courts and never to talk about it while her parents were still alive. "Born of a feeling of compassion, honoring family unity on material greed, ours was a pact to be kept faithfully," she wrote in Child-star .
She also refused to be bitter, writing: "My attitude has always been, ending and continuing to live." And continue it, raising a family before turning to politics with a race for the congress, six months as a protocol leader under president Jimmy Carter and the terms as an American ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia, accumulating a estimated net value of $ 30 million , according to The Richet, by his death at the age of 85 in 2014.
