the -EMPIRE

BABY LeROY

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WORDS NICK DE SEMLYEN

THE RED DRESS

IN THE CITY of dreams, two of the town’s most talked-about movie stars were embarking on a first date. An excited photographer, bent on capturing every moment, followed in hot pursuit, capturing the A-listers driving down Hollywood Boulevard, enjoying a drink, catching a movie, having dinner at a buzzy restaurant, and finally dancing. The resulting snaps were published in the September 1934 issue of Hollywood magazine, where for ten cents fans could pore over the shoot and share it with friends.

So far, so standard-issue gossip-mag folderol. Except, these photos were different. Because the two stars in question — Baby LeRoy and Shirley Temple — were respectively two years old and six. And each shot was a twist on the usual type of celebrity-in-the-wild image: Baby LeRoy driving Temple in a toy wagon, the pair sipping milk through straws, LeRoy reaching up to a counter to grab tickets for Western The Golden West, both at a miniature dining table, and finally holding hands on the Cocoanut Grove dancefloor, LeRoy’s head barely reaching Temple’s shoulders. Finally: a photo of her tucking him into a crib, with the caption, “Gosh, Shirley, I’m sorry but I guess I simply can’t take it. After all, bed is the best place for a little fellow like me at this time of night.”

And so ended the article titled “BABY LEROY’S FIRST DATE”, the latest weird happening for an infant whose life to date had been very weird indeed. And things were getting stranger by the day. Rocketed to global fame before he was able to utter a word, the boy from Altadena, California, was receiving unimaginable amounts of money, being romantically linked (albeit jokingly) to starlets, getting whisked from movie set to movie set — after he’d had his nap, of course. More peculiar still, he was about to meet his nemesis, another Hollywood star who would become jealous of his fame and do anything to upstage him.

Welcome to the one-of-a-kind, brief but bright-burning saga of Baby LeRoy, the kid who would be king.

Itstarted with a crisis at Paramount Pictures. In the summer of 1932, in pre-production for Maurice Chevalier comedy A Bedtime Story, the studio realised they needed to find a baby with a protruding lower lip — in the story, Chevalier’s man-about-town would discover the child left in his car and assume it was his progeny, due to a previous dalliance, because of the physical resemblance (until it’s discovered later that the baby was just sucking on a button the whole time). The studio machinery whirred into action, searching for just the right sprog. Nurseries were combed through, and finally a tip from one of them led Paramount’s supervisor of children, Rachel Smith, and assistant director William Kaplan to a farm near Altadena. There, Ronald LeRoy Overacker lay innocently in a cradle. “No use looking any further,” Kaplan declared. LeRoy was whisked to the studio lot.