She once shot Eleanor Roosevelt in the backside with a slingshot, and she was the first white girl to dance with a black man in the movies. Around the time Graham Greene was sued for commenting on her “desirable little body”, she became the object of a papal inspection to determine if she was a dwarf. She counted J Edgar Hoover as a close friend from the time she became the youngest person ever to win an Oscar, right through her failed run for Congress. Only one person could make such fantastical claims: Shirley Temple. A year and a half after she succumbed to emphysema at the age of 85, the screen legend’s costumes, dolls and childhood memorabilia go on auction in Missouri’s Little Theatre, Kansas City on 14 July.

Handling the sale for Temple’s heirs – Charles Black Jr and his half-sister Linda Susan Agar – is Theriault’s auction house, a leader in childhood memorabilia, controlling 70% of the global auction market for dolls. Over 550 items will come to the block, including hundreds of dolls, toys and other objects, and nearly100 film costumes, including her polka dot dress from her 1934 breakout film, Stand Up and Cheer, with a suggested price of $20,000. If that’s a little steep for you, there’s a teddy bear for $500, or crayon drawings signed by the artist herself starting at $300.

Shirley Temple’s typewriter, shoes and toys. Photograph: Supplied

“There will be opportunities for everyone, and no one should feel they are out-priced, or this event is not for them,” says Stuart Holbrook, Theriault’s president. In a booming market, Theriault set the auction record last year at $300,000 for a 1916 bisque porcelain doll. Nothing in the Temple collection is expected to go for that kind of money, but prices could become stratospheric when passions trump pocketbook practicality.

“You’re bringing out the emotions of childhood in ways that are very powerful,” says Holbrook, who in the run-up to the auction has toured seven cities with the collection. “I remember two 85-year-old twin sisters came into one of our exhibits and they were standing below the Good Ship Lollipop dress, and all of a sudden they started dancing and singing Good Ship Lollipop together, re-enacting the whole thing. And they finished and burst out in tears and hugged each other for five minutes.”

Temple’s famous polka-dot dress from Stand Up and Cheer. Photograph: Supplied

That song is from the 1934 movie Bright Eyes which, along with Little Miss Marker, made Temple the first child to receive an Oscar. Her statuette, which will be housed in the Academy Museum, was the final presentation of the night, at which point Temple turned to her mother, Gertrude, and asked, “Can we go home now?” By then she was eight, an industry veteran since Gertrude entered her in Meglin’s Dance School (where Judy Garland was a classmate), at the age of three. By the time she was four, she had a contract with Educational Pictures in their Baby Burlesk one-reelers, and a year later she was starring in 20th Century Fox’s Stand Up and Cheer, earning $150 per week.

The year 1935 marked her first pairing with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, a tap dancer and vaudevillian who, in a famous scene, teaches her his signature stair dance. “It was the first time ever an interracial couple danced together on film. It was really a moment that changed history, a little white girl holding a black man’s hand,” notes Holbrook. In fact, it was just a pair of dancers steadying each other, with Robinson (who was in his 50s), signaling Temple (who was six), by squeezing her hand. “Now, you wouldn’t think anything of it. But theatre owners said, we won’t show it unless you delete the scene.”

Temple and Robinson went on to make three more movies together and became close friends. In fact, a child-sized racing car with a lawnmower engine given to her by Robinson is likely to be a favorite among buyers, with a suggested price of $10,000. “She tore around the lot at 35 miles per hour,” says her son, Charles Black, Jr. “She ran into a publicist, not very hard, but tore his pant leg. But because it was an unmuffled engine, it disrupted production. And they eventually put a governor on it to slow it down. And they sent it home to her and she drove it around her driveway and lost interest because it was no fun anymore.”

Temple’s seven autograph books are for sale, with the best of them estimated at $6,000 to $8,000. Included are the signatures of most movie stars of the 30s, as well as President Franklin D Roosevelt, who famously assuaged a Depression-weary public, saying: “As long as our country has Shirley Temple, we will be all right.”

In her autobiography, Child Star, Temple wrote, “These tangible mementos were important far more than the event. Things to heft, feel and take away gave an air of permanence to what happened.” But for Black Jr and his sisters, Shirley Temple was not an adorable kid charming the masses - she was a mom.

More of Temple’s old toys and costumes. Photograph: Supplied

“We didn’t have contact with this stuff. We never saw her as a child,” he says, recalling how, when they screened her movies each year on her birthday, she watched with relative dispassion. “It’s much harder to say goodbye to something like the baby grand piano, which was given to my mom by the Steinways. That’s been around the house since our earliest memories. We all learned to play on that.”

As the 30s wound down and adolescence approached, Temple’s popularity began to wane. MGM tried to cast her as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, a part that might have eased her transition out of child roles, but studio boss Darryl Zanuck didn’t care to release her from her contract. In later years, she ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in 1967, and was named ambassador to Ghana by President Gerald Ford in 1974, and ambassador to Czechoslovakia by George Bush Sr in 1989.

“She was much more interested in what was happening in the present,” recalls Black. “She didn’t shun the little girl. She always said she and the little girl were a great team because the little girl would get the door open, and then she had a chance.”

When news came of her death, many were surprised to learn Temple died of emphysema. A lifelong smoker, she hid her habit from the public in order to avoid setting a bad example. “She knew her work was very different than what was available today,” Black says of his mother’s legacy, adding, “You almost can’t go wrong if you can get your kids looking at a Shirley Temple movie.”