The Beatles Put a Movie Star on the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ Cover 3 Times

The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band features numerous famous people on the cover. One movie star is featured on the album three times. During one of those appearances, she’s depicted as a doll.

A movie star is on The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ 3 times and 1 time she’s barely visible

The cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper includes people from many fields. For example, it includes authors like Karl Marx and Oscar Wilde, musicians like Bob Dylan and Dion DiMucci, and religious leaders like Aleister Crowley and Paramahansa Yogananda.

Despite this, Hollywood stars make up a huge portion of the people on the album. Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Bette Davis, Tyrone Power, and Marlene Dietrich are all there. According to Goldmine, child star Shirley Temple is on Sgt. Pepper three times. Each appearance is very different from the last.

The first time Temple appears on the cover, she’s in the front row of the crowd. Her hair is barely visible behind the wax figures of John Lennon and Ringo Starr. She can also be seen prominently on the right side of the front row in black-and-white. She’s depicted as a small child rather than the adult she was at the time.

A Shirley Temple doll hailing The Rolling Stones is on ‘Sgt. Pepper’

Finally, a cloth doll of Temple can be seen on the far right of the cover beneath the palm trees. The doll is wearing a shirt reading “Welcome The Rolling Stones Good Guys.”

In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul explained the decision to pay homage to The Rolling Stones. “The Rolling Stones were friends of us all, and I think [art director] Robert [Fraser] thought that it would be a great harmonious gesture to actually acknowledge them on our record cover because everyone thought The Beatles and The Stones are always b******* at each other, so that would be far out,” he recalled. “There were millions of ideas like that.”

Paul McCartney said the artwork changed The Beatles’ plans for the album

In Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul said the album artwork of Sgt. Pepper took on a life of its own. “Then we had a few meetings and we decided it might need to be a gatefold thing because we started to need space,” he said. “George Martin in his book says Sgt. Pepper was going to be a double album but they didn’t have enough material.

“I’m not sure that’s true,” he added. “I think it was always going to be single album but we ran out of space for the artwork rather than have too little material. We suddenly had an art project here and people want canvases, you know.”

The album is so iconic it inspired the artwork for other albums. We’re Only in It for the Money by The Mothers of Invention and The Simpsons’ The Yellow Album both spoof the crowded cover of Sgt. Pepper.

Sgt. Pepper is a great album and Temple’s image helped make it iconic.