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Fw: a birthday coincidence: Shirley Temple
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a birthday coincidence
----- Original Message -----
From: Carolyn Kunin
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Saturday, April 24, 2004 9:16 AM
Subject: a birthday coincidence
The post that came suggesting that Shirley Temple (now Mrs Black) was born on the same day as VN does make for a rather intriguing coincidence, especially in the context of the recent brouhaha over the German Lolita.
(from a bibliography on the career of Miss Temple:)
Greene, Graham. Graham Greene on Film: Collected Film Criticism, 1935-1940. Ed. John R. Taylor. Simon & Schuster, 1972. Among other pieces, this work includes Greene's biting review of Wee Willie Winkie written for London's Night and Day magazine, in which he called Shirley Temple "a complete totsy" whose "dimpled depravity" emerged from beneath a "mask of childhood." Furor over the article resulted in a lawsuit that Greene and the magazine lost
Here is the text in question:
Miss Shirley Temple's case, though, has peculiar interest: infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out with 'The Littlest Rebel'). In 'Captain January' she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in 'Wee Willie Winkie', wearing short kilts, she is a complete totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant's palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers -- middle-aged men and clergymen -- respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.
A remarkably adult consideration of the lawsuit can be found in Mrs Black's autobiography, Child Star.
Carolyn
----- Original Message -----
From: Carolyn Kunin
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Saturday, April 24, 2004 9:16 AM
Subject: a birthday coincidence
The post that came suggesting that Shirley Temple (now Mrs Black) was born on the same day as VN does make for a rather intriguing coincidence, especially in the context of the recent brouhaha over the German Lolita.
(from a bibliography on the career of Miss Temple:)
Greene, Graham. Graham Greene on Film: Collected Film Criticism, 1935-1940. Ed. John R. Taylor. Simon & Schuster, 1972. Among other pieces, this work includes Greene's biting review of Wee Willie Winkie written for London's Night and Day magazine, in which he called Shirley Temple "a complete totsy" whose "dimpled depravity" emerged from beneath a "mask of childhood." Furor over the article resulted in a lawsuit that Greene and the magazine lost
Here is the text in question:
Miss Shirley Temple's case, though, has peculiar interest: infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out with 'The Littlest Rebel'). In 'Captain January' she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in 'Wee Willie Winkie', wearing short kilts, she is a complete totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant's palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers -- middle-aged men and clergymen -- respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.
A remarkably adult consideration of the lawsuit can be found in Mrs Black's autobiography, Child Star.
Carolyn