Shirley Temple leaves the White House with her mother, 1938

THE March issue of Chronicles magazine includes “Going Down with the Good Ship Lollipop,” an excellent, first-rate piece by Jack Trotter on Shirley Temple, whose stardom the writer identifies as the beginning of popular culture’s explicit sexualization of children. Countering those who might protest that the tap-dancing little girl in embroidered frocks was nothing like today’s Britneys and Mileys, Trotter describes the dark, prurient side of her appeal.

“[M]illions of Americans embraced Shirley without so much as a murmur of disapproval,” he writes. In the piece, unavailable online, Trotter recalls the novelist Graham Greene’s observations of Miss Temple in his film reviews:  

[G]reene remarked on Temple’s performances in several reviews. He found Captain January (1936) “a little depraved” and suggested that her popularity was thanks, in part, to “a cocquetry [sic] quite as mature as Miss Colbert’s,” adding that “her oddly precocious body [was] as voluptuous in green flannel trousers as Miss Dietrich’s.” In another instance, Greene called Shirley a “50-year-old dwarf.” Such comments have been shrugged off as “snide” expressions of the reviewer’s obvious dislike of the little princess of “uplift,” but Greene’s Night and Day review of Wee Willie Winkie (1937) leveled more serious accusations, first of all at Temple’s producers: “The owners of a child star are like leaseholders – their property diminishes in value every year. Time’s chariot is at their back; before them lie acres of anonymity.” In the peculiar case of Miss Temple,  whose value was then at its zenith, childhood innocence is “merely her disguise, her appeal is more secret and adult.” Green comments on the twisting of her “well-developed little rump” as she tap dances, and upon the “sidelong, searching coquetry [sic]” of her eyes. Observe, he notes,

her swaggering stride [in a revealing kilt] 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 that is only skin deep.

Trotter goes on to say:

What we have witnessed over the course of the twentieth century, and accelerating especially in recent years, is an unseemly haste to awaken carnal knowledge at an earlier and earlier age. I suggest there is more at work here than the profit motive and parental permissiveness. A powerful element of perversity motivates the urge to parade before the public eye little girls in the dishabille of the courtesan. It is as if we are flaunting our loss of faith in the very possibility of moral innocence, sacrificing our children on the altar of our defiant cynicism.

Please follow and like us: