Shirley Temple, who died yesterday, found fame and fortune as the original child star. And just as she invented the phenomenon of the starlet, so too did she first spark the fierce controversy over those who make it big, young.
Long before Miley twerked or Justin Bieber was arrested, Shirley inspired moral outrage in the novelist Graham Greene. “She is completely totsy ... 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.”
Greene’s critique led to a libel suit, the closure of the magazine for which he wrote and exile to Mexico. Ms Temple’s modern heirs and heiresses must wish they could vanquish their critics so resoundingly.
