Was Graham Greene right about Shirley Temple?

Shirley Temple, who died last week at the age of 85, was the most successful child film star in history. During the second half of the 1930s, a decade in which she made 23 films and earned $3 million before puberty, she was America’s most popular film star of any kind; Clark Gable came only a distant second. What was the secret of her enormous popularity? According to Temple’s own oft-repeated explanation, ‘People in the Depression wanted something to cheer them up, and they fell in love with a dog, Rin Tin Tin, and a little girl.’ This surely has truth in it, for the precocious, confident, sparkling little actress embodied an optimism for which her country yearned. But Graham Greene, in a 1937 review of one of her most famous films, Wee Willie Winkie, offered a rather creepier interpretation. It was a review that resulted in a successful libel action by Shirley Temple’s Hollywood studio, Twentieth Century Fox, which precipitated the death of Britain’s recently launched rival to the New Yorker, the stylish and exuberant but underfunded literary magazine Night and Day.

In his review, for which the magazine was fined £3,500 and made to pay a further £1,500 in legal costs, Greene suggested that the essence of Shirley Temple’s appeal was in fact sexual. ‘Infancy with her is a disguise,’ he wrote. ‘Her appeal is more secret and more adult.’ He went on to refer to ‘her neat and well-developed rump’, to the ‘sidelong, searching coquetry of her eyes’, and ‘the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity’.