Figure . Shirley Temple and Jack Haley in a Publicity Still for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Dir

Figure . Shirley Temple and Jack Haley in a publicity still for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (dir. Allan Dwan, US, ) Discipline and Pleasure: Shirley Temple and the Spectacle of Child Loving

Kristen Hatch

Contemporary viewers are likely to nd the image of Shirley Tem- ple riding Jack Haley perverse (g. ). Haley is on his hands and knees, straddled by the child, who swishes a riding crop against his backside and loosely holds a leather strap around his neck.1 Temple’s famous dimples and curls frame a face that seems too knowing for such a young girl. Her half- closed eyes look down slyly at the man, while her lips turn up into a disconcerting grin. How could we not see in this a pedophilic fantasy of domination and submission? And yet it is impossible to believe that Twentieth Century-Fox would deliberately stage its highest- grossing star in such a disturbing photograph. In The Structure of Scienti c Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn draws upon Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of the gestalt shift produced by a duck- rabbit — an image that appears as a duck or a rabbit depending on where one’s focus falls (g. ) — to describe the effects of a paradigm shift in scientic thinking.

Practicing in different worlds, [the proponents of competing paradigms] see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything

Camera Obscura , Volume , Number . /- © by Camera Obscura Published by Duke University Press • Camera Obscura

they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of Figure . Duck- rabbit. When focus falls to the left of the image, it appears scientists may occasionally seem 2 to be a duck. When focus falls to the intuitively obvious to another. right, it appears as a rabbit. Joseph Jastrow, “The Mind’s Eye,” Popular In other words, two groups Science Monthly ( ) on opposite sides of a paradigm will look at the same image and see two completely different things. Each view is equally true because our paradigms are the frameworks through which we evaluate the veracity of a claim. For the same reason, it can be difcult to see the truths produced within paradigms we do not share or to see beyond the truths produced by our own paradigms. The photograph of Temple riding Haley operates like the duck- rabbit, producing two entirely different sets of meanings, because our culture has undergone a paradigm shift regarding childhood. Whereas we now understand children to be imperiled by adult male sexuality, childhood innocence once seemed inviolable. Just as it is very difcult for us to see anything other than pedophilia in this photograph, it would have been equally difcult for early twentieth- century audiences to see the same image as anything but benign. The man in the photo is white, well-dressed, and apparently middle class, with clean white cuffs held together neatly by cufinks, his curly hair tamed by a generous helping of pomade. He wears a suit, the uniform of the ofce rather than the home, and the two are posed as though caught in the act of play- ing horsey, a game in which the man submits his powerful body to the demands of the tiny child. It is a game that Temple played with adult male costars in several lms, in which this play signied the man’s capitulation to the child’s charms. For early twentieth- century audiences, the image is likely to have represented child loving rather than pedophilia.3 And while audiences might have seen Discipline and Pleasure •

submission in the image, this submission would not have conjured sexualized images of bondage and domination but rather would have suggested the man’s self-discipline. Given the prominent role that adult men played in Tem- ple’s lms and publicity, it is difcult not to read her as a “post– Production Code sex kitten” or the “Lolita of repressed Depression audiences.”4 However, this reading rests on an understanding of childhood and adult male sexuality that was not widely available to Depression- era audiences; Temple’s stardom relied on a refusal to recognize the possibility that white men might be aroused by the young girl. Certainly, an unwillingness to acknowledge white men’s capacity to sexually abuse children is dangerous. However, the discourse of pedophilia is also dangerous. The endangered child is at the center of what Lauren Berlant identies as a discourse of “infantile citizenship” and what Lee Edelman polemically decries as the tyranny of futurity.5 The imperative to protect children from sexual danger, both real and imagined, has been the driving force behind a range of laws that work to limit sexual expression and curtail the rights of adults, particularly gay men, more than they do to protect children.6 Indeed, the numerous parallels in the development of legal and scientic discourses about homosexuality and pedophilia throughout the twentieth century should make us deeply suspicious of the idea of pedophilia that dominates political and popular discourse today. At the same time, the gure of the sexually endangered child forecloses the child’s own subjectivity, particularly with regard to sexuality. It is, therefore, important to denaturalize the gure of the imperiled, innocent child in order to drain it of its iconic power. One means of denaturalizing the iconic imperiled child is to situate this gure as the product of a paradigm that emerged at a specic historical moment rather than imagine it to be the expression of a timeless truth. In fact, Shirley Temple’s stardom stood at the juncture of two paradigms. It was built upon a fairly stable idea of adult male affection that had dominated publicity about girl stars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time, it risked being undone by an emergent discourse of pedophilia and child endangerment, a discourse that Temple’s studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, actively worked to suppress. • Camera Obscura

In this essay, I demonstrate that Temple’s stardom closely conformed to a model that had been developed in relation to girl stars during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a model in which male fandom prominently gured. Men played a central role in the publicity for these girl stars because men’s love for little girls was imagined to be socially productive rather than perverse; men’s child loving signaled their willingness to indulge in sentimental pleasures rather than sexual ones. Whereas mass culture was often accused of appealing to men’s libidinous desires, male fandom for child stars offered the promise that men were eager to indulge in a worshipful adoration of the child. In this sense, the girl star was imagined to serve a disciplinary function; stories abounded of men reformed by virtue of their love of little girls. Indeed, the fantasy of men enthralled by Shirley Temple was particularly appealing during the Depression. However, even as Shirley Temple was celebrated for her ability to lure men to the movie theater, a new paradigm was beginning to emerge, one that regured her sentimental appeal as sexual.

A Very Healthy Sort of Worship When Shirley Temple initially emerged as one of Hollywood’s most popular stars, an adult man who did not adore Shirley Temple was perceived as somewhat aberrant. In , one newspaper columnist went in search of the rare man who was not a Temple fan. When he nally found one at the ofces of the New York Times, readers were assured, “He’s normal otherwise, he just doesn’t like Shirley Temple.”7 In fact, far from trying to obscure the elements of her films that seem perverse to contemporary audiences — her kissing and cuddling adult costars, crooning love songs to them, rubbing her dimpled cheeks against their grizzled ones — Twentieth Century-Fox deliberately marketed Temple’s lms as love stories between the girl and middle- aged men, going so far as to portray her as a little seductress who captures the hearts of her adult male coworkers as well as the men in the audience. Newspaper ads for The Little Colonel (dir. David Butler, US, ) use photographs of Temple and Lionel Barrymore looking lovingly into one another’s eyes along with tag lines that describe Discipline and Pleasure •

the pair as though they were star- crossed lovers: “She’s a child of the gallant South. . . . He’s a crusty silver- haired veteran. . . . Love tears them apart — then brings them together again!”8 The pressbook offers advertisements that suggest romance as much as they do familial love: “He responds to her and gradually comes to love her, before he learns that she is his grandchild.” Likewise, Dimples (dir. William A. Seiter, US, ) was advertised as a love story between Temple and her costar, Frank Morgan: “A new somebody for her to love . . . and what fun he is! She’s an irresistible minstrel! He’s an incorrigible scamp! And even the rowdy Bowery can’t part these sweethearts.”9 Men’s adoration of Temple was not inciden- tal to her publicity but rather a central element of her stardom. It is worth examining why male fandom gured so prominently in Temple’s star discourse and what men’s pleasure in images of young girls signied to audiences who did not perceive it as a sign of pedophilic desire. Stories of men’s devotion to child stars not only demonstrate the considerable charms of girls who could win over even the most churlish of men, but also celebrate the girls’ civilizing inuence and their ability to domesticate male desire. Narratives of white men’s love for young girls ultimately worked to reinforce white male rule by assuring audiences that even the coarsest gold miner or the most miserly businessman would prove benevolent when touched by the innocent love of a little girl. In this sense, the child functions symbolically as a corrective to the potential shortcomings of patriarchal rule. Similarly, stories of bachelors awakened to the pleasures of domestic life suggested that child loving, and specically consuming the child star, could have a stabilizing effect on the nation. In this sense, the love offered by Temple serves a similar function to that of little girls in nineteenth- century ction. Karen Sánchez- Eppler has explored how the child, more specically the prepubescent girl, functioned as a means of disciplining intemper- ate fathers in nineteenth- century temperance literature. Over and over again in these formulaic stories, the child’s bed is the site of conversion; the girls’ kisses transform drunken and often violent men into gentle, temperate fathers. Sánchez- Eppler argues that these scenes reect a new model of discipline based on love rather than punishment, a form of discipline particularly well-suited to a • Camera Obscura developing commercial culture, in which restraint is rewarded by the satisfaction of desire.10 Like the young girls of temperance ction, the girl performers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served a disciplinary function. In publicity for these young stars, adult male adoration signaled not pedophilia but the disciplining of male sexuality, the channeling of potentially disruptive male desire into a chaste love for the child. In the s, for instance, a New York Post journalist proclaims himself enamored of innocence rather than vice when he announces his love for Elsie Leslie, the seven- year- old girl who originated the role of Little Lord Fauntleroy on the American stage: “I am only changing positions with some of my contemporaries who once writhed in ecstasy before the Langtry shrine. I remained bolt upright then, and very cold, but now I’m down on my face, and up above me is a delicious child, with long tangled curls, a pure mouth, and good tender eyes. . . . This is a very healthy sort of worship.”11 The author draws a parallel between his adoration of Leslie and other men’s devotion to the European courtesan Lilly Langtry to contrast the child’s innocence and Langtry’s sexuality, to emphasize that his love, unlike that of his colleagues, is “a very healthy sort of worship.” While his description is vividly sensual — the “delicious” child has had a bodily effect on the man who was once cold and stiff but is now “down on [his] face,” presumably writhing in ecstasy as his colleagues once did over Langtry — we are not meant to read his writhing as an indication of illicit desire but as an hom- age to innocence and a celebration of the ecstasy associated with “worshipping” the sacralized child, an ecstasy implicitly spiritual rather than sexual. Men who exhibited such adoration of young girl stars were interpreted to be not dirty old men but “children- loving bachelors.” Mabel Taliaferro, who made her stage debut in at the age of three, became the darling of a New York millionaire at the age of twelve: “The little actress has a patron, Mr. Charles H. Wilcox, the millionaire senior member of the rm Wilcox & Gibbs. He gives her silk gowns and American Beauty roses and carte blanche as to cab hire. He wants to back a company, of which she shall be star, supported by a strong company of adult players. . . . Mr. Charles Discipline and Pleasure •

Wilcox, who is a children- loving bachelor, saw Mabel’s picture in a photograph gallery.”12 This story echoes the countless tales of actresses who have seduced wealthy men away from family and legitimate society, or of wealthy bachelors who have seduced and abandoned chorus girls. It is a story ordinarily characterized by the scandal of uncontrolled sexual desire and invariably accompanied by the ruin of one or more of the participants, as in Emile Zola’s novel of the chorus girl turned courtesan, Nana. In the case of Taliaferro, however, the child’s youth renders the man’s sponsorship — his gifts of silk gowns and roses, and his desire to back a play for her, both of which are ordinarily signs of reckless passion — entirely innocent, even praiseworthy. Situating the child in the context of the familiar story of the fallen woman and the debased gentleman, this vignette serves to contrast the child’s innocence with the wantonness of chorus girls and courtesans who habitually populate such tales. While the bachelor may live outside the bounds of marriage, his adoration of the child demonstrates that he is not ruled by sexual passion but instead is willing to exercise sexual restraint. Likewise, publicity for Hollywood’s earliest child stars play- fully imagined the girls to have disciplined men to enlist in the war effort. During World War I, Motion Picture magazine offered tongue- in- cheek advice to nine- year- old Madge Evans’s male admirers: “If you are a mere male and would win your way to the heart of Madge Evans, unspoiled idol of millions, then don khaki — don it quick.”13 The New York Telegraph reported that ve- year- old Jane Lee enticed men to enlist in the army in much the same manner that a more mature starlet might: “Few men can resist Jane, and when she adopted the policy of kissing each recruit, the enrolling ofcer lost much of his gravity and actually perspired.”14 Publicity that emphasized Temple’s appeal to adult men likewise imagined the child to have had a disciplinary effect on her fans. Temple emerged as a star in , the same year that the Production Code Administration was established to vet the studios’ lms for violent or sexually suggestive content, among other things. Journalists celebrated Temple’s popularity as a victory of morality over vice, contrasting her popularity with that of such sexualized stars as Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, and Jean Harlow. It seemed • Camera Obscura cause for rejoicing that she had won over the nation “without even a sexy inference or a fulsome wiggle of her hips.”15 The fact that “Shirley is no glamorous movie siren, no mysterious foreigner, not even a highly sexed platinum blonde, but just a pretty little girl who is a natural- born actress”16 was taken as evidence that the nation never really did want the suggestive sex comedies and fallen- woman lms that Hollywood had been foisting on it: “This ‘trying to give the public what it wants’ bleat is swept away by the record of Shirley Temple’s pictures. For in them is neither overstressed sex nor glamour, nothing but good acting by a remarkably pretty and remarkably intelligent child. Yet that combination brings more money into the box ofce than the sex- glamour team.”17 The fact that Temple produced more love — if ticket sales can be taken as a sign of love — than Mae West, and the idea that loving a child proved more popular than indulging in the pleasures provided by more risqué stars, seemed proof of the moral stability of the nation in the wake of the s’ upheaval in sexual mores. Review- ers celebrated Temple’s popularity as cause for optimism during the troubled times of the Depression: “Under the leadership of a little child, the cinema is rapidly regaining its faith in the essential nobility of human nature.”18 Far from being a dirty little secret, the adoration of girl stars was celebrated because it suggested that men’s passions had been directed away from indulgence in sexualized entertainments by the likes of Lily Langtry or Mae West and toward a “very healthy sort of worship,” a love that was taken to be sexually chaste and even socially productive. Within the discourse of child loving that circulated in publicity for child stars, a man’s love for a little girl signaled his capacity for self- control and his willingness to discipline his unruly desires in order to partake of the chaste pleasures of sentimentality and innocence.

The Uses of Child Loving The spectacle of male child loving proved to be particularly appealing during the Depression, a period when the survival of the nation seemed to depend on the compassion and restraint of its men. While the image of men in bread lines inspired fear that Discipline and Pleasure •

armies of unemployed men might erupt into violence, as had their German and Italian counterparts, or that they would start a revo- lution, as had their Russian ones, the image of men lined up for a Shirley Temple lm offered the promise of peace and stability. Men’s love for the child provided assurance that they were subject to the same tender sentiments that made women the moral guard- ians of the nation. Like the young girls in the temperance stories described by Sánchez- Eppler, Temple functioned both on- and offscreen as an agent of discipline, leading men to renounce their errant ways for the love of the little girl. Although Temple’s lms seldom directly depict the grim effects of the Depression, they often indirectly address the problems associated with the social disruption of the s, and they attribute these problems to a failure of patriarchy. At a time when out- of- work fathers were unable to provide for their families, when men had to rely on government relief or wages earned by their wives and children, Temple’s lms were peopled by ineffectual father gures. In Captain January (dir. David Butler, US, ), she is adopted by an aging lighthouse keeper (Guy Kibbee) who can no longer perform his job and is on the verge of being replaced by a mechanical light. In Dimples, she lives with “the professor,” her bum- bling grandfather (Frank Morgan), who uses inated language and antiquated social graces to mask his status as an impoverished petty thief and con man. And in The Little Colonel, her father is debili- tated by pneumonia after being bilked of all his money, while her grandfather (Lionel Barrymore) is an aging Southern gentleman who refuses to acknowledge the South’s defeat in the Civil War and is unable to prevent his own daughter from eloping with a Yankee. In each case, Temple’s character helps to rehabilitate a suffering father gure, securing a job for the Captain, leading the professor away from crime and into a romantic partnership with a wealthy dowager, and inspiring the Colonel to act bravely and self- lessly by rescuing his Yankee son- in- law from armed criminals. It seems safe to say that Shirley Temple’s lms were fantasies of male rehabilitation. Temple had her rst major starring role in Little Miss Marker (dir. Alexander Hall, US, ), which set the template for most of the Shirley Temple vehicles that would follow: the child would • Camera Obscura worm her way into the heart of a man who was otherwise impervi- ous to children’s charms and thereby transform him for the better. In Little Miss Marker, Temple plays Martha Jane, or Marky, a young girl whose father has left her with a miserly bookie, Sorrow- ful Jones (Adolph Menjou), as a marker on a bet. The bet is lost, the father kills himself, and Sorrowful nds himself saddled with the orphaned little girl. Despite Sorrowful’s initial resistance, the child soon inspires a transformation that results in his embracing marriage and family and turning away from crime, a transformation signaled by his new willingness to spend money on others rather than hoard it for himself. Sorrowful is not alone in this transformation. In response to the child, his entire cohort of small- time gang- sters is inspired to embrace an ethos of sentiment and caring rather than cynicism and self- interest. In this manner, the lm suggests that men’s child loving offers a solution to the world’s problems. The lm depicts a tug- of- war between traditional and modern values, between a culture of sentiment and one characterized by cynicism. Sorrowful and his cohort are held together not by any sense of brotherhood but by their shared economic interests. They inhabit a subculture — an underworld of small- time criminals — in which sentiment is considered a handicap because relationships are built on economic self- interest rather than any sense of caring or community. It is a world in which everyone is a con artist looking for the next sucker; even a blind panhandler proves to be working a scam, pretending to be blind in order to inspire gener- osity. The only heterosexual relationship we see, between Bangles (Dorothy Dell) and Big Steve (Charles Bickford), is one based on the exchange of goods — diamond bracelets, an expensive apart- ment, a maid — for sex. The characters’ valuation of cash over sentiment is established in the opening scene, when Steve demands that the gang pay him , apiece in exchange for his guarantee that his horse, Dream Prince, will lose in the next race. If he does not receive their payoffs, he threatens to give the horse a shot of adrenaline to ensure it will win, though the “speed ball” is certain to kill the animal. “Are you sentimental about Dream Prince, Steve?” asks one of the men. “No,” Steve answers. “I’m short on cash . . . I can’t afford to kill him today.” Discipline and Pleasure •

In its depiction of a cynical and cutthroat world, the lm reects anxiety about the rejection of sentiment in the context of an increasingly corporate economy in which deals are made between strangers and are based not on trust but on cash in an exchange that seems to be a zero- sum game in which one party strives to get the better of the other. The rapid urbanization and immigration of the s meant that families and communities were scattered, a condition exacerbated by the economic depression of the s. Meanwhile, the proliferation of radios and radio programming contributed to a cacophony of advertisements that strove to part people from their money. If one was not on guard — if one was not cynical — one risked being taken advantage of by strangers who had little regard for the needs of others. In this cynical world, the child is assessed according to her economic value rather than her sentimental appeal.19 When the gang is introduced to Marky, each man in turn picks her up and holds her, not in response to her consummate cuteness but in order to place a bet on her weight. When Sorrowful initially agrees to take the girl as a marker on a bet, his morose assistant, Regret (Lynne Overman), disapprovingly observes, “She ought to melt down for that much,” though Sorrowful assures him that the girl is “worth that much any way you look at her.” When the girl’s father fails to pay his debt, Sorrowful does, indeed, nd a way to prot off the child in a scheme whereby Big Steve will transfer ownership of a horse to Marky so that the two men can manipulate the odds on the race and share in the , take. While Sorrowful and his gang are guided by self- interest, Marky invokes a very different ethos and a different brotherhood of men through her fascination with the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Marky’s mother had read Arthu- rian tales to her daughter before she died, and audiences in would have recognized this as a mother’s strategy for imparting good moral values to the child.20 Marky initially mistakes Sorrow- ful’s gang for the Knights of the Round Table, dubbing them with Arthurian nicknames. However, the men initially dismiss Marky’s heroes as “fairies,” rejecting as unmanly the principles — chivalry, piety, selessness — upheld by the Knights of the Round Table. • Camera Obscura

However, by the end of the lm, the men willingly (if grudg- ingly) transform themselves to conform to Marky’s image of ideal manhood, staging an elaborate party for the young girl in which they impersonate the characters from the stories of King Arthur, although their round table is shaped like a horseshoe. The child’s small body is integral to men’s transformation not because it produces a sexual response but because it produces a desire to care for and protect the child. Her smallness and helplessness interpellate the men as caregivers rather than tough guys. As Lori Merish argues, “The cute demands a maternal response and interpellates its viewers/consumers as ‘maternal.’ ”21 Sorrow- ful’s transformation begins when he brings the child home and attempts to put her to bed. Dressed in one of his shirts, she com- plains that she cannot go to sleep in her underclothes. When he tells her to take them off, she shows him — and the audience — her backside and explains that she cannot because they button up the back. As the child holds a borrowed nightshirt wide to block her small body from the camera, Sorrowful obligingly removes her clothes.22 The child’s nakedness serves to emphasize her vulnerability and to incite a desire to swaddle her in clothing. Marky demands care in other ways as well, asking for help brushing her teeth and going to the bathroom, and when the child climbs into Sorrowful’s bed he declares himself a “sucker” for allowing her to take it, while he sleeps on an uncomfortable chair. Likewise, Big Steve’s transformation is inspired by the tiny child’s helplessness as she lies on the operating table, utterly dependent on his willingness to give her his blood. In this way, the lm suggests that even the most cynical and self- serving of men will become seless in response to the needs of the adorable child. Initially, however, it appears that Marky will be transformed by these men rather than vice versa, that she will lose her faith in fairy tales and become as cynical as they are. She loses interest in tales of chivalry when she discovers that she has been conned and that the horse given to her by Sorrowful and Big Steve is not really hers at all. The nightclub singer, Bangles, suggests the trajectory that Marky will take if her faith in men is not restored. The physical resemblance between Marky and Bangles is striking. When the girl and the woman lie together in Marky’s bed, their faces are mirrored Discipline and Pleasure • on the pillow they share, Marky’s tousled blonde curls matched by Bangles’s carefully marcelled and bleached hair. This mirror- ing highlights the differences between the innocent child and the fallen woman while also reminding us that Bangles, too, was once a child and that Marky is at risk of becoming a jaded woman if she continues to be inuenced by Sorrowful and his gang. This sense is reinforced by the lyrics of the blues lullaby that Bangles sings to the child, advising her, “You’d better get some shut- eye while the getting is good. You got some tough nights ahead.” Her song suggests that women suffer a disadvantage, made vulnerable to a world in which “it’s all a racket” and “the cards are stacked against you” because, unlike men, women are “born with a heart.” The outcome of this battle of values has consequences beyond the child’s personal development, for the ideals awakened by child loving are demonstrated to be necessary to a civilized society. When Sorrowful and Big Steve recognize that they value Marky for sentimental rather than economic reasons, their treatment of horses and women also changes. As Marky lies close to death on the operating table, Sorrowful has a spiritual awakening and prays to God for the child’s survival, vowing that he will not allow the horse to be killed and crushing the vial of adrenaline in his st. Further, while he had earlier proposed an illicit affair with Bangles, he now proposes marriage so that the couple can create a proper home for the child. Steve, too, is visibly transformed by his desire to protect the child. Watching the small, helpless girl begin to revive, Steve discovers that it is far more thrilling to give life than to take it. Although he has come to the hospital to have it out with Sorrow- ful for sleeping with Bangles (in fact, Bangles had fallen asleep in Marky’s bed while singing the girl to sleep), after the girl’s survival is assured, his interest in vengeance and horse racing vanishes. In this way, the lm suggests that child loving represents more than the transient pleasure of gazing upon the cute antics of a little girl. This love is imagined to help men to reconnect with the traditional values that are essential to a civilized society, values that seemed to be threatened by industrial capitalism. Following the enormous success of Little Miss Marker, its nar- rative device, whereby child loving produces a transformation that results in the resolution of social problems, became a key ingredi- • Camera Obscura ent in what is best described as the “Shirley Temple formula.” Over and over again, Temple’s lms offer a comforting fantasy in which problems — domestic, economic, and political — are resolved once men become enamored with the little girl and are awakened to the values she represents. Often, as in Little Miss Marker, her love functions to discipline adult male sexuality, driving bachelors to marriage. In Bright Eyes (dir. David Butler, US, ), an airline pilot ( James Dunn) living in the company of other bachelor pilots, is inspired to reconcile with his former ancée so that he can make a home for an orphan (Temple). In Curly Top (dir. Irving Cummings, US, ), a playboy (John Boles) falls for a young girl when he spies her singing to her fellow orphans. So smitten is he by the little girl (Temple) that he adopts her, even though he must also take in her eighteen- year- old sister (Rochelle Hudson). Gradually, the bachelor shifts his affections to the older sister, whom he marries. In Stowaway (dir. William A. Seiter, US, ), a millionaire playboy (Robert Young) marries so that he can adopt the little orphan girl (Temple) whom he met in Shanghai. Initially, the couple plans to divorce as soon as the adoption is nalized, but, in accordance with the Temple genre, they fall in love and yet another bachelor discovers the pleasures of marriage and domesticity through the transformative love of a little girl. Men’s sentimental engagement with Temple was especially appealing during a period when economic and political stability rested on the willingness of political and nancial leaders to recognize and empathize with the needs of the populace. In this context, the possibility that a lm about “a neglected four- year- old girl with a patch on her little drawers and a broken toy” could “wring sobs from a bank president” offered hope that the nation could depend on the benevolence of bankers and business leaders.23 Within the narratives of her lms, Temple has a transformative effect on the captains of industry, who are inspired to loosen their purse strings once they have been seduced by the little girl. According to these narratives, it is the miserliness of aging men that briey stymies economic growth; Temple’s characters induce the men to stimu- late the economy by investing, rather than hoarding, their money. For instance, in Just around the Corner (dir. Irving Cummings, US, Discipline and Pleasure •

), whose title refers to President Hoover’s empty promise that prosperity was “just around the corner,” Penny (Temple) mistakes a miserly businessman (Claude Gillingwater) for Uncle Sam. When she hears adults commenting that Uncle Sam is in trouble, she organizes a benet for the millionaire. So inspired is he by the child’s selessness that he decides to invest rather than hoard his money, and the promise embedded in the lm’s title is fullled for the lm’s characters, if not for its audience. Likewise, child loving leads to political stability by helping bellicose adversaries see eye- to- eye. In Wee Willie Winkie (dir. John Ford, US, ), Temple is the darling of a British colonial outpost in Afghanistan, and in Susanna of the Mounties (dir. Walter Lang and William A. Seiter, US, ), she is adopted by the Canadian Royal Mounted Police. These lms are pacist parables in which unnecessary conicts are averted as a result of the white girl’s sup- posedly universal appeal. Wee Willie Winkie, for instance, is a dis- tinctly unfaithful adaptation of a Rudyard Kipling story. In the lm, Temple portrays the American granddaughter of a British colonel (C. Aubry Smith) stationed near the Khyber Pass. The pass is held by an Afghan rebel, Khoda Khan (Cesar Romero), who is arrested and jailed for arms smuggling. Winkie (Temple) captures the hearts of both Khan and her grandfather, and the men recognize their shared humanity in their shared love for the little girl. Armed conict is averted in favor of a negotiated peace, albeit one that requires the Afghans to submit to the rule of Queen Victoria. The child’s role in the process is visually represented by the three characters’ walking hand-in- hand toward Khan’s stronghold, the two men literally and guratively joined by virtue of their love for the little girl. Within Temple’s lms, men’s child loving does not signify perversity. Rather, it functions as a means of disciplining men to act for the betterment of society. Audiences invoked these narratives when they suggested Temple act as a peacekeeper, whether by helping a costar, Stepin Fetchit, resolve his differences with Fox or by making “the Chinese and Japanese see eye to eye” and convinc- ing “Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt [to] patch things up.”24 We should not be surprised, then, to nd that men in the audience • Camera Obscura were not ashamed to declare their own love for the little girl. To do so was not to announce one’s sexual desire but rather to declare the possibility of being transformed for the better.

Uncle Billy’s Little Darlin’ One man in particular was prominent in Temple’s star discourse. The legendary tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was featured in four of Temple’s lms — The Little Colonel, The Littlest Rebel (dir. David Butler, US, ), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and Just around the Corner — and played a signicant behind- the- scenes role as her choreographer in a fth (Dimples). Offscreen, publicity described the black man as a “devoted slave” to the white girl. It was widely reported that the illustrious dancer called the young star “Little Darlin’,” while Temple referred to him as “Uncle Billy.” The press reported that Robinson had gifts made especially for his young friend: a pair of handmade dancing shoes, with the gilded inscrip- tion “To Shirley from Uncle Billy,” and a friendship bracelet of gold and pearls.25 As I have argued, the spectacle of white men’s child loving was appealing because it seemed to suggest that family and nation were under the stewardship of caring and benevolent men who would eagerly set aside their own desires in order to protect the interests of the child. However, black men held very little economic or political power in s America, so the fantasy of a black man’s devotion to a white child would have had a very different emotional valence from that of white men besotted by the child. Further, whereas white men’s adoration of child stars was often publicized in terms of chaste courtship, Temple and Robinson’s affection for one another was described in terms of friendship rather than romance. All this would suggest that the pairing of Temple and Robinson produced quite different meanings than did the pairing of Temple with her white male costars. A legend of sorts has developed around Temple’s dancing with Robinson, a story that appears to have originated with the publication of Shirley Temple Black’s autobiography, Child Star. Black reports that Southern audiences objected to the images of Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson holding hands in The Little Colo- Discipline and Pleasure •

nel. According to Black, audiences interpreted their dancing on the stairway of a postbellum plantation home to be suggestive of miscegenation.26 However, there is no direct evidence to support the claim that Southern, or any other audiences for that matter, read the pairing of the black dancer and the white child in these terms. Variety did express surprise at the lm’s representation of “Civil War bitterness, with quite frank jibing as between loser and victor . . . in view of Southern play dates.”27 However, the lm was approved without eliminations by the Production Code Admin- istration and various state and municipal censor boards. Indeed, Southern exhibitors praised The Little Colonel as “one of the nest pictures” Fox released that year, one that “will please anybody,” and reviewers appear not to have interpreted Temple and Robinson’s dancing to be suggestive of pedophilia or miscegenation when they compared the pair to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.28 As with so many images that seem shockingly pedophilic today, the image of Temple and Robinson then seemed indicative of the civilizing power of the sacralized child. Nonetheless, Black’s apocryphal account of outraged Southerners does offer a clue to the manner in which “the rst interracial couple” functioned for American audiences. As Black’s account suggests, and as the surprise expressed by Variety’s reviewer conrms, The Little Colonel was released to a nation that remained divided nearly three quarters of a century after the Civil War had ended. During the s the Hollywood studios were faced with the difcult task of forging a national audience out of disparate regions that espoused conicting ethical and aesthetic principles, particularly with regard to maintaining the boundary between blacks and whites. However, far from offending white, Southern audiences, the pairing of Robinson and Temple was designed precisely to eliminate regional differences and forge a national culture by proposing a solution to the impasse over the place of African Americans in US culture. By joining Robinson with Fox’s most popular star, the studio sought a solution to the economic problem of how to capitalize on the talents of a celebrated black performer while minimizing the perceived threat produced by the increased visibility of African Americans in popular culture. • Camera Obscura

Once again, Temple functioned as a corrective of sorts to her more controversial, and equally popular, counterpart, Mae West. West was controversial, in part, because she so enthusiasti- cally blurred the boundary between black and white female sexuality. She was famous for helping to introduce the shimmy — a frankly sexual dance that emerged out of Chicago’s South Side — to white audiences and singing innuendo- lled songs; “Frankie and Johnny,” for instance, had been originated by black blues singers. On-screen, she and her black maids engage in suggestive repartee about their lovers and husbands. By proclaiming white and black women to enjoy the same sexual pleasures, such performances undermined the very foundation upon which the ideology of racial difference rested. Writing for Esquire magazine in , Gilbert Seldes noted the similarities between Temple and West, not the least of which was Temple’s easy camaraderie with black characters and her appropriation of performance styles associated with African Americans.29 However, Temple’s performances worked to reinstate the racial ideology that West’s had undermined while still offering the promise of urban sophistication that had come to be associated with black performers. Despite Shirley Temple Black’s claim that her dancing with Robinson represented something new, the spectacle of intergenerational, interracial love was quite familiar to Depression- era audiences, having been central to the most popular stage play of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Indeed, if anything, Temple and Robinson are less physically intimate than Tom and Eva had been. Nonetheless, their pairing serves a similar function. In Stowe’s novel, Tom and Eva’s relationship is characterized by cultural exchange. During their brief time together, Eva reads to Tom from the Bible and Tom sings spirituals to Eva. In this way, she gives him the gift of literacy and knowledge while he gives her the gift of emotional expression. Temple and Robinson’s lms also stage a cross- racial exchange, though theirs is more one- sided than that between Tom and Eva. On-screen and off, Robin- son and Temple’s relationship is built around his teaching Temple to dance. In The Little Colonel, for example, Walker (Robinson) seduces Lloyd (Temple) up the stairs to bed by demonstrating the Discipline and Pleasure • famous stair dance that had made Robinson a vaudeville star. But it is not enough for Lloyd to observe Walker’s dancing. Enacting what James Snead describes as “exclusionary emulation,” whereby the white star’s emulation of a black performer contributes to his exclusion from the scene of performance, Lloyd insists on learning his dance.30 The black man takes the white child by the hand, and together they tap their way up the stairs, their unity emphasized by a close- up on their dancing feet and the sounds of their synchro- nized tapping. In this way, cultural appropriation, whereby white performers capitalized on musical and dance styles introduced by black performers, is redened as a gift lovingly bestowed by the black man onto the white child. More important, the ideological threat introduced by Mae West and other white performers is obviated, despite the shared physicality of Robinson and Temple, by Temple’s status as a child. While West titillated and shocked audiences by suggesting that she was subject to the same bodily desires as the black women whose songs and dances she appropriated, Shirley Temple reasserted white supremacy by demonstrating the intellectual superiority of the white child who could so adeptly mimic the black man’s steps. Lest any anxiety remain that the black man’s body would leave its imprint on the white child, the oft repeated story that Temple learned these dances by listening to the sound of Robinson’s tapping feet rather than watching his movements suggests that it is not his body that she emulates, but rather the sounds that he produces; in parroting these sounds, she is framed as merely indulging in the mimicry that is endemic to childhood. Temple thus lent Robinson her innocence, while she in turn beneted from the patina of sophistication that he brought to her lms. A publicity piece in the pressbook for Just around the Corner cannily exploits the terms of their partnership, reminding readers that Robinson is emblematic of urban sophistication — the main attraction at Harlem’s Cotton Club who habitually places long- distance, person- to- person telephone calls — while keeping him safely domesticated within the white family. His devotion to Temple is demonstrated by his engaging in a nightly ritual of put- ting her to bed across several time zones, much as he had put her • Camera Obscura to bed in The Little Colonel. The publicity piece describes how after performing at “one of the hottest hi- de- ho spots on Manhattan Island,” Robinson hurries offstage to make “his nightly New York to Hollywood, person- to- person call, to his friend Shirley Tem- ple.” The Cotton Club audience, “blasé New Yorkers” who were “wowed” to an uncharacteristic show of enthusiasm by his dancing, applauds the dancer uproariously, hoping for an encore, but Robin- son ignores their calls. Nothing can interfere with his telephoning Shirley: “Whenever Bill’s in New York, he invariably calls Shirley just before bedtime to nd out how she is and wish her well. It’s just an expression of sincere friendship of long standing, for it was Bill who rst taught Number One how to dance.”31 Within their lms together, the relationship between Rob- inson and Temple was markedly different from that between Tem- ple and her other costars, characterized by friendship rather than romance. Nonetheless, the lms relied on the same paradigm of inviolable innocence that underwrote so much of the publicity surrounding young girl stars. However, even as Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson danced across the screens of American movie theaters, a new understanding of the child’s innocence was beginning to emerge, an understanding formulated on the child’s vulnerability to men’s desire rather than her inviolability.

Strange Behavior In the s, a competing discourse about men’s adoration of Shirley Temple emerged, a discourse that was unsanctioned by her studio and consequently remained a whisper amidst the din of publicity for the young star. Writing in , Seldes identied a veiled eroticism in Temple’s performance, arguing that her “celebrated dimpling and cuteness have very little to do with [Tem- ple’s] real power” and describing the child’s male fans as “emit- ting a growl of satisfaction” in response to the child.32 A year later, Graham Greene published a now notorious review of Captain Jan- uary, describing the lm as “sentimental, a little depraved, with an appeal interestingly decadent . . . Shirley Temple acts and dances with immense vigour and assurance, but some of her popularity Discipline and Pleasure •

seems to rest on a coquetry quite as mature as Miss Colbert’s and an oddly precocious body as voluptuous in grey annel trousers as Miss Dietrich’s.”33 Again, unlike the reviewers who celebrated Temple’s difference from the celebrated vamps of the day, Greene nds an equivalence between the child and the sexualized women with whom she competed at the box ofce. Greene’s review of Wee Willie Winkie went further, explicitly describing the child’s body in terms of its sexual appeal and nding “dimpled depravity” in her interactions with men: “In Captain January . . . 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 the way she mea- sures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity.”34 Greene’s reviews anticipate the current perception that there is something perverse about Temple’s popularity. However, in the s, his was a minority view and one easily quashed by the studio. When a London news agent refused to sell issues of the magazine in which Greene’s review appeared, Night and Day elected to exploit the agent’s outrage and advertised the issue with placards promising “Sex and Shirley Temple.” Unfortunately, their advertising proved a bit too successful, and Twentieth Century-Fox learned of Greene’s review. The studio successfully sued Greene and the magazine for what the courts deemed a “gross outrage” against the child, effectively driving the magazine out of business and Greene out of the UK.35 It is more than likely that the suit effectively silenced other, like- minded reviewers, though in the US news of the suit was limited to cryptic announcements that Greene and Night and Day had been sued for publishing an article that criticized the child’s acting. Greene and Seldes’s reviews emerge out of a new paradigm for understanding men’s pleasurable responses to images of young children, a paradigm that gained an increased presence in discus- sions of Temple’s stardom from the s onward. The image of Temple’s male fans as potentially dangerous relied on a conception of the “sex psychopath” as a white, middle- class man, a paradigm that, according to Estelle B. Freedman, was produced within legal and psychiatric discourse during the s.36 The concept of the • Camera Obscura sex psychopath was reliant on a Freudian understanding of sexuality that gained popularity among the educated elite in the s and exploded into a national mythology by the mid- twentieth century. Paula S. Fass argues that the trial of Nathan Leop- old and Richard Loeb, two wealthy young men convicted of kidnapping and killing a schoolboy in the Chicago area, helped to establish Freudian psychoanalysis as the means for interpreting sex crimes and, not incidentally, helped to establish an association between the pedophile and the homosexual.37 Greene’s review of Wee Willie Winkie developed out of a Freudian paradigm to explain that Temple’s adult male admirers “respond to her dubi- ous 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.”38 Greene relies on the idea of the unconscious — Freud’s revolutionary restructuring of the human psyche — when he imag- ines an audience of men who do not recognize that the source of the pleasure in the child is sexual. His “safety curtain” functions as a Freudian screen that permits men in the audience to disavow an unconscious desire. What had once signied manly self- control now seemed to signal repressed desire, and within this new paradigm repressed desire has a tendency to erupt in unpredictable ways. The successful lawsuit against Greene suggests that the studios could rely on the courts to prevent the idea of pedophilia from becoming part of the public discourse about child stars. Nonethe- less, there were other signs that a new paradigm was beginning to shape the interpretation of men’s responses to the child star. The sexual psychopath — paradigmatically white and middle class — was not visible except insofar as he exhibited behavior outside the norms of masculinity; child loving was beginning to be understood as one of those behaviors.39 According to Freedman, the gure of the sexual psychopath helped American society adjust to increasingly permissive sexual norms even as it solidied the association of male feminin- ity with sexual deviance: “The concept of the sexual psychopath provided a boundary within which Americans renegotiated the denitions of sexual normality. Ultimately, the response to the sexual psychopath helped legitimize less violent, but previously taboo Discipline and Pleasure •

sexual acts while it stigmatized unmanly, rather than unwomanly behavior as the most serious threat to the social order” ( ). Much as the sex psychopath helped to dene sexual norms at a time when sexual mores were rapidly changing, accounts of Temple’s deranged male fans helped to dene normative male pleasure in the child star’s image. The men who were consumed by a perverse love for Temple were identied by the sort of overinvest- ment in her image that has been associated with female fans’ devotion to lm stars. In , Los Angeles area newspapers reported that a twenty- three- year- old man, Maurice Goldberg, had been arrested after demanding to be admitted into the Temple family home.40 In the aftermath of the kidnapping and murder of one- year- old Charles Lindbergh Jr. in , there was increased anxiety about public gures being kidnapped for ransom.41 However, Temple’s uninvited visitor did not plan to kidnap the young star for ransom. Rather, he had hitchhiked from Spokane, Washington, to Santa Monica, California, merely to meet the young star. Upon his arrest, he was turned over to authorities for a psychological examination.42 Goldberg was one among several men whose adoration of Temple appeared to signal psychosexual pathology. In , papers reported that a teenage boy who had been jailed for delin- quency attempted suicide in his cell after writing a note in which “he told of his despairing affection for the tiny movie star.”43 And in , another man was arrested for exhibiting “strange behavior as he looked at the photograph of [Shirley Temple].” When he admitted to having sent Temple two postcards in which he “expressed his great love for her,” the Los Angeles Police Department turned him over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a suspect in the kidnapping and murder of a young Washington boy.44 Here, the man’s fascination with the image of the child, together with his undisclosed “strange behavior” as he looked at her picture, signaled the possibility that he was dangerous not only to Temple but to all children. While the adoration exhibited by male fans of previous child stars had been celebrated, this man’s love for Temple was taken as a sign of sexual perversity that would ultimately erupt in violence if left unchecked. This discourse of the dangerous male fan emerged quietly in the s, silenced in part by movie studios that had made a con- • Camera Obscura siderable prot promoting the ideal of male child loving and had little means of proting from these new fears. However, anxiety about the male sex psychopath — a term that connoted both homosexuality and pedophilia — was mounting outside Hollywood.45 In , for instance, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover declared “war on the sex psychopath,” and national magazines and newspapers ran prominent stories about child molesters and murderers. In the context of this new paradigm, the ideal of men’s child loving became increasingly suspect.

Conclusion Men’s adoration of little girls held quite different meanings for nineteenth- and early twentieth- century audiences than it does for us today. The child- loving bachelor, far from signifying failed masculinity and the attendant threats of perversion and violence, demonstrated white men’s ability to put aside their base desires and revel in a higher sort of love. In celebrating white, middle- class men’s adoration of little girls, the press celebrated men’s capacity for compassion and protective love for the helpless child. However, when the paradigm of normative masculinity shifted so that love for the child star suggested not self- control but repression, not an admirable capacity for sentiment but failed masculinity, a new discourse began to emerge. In reading Shirley Temple’s appeal as implicitly pedophilic, contemporary interpretations rely on this new paradigm that has made it all but impossible not to perceive pedophilic desire in the conventions surrounding child stardom in early Hollywood. If we are to advance the important work of denaturalizing the current understanding of pedophilia and children’s vulnerability to unruly male desire, we must recognize that this idea of the pedophile has no more claim to truth than did the earlier celebration of child loving. And if we are to understand the child’s place in contemporary society, we would do well to explore the manner in which previous practices, built on a very different paradigm of child loving, persist even as concerns about children’s vulnerability to perverse male desire proliferate. Discipline and Pleasure •

Notes

I would like to thank Catherine Liu for organizing a University of California, Irvine, Humanities Collective Work- in- Progress seminar that helped me to clarify many of the ideas here, and Jonathan Alexander, Lucas Hilderbrand, and Allison McCracken for commenting on an earlier draft of the paper. . There is little information available about the image, but judging by Temple’s age I am guessing it was taken around , when Temple and Haley appeared together in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (dir. Alan Dwan, US). . Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scienti c Revolutions, rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . . For the purposes of this essay, I use the term “pedophilia” to suggest an explicitly sexual interest in children, the ultimate expression of which results in the violation of the child. I use the term “child loving” to denote a broader, more amorphous range of pleasures, erotic and otherwise, produced by the child and celebrated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), ; Andrew Sarris, “Freudian Fantasy,” New York Times, December . A number of scholars have provided nuanced analyses of Temple’s pedophilic appeal. See, for example, Valerie Walkerine, Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ); Ann duCille, “The Shirley Temple of My Familiar,” Transition, no. ( ): – ; James Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham: Duke University Press, ); Ara Osterweil, “Reconstructing Shirley: Pedophilia and Interracial Romance in Hollywood’s Age of Innocence,” Camera Obscura, no. (): – . . Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ). . The gure of the child imperiled by unruly male sexuality has been effectively deployed in anti – gay rights campaigns, ranging from Anita Bryant’s calls to “Save Our Children” in the mid- s to advertising in support of California’s Proposition that • Camera Obscura

invoked the fear that young children would be indoctrinated to reject heterosexuality if gay marriage were to remain legal.

. George Lewis, “Cinematters,” Post Record (Los Angeles), December .

. The Little Colonel pressbook, The Little Colonel production le, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (hereafter AMPAS).

. Dimples one- sheet, Dimples production le, AMPAS. . Karen Sánchez- Eppler interprets these scenes of redemption in which adult men crawl into the beds of children and are transformed by the girls’ caresses as implicitly incestuous. However, as I hope to demonstrate, the “recognition” of incest in these stories requires a frame of reference unavailable to nineteenth- century readers or, for that matter, to early twentieth- century lmgoers. Karen Sánchez- Eppler, “Temperance in the Bed of a Child: Incest and Social Order in Nineteenth- Century America,” American Quarterly , no. ( ): – . . C. M. S. McLellan, New York Post (title unknown), December , Little Lord Fauntleroy (American Performances) clippings, Harvard Theatre Collection (HTC). . “The Child Star of Zangwill’s Play,” October (unidentied clipping), Mabel Taliaferro clippings, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library (BRTC). Vanity Fair, too, reported on Wilcox’s patronage in December (title unknown), n.p., Mabel Taliaferro clippings, BRTC.

. Motion Picture (unidentied clipping), June , Madge Evans clippings, BRTC.

. “Miss Pearson and Little Lees Help in Bond Campaign,” New York Telegraph, June . Jane and Katherine Lee: Clippings, BRTC. . “Shirley Temple Passes Mae West at Box Ofce Sans Resort to Sex,” Morning Telegraph, June , Shirley Temple biographical le, AMPAS.

. “Clean Movies Make Money,” Gloversville (New York) Herald, July . Shirley Temple biographical le, AMPAS. . “Clean Movies Make Money.” Discipline and Pleasure •

. E. L. H., “Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel,” Boston Herald, December , The Littlest Rebel clippings, HTC. . Viviana Zelizer argues that by the s children, who had once played a vital role in the economy, had been redened as “economically useless” but “emotionally priceless.” Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). . Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack, King Arthur in America (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, ), – . . Merish’s choice of the word “maternal” points to the degree to which this response is gendered feminine. Lori Merish, “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, ), – . . The Production Code forbade images of children’s genitalia on- screen.

. W. B. Courtney, “Little Mother’s Darlings,” Collier’s, October , Children of the Stage clippings, HTC.

. Frank S. Nugent, “Now It’s Miss Temple,” New York Times Magazine, November , Shirley Temple clippings, HTC. . See Read Kendall, “Odd and Interesting,” Los Angeles Times, November ; Read Kendall, “Around and about Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, January . “Uncle Billy” was the name of Robinson’s character in his second lm with Temple, The Littlest Rebel. . Shirley Temple Black, Child Star: An Autobiography (New York: McGraw- Hill, ), .

. “The Little Colonel,” Variety, March , PCA les, The Little Colonel, Production Code Administration, AMPAS. . “New York Reviews,” Hollywood Reporter, December , PCA les, The Littlest Rebel, AMPAS. . Gilbert Seldes, “Two Great Women,” Esquire, July . . James Snead, White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (New York: Routledge, ), . • Camera Obscura

. Just around the Corner pressbook, Just around the Corner production le, AMPAS. . Seldes, “Two Great Women,” .

. Graham Greene, “Under Two Flags, Captain January,” Spectator, August , reprinted in The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews, and Film Stories, ed. David Parkinson (New York: Applause, ), .

. Graham Greene, “Wee Willie Winkie, The Life of Emile Zola,” Night and Day, October , reprinted in Graham Greene Film Reader, . . The incident would come to haunt Greene two decades later when he was accused of being a pedophile by virtue of his being among the rst to publish a positive review of Vladimir Nabakov’s novel Lolita. . Previously, sexual psychopathology had been associated with white women. Estelle B. Freedman, “ ‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, – ,” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ), – . . Paula S. Fass, “Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in Popular Culture,” Journal of American History ( ): – .

. Greene, “Wee Willie Winkie,” . . As Freedman points out, when African American men committed sex crimes, they were understood as reverting to their “primitive natures,” whereas such crimes on the part of white men were seen as an aberration, the manifestation of psychological disease. Freedman, “ ‘Uncontrolled Desires,’ ” .

. “Shirley Temple Annoyer Is Held for Examination,” Herald (Los Angeles), October , Shirley Temple biographical clippings, AMPAS. . Bruno Hauptmann was executed for the kidnapping and murder of Baby Lindbergh in April , after a trial in January and early February . . “Shirley Temple Annoyer Is Held for Examination.” Discipline and Pleasure •

. “Pens Shirley Temple Love Note, Tries Death,” Herald (Los Angeles), January , Shirley Temple biographical clippings, AMPAS.

. “Transient Held as Cards Said Mailed to Star,” Citizen News (Los Angeles), March , Shirley Temple biographical clippings, AMPAS; “Suspect Held in Shirley Temple Case,” Examiner (Los Angeles), March , Shirley Temple biographical clippings, AMPAS.

. Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), – .

Kristen Hatch is assistant professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies and the Visual Studies Program at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently completing a book on pedophilia and child stardom in early Hollywood.

Figure . Duck- rabbit Copyright of Camera Obscura is the property of Duke University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.