Living with Larry

shirley-temple-14I’m making scones. Larry is reading me snatches from the NY Times, including this from the Book Review: “When Shirley Temple Black died at 85 on Feb. 10, The Times’s obituary made brief note of her connection to Graham Greene. In a review of the 1937 film ‘Wee Willie Winkie,’ Greene wrote that Temple’s ‘infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. ‘He unwisely continued: ‘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.’

images-2In his memoirs, the film director Alberto Cavalcanti said Greene fled to Mexico, where he wrote “The Power and the Glory,” rather than face a possible prison sentence in a libel case inspired by the review. Cavalcanti wrote: “Very likely Shirley Temple never learned that it was partly thanks to her that, during his exile, Graham Greene wrote one of his best books.”

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