Shirley Temple and the Art of Obits

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

From 1934 to ’38, she was the biggest star, period. Anything with her image on it sold in the millions; you can still buy the “Shirley Temple doll.” Clark Gable, who finished in second to her year after year as most popular movie star, never had a hit song, and not many singers sold out movie theaters. Many a girl born in the period had to live for a time with her hair done in a perfect, bouncy mop (said to be 56 ringlets), whether or not her hair actually could be so styled.

Several obituaries for Shirley Temple Black yesterday included a quote like this one from people who lived through it: “That little girl danced us out of the Depression.” It is a true statement, both uppercase D and lowercase. More specifically, Shirley Temple sang and tap-danced 20th Century Fox from the edge of bankruptcy. In two dozen movies made in about five years, the country saw a child solve adult problems with a cute song, a dimply smile, and relentless optimism.

Even racism. As the New York Times noted in its own somewhat odd obituary (more on the oddness later), the child Shirley Temple “may have been the first white actress allowed to hold hands affectionately with a black man on screen in her staircase dance with Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson in ‘The Little Colonel,'” which was made in 1935. Robinson, born in the Reconstruction South of the 1870s, was a stage star, the most successful black performer of the era to bridge the worlds of white and black audiences, if only by always appearing relentlessly cheerful, as relentlessly cheerful as his child co-star. Their pairing, across four movies, made history by suiting Hollywood’s logic.

Once the dimples faded, though, her movie career declined—she was still popular as an icon, but the sight of a teen Shirley Temple reminded audiences too much of time’s passing, and people had their own lives to remind them of that. (The era of money-making nostalgia was still far-off in our country’s future. Today, in which history is not valid unless it is memorabilia, how is it that there is not an annual “Great DepressionCon,” at which cosplay performers wander around the convention floor dressed as hobos? If there was, Shirley Temple Black would have been a huge attraction.)

The rest of her life, a truly event-filled 85 years of life, minus any of the “child-star becomes a teenager, discovers they are not God, enters rehab” sadness, is sketched briefly in all of the obituaries, like so: Married to a businessman, she officially ended her show business career by age 30, discovered that the millions she had earned had vanished in her father’s bad business decisions, ran for office and did not win, and served in many official public roles.

She was a political fundraiser of such great note that two Republican presidents named her to official posts, only to discover that she was actually a talented and dogged diplomat, much like the dogged problem-solver of a child she played in her movies years before. She was a delegate to the UN, ambassador to Ghana under President Ford, and ambassador to Czechoslovakia under the first President Bush. She was a co-founder of the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Societies, which sounds anomalous but her brother had MS.

But the New York Times, in its long-standing role of uncle who you like to chat with about current events at parties until he gets creepy, got creepy in its obituary. I admit that I have not seen many of the famous “Baby Burlesks” that brought Shirley Temple to her first fame, but after reading this paragraph, I do not think I ever saw any, not any at all:

In 1932, Shirley was spotted by an agent from Educational Pictures and chosen to appear in “Baby Burlesks,” a series of sexually suggestive one-reel shorts in which children played all the roles. The 4- and 5-year-old children wore fancy adult costumes that ended at the waist. Below the waist, they wore diapers with oversize safety pins. In these heavy-handed parodies of well-known films like “The Front Page” (“The Runt Page”) and “What Price Glory” (“War Babies”), Shirley imitated Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and—wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse and satin garter as a hard-boiled French bar girl in “War Babies”—Dolores del Río.

Later, after affectionately describing Shirley Temple’s partnering with Bill Robinson, the Times does this:

She may have been the first white actress allowed to hold hands affectionately with a black man on screen, and her staircase dance with Mr. Robinson in “The Little Colonel,” the first of four movies they made together, retains its magic almost 80 years later.

Not everyone was a Shirley Temple fan. The novelist Graham Greene, who was also a film critic, was sued by 20th Century Fox for his review of “Wee Willie Winkie” in the magazine Night and Day, which he edited. In the review, he questioned whether she was a midget and wrote of her “well-shaped and desirable little body” being served up to middle-aged male admirers.

Does the next paragraph reveal the outcome of this lawsuit? No it does not. (The movie studio won a few thousand dollars, which at that time was enough of a hit for Greene to close the publication.) “Not everyone was a Shirley Temple fan.” That’s quite a non-transition transition. In its lurching, whiplash style, the Times moves on to the end of Shirley Temple’s contract days, her relief at this, and then … therestofherlife. The Greene anecdote is deposited into Shirley Temple Black’s obituary like any other fact of her life, like the duration of her marriages, say, and then given the same weight as any other fact.

The story of Graham Greene’s ancient movie review is worth exploring on its own because it raises issues of child stardom, audience participation in the fetishization of a child star, especially a female one, and even libel law. Greene’s attempt to capture the uncomfortable specter of middle-aged people leering at a young body instead veered most uncomfortably into the specter of watching a middle-aged Graham Greene leer at a young Shirley Temple’s body (he calls her a “fancy little piece,” for instance), but its place in Shirley Temple Black’s obituary, out of context, seems to place us in the leering role. The Times uses Greene’s language to raise the issue, then does not follow through on the issue because why would we, this is an obituary. It is the prurient censor urging us not to think thoughts we may not actually be having while holding up a photo, pointing at it, and telling us not to look.

Shirley Temple, a child star whose image became immortal eight decades ago, and Shirley Temple Black, dead at age 85, probably deserve better.

An Award-Winning Blog

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

liebster2A nomination for a “Liebster Award” is something of a blogger’s—or at least a WordPress blogger’s—rite of passage. In German, the word “liebster” means “dearest” or “beloved,” so sharing a nomination for the award and asking the nominee to pass it on (which is one of the stipulations of the award) is a way to make the world a little more dear. Billie nominated me this week, so I am a dear in her headlights. Please visit her website—it is worth your time, and her design and approach have given some direction to my plans for this website.

As I have detailed elsewhere, my column won a prize from the New York Press Asssociation some years ago, but most of my pride that day was for the writers I edited who won awards for their work, themselves. Those were some of the best phone calls I have ever been asked to make. This is the first time work of mine has been nominated by someone other than my employer. A Liebster Award nomination is the same thing as winning—as long as I pass it on and nominate several blogs that have fewer than 1000 followers each and give them some props and ask them to take part. (This award is kind of a pyramid scheme, minus the con. It’s actually just a cool way to build readership and showcase some blogs that are worth getting to know.)

Besides “Ireland, Multiple Sclerosis & Me,” my nominated blogs are “Mywordsontheline,” “Words, Words, Words,” “Read. Write. Teach,” “Writing with Purpose,” and “black is white.”

If I have nominated you, and you choose to accept my nomination of your blog and continue with the Liebster award process, here are the rules:

1. Thank the person who nominated you, and post a link to their blog on your blog.

2. Display the award on your blog—by including it in your post and/or displaying it using a “widget” or a “gadget.” (Note that the best way to do this is to save the image to your own computer and then upload it to your blog post.)

3. Answer eleven (11) questions about yourself, which will be provided to you by the person who nominated you.

4. Provide eleven (11) random facts about yourself.

5. Nominate five to 11 blogs that you feel deserve the award, blogs that have less than 1000 followers each. (Note: you can always ask the blog owner for this information since not all blogs display a widget that lets the readers know how many followers they have.)

6. Create a new list of questions for the bloggers you nominate to answer.

7. List these rules in your post (You can copy and paste from here.) Once you have written and published it, you then have to then:

8. Inform the people/blogs that you nominated that they have been nominated for the Liebster Award and provide a link for them to your post so that they can learn about it (they might not have ever heard of this prestigious honor).

Here are the questions that were sent to me and that I now send on with my replies: (in the case of the first question, change “Ireland” to “upstate New York”)

What do you think of when you think of Ireland?
The Hollywood version, probably: “The Quiet Man,” etc. I studied James Joyce in graduate school and have ambitions to reread “Ulysses” this year. I also have ambitions to see Ireland in person someday …

What food is too much work for you to eat?
Anything too hands-intensive. Lobster. I can still work chopsticks.

Did you ever have a tree fort growing up? How about a secret club?
My dad laid some planks in a tree in our backyard, and I remember some steps nailed to a tree. I never liked climbing trees or even jungle gyms. I seem to have developed my healthy fear of falling from the start, before ataxia.

What technology (if any) in today’s world are you suspicious of?
Anything controlled remotely or automatically—drones, online bots.

What is the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night?
Start boiling water for coffee (I love my coffee press). Fall asleep watching Netflix.

What (if anything) would you absolutely refuse to do under any circumstances? Why?
Physically injure an animal.
Hum. I don’t hum.

If you could ask one person one question and get a completely honest answer, who would it be and what would you ask?
Maybe my great-grandparents (great-grandfather, I suppose) on my mother’s side about what made them leave Russia and move to America.

What is the first thing you learned to cook? Did you enjoy the experience?
The first thing I actually remember cooking for myself (or knew that I knew how to) is french toast.

What thing sucks most of your free time away? Do you enjoy it?
Online social media. Yes, I enjoy being in touch and expanding my circle of friends.
When my health insurance starts up again, I will be spending a lot of time in doctors’ offices. Because of my ataxia, I have a neurologist and a cardiologist.

Describe a time when a small decision by you brought big consequences (good or bad).
If I knew that the night I drank my last drink was going to be the night I had my last drink … it was not a decision, not one made by me, at least, and it was small in the scheme of things. The universe did not change when I stopped, but when I stopped, my universe changed.

What major historical thing(s) happened in your lifetime? Has it changed your life?
In my lifetime, there have been many major news stories. There were two presidential impeachment cases, one of which provides me my earliest memory of a news story, and the later one I wrote about in a newspaper. Space exploration accidents. The realization that climate change is happening and more man-made than not.
Mandela.
The social neuroses caused by the Cold War. I probably still have those echoing in my psyche.
September 11.
Chernobyl.
The announcement last year that Voyager 1 had left the solar system affected me deeply; the “pale blue dot” photo.

Eleven random facts about me:

1. The number four is my lifelong “secret lucky number.” (Anyone who has gambled with me knows about this. Read: The Gad About Town: Against NYS Proposition 1.) Now, I know that in most of the world’s luck traditions, if one declares out loud that something is secret and lucky, one has immediately kiboshed all secrecy and luck out of that thing’s existence, but that is the beautiful thing about my “secret lucky number 4”: It remains lucky and maybe even grows in power every time I speak of my special relationship with it.

2. I left New Paltz in 1995 to work in Narrowsburg, NY, and moved back to New Paltz in 1997. I left New Paltz again in 2000 to work in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and returned to New Paltz in 2006. (There are legends about New Paltz and eternal return and gazing upon the nearby Wallkill River—I am legend, I suppose.)

3. Depending on my relative levels of optimism or pessimism, I may refer to my spinocerebellar ataxia as an “illness” versus a “condition.” The latest feature of this condition that I have been noticing of late (first noticed last year) is that when I can not see my feet, I lose track of which is which. I may think I’m tapping my right, but it’s my left that’s annoying people around me. After going to bed, I may think my left leg itches, only to scratch it and find it was my right, or worse, that I am scratching the mattress.

4. I pretended to write before I knew how to write. There may even now be pieces of furniture at my family’s house with my crayon scribblings on and in them—I did not draw, I wrote, wavy lines that I would then interpret to my parents as a story. I’ll guess I was about three or … four. See? It must have been a lucky number.

5. I am one of the least ambidextrous humans on earth. When I sprained my right side a few years ago (falling asleep in an office chair), I learned that I could not write my name left-handed. This was a severe disappointment, as I spent many hours as a child trying to become ambidextrous and had trained myself to write at least my name with my left hand. The skill has left me.

6. I am very audiologically sensitive (I do not know if that is even a term). I can identify voiceover actors, even when famous ones are used anonymously. The downside of this is a sensitivity to certain noises … if the faucet in your kitchen sink is dripping, I will excuse myself from your living room to see if the tap can be tightened or if the faucet swung away from any container under it. Sadly, this sensitivity does not translate to any musical ability. I have none, just an appreciation for music and performance.

7. I see words as I speak them.

8. If you have a trivia team, I am an asset. My areas are American political history, baseball, English literature, broadcasting history.

9. My favorite animals growing up were dinosaurs. My favorite dinosaur was the triceratops. In the children’s books about dinosaurs, the triceratops always seemed to get into a tangle with the T-Rex and walk away.

10. I remember most people’s names after one hearing, especially if I also saw it written down. I can not, however, remember jokes or poems.

11. Formal logic is a weakness. In Geometry class, it once took me eight steps in a proof to establish one leg of a triangle equal to itself. It amazes me that I can design this webpage.

A Conspiracy Theory of Conspiracy Theories : A Rant

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It is a conversational moment that I have come to dread over the years, the moment I learn too much about what is going on inside the head of a new acquaintance whom I so much want to respect.

The other night my girlfriend and I were chatting convivially with a new friend of ours about many topics, and the two of them were finding with greater and greater rapidity and excitement that they shared opinions and even a mindset; they were having an “I knew I knew why I liked you” moment, and our new friend even said those very words out loud.

I sensed what was coming. Our friend’s shoulders relaxed, she drew us in closer and spoke loudly because of her new confidence in us, “I knew I knew why I liked you. You think like me! You probably know all about the chemtrails and what they are doing to our water and food.” My girlfriend continued smiling but betrayed no such knowledge. “You know, how they’re killing us for money. It’s outrageous what they’re doing to us all.”

I was surprised but not shocked. It was not the first time I had heard someone I thought was a rational-minded person with unimpaired critical thinking skills give voice to approximately three conspiracy theories in ten words or less.

(There are real outrages in our world and society, of course. Before those of you who feel legitimate outrage about “Big Pharma” and its effect on modern medicine … or those of you with gripes about corporate agriculture and its effect on our ecology, economy, and general health … or those of you who feel that our various layers of government present heavy-handed restrictions on fair-minded business people or restrictions that are infuriatingly not heavy at all … before you decide to take up arms and keyboard and aim angry words attempting to correct my insouciant attitude about the legitimate threats these pose to our greater welfare, please re-read the clauses opening this extra-long sentence. And please read on. There are legitimate dangers in this ever-complicated world and I am outraged by them. I vote my conscience. I write letters and this blog, and I sign petitions. I have marched and I will again. (Well, maybe it’ll be in a wheelchair.) We do not need belief in ever-complicated conspiracies posed by a mysterious and infernal “them” to get in the way of believing that maybe just possibly we can affect what “they” are doing to our lives.)

(I am glad I found that soapbox nearby; can someone help me down from it?)

When one lives in the Northeast, as I do, during every winter storm one hears this sentence at least too many times to count: “Heh. So much for global warming.” I have heard people who have explained to me fairly complex physical realities (okay, indoor plumbing) utter this inane sentence as if they do not understand the difference between our Hudson Valley weather on a given Tuesday in January and a global climatological condition. Come summer, these people inevitably give voice to the opposite idea, without minding the contradiction, when they note, “Summers seem warmer than when I was a kid.”

We all want to feel in possession of some special insight or know that our facts are more fact-y than other peoples’, to feel that we know more than the people “in the know”—our elected officials, our scientists, our religious leaders. Because there is so much dogma in our daily lives, we think that everything we read or hear is dogmatic. From Will Rogers to Lewis Black through every heroic iconoclast of the last several generations, we have taught ourselves that we “know better,” that we must “question authority,” but without questioning one authority: our own. We may in fact know better, but that only comes through a skeptical weighing of all evidence, including my own state of mind and knowledge.

I admit that as a skeptic, I question questioning authority. I question my own, which makes writing this post a tad ironic. What do I know?

I am by nature a non-confrontationalist, so when I learn that someone I have been getting to know possesses a conspiratorial mindset—is a person who treats beliefs as facts—I shut down and do not involve myself in a debate over the merits of the thinking. If you already think that water fluoridation is a part of a government plot to make people submissive subjects, instead of what it is, I am not going to get into a detailed discussion about the number of gallons of distilled water we need to start consuming.

Instead, I will make slightly agreeable-sounding sounds that can be easily mistaken for words and statements by my interlocutor but in fact are not. I will find the soonest conversational exit, which is what my girlfriend and I did with our new friend the other evening. Before we learned too much about her worldview, because I still wanted to have some intellectual respect for the friend and myself.

Maybe I should engage people more forcefully and in the name of logic and skepticism … no. No. Because, oftentimes, the other person has come to these insights and beliefs by employing the tools of critical thinking, which is the shame of it. They think that they are questioning authority by reflexively denying the possibility that the facts as presented by authorities are the facts. This is a way of thinking as blind as automatically assuming that anything we are told is true.

It is as if there is an item on the critical thinking checklist that is ticked off every time we declare ourselves a “skeptic,” but only of the official line. By believing that there is something more complicated going on than we are being told. We cheer ourselves believing we are thinking for ourselves.

I love thinking that does not involve thought. It gets me to really not work out those mind-muscles at all but still use my gym membership to get in the sauna. For me, some forms of gambling scratch the same itch in my head and feel the same way as conspiratorial skepticism: the game of roulette, for example. There are books and pamphlets outlining patterns one should be aware of and gambling practices one should adhere to at the roulette table. But you know what the most detailed, complicated thought I have ever had at the roulette wheel is? “I like 4. I think I’ll bet on it.”

It is not critical thinking to posit that simply because the “government denies it” certain fabulous tales must be true. In logic, there is a principle called “Occam’s razor,” which simply states that among several hypotheses, the one requiring the reader to make the fewest assumptions is the one to pursue. Are those lights in the sky vehicles from light-years away? or something earth-based? The earth-based explanation might be less complicated but more frightening.

Are the patterns of condensation left in an airplane’s wake a part of a nefarious plot to poison the populace into a submissive agreeability from the sky? Without evidence, this asks us to assume quite a few things.

Is our government poisoning us into a state of dependence on it? I do not know, and I do not see evidence to support it, but isn’t the idea that corporate agriculture, in the name of the profit motive, producing food with ever less nutrition per volume in fact scarier? Yet that sentence is the one that asks us to take action and do something for ourselves, because we can still. Somehow, underneath it all, I am an optimist.

My conspiracy theory of conspiracy theories is that the powers that be prefer us speculating wildly about hidden plots and nefarious powers “behind the scenes” and thinking that the knowing is enough. They love it when we think we are doing something but aren’t. In the ’90s, one of my co-workers at a bookshop used to angrily relocate the paperback sci-fi books inspired by “The X-Files” TV series from fiction to non-fiction. My conspiracy theory is that this is exactly the sort of fight corporate America wants us to wage. Because then, the only causes we are taking to the streets over will sap us of our “precious bodily” intelligence.