Her
charms escaped me then because I was only a few years old older, but after
undergoing mastectomy in 1972, she wrote a McCalls
article about it for me after holding a press conference at her hospital
bedside to encourage preventive mammograms and choice of treatment.
The
cuddly moppet had morphed into a strong-minded woman, writing, “The doctor can
make the incision, I’ll make the decision,” confiding that she was a secret
surgical buff, who had used her celebrity to get doctors to break rules and
allow her to observe operations.
When
stardom ended in her twenties, Shirley Temple married a superrich second
husband and went into politics and was named United States Ambassador to Ghana
and later to Czechoslovakia. She later served as Chief of Protocol of the
United States.
In
those Depression days when she was the
American Idol, as TV news no doubt will keep endlessly showing, she was
partnered with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, an elderly African-American hoofer in
an interracial breakthrough for movies that were shown in segregated Southern
theaters.
In
today’s sophisticated time, her passing comes on the heels of the Woody Allen
child abuse furor to remind us how different life was then.
But
not entirely. A celebrated British novelist, in his role as film critic, wrote
in a magazine that she was “a complete totsy” as a nine-year-old:
“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.”
Shirley’s
studio sued and won enough to remain in trust for her until she was 21, when
she donated it to build a youth center in England.
That building
no doubt still stands as a tribute to her memory, as well as in the hearts of
women whose lives may have been saved by her frankness about breast cancer in
those days when the subject was not openly discussed.
“The
Good Ship Lollipop” has sailed off but won’t be forgotten.
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