Blame Shirley Temple's Ass

[Dave Monroe]

SEPTEMBER 21, 2005

JIM KNIPFEL
NEWS & COLUMNS

It was 50 years ago that Vladimir Nabokov published
Lolita, whose title has become synonymous with
underage sexuality. But Lolita was hardly the first
time this subject was portrayed in American popular
culture. Nor was it the last. Or even the most
graphic.

If you begin looking at Lolita in context, though, an
interesting chain of connections emerges.

In 1955 Lolita came out in France and eventually made
it over to America, where it caused a bit of a stir.

Two years after that, Thomas Pynchon took a literature
course with Nabokov at Cornell. In 1973, after
publishing two previous novels, Pynchon published
Gravity's Rainbow, which itself caused a bit of a
stir.

In Gravity's Rainbow, there's an infamous scene in
which we meet Bianca, who makes Nabokov's Dolores
"Lolita" Haze look like a schoolgirl (which I suppose
she was, but that's beside the point).

Without going into all the details, let's just say
Bianca is first described as "a knockout, alright, 11
or 12, dark and lovely
" She is, in fact, roughly 16,
and is introduced during a graphic orgy scene aboard a
yacht called the Anubis:

"
funseekers crowded eagerly around a cleared space
where Bianca now stands pouting, her little red frock
halfway up her slender thighs, with black lace
petticoats peeping from beneath the hem
"

Urged on by her mother, Margherita, she sings "On the
Good Ship Lollipop" to the horny crowd while
performing a dead-on Shirley Temple impression. Her
mother then demands that she sing "Animal Crackers in
My Soup." Bianca refuses, and a reveler shouts "Super
Animals in My Crack!"—a line that's stayed with me for
years.

What follows is a mother-daughter S&M scene that's
disturbing, yes, but also hilariously over-the-top:

"Someone has provided Margherita with a steel ruler
and an ebony Empire chair. She drags Bianca across her
lap, pushing up frock and petticoats, yanking down
white lace knickers. Beautiful, little girl buttocks
rise like moons. The tender crevice tightens and
relaxes, suspender straps shift and stretch as Bianca
kicks her legs, silk stockings squeak together, erotic
and audible now that the group has fallen silent and
found the medium of touch, hands reaching out to
breasts and crotches
"

More than just kiddie porn, it's S&M kiddie porn—with
Shirley Temple. The orgy that follows is really
something.

Eggheads who worry themselves over such things
attribute the scene to Jules Siegel's ex-wife,
Chrissie, a friend of Pynchon's back in the 1960s when
Siegel and Chrissie were married. Then (according to
Jules) Chrissie and Pynchon ran off together. What
matters here is that Chrissie was said to have had a
hell of a Shirley Temple impersonation.

That may all be true; it's not for me to say. But
there's another reference at work here that is at
least an intriguing coincidence in a book full of such
coincidences, and of film references.

In 1932, Shirley Temple made her film debut in What's
to Do?, the first in a new series of comedy shorts
called Baby Burlesks, created to compete with Our
Gang. But here, instead of three- and four-years old
child actors playing smart-aleck kids, they played
adults in adult situations.

A friend of mine, Daniel Riccuito, who happens to be a
film scholar, first called my attention to the films.
He describes them as such:

"Shirley plays a variety of sexually out-there
characters. The one I own (Polly Tix in Washington)
isn't the most outrageous of the bunch, but it has her
playing a whore whose mission is to seduce a new
senator and get him to sign The Castor Oil Bill. The
all-child cast appears in diapers, mostly topless,
with top hats, cigars, flesh."

Another film in the series, he tells me, has a
diaper-clad boy squeezing a cucumber that shoots juice
out of one end, striking Temple in the face.

"A lot of actresses do porn before they go on to more
legitimate films," Riccuito said. "But Shirley Temple
did it when she was four."

It may not be an orgy scene or S&M, but it is a
four-year-old playing a prostitute. Back then, it was,
apparently, wholesome family entertainment.

It's Shirley Temple being all skanky, which finally
brings us back to Lolita.

In last week's Village Voice, Leland de la Durantaye
wrote of the difficulties involved not only in getting
Lolita published, but in getting it noticed. Nobody
paid any attention to the novel, he writes, until
Graham Greene declared it one of the three best novels
of the year.

Then de la Durantaye drops in the following curious
parenthetical: "Greene exercised great influence, and
some years earlier he had been sued by Shirley
Temple's parents and her studio for a review of Wee
Willie Winkie in which he made reference to her 'neat
and well-developed rump.'"

So what does it all mean? Over the years, people have
blamed an awful lot of our moral decay on Lolita. They
would probably be blaming Gravity's Rainbow for
promoting any number of terrible things, too, should
they ever take the time to read it. But the more you
look into it, the more the real culprit is making
herself known.

Who could've imagined that sweet little curly-headed,
tap-dancing Shirley Temple would turn out to be such a
silent but powerful manipulator of the wickeder,
weirder side of our collective unconscious?

Volume 18, Issue 38

http://www.nypress.com/18/38/news&columns/knipfel.cfm


		
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