Blame Shirley Temple's Ass

[Paul Mackin]

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

IT must be very hard today to understand the kind of stir certain  
books and movies could make in the U.S. in the mid fifties.  The  
Knippel article makes it even harder to fathom by leaving out the  
mention of the American Motion Picture Production Code and similar  
trends in publishing and their combined effects on the American  
psyche. Starting in 1934 and lasting about 25 or 30 years America was  
kind of surrealist place when explicit sexaul matters were completely  
absent from movies and any book at all likely be be read by more than  
a few people. (Books weren't quite as restricted as movies but it was  
only a difference of degree. ) So we had a situation in which sexual  
matters including incest, child sex, homosexuality were in everyone's  
mind but information had to be transfered solely by word of mouth and  
mostly among peer groups.  Children talked to other children. Adults  
to adults.  And all the time the  popular media never let on that  
such things existed.  So along comes a book like Lolita . . .

It was an odd period to live though.  And to think about  
retrospectively.

P.

On Sep 21, 2005, at 4:49 PM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
> 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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