Sorts of Success

Stefan Collini notes that Graham Greene became the literary editor of Night and Day, which folded within a year (LRB, 5 August). In fact, Greene was the cause of the magazine’s failure. His review of Wee Willie Winkie, a vehicle for the eight-year-old Shirley Temple, claimed that ‘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.’ ‘Infancy with her is a disguise,’ he went on, ‘her appeal is more secret and more adult … her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry.’ All this caused 20th Century Fox to sue for libel. The judge described Greene’s review as ‘a gross outrage’ and awarded damages of #3500, which led directly to Night and Day‘s closure. Temple retired from the movies at the age of 21 and went on to a different sort of success, as State Department chief of protocol and ambassador to Czechoslovakia. (Soon after she left Prague, the country split in two.)

Mark Etherton
London W2