单选题
Shirley Temple: A Walk on the Bright Side
A. There had to be a dark side to Shirley Temple's life.
Biographers (传记作者) and interviewers tried to dig it up. The lovely dancing, singing, curly-haired girl, the world's top-earning star from 1935 to 1938, surely shed tears once the cameras were off. Her little feet surely ached. Perhaps, like the main character of
Curly Top, she was marched upstairs to bed afterwards by some thin-lipped unpleasant woman, and the lights turned unhesitatingly off.
B. Not a bit of it. She loved it all, both then and years later, when the cuteness had gone but the
dimples (酒窝) remained. Hadn't her mother pushed her into it? No, just encouraged her, and wrapped her round with affection, including fixing her 56
ringlets (长卷发) every night and gently making her repeat her next day's lines until sleep crept up on her. Hadn't she been punished cruelly while making her
Baby Burlesks, when she was three? Well, she had been sent several times to the punishment box, which was dark and had only a block of ice to sit on. But that taught her discipline so that, by the age of four, she would 'always hit the mark'—and, by the age of six, be able to match the great Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson tap-for-tap down the grand stairway in
The Little Colonel.
C. To some it seemed a stolen childhood, with eight feature films to her name in 1934, her breakthrough year, alone. Not to her, when Twentieth-Century Fox (born out of struggling Fox Studios that year on her shining name alone) built her a little bungalow on the lot, with a rabbit pen and a swing in a tree. She had a bodyguard and a secretary, who by 1934 had to answer 4,000 fan-letters a week. But whenever she wanted to be a tomboy, she was. In the presidential garden at Hyde Park she hit Eleanor Roosevelt on the bottom with her
catapult (弹弓), for which her father spanked her.
D. The studios were full of friends: Orson Welles, with whom she played
croquet (槌球游戏), Gary Cooper, who did colour with her, and the kind camera crews. She loved the strong hands that passed her round like a
mascot (吉祥物), and the soft laps on which she sit (J. Edgar Hoover's being the softest). The miniature costumes thrilled her, especially her sailor outfit in
Captain January, in which she could
sashay (神气活现地走) and jump even better; as did her miniature Oscar in 1935, the only one ever awarded to somebody so young. Grouchy Graham Greene mocked her as 'a complete totsy', but no one watching her five different expressions while eating a forkful of
spinach (菠菜) in
Poor Little Rich Girl doubted that she could act. She did sadness and fierce determination (sticking out that little chin!), just as well as she did smiles.
E. Her face was on the Wheaties box. It was also on the special Wheaties blue bowl and pot, greeting people at breakfast like a ray of morning sunshine. Advertisers loved her, from General Electric to Lux soap to Packard cars. After
Stand up and Cheer! in 1934 dolls appeared wearing her polka-dot dress, and after
Bright Eyes the music for 'The Good Ship Lollipop' was on every piano, as well as everyone's brains: 'Where bon-bons play/On the sunny beach of Peppermint Bay.'
F. Her parents did not tell her there was a Depression on. They mentioned only good things to her. Franklin Roosevelt declared more than once that 'America's Little Darling' made the country feel better, and that pleased her, because she loved to make people happy. She had no idea why they should be otherwise. Her films were all about the sweet child bringing grown-ups back together,
emptying misers' (守财奴) pockets and melting frozen hearts. Like the dog star Rin Tin Tin, to whom she cheerfully compared herself, she was the bounding, unwitting
antidote (缓解之物) to the gloom of the times.
G. She was as vague about money as any child would, and should be. Her earnings by 1935 were more than $1,000 (now $17,000) a week—from which she was allowed about $13 a month in pocket money—and by the end of her career had sailed past $3m (now $29m). But when she found out later that her father had taken bad financial advice, and that only $44,000 was left in the trusts, she did not blame him. She remembered the motto about spilt milk, and got on with her life.
H. Things appeared to dive sharply after 1939, when her teenage face—the darker, straighter hair, the troubled look—failed to be a box-office draw. She missed the lead in
The Wizard of Oz, too. She shrugged it off; it meant she could go to a proper school for the first time, at Westlake, which was just as exciting as making movies. By 1950 she had stopped making films altogether; well, it was time. She couldn't do innocence any more, and that was what the world still wanted. Her first husband was a drunk and a disaster, but the marriage brought her 'something beautiful', her daughter Susan. The second marriage, anyway, lasted 55 years. She lost a race for Congress in 1967; but when that door closed another opened, as an ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia. Breast cancer was a low point, but she learned to cope with it, and helped others to cope. 'I don't like to do negatives,' she told Michael Parkinson. 'There are always pluses to things.'
I. In the films, her sparkling eyes and
chubby (胖乎乎的) open arms included everyone; one toss of her shiny curls was an invitation to fun. Her trademark was, it turned out, that rare thing in the world, and rarer still in Hollywood: a genuine smile of delight.