鄧波兒：從童星到外交大使的傳奇人生
摘錄自：天下雜誌 經濟學人電子報 2013/2/14
2014-02-13 Web only 作者：經濟學人
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| 圖片來源：flickr.com/photos/paulsedra/ |
秀蘭．鄧波兒（Shirley
Temple）的人生中一定有黑暗面。傳記作家和訪談者拼命地尋找，卻什麼都找不到；她鍾愛一切，童星時期如此，失去可愛氣質之後也是如此。
她的母親沒有逼她嗎？不，母親只是鼓勵她。她在3歲時拍攝《布勒斯克斯寶寶》之時，母親曾經嚴厲的處罰過她不是嗎？嗯，母親幾次將她送進處罰室，但那教會她紀律，讓她在4歲時「永遠一擊中的」，更在6歲時有能力與李昂．巴利摩（Lionel
Barrymore）在《小上校》中同台較勁。
鄧波兒單是在1934年就演出了8部電影，有些人認為那是遭竊取的童年，但她並不這麼想。她在1935年獲得奧斯卡金像獎，也是史上最年輕的得獎人；牢騷滿腹的格雷安．格林（Graham Greene）說她「完全就是個性感尤物」，但每個看過她演出的人，都不會質疑她演戲的能力。
父母並沒有告訴她當時正值大蕭條，他們只對她說好事。羅斯福不只一次表示，「美國的小寵兒」讓整個國家都好過了一些；那讓鄧波兒非常開心，因為她喜歡讓人快樂，而在她的電影裡，也總是有個甜美的小孩讓大人重新聚首並融化了冰凍的心。
鄧波兒在1935年的每周收入超過1000美元（現在約合1.7萬美元），她每個月的零用錢則為13美元左右。演員生涯結束之時，總計收入超過300萬美元（現值2900萬美元）；後來她發現父親聽信了錯誤的財務建議，只剩下4.4萬美元之時，但她並沒有怪罪父親。
情勢在1939年後急轉直下。進入青春期之後，鄧波兒不再是票房保證，但她只是聳聳肩，那代表她終於可以好好上學。到了1950年，她完全不再拍電影；她再也無法演出天真無邪，但世界仍舊想要這種東西。鄧波兒在1967年競選國會議員失利；但塞翁失馬焉失非福，她先後成為迦納和捷克斯洛伐克大使。罹患乳癌是她的人生低點，但她學會了面對乳癌，更協助他人面對乳癌。
在電影裡，她那閃閃發光的眼睛和開展的雙臂包住了每一個人。如今觀之，她最重要的特徵，就是那個在世界中極為少見、在好萊塢則更加稀有的事物：真誠的歡欣笑容。（黃維德譯）
©The Economist Newspaper Limited 2014
The Economist
Shirley
Temple
A walk on the
bright side
By The Economist
From The Economist
Published: February 13, 2014
Feb 11th 2014, 18:23 by The Economist
Shirley Temple Black, actress and diplomat, died on February 10th, aged
85.
THERE had to be a dark side to Shirley Temple's life. Biographers and
interviewers scrabbled around to find it. The adorable dancing, singing,
curly-haired moppet, 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 heroine of "Curly Top", she was marched upstairs to bed
afterwards by some thin-lipped harridan, and the lights turned resolutely off.
Not a bit of it. She loved it all, both then and years later, when the
cuteness had gone but the dimples remained. Hadn't her mother pushed her into
it? No, just encouraged her, and wrapped her round with affection, including
fixing her 56 ringlets 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 Lionel Barrymore tap-for-tap down the grand staircase in "The
Little Colonel".
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 (whose rickety fortunes she reversed) built her her own 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 rump with her catapult, for which her father spanked
her.
The studios were full of friends: Orson Welles, with whom she played
croquet, Gary Cooper, who did colouring with her, and the kind camera crews.
She loved the strong hands that passed her round like a mascot, and the soft
laps on which she was plumped down (though not J. Edgar Hoover's, which was too
fat). The miniature costumes thrilled her, especially her sailor outfit in
"Captain January", in which she could sashay 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
in "Poor Little Rich Girl" doubted that she could act. She did pathos
and fierce determination (jutting out that little chin!), just as well as she
did smiles.
Her face was on the Wheaties box. It was also on the special Wheaties
blue bowl and pitcher, greeting people at breakfast like a ray of morning sunshine.
Advertisers adored 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."
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 waif bringing grown-ups
back together, emptying misers' pockets and melting frozen hearts. Like the dog
star Rin Tin Tin, to whom she gaily compared herself, she was the bounding,
unwitting antidote to the bleakness of the times.
She was as vague about money as any child would, and should, be. Her
earnings by 1935 were more than $1,000 a week—from which she was allowed about
$13 a month in pocket money—and over her career well over $3m, in current
dollars, from which she was allowed about $13 a month in pocket money. 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.
A toss of curls
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."
In the films, her sparkling eyes and chubby 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.
©The Economist Newspaper Limited 2014
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