Blame Shirley Temple's Ass

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?