Libel Trials Revisited - No 4 - Temple v Night and Day

I am indebted to my friend Graham for reminding me about this libel trial from another age - it caused quite a stir in its day (1936) because it concerned a film review written in ‘Night and Day’ magazine by novelist Graham Greene (thought by many to be one of the leading writers of the 20th century). The review was of the film ‘Wee Willie Winkie’ starring the child actress Shirley Temple.

This is what the plaintiff considered to be the libellous section of Greene’s review -

“Miss Shirley Temple’s case, though, has peculiar interest : infancy with her is a disguise, her appeal is more secret and adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich : her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance : her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short kilts, she is a complete totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square : hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant’s palm is raised : watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep.

It is clever, but it cannot last. 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.”

At the time when this review was written Miss Temple was 8 years old.

It seems clear that Greene did suggest, and certainly intended to suggest, that the film makers were pandering to those older men who had an unhealthy and perverted sexual interest in young children. In some ways the review can be seen (from the perspective of 2006) as a complaint by Greene about the sexualisation of the child in Hollywood, though the ensuing libel action seemed to completely confuse the messenger with the message. In effect, Greene found himself being vilified as some sort of abuser of children for daring to point out that Temple’s films were a magnet for dirty old men.

The film company, Twentieth Century Fox, decided that Temple should sue. Apparently the company were under the impression that Greene actually believed Temple to be a midget adult woman with a 7 year old daughter of her own. In any event the basis of the claim was that Greene’s article damaged her and was libellous to the extent that it suggested she was deliberately sexually provocative.

The trial began before the Lord Chief Justice of England in the Kings Bench Division on 22 March 1938. Temple’s counsel described the article as ‘one of the most horrible libels that one could well imagine’, and went on to describe ‘Night and Day’ magazine as a ‘beastly publication’. By that time, in fact, the magazine was all but finished anyway and it did not survive the trial, foundering and going out of business.

Greene did not attend the trial as he was in Mexico at the time. As things developed, he was forced to apologise via his counsel for the libel and pay £3500 in damages to 20th Century Fox/Temple - a very considerable sum in those days. The apology was given in bad grace - Greene told a friend, “I have to apologise to that bitch Shirley Temple”.

Things could have been worse for Greene had the Lord Chief Justice got his way. His Lordship (possibly a big fan of the juvenile Shirley) wanted Greene arrested and prosecuted for criminal libel, describing the article as ‘a gross outrage’. Greene was initially in Mexico beyond the court’s reach, but when he returned to England it was with the fear of arrest hanging over his head - the papers were sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions but no arrest ever took place.

It is difficult to see how a case such as this could succeed nowadays - particularly since it is patently obvious that Miss Temple’s films did indeed appeal to precisely the constituency which Mr Greene identified.