Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Shirley Temple Black...

...died on Monday at age 85. That's the actress above with, yep, Ronald Reagan in the 1947 film, That Hagen Girl. “He was one of the best kissers,” she told the television show Entertainment Tonight in 1988. She also added that the film was “probably one of the worst movies either one of us ever made.”

From her obit in the Times: 

From 1935 to 1939 she was the most popular movie star in America, with Clark Gable a distant second. She received more mail than Greta Garbo and was photographed more often than President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

And then there's this amazing tidbit. At age 12 or 13 (it's not clear):

On her first visit to MGM, Mrs. Black wrote in her autobiography, the producer Arthur Freed unzipped his trousers and exposed himself to her. Being innocent of male anatomy, she responded by giggling, and he threw her out of his office.

It must have been a different age, because as far as I can tell, nothing ever happened to Mr. Freed. In fact, the incident isn't even mentioned on his Wikipedia page. Can you imagine if something like that happened today?

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