What do we want from our star children?

Yet Master Betty ruled the small province of Parnassus reserved for underage actors until the advent of Shirley Temple—a measure of her talent, or perhaps her moment, that nearly a century later, her name is still the first that comes to mind when we think of child stars. Temple’s autobiography, simply titled “Child star“, like its author, a classic little American novel. Hard-minded, unsentimental, and unexpectedly bleak, closer to “The Day of the Locusts” than “The Good Ship’s Sucker,” her memoir, like its author, a classic little American novel, presents a witty and often scathing portrait of 1930s Hollywood. The voice is retrospective, but it reproduces her childhood mind so convincingly that one often forgets the book was written decades later. It reads as if six years have been reviewing her contracts with a jaundiced eye.

She started on “Baby Burlesks,” a series of short films produced by studio Poverty Row called Educational Pictures. Unfortunately, it can be easily watched on YouTube, and once watched it cannot be easily forgotten. With the adorable look of early porn films that they uncannily resemble, these shorts feature young children in diapers and above-the-waist “adult” costumes, acting out adult romances complete with cocktails, kisses and French lingerie. From there, Temple moved to Twentieth Century Fox, where she appeared in musicals and period pieces that helped make the Depression bearable. She was a band professional, and so indefatigable that she could dance with Bill (Bojangles) Robinson without losing her step. (Those scenes are also on YouTube, and they’re good.)

Throughout her memoir, Temple’s advice on dealing with the press is sage: Give them time, but don’t answer their questions. She’s also strict about what producers want from child stars, which is a repeatable product with a short shelf life. She grows impatient with her mother’s tardiness, treats her colleagues with brisk professionalism, and writes with chilling composure about her powers of flirtation and control, which she wields with a well-rehearsed, sometimes feigned, innocence. She remembers climbing the laps with the confidence and pride of a little geisha. There is a chilling scene where Arthur Freed accuses her in one M-GM office, while in another her mother is attacked by Louis B. Mayer.

A scandal arose when Graham Greene was writing for a short-lived London magazine Night and daysimilar to new yorker, She published an article accusing Temple of being “a complete idiot… Watch how she measures a man with sharp eyes and dark depravity.” The ensuing lawsuit prompted him to move to Mexico and eventually write “Power and Glory.” For her part, Temple has never admitted to “dimple sleaze,” but she has admitted to having sharp studio eyes, and is far from modern in her own account. She stated that her husband was shocked when he discovered that she was not a virgin, although she left the details vague. By the time she was writing, she had become an accomplished diplomat – an actual diplomat, with postings abroad – shining in another field, one with its own secrets.

The sexualization of child stardom is usually discussed in terms of girls. However, even beyond the overt cases of abuse, Mickey Rooney’s memoirs and autobiography reveal an illness no different. Trained to be more predator than prey, Ronnie is nonetheless trapped in the expectation of constant gratification—encouraged, even as a teenager, to assert himself through conquest so compulsively that he verges on a form of self-effacement. He admits that by the age of 19, what his wholesome upbringing at MGM had taught him was that “everyone wanted to fuck him.” He records what feels less like a series of dalliances than a perpetual sexual purge, one encounter after another, at random, even when the obvious objects of his teenage interest (Ava Gardner, Norma Shearer) seem startling enough to stick around.

Little Shirley’s diary, which one might expect to be a period artifact, turns out to be a model for our times. Jennette McCurdy, in particular, came from the same poor white background as Temple and was led by the same kind of stage mother. Temple points out that Hollywood had three social classes: the moneyed people at the top, the transplanted “East Coast” creatives in the middle, and at the bottom, a legion of poor whites desperate to break into it—the people Nathaniel West captured and caricatured. McCurdy sees much the same structure today, and dispassionately describes her working-class Mormon family in Garden Grove, Calif. — her grandfather books tickets at Disneyland, grandmother a receptionist at a retirement home, father an employee at Home Depot, mother a tarmac beautician who takes shifts at Target. No one can earn much for a living. When her grandfather retired, Disney’s main post-employment benefit seemed to be lifetime Disneyland discounts. In this context, making a child star was not just an opportunity to enter the elite, but a way to pay the rent.

So McCurdy was a lottery ticket, and a winning one. Her memoir details the agents and managers who specialized in trapping children, and whom she charmed enough to secure an audition at Nickelodeon. There is a slight moral superiority over the men who chased down Shakespeare’s rival boy actors, as these agents treated children as commodities – “I’ve booked her!” This was the only term of praise for them – provided that no one was forced to be there and that everyone knew the rules. The key skill, more than acting, was to be smart, tender and ‘ready’: ready, no need to learn an accent or a dance step, and actually able to sound like an Aussie, or enough like someone who makes it at five. p.M. For an after-school audience. (Another important gift — and this is the one she received — is being able to play younger than your actual age.) McCurdy also recounts how her mother, who, to be fair, was already dying of cancer, carefully coached her through the eating disorder, even down to the mechanics of bulimia, in an attempt to curb puberty.

What is a good child actor, anyway? People who can really act — like Margaret O’Brien in “Meet Me in St. Louis” and Patty Duke in “The Miracle Worker” — have the gift of emotional availability. They are not pretending; They live. What stays with us is not the feeling of impersonation, but the feeling of excess. We want the children on the screen not to become other people, but to be themselves, only more than that – to break through the childhood caution, the shyness that all dependent beings share, and reach a state of unmediated emotion. (Henry Thomas does just that in his famous screen test for “E.T.”) That’s why we love Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz” — a role that Temple coveted but lost, partly due to the machinations of MGM. Garland captures the thrill of reaching adulthood. Shirley was dancing through it, smiling; Garland makes it painful, with his unparalleled ability to walk the tightrope between childhood and adolescence without betraying either.

At the heart of every acting career lies a paradox: ambition is self-recognition; Art is self-disappearing. Alyson Stoner writes poignantly about her exhaustion with the roles they played and the fictional families into which they were temporarily absorbed. (Stoner was one of the kids in the movie “Cheaper by the Dozen” two decades ago, and felt closer to these imaginary siblings than to his own siblings.) Being a star means asserting yourself the part; To be a good actor is to disappear into it. This contradiction leads to an even deeper wound in the life of the lucky artist. The greatest young actors – Marlon Brando, Daniel Day-Lewis – seem haunted by this: having mastered the art of self-effacement, they find themselves loved for being themselves. Hence Brando with his bongos, and Day Lewis with his cobblestones. The ego needed to overcome shyness and stage fright collides with the endless rejection that characterizes the profession.