Books: Iron Whim CHILD STAR: by Shirley Temple Black SHIRLEY TEMPLE: AMERICAN PRINCESS by Anne Edwards Morrow

Shirley Temple is exactly the same age as Mickey Mouse. At 60 he is wealthier, but she has the more interesting tale. The little lodestar of Depression musicals grew up to become a grandmother, Republican spokeswoman, U.S. Ambassador and U.N. delegate. The journey is so convoluted it takes two volumes to chart: a biography, and a chronicle by the subject herself.

This double coverage results in a few collisions. In her spirited account, Child Star, the actress recalls some work with Bill (“Bojangles”) Robinson in The Little Colonel: “We were the first interracial dancing couple in movie history.” She was six; he was 56. In American Princess, Anne Edwards describes it differently: “An ‘inside’ joke was that a Temple picture was incomplete without at least one ‘darky.’ “

But for most of the way there is little disagreement. Both books candidly discuss the child’s unripe screen sexuality, which also seemed to bother the Roman Catholic League of Decency. In 1937 a priest who had been sent to investigate informed the Temple family: “The rumor is, Shirley is a midget.” Convinced she was merely a talented minor, he departed. Then Graham Greene weighed in, during his tenure as film critic for the British magazine Night and Day: “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.” That passage cost more than $12,000 in libel damages. Greene and the editors learned in court what Alice Faye had found on the set: to be an adult around Shirley Temple “was a pretty thankless job. You had to work to hold your own.”

In the great show business tradition, Shirley was acting in the interests of her parents. According to Edwards, the little girl “held on to . . . love and approval the only way she knew how, by continuing to dance while her mother watched.” Her demanding father, a bank manager who quit his career to manage his daughter’s, squandered most of her earnings in bad investments. The money was irreplaceable; like others of her Hollywood generation, the child woke up one morning to find that postwar America had outgrown its innocents. The features continued until she reached the age of 21. But Shirley was effectively finished at 17, the year she married actor John Agar, soon to begin his descent into violent alcoholism.

What distinguishes Temple is an absence of rancor. Producer Arthur Freed exposed himself to her when she was eleven; she now claims to have found the act hilarious. Despite her father’s fiscal mismanagement, she has kind memories of him, and her autobiography concludes with the tribute “Thanks, Mom.”

This generosity of spirit may derive from a series of offscreen successes. Temple seems to have been a natural Republican: at ten she watched Eleanor Roosevelt bend over at a Hyde Park barbecue. Shirley grabbed her slingshot: “I let fly. Bull’s-eye!” At 22 she married conservative businessman Charles Black, whose politics she has espoused ever since. Although her own account stops in 1954 after the birth of their third child, what followed takes up 50% of Edwards’ biography. Shirley Temple Black ran unsuccessfully for Congress. Later she was stricken with cancer. But the old iron whim exerted itself, and she began the second phase of her career. After regaining her health she was appointed Gerald Ford’s Ambassador to Ghana and then U.S. chief of protocol. Edwards reports that no important assignments came in the Reagan years, “perhaps because Shirley had championed his then-rival George Bush in the early days of the 1980 presidential race.” Watch for the sequel.