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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.