Word: child
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Rapids, Iowa, at 8:40 a.m. for a quick gulp of coffee. Then she heads back to Room 208 to wait for her third-grade students, who have formed two lines outside the red brick building. This particular morning the girls' line enters first. As they file past, one child, Heidi, stops and shyly hands Bowen a slender envelope. Inside is a bookmark. Its inscription: "To my teacher: thank you for taking the time to share what you have learned...
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...
...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...
...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...
These are variations on motherhood's worst-case scenario: you turn your back for a moment or make, under pressure of conflicting emotions, what seems to you only a minor error in judgment, and suddenly your child is snatched from you. For Lindy Chamberlain (Meryl Streep) in A Cry in the Dark, the loss is permanent: she never sees her baby again, alive or dead. For Anna Dunlap (Diane Keaton) in The Good Mother, the outcome is not quite so cruel: she faces losing custody of her daughter Molly, but not the child's death. Yet both mothers find themselves...