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" Shirley Temple died last night, far from her fame. A publicist announced that she was surrounded by her family in her home in Woodside, California. She must have known which picture was going to appear in the obituaries. An eighty-five-year-old lady with a lot of life behind her would inevitably be recalled as a six-year-old girl. Shirley Temple was the first child movie star, but she was also the wisest. She understood the cruelty of celebrity before its trajectory was so well-established. It&amp;#039;s still hard to imagine the supersize, absolute celebrity that Shirley Temple achieved. At her height, she made Brad Pitt today look like a provincial touring actor. She was, by far, the biggest box office draw for four consecutive years, from 1935 to 1938. The sheet music of &amp;quot;On the Good Ship Lollipop&amp;quot; sold half a million copies. She was more than famous. As a child star, she was the icon of her times. She represented the desires as well as the aspirations of the whole world. She was pluck embodied. She was hope and determination embodied. She was cute, white innocence embodied. And she achieved the apotheosis of fame: She was turned into a cocktail. That&amp;#039;s as close to eternity as celebrity culture gets.  She also had the great fortune to be smart enough to recognize in later life what all this fame was about. The Internet is full of &amp;quot;where are they now&amp;quot; stories, and they are almost never happy. We currently seem to be witnessing the collapse of Justin Bieber, who once accounted for three percent of the server capacity of Twitter. Stephen King, talking about Justin Bieber, tweeted what we all already know: &amp;quot;For the young celeb, life is a banquet of free food. What they don&amp;#039;t tell you is that you are often the last course.&amp;quot; Shirley Temple about the monstrosity of celebrity from an early age. &amp;quot;I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;Mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked for my autograph.&amp;quot; She gamely tried to make a post-childhood career for herself, but quickly realized that the public didn&amp;#039;t want her as an adult. They remembered her as a child, and she was physically unremarkable as a teenager. She no longer represented pluck or the aspirations of the Depression-era public. She no longer represented anything to anybody. Instead of completely falling apart, she rebuilt. In light of the careers of later child stars, her life after fame is something like a miracle. Not only did she retire and marry a citizen and remain happily married to him for fifty-four years, she even managed to develop a healthy relationship to her earlier work. In the 1960s, when the inevitable nostalgia for her &amp;#039;30s output reappeared, she did not try to become a new Shirley Temple. She did television shows and books for children, just like the public wanted.  Then, most miraculously of all, she became useful. She raised children. She was president of the Multiple Sclerosis Society. She was appointed to the United States delegation to the United Nations. In 1974, she was made ambassador to Ghana, and by all reports was superb at the job. When she was ambassador to Prague, she earned praise from Henry Kissinger.  Her story should give hope, but also guidance, to former child stars. She saw the size of her fame and knew its destructive power intimately. &amp;quot;Any star can be devoured by human adoration, sparkle by sparkle,&amp;quot; she said. Shirley Temple figured out that her fame had very little to do with herself. It had much more to do with what people needed at a particular time at a particular place. She triumphed by overcoming any residual hunger for the love of a public that wanted to love her to death.  The lesson for Justin Bieber should be obvious. It&amp;#039;s time to come home to Canada, attend university, maybe get a law degree, find somebody to marry, and then twenty years from now, when all the little girls who had posters of him on their walls are running the world, become prime minister. Shirley Temple showed that that&amp;#039;s not impossible. All it takes is a little humility and hard work. That&amp;#039;s how you end up dying surrounded by a family that loves you rather than dead in a ditch in a yellow Lamborghini. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a27345/shirley-temple-dies/>