'Dimpled Depravity"

Any lawful enterprise prepared to pay Lloyd's of London the right price can insure itself against almost any emergency. But lately Lloyd's rate on libel insurance has jumped prohibitively skyhigh. For shrewd, dumpy Lord Chief Justice, Baron Hewart, has applied England's oppressive libel laws so sternly that rare has been the libel which could be successfully defended.

Night and Day, a London imitation of The New Yorker, was published from last July to January, then folded up. Its best piece of fortune was that it had libel insurance when dimpled, kink-curly Shirley Temple sued it because of Critic Graham Greene's review of her Wee Willie Winkie. One of England's famed film critics, Oxonian Greene, a devout Catholic, had found Shirley's acting offensive, and offensively intimated that it appealed to man's baser sex instincts. "She wore trousers," he wrote, "with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich. . . . Her admirers--middle-aged men and clergymen--respond to her dubious coquetry . . . agile studio eyes . . . dimpled depravity," etc.

Last week counsel for the defunct magazine, with the fear of the Lord Chief Justice in their hearts, decided not to risk a trial. The suit was publicly settled out of court. Author, proprietor, publisher and printer agreed to pay Shirley Temple $10,000, to hand over an additional $7,500 to Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., producers of Wee Willie Winkie. It was announced that the $17,500, when collected, would go to charity.

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