A woman pointed a loaded gun at her during a live radio broadcast. A powerful MGM producer exposed himself to her in a closed-door meeting when she was a teenager. Two decades later she hid on a Prague hotel roof watching Soviet tanks fire on unarmed civilians. This episode traces how Shirley Temple Black, the most famous child on the planet, dismantled a billion-dollar persona and rebuilt herself as a congressional candidate, United Nations delegate, ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia, and the first female U.S. chief of protocol.

The conversation covers the Baby Burlesques shorts she performed phonetically as a toddler, Franklin D. Roosevelt's praise of her films as a Depression-era antidote, her groundbreaking dance partnership with Bill Bojangles Robinson, the merchandising empire in which her dolls made up nearly a third of all doll ...