The extraordinary story of Baby Peggy

At the ripe old age of 96, Slapstick patron Diana Serra Carey is one of the last living links to the golden age of silent movies. Her extraordinary story is told in a new documentary, The Elephant in the Room, which will be introduced by its director, Vera Iwerebor, at this year’s festival on Fri 23 January (go here for full details). One of the few child stars to enjoy a post-fame career, albeit belatedly, Diana became a respected writer and historian who specialises in the child star phenomenon and the early years of Hollywood. This interview took place back in 2006, when she was guest of honour at the second Slapstick festival.

The story of the child star is a familiar one: pushy parents, enormous riches, exploitation, puberty, career decline, bankruptcy, drink, drugs, mental problems, probable early demise. But this is by no means a new phenomenon. Back in the heyday of the silent movie, grown-up stars could hardly chuck a custard pie without hitting a fun-sized moppet. The little blighters often travelled in packs (Our Gang, the Little Rascals). But only two nippers could open a film in the early 20s: Jackie Coogan, who played opposite Charlie Chaplin in The Kid, and his playmate and future biographer Margaret Montgomery, who went by the screen name of Baby Peggy.

These days, Baby Peggy prefers to be known by the name she adopted later in life: Diana Serra Cary. “People would say, ‘Oh, you were Baby Peggy? Whatever happened to your money? Whatever happened to your fame? What a mess you’ve made of your life,’” she explains matter-of-factly. “After I got married, I thought that would end. But the minute I said Peggy – even though I had a new last name – they would recognise me. So I changed it. Peggy sounds awfully frivolous, like Mitzy and Mimi. Those were chorus girls’ names when I grew up. Diana came from Diana Wynyard in Cavalcade. She had dignity and didn’t look like a floozy.”

A screen star at 20 months old and washed up by the age of eight, she made around 100 two-reel shorts and five feature films during her short career. By the age of six, she had a $1 million-a-picture deal, hung out with the likes of Harold Lloyd, and was a regular at Pickfair – Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford’s luxurious mansion, where 20s Hollywood royalty gathered. Many of her comedies were parodies of mainstream films, in which she impersonated the likes of Rudolph Valentino and Mary Pickford. The best-known of her features, Captain January (1924), was later remade as a vehicle for Shirley Temple. But when the work dried up, her family was completely broke. So where did all that money go? “There are a lot of people to take your money when you’re a kid, I’ll tell you,” she says wryly. “It’s as easy as taking candy from a baby, as they say. Your managers take a chunk, investments take a chunk, and my parents lived very well. My father loved cars. He had three or four in the garage all the time. And he had horses and stables.”

Diana’s father was a cowboy who wound up in the movies as a stuntman, but never achieved the stardom he craved. Instead, he put his energy into making his youngest daughter a star. But he had little business sense and was conned out of the money he didn’t fritter away. Becoming the family’s main breadwinner at the age of three or four must be a bizarre experience. “It is. A child feels very responsible. I probably wouldn’t have known about it if my parents hadn’t fought within my earshot. But they were careless. They quarrelled about my salary. My mother thought my father wasn’t aggressive enough and we should get a Jewish manager, who could handle these people who were primarily Jewish. They were very good, shrewd businessmen, and my father was not.”

Nonetheless, she enjoyed the work. “Almost every morning, we set out with a cameraman, a gag man, my father, and whatever animal was working with me, and we never knew where we were going. They made it up as they went along. It was typical slapstick. I liked what I did. I didn’t know anything else. I had no other agenda. I hadn’t played with other children, so I never played games. I didn’t have a peer group, so I didn’t come home and say ‘Oh, I never got to do this or that. I’m losing my childhood.’ That never crossed my mind. I didn’t know what a childhood was. My whole sense of values lay with the respect of my co-workers. They were all adults, and so as a consequence I could carry on a pretty good conversation with an adult but I was hopeless with children.”

The height of the Depression was not a good time to find yourself penniless and unemployed. Having received an offer of $3,000 a week as a vaudeville headliner, Diana hit the road for four years, where “the anger and the rage between my parents over having lost everything really exploded”. By the time she was 11, the work dried up and the money she had earned inevitably disappeared. Diana was left with no education, living on the dude ranch her father had bought with the last remnants of her earnings. “It took me until I was about 30 to begin to suffer the walking breakdown,” she says, though any bitterness she once felt has been erased over time.

A bad marriage followed a failed Hollywood comeback. “I got married because I found I couldn’t get out of the trap any other way. I hated to do that, because I wanted to make a decent decision. I didn’t want to fight with my husband the rest of my life like my parents did. But I had no choice. It was the only door open and I took it. It lasted nine years because I put up with anything.”

After her divorce, she decided to turn her early passion for writing into a new career, beginning in 1975 with a book about Hollywood cowboys. This was followed by a study of child stars and a biography of Jackie Coogan. Her autobiography, Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy?, was published in 1996.

So how has the child star experience changed over the last 90 years? “Actually, very little, unfortunately. I tried very hard to effect changes so that children wouldn’t have a lot of the trauma that I went through. Of course, now we have the additional problems of drugs, which in those days were not within the reach of children. However, the problem still lies with the families. They’re often on the brink of dysfunction and once the child becomes a breadwinner everybody else quits. Those kids can be making, like [the late ‘Diff’rent Stokes’ star] Gary Coleman, $65,000 an episode on TV. And at the end, the rug is pulled out from under him. So at the most crucial time in his life – maybe 18 or 20 – he has no skills and his resume is worthless. When my great friend Roddy McDowell was about 17, they called him into the office and said ‘OK Roddy, you’re through.’ And Roddy, in his typical way, said, ‘I’m 17. I daresay, I’m just beginning.’ And they said. ‘Not in your case. You’re finished.’ And so he had to go to New York and start all over again learning how to act.”

The experiences of the Culkins, the Colemans and even the Olsens follow a time-honoured pattern, she argues, because US law gives parents the rights to their children’s salaries while they remain minors, with no obligation that these earnings should be held in trust. “Gary Coleman had to sue his parents for $65 million. Then there’s Jackie Coogan, who sued his parents for $4 million in 1938. When I wrote his biography, I was appalled at how that family laid in ambush for him. I mean, they knew from the beginning what they were doing. There was all this rhetorical talk about how they were setting up an iron-clad trust fund. It never existed.”

While most of her features survive, the majority of the Baby Peggy two-reelers were burned when they returned from touring the world. This was standard practice at the time to recover a couple of dollars’ worth of silver nitrate. But they’re still popping up in archives across Europe, where Peggy was as popular as she was in the US. Curiously, the 2006 Slapstick festival marked her first ever visit to these shores. Her father forbade her to tour here, as he bore the Brits a grudge ever since his employer’s cattle ranch was taken over by a British syndicate. She first met up with Paul Merton and Chris Daniels from Bristol Silents at the 2004 Pordenone silent film festival in Italy. “I think what we’re seeing is a real groundswell of interest in silent films,” she says of the Festival’s success. “They’ve now saved so many films that were thought lost. Masterpieces have been found that were never commercially profitable, like Buster Keaton’s The General. To me, that’s one of the greatest films ever made. I first saw it in 2004, and I was just stunned. The things I’ve seen at the festivals have astounded me.”