Diana Serra Cary
‘Baby Peggy’, toddler star of the silent era whose smiling cheeks disguised a brutal filming schedule
DIANA SERRA CARY, who has died aged 101, was better known to cinemagoers of the silent film era as the child star “Baby Peggy”. Her brief screen career as Baby Peggy began when she was talent-spotted by Century Studios at 19 months and given a leading role alongside Brownie the Wonder Dog in Playmates (1921). By the time she was five she had signed a three-picture deal for $3.5 million and her popularity rivalled that of Jackie Coogan, Charlie Chaplin’s co-star in The Kid.
She received some 1,700,000 fan letters a year and spawned a merchandising industry, with Baby Peggy dolls and Baby Peggy lantern slides. She was adopted as the mascot of the 1924 Democratic Convention in New York, and stood on stage waving a flag next to Franklin D Roosevelt.
A smiling, dimpled figure with chubby cheeks and a jet-black bob, Baby Peggy was a surprisingly accomplished screen actress given her tender years. She played in some 150 films, mostly comedy shorts, many of them exploiting her gift for mimicry to poke gentle fun at adult stars of the silent screen.
In Peg o’the Movies (1923), for example, Baby Peggy assumed the guise of the Hollywood vamp Pola Negri, complete with slinky dress, cigarette and eyeliner. In another film she starred opposite, spoofed, and many felt outacted, Clara Bow.
She also appeared in film adaptations of novels and fairy tales, such as Hansel and Gretel and Jack and the Beanstalk, and in a few full-length motion pictures. In her most popular feature, Captain January (1924), the five-year-old Peggy played a shipwrecked orphan adopted by a kindly old lighthouse keeper (Hobart Bosworth).
Nowadays her working conditions would be considered child abuse – and in later life “Baby Peggy” would campaign for child actors’ rights. As a toddler she worked eight hours a day, six days a week. She was required to perform her own stunts, which included being held underwater in Sea Shore Shapes, escaping from a burning room in The Darling of New York and riding underneath a train in Miles of Smiles.
“We went from one situation to the next: a lake, a manhole, and a canoe, adding an action element, often with a camera placed on my back. They thought children were made of rubber then,” she recalled. When she was not filming, she embarked on extensive personal appearance tours to promote her films.
There was a horrid inevitability about the way her career unravelled. In 1925 her father fell out with Universal’s Sol Lester over her salary and cancelled her contract. She found herself blacklisted and was only able to land one more part in silent films, a minor role in the 1926 picture April Fool.
“There was an argument between my father and the producer, and my two front teeth fell out. We left Beverly Hills and bought a ranch in Wyoming. I had retired at 10.”
Though she appeared in vaudeville, she was judged to be well past her peak and by the mid-1930s she had retired from performing for good. Her parents, meanwhile, had squandered her fortune, and as a young adult she suffered nervous breakdowns.
Nevertheless, she survived, changed her name, converted to Roman Catholicism and went on to have a career as a writer on Hollywood subjects under the name Diana Serra Cary. “I was resurrected from the dead, but in a nice way, you know,” she recalled.
One of two daughters, Peggyjean Montgomery was born at Merced, California, on October 26 1918. Her father Jack, a former cowboy, worked as a stuntman and stand-in for Tom Mix in his cowboy movies. Baby Peggy herself was “discovered” when she visited Century Studios with her mother and a film extra friend. When she was three and a half, she transferred to Universal.
Baby Peggy’s father controlled her career, accompanying her to the studios and negotiating her contracts, though he was jealous of her success, claiming that it was based on her unquestioning obedience to his orders rather than on any innate talent. “My father spent much of his early life breaking horses. He thought raising children was the same,” she recalled.
Her salary became the main constituent of the family income:
“I knew I was the breadwinner from the time I was three because my parents quarrelled a lot about my money.” There were expensive cars, homes and clothing, but no money for Baby Peggy’s education; her father blocked the idea of her going to school. Nor was she encouraged to fraternise with other children. She recalled looking over the fence at her Beverly Hills home and seeing children playing.
“‘Why aren’t they working?’ I asked. I thought all children worked to support their parents.”
Although her film career soon came to an end, seven-year old Baby Peggy was still expected to support the family. From 1925 to 1929, she had some success as a vaudeville performer, though she was frequently ill with tonsillitis: “On several occasions I went on stage so sick they had to put buckets in the wings: I threw up in one before I made my entrance, and in the second when I exited, before changing and going back out for my encore.”
By the early 1930s, there was nothing left of Baby Peggy’s fortune. The little that remained had been lost in the Depression and the family was living hand to mouth. They returned to Hollywood, where Peggy got occasional bit parts in talkies.
She was a member of a youth gang in Cecil B Demille’s This Day and Age. But she could not escape from Baby Peggy: “People would come up to me and say, ‘Oh, you were so cute. My, how you’ve changed’ and things like that. When I was 16 or 18, I had a beautiful portrait made. I went in to pick it up, and the clerk leaned over and said, ‘How does it feel to be a has-been at 16?’” Her final screen appearance was in Having a Wonderful Time in 1935.
At the age of 17 Peggy Montgomery ran away from home and rented an apartment with her sister Louise. She married the actor Gordon “Freckles” Ayres in 1938, but soon realised she had made a mistake: “He told me I couldn’t have a child because that would mean I wouldn’t be Baby Peggy any more. She was stalking me.”
By the time the marriage ended after nine years, Peggy had made up her mind to turn her back on the past.
She set about forging a new identity, getting a job in a book shop, changing her name to Diana Serra and becoming a Catholic. In 1954 she married Bob Cary, an artist, with whom she had a son. They settled in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and later at the seaside community of La Jolla in the south of California.
She went on to work as a magazine writer and author of, among other works, an autobiography, What Ever Happened to Baby Peggy? (1996); Hollywood’s Children: An Inside Account of the Child Star Era (1997) and a biography of her contemporary, Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King (2003). In 2017 she published a novel, The Drowning of the Moon.
Diana Cary’s husband died in 2001; she is survived by their son.