LAST OF THE SILENT MOVIE STARS
SHE was Hollywood’s original Million- Dollar Baby. With her brown eyes as big as saucers, cute bob haircut and cherubic bee- stung smile Peggy- Jean Montgomery was only four when she signed a staggering $ 1million- a- movie deal.
Famed as Baby Peggy she was the most acclaimed child star of the Roaring Twenties. Fans bought her signature dolls, jewellery, canned peaches, sheet music and even her own brand of milk.
Five secretaries handled her annual haul of 1.7 million fan letters. She was chosen as the Democratic Party mascot and shared the convention stage with future US president Franklin D Roosevelt.
Yet by the age of seven she was washed up, her fortune squandered by her family and she slipped into anonymity – until now.
At 97 Baby Peggy is the last living silent movies tar, the final survivor of a golden era when she topped the box office alongside Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks and It- girl Clara Bow.
“People said my performances changed their lives,” she says. “Child stars were important in those days. And Baby Peggy made a pretty good dent in people’s lives. I never expected to live this long or for people to still remember me after almost a century.
“But I wasn’t impressed by fame or other stars. It was just a job. I assumed that all children worked to support their families. My whole childhood I was exploited. I never had friends or played with other children. I was worth about $ 4million at the age of six but never earned any praise from my parents.”
Peggy fell into movies in 1920, visiting a Hollywood studio with her mother and spotted by a director seeking an infant to co- star in a comedy with Brownie The Wonder Dog. She was just 20 months old .“That first film was very successful so they put me under contract,” she says.
Her authoritarian father Jack, a cowboy- turned- stunt double for western star Tom Mix, directed Peggy’s performances like an animal trainer, barking commands. “My father would put me through a few things like registering fear, anger, happiness, sorrow. He would snap his fingers, and say ,‘ Cry !’ And I would cry. I was very outgoing and I could take the discipline without being cowed.”
She filmed more than 150 two-reelers ho rt films before she turned four, playing detectives, reporters, beggars, bellboys, movie stars, matadors and Mounties. “I had a great work ethic even as a child,” she says. “It was important to me to do a good job and to earn the respect of my co- workers.”
BUT she paid a price for fame. Peggy did not attend school until she was 12 and there were no work safety laws protecting children. “At times I was exposed to real danger,” she recalls. “I did most of my own stunts.”
For a dramatic sequence in one film the director placed her in a house and actually set it ablaze. The door she was supposed to escape through burst into flames and she had to scramble through a burning window to survive. “They said I was fearless, which was not true.”
Filming various movies she was accidentally thrown from a speeding truck, hit by a bicycle and nearly drowned while shooting an ocean rescue. She saw co- star Jack Earle blinded by falling scenery and watched a trained elephant break its chains and kill a studio employee before it was shot.
Yet the studios made her life seem glamorous. Newsreels show Baby Peggy visiting Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford at their Beverly Hills mansion and socialising with stars including Harold Lloyd.
At the age of four she graduated to full-length silent feature films including The Darling Of New York, Captain January and Family Secret. But her father, who quit his career to manage Peggy, struggled with her success. “At less than two years of age I was earning four times more than my father and he felt emasculated.”
Winning a $ 1million movie deal at four – worth $ 14million at today’s prices – her parents began spending lavishly. They bought a 14- room mansion in the Hollywood Hills, a $ 30,000 Duesenberg car and a ranch in Wyoming. “They got into the habit of spending more than was earned,” she says.
Peggy’s father demanded more and in a clash with studio bosses broke her contract. The studios closed ranks and by the age of six Baby Peggy found herself blackballed. “It was hurtful and I found it extremely diffi cult to survive the horror of being shunted aside.”
The family’s business adviser ran off with their fortune and she was suddenly broke.
Peggy fl ed to vaudeville performing four shows daily for $ 2,000 a week until 1928. “The talkies killed vaudeville,” she says. Peggy returned to Hollywood, attending school with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. “I tried to make a
During the Roaring Twenties Peggy- Jean Montgomery was the darling of Hollywood earning $ 1million a movie. But she paid a very high price for being a child actress
comeback but it didn’t work. People would come up to me and say, “Oh, you were so cute. My, how you’ve changed.”
In desperation she worked as a film extra for $7 a day, struggling for almost a decade to revive her career. “Worst of all my fame ostracised me. I didn’t have a date until I was 22 and married the first boy who took me out .”
She wed Gordon Ayers in 1938, divorcing after 10 years, and in 1954 married artist Bob Cary, her husband until his death in 2001. Their son Mark, aged 54, helps care for her now.
Peggy struggled for years to deal with the aftermath of fame and its loss. “I had identity problems from the time I was growing up and suffered depression. Baby Peggy was very powerful. Nobody knew who I was. I mean me, I could not be me as long as I was carrying her. I went through a five-year period that was very, very close to a nervous breakdown. Certainly it was an identity crisis.
“I lived with failure. Baby Peggy’s and my own failure to get on my feet.”
Trying to shed her troubled past Peggy changed her name to Diana Serra Cary. She became a writer, penning books about early Hollywood and her memoir Whatever Happened To Baby Peggy?
LIVING modestly in a sleepy Californian town 280 miles north of Hollywood, despite two recent minor strokes Peggy is agile with her walker and working on a new Hollywood history. And she urges parents not to put their children in movies. “You are exploited and fame has no substance. It can be very painful and children pay the price.
“Parents are the ones, very often, who are the culprits. They want the child on the screen, they want money, they want fame, they want reflective glory. Don’t put the child in the big arena. It is frightening.
“I don’t have any anger or rancour toward anyone or toward Hollywood. Even when it was happening I realised it was nobody’s fault but you get hurt in spite of that.”
She only wishes the memories of her glory days were happier. “It wasn’t fun and it was hard work with its ups and downs. But I have no regrets.”