Baby Peggy made her film debut at 18 months. By 10, she was one of the biggest child stars in Hollywood. Then came the talkies – and obscurity. Ninety years on, she and other silent screen actors reveal what happened next

In 1922, when Hollywood was young and anarchic, an actor known as Baby Peggy made a silent film called The Darling Of New York. Her career was booming and this was a major role, the movie pivoting on a scene in which she would be trapped – title-cards illuminating the horror – in a burning bedroom. On the day of the shoot, propmen doused their set in kerosene. Then they positioned Baby Peggy in the middle and lit everything on fire – including, the actor thinks by accident, the door by which she was meant to escape. Forced to improvise, she had to claw a way out across a burning windowsill, her performance later praised for its realism. Baby Peggy was four years old. “They said I was fearless,” she remembers. “Which was not true.”

Baby Peggy lived at the time on Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills, in a mansion paid for with the earnings of three dozen silent films. The little girl was as much of a draw in her day as Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, even Charlie Chaplin. “Honey,” she was told, when she sat down for an interview, “do you realise you’re the youngest self-made millionaire in the history of the world?” From the age of 18 months, she was “the Child Wonder”, “the Kutest Kiddie on the Screen”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Baby Peggy as two different characters in Carmen, 1923.

Today, Baby Peggy is 96 and goes by the name Diana Serra Cary. She lives modestly in the sleepy town of Gustine, 300 miles north of Hollywood, where, on a bright spring day, a Kenny G song, By The Time This Night Is Over, plays from speakers in the town centre. She meets me in her bungalow, leaning on a walking frame, dressed in a bright blouse and black skirt. Her hair is pulled back so that the first thing you notice are the large, dark, glassy eyes that once engaged moviegoers before sparkling repartee or soupy dialogue could.

She gave her first interview, she tells me, when she was three. That was in 1922. Since then, there have been movies with sound, movies with colour, latterly “movies with all these explosions”. There was the second world war and the 60s and the internet. And now here she is, being interviewed again. “Someone walks up, sits down, asks questions.” She shrugs: not much has changed.

Pickford, Fairbanks and Chaplin are long gone. Mickey Rooney’s massive life – 300 films, eight wives – began when he was a child star in the silent era, and ended last spring, when he died at 93. Perhaps a dozen men and women who worked in silent film are still around (there is a Wikipedia page that keeps track of them, via a grimly shrinking list), but these were mostly extras, ensemble players. When Rooney passed away, I started thinking about getting on a plane to Gustine. There was only one real star of the silents left. “Last one,” Cary says, nodding. “Yeah.”

Cary’s father, Jack Montgomery, was a park ranger who had been to the cinema once, to see The Great Train Robbery, when he moved his family to Los Angeles to seek work as a stuntman in cowboy films. His wife, Miriam, looked after the children: Peggy and her elder sister, Louise. They had a neighbour who worked at Century Studios on Sunset Boulevard, and one day Miriam and her daughters were taken to visit the lot. The producers happened to have a performing dog on contract, and were looking to pair it with a performing child. “They tried to get me to talk and I wouldn’t,” Cary says. “Well, I didn’t talk to strangers.”

But talking didn’t matter – not yet. Jack had raised his daughters like horses, to answer commands immediately or be punished. “In those days, expression was everything in movies. And I had a real warehouse of expressions. My father would snap his fingers and say, ‘Cry!’ And I would cry. ‘Laugh!’ And I would laugh. ‘Be frightened!’ And I’d be frightened. He called it obedience.”

Costumed in dungarees and clown makeup, she made her debut in Playmates (1921), with the performing dog. “He was called Brownie. We were on the same money. Sharp dog. Together we made a very saleable property and it went around the world, almost overnight. In those days, all they had to do was change the language on the cards.”

Brownie died after about a year of working with Baby Peggy, but by then producers felt they’d “mined out the dog-and-baby format” anyhow. They came up with plots that cast the little girl as Little Miss Hollywood, Little Miss Mischief, Little Red Riding Hood. She was a matchgirl, a beggar girl, a matador (with cigarette on the lip), a femme fatale, a bellboy. “We were making them like hot cakes!” She was put on horseback for a series about a mounted policeman. Later, for a role as a hobo, she was to be strapped to the underside of a train, only there was a mix-up on the shoot and the train pulled out before Cary could be attached.

By now, Jack had given up stunt work to manage his daughter. “At less than two years of age, I was earning more than my father. Those are the kind of things that turn a family upside down.”

Jack was a troubled man, who once threatened to shoot himself and his entire family, so bad was his toothache. According to Cary, his idea of charitable giving, if he came across a group of the needy, was to throw a handful of coins at them and watch the fight. Anything she earned in movies was quickly spent on houses and cars. “My parents argued a lot about my salary, within earshot.”

She can recall getting to know “Ed” Rice Burroughs on the set of an early Tarzan, and later posing in a frock beside Franklin D Roosevelt at a political rally. Her career coincided with the worst of Hollywood’s unregulated age, so that she worked without nap breaks or tutoring, and was once entered in a swimsuited beauty contest while still in possession of her milk teeth.

At less than two years of age, I was earning more than my father. Those kinds of things turn a family upside down

Cary thinks she might not remember the era as well as she does had things not been so turbulent at home, so chaotic on set. She has the clearest memories of films accompanied by a catastrophe, such as the time an elephant called Charley escaped its chains, stampeded, killed a studio employee and was shot. She was present when Jack “the Giant” Earle, her 7ft 7in co-star in 20-odd films, was blinded by falling scenery, and was herself bucked from a speeding truck in one film, struck by a bicycle in another, and half-drowned by a Great Dane while filming a rescue at sea.

It was at about the time her front teeth fell out that Baby Peggy’s career went into decline. Her father had been contracting her out to larger studios, so she could appear in more ambitious, lucrative features. These included The Darling Of New York, the one with the burning bedroom scene, and Captain January, a drama in which Baby Peggy manned a lighthouse. But in his dealings with the studios, Jack, always an impetuous negotiator, insulted one too many people of influence. Baby Peggy stopped being cast. The family went broke when a business adviser fled with what money hadn’t been spent on mansions and cars, and they relocated to Texas, so Baby Peggy could be put to work on the vaudeville stage.

In Hollywood, meanwhile, the arrival of sound-recording technology and talking pictures – “the talkies” – made Baby Peggy obsolete. One studio incinerated its entire archive of her movies in order to retrieve the silver nitrate in the reels. (Many of these movies remain lost.)

When the Depression drove the family back in the early 1930s, the city was several times the size they remembered, Century Studios had burned down in a fire and Baby Peggy was already a local joke. “Only yesterday you were asking, ‘Whatever happened to Baby Peggy?’” wrote a Hollywood newspaper on her return. “Well, ask that famous question no longer!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In The Kid Reporter, 1923.

Cary was 17, beautiful, back – and untouchable. To justify the immense costs of retooling for sound, she says, studio bosses “had to bad-mouth Hollywood in the old days. They talked about silents as the stone age. And they treated former stars terribly, just terribly.” She took work as an extra, against the advice of her agent, for almost a decade. “I was considered second-rate. I spent most of my life as a nobody.”

In 1938, she married a man called Gordon Ayres, but they divorced in 1948. By then, she’d stopped acting. By the 1960s, she was working as a journalist, thinking about writing a book, when there was a first renewal of interest in silent film. She read an article about film scholars trying to track down and restore 1920s reels. “At first I thought the writer was crazy,” Cary tells me. “People wanted to revive the silents?”

In the 1980s and 90s, major silent film festivals were established in Italy and San Francisco. In 2012, preservationists in Los Angeles invited Cary to a special screening of a Baby Peggy film, The Kid Reporter (1923), which had just been recovered: a short comedy about a four-year-old journalist who solves a major crime and is rewarded with the job of editor-in-chief. Cary watched herself caper about some 90 years earlier, sporting a stick-on moustache and a monocle, and was reminded what a pain it was getting that monocle to stay in. “You really had to learn what muscles to use.”

She can remember that? “I was perceptive,” Cary says. “I was a child who paid attention to her surroundings. Even in the very beginning, I had a kind of arm’s-length attitude towards everything. It was there, in front of me, and I observed it very seriously. It was something about my nature, and it was why I came to like writing, I think. That seeing-at-a-distance.”

As a young girl, she sat in press conferences while her father boasted about her enormous IQ

As a young girl, she sat in press conferences while her father boasted about her enormous IQ. Cary shows me a letter sent to her by a psychologist who wanted Baby Peggy to know he’d diagnosed her, remotely, as a child genius. (How else would she know how to man a lighthouse?) Apparently, only the child herself recognised it all as bluster, puff, magic-of-the-movies stuff. She’d had no education whatsoever. “I didn’t go to school until I was 12! And when I was there, I couldn’t make the grades.” When she decided she wanted to write, “I had to teach myself everything. I had to invent the wheel over and over again. For life.”

Diana Serra Cary was the identity she slowly created for herself. Diana she borrowed from Diana Wynyard, a quietly glamorous actress she’d once admired. Serra came from an 18th-century friar who founded California’s first Catholic missions (she converted after the end of her first marriage). And while running a bookshop in Santa Barbara, she met Bob Cary, an artist. They married in 1954 and had a son, Mark. They were living in Mexico when Cary started trying to write.

Jack C Edwards today (below), and as a boy with silent screen star Eleanor Boardman.

Photograph: Bob Croslin for the Guardian

She published her first book in 1975, about early cowboy films. In 1978, she published the work she’s most proud of, a study of former child stars, called Hollywood’s Children. For the book, she interviewed actors who’d grown up as she had – on studio backlots, taught how to hold a monocle in their eye but not how to spell, do sums, socialise. Only one of the former stars she spoke to went on to university. “Which is amazing, because the first thing I heard when I got my first job was, ‘She’ll be rich! She’ll be able to go to college!’ And I was rich. I was worth about $4m at the age of 10. But the thing is, the money is spent for other people, and the child doesn’t have any say about it at all.”

Cary isn’t certain, a lifetime on, that the business has corrected itself. She still feels a connection with the movie industry she helped to found; and on the enormous flatscreen TV in her bungalow she’ll watch anything with Helen Mirren in it, also “that man who played the king in The King’s Speech, I’m very taken with him”. But over 90-something years, she’s been dismayed by Hollywood’s tendency to grow its young into tragic adults. Jackie Coogan, River Phoenix, Lindsay Lohan: we all know the names. “I’m always warning parents to be careful. The pitfalls are great.” This was why she wrote Hollywood’s Children. “I could find hundreds of studies about the effects of children watching too many movies. But nothing about the effects of being in them.”

Cary’s father died in 1961, her mother in 1977. “It was sad – I realised they never really learned anything, about me or about themselves.” The Baby Peggy experiment was never discussed in the family. “They didn’t ask if it affected my life… if I enjoyed it. It’s astonishing, in a way. I was the one who did all that, earned all that money, and they weren’t even curious.” It was only Cary’s sister who, before she died in 2005, wrote to acknowledge something. “She said, ‘I’ve been thinking about your life. How hard you worked at an age when my own children had nothing more to think about than potty training. And I think it’s time that somebody said thank you.’”

Her father did make one comment. It was at a screening Cary had organised, shortly before his death, to show him one of the Baby Peggy silents that were then coming back into fashion. When it finished, Jack had tears in his eyes. He turned to her and said: “Too bad it wasn’t a talkie.”

***

Before travelling to Gustine, I got in touch with some other survivors of the silents – those child actors who’d appeared as extras, walk-ons, bit players. These were not household names, not even in their day, and most had spent the vast majority of their lives away from Hollywood. All reported total bafflement when aficionados started to get in touch with them.

Jack C Edwards once appeared as a miniature extra in the 1920s films of Harold Lloyd: “At the beginning of the film Grandma’s Boy [1922], another baby took a cookie away from me.” His family left California for Florida when he was still a young boy, and he grew up to become a soldier and a teacher. “Fellow marines, colleagues when I was a teacher, neighbours, none ever had a hint of my being in movies.” He was already an old man, Edwards told me, when his first piece of fan mail arrived. “Bewildering.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lassie Lou Ahern today (below) and in Sweet Daddy, 1924.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Steve Craft for the Guardian

“I started to be invited to conventions,” remembered Mildred Kornman, who was not much more than a baby when, in 1926, she was added to the cast of the long-running silent series Our Gang; publicity shots taken at the time show Kornman as a blur, too young to sit still. Now 89, she lives on a remote ranch in Utah. The day before we spoke, a silent-film enthusiast had made the long trip out to visit her. “I guess everything, when it gets older, becomes more popular, more desirable,” she reflected. “Look at paintings.”

Lassie Lou Ahern appeared as a six-year-old in a 1927 adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Many decades later, she was a dance teacher living in obscurity when she was contacted by two British film historians, Austin and Howard Mutti-Mewse, who were beginning to work on a book about old Hollywood, I Used To Be In Pictures. They’d had difficulty tracking her down. “So they told me to get a website,” Ahern said. “You would not believe the fan mail I started to get.”

I spoke to Ahern by phone. At 94, she sounded cheerful and energetic, but was obviously ailing. “I have neuropathy in my feet. Spinal stenosis. Arthritis that’s very bad. I have a muscle disease that affected my left eye – it just dropped out one day while I was driving. I have to walk using a walker, which is humiliating for me, having once been a dancer. Growing old isn’t for cissies, I’ll tell you that! But these beautiful letters I get… They’re really keeping me alive, I think.”

She said she could remember Kornman in the Our Gang series, and Baby Peggy and her films. Say, whatever happened to her?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mildren Kornman today, at 89 (below), and showing a youngster the ropes in Our Gang.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Steve Craft for the Guardian

What Ever Happened To Baby Peggy? was the title Cary gave her 1996 autobiography. She wrote it shortly before moving to Gustine, to be near her son. Her husband died in 2001, and Mark has cared for his mother ever since. He’s an engineer who likes to refit old Porsches in his spare time; there are two battered models waiting outside in the driveway. Mark’s daughter Stephanie just became a cheerleader at Gustine High. “When Mark was little I never pushed him in any way,” says Cary. But if she’s honest she would sometimes watch him as a toddler, as she’d later watch Stephanie, and think: “Why aren’t you working, kid?”

Cary has been in hospital twice since Christmas, with pneumonia. “I haven’t really got much time left,” she says. “And there’s a number of other projects to finish up.” She has been writing a pair of historical novels, and wants to get going on a short memoir about Roddy McDowall. New editions of her non-fiction books are due out soon. A teeming box-file on her dining table marks an effort to gather together all of her silent-era cuttings and documents. “I guess I didn’t realise it would all be so heavy.”

Life in the bungalow has been slow-going lately. Growing old isn’t for cissies. But she prefers it to being that little girl put to work in Hollywood. “I feel better now. I feel very, very liberated. I find you’re not surprised by unexpected things as you get older. You’ve had lots of experience, and that’s valuable. Priceless, really. Yes, I find that old age is much more pleasant than youth.”

And how could she complain, she says, “when the silents have come back. It’s been remarkable. When the talkies came along, and the silents were lost, with those stacks of films in the back yards of Hollywood, incinerated, well, I closed the lid on the whole situation. But the minute I lifted the lid again, everything was still there. I remembered everything. She remembered everything.”

She? You mean Baby Peggy?

“Oh yeah. She’s still alive. I talk to her.”

You talk to her?

“Yes. We have a relationship now that’s remarkable. We’ve reconciled. She’s still separate, like she’s another person in me. But now we deal together.”

The 96-year-old and the little girl. Co-stars.

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