"I Came Back as Nobody": An Interview with the Former Baby Peggy
Click for larger view | Figure 1 Diana Serra Cary on March 10, 2006. Photographed by Elizabeth Galecke, www.elizabethgalecke.com. Courtesy of Marsha Orgeron and Elizabeth Galecke. |
On March 10, 2006 I interviewed Diana Serra Cary, best known for her career as the 1920s child movie star Baby Peggy. Ms. Cary was born October 29, 1918 and began making films at the age of twenty months after being discovered by director Fred Fishback. Her parents signed her to a contract at poverty row's Century Studio, where she was first featured in a series of two-reelers with Brownie the Wonder Dog. Six months later Century producers Julius and Abe Stern declared her a "star," giving Baby Peggy her own series and production unit. As Motion Picture News reported it, "Baby Peggy, the talented, versatile little two year old, famous for her work as co-star to Brownie the wonder dog, has been elevated to stardom."1
Baby Peggy was a veritable phenomenon of early child actor stardom. In a 1922 Motion Picture Classic Willis Goldbeck described her as, "with Jackie Coogan, one of the two kid stars who have justified individual stardom."2 Critics often noted her knack for comedy and her smile-inducing cuteness, whether making mischief with a box of Edward Everett Horton's shirt collars in Helen's Babies (William Seiter, US, 1924) or pretending to be Rudolph Valentino in Peg O' the Movies (Alfred Goulding, US, 1923). Adela Rogers St. Johns wrote of her, "Nothing else in the world except a tiny, black kitten—very fluffy—or a very small, white bull pup could possibly be as cute as Baby Peggy."3 Dorothy Whitehall's "Juvenile Critic" column proclaimed that the young actress' antics in Peg O' the Movies made her laugh until she cried.4 A 1923 Baby Peggy look-alike contest in Denver, Colorado resulted in a reported onslaught of 3,000 aspirants: "Eleven hundred boxes of candy were given away, and then the promoters quit in despair."5 Photoplay called her "not one of your curled and frilled starlets, but a bobbed, banged, comical [End Page 5] child of three, with more humor in one diminutive finger than grown-up luminaries have in ten manicured digits."6 All of this before her fifth birthday.
Click for larger view | Figure 2 Baby Peggy as a Shiek-era Rudolph Valentino in Peg O' the Movies (1923). Courtesy of Diana Serra Cary. |
After her father broke an immensely lucrative contract with independent producer Sol Lesser in 1925, Baby Peggy hit the vaudeville circuit as a headliner, compelled by her parents to continue supporting the family by exploiting her Hollywood fame on the road. In 1932, Baby Peggy—now using the adolescent name Peggy Montgomery—returned to Hollywood, but the silent era was long gone and the former child star had little to broker in the newly reinvented sound-era Hollywood. Again urged on by her parents, Montgomery struggled to find work as an extra, taking largely uncredited bit parts. She had now lived the life of the preeminent child star and the struggling Hollywood extra. A 1932 Movie Classic article, titled "Remember Baby Peggy? She's Back Again—As a Young Lady," heralds her return to Hollywood and reports a new contract to make two-reel comedies with the Gleason family.7 Following an unsuccessful lawsuit, filed by Peggy's father Jack Montomgery against actor James Gleason and producer Norman Sper for allegedly breaking this nine picture contract, Peggy Montgomery's 1933 headline read: "Film Actress, 14, Loses $500,000 Action in Court."8
Ms. Cary permanently retired from the screen when she married in 1938, and left Hollywood altogether in 1943 when she joined her husband at Fort Ord in northern California. Only a handful of the feature...
