By the age of four, she was a superstar child actor of the 1920’s silent screen. And a millionaire!
But within two years, she was broke.
For much of her career, this tiny titan of early Tinseltown went by the stage name of Baby Peggy whose animated face, radiant smile, and short dark bangs captivated early movie audiences. Today, she’s known as Diana Serra Cary – one of the last surviving actors from the silent era – who is again experiencing financial woes.
“My situation got worse last year when I suffered a mini-stroke and then in December I got pneumonia and had a couple of falls,” said Diana from her son’s home in Gustine, Calif., where she now lives. “I needed the assistance of a caregiver which we couldn’t afford, so my son had to stay home to look after me and couldn’t work.”
But Diana has never been one to dwell on her financial misfortunes, despite having a large chunk of her childhood earnings squandered by extravagant parents. And what her family didn’t spend was simply stolen by a business manager.
“I was earning $12,000,” she said. “It was a huge amount of money for my parents to handle so they gave my father’s stepfather, a banker, power of attorney to manage it. Well, he knew how to handle the money – he put it in his pocket and disappeared. All the money was gone and we never saw him again.”
Compounding the problem was a dispute between her manager father and producer Sol Lesser.
“I was supposed to get top salary for three features, but my father wanted more and the contract was broken. Then I was blacklisted by Lesser because my father was labeled difficult to work with.”
Just two years old in her first film, “Playmates” in 1921, Baby Peggy appeared in some 50 shorts and three feature length films before her star began to fade in the mid-1920s.
“Then I found work on the vaudeville circuit and we were on the road for three years and I made over $600,000. My father invested all that money in a dude ranch in Wyoming, but vaudeville died and we lost it all.”
Diana did return to the big screen briefly in the 1930s appearing in several films as a lowly extra earning just $7.50 a day, relinquishing the credits top spot to new stars such as Ginger Rogers, Carole Lombard, and Gary Cooper.
But in 1938, Diana married and left Hollywood forever. For much of her adult life she worked as a book buyer for the University of California.
“Most of my income today comes from a small pension from that job. I also wrote four books on Hollywood and my autobiography ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy?’ in 1996. I make a little from royalties still.”
To help make ends meet now, at 97, Diana is planning a new book on little known early Hollywood stories and, with her son, Mark, is creating a web site to sell autographed rare photos from her early career (BabyPeggylmages.com; queries can be emailed to babypeggyimages@gmail.com).
“I’m not one to sit around holding up a sore paw and complain,” she says. “I’m the last surviving major star from the silent era and want to spend these days having a dignified tenure representing the actors from that almost forgotten period of Hollywood.”
Nick Thomas teaches at Auburn University at Montgomery, and has written features, columns, and interviews for over 600 magazines and newspapers. See www.tinseltowntalks.com.
