Little Peggy March: Will Tiffany Follow Her?

The Tiffany troubles aren’t news to Margaret Battavio (a.k.a. Little Peggy March) or manager/husband Arnie Harris.

Many of Tiffany’s cast of characters are deja vu to the Harrises. They just hope that the ending is not the same.

When Harris first met his future wife in 1968, she was broke and her pop music career looked like it was over. Little Peggy March was the youngest person at the time ever to have had a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Top 100. “I Will Follow Him” was at the top of the pops for three weeks in April of 1963 when she was only 15 and it remains a pop standard today.

By all rights, royalties from the million-selling RCA single and the album that it came from ought to have created a large nest egg for Little Peggy and launched her adult singing career.

Instead, according to the Harrises, it created a deficit and launched nothing. When Margaret turned 18, she severed ties to her longtime manager, Russell Smith, and asked for an accounting of her funds. She discovered that she had $500 and a judgment decree for $12,000 lodged against her by a Lansdale, Pa., Chevrolet dealership. It turned out to be a loan made to her manager that Margaret knew nothing about, she says.

Among the expenses charged to her: $2,000 for braces.

“I never had braces in my life,” Margaret said.

But, she relates, she discovered that she didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. What happened to her was a simple ruling, executed by the Pennsylvania dependency court system (known in that state as the Orphan’s Court) on Jan. 26, 1962. Margaret Battavio’s parents consented to make her manager, Smith, her legal guardian for financial and contractual matters.

“It’s rather mechanical with the parents’ consent and they had to consent to this thing,” said Smith’s attorney, John Kaufman, who still practices law in the suburbs north of Philadelphia. At the time, he said, parents of budding singers routinely surrendered business affairs to managers in hopes of seeing their children become stars. But record contracts were “terrible--a real Prisoner of Zenda kind of thing--and I guess they still are.”

Further, he said, entertainment law is a specialization that a general practitioner like Kaufman can handle, but isn’t experienced to handle well over an extended period of time.

“If you want to do that, I guess you would want to go to someone in the entertainment centers like New York or Los Angeles,” he said.

Neither Kaufman nor the Harrises know what became of Smith.

Harris became Battavio’s manager two years after the revelations about her financial standing. He advised her to abandon the debacle and get on with her career. They subsequently married and, for most of the last 20 years, have lived in Europe where Margaret, now 40, has earned a living as an entertainer and Arnie has worked as her manager as well as managing several other performers. Last year, they moved back to Southern California in hopes of resurrecting Margaret’s career in the States.

They could blame a whole cast of characters for what happened, but they don’t. They blame a judicial and legal system that allows itself to be manipulated.

“We are not talking about the validity of the law here, but the abuse of it,” said Harris. “She was a child that the courts should have been looking out for, but they didn’t. She was not a human being. She didn’t even exist. She was a song machine created by the state of Pennsylvania. She had no recourse. No legal standing. Zippo.”

That is not how the law is supposed to work, according to several family law attorneys contacted by Calendar. Before 1938, there were limited protections against parents or managers who wanted to exploit their famous children. But a landmark law named for the late child actor Jackie Coogan was passed 50 years ago in California and Pennsylvania.

The Coogan Act followed Coogan’s discovery that his mother and stepfather/manager had spent $4 million of the money Coogan had earned as a minor.

Because of Coogan’s sorry experience, Section 36.1 of the California Civil Code now allows a judge to order up to 50% of a minor’s net earnings after taxes, expenses and legal fees, to be put into an untouchable trust fund until the minor’s 18th birthday.

But the law also allows a judge to name a legal guardian other than a parent to handle a child’s financial and contractual affairs. In a further refinement, minors over 14 who can prove to a judge’s satisfaction that they have the maturity to handle their own affairs can sever ties with their parents.

“The reality of the Coogan Law is that a parent really can have all their rights to be a manager taken away from them,” Harris said. “It’s one of those laws that has an incredible double edge to it. The court can assign a personal manager as guardian and greed takes over.

“In the State of Pennsylvania 25 years ago, the courts did not recognize that Peggy’s parents were not the same kinds of spendthrifts . . . as Coogan’s parents. They just painted them with the same brush that they did the Coogans. And Russell Smith wound up as her guardian.”