Whatever Became of Baby Peggy?

A brief item in our Calendar section recently made me think about the transitory nature of fame.

It said that a replacement was being sought for Macaulay Culkin to star in a sequel to the “Home Alone” movies because, at 16, Culkin was too old.

He’s grown beyond the manic cuteness of a little kid fighting the bad guys, and now everyone is wondering if he has the stuff to play other roles.

The business is tough on used-to-bes, whether they’re adults or children, once they stop attracting audiences doing whatever it was they were doing.

Culkin has made a lot of money being a kind of sly Dennis the Menace. Twenty-four million viewers watched “Home Alone” on television just the other night.

But money is never enough to compensate for an anguish in the heart once you become one of yesterday’s children.

It happened to someone I know. I’ll call him Billy. He was chosen a few years ago for a role in what everyone said would be a hit series. He was 7.

Hollywood promised he’d be a star, millions would adore him, blah-blah-blah. Kids believe what adults tell them and Billy absorbed it all.

He starred in the pilot all right, but when the show became a series, they unceremoniously dumped him. Billy turned to narcotics, spent time in juvenile detention facilities and ended up in state prison.

I’m not sure this proves cause and effect, but I am sure it was at least part of the reason. It’s got to be hard feeling you’re a failure at 10.

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The subject of child stars obviously interests me, and I was intrigued when I heard that Baby Peggy was in town.

Her name now is Diana Serra Cary. At 78, she’s a wry and witty author of three books, the latest being a fascinating account of her life called “Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy?”

She hasn’t lived in L.A. since 1948, but returned to sign copies of her autobiography at Dutton’s in Brentwood, looking alert and regal at a small table in the store’s patio, still radiating the kind of presence that worked well before the cameras.

Cary made her first movie at 19 months in the silent era, long before Shirley Temple pouted her way into America’s heart.

Her name was Peggy Montgomery, but Baby Peggy was who she was, an angelic, kewpie-lipped image on 150 two-reelers and feature films that made her a millionaire by the time she was five.

I have one of her films, “Captain January,” later made into a talkie with Shirley Temple, and Peggy was a baby-doll darling all right as the li’l cap’n.

She was also a child without a childhood and the sole support of a family that squandered her money, living high on the Hollywood hog.

“I remember looking over the fence of our home in Beverly Hills and asking my sister Louise what the kids were doing over there,” Cary said between signing books. “‘They’re playing,’ Louise said. I was puzzled. ‘Why aren’t they working?’ I asked. I thought all children worked, you see, because I always had.”

But kids whose movie fame is based on cutesy-poo usually end up being tossed out with the trash, and that’s sort of what happened to Baby Peggy. She outgrew her dimples.

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“I tried a comeback in the talkies at 13,” she said, “but I knew in my heart of hearts it was over.”

It didn’t matter. She had already tired of being Baby Peggy and worked only because no one else in her family was working. Her last movie was in 1935. She was Macaulay Culkin’s age.

A few years later, she changed her first name from Peggy to Diana.

“I just got tired of being Baby Peggy,” she said as we sat alone in the crisp afternoon, the book buyers all gone. “She was haunting me. She was stalking me. A child three feet tall was more important than I was.”

But does she miss the fame--the chauffeurs, the magazine covers, the adoration, the money--that shaped her pre-pubescent years? Does she miss . . . show biz?

Diana Serra Cary looked at me with the kind of beguiling sincerity that characterized Baby Peggy a lifetime ago and said, “Not at all.”

I believe her. How could I not believe the li’l skipper of “Captain January”? She’s happily married, writing books and living in Hollister, far from the empty puffery of Hollywood.

Billy, by the way, is out of prison, free of drugs, married and has a child of his own. They, too, live far from the industry that eats its young.

Who knows how Macaulay Culkin will turn out? Being too old at 16 to do the only thing he’s ever done in life isn’t the greatest way in the world to step into tomorrow. He may be home alone in more ways than one.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com