You’ve come a long way, Baby Peggy

Diana SERRA CARY’s Hollywood career is atypical of many a child star. Discovered at 20 months and dubbed Baby Peggy, she quickly became a superstar only to be washed up by age 8.

At the Silver Lake Film Festival’s closing ceremony next Thursday, Cary will be the party’s special guest as part of a night celebrating the 80th birthday of the venerable Vista Theatre in Los Feliz. The very first film to play at the theater was a two-reel comedy, “Tips,” starring the silent screen child superstar.

Cary will leave her handprints in the Vista’s Walk of Fame and speak about the silent era before a screening of two of her movies, “The Cub Reporter” and “Captain January.”

Now a well-respected author on Hollywood, she will also sign copies of her latest book, “Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King,” a fellow silent film child star.

“I opened the Vista when I was 4 years old,” says Cary, now 84. “It was a rather low-key [premiere]. It was a neighborhood theater even then. ‘Tips’ was filmed entirely inside the Ambassador Hotel. I played a bellboy.”

Her father was a cowboy who moved the family out to Hollywood after the big ranches closed down out West. “Hollywood was the only place where horsemanship was needed and valued anymore,” says Cary. “They worked as stuntmen and riders. My father was doubling for Tom Mix at the time.”

A director discovered Cary accidentally when she accompanied her mother and a friend to the Poverty Row studio called Century, which specialized in serials and slapstick comedy shorts.

The studio, she says, had a big star -- a mutt named Brownie the Wonder Dog. “They wanted him to work with a child close enough to his size. Brownie and I really hit it off. By the time I was a little over 2, he died in his sleep.”

After Brownie’s death, Century starred Baby Peggy in her own short comedies. “They got a global audience,” she says of her films. “I played satires and spoofs on adults. I was the youngest child star probably ever to star in her own pictures.” And like Coogan, she even had her own production company.

By age 3, she had moved to Universal where she made the leap from shorts to features. “[Producer] Sol Lesser, who had just worked with Jackie, took me over and paid me [well]. It was 1923 and I was at the peak of my career.”

But everything started to go wrong. Her father’s stepfather, a banker, handled all of their business affairs. “In our absence, during a personal appearance tour, he looted my production company.... He disappeared and they never found him.”

Her father got into a row with Lesser over problems involving booking her films and withdrew her from her contract.

With her film career over, Baby Peggy found herself touring the country in vaudeville for the next four years.

“I didn’t mind [making] movies because they were creative,” she says. “But vaudeville was three to five shows a day. I did everything in vaudeville: I did comedy. I did a crying scene. I danced and I sang. I was just trying to survive and get my parents through this.”

After vaudeville, her father bought a ranch in Wyoming. “I enjoyed the ranch very much,” says Cary. “The only thing was, we lost the ranch during the Depression. We had to have an auction of all of our possessions.”

Her parents thought the family’s breadwinner could easily hit superstar status again in movies. But that wasn’t the case.

“I got a couple of jobs,” Cary says. “But my folks thought I could jump at 13 into playing ingenues. I didn’t have any interest [in acting] at that time. I wanted to be a writer by the time I was 8, but I had some detours along the way.”