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Hollywood's Children An Inside Account of the Child Star Era by Diana Serra Cary Foreword by Kevin Brownlow New Afterword by the author |
A history and group portrait of the major child performers of the nineteenth-century American theatre and the twentieth-century motion picture industry, Hollywood's Children details the rise and fall of the child star cult, exploring individual family backgrounds and the financial and societal pressures which brought these talented youngsters to celebrity status and (often) cast them back into obscurity and poverty.
As "Baby Peggy," Hollywood's pioneer child star—the youngest in theatrical history—Diana Serra Cary has lived her subject, surviving a childhood filled with an enormous workload, some real physical danger, and emotional trauma, all of which she describes with rare insight and without rancor. Cary weaves her own story of being her family's chief breadwinner with similar tales involving famous movie children she knew and worked with—Jackie Coogan, Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, and Judy Garland, among many others.
In the first half of her book, Cary mines a lode of new information, recounting stories of the precursors to Hollywood's child stars (and their ambitious parents)—the spectacular 1853 stage debut of four-year-old Cordelia Howard, the rise of red-haired Lotta Crabtree in California's Gold Rush camps, and the travails and triumphs of the hoydenish Elsie Janis as she ad-libbed her way to stardom.
Cary's well-wrought, empathetic narrative presents the underside of the glittering stage and screen world: frightened children, merchants who buy and sell childhood as a commodity, rapacious stage mothers and fathers whose ambition and avarice make them willing to sacrifice their children to fulfill their own dreams. This insider's view of the child star era was first published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1979.
DIANA SERRA CARY debuted as "Baby Peggy" in 1920 at the age of nineteen months, starring in 150 two-reel comedies and seven feature films before her silent movie career ended at age seven. She worked in vaudeville for another half dozen years and later in "talkies" through the 1930s. She became a freelance writer, specializing in Mexican and Western American history. For many years she was the trade book buyer for the University of California's San Diego campus bookstore. She is the author of The Hollywood Posse (telling the little-known story of stuntmen and doubles); her most recent book is Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy?, an autobiography. She lives in Hollister, California, with her artist husband, Robert Cary, and is currently at work on a trilogy of historical novels set in Spanish colonial Mexico.
"This amazing book could only have been written by a survivor of a childhood that never was. It should be read by every movie-goer who is delighted by the antics of little children on the silver screen."—Newsday
"A fascinating account which is neither memoir nor history but more than a little of both."—Los Angeles Times
"An eye-opening wide-angled view. A riveting, discerning account of performing children and their parents."—Anne Edwards, Washington Post Book World
"For those who were never there, but wondered what it was like, here are tales of wealth and folly, poverty and fame, to dazzle Balzac."—New West
"Cary's book is thoughtful and sad. Cary has some interesting ideas about the national moods—public innocence and optimism —that embraced child actors and made them stars, in vaudeville, on the stage and in movies, and then turned away from them."—New York Times Book Review
Hollywood's Children
0-87074-424-0 paper $14.95
6x9. 328 pp. 37 b&w photos. Bib. Index.
Film/Theatre. Psychology. Literary Nonfiction.
Publication Date: October 1997.
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