Silents are Golden: Silent Superstars – Remembering Diana Serra Cary, Or “Baby Peggy”

Silents are Golden: Silent Superstars – Remembering Diana Serra Cary, Or “Baby Peggy”

On February 24, 2020, the world lost its last bona fide silent film star – Diana Serra Cary, who had passed away at age 101. While there is a very small handful of people left who appeared in silent films in some capacity – usually as extras or even as infants – Cary was the last “name in lights” star. Known to 1920s audiences as Baby Peggy, she would act alongside such luminaries as Clara Bow and be photographed with the likes of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.

Cary was born on October 29, 1918, in San Diego. Her birth name was Peggy-Jean Montgomery, and she had one older sister, Louise. Cary’s father, a strict and rather unstable man, was a former cowboy and horse trainer. He soon moved his family to Los Angeles so he could work as a stuntman in westerns. One day a neighbor took Cary (then 19 months old) and her mother and sister to visit Century Studios. Director Fred Fishback was impressed with how well-behaved the toddler was – and especially how obedient she was. Cary later recalled that her father had trained his two daughters much like they were his horses: “My father would snap his fingers and say ‘Cry!’ And I would cry. ‘Laugh!’ And I would laugh. ‘Be frightened!’ And I’d be frightened. He called it obedience.”

Fishback thought the chubby-cheeked Cary would work well with Century’s resident animal star, Brownie the Wonder Dog. They starred together in a series of charming comedy shorts, starting with Playmates (1921). The films were so well-received that Cary got a longer-term film contract, working long hours even at that tender age – “We were making them like hotcakes!” When Brownie died a year after the series began, directors started getting creative: little Peggy-Jean would play characters like Little Red Riding Hood, “Little Miss Hollywood,” and dress up as Rudolph Valentino and Pola Negri to satirize various movie tropes.

Now called “Baby Peggy,” Cary’s popularity was exploding, but fame took its toll on her family: “At less than two years of age I was earning more than my father. Those are the kinds of things that turn a family upside down.” She would say that memories of her early career would be fuzzy if it weren’t for her parents’ frequent fights over money. She also clearly remembered various catastrophes that would happen on set, in those hazardous days – like the time she was accidentally thrown from a speeding truck and another time when an elephant stampeded the studio and had to be put down.

Soon the popular tyke was starring in features like Captain January (1923), co-starring Hobart Bosworth (who Cary remembered liking very much) and The Law Forbids (1924). And she wasn’t just expected to act – sometimes she even had to do stuntwork. The Darling of New York (1923) is somewhat notorious as the film with the “burning bedroom” scene. As part of an exciting climax, the crew doused parts of the set with gasoline, set it on fire, and three-year-old Cary was instructed to exit the burning set through a certain door. But the fire grew more out of control than the crew realized. When she discovered the door was hot to the touch, Cary, fortunately, ignored the director’s instructions and carefully crawled through a burning window instead. Even at that tender age, she had realized that adults don’t always know everything.

By 1924 “Baby Peggy” was receiving hundreds of thousands of fan letters and was raking in around $1 million per year. Unfortunately, her parents spent the money almost as fast as she earned it. Her father, always an impulsive negotiator, took his demands too far and Cary’s contract was terminated. Around this time the family’s business manager (a relative) took the remainder of the Baby Peggy fortune and fled, leaving them broke.

To make ends meet, Cary’s family went on vaudeville tours, where Baby Peggy made appearances around the country. These tours were successful, but by the early 1930s, they decided to try their luck in Hollywood again – much to Cary’s chagrin since she’d already been working nonstop for so many years. But the slicker Hollywood of the ‘30s was a different place: “They talked about silents as the stone age. And they treated former stars terribly, just terribly.”

After taking bit parts and working as an extra for a few years, she retired from film in 1938, the same year she married her first husband, Gordon Ayres – partly to escape her parents. They were married for ten years, and after their 1948 divorce, Cary realized she needed to deal with her past. “…I had had identity problems from the time I was growing up. Baby Peggy was very powerful. She was very popular…I couldn’t be me as long as I was carrying her.” Putting her famous persona behind her, she began working on a long-buried dream: to become a writer. Freelancing led to work in radio and publishing, and she began making a name for herself as a historian. Her second marriage, to Bob Cary, was successful and would last until his death.

In later years Cary grew at peace with her “Baby Peggy” image and started attracting the interest of film historians. She would sit for many interviews and publish several books on early Hollywood, such as Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King: A Biography of Hollywood’s Legendary Child Star, and What Ever Happened to Baby Peggy: The Autobiography of Hollywood’s Pioneer Child Star. She advocated passionately for child actors, recalling the difficulties she once had as a pint-sized star. Always sharp and eloquent, at age 99 she would publish her first novel, The Drowning of the Moon.

Incredibly, Diana Serra Cary (the name she later adopted) would outlive all her silent era contemporaries, passing away at age 101. Her passing made headlines around the world; in a sense, it brought the silent era to a close. And she will always remain an inspirational figure, thanks to her dedication to sharing her experiences in early Hollywood. In 1999 she stated in an interview: “I see [my early career] as all of a piece. It’s kind of like putting a quilt together. Quilt-making is very good because everything becomes equally important and equally valid, and everything forms the core of yourself. So both the good and the bad – I always felt that was the hand life dealt, and I’ve tried to handle it as best I could. I don’t have any rancor or any anger or anything toward anyone – or toward Hollywood. Even when it was happening, I realized it was nobody’s fault, but you get hurt in spite of that. But, I’m very peaceful about it.”

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–Lea Stans for Classic Movie Hub

You can read all of Lea’s Silents are Golden articles here.

Lea Stans is a born-and-raised Minnesotan with a degree in English and an obsessive interest in the silent film era (which she largely blames on Buster Keaton). In addition to blogging about her passion at her site Silent-ology, she is a columnist for the Silent Film Quarterlyand has also written for The Keaton Chronicle.