Baby Peggy Made 150 Films by Seven. Her Parents Spent the Money.
Diana Serra Cary made a hundred and fifty films by the time she was seven, and silent-film audiences knew her as Baby Peggy. Her movie days left her impoverished.
In 2006 she talked through the dangers of fame with film scholar Marsha Orgeron, who notes that Cary's career was entirely in the hands of parents. They worked her mercilessly: she performed her own dangerous stunts, cried and laughed on command, and watched as they mismanaged her career and spent all of her money.
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Cary's own description of herself is the line that stays with you: programmed only to survive and to keep the whole family afloat, doled out a single nickel for every vaudeville performance. A business where the wage is a nickel and the stated purpose is family survival isn't grit. It's an extraction scheme wearing a bow.
She got more than one act, though: at thirteen and too big to play a baby, she went back to Hollywood as a bit player, and at ninety-nine she published her first novel. That reads less like a has-been than like someone who simply refused to stay written off.