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Long before Shirley Temple's curls bounced their way into America's heart, Baby Peggy lit up marques here and abroad. This story of the shared infancy of a child and the film industry reveals the incredible life and awesome burdens of a child super-star.
Diana Serra 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. The first part of the book 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 - as "Baby Peggy", Hollywood's pioneer child star, the youngest in theatrical history - has lived her subject, surviving a childhood filled with an enormous workload, some real physical danger, and emotional trauma. She 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.
After 1912, when the great cattle empires began to crumble, hundreds of seasoned cowboys found themselves jobless. A handful of discarded horsemen, however, stumbled upon an entirely new frontier-Hollywood. In a rare insider’s view, Diana Serra Cary tells the story of these cowboys, who survived for another fifty years as riders, stuntmen, and doubles for the stars. Filled with humorous anecdotes, The Hollywood Posse reveals the full story of the cowboys’ long and bitter feud with autocratic director Cecil B. De Mille; their relationships with the great Western stars-from the flamboyant Tom Mix to the durable John Wayne; and above all, their touching loyalty, code of honor, and devotion to each other.
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Discovered by Charlie Chaplin in 1919, four-year-old Jackie Coogan soared to overnight stardom for his title role in the silent masterpiece, The Kid. A string of successes followed, including Peck's Bad Boy, Oliver Twist, and A Boy of Flanders, earning Coogan a fortune of four million dollars. Dubbed 'The Millionaire Kid' by the press, he later had to sue his parents in a futile attempt to recover his squandered fortune. His later years were marked with penury and the cruel diminishment of his childhood fame. As an adult, he found work in character roles and gained unexpected but fleeting fame as 'Uncle Fester' in the series The Addams Family. He continued to make guest appearances on televi...
The Drowning of the Moon is a vast panoramic novel whose major characters are drawn from the aristocracy of 18th-century Mexico, an upper class made up almost exclusively of immigrant Spaniards and native-born criollos, the latter direct descendants of the first conquistadores, who legitimately lay claim to pure European blood. While the novel is a work of fiction and all the characters, (excepting historical personages) are entirely fictional as well, it should be understood, at the outset, that everything is solidly grounded in fact. All historical personages and events are treated with scrupulous regard to accuracy -- physical appearance, temperament, political stance and chronology. No o...
Former child actor Paul Petersen once said, "Fame is a dangerous drug and should be kept out of the reach of children." It is certainly true that many child actors have fallen prey to the dangers of fame and suffered for it later in life, but others have used fame to their advantage and gone on to even more successful careers in adulthood. This work is a compilation of interviews with 39 men and women who, as children, worked in the motion picture industry in Hollywood. They all handled their childhood celebrity differently. Lee Aaker, Mary Badham, Baby Peggy, Sonny Bupp, Ted Donaldson, Edith Fellows, Gary Gray, Jimmy Hunt, Eilene Janssen, Marcia Mae Jones, Sammy McKim, Roger Mobley, Gigi Perreau, Jeanne Russell, Frankie Thomas, Beverly Washburn, Johnny Whitaker, and Jane Withers are among those interviewed. They talk candidly about their experiences on and off the set, the people they worked with, and what they did after their careers ended. The pros and cons of being a child actor and the effects that it had on them later in life are discussed at great length.
The Long Shadows: A True-Life Novel The Long Shadows is a fascinating true-life novel about Jacob Reuben Erlich, who, at 8 foot 6, was among the tallest men in the world. Best known by his stage name, Jack Earle, he would overcome crippling shyness, depression, temporary blindness and the physical challenges of a giant's frame to earn widespread acclaim during his career as a silent film star, circus performer, artist, poet and vaudevillian. Drawing on ten years of research culled from family lore, newspaper archives, historical documents and the recorded recollections of Earle's contemporaries, author Andrew Erlich weaves a fascinating bio-fictional account of a remarkable man and the cast of colorful characters who knew him. Along the way, we learn a great deal about courage, character, and one man's unique perspective on a broad sweep of history that encompassed the Great Depression, the immigrant experience in turn-of-the-century Texas, silent films, life in the circus, the modern art movement and the domestic anti-Semitism that accompanied the run-up to World War II.
Son of Forgotten Hollywood Forgotten History is the long anticipated sequel to the award-winning Forgotten Hollywood Forgotten History, and it tells more rarely shared American stories through the eyes of 21 character actors of Hollywood's Golden Age, including Frank Morgan, Peter Lorre, Cesar Romero, Majorie Main, Andy Devine, Alan Hale Sr., Leo Gorcey, Jack Carson, and Lon Chaney Jr. Son of Forgotten Hollywood Forgotten History is part of the Forgotten Hollywood Book-Series, and it's officially in gift stores, bookshops, and iconic locations, such as the Hollywood Heritage Museum. For further insight, visit www.forgottenhollywood.com.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE GUARDIAN, THE BROOKLYN RAIL, THE GLOBE AND MAIL, POP MATTERS, COMICS BEAT, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY From the “heir to R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman” (Economist), a masterful work of comics journalism about indigenous North America, resource extraction, and our debt to the natural world The Dene have lived in the vast Mackenzie River Valley since time immemorial, by their account. To the Dene, the land owns them, not the other way around, and it is central to their livelihood and very way of being. But the subarctic Canadian Northwest Territories are home to valuable resources, including oil, gas, and diamonds. With mining came jobs and inve...