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Million
THE Arabian Nights of the motion picture industry has produced no story stranger than the Midas-like tale of a little boy named Jackie Coogan.
No more unbelievable series of circumstances ever happened than the one that swept a small, brown-eyed youngster from the hectic, hard-worked, ill-paid life of cheap vaudeville to the pinnacle of fame and fortune.
Ten years ago, it would have seemed utterly impossible that a child should earn a million dollars in a year by his own unaided efforts.
And it is still so fantastic that as you read you can only think of the dear old fairy-tales about the poor, ragged little country boy who became a prince overnight and won half the kingdom.
Just a few years ago, a baby boy was born in a small town in New York state. He was born in that particular town because his Dad, an eccentric dancer in vaudeville, happened to be showing there and his mother travelled along.
But vaudeville life was too hard for the brown-eyed baby and, when his mother rejoined her “sister act,” he was shipped out to his grandmother in her tiny cottage among the Oakland hills. There for three years, little Jackie Coogan played,
happy and fagged, and hardly knew that he had a mother and father. They flashed into his infant vision only now and again when their booking brought them to the coast. It was not a happy life for the young mother and father, but it was all they knew, and Jackie grew and blossomed in the regular, though simple life with his grandmother.
But, when he was three years old, the senior Coogans had a chance to go with a Shubert musical comedy, very small parts, but at least it meant freedom from the road for a while. So they gathered up their boy and returned to New York.
And there, in one tiny room on a dark side street of New York, little Jackie Coogan was to battle during long, winter days for his very life. The dread spectre of infantile paralysis crept over the city, and in its grip the little boy lay motionless and white on his cot in the corner.
Oh, those were desperate days for the Coogans. Each night they had to go on with their work. Each day they spent trying to make their salary cover the terrific expenses.
They were aided in their struggle by one of those deep devotions that their son seems able to inspire. The young doctor who had brought him into the world three years before, was practicing in New York. And he became as devoted to Jackie as though the child were his own. He gave to the effort to save him every ounce of energy and skill he possessed.
And he won.
Followed for the Coogans months on the road, while the father trooped with Annette Kellerman in a vaudeville act. Jackie by that time had begun [ continued on page 115 |
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