Only six Baby Peggy's feature films have survived today, one being made earlier in the year, the highly-critically praised July 1924 "Captain January." She carries more the dramatic weight since her character is found washed up shore where an old lighthouse keeper discovers her. The two establish a close bond, only to have her parents tracing her to the lighthouse. The strength of Peggy's acting was her pantomiming physicality, displaying an uncanny ability to show an entire range of emotions for a child of her age. "Captain January's" script called for a special showcase of happiness when she's interacting with the keeper, while turning 180 degrees when she finds out she has to leave him. As one film historian notes, "silent films were quite advantageous to child performers. Instead of memorizing lines, they were free to create performances out of pure movement and emotion and they did this quite well. Child acting has never quite recovered from the coming of sound."
Baby Peggy was as famous in the 1920s as Shirley Temple was in the 1930s. In fact, Shirley Temple remade "Captain January" in 1936. But as quickly as Peggy rose to prominence in the early 1920s, she just as speedily fell in 1925 when her father, Jack Montgomery, got in a fierce argument with Universal's producer Sol Lesser about her salary. After that confrontation, the studio executive abruptly released Peggy from her contract. She was secretly blacklisted from the other Hollywood studios who didn't want to deal with her father's abrasive behavior. Peggy turned to the vaudeville stage, where she drew large crowds. But the family became tired of the arduous traveling circuit and, much to Peggy's delight, she stopped performing in the late 1920s.
With all the money she made in movies and on the stage, Peggy should have enjoyed the fruits of her labors. However, her parents, Baby Peggy's financial handers, were proliferate and careless spenders, draining her hard-earned millions. The 1929 stock market crash placed the family in financial straits where the parents resorted to food coupons from the Motion Picture Relief Fund. Baby Peggy received a high school degree and ran away from home in 1935. Her marriage to bartender Gordon Ayres in 1938 was equally awash in poverty as newspaper columnist Walter Winchell discovered in 1940, finding the pair in a small New York City studio with only doughnuts to eat.
Wanting to get a complete break from Baby Peggy, she adopted the first name Diana and took her artist second husband's last name, Cary, when they married in 1954. She eventually accepted being the former childhood actress, writing several books on her personal experiences and the movie industry. In addition, she became a film historian, giving lectures around the country about the era of silent movies and the personalities during that remarkable time. In February 24, 2020, at the age of 101, she passed away, marking Baby Peggy as the last star of the silent movie generation and closing a unique chapter in cinema.
