Cinema: Kid

Nearly 19 years ago, in a motion picture called The Kid, a saucy, bright-eyed little ragamuffin, taffy hair rumpled untidily under a tattered caricature of a cap, scampered into the hearts of the world cinemaudience clinging to the threadbare coattails of Charlie Chaplin. The kid was Jackie Coogan. Before he was 10, Jackie was a corporation, Jackie Coogan Productions,

Inc., earning $1,000,000 for his two best years. Before he outgrew his small-boy roles (Oliver Twist, Peck’s Bad Boy, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn) his total earnings were estimated as high as $4,000,000.

Last week people had reason to recall the Kid again. For out of the liveliest family shindig Hollywood has staged since the Mary Astor case had come two amazing bits of news. The first was that out of his vast earnings Jackie Coogan had got virtually nothing. The other was that if his billowy, multichinned mother and his slick, slanty-eyed, beaky stepfather and former adviser, Arthur L. Bernstein, had anything to say about it, he never would.

Fortnight before, Jackie, at 23 a slight, blotchy-faced young man with a thinning patch of muddy blonde hair where once grew the Kid’s famous Dutch-boy bob, had sued for an accounting of the great fortune he was sure he had amassed. From the San Fernando Valley mansion that Jackie’s talents paid for, came the hurt and indignant cry of an outraged mother, the shrewd two-cents’ worth of a storybook stepfather.

“Jackie has had all he is entitled to, and more,” shrilled Lillian Coogan Bernstein. “He isn’t entitled to that money. It belongs to us.” Added Stepfather Bernstein: “The law is on our side. Lawyers tell his mother and me that every dollar a kid earns before he is 21 belongs to his parents. . . .”

This kind of talk was no news to Jackie. He heard it first nearly three years ago when, a few months after his father was killed in an automobile accident, he turned 21. Up to that day in October 1935, says Jackie, he managed to get along on a $6.25 weekly allowance. Day before his 21st birthday he got $1,000, heard his mother say next day, about the rest: “You haven’t got a cent. There never has been one cent belonging to you. It’s all mine.” Year later Arthur Bernstein married Lillian Coogan. One day the Kid hauled off, knocked Arthur rump over teakettle. From that day on, the Coogan mansion was not big enough for both of them.

Meantime Jackie was trying, and failing miserably, to make a living as a grownup. He wanted to marry blonde, lissome Actress Betty Grable. Mrs. Bernstein telephoned Betty’s mother. “If Betty thinks she’s marrying a rich boy,” she piped, “she is mistaken. He hasn’t a cent. He’s a pauper.” Last November Betty married Jackie anyway, began to support him on her Paramount Pictures salary of $500 a week. Since then Jackie has earned exactly $1,000, the result of two weeks’ work with his wife in Paramount’s College Swing, released this week.

Confronted in Los Angeles Superior Court last week with all this niggardly evidence, the Bernsteins put on a great show. Weeping wetly, Jackie’s mother squalled: “I love my boy. . . . I’ve always tried to do the best I knew how for him.” Without disputing the point, Jackie’s lawyer pressed on to the real issue. “Is it your position,” asked he, “that Jackie’s fortune belongs to you?” Mrs. Bernstein hastily dried her eyes. “I believe that is the law,” she snapped.

At week’s end, with Mrs. Bernstein heartily protesting “I’d go through fire and water for that boy!”, old friends, new friends and thousands of admirers were rallying to Jackie’s cause. Veteran Actor Wallace Beery, an old friend of the Coogans, rubbed his chin reflectively and recalled that “not once, but many times, Jack [Coogan Sr.] told me that he had never used or intended to use a cent the boy earned. Every penny . . . was being put away and saved for him.” In a caustic drawing deftly slugged The House That Jack Built, Cartoonist Rollin Kirby put the Scripps-Howard newspapers on record in Jackie’s behalf.

To allow time for an accounting of the Coogan earnings, Superior Judge Emmett H. Wilson at week’s end adjourned the case until May 2. But before he did so he outlined a sure-fire plan by which future child stars will be spared Jackie Coogan’s plight. Since all contracts involving child players must be approved by the Superior Court, Judge Wilson announced that henceforth he will approve only those contracts that provide for placing at least one half of the earnings in trust funds payable to the children at or after majority.

Of Hollywood’s current crop of cine-moppets, only one, curly-haired, British Freddie Bartholomew, stands in immediate danger of trouble like Jackie Coogan’s. A pawn in the brisk and recurrent squabble between his parents and the aunt who has steered his cinema course, Freddie’s anticipated $100,000 1938 salary is already more than 95% pledged for legal fees, taxes, agents’ claims. Shirley Temple’s money is being invested by her parents in annuities payable to her at intervals until she is 50. For plump, brattish Jane Withers her parents deposit $1,000 weekly in annuities and trust funds. Ripening Songstress Deanna Durbin has a $50,000 home held in trust for her, invests her earnings in special ten-year annuities.