The Little Children

Shall Theirs Be the Kingdom of Hollywood?

Coincident with the news that Baby Peggy (half past three) has "signed" a contract that will net Mr. and Mrs. Peggy $5,000,000 during three years, come certain advices* regarding the maltreatment of the children of the studios. It appears that small armies of indigent mothers and indolent fathers stand ready daily to sacrifice their offspring on the altar of Hollywood art.

Pictures are drawn for the avid imaginations of magazine readers of tiny citizens absurdly caparisoned in velvet and plumes waiting daily for a director who requires the patter of little feet about the house to motivate his final clinch. Though there are laws which insist upon the education of movie children, we are led to believe that the education is scattered thinly through sessions before the blinding Kleig lights and interrupted by the hammering of carpenters and the yammering of stars.

It is told, too, how film infants lose their normal childhood because they are not allowed to play in other children's back yards. Violent games are forbidden owing to the likelihood of accident. Sleeping hours are all awry. The children are primarily edified by the spectacle of their parents fighting over the weekly pay check.

These plangent protests seem ill considered. It is probable that any parents who are so shiftless as to stand by while their children posture and grimace at the command of bull-throated directors would stand by anyway. In such a case the children would inhabit some top floor garret, subsist on cheese and warmed-over coffee. They would have the questionable advantage of consorting with other gutter children. They would grow up into third-rate mechanics-- kitchen or gasoline, according to sex.

Under the present circumstances they immediately assume enviable posts in the community. They are well fed; the wealth they acquire for their parents opens the latters' eyes to the amenities of life which in no other way could they have learned and translated to their children. There are only ten years of life that even the greatest can hope to be actively famous. Why not the first ten as soon as the last? And, finally, it is the children of Hollywood alone that seem able consistently to interpret life for the screen as it really exists on this strange planet. W. R.

* In Sunset (Pacific Coast monthly) for September.