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ABSTRACT

This article uses details of the personal and professional life of American screen actor Jackie Coogan to examine the social transition from boyhood into manhood during the 1920s. As Hollywood's first child superstar, Coogan was given a haircut to make visual his maturation from his famed persona as an orphaned waif into a leading man. The haircut was also linked to larger concerns about the so-called flaming youth of the Lost Generation; what was known as Americanism; and identity construction for both child and parental roles. Unfortunately for Coogan, fans refused to accept his makeover; his screen persona in public memory contributed to the decline of his career while concurrently protecting the Kid from a vilified mother.

KEYWORDS

boyhood, child actor, fan culture, Hollywood, maturation, motion pictures

In 1927, child actor Jackie Coogan was given a makeover. Although not even in his adolescence, Hollywood's boy king needed a new image lest he face the career-ending label of a has-been. Barely of grammar school age in 1921 when he shot to stardom by tramping alongside Charlie Chaplin in The Kid (1921), Coogan's screen persona of a pitiful vagabond waif depended upon a projection of extreme youth to signify his vulnerable innocence in a cold, cruel, urbanized world. Five years later, at the age of 12, the rapidly sprouting moppet needed a similar dramatic entrance to mark his ascent into manhood.

Although not the first famous child screen actor-earlier predecessors included the "Vitagraph Boy," Kenneth Casey and the "Thanhouser Kid," Marie Eline-Coogan's stardom was unprecedented. As a result, his impending adulthood generated buzz not only over his future, it reflected on boyhood in general. In 1927, B.P. Schulberg, Vice President at Paramount Pictures, even heralded the end of the kid superstar. He lamented the short shelf life of most child actors and downplayed the cute kid cycle in Holly- wood's "quest of realism" because a "child is not and never will be the guiding power of a family, a community, or a nation, as they must be pictured on the screen for story purposes" (Wells 1927: 43). As discussed below, Coogan's box office decline in pictures such as The Rag Man (1925) and Old Clothes (1925) led moguls like Schulberg to believe that child-centered scenarios had...

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