and vaguely remember that this is the picture he would give out.
I grew up in Palm Springs, CA. I remember that he lived on Racquet Club Dr. just around the corner from us.
Uncle Fester was Jackie Coogan. He had been a child actor and starred in "The Kid" with Charlie Chaplin, after which he was able to command one of the higher salaries in Hollywood. I have heard that in later years he joked about how far he had declined from being considered one of the cutest kids in the world to playing Uncle Fester.
and vaguely remember that this is the picture he would give out.
I grew up in Palm Springs, CA. I remember that he lived on Racquet Club Dr. just around the corner from us.
Uncle Fester was Jackie Coogan. He had been a child actor and starred in The Kid with Charlie Chaplin, after which he was able to command one of the higher salaries in Hollywood.I saw The Kid a month or so ago and it was small wonder Jackie Coogan became such a hit. (This is probably Chaplin's most poignant comedy---bar none.) The boy was as deft a comic actor as they came for such a young age, and he played with Chaplin as if they could have been a real life father (surrogate or otherwise) and son. The Kid deserves its legend.
Unfortunately for Jackie Coogan, he had actual parents---and got a world-class screwing by them. He achieved his legal majority and discovered that his mother and stepfather, who also acted as his managers, had squandered every last nickel worth of the $4 million he earned (big money in the 1920s-1930s) as a child star. He sued to recover the money and lost: at the time, earnings of minors belonged legally to their parents or guardians, and Coogan legally had no recourse. He recovered a mere $125,000 of the money in due course and, though he was visible enough to have a few, ahem, relationships with a few starlets (and was married once to Betty Grable), his career went into the tank until he resurfaced in the television era as a character actor and, especially, as Uncle Fester in 1964 on Friday nights. (He also saw action in World War II, first enlisting in the Army before Pearl Harbour and then learning to fly with the Army Air Corps after Pearl, flying with the First Commando Corps beginning in 1943.)
The Coogan suit provoked the original California law that placed certain portions of a show business minor's earnings into trust, but according to theactorssource.com the problem ultimately was that the courts' lack of review of many such contracts still left as many as 95 percent of child actors unprotected by the law---or untended as to payments of taxes, agents' and managers' fees, and similar such things whenever the Coogan law was applied at all.
In due course, the law was amended to guarantee 15 percent of a child performer's gross earnings are set aside until they reach their legal majority, according to theactorssource.com again. The amended law also ensures that a child performer's earnings belong to him or her alone. The amendment got the biggest push, that Website says, by three former child stars: Melissa (Little House on the Prairie) Gilbert, Malcolm-Jamal (The Cosby Show) Warner, and Mimi Gibson (who was, like Jackie Coogan, left at age 18 with nothing to show for dozens of films, commercials, and television appearances she had done in her childhood--including the Cary Grant/Sophia Loren vehicle Houseboat, guest gigs on Leave It to Beaver and My Three Sons, and the voice of Lucky in the original 101 Dalmatians, among other roles and work).