12 Child Stars Robbed by the Adults They Trusted HT

 

The roles were very challenging and they were fun.  And let’s face it, I got paid for what most kids got spanked for [laughter]  for years. Jane Wither’s Fox contracts in the late 1930s and early 1940s paid her as much as 2750 to $3,000 a week. In 1937 and 1938, her films ranked among the top 10 US box office hits.

 Those were adult star paychecks. But as a minor, she had no access to her own income. All accounts were controlled by her parents, Walter and Levvenia Withers. They decided what she could actually spend. In 1938, her personal allowance was just $5 a week. By 1941, it was raised to only $10. At the same time, Jane was generating milliondoll business for the studio, and her contracts were worth tens of thousands of dollars per month.

 Fortunately, Jane did not end up in financial ruin. As an adult, she did receive the money she had earned because her parents had invested much of it in trusts and securities. But this is only the first story. There are 11 more ahead. And for many child stars, the ending was far less fortunate than Jane Withers’. The star of the kid and the first true child superstar of old Hollywood, Jackie Kugan, earned a great deal of money.

 In the 1920s, he made an estimated 3 to4 million. His finances were fully controlled by his mother, Lillian, and his stepfather, Arthur Bernstein. By the mid 1930s, they were spending the money on furs, diamonds, automobiles, and an extravagant lifestyle. When Kugan finally got access to his accounts in 1938, almost everything was gone.

 In court, his mother insisted no promises were ever made to give him anything. At one point, she also described him as a bad boy. The family also argued that his earnings were family income, legally under the parents control. Kugan did not accept this. He filed a lawsuit against his own mother. But even after the legal battle, he recovered only about $126,000, a tiny fraction of the $3 to4 million he had earned as a child.

 After the scandal, California passed the Kugan Act to protect child actors earnings. Today, Kugan account rules require 15% of a child performer’s gross pay to be placed in a blocked trust account. Kugan’s story made national headlines, but even that would not save Shirley Temple. In the mid 1930s, Shirley Temple was the highest paid child actress in America.

By the time she reached adulthood, she had earned approximately $3.4 million. Her finances were controlled by her father, George Temple. When she asked to see the accounts at age 22, the answer was shocking. Only about $44,000 remained in her name. It later emerged that a significant portions of her earnings had been spent on the family’s luxurious lifestyle.

 The money went to expensive cars, a large household staff, and a series of her father’s unsuccessful investments. There were also questions about whether her earnings had been properly set aside in trust, but no major courtroom battle followed as it had with Jackie Kugan, in part because proving outright misappropriation under the laws of the time was extremely difficult.

 Temple herself ultimately chose not to take the family dispute to court. She and her husband wanted to avoid a public family scandal. She later spoke openly about this decision in her memoir, Child Star. Shirley worked relentlessly throughout her childhood, expecting a comfortable adult life.

 Instead, the reality proved far more modest, and she was not the only one who had to start over at zero. Baby Marie Osborne started acting at the age of three. Within a few years, she appeared in 29 films. By the time she was eight, studios already considered her too old for the parts. Her career stopped. Born Helen Alice Meyers, she was raised by adoptive parents, Leon and Edith Osborne.

 They changed her name and turned her into a brand, Baby Marie. Newspapers at the time claimed that 6-year-old Marie could earn around $800 a week. And in 1921, some reports even printed the figure $1,000 a week. When Marie became a teenager, she learned two things at once. First, the people who raised her were not her biological parents.

 Second, they fought over money and in her words squandered everything she had earned. She later recalled, “There was a trust fund, but I never seemed to have received anything from it. My foster parents lived a gilded life.” Without the money from her child star years, she returned to Hollywood not as a star, but as a shadow. She worked as a stand-in for Ginger Rogers, Deanna Durban, and Betty Hutton.

 Later, she built a long behindthe-scenes career in wardrobe. She worked as a costume supervisor on major studio productions, including Cleopatra, where she oversaw Elizabeth Taylor’s wardrobe. Another baby star earned even more. This time, it was her biological parents who spent it. Baby Peggy was a silent film phenomenon.

 Between 1921 and 1925, she made nine features and around 150 shorts. In 1922, she reportedly received over 1.2 million fan letters. Newspapers claim she earned up to $1 million a year and at the peak of her contracts, some reports put the figure at one.5 million. That is where the nickname came from, the milliondoll baby.

 Her parents controlled the money, and they spent that childhood fortune on expensive cars, homes, and clothing. Almost nothing was set aside, not for her education, not for her future. When baby Peggy went on promotional tours, she personally received just a single nickel per her appearance. After that, Jane Withers and her $5 a week almost soundprivileged.

Eventually, everything collapsed. Her career was damaged by her father’s money conflict with producer Saul Leser. And by the time she was six, she was effectively pushed out of major film work. After that, the family spiraled downward. And the final blow came from her father’s business adviser. He fled with whatever money had not already been spent.

 When Jackie Kugan sued his parents in 1938, she was asked whether she would do the same. She said it would not help. As an adult, she was forced to start over from scratch. In the 1930s, she worked as an extra for nearly 10 years. Later, she became a writer and a researcher of early Hollywood. Baby Peggy never went to court.

 The child star who followed spent seven years in court fighting her own parents. Freddy was raised from childhood by his aunt, Millisent Mary Bartholomew. He lived with her in England. In practice, she was his mother. He came to the United States for his film career. And on October 22nd, 1935, a Los Angeles court officially appointed Millisent as guardian of both his person and his property.

 His biological parents, Cecil and Lilian Bartholomew, had been long absent. But after the success of Little Lord Font Laoy in 1936, they arrived from England to Los Angeles and immediately filed in the same case to remove the aunt’s guardianship. A compromise followed. Part of Freddy’s money remained in trust for him, but direct payments were set up for the family.

 10% of his income went to his father and 5% went to each of his two sisters. In the end, the fight dragged on for nearly 7 years, and almost everything he had managed to accumulate went to lawyers, court costs, and those family payments. By the end of summer 1937, the financial drain was severe. His aunt, still acting as his guardian, demanded that MGM raise Freddy’s salary after the success of Captain’s Courageous in 1937.

 She even threatened to break the contract. MGM responded with a hard ball contract fight and it kept him out of work for roughly a year. He lost major planned leads including Kim based on Kipling and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry in 1937 a project tied to Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Freddy did not live off childhood millions.

 He served in the US Army Air Forces during World War II. Later stepped away from film and became an advertising executive. Like Jane Withers, another child star lived on a pathetic allowance. About three pounds a week, while tens of thousands were being earned in her name. Haley Mills became a Disney child star in the early 1960s.

The money she earned was immediately placed by her parents into a special trust. When Haley grew up and it was time to access the fund, the trust was almost empty. What happened? Much of it was consumed by the British tax system, as much as 91%. Haley tried to challenge it, but in the end she lost.

 In 1960, Haley’s father, together with lawyers and a banker, created a private company, Sussex Productions Limited. Studios paid the company, not Haley, and the money was rooted through that structure into a trust. On May 18th, 1960, 13-year-old Haley was made to sign a 5-year contract with that company for just £400 a year.

The court later noted she was told it was for her own good and she signed without understanding what she was signing. In the first year alone, the company received more than £40,000 for her work. Thousands more went to agents, fees, and taxes. Haley herself saw almost none of it. Her £400 was not paid in cash.

 It was credited on paper, then reduced by expenses charged back to her. Living costs, travel, and whatever the adults called necessary. Meanwhile, Haley lived like an ordinary school girl. Pocket money, £3 a week, no proper personal bank account. Later, she said in interviews that if she had won, she could have kept about 2 million, but the court ruled against her in 1975.

 Another case went to court too, but this one unfolded in the 1920s. Mary Miles Mter went on stage at about 5 years old. She started appearing in films by the age of 10. By the time Silent Hollywood made her a star, adults controlled both her career and her money. When Mary was about 10 and performing at Chicago, her mother, Charlotte Shelby, allegedly used the birth certificate of an older deceased relative to get around child labor restrictions.

 Around the same time, Juliet Riley was presented under the stage name Mary Miles Mter. In 1925, Mter filed a lawsuit against her own mother. She demanded an accounting, opened the books, and show where her money went. Public reports referenced $1.3 million. There was no courtroom victory. The case ended in an outofc court settlement signed by Mentor and Shelby on January 24th, 1927 at the American consulate in Paris.

 Public sources usually do not say how much Mter received. She never regained her former career. After the William Desmond Taylor scandal, she effectively disappeared from major film work. In later years, she lived outside Hollywood with finances tied to Los Angeles real estate. Decades later, even with the Kugan Law already on the books, another child star would still end up fighting over money in court.

Gary Coleman was the face of American television in the 1980s. Different strokes made him the most famous boy in the country. At the height of the show, he was earning around $100,000 per episode. In 1979, a financial guardianship was set up for Gary Coleman with his adoptive parents Willie and Admonia Sue Coleman as his personal managers and business manager Anita Deomas handling the money.

 When he turned 18, the guardianship ended, but the assets were moved into a trust that his parents still controlled. In 1989, Coleman went to court. He sued his parents and to Thomas. The claim was blunt. Money was being pulled from his earnings as salaries, commissions, and management fees while the assets were being mishandled.

 The defense argued Coleman’s parents were legally entitled to 70% of his earnings. Coleman’s attorney countered that part of the missing money was an unpaid loan and that Anita Deomas used his funds to start a failed interior design business. In February 1993, the court put a number on it, about $1.28 million. The ruling went in Coleman’s favor, but it still did not bring financial stability.

 As an adult, he no longer lived like a TV sensation. chronic kidney disease and constant medical care kept his career from returning to its peak. He survived on occasional jobs and small appearances lived in Utah and in 2010 after a fall down the stairs died in the hospital at just 42.

 Another child star from Different Strokes followed and her fate turned out even worse. Before the scandals and arrests, Dana Plato was the teenage daughter that audiences knew from Different Strokes. Her case came later after child stardom, but the money still ended up in a trusted adult’s hands first.

 As her career declined and her life became unstable, Plato handed control of her finances to an accountant and signed a power of attorney. In 1988, when she was about 23, he gained full access to her accounts, agreements, and money. Biographical accounts say the accountant disappeared with most of her savings, leaving Plato with less than $150,000.

The same accounts claimed that he also took more than $1 million from other clients. They further state that he was never found or prosecuted despite what was described as an exhaustive search. In other words, there was almost no one to sue and nothing realistic to recover. After that, Plato fell into real poverty.

 In Las Vegas, she worked behind the counter at A1 Phillips on West Flamingo Road. Then in 1991 came the lowest point. She walked into a video store, pulled out a BB gun, and took $164 from the register. The clerk recognized her immediately. Police were called at once. In May 1999, Dana Plato died of an overdose at just 34. One disastrous signature became part of the collapse.

 This time it wasn’t an unknown accountant. The people handling the money were family. At just 9 years old, Jackie Cooper became one of the youngest nominees ever for the Academy Award for best actor for Skippy in 1931. The public saw a child prodigy. The adults around him saw a weekly paycheck. Once Cooper was earning $13 a week, he was left with only $400 in real money.

 The rest was broken down like corporate accounting as if he were a business, not a child. Part of his pay went straight into a trust, $900 a week. Separate lines covered emergency savings and household upkeep. In that same breakdown, the adults drew regular salaries. His mother and grandmother received $75 a week each.

 Even Jackie’s clothes, schooling, and recreation were listed as fixed expenses, like production costs. For years, Cooper believed his father was dead. Then he learned the truth. From 1935 to 1948, his mother was sending his father $100 a week, paid, of course, from Jackie’s earnings, not her own. Over those years, that added up to roughly $67,600.

There was no loud courtroom war like Jackie Kugan’s. His story was quieter. The money still moved through adult hands. And the last story wasn’t about one child. It was about five. And this time the state was involved too. In May 1934 near Corb Bay, Ontario, Elazir Dion gave birth to five identical girls. Ivonne, Annette, Cecile, Emily, and Marie.

 They were so premature that each baby was said to be the size of a hand and together they weighed about 14 lbs. Their father Oliva briefly signed a deal to exhibit them at the Chicago World’s Fair, then cancelled it. But the Ontario government stepped in quickly. In 1935, the province took control of the girls, claiming it was protecting them from exploitation.

 Instead, it turned them into one of the biggest tourist attractions in North America. At first, nurses carried the girls onto a nursery balcony and showed them to crowds one by one with name signs held beside them. Later, the province built Quincland, a full complex where visitors watched the children on a strict schedule through glass around the playground.

 The sisters later recalled that even when the view was screened, they still saw the shadows and knew they were being watched. By 1937, about 3,000 people passed through Quintland each day. From 1934 to 1943, roughly three million tourists came through. Entry could be free on paper, but the site’s gift shop generated millions.

 A huge souvenir industry grew around the girls. Postcards, dolls, dishes, and staged holiday photos sold to newspapers. A trust was set up for the girls. In practice, much of the money was consumed by the Quintland operation itself, including staff and facility costs. By the time the three surviving sisters, Annette, Cecilele, and Ivonne, were living together in Montreal in their 60s, their combined income was about $746 a month.

 Two of their sisters had already died. Emily died in 1954 and Marie died in 1970. In 1998, they asked for compensation, saying the trust money had disappeared or been taken. The government first offered just $2,000 a month for all three. After public outrage, Ontario agreed to a $4 million settlement and apologized.

As these stories show, children earned enormous amounts of money and almost never had any real control over it. Adults called it protection, guardianship, or management. But again and again, the money paid for luxury cars, large homes, and household staff, not the child’s future.