HAPPY BIRTHDAY JACKIE COOGAN, BORN OCTOBER 26, 1914
Have you ever heard about or seen The Kid, Charlie Chaplin's silent comedy-drama?
If so, you might be surprised as I was to learn that Jackie Coogan, who played the adorable kid in 1921, also played the grotesque Uncle Fester in the Addams Family TV series from 1964-1966—and that in between, he became a romantic lead who acted in movies with and in 1937 married Betty Grable, who later became the most popular World War II pin-up girl.
And it also was a bit surprising to me that he was a Catholic. Jackie Coogan was born into an Irish-American Catholic family. At least he started out Catholic, and by the grace of God he seems to have finished that way too.
Starting at the age of seven, Jackie Coogan was the first celebrity child star "the most famous boy in the world." His image was used to sell products as diverse as peanut butter, stationery, whistles, dolls, records, and figurines.
He also was the first celebrity humanitarian. In 1924, after the Armenian genocide in World War I, when he was ten, Coogan promoted the Children's Crusade of Mercy, and he travelled in his own rail car across the U.S. collecting food and donations for orphaned refugee children. He traveled to Europe by ship, had a private audience with Pope Pius XI, and then he accompanied the donations to their final destinations in Athens, Syria, and Palestine.
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Looking at the poster, I see Karo syrup had a commercial tie-in to the charitable mission, since the poster tells children to buy and donate Karo syrup with claims that dextrose is an important nutrient for children. |
The history page of the website of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills also mentions him as one of the celebrities who attended Mass there and who became a member of the Catholic Motion Picture Guild that was started by the pastor.
Perhaps because it is hard to keep your moral compass when you're immersed in the temptations of wealth, fame, and the Hollywood lifestyle, Jackie Coogan and his family were involved in so many scandals that there's not room to write about them all here. For one thing, he had to sue his mother and his step-father to try to get money he had earned as a child star. For another thing, when two kidnappers killed a friend he met at Santa Clara College before he had to leave for bad grades, he was in a lynch mob that hung the murderers, in the city where I live now, in San José.
Coogan and Grable divorced after two years, and he later married three more women in civil ceremonies. He married his fourth wife, Dorothea Lamphere, in 1952, and he was still married to her when, in 1961, he was arrested for marijuana possession in company with a former exotic dancer and two other men at his Malibu ocean front home.
Nothing was reported about where Dorothea was at the time of Coogan's arrest. But he was still married to her at the time of his death.
After Betty Grable died in 1973, Coogan might have had his fourth marriage blessed in the Church. In any case, he was in good enough standing as a Catholic to have a Requiem Mass at the chapel of Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, where he is buried.
"Jackie’s daughter, Leslie, related to author Stephen Cox one particular Addams Family-related memory concerning her father: 'He had been doing the part for a while, I guess, and he came home crying-sober. He said, ‘I used to be the most beautiful child in the world and now I’m a hideous monster.’ That was heavy. Something just dawned on him one day. It hit him. He’d let go of it later, but it really had to do with his lost childhood. Later he came to cope with the Fester character and loved doing the character and loved doing the show. Then he cherished it.'"—‘Addams Family’ Star Jackie Coogan Was Haunted By His ‘Lost Childhood’ When He Played Uncle Fester
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| When Jackie turned 50 in 1964, he received this doll as a gift. His smile seems a bit forced, methinks. |
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