Leonard Maltin’s 1969 Paper about Margaret Kerry

Did you know that Film Historian extraordinaire Leonard Maltin started his career at the age of 10 writing a weekly magazine?  By the age of 15 in 1966 he purchased and took over and became editor the Publication Film Fan Monthly for $175!  

In June of 1969 Film Fan Monthly featured Margaret Kerry!  

This is an incredible biography of Margaret's earlier work in her 90+ years entertaining us all!

Margaret Kerry

By David Chierichetti

"My mother and I were always at cross-purposes," states Mrs. Margaret Brown today. "She always wanted me to be another Shirley Temple, and for twenty years I tried. But I always wanted to be a school teacher, and that's what I'm going to do now. In between, she has worked on an incredibly wide range of activities, both in and out of show business.

Margaret Lorraine Robb was born on May 11, 1929. Her parents were from old Los Angeles families, and their friendship with Shirley Temple's parents made Mrs. Robb decide her daughter could do as well. "My mother thought I was going to be the greatest actress in the whole wide world, so she started training me when I was three," she recalls. made my debut in a 'crawlon' part at the Biltmore Theater and then I got my first movie job in Max Reinhardt's MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. Margaret had been renamed Peggy Lynch because "My father never wanted to be known as Peggy Robb's father as George Temple was known as Shirley's father." Though Shirley was her personal friend, Peggy only worked in two Temple pictures. "The problem was that I was smaller than Shirley, and she always had to be the smallest and cutest of the bunch." In the first film, the two girls sat on the ground playing jacks, which obscured the size difference, and in THE BLUEBIRD, Shirley was no longer such a little girl, and Peggy's size didn't matter. "I have the greatest respect for Shirley," she says, recalling when she to do thirty takes of a scene. "She just did it and did it and didn't blow up. Her mother was strict with her, but oh, what a wonderful person she raised." 

Peggy also got in the OUR GANG comedies. Gordon Douglas, the director, called her in so often she became sort of a regular in the series, doing about eleven in all. "I was Darla Hood's best friend; if she had to give the plan to somebody, it was me. Later, when they turned more into little musical comedies, Darla, who has the best voice, would sing, and I would be her backup dancer." Peggy had joined the dancing school of Gladys and Morrie Robinson, which led to other jobs at different studios. She was a flower girl in CAREFREE, and a flower girl in ROSALIE's mile-long wedding. She had a bit in the opening sequences of GIRL OF THE GOLDEN WEST, appeared as the Madonna in a school pageant scene for PENNY SERENADE, sang a duet with Bing Crosby in THE STAR MAKER, jumped rope in REBECCA, and was one of the children Greer Garson adopted in BLOSSOMS IN THE DUST. When World War Two broke out, Peggy became quite active with the USO, eventually doing over five hundred shows. She also played the lead in five local stage plays based on a character named Cordelia, and had many parts on radio.

Peggy's film jobs in this period were interesting, but she didn't always get screen credit. For SINCE YOU WENT AWAY, it was necessary to make a "family portrait" including Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, and a younger Shirley Temple than appeared in the film. So Peggy, who was still smaller than Shirley, sat in on the portrait, and later photo technicians replaced her face with a picture of Shirley's face, taken several years earlier. Under heavy make-up and a black wig, she dou-bled for Elizabeth Taylor in NATIONAL VELVET. The reason she was needed was simple. "As a child, you could only work four hours, SO they would get long shots and back shots and over the shoulder shots of me while Elizabeth was in school, then they'd do close-ups of her while I was in school. Did Peggy ever ride the beautiful black horse, Prince Charles? "No, they had a man to double for that, she explains. wouldn't have touched him if they'd paid me half the world. He was so overtrained and nervous he would turn on anybody, and Elizabeth was terrified of him. In the scene in which Velvet is walking home after being disqualified, the horse was being dragged by the trainer off-ca-mera, and Mickey [Rooney] and I followed him over a Suddenly he reared, and Mickey threw me over the bridge into the water, which saved my life." 

Peggy has pleasant memories of Elizabeth Taylor. "She was so sweet, and so adorable, and so gorgeous that you couldn't take your eyes off her. She was so well mannered and well brought up that all of the kids around got sick of our mothers saying 'Why can't you be as nice as Elizabeth is?' It never occurred to her that she would be a star, or that she was terribly beautiful." What are her memories of the other MGM stars? "My favorite was Wallace Beery. This man just lit up the room; he had a spark. And George Brent! When this man turned on the charm, nobody could say no. Clark Gable never impressed me. I met him at the party where Judy Garland sang 'Dear Mr. Gable.' I went to school with Judy and Deanna Durbin for six months at MGM. Judy was being torn apart by everyone. It was very sad. She was trying to keep her weight down, and was taking pills for that, and pills to calm her nerves. I saw her mother pick, pick, pick at her; 'Judy do it this way, do it that way.' Mrs. Gumm and Judy's sister would always be there. When things got too rough, she would start crying in the classroom, and the only one who could settle her down was Mickey Rooney. She was having a terrible time; of course I didn't realize it at the time...nobody realized it then."

After VELVET, Peggy was seen as one of the girls in a boarding school in a Dr. Kildare film, and then giggled a lot in SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD. She appeared in one of the dream sequences of LADY IN THE DARK with Ginger Rogers, and under contract to 20th Century Fox, had a role and a featured dance in MARGIE. Peggy began appearing on pioneer television broadcasts in 1946, and she remembers many funny things about the days of all-live programming. On one broadcast over KTLA, which was then on the Paramount lot, she saw Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake standing behind the camera as she was finishing her song-and-dance number. They quickly drafted her to play "the other woman" in a playlet because Agnes Moorehead, who was to have done the part, never showed up. Peggy also worked on quiz and interview shows. In 1947 Peggy went to RKO where she played the daughter of Eddie Cantor and Joan Davis in IF YOU KNEW SUSIE. Cantor had put a good deal of money into the production, and was quite worried throughout. He disliked the name Peggy Lynch, so Peggy was renamed Margaret Kerry. As Margaret Kerry she was cast as one of the children in I REMEMBER MAMA, but was replaced after two weeks of shooting because George Stevens felt she didn't look Norwegian enough. However, she did play the leads in THE CYCLE AND THE CROSS and Eagle Lion's CANYON CITY.

Margaret then became an assistant dance director at 20th Century Fox, where she auditioned numbers for the producers and then taught them to the stars. 

Walt Disney borrowed her from Fox to dance for animators who used her as a source for their character Tinker Bell in PETER PAN. Margaret's voice was also used on the soundtrack when the boy who had been playing Michael became ill in the middle of the recording sessions. Margaret was able to provide a voice that sounded exactly like his, and was also heard as one of the giggling mermaids in the Never Never Land Lagoon. Her PETER PAN training has since proved invaluable, for she has dubbed several foreign films and supplied voices for over eight hundred cartoons. Margaret played the daughter, Sharon, for several seasons of THE CHARLIE RUGGLES SHOW, where she met Richard Brown, who was the director. They were married in 1951, have three children: Kerry (spelling later changed to Cary, born 1952) Tina (1955), and Ellen (1959). Brown has directed over 100 television shows, and produced such cartoon series as CLUTCH CARGO, SPACE ANGEL, CAPTAIN FATHOM, and THE THREE STOOGES CARTOONS, for which Margaret supplies the voices; she is now going into feature film production abroad. Margaret's most recent appearances have been in the one-minute live-action sequences that precede the Stooges cartoons.

A "On my thirtieth birthday, I looked in the mirror and said, 'This is it, kid, it's now or never!! So saying, Margaret enrolled at Los Angeles City College in 1967 in pursuit of a teaching credential. History major, she appeared on the honor list every semester. In the spring of 1968, she took an incredible 18 units, got four A's and two B's, and an award for the most hours of student volunteer work, all of the while taking care of her family and voicing the cartoons. She graduated from LACC this winter and is planning to spend some time re-searching and writing a paper titled "How Do You Spell Ignoramus" in which she will study the effectiveness of public education. In June her family is moving to Vancouver where her husband is going to be producing films. She is writing scripts for them now, and will also host a kiddie show featuring his cartoons in Canada. Her achievements seem impossible to everyone but her.

"Listen honey," she says, "take it a little bit at a time. Life is hard by the yard, but it's a cinch by the inch."

-Margaret Kerry Tinker Bell