Jackie Coogan, 69, whose performance as a sad-eyed street urchin alongside Charlie Chaplin in "The Kid" melted the hearts of silent-film audiences and helped make him Hollywood's first major child star, died of cardiac arrest yesterday in Santa Monica, Calif.
The son of vaudeville performers, Mr. Coogan won his first movie part at the age of 18 months by gurgling and weeping on cue. He went on to lead a klieg-lit entertainment-world life of ups and downs that appeared to exemplify, as much as anything else, the "show-must-go-on" tradition of his craft and trade.
At one point in the 1920s, Mr. Coogan was the nation's No. 1 box-office attraction, leading Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks. He was also one of the first child actors to capitalize on endorsem*nts. As a juvenile celebrity, his name and face were everywhere. But as he grew up, he watched his star fade and his prospects dim.
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Of the $4 million he believed he had earned by the time he was 21, he saw very little. He entered a turbulent period of tangled litigation and highly publicized domestic problems. Jobs became hard to find.
Finally, he carved out a new career in summer stock, in movie character parts and on television. In the latter medium, he appeared as Uncle Fester in more than 60 episodes of the series, "The Addams Family."
Yesterday, Mr. Coogan, accompanied by his wife, was taken to the Santa Monica Hospital from his home in Malibu shortly before noon. After treatment in the emergency room, he was transferred to the cardiac-care unit, where he died about 1:30 p.m., a hospital spokeswoman said.
Born Oct. 26, 1914, Mr. Coogan was only 1 1/2 years old--and the film industry itself barely out of its infancy--when his mother demonstrated his emotional range in a high chair to win him a role in a film called "Skinner's Baby."
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As a toddler of 4, with shining blond hair, he was in vaudeville, dancing a version of the shimmy in an act that included his father and swimmer Annette Kellerman. Chaplin was in the audience when the act played Los Angeles.
In 1919, before he was 5 years old, Mr. Coogan, his hair cut in a Dutch-boy style, was making "The Kid" with Chaplin. Able to bring tears to his blue eyes at will, Mr. Coogan captivated a nation as a sweet-faced waif who broke windows for Chaplin, a glazier, to repair.
Fame followed, indisputably. Mr. Coogan and the bangs he wore at least until the age of 10 were seen in "Peck's Bad Boy," "Oliver Twist," "My Boy," "Daddy" and "Old Clothes." Later, as a teen-ager, although his appeal seemed to dwindle, he was seen in such talkies as "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn."
But the extent of Mr. Coogan's fortune was in dispute. At the age of 23, several months after his marriage to Betty Grable, he found himself without funds. He filed suit against his mother and the man she had married after the death of his father.
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"Nobody but me knows how rough things really have been for Jackie," Grable said. The couple lived in a luxury apartment, but Mr. Coogan auctioned their furnishings. "A guy has to eat, hasn't he?" he asked.
Eventually, he settled out of court for an amount he once put at about $80,000. The highly publicized litigation led to passage in California of the so-called "Coogan Law" that places juveniles' earnings into court-administered trust funds.
Grable and Mr. Coogan were divorced in 1940. The next year, Mr. Coogan married Flower Parry. She sued for divorce in 1942.
Meanwhile, early in 1941, Mr. Coogan asked that his draft call be speeded up. An experienced flier, he became a glider pilot. In March 1944, as Flight Officer John L. Coogan, he was at the controls of the lead glider when Allied forces under Maj. Gen. Orde Wingate landed behind Japanese lines in an operation in northern Burma.
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In 1948, after leaving the Army, Mr. Coogan married Ann McCormack. They were divorced two years later.
On his postwar return to Hollywood, Mr. Coogan said, "I got big hellos and backslaps, but no jobs." The wistful expression that had once made him a star was long gone. His hair had grown thin at the temples by the time he was 21. Now he wore a toupee.
In 1950, at the age of 35, he said he was quitting show business to sell a kitchen gadget because he could not find a job in Hollywood.
But in time, Mr. Coogan, a trouper who could recall playing New York's famed Palace in the heyday of vaudeville, found work in television, making more than 800 appearances by the middle 1960s. He toured on stage in summer stock, and he began again to make movies.
In addition to the "Addams Family" series, the decorated flier costarred in numerous episodes of "McKeever and the Colonel." More recent films included "The Actress," "The Joker Is Wild," and "Rogues Gallery."
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Showing little inclination to dwell on the problems of the past, he said, "Maybe I'm funny, but I look forward to getting to work each day."
Although most of the money he had earned as a child star was gone, Mr. Coogan retained a visible reminder of his childhood--a movie print of "The Kid." "Oh yes . . . " he once told an interviewer. "And every time I run it, I remember little things."
Survivors include his wife, Dorothea, whom he married in 1950, and four children.
