Hollywood, July 1 - (By N. E. A.) - The greatest child actor in talking pictures.
Few will dispute this claim of little Jackie Cooper's - although Jackie doesn't make it himself. In fact, he doesn't make any kind of claims for himself, unless it might be that he is the best scrapper in his neighborhood.
Strange as it may seem in view of the tremendous success he has scored, and nobody could term 'Skippy' anything but a tremendous hit, Jackie is a very regular fellow. There's nothing of the stereotyped movie youngster about him. Nor is his mother continually exploiting him as are most movie mothers. For that she gets three cheers from us.
I was interviewing Jackie the other day out at the M-G-M studio, if it could be termed an interview. Talking to him probably would be better, especially in view of the fact that I did most of the talking. We hadn't been in the room five minutes before Jackie spotted a huge dictionary. That was the end of things. He immediately became absorbed in the dictionary and would have nothing more to do with me. It didn't make any difference to him if we got a story or not.
"How would you like to have school books that big, Jackie?" I asked.
"Gee, I'd have to go to school in a truck," he replied.
The story of this 7-year-old youngster - he claims 8 because he will be 8 in September - really reads like a fairy tale. Six months ago he was a practically unknown member of "Our Gang" earning $100 a week. Then came "Skippy." For making that entire picture he received $900 - $600 salary and a bonus of $300 which Parmount executives gave him for making one of the greatest films of the year. Now, under his new contract with M-G-M, he is receiving $1000 a week with yearly increases that will make his salary $2,500 per week at the end of four years.
He's worth the money, too. As far as the writer is concerned Jackie is easily the best child actor on the screen today, comparable to the Jackie Coogan who appeared in "The Kid." And as Coogan always will be remembered as "The Kid," so will Jackie Cooper always be remembered as "Skippy,"