Frederica Alexandrina Sagor Maas was an
American playwright,
screenwriter,
memoirist, and
author,
[1] the youngest daughter of
Russian immigrants died she was 111.. Maas was best known for a detailed, tell-all memoir of her time spent in early Hollywood.
[2] She was one of the rare
supercentenarians known for reasons other than longevity.
[3]
(July 6, 1900 – January 5, 2012)
Biography
Maas's parents, Arnold and Agnessa Zagosky, emigrated from
Moscow,
Russian Empire, and anglicized their surname to Sagor. Her mother supported the family as a very successful midwife. One of four daughters,
Frederica Alexandrina Sagor was born on July 6, 1900 in a cold-water, railroad flat on 101st Street near Madison Avenue in
Manhattan.
[4]
She studied journalism at
Columbia University and held a summer job as a copy- or errand-girl at the
New York Globe. She dropped out before graduation in 1918 and took a job as an assistant story editor at
Universal Pictures'
New York office at $100 a week. By 1923 Maas was story editor for
Universal and head of the department. A year later in 1924, Maas had
become dissatisfied with her position and left Universal to move to
Hollywood.
[4]
Hollywood years
Once in Hollywood, Maas negotiated a contract with
Preferred Pictures to adapt
Percy Marks's novel
The Plastic Age for film. Based on this, she was signed to a three-year contract with
MGM for $350 per week, though in her words: "I had the peculiar feeling that wily
Louis B. [Mayer] was less interested in my writing ability than in signing someone who had worked for
Ben Schulberg and
Al Lichtman."
[4] It was in this period that she wrote
Dance Madness and
The Waning Sex.
Her recollections of that period:
I wrote a movie called The Waning Sex
. It was a title I was given and we wrote the title around it. I got into a lot of fights with the co-writer on the film, F. Hugh Herbert.
It was rough. I would work so hard on some of the scripts and the
minute I'd turn it in, someone else would take credit for it. You'd be
ticketed as a troublemaker. Unless you wanted to quit the business, you
just kept your mouth shut."
[5]
Thus Maas' introduction to studio politics did not go well and her
MGM contract was not renewed. During 1925–1926 she wrote treatments and
screenplays for
Tiffany Productions, including the well-received
flapper comedies
That Model from Paris and
The First Night.
[4]
Already before she married
Ernest Maas, a producer at
Fox Studios, on August 5, 1927, they sold story ideas such as
Silk Legs
to studios. Many of these would never get produced; "swell fish" was
their term for scripts that never saw the light of day. During 1927,
Schulberg, this time with
Paramount Pictures, contracted Sagor for a year and she says she worked uncredited on scripts such as
Clara Bow's
It,
Red Hair and
Hula; and credited for writing the story for
Louise Brooks' lost film
Rolled Stockings.
[4] Regarding
It, which was produced between October 7 and November 6, 1926,
[6] i.e. before Sagor signed up for Paramount, her claim is conflicting.
An unusually long European vacation in the summer of 1928 made
finding steady studio work difficult upon her return. Ernest remained
with Paramount Short Subjects division in New York. When a story by the
Maas couple was misappropriated and filmed as
The Way of All Flesh he left the studio; their original script had been called
Beefsteak Joe. The couple returned to unsteady work on the west coast in October 1929.
[4]
According to her memoirs, "[b]y the fall of 1934, it was plain that we
were not a success in Hollywood. In these five years we only found work
doing short studio assignments – cleaning up other people's scripts –
and had failed to sell our own stories."
[4]
The couple had lost $10,000 in the stock market crash and moved back to New York.
[5] From 1934 to 1937, they reviewed plays for the
Hollywood Reporter.
Another relocation back to Hollywood had Maas representing writers and
selling story material for the Edward Small Agency; Maas plied every
studio every day with her wares. After a year as an agent, the Maas
couple secured writing contracts at Paramount to cull previously
purchased material.
[4]
Post-Hollywood
The war years found the couple back seeking unsteady work and writing for political campaigns. It was in 1941 that they wrote
Miss Pilgrim's Progress, the story that would become
The Shocking Miss Pilgrim.
Bad representation caused the story to sell for a pittance, and it
would not be produced until 1947 when it was rendered almost
unrecognizable in an adaptation by
Darryl F. Zanuck's
20th Century Fox for
Betty Grable.
[4]
The Maas couple continued to live a hand-to-mouth existence
struggling in Hollywood. During this time they were even interrogated by
the FBI for having subscribed to two allegedly Communist publications.
"I'm something of a Bolshevik. I'm always for the underdog … I remember
when I was 17 or 18, marching in a New York parade, right before women
got the vote. I marched in the schoolteacher segment, because my sister
was a schoolteacher. I remember we held hands, and I remember how I
felt. My God, I thought I was revolutionizing the world."
[2]
Having had enough "swell fish", Frederica Sagor Maas took a job as a
policy typist with an insurance agency in 1950, quickly working her way
up to insurance broker. Ernest took up ghost writing professional
business articles and freelance story editing. Ernest succumbed to
Parkinson's disease in 1986 at 94.
[4]
Autobiography
In 1999, at age 99, and at the urging of film historian
Kevin Brownlow, Maas published her autobiography,
The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood. The book was well received and is still a standard reference for early Hollywood history. From the Library Journal:
Maas's chronicle of her writing career, which
spanned over a quarter of a century, is a valuable contribution to the
literature on women in Hollywood ... Rejecting studio politics, Maas
ultimately paid the price for playing maverick. Peppered with
fascinating anecdotes from yesteryear, this account of the author's life
bespeaks frustration with the vapidity of Hollywood: a fickle business
world that relied on formula for its success.[7]
From Kevin Brownlow:
(she) proved so "ignorant of studio politics"
that she was labeled a "troublemaker" by producer Harry Rapf. After her
1927 marriage to script writer and producer Ernest Maas, the couple
survived the coming of sound films, the Depression and various
earthquakes, but dry scripting spells and the constant theft of their
ideas, stories and credits led them to quit the business. In 1950 she
"bid farewell, without tears, to the Hollywood screen industry that had
so entangled and entrapped me in its web of promises." Maas trashes
Hollywood legends, recalling Louis B. Mayer as "a very fearful, insecure
man"; Clara Bow dancing nude on a tabletop; Jeanne Eagels squatting to
urinate in the midst of a film set ...[8]
There are also her detractors:
Her story has to be taken with a grain of salt.
By the time she wrote her memoirs at 99 her bitterness with Hollywood
was deep and she particularly relished describing the bosses with whom
she so frequently battled as amoral debauchers.[9]
In her own defense:
I know I've been hard on the motion picture
industry [in the book] ... [T]he facts and the stories I tell – about
the plagiarism and the way I was handled and the way other writers were
handled – are true. If anybody wants to take offense at the fact that I
tell the truth and I'm writing this book ... [I] can get my payback now.
I'm alive and thriving and, well, you SOBs are all below, because I've
lived to 99. And I quit the business at 50.[2]
Longevity
On October 1, 2009,
[10] Maas, aged 109, became the fourth oldest living person in
California.
In July 2010 there were inaccurate reports of her death. On February
18, 2011, Mollye Marcus died, and Maas—aged 110 years, 229 days—became
the third oldest living person in California.
[11] On November 29, 2011, she was the third oldest person in California after
Soledad Mexia and Avice Clarke.
Sagor Maas died on January 5, 2012, at the Country Villa nursing facility in La Mesa, California.
[12] At the time of her death, she was the 44th oldest verified person in the world.
Filmography
Bibliography
Maas, Frederica Sagor (1999). The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2122-1.
To see more of who died in 2011
click here
Alexander Alekseyevich Sizonenko was a Soviet basketball player died he was 52..
