Frederica Sagor Maas

SAN DIEGO, Calif. — Frederica Sagor Maas, a Hollywood screenwriter and one of the last links to the silent film era, died on Jan. 5 at the age of 111.  She lived in San Diego, and was the second oldest Californian and the 44th oldest person in the world.

Maas, whose wrote the 1925 script for the film “The Plastic Age,” which launched the career of actress Clara Bow.  Her final credit was the 1947 musical “The Shocking Miss Pilgrim,” starring Betty Grable.

Disgusted by the “shallow” industry, she and her screenwriter husband contemplated suicide before leaving the movie business altogether.  But she exacted her revenge on what she considered a heartless and unethical Hollywood in 1999 when she wrote her memoir “The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood.” In it she recalls a screenwriting career that began when she was 23 in an industry in which “many people worked just for the buck” and told tales on famous names. Legendary producer Irving Thalberg was “very, very overestimated,” she wrote, and she “never met anybody” who liked or trusted Louis B. Mayer.

Both she and her husband, Ernest Maas, saw their ideas stolen and plagiarized, and they were blackballed by the industry after being wrongly accused of being communists, she wrote. “Her book is perhaps the best muckraking memoir about early Hollywood,” film historian Alan K. Rode said last week. “She was one of the last living connections to silent film, and her autobiography is an irreplaceable record written from the rare perspective of a woman who lived through those times. She was frank, and she was funny”and she kept that kind of wit and cynicism past 100.”

Frederica Sagor was born July 6, 1900, in New York City to Russian Jewish parents who had shortened their name from Zagosky.  She studied journalism at Columbia University but never graduated.  At 20, she was hired as assistant story editor at Universal Pictures in New York. When the bosses she later called “chauvinistic honchos” refused to help her become a screenwriter, she left for Hollywood. She was 23. In the late 1920s, she married Ernest Maas, who was her writing partner. Her scripts for silent films include the 1926 movies “Flesh and the Devil” with Greta Garbo and “Dance Madness.”

Maas had nearly 20 credits, including “His Secretary” in 1925 and “The Waning Sex” the next year. Both starred Norma Shearer, who was a good friend until Maas unsuccessfully warned her against marrying Thalberg.
“I enjoyed the writing part, but I didn’t enjoy being a screenwriter,” Maas told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 1999. “You don’t get any respect.”

Many of the screenplays she and her husband wrote between 1938 and 1950 were never produced. Hopeless, humiliated and having little money, the couple drove to a hilltop overlooking Hollywood with the intention of committing suicide in their Plymouth. Clutching each other, they started sobbing and realized that “none of these things mattered. We had each other,” wrote Maas, who had no children. Her husband died in 1986.

She eventually became an insurance adjuster and said if she had it to do over again, she would “be a wash lady.”