Trivia

In addition to her writing and work in films, Sagor also gained fame for her longevity. She lived to be 111 years old.

Broke and depressed, she and her husband had agreed to commit suicide by driving to an isolated hilltop, parking their car and leaving the engine running, and asphyxiating themselves. At the last minute they couldn't go through with it and turned off the engine.

At the time of her death, she was the 44th oldest person in the world according to the Gerontology Research Group.

She published her memoirs, "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim," in 1999 at 99 years old.

She gave up plans to be a doctor and studied journalism at Columbia University in New York City. She worked a summer as a copy girl for the "New York Globe" newspaper. She started in the film industry when she answered a want-ad for an assistant to the story editor at the Universal Pictures branch in New York City. She soon dropped out of college and scouted Broadway for film ideas. She moved to Hollywood in 1924, and although she was encouraged to be an actress, she decided against it and became a screenwriter, working for such studios as Universal, MGM, Paramount and Fox.

After giving up on Hollywood, she would have preferred to be "wash lady.".

She was one of four daughters born in a cold-water railroad flat at 101st Street near Madison Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia.

After moving to Hollywood in 1924, her first job as a screenwriter was for Preferred Pictures. She found success writing Clara Bow's hit The Plastic Age (1925), which got her a contract with MGM. She left MGM because, she claimed, others took credit for her work. She signed with Tiffany Productions, where she wrote--and received credit for--"flapper" comedies.

She married Ernest Maas in 1927, and they collaborated on screenplays (she also wrote screenplays by herself). They lost $10,000 in the infamous stock-market crash of 1929 which set off what has become known as The Great Depression. They survived by turning out movie reviews. They also wrote screenplays, but only one was accepted--"The Shocking Miss Pilgrim", which was eventually made into a film, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947). She also used it as the title for her autobiography.

The couple had no children and no immediate survivors. They were married for almost 60 years until her husband's death in 1986 at 94 years old.

She left the movie industry and worked as a typist in an insurance agency (she lied about her age to get the job). She was eventually promoted to adjuster.

A supercentenarian, she was one of the oldest surviving entertainers from the silent film era.

Film historian Alan K. Rode said: "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," he said, "and she kept that kind of wit and cynicism past 100.".

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.

Already before she married Ernest Maas, a screenwriter and producer at Fox Studios, on August 5, 1927, they sold story ideas such as Silk Legs to studios. Many of these would never be filmed; "swell fish" was their term for screenplays that would remain unproduced.

As an essayist, Maas was best known for a detailed, tell-all memoir of her time spent in early Hollywood.

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.

She studied journalism at Columbia University and held a summer job as a copy- or errand-girl at the New York Globe newspaper. 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.

Maas's parents, Arnold and Agnessa Zagorsky, Jewish immigrants from Moscow, Russian Empire, and anglicized their surname to Sagor.

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." It was in this period that she wrote the screenplays for silent films Dance Madness and The Waning Sex.

She was an American dramatist and playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, and author, and the youngest daughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia.

In 1941 she and her husband Ernest Maas 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.

She took a decade to write her memoir. The book portrayed young Hollywood as heartless and unethical. The 300-plus-page tome recounted a tortured 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.

When a story by the Maas couple titled "Beefsteak Joe" was misappropriated and filmed as The Way of All Flesh Ernest Maas left the Paramount studio. The couple returned to unsteady work in California in October 1929.

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 age 94.

The Maas couple continued to live a hand-to-mouth existence in the 40's 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.".

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.

"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.".

Frederica Sagor Maas wrote the script for 1925's "The Plastic Age," which launched actress Clara Bow. But she watched in horror as her serious treatment on women and work was turned into a frivolous 1947 musical, "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim," starring Betty Grable. It was Maas' final Hollywood credit.

Maas, who had long called San Diego home, was the third-oldest Californian when she died.