Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
Aargh! Online celebrity surgery!
Maybe they're right about regulating the Internet: Carnie Wilson goes live with her gastric bypass; Claire Danes, urine the movies now. Plus: Look out, Hillary, look out, Rudy, here comes Grandpa Munster!
By Amy Reiter
[08/12/99]

Rogues' Gallery
Last roundup at the Mustang Ranch
Bordellos R Us: In the Nevada desert, a new management style is coming to the world's oldest profession.
By Douglas Cruickshank
[08/12/99]

Nothing Personal
If this boat's a-rockin'...
Jerry Hall and Paul Allen makin' waves in French waters? Oasis members get good and gobsmacked. The cut-ups at the K.C. Star take clowning too far. Plus: Money talks, "Bulworth" walks, Beatty for prez!
By Amy Reiter
[08/11/99]

Column
God is dead. So is art ... Show us your tits!
Museums are supposed to be the last outposts of cultural experience, inspiring us to be less idiotic. Instead, they're sucking down to our lowest impulses.
By Cintra Wilson
[08/11/99]

Nothing Personal
Dennis Rodman, auteur
Ex-hoops star revealed to be creative visionary; Hugh Grant on scintillating secrets of celebrity nostril evacuation. Plus: We bid adieu to Tish, a great and noble fish, though a wee bit moody on occasion.
By Amy Reiter
[08/10/99]

Complete archives for People

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

When I ask her how it's possible to remember so much so clearly, Maas shrugs her shoulders, smiles and taps her forehead with her index finger. "When you use your brains, they just get sharper. Everything is recorded up there; you don't have to make it up."

Indeed, Maas' recently completed memoir, "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood," is a bittersweet, extraordinarily detailed recollection of her 30-year career in the motion picture industry. Because she's losing her eyesight, when Maas talks, she places her hand on your arm and pulls you toward her. The gesture has a conspiratorial feel, like every word spoken is the greatest of secrets.

The daughter of Russian immigrants, Maas was 19 and working as a copy girl for the New York Globe when she saw an ad in the New York Times for an assistant story editor at Universal Pictures. She applied, got the job and a career was born. Four years later, she moved to Los Angeles to become a scriptwriter, first for Preferred Pictures, then MGM and later for Fox and Paramount. Her screenwriting credits include "The Waning Sex" (starring Norma Shearer), "Flesh and the Devil" (starring Greta Garbo) and "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim" (starring Betty Grable). Maas' first screenplay, "The Plastic Age," launched the career of the "It Girl" of silent film, Clara Bow.

While in Hollywood, Maas saw films go from silent to "talkies," and from black-and-white to color. She struggled through the Great Depression and the tempestuous days of the Hollywood Ten, during which she and her husband were interrogated by the FBI for having subscribed to two Communist publications.

"I'm something of a Bolshevik. I'm always for the underdog," Maas says. "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."

Maas' book is chockablock with such anecdotes, and a blinding amount of star-wattage to boot. She frequently lunched next to the legendary wits at the Algonquin Hotel's "roundtable," received a personal invitation to Hearst Castle, had Irving Berlin play piano just for her and dispensed clothing advice to the then-undiscovered Joan Crawford. "She was a gum-chewing tart from New York," Maas says of the actress now known to many as "Mommy Dearest." "But she came to Hollywood -- she was going to be a movie star, see. She quickly learned to speak the King's English and turned into a lady. Whatever debts she had to repay to get out here, I don't know, but I'm sure she paid them pretty damn quick, and then locked the door and concentrated on her work."

Although she shunned actresses in general, Maas was close with Norma Shearer, for whom she wrote many scripts.

"Norma and I were good friends. We used to tramp around a lot together. We used to go to parties and hike together. We had a lot of fun until she met Irving Thalberg, and he fell head over heels in love with her. She told me she was engaged and intended to marry him. I thought it was a big mistake and I told her so." Maas explains that the MGM producer, director and writer was a mama's boy. And when she said as much to Shearer, the friendship cooled abruptly.

"I think it's pretty generally known that writers do not mix with movie stars, or directors. We stick to our own," Maas tells me. "We go from assignment to assignment, and we are primarily interested in writing. Most of us look a little askance at the stars. We're not over-awed by them."

Next page | Tempting offers and bitter failures