Birthday Girls: Bang Bangs!

Many happy returns today to two of the Café's favorite (for very different reasons) ladies...

The Last Flapper

I just came across a remarkable obituary in that staple of the almost lost art of writing them, The Telegraph. Would you believe - and I very nearly don't - that the limpid-eyed young lady above has only just left us this month? She was the euphoniously named Frederica Sagor Maas, and at the time of her death she was, at 111, the third oldest person in California.

That alone is, to an extent, remarkable in itself. What has me gobsmacked, though, is that she was very likely among the very last links to the silent-film era at its most vibrant. A scriptwriter, she worked on films including the major Clara Bow vehicles The Plastic Age and It (generally identified, inaccurately, only with the hyperflorid writing of Elinor Glyn), as well as one of Louise Brooks's more notable Stateside efforts, Rolled Stockings (as evocative a Jazz Age title, in its way, as any, no?). She even had a hand in the great Garbo-Gilbert Flesh and the Devil.

She and her husband, Ernest, had a varied time of it, and while their work on Betty Grable's 1947 vehicle The Shocking Miss Pilgrim helped make that picture a hit, they left Hollywood, and Frederica spent the balance of her professional life in the somewhat less fraught field of insurance adjusting.

At 99, she published an autobiography that was, apparently, equal part bitterness and exposé, full of lurid tales of Paramount orgies and Metro misbehavior. She didn't think much, it seems, of most of the studio types she worked with, and she doesn't seem to have gone out of her way to have played the Hollywood game.

It's amazing to think that until just a couple of weeks ago there was someone among us who could have told us, first person, what it was like to watch Clara Bow at work and play, someone who was a peer and counterpart of Frances Marion, who was hard at work as a scriptwriter years before Dorothy Parker headed West. Not to mention someone who likely danced the Charleston and Black Bottom alongside Lucille LeSeuer in some LA nightclub and who was a friend of Norma Shearer's (before Mrs. Thalberg became the semi-petrified Boss's wife and no matter what she thought of the man she dismissed as a "mama's boy").

At 110, the Telegraph reports, she asked for "a large chocolate cake" on her birthday. She earned it.

The Heavens Over Berlin...

...were once full of stars. Some were born there, some passed through; some lingered long, some burned out young or moved too close to black holes artistic or political. You still feel them, at times, in the streets here, in the makeup of old women and the attitudes of young girls...

Pola, once a serious artist before becoming a Hollywood vamp...

Louise, who arrived something of a Hollywood lightweight and left, although she didn't know it for two decades, a sublime artist - and a has-been...

Miss Dietrich, of whom no more need be said than that she did quite all right for herself...

Anna May, who was here a bigger star than ever she managed to be again...

And the ineffable Lil Dagover, for a while the biggest lady of all of these...

Not to mention the problematic Fraulein Riefenstahl, long-lived - but not enough to live it down...

A trouble shared, to some extent, by the far less villainous (and infinitely more camp) Miss Zarah Leander.

I think I saw at least three of them at yesterday's parade...