The House of Herbert Bayard Swope

January 5 was the birthday of newspaperman Herbert Bayard Swope (1882-1958).

You’d be correct in noticing that it’s unusual for us to give attention to a straight news journalist on this blog. We’ve gotten close to that but invariably those we’ve written about also wrote theatre criticism, or plays, or screenplays, or such like. For a couple of examples, Richard Harding Davis also wrote playlets for vaudeville, and William Randolph Hearst became a movie producer, and of course socialized with showfolk via his consort Marion Davies. And Swope too gets us close to that kind of tangential relationship to show business.

Swope was long associated with Pulitzer’s New York World, toiling there from 1909 from 1929. Notably, he won the first Pulitzer Prize for Journalism, and then went on to win two more. He’d been a crime reporter, then became a war correspondent during World War One, establishing himself as an authority on the dreaded “Hun”. He also wrote a series on pieces critical on the Ku Klux Klan (which throve terrifyingly in the 1920s), and is credited with inventing the modern op-ed page during his time as an editor. Originally from St. Louis, he’d spent his “cub” years at the Chicago Tribune, then the New York Herald and the New York MorningTelegraph.

None of that’s why he’s here, though. Nor is the fact that he even occasionally wrote about theatre, because he basically wrote about everything. He’s here because he was a member of the Algonquin Roundtable and his Long Island homes were gathering places for wild Jazz Age parties attending to by famous celebrities and newsmakers. At the time F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing The Great Gatsby in Great Neck, Swope lived on East Shore Road next to Ring Lardner.Great Neck is West Egg. Later he moved to an even more fabulous mansion on Sands Point, which is on the next peninsula over, and the model for East Egg. Many have erroneously claimed that that second mansion was the model for Daisy Buchanan’s house. The problem is that Fitzgerald published Gatsby in 1925 and Swope didn’t move to Sand’s Point until the end of the decade.

Swope is credited with the excellent saying “I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.” It is a dictum I try hard to live by. The difficulty is that, in the age of polling (which by definition generates simple-minded polarity) and social media algorithms (which tends toward singularity), it may be sadly obsolete. Original thinkers by definition live off the beaten track. How is anyone ever going to find them? But I stubbornly and maybe idealistically like Swope’s saying anyway.

During World War Two, Swope was a consultant to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, no doubt on German affairs. He also credited with coining the term “Cold War”.

As it happens, the show biz connections heat up in the person of his son Herbert Bayard Swope, Jr. (1915-2008). Junior was a producer and director during television’s first decade, connected with such now forgotten shows as The Clock (1949-52), The Black Robe (1949-50), Lights Out (1949-52), and Five Fingers (1959-60). He also produced some theatrical films including Hilda Crane (1956) with Jeanne Simmons; Three Brave Men (1956) with Ray Milland, Ernest Borgnine, and Frank Lovejoy; The True Story of Jesse James (1957) with Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter; The Bravados (1958) with Gregory Peck and Stephen Boyd; and The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958) with Hugh O’Brian.

Junior’s second wife was Margaret “Maggie” Hayes (1915-1977) an actress with nearly 90 screen credits. Her biggest roles were in films like Blackboard Jungle (1955), Damn Citizen (1958), The Case Against Brooklyn (1958), Girl in the Woods (1958), Good Day for a Hanging (1959) and The Beat Generation (1959), although she had also played smaller roles in classics like Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Glass Key (1942), and Hitchcock’sSaboteur (1942).

Their daughter Tracy Brooks Swope (b. 1953) is an actress with over 50 screen credits, and was married to director John G. Avildsen (Rocky, The Karate Kid). And their daughter Bridget Avildsen (b. 1993) is also an actress!

For more on the history of show business,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous,