The Press: Swaffer Smacked

Dramatic critics, like oldtime court jesters, have more than poet’s license. The monarch public, easy to amuse, hard to offend, suffers them gladly. Avowedly criticizing plays, they sometimes overindulge in gossip, in personalities. Some days they go too far. Manhattan has its suave George Jean Nathan. London has emaciated Hannen Swaffer.

One day last week Critic Swaffer of the London Sunday Express (circulation 538,889) sat at lunch in the Savoy grill, crowded with Londoners eating solid, expensive food. Up to his table stalked Actress Lillian Foster, U. S. star of Conscience, just opened in London.

“You insulted me!” said she.

Smack! Whack! Twice on the face she slapped Critic Swaffer for referring in print to “her affected baby voice, [like] that of a ventriloquist’s doll.”

Complementary but not conflicting were subsequent comments of slapped and slapper.

Said Slapped Swaffer: “I was surprised at my own calmness. … I called the headwaiter and said, ‘Throw this woman out.’ ” Said Slapper Foster: “I smacked him wholeheartedly on behalf of America. The dining room was crowded and I introduced myself by saying: ‘You deliberately insulted me and I’m going to insult you in the only way I can.’

“Other critics had been kinder to Miss Foster. When Playwright Don Mullaly’s Conscience opened in Manhattan, in 1924, Actress Foster made a hit, saw her name in lights.

At its London opening last fortnight the play had fair success. Actress Foster is not the only person Critic Hannen Swaffer has belittled. He once called Playwright George Bernard Shaw “a tiresome old driveller.” Playwright Shaw did not smack Critic Swaffer’s face. Instead, at the annual luncheon of the Critics’ Circle last month in London, when Toastmaster St. John Ervine divided dramatic critics into three kinds—”critics, reporters and Hannen Swaffer”—Shaw said all dramatic critics were very bad, compared Swaffer to the late great Playwright-Critic William Archer,* said that Archer was worse.

Critic Swaffer, tall, stringy, in his 50’s, convivial, well-to-do, was once a famed young tosspot. Now he confines himself to sherry, champagne His black silk stock, early Victorian wing collar and frock coat attract stares. An English wisecracker, he likes to pin actors with a phrase. Besides the Express, he writes for the London Bystander, for Manhattan’s slangy Variety (stage trade journal whose language Editor Sime Silverman defends on the grounds that Variety caters “strictly to hams and theatre managers and acrobats.”)

*Author of The Green Goddess, translator and editor of many Ibsen plays.