Lela Swift obit

Lela Swift Dies: Pioneering TV Director Was 96

 

She was not on the list.

Lela Swift, who rose from the secretarial pool at CBS to become a pioneering force for female TV directors, died today at her Santa Monica home of natural causes. She was 96. Swift went from gopher to an AD job on the network’s Studio One in 1948, to directing nearly 600 episodes of Dark Shadows and winning three Daytime Emmys over 14 years of helming the soap opera Ryan’s Hope.

Born Lela Siwoff on February 1, 1919, in New York City, she joined the then-nascent CBS in the early 1940s. She was assigned as a researcher to Dr. Peter Goldmark, who, as CBS’ chief engineer, developed the original technology for color television and the concept of video recording. As the network expanded nationwide, she cracked the boys club of TV directors, going on to helm for such shows as Studio One, Suspense, The Web, The Dupont Show Of The Week, The House On High Street, NBC’s The Purex Specials For Women and the farmland documentary Years Without Harvest.

In 1966, Swift joined producer Dan Curtis on the ABC gothic serial Dark Shadows. After a slow start, the show became a big hit; it ran five seasons and 1,225 episodes, and Swift directed nearly 600 of them and was a producer for the final seasons. In 1975, she helmed the first episode of the Alphabet network’s daytime drama Ryan’s Hope. It would run for 14 years, and Swift directed most of its hours, more than 825 in all.

She is survived by her brother, Seymour Siwoff; sons Russell Schwartz, SVP Business and Legal Affairs at Starz, and Stuart Schwartz, an Emmy-winning TV producer; their wives; and five grandchildren.

She was born in 1919 as Lillian Siwoff in New York City, New York. Her brother was baseball statistician and owner of the Elias Sports Bureau, Seymour Siwoff.

Her husband, Gilbert ("Geb") Schwartz, died on January 30, 2015, after suffering from Alzheimer's disease for many years. The couple had two sons, Russell and Stuart, who both work in the television industry; Russell is an executive at Starz, and Stuart is a TV producer known for his work on Unsolved Mysteries (not to be confused with Stuart Schwartz who produced news programs for ABC News including Good Morning America).

A native of New York, Swift started her career in the early 1940s as an assistant in the research center at CBS. She rose from gofer to writer and then to assistant stage manager under the guidance of Frances Buss, another groundbreaking female TV director.

In 1948, as CBS expanded nationwide, Worthington Miner, who ran the network’s drama department, brought Swift to the dramatic anthology show Studio One as an assistant director.

She later directed a two-part adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women in 1950 that starred Nancy Marchand. Swift also helmed installments of Suspense and The Web; on the latter, she insisted that James Dean, then a young, temperamental actor, remain in the cast despite producers’ efforts to fire him.

“The minute he started reading,” Swift recalled, “I knew that boy had something special.”

In the 1960s, she directed at NBC The House on High Street, a series of multipart stories about such social issues as divorce and juvenile delinquency, and several public affairs specials.