From brief fame to family and back, Mary Swan has known her place was onstage.
by Robert King, Times Staff Writer
St. Petersburg Times
Published December 22, 2002
Already warm to her, the crowd stirs, and people start to dance. She jokes with them and they laugh. She finishes a song, and they applaud. During a break, a fan comes up to her. "You have a beautiful voice," she says. "You have so much energy."
It's a Christmas Party at the Timber Pines Lodge for about 200 residents of the retirement community. And it's the latest stop on a whirlwind month of December that has Mary Swan and her husband and partner, Bim Brown, playing almost every night.
While it's far from the heights Swan reached more than 40 years ago, Swan clearly is enjoying herself. And the compliment from the fan, a woman wearing a festive red Christmas blouse, is music to her ears.
"I never get tired of that," said Swan, whose song list for the evening covers everything from Patsy Cline's "Crazy" to the song that haunted Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca" - "As Time Goes By."
For Swan, it's all a part of a life that she still considers a fulfillment of the American dream, despite everything that might have been.
A Peek At Stardom
Back in 1958, Mary Swan's life could have been the dream of any American girl. The dollish little teenager from Philadelphia appeared on "American Bandstand" in October that year to sing "My Heart Belongs To Only You." The screaming kids in the audience loved it so much that Dick Clark, the TV show's host, had to scold them so he could talk to Swan afterward.
Already, Clark had signed Swan to a recording contract that would lead to the release of three singles over a two-year period, including "Prisoner Of Love" and "Crying In The Chapel."
As other girls fainted at the prospect of touching the hand of musical heartthrob Fabian, Swan was hinging out with him on a bus they shared for a month with an entire posse of musicians traveling with "The Big Rock Show."
There was talk of her doing a movie with Frankie Avalon, another heartthrob of the day. And she was laying down some promising tracks in the studio that seemed destined to be big hits.
Yet, events would conspire against her.
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