Welford Beaton, and about Anne Royall

In The American Mercury from September, 1927:
Heber Blankenhorn on Anne Royall (b. 1769)
In the late 1820's, before bathing suits existed, President John Quincey Adams, noted for a personal dignity excessive beyond even that of his office, swam of an early morning in the Potomac, a mile from the White House. He was hailed from the shore by an old lady, sitting on his clothes, quill in hand. She called out that she had been repeatedly denied opportunity at the Presidential Palace to question him on his bank policy. Now after she got the interview, he could have his raiment. ... In the end he gave what seems to be the first newspaper interview ever obtained from a President of the United States.

Beaton, from Mad Movie Money:
There is a lake in the center of a park which is in the center of Los Angeles, the most photographed lake in the world and famous for the number of film policemen that have fallen into it. But neither of these lakes would do. Some brilliant genius in the Lasky organization decreed that Huntington Lake in the High Sierras must be the scene of the weeping willow episode. Here a slight difficulty presented itself. There was no water in the lake. There hadn't been any in it for 3 years. So the company hung around for three days in order to give the still photographers an opportunity to record the conditions of the lake that leaked in order that Mr. Lasky would not have to rely upon the unsupported testimony of sixty people.