Tyrone Power has proved he can take it?.

He's faced everything in punishment the movies have to offer-and still he come up smiling.

To start off this inside yarn properly, we have to go out to the moat, which is something of a lake, smack in the middle of the wilds of the 20th Century-Fox studio. Here starts the amazing off-the-record story of what young Mr. Power can take, and how he?s taken it.

Forty feet in the air, at the top of long chutes, are six dump tanks holding a total of 18,000 gallons of water. This large collection of H20, when allowed to plunge down said chutes, will raise the level of the water in the moat just four feet, according to the calculations of the studio statisticians. The effect, they promise, will be that of the water from a bursting dam. It will add pictorial emphasis to The Rains Came.

Know the story? First it doesn't rain and everybody gets thirsty. Then it does rain, and everybody gets wet. Then an earthquake wrecks the dam high above Ranchipur, a mythical town in India. The dam takes Ranchipur. It?s still raining. But after a while the rain goes away to come some other day, and Tyrone Power, physician and surgeon, braves the natives, burns their huts to kill the germs and the next thing you know the newsreel is on.

Power goes all the way through all these commotions. He?s in from the first drop of rain. And how!

"There were forty-eight days of it," Tyrone told me as he packed for a vacation which would take him to New York, England, France and Italy. "I need it."

Power, glutton for punishment, was so anxious to get away from it all and let the scars heal that he tried to buy a passage for his wife, Annabella, and himself on the Atlantic Clipper. There were only 3,400 people ahead of him.

But let's get back to this scene on the moat. The water is all ready. Clarence Brown, director, is ditto. So are all the extras, technicians. In fact, they're ready to run. This is going to be a nautical wowser.

"Now, Ty," says Brown, "Brenda Joyce has come after you in a boat after you've been marooned by the flood. She?d anxious to get you to the hospital. So you get into the boat and off you go-until the flood really hits you. Maybe you better have a double.

"Skip it," says Ty. "I'm ready."

So, having been thoroughly soaked with a host for the fourteenth time since nine a.m., he gets into the little rowboat with Brenda. Cameras turn.

"Okay!" bellows Brown.

And down come the 18,000 gallons of water. Smack, crack and splash! Power isn't in a boat with Brenda Joyce, University of California at Los Angeles co-ed who didn't have swimming on her study course. Power is out of the boat, the boat is in mid-air out of water, and Brenda Joyce is doing a double-barreled-back-handed-jack-knife.

The staticians have leaned too far toward the spectacle side of the business, and Power has changed from guinea pig to goat, Brenda is floundering. Thos on the rim of the moat are aghast-and the water?s eight feet deep. Ty strikes out. He seized Brenda. A few good strokes, and Ty's at water edge, passing up Brenda, who is much heavier on account of water absorbed.

"Next time," says Director Brown, "we won't use quite so much water."

Maybe you think that's something?"

"The reports," says Tyrone, modestly, "are slightly exaggerated."

Intestinal fortitude? Yes. Modesty? And how! But it?s on the record with the boys and girls who work with Tyrone. That's why their affections go with him.

Now, let us consider the earthquake. It is very real. First, there is a gay party going on, with Power having quite a time with Miss Loy. They decide to go for a walk. Behold, the lovely arch which holds up the porch. It is constructed of about twenty tons of California's best quality of brick. Wires, electrically controlled, will at a given signal cause the wall to collapse practically in Power's lap, if he happened to be sitting down. But he's standing up, talking to Miss Loy when the earthquake hits.

"This has to be good, Ty," says Brown. "You get your cue when the platform starts shaking. The wall topples, bricks hit you, but your first thought is for Miss Loy. You scoop her into your arms and beat a retreat.?

"Okay," grins Power.

The whole platform with porch, brick walls and arch and considerable other bric-a-brac starts imitating that stuff Jack Benny advertises. Power turns pale beneath his make-up. Brown drops an upraised arm. An electric contact snaps the wires. Down come the bricks.

Several seek out and strike Power on various portions of his anatomy. He winces, very, very realistically. He seizes Miss Loy, limps out of the scene.

"Boy!" enthuses Brown. "We've got something! Even the limp. How'd you happen to think of that, Ty. "I didn't think of it," winces Ty. "It happened to me."

Yes, he carried bruises for a week or ten days after that. But in the next scene Trouper Ty has to carry Myrna through a banquet hall, still limping, dodging falling chandeliers, statuary, sections of ceiling and walls. Six days of this. Eight and nine hours a day.

"But you haven't heard the inside!" exclaims Mrs. Power, nee Annabella. "He's afraid of earthquakes. He was badly shaken up in Long Beach in 1933, when he was playing down there and looking for work in Hollywood. He nearly dies any time anything shakes!"

Another feather for Power, who hid a complex to make a picture. But we aren't done yet.

While these ten-hour days are going on, with rain falling on Power, Miss Loy, George Brent, Brenda and others-they all have colds-Power is spending a lot to time with two physicians. They are taking him alternately to two hospitals-Hollywood and Good Samaritan-and on two separate occasions he is actually in an operating room, concealed in a white gown, rubber gloves and a surgeon's mask, learning operating technique. This wasn't a required subject Power was doing it on his own so that physician and interne fans wouldn't find fault with his portrayal!

Now that the rains have gone, come the flames.. Power is right in there pitching, coming so close to fire that his eyebrows are slightly charred. Power wouldn?t admit it to me-it would sound too much like boating-but Director Brown quotes him as follows:

"Of course I don't want a double. The public goes to see me get kicked around. Why shouldn't I be?"

And Power has all kinds of daring in his make-up. Not only did he buck a rainfall of three thousand gallons each minute, pull Brenda from the brink when the lads with the pencils became overenthusiastic, and continue to carry Miss Loy while being brick-battered, but he dared to play a heel all through Rose of Washington Square. With the fan following Power has, such a move takes a lot of courage.

The Rains Came is Power's most daring and his hardest role, but he didn?t start taking it all of a sudden. Back in the stage days an actor toyed with a knife, let go of it suddenly by accident and it whizzed by his cheek. The late, great, Tyrone Power, Sr., was in the cast:

"Good heaven's, son! Are you hurt?" he gasped, as the knife buried itself in the scenery. But Tyrone, Jr., didn;t go out of character. He just kept playing his part.

In Suez, Power played guinea pig again. Remember the sand storm? It was finally okay, but it took a lot of fixing. At first, the boys went out with trucks and brought in an even thousand loads of sand, which they dumped on the old golf course at the studio. Then everybody sent for every available wind machine-gasoline-powered airplane engines with propellers on them. On the first sand storm scene, the wind machines were opened wide, with Power, who had just met Annabella, and Annabella, herself, in the center of the vast, man-made desert.

You know how much of a wind one propeller can stir up. Figure twenty, all aimed at Tyrone and Annabella. The director gave the signal, the propellers sent the wind into the sand, it gathered a seventy-mile speed-and the whole works hit Power. Down he went, his face cut by the sand, his nose, throat, mouth and lungs filled. He saw the tornado hit Annabella, gave one dive, grabbed her, pulled her down, and threw as much of his clothing over her as he could.

They stopped the wind machines, dug the hapless players out. Everybody apologized to everybody else. All except Annabella. She said to Tyrone: ?You were wonderful!"

That was the beginning of what resulted in April, in marriage.

In Jesse James, the script said that Power was to fall off horses. So he wet out and fell off horses until he hoped he never saw a saddle again. When it came time for Power to ride through a ?glass window? made of sugar candy, Power told Director Henry King: ?If you?re going to shoot it close enough to see my fact, I don?t want a double.?

"We are," replied King.

So Power mounted, went through the glass, and if you looked closely you saw it was really he who did the trick. But here's something you didn't know. One of the cross-members in the glass slapped in across the forehead, knocked him groggy-and he was in front of the cameras for several days with a coating of collodion between his torn skin and the make-up!

In Old Chicago called for a fight between Power and his off-screen pal for these many years, Don Ameche. It seemed that Don was to reproach Ty for going around with a gal like Alice Faye. Ty was to resent it.

"Doubles for long shots!" ordered Director King.

"Horsefeathers!" replied Ty and Don in unison. "We want at each other."

They battled on and off for three days. It was a better fight that the one in the cabaret in the same picture, where Ty dodged everything from break-away chairs, which can hurt, to beer bottles made of sugar candy, which also can hurt. The lads spared each other at no time, and iodine and liniment came into play at the lunch hours and after work nights.

"I can take it? Maybe," says Power. "But give a bow to Don, too, will you? He can, too."

But Don, lucky guy, missed the toughest job of all--The Rains Came