A bluebottle fly moved in a zigzag across the pond surface, stopped on a leaf, darted suddenly upward, and disappeared with the sun glinting on it. Tyrone Power, moving lazily, sank the leaf with an accurate flip of his cigarette and heard with momentary pleasure the hiss of the coal being drowned.

It was late August in the Canadian woods, and the heat was breathless. “’Mar’s hot minion is retun’d again; her waspish-headed son has brook his arrows,’ “ declaimed Tyrone softly. “William, you bore me.” It was hard remembering lines this afternoon, hard forcing the smooth Shakespearean rote to his memory; Chicago Civic season or no Chicago Civic season, he was only seventeen. And he hadn’t seen a good-looking girl for three solid months.

”If you really study,” his famous actor-father had said that day last June, “I’ll take you up to Canada with me for the summer, then we’ll get you a part in one of my Shakespeare plays by fall, and you won’t have to go on to college Think it over.”

It had sounded good-----------a lot better than his mother’s theory of a college education. In fact, Tyrone thought nothing ever had sounded so good in his life before. At seventeen, to put school behind him, to succumb to his enormous impatience, to begin the quick furious climb to success and big money that he had always wanted…..after all there was no time; after all it was 1931, with the Depression two incredible years old and shrieking a warning of disaster to idle, impressionable youth.

He had said to this Mother, “I’m tired of running around and loafing. I want to get places now-----“ He had no needed to add, “Don’t try to stop me.” Patia Power knew better than to try.

The vision had been, of course, of roseate hue. He would spend a magnificent season at a smart resort, remaking acquaintance with a father he hadn’t seen in years, for it had been Patia who had reared young Tyrone and his sister, Ann; later there would be a spot for him on the stage 9prearranged by Power Senior), and after that, other---and increasingly bigger-roles, until eventually life would settle easily into his lap.

He’d forgotten naturally, that his father would be a person to respect and admire to the exclusion of emotion, that the long years of estrangement might make true companionship impossible. Well, that didn’t matter; members of Tyrone’s particular generation are not sentimental.

He got up and started down the path toward the camp. As he walked he though comfortably, “at least so long as Dad lives I’m secure. He’s an important guy in the theatre world. H can fix it for me-I needn’t worry.”

Five months later, at four o’clock in the morning, Tyrone Power Snr. Died quietly in his son’s arms. A few minor things had happened in the interim. The boy had carried a spear with definite insouciance during two weeks’ rehearsal in Chicago; he had toured New England for three months (with Fritz Lieber and Helen Menken and the spear) as a member of the Civic troupe; he had agreed to go with his father to Hollywood when the famous old actor was offered a role in Paramount’s “the Miracle Man.”

but these activities were trivial. Tyrone sat in the bleak half-light of that California dawn while seasonal fog crept outside the windows of the hotel suite and doctors closed with stark finality their instrument cases; and through the tumult in his mind he thought, “I’ll have to do it by myself. Whatever I want=all those things I have to get-----I’ll have to get them alone.”

It was a bright day before he got up at last, looked at the disturbing sheet-covered figure on the bed, and said aloud: “But I’ll get them. Don’t worry.”

Now that he has these things, he drives sometimes in his sleek special car to an apartment building at the top Highland Avenue, where in the days after his father’s death he lived and planned the future. Having parked the expensive motor, he walks slowly in his correct English clothes down the same sidewalks, around the same corner, looking in the same windows and having a sandwich in the same beanery, trying desperately to recapture the years.

Now that he has these things, he must wring from them every drop of pride, of arrogance, of achievement, before they are translated to the commonplace.

As an aid to nostalgia he whistles the songs popular in 1931 and 1932 and 1933. “Say It Isn’t So,” “the Peanut Vendor, “ “We Just Couldn’t Say Good-buy.” Usually, if some passing girl doesn’t stare, and nudge her companion, and whisper audibly, “That’s Tyrone Power!” the mental fiction works. Then he is once again the eighteen-year old youngster with a fierce determination, with a carefully cynical patience, with $3.51 in his pocket. Then he can remember.

He can remember, first of all, the talk with his father’s financial adviser, a certain Francis D. Adams, and the tone of Adams’ voice saying: “Yes, I know he lived well. Yes, he did have an enormous wardrobe and stopped at the swank hotels and drove imported cars. That’s just exactly it, do you see? That’s why there’s not a penny left------“

That was that, then Tyrone could go home, to Cincinnati and the patient Patia,----or he could stay here and hunt for a job. Adams would see he didn’t stare. There was such a thing as friendship, as loyalty, wasn’t there?

He couldn’t go home. It wasn’t pride that dictated his refusal or even consider return-----“I’ve never believed in starving,” Tyrone told me, as he remembered this, but it was the thing in him that wouldn’t let him step back, ever, which said with wild persistence that forward was the right way, and the intelligent way, and the only way. If it meant living off someone else’s bounty, however, ungrudging; if it meant hurting people’s feelings-“Nut’s,” he thought. “There’s no time for sentimentality.” There was a man named Arthur Caesar and his wife, old friends; and he went to live with them. That was in May of 1932, the month his agent brought him the news that Universal could use him for a small role in “Tom Brown.”

”You don’t; have to worry now,” crowed the agent. “This is it. You’re set.”

Tyrone believed h was. He went confidently off to location for eight weeks, at $150 a week, and in the evenings in a strange town, apart form the strange people whom he had not the money or the greatness to know, he figured with pencil and paper, adjusting the balance of his salary against the sum he owed Mr. Adams. He thought, if nothing happens this will just pay him back, then after that what I get will be mine. I can work for myself on the next jobs.

When, toward the fall of that year, he had finally to fact himself in the mirror of his room and admit that there hadn’t been any next jobs, that there might never-for months and years-------be any next jobs, he was a little afraid. Yet he was without panic. The agent who had been so sure, had been wrong; well now Tyr0ne knew better. Now Tyrone needn’t trust anyone else’s judgment, ever again.

And to the shell around his youth was added another polished layer.

Then began the interminable, the lonely, dogged, stubborn months that somehow passed until 1932 was gone, and then the winter, and the banks had reopened, and Mussolini was staring at Ethiopia, and I’ve enjoyed this chat about your father but I haven’t a thing for you just now, and Your attentions respectfully called, and Not Sufficient Funds. And it was spring, and somebody flew somewhere, making a record and You’d better not wait any longer, Mr. Power, Mr. So-and-So says he positively cannot see you this week, and how have you been.

Doing all right, thanks. My agent says he’s got two or three good things lined up they should break next week--------or tomorrow, maybe.

And it was bright, dry hot 1933, California summer, and “tomorrow, maybe” had begun to need the seasoning of a little truth to make it palatable.

Mr. Adams, in his capacity as lawyer, handled the receiverships on apartment houses sometimes-ever increasing times during those Depression months when real estate was still unsubsidized by government funds so that Tyrone was continually moving from one vacant building to another, staying until the litigation was completed and the new owner stepped in. It didn’t cost anything, but it was a funny way to live. There might be no apartment house failure next months, and then what?

For that matter then what when Adams got tired of shelling out, when the very last chance of getting anywhere in this town had been explored to its final possibility and then at last had been discarded? What did you do after that, when you were nineteen and would rather die than end up as a clerk in a show store?

Lying on the beach one early afternoon in that September, he considered those things thinking back over the past months.

He thought of his father, and of the endless waiting rooms to casting director’s offices and of streetcars and buses and of the little blonde girl in the corner drugstore (he had borrowed Adam’s car that night). And the unsigned contracts and the waiting----the eternal, maddening house of waiting.

”Come on,” he growled furiously to his personal Providence. “Don’t just sit there. Do something!”

So it did. A tanned young man in blue trunks sprinkled water on his dry back, sat down, said, “How’s the street-cleaning business?”

”Fisher!” yelled Tyrone joyfully. “Eddie Fisher! Where’ve they had you in storage?”

It seemed that Mr. Eddie Fisher had not been in storage, but in Santa Barbara---unless the two were synonymous in your mind. There was a theater group there, and Mr. Fisher had an excellent job in it-oh, stage-managing and directing ad things. They could use al little new talent though. He supposed Tyrone was so busy these days he couldn’t consider.

That night Tyrone, dashing happily up the stairs to this apartment, found a wire under his door. “Tell the mayor to get his speech ready,” it said. “We are coming.” And it was signed Patia.”

One period, the worst, in his life was over, then the next began with the Santa Barbara excursion, and lasted a year, and concerned a girl.

Her name, in Tyrone’s memory and for the purposes of this story, was Nicky. Hopeful parents at one time and christened her with other, more sedate nomenclature; but no on ever bothered to remember. “Nicky” suited her; she was slim and gilt and ten years in advance of everything. When you saw her you thought of surfboards, of roadsters with the top off, of TWA tickets, of spike heels going down a theater aisle, of all the things that are youth and made of laughter.