PICTURE PLAY
'Glamour Boy-----With Tradition'
November 1938
By Dorothy Spensley







Of all the glamour lads who decorate the screen, at the matinee girls' insistence, none has any more indisputable right to the title of 'actor' than Tyrone Power. Pronounce it 'T'rone,' please, as he does. He is the only son of the late Shakespearean performer, Tyrone Power, who was the son of a concert pianist Harold Power, who was the son of the first Tyrone Power, Irish actor, named for Erin's County Tyrone, his birthplace. Obviously, today's Actor Tyrone Power is Tradition. It's more than you can say for Bob Taylor, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, and the other heart-throbers. But they do all right, too.

Although acting success does not require a long line of thespian ancestors, it helps if your mother, the talented Patia Power (nee Reaume), has histrionic abilities, too. Tyrone's mother, who makes her home with her son and her daughter, Ann, is a former actress. However inspirational the tradition stuff is, in Tyrone's case it has given him, in addition to plastic emotions, a sense of balance. It has made him less apt to be thrown off his feet in the first wave of adulation such as he felt after last year's 'Lloyds of London.' As an actor's son, Tyrone recognized the mob spirit in the demonstration. Most forget actors, too, he thought.

Perhaps that explains why T'rone to-day, at twenty-four-his birthday was May 5th-is pretty sane about the thing that has miraculously happened to him within the past two years. He is poised and canny, juggling the advantages and the disadvantages that his spotlighted position has brought him. But he is changed, too. He sees that in himself. His friends don't.

'I'd like to write an article on how success had changed me,' he said, last year.

'In dollars and sense?' we asked.

'No. In a hundred other ways,' he answered. But he never gave the story. Another glamour lad happened to write how success had changed him. 'I don't want to look as though I am crashing on his idea,' was T'rone's final word.

To his friends there has been no variation in young Power's attitude toward life. Fun-loving always, he is still that way, tossing off good and bad puns, enjoying life to the fullest. People who don't know him get the idea-probably from his soft, tragic, chocolate-colored eyes-that he's a melancholy mug. It's farthest from the truth. Like his father, he's a 'black Irishman,' supercharged with emotions and sentiment. Humor is foremost amongst them. 'Just a quip off the old block,' he might say. He had been known to tell a waitress that a gooseberry pie was 'berry' good. It's all in good clean pun.

Six feet tall, slim, muscular, mannerly, driving a sleek black car, Mr. Power ranks as one of Hollywood's No. 1 eligible bachelors. 'But young actors like myself can't think too much about marriage,' he says 'Not yet. Not until we have financial security, something put ahead for the future, our careers launched a little deeper. That's the way the girls I know fee, too. Most of them are actresses, of course.'

Of the girls with whom Ty's name has been romantically tied, perhaps Sonja Henie-a careerist, herself-realizes this fact best. Romance now, yes. And laughs. Marriage now, no. Marriage demands far more than these young people can give it at the moment. Later there will be time enough for marriage and a family. Career-minded Sonja has always looked at it that way. The result is famine friendship between the two. It may even outlast the fervid friendship that flamed up between young Power and little Janet Gaynor, and threatened for a moment to become a conflagration. But only for a moment. T'rone is, at present, heart and fancy free, if any actor or any Irishman is ever free from fancy.

Tyrone's fancy is not all orthodox. It doesn't go charging about the place, making him imagine that he is don Juan and Edwin Booth. When it is not busy projecting the likable Power personality onto the screen in costly vehicles such as 'Lloyds of London,' 'In Old Chicago,' 'Alexander's Ragtime Band,' 'Marie Antoinette' and his latest 'Suez,' it finds outlet in good deeds. Yep, it's touching but true. The most sentimental is his reconstruction of the apartment house in which he lived as a struggling extra. Film recognition of the boy, born in Cincinnati, was a lengthy process, punctuated with despair and defeat. He tried radio-now he is an NBC-Woodbury Soap star-stage, soda jerking, theater ushering, before 20th Century-Fox's necromancer, Darryl Zanuck, conjured him into a film star.

'As soon as I had enough money to buy the apartment building that I lived in after my father's death in 1931, before all this happened to me, I took it over,' says T'rone.

'You should see the building now! Cheerful white walls, indirect lighting, comfortable furniture. It's no longer a bad dream. It's livable. I want my tenants to enjoy what I did not have.' A grin broke over his face. 'And d'you know what I call it? The Tyrone.'

'The Tyrone' is not Mr. Power's only investment. He has several pieces of property, purchased by 'Uncle Frank,' whose business card reads Francis D. Adams. It is 'Uncle Frank' who budgets the young actor, sees that part of his salary goes into annuities, and that the Sunday-morning mood-rich and extravagant-to which T'rone sometimes awakens doesn't lead him into floral spendthrifting. 'Sometimes I wake up on Sunday morning and think, 'Gee, I'd like to send flowers to-day. Lots of flowers,'' says the young feller. 'And I call the florist and he does the rest.'

Always before him, like an altar light, is the reverence he has for his father's career. He wants to equal it. Slavishly he imitates his father's signature; always has, even when he was a youngster. He keeps his father's ideals. The only variation he concedes is in the pronunciation of his first name. His father, with sonorous inflection, called it 'Ty-rone'


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