Ever since that eventful night last spring when Tyrone Power pushed me through Claudette Colbert's cellophane party tent into a pansy bed (he didn't mean to, really, it was simply a case of not knowing his own strength) I have held in my little pink paw something vaguely resembling---er---refined blackmail. (Blackmail is a handy little gadget in the writing racket---some day it may even take the place of the typewriter.)

And so when I read in the newspapers that Ty and Annabella had moved into their lovely honeymoon house our in Brentwood, and like the newly married Clark Gables and Bob Taylors wanted a private life all their own with no snooping Press allowed, I merely shook my head sadly, sighed a couple of 'Tchs, Tchs,' and reached for the telephone. Who did the Powers think they were to enjoy a private life while Thad crushed pansies all over the back of my new evening dress! And that, so help me, was how your Cousin Liza was the first writer to get invited to the Tyrone Powers for an intimate look-see at their new home and their domestic happiness, I had so much fun with them that I think I will go in for blackmail entirely. I find it much more subtle than the sledgehammer.

When I arrived at the Powers' (they live right across the street from the Gary Coppers and the Fred Samurais which makes it nice for Annabella if she wants to borrow an egg or a cup of sugar in a hurry) they were sprawled across the grass down near the swimming pool engaged in an exciting game of backgammon. Annabella, looking like a fifteen year old in her white shorts and blouse, was beating the daylights out of Tyrone. 'It's a pleasure to let her win,' said Ty, winking at me as he folded up the board. 'She's so cute when she wins.'

'It's the only game,' said Annabella, 'at which I can beat him. It doesn't give him any pleasure to let me win at badminton or the pin machine game, I notice.' Annabella speaks with a delightful accent, which cannot be duplicated, on paper. A frank, straightforward young person, she looks you right in the eye when she speaks to you-but not for long-those eyes invariable turn to Tyrone with a look of adoration in them the likes of which I have never seen in this world.

'We give you exactly a thousand guesses,' said Ty magnanimously, 'to tell us what that peculiar marking is on the back of the backgammon board. Examine it carefully, and don't throw away your guesses. Take all the time you want to think about it.'

I gave up in three. 'Tell her, Annabella,' said Ty.

'It's the rear end of a donkey,' giggled Annabella, doubling up in a laugh. It seems that the Powers are passionately fond of backgammon, played it all over 'Suez' and South America, and so quite naturally when they drove to the Grand Canyon for a five-day honeymoon right after their marriage they threw the backgammon board in the back of the car. The day they went down into the Canyon, astride donkeys in the tourist manner, they took the board along with them, slung over the donkey just so, in case they wanted to play a game in the bottom of the Canyon-which they did. The donkey, alas, left his print, not his finger print, but quite a print.

Second in popularity with the Powers is an electric pin machine, which someone gave Ty on his last birthday, and which has become practically a family heirloom. 'Except for our bed it was the only piece of furniture we had when we moved in,' said Annabella. 'We ate diner off it at night, and Tyrone would run up perfectly beautiful scores between the soup and the roast, and it has served every purpose from dressing-table to writing desk. I don't know what we would have done without it.' Now that Annabella's furniture has arrived from France, at long last ('the silly boat seemed to like Panama it stayed there so long'), the pin machine has been relegated to a corner of the playhouse by the pool, where it waits for innocent victims who think they can match their skill against Ty's.

'Give me a dime,' said Ty. I though it rather unusual for the screen's handsomest and most romantic actor to turn panhandler suddenly, but I don't surprise easily when it comes to these movie folk, so I gave him a dime, and not my last one either. Ty pretended to look at it carefully, returned it to me and said, 'Scratch it.' Annabella, a perfect assistant, was right there with a bottle opener from the playhouse bar, an together we managed to scratch it up quite a bit. 'Now, watch,' say Ty, the great magician, swinging into action. He put the dime in the pocket of his white pants and with a look of feigned annoyance said, 'Tut, tut, I must get this out of my pocket, it crowds things too much.' Out he pulled a little red box with a rubber band around it. 'Now I wonder where your dime is,' he said mysteriously, while Annabella giggled. 'Must have lost it. Wait a minute, wait a minute! Maybe it got in the little red box!' Annabella was so excited she could hardly sit still. I was blas'. I would be easy enough to slip that dime under the lid of the little reed box. I wasn't born yesterday. And I wasn't going to be excited, even for Tyrone. He opened the little red box. Inside of it was another little red box with a rubber band. Inside the third little red box with a rubber band. Inside the third little red box was a little red woolen bag tied at the top. He untied the bag---and there was my dime, scratchings and all! My mouth opened and I forgot to shut it.

'Isn't he wonderful?' beamed Annabella. 'Darling, show her the glass and spoon trick!'

I'm a sucker for magic, ad Tyrone is no slouch at it, and I would still be there with my mouth open if people from the nursery hadn't arrived with some trees for the front yard (Annabella called them trays). Dinner table magic is quite the thing in Hollywood now, all the best movie actors are going in for it. But I must say that Ty gets more encouragement from his wife than most others. Sandra Cooper spoiled Gary's best trick one night (the one about the handkerchief and the burning cigarette) by saying, 'Get your false thumb, Gary.' But not Annabella! She must have seen that dime in the red box trick a dozen times or more---but she was just as excited as I was. And no amount of coaxing from me would drag the solution from her.

Ty and his dog Pickles (Pickles is not a pedigree and was on his way to the dog pound when Ty adopted him) went off to inspect the new trees which the nursery men were planting, and Annabella took me by the hand, a most friendly gesture, an led me through her old-fashioned garden to her new-fashioned home. 'It's nowhere near complete,' Ty called after us. 'I think our carpenters love us so much they don't wan to leave us. My lawyer has built two homes in the Valley while we were having a bar built in.'

The Power home is set in the midst of three beautiful acres on a high point out in Brentwood, so high that you get a beautiful view of the ocean from the bedroom windows. Grace Moore built the house---it's Georgian in architecture---but never lived in it. Annabella liked it better than any place she had seen in California and so a few weeks before their marriage Ty bought it for her. There are colorful flowers galore all over the place (Ty and Annabella both are perfect nuts about flowers), beautiful green lawns, and lemon, orange, and avocado groves. When the orange trees are in blossom, and the moon is full, it must be the most romantic spot in the world. 'We often walk in the garden at night, 'said Annabella.

Annabella's house is a delightful blending of the old and the new. She has had many beautiful antiques sent over from her home in France. She has 'done' part of the house herself, and the other part has been done by one of Hollywood's best interior decorators. It is afar from finished. She and Ty plan to pick up little tables, lamps, paintings and knick-knacks while they are in Europe. Her living room is formal and is done in Eighteenth Century English. The walls are soft grey green and the drapes are of an old English pattern in glazed chintz with reds, blues, and greens predominating. The rug is very heavy pile, hand-tuffed, and on the beige side. The sofa is a wooly fabric the same color as the rug. 'There is so much to do still,' said Annabella as we crossed the hall to the library, which by the way, has books, plenty of books. One alcove is completely filled by Annabella's books, all in French. The chairs are the comfy kind, and two of them covered with glazed chintz to match the drapes. A nice fireplace which makes you feel sure that this is the room in which the Powers will spend those chilly winter evenings. Off from the library is the bar which Ty had built on to the original Moore house. The bar's quite modernistic, of course, and on the walls are a framed caricature of Ty and several old programs of his father's.

The dining room has a Duncan Phyfe table and chairs. There's a built-in plate rack (with lovely Spode in it) and early English cupboard with Sheffield silver on it. Again there are the inevitable chintz drapes. There is a glassed-in sunroom down-stairs with gay porch furniture and colorful pots of flowers. The sunroom leads off into a little patio where under a spreading tree the Powers like to have their lunch on days when they are not working at the studio.

Upstairs there are two tremendous bedroom with adjoining dressing room and baths-one for Ty and one for Annabella. (there is a 'guest room' but it is used as a storage room now and I don't think the Powers are in any hurry to furnish it.) Annabella's room is very, very feminine, with flowers all over the place, including a big bowl of gardenias on the table by her bed. The one picture in the room is a large autographed picture of Tyrone Power in a leather frame. The room is done in French Provencal with a pale grey green rug and gay flowered chintz drapes. Ty's room is strictly modern. The rug is brown and the drapes are brown and yellow. The wallpaper is very interesting---it's a new kind of wallpaper that looks exactly like bamboo. On either side of this double bed are little tables---on one is a picture of his mother, on the other is a picture of Annabella. On his dresser (all the furniture is natural wood) there is a picture of his sister Anne. On the walls of his dressing room are some rare old prizefight prints. In the middle of the bedroom floor---the day Annabella took me on the tour----were a pair of old tennis shoes. In the middle of the bathroom floor were a pair of old golf shoes. Mr. Power, I assume, is he type who never picks anything up. But Mrs. Power is not the type to scold. 'Poor boy,' she said, 'he cut his foot and his shoes hurt.'

Annabella's pride and joy are two of the beautiful antiques which arrived from France. One is an Archbishop of the Fourteenth Century, form an old cathedral, who sort of looks over the guest (I hope with not too much disapproval) as they enter the Power home. The other is a cabinet Fifteenth Century, with rural scenes painted on it, which stands in the upstairs hall. It has been in the family for ages and when Annabella married Ty her mother gave it to them for a wedding present. 'When I was a little girl in Chantilly,' said Annabella, 'my Mother would put me in her bed when I was sick. The cabinet stood right by the bed and I sued to imagine myself playing in those various pictures. I didn't mind being sick because I could make-believe with the dream cabinet.'

And what kind of a person is this Annabella, you ask? She ought to be really something when you think how Ty threw us all over for her. And she is. Really something. She has a frankness about her that's charming not a frou-frou, or a ga-ga, or ala-de-da in her entire little body. She is probably the only girl Ty ever knew who didn't go coy on him. Not that Annabella's not feminine, she's feminine right down to her red-tipped fingernails, but she also has that delightful boyish quality about her of being a companion too. Whether or not Annabella will be a success in Hollywood-the land of the 'Biased Nod'----I am not at all sure. She finds it impossible to tell producers, directors and stars that their pictures are good when they aren't. No, I guess she won't be a success. But she'll certainly be a success with Tyrone-and you only have to be with Annabella five seconds to know that that's all that really matters.

'I hope,' said Annabella, as we descended the hill in the back of tee house to see Tyrone's elaborate electric train, 'that we never finish the house to see Tyrone's elaborate electric train, 'that we never finish the house. It is so much fun planning and shopping. And every day Tyrone brings me home a little package, something for the kitchen, the playhouse, the library. 'What is this?' I say. 'Something new?' And then I have to guess. I love little packages.' I wish I could put Annabella's enthusiasm for living and Tyrone Power on paper, without sounding sloppy. But take my word for it those are the two most in-love people I have seen in a month of Sundays.

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