The morning I saw Ty Power on the set of “This Above Al’ hw was drinking coffee like mad in a desperate effort to keep awake. The hand that held the cup wasn’t the steadiest I’ve ever seen, and I was certain that his eyes were going to close up tight any minute. Ty greeted me between gulps of coffee with the quite obvious statement that he’s had less than an hour’s sleep the night before. Naturally I jumped at conclusions, after all I’m only human. Uh huh, I thought, so Annabella goes on a trip and Ty goes on a bender. Well.

I couldn’t have been further from the truth. It seems there had been a blackout in Brentwood the night before and air raid warden Power had been on duty until six in the morning. “I had dinner over at Cesar Romero’s,” Ty said, “and after dinner the Walter Lands dropped by and we played gin rummy [there is no doubt in my mind but that next to Annabella Ty Power loves games] until about one o’clock. I must have just gotten to bed when the phone rang and I was told to get on duty at once. I put on a pair of old pants and a bedraggled raincoat, hopped on my bicycle, and started pedaling toward the Old Ladies’ Home.

I don’t know why that should seem so funny to me, but it does. Tyrone Power, Mr. Darryl Zanuck’s number one Glamor Star, and the idol of American womanhood, cold, tired and disheveled, knocking on doors at the Old Ladies’ Home-which happens to be on his beat.

Anatole Litvak, who is directing the screen version of Eric Knight’s best seller English war novel, called “Ready,” and Ty hastily swallowed his coffee and jumped into the haystack with Joan Fontaine. They were taking the scene that morning where Ty, as Clive Briggs, a deserter from the British army, makes love to Joan, as Prudence Cathaway, an English girl in the W.A.A.F. It was the first love scene of the picture, very tender and beautiful really, but the tenderness and beauty were thrown for a complete loss for the first few “takes” by a series of revolting sneezes. Both Miss Fontaine and Mr. Power, it appears, are allergic to hay.

After that they poured three hundreds gallons of water per minute (a Hollywood rainstorm) on poor Ty, and I must say that opened up his drooping eyes but good. Thoroughly drenched at the end of that scene he ducked into his trailer dressing room on the set where he changed into dry clothes. It was there I found him a half hour later. He was in the midst of a letter to Annabella who is in Chicago starring in Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.” (I hear that the first thing Ty does when he arrives at the studio in the mornings is to start a letter to Annabella, and he writes on it between scenes all through the day. Well, that’s amour for you.) I let my eyes wander languidly to his desk, there’s nothing like a pair of wandering eyes in my business, but Ty knows all the tricks of the trade and casually, but effectively, covered his letter with his arm. I’m sure it smeared. Served him right for being so suspicious.

”I was just writing Annabella about Ma’s picture, said Ty with a wicked grin-personally I thin he was writing her something else entirely. “We were doing a scene yesterday afternoon where I go to Prue’s house in London for the first time and she shows me a picture of her dead mother. I took on look at the picture and did a double-take. ’Your mother!’ I said-Litvak thought I had gone completely nuts-‘hey, that’s my mother!’ Believe me, it gave me quite a jolt. But I figured it out later. When I was making ‘Johnny Apollo’ the studio wanted a picture for a close-up of a woman who resembled me enough to be my mother, so I told them to go ahead and borrow one of mother’s pictures. The picture was evidently stored away in the property department when the sequence was finished-where it stayed until someone dragged it out for ‘This Above All.’ Mrs. Power certainly gets around. First she’s my Ma, then she’s Joan Fontaine’s Ma. Next week Don Ameche’s.”

It isn’t difficult to get Ty to talk about Annabella. He’s not one of those sourpuss actors who thinks it vulgar, or something, to mention his wife from nine to six. Ty is so much in love with Annabella, and he’s so terribly proud of her, that you’d have to bash his head in to keep him from talking about her. When the publicity department informed him just the other day that one of the newspapers wanted to take pictures of his home for a Sunday feature Ty said, “Without Annabella? The wouldn’t be any good. Can’t the paper wait until Annabella comes home? You’ll never find Mrs. Powers fluttering mouse-like in the background. Ty doesn’t want it that way. And he has a way of telling studios what he wants. A pretty swell guy, that Ty.

The young Powers celebrated their third wedding anniversary this past April! (Will those gloomy goons who said their marriage wouldn’t last a year kindly go out in the backyard and kick themselves?) Their first anniversary they celebrated in New York, their second in Grand Canyon, and this one of course in Chicago, with all the wonderful and exciting trimmings. Take the word of their Hollywood friends that they are just as romantically in love today as they were that April afternoon in 1939 when they stood side by side in Annabella’s flower be-decked Bel-Air living room, looked into each other’s eyes, and said, with a feeling close to reverence, “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death do us part.”

Love has a way of settling down, like a soufflé that has been too long out of the oven. The Ty Powers do not like soufflés that have flattened out. Love has a way of getting into routines. The Ty Powers do not like routines. As a matter of fact Ty hates routines, with a grim and gruesome hate. “The only thing I like in a routing way,” Ty said to me in his trailer dressing room, while he was waiting for Joan Fontaine to finish her close-ups, “the only thing about which I want no change-is my friends.”

Said Ty, “The best way for a married couple to keep romance fresh and alive, year in and year out, is to break the routine-though, mind you now, don’t think I’m trying to put myself up as an authority on romance and marriage. Maybe I’m prejudiced. Maybe I just don’t like routines. Why, Annabella and I resent routines so much that we celebrate our wedding anniversaries in a different place each year.”

But Ty is right, don’t you think? Nothing kills off romance quite so quickly as the dull monotony of everyday procedure, order, and habit. And, on the contrary, nothing is so conductive to a tingling pulse and a thrilling glow around the heart as the unexpected surprise. Habit is relaxing, you may argue if you’re the type, but it is also boring. A famous neurologist, who boasted that he had prevented the breaking up of innumerable marriages, uttered words of wisdom when he said, “People do not understand that habitude may become the worst of corrosives.”

Well, from the looks of things, you can safely bet your last dollar the one you had left over from your income tax) that Ty and Annabella’s marriage isn’t suffering from any corrosion. Not even around the edges. Habits, at the powers, seem always to be getting a sock on the jaw. Last summer when Ty had a long vacation from picture-making he and Annabella, as excited as two children, packed their bags, closed up their Brentwood house, and joined the straw-hat circuit in New England. The advice givers of Hollywood gathered around like a Greek Chorus and muttered gloomily, “It’s suicide for you to return to the stage. You are one of the biggest box-office stars in Hollywood. The critics will tear you limb from limb. It will be humiliating. Degrading. No Hollywood star has ever returned to the stage when he’s on top. You’ll regret it. Woe, woe, woe.

Ty and Annabella couldn’t have had more fun. Summer stock along the straw hat circuit is to no bed of roses, as you doubtless know, and their hard-earned salary wouldn’t even pay postage on Ty’s fan mail They work old slacks and sweaters, they helped build scenery, they talked “theatre” with the other actors far into the night, they studied hard-and they loved every minute of it. Furthermore, their performances in “Liliom” rated raves from most of the critics. Well, of course, they could have spent the summer in Hollywood and gone to night clubs and given diners for the same old tired faces, and yawned themselves to death.

Annabella firmly believes that her handsome husband has the right idea about keeping romance alive and fresh by breaking routine. A perfect example of that is her recent decision to leave her home and appear with the Chicago company of Noel Coward’s very successful “Blithe Sprit.” Of course, when Annabella casually announced her decision the Greek Chorus gathered around with faces even longer than ever and crooned a dirge which said, “Annabella is a fool to leave her beautiful, comfortable home and live in a grimy Chicago hotel where she’ll freeze in the winter and roast in the summer. Annabella is crazy to sweat and toil when she doesn’t have to sweat and toil when she doesn’t have to lift a finger. Annabella is completely mad to leave Tyrone along in Hollywood with all those predatory females. Woe, and more woe!”

But phooey, say I, to these dreary advice givers. This separation is a wonderful thing for two young people, like Ty and Annabella, who are so keen to keep their romance a love. It’s really a second courtship. Ty, the lover again, writes Annabella long letters every day, he anticipates those long distance calls at night,, he thinks up surprises for her, he spends long but pleasant, hours selecting presents to send her, and whenever he has four or five days off from the studio he dashes madly to the airport and takes the fastest plane to Chicago. Then there’s the breathless excitement of two people who love each other seeing each other after an absence. This second courtship is almost as thrilling as the first-the time he pursued her to South America and did such a fine bit of wooing that she promised to become Mrs. Tyrone Power. A marriage such as this hasn’t a chance in a million of becoming stale.

Far from being crazy, as the calamity-hiped Cassandras of our village would have you believe, Annabella is a very smart young woman. She knows that this separation, this excursion into the drama, will be a chance to build her own personality. There is a belief that by the sacrifice of two individualities of joint personality can be accomplished. It’s little wonder that so many Hollywood marriages fail to survive the compression. And why should a woman, simply because she becomes a wife, sacrifice her individuality? When a man marries it’s because he loves a woman as she is, so why should she right off sacrifice her personality, thereby killing the thing about herself that intrigued him in the first place? Keep your personality, and keep your husband intrigued.

But long before they started running off to straw-hat circuits and Chicago, Ty and Annabella refused to stick to routines-and had a lot of fun. Like the time two years ago when they decided to take an automobile trip through Arizona and New Mexico. “just a short trip. No, we don’t need much luggage. We’ll be back in a week or ten days.” Well, they were gone for weeks, they went to Oregon instead of Arizona, no one knew where they were, and they had a perfectly glorious time. When they reached a town and they were tired they stayed several days. Sometimes they went to hotels and sometimes they went to auto courts. They didn’t try to make so many miles an hour.

This refusal to stick to routines naturally is rather hard on their servants, who have to be very understanding, very understanding indeed. Ty will come home from the studio , and with dinner practically on the table, he will suggest that they get all dressed up and join the Gary Coopers at Ciro’s. On the other hand if a dressy party is planned ahead at one of the nightclubs it’s a nine-to-nine bet that Ty will say, “Let’s skip it. Let’s eat in.” And Annabella likes to tell about the night that they were done up like movie stars, white tie, ermine, jewels, everything, on their way to a great big snooty dinner party. The car stopped for a traffic pigs feet in a delicatessen window. Well, you know what happened. The Power ate huge rye bread sandwiches with dabs of cole slaw in their own dining room.

Lloyds of London wouldn’t handle it, but believe me, I don’t think you can get better love insurance than insurance than the Powers’ Method of keeping romance alive.

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