[Part 3]: Girls Whooped at First Appearance on Screen
This is the third in a series on the late Tyrone Power. Today's article records his remarkable career.
Bill Slocum ; New York Mirror, November 22, 1958

Tyrone Power was born to act. Whether he found his own performances personally pleasing is moot. However, his work certainly delighted a large segment of the civilized world. Particularly the segment that is female.

Looking like a magnificent male and being a magnificent male are not always the same thing, as the most casual student of Broadway and Hollywood mores soon learns. Power's appeal was as authentic as it was universal.

Power's remarkable physical appeal made him a movie star in virtually no time at all back in 1936.

That was ironic, because he had been banging his head against the studio gates without avail for years in his teens when he lived in Hollywood with his mother and carried the illustrious name of his father, a stage and move star.

He became a barker at the Chicago World Fair, explaining something he knew only from hearsay-how a movie is made.

He worked himself East and got some small jobs on the Broadway stage with Katharine Cornell companies doing "St. Joan" and "Romeo and Juliet." The movie scouts got a look at that remarkable face and that virile grace and he was on his way.

He was signed for $200 a week and got a bit part in something called "Girls Dormitory." Sheila Graham, writing in the New York Mirror, said, of his appearance in "Girls Dormitory": "Girls all over the world whooped when Ty's handsome head flashed on the screen."

A YEAR LATER the $200 a week hopeful was a $4,000 a week a major star. He was 23, single, and only a year away from Broadway. A Broadway he had recently walked without shoes after a party.

He told the story this way: "I went to a big party all dressed up-tails, top hat and everything. I had to walk miles to get home, carrying my shoes. They were too tight to walk any distance in and I didn't have a nickel for the subway."

"Lloyds of London" made him a star and he went from one major picture to the next. These epics ran heavily to costume pictures and were presented as spectacles as much as plays.

Nobody was expected to do any real acting-just look pretty and say the words so they could be understood. But young Power spent hours every night rehearsing under the tutelage of his mother, whose professional name was Patia Rayome.

He tried to instill life and believability into some of the most stereotyped words and plots known to cinema history.

He always wanted to be a real actor, just as his father and his grandfather before him.

WHEN POWER broke away from 20th Century Fox after 18 years a friend asked, "How did all those years of success feel?" Power told a lot about his attitude toward his craft when he replied, "How does it feel to have all the trappings of success and never enjoy them"

He explained this statement to the Mirror's Sidney Fields, "What I meant," he told Fields, "was that I had been in California since 1936 and called a 'star' and acquired what went wit it: A name, fame worldly goods..But, you can kid everyone for a time except the person you shave."

He explained that now that he had his own production company he would make movies on his own terms. But apparently he was not going to buck a winner. The plans for his first two pictures indicated they were costume plays, in the mould that he abhorred but was responsible for his fame.

The perceptive Fields caught Tyrone Power perfectly with the last sentence of the interview. He wrote: "Self-approval is elusive. Sometimes it never comes."

APPARENTLY Power sought the means to approving himself on the stage. In the beginning he played bit parts, signifying nothing. when he returned to the stage he was an established star. He packed houses in this country and in London.

But, somber realist that he was, he could never be quite certain that the business out front was a tribute to his acting or a tribute to his profile.

LIFE AND LOVES OF TYRONE: A REAL LADY IS TY'S WIDOW [Part 4]
The New York Mirror's series on Tyrone Power's life continues today with a sketch of his widow, the unknown southern beauty who has become a deeply respected American woman in eight sad days.)
Bill Slocum ; New York Mirror, November 23, 1958

Mrs. Deborah Ann Hungerford Minardos Power has become something of a lady of mystery with the sudden death of her new and famous husband, Tyrone Power.

She isn't really so much a lady of mystery as she is simply a lady.

She never once in all her life got in a law suit or even had a disenchanted admirer hire pickets to carry signs asking her to go home.

There seems no public record, or even public pictures, indicating that she posed for nude statues. and not once did a guy go to jail because he couldn't pay for the fabulous jewels she accepted.

She simply hasn't made any copy in all her life, which is about as good a definition of a lady as comes to mind.

When she became Mrs. Power on May 7 last she did it as quietly and as simply as so earth-shattering a romantic event could be accomplished when the bridegroom was a chap of Power's monumental fame.

And when she became Power's widow so suddenly a week ago Saturday she accepted this hopeless, frightening catastrophe with the dignity and courage of a woman in love with a man, rather than a headline.

She had nothing to say to the world, although she made a gallant try at playing the role of a famous man's wife twice. She attended non-sectarian services for her late husband in Spain. When they were finished she was barely capable of thanking the minister she left shattered but not hysterical.

She steeled herself for the photographers she knew would meet her plane in Los Angeles and appeared on the ramp composed and brave. But the exploding flashlights were too much.

She cried. No scenes. Just tears.

Although beset by grief and strange rites that are part of burying a big time movie star, Mrs. Power did manage to get the word out that Linda Christian, Power's rather determined ex-wife, was not really wanted at the funeral.

Linda faced up to yet another press conference and announced her outrage, but bowed to the will of the widow in fact. Miss Christian is not unused to widows-in-fact asking her to please refrain from public demonstrations. the Marquesa de Portago was moved to make a similar request prior to burying the late Marquese.

The third Mrs. Power is 26. She was born Deborah Ann Hungerford in Greenwood Miss. and raised in Tunica, Miss., a town about 40 miles south of Memphis, Tenn. She brought Power to Tunica for their marriage.

Apparently they met about a year ago and the crashing irony of it is that no less than one of Linda's brothers's in law made the introductions.

The brother-in-law, Charles Skipsey, had married Ariadne, Linda's sister and put the bite on Tyrone for the use of his home as a honeymoon site.

One morning Skipsey asked if he could bring a friend to lunch. the friend was Mrs. Nico Minardos, divorced almost three years. Her first husband is a Hollywood actor, respected in the town as a person and a performer

They became parents of a girl before their marriage broke up.

She was shocked when she discovered that the news of her pregnancy had somehow leaked to the press a few months after her marriage to Power. But she made one of her rare public statements in response to queries on the delicate matter: "Ty now has three girls (his two, her one) and so we hope the next will be a boy." She is also quoted as saying, in describing her meeting with Power, "As soon as I saw him, I knew Ty was the man for me."

This, of course, was a terribly common female reaction upon meeting Ty. the lady from Tunica, however, was able to carry it off.

"She is striking looking woman. Those who saw her in more animated poses than her recent appearances were inclined to agree with her husband who said, often, "Doesn't she look like me?"

Power made yet another statement about the last of his three wives: "She is interested in the theatre, but has no ambition to be an actress. She doesn't care about expensive clothes or jewelry. My welfare is her first concern."

He apparently had never run across such a phenomenon in all his women-crammed lifetime.

And before leaving for Spain he said, "Debbie has never been to Europe before. (Tomorrow the series on Tyrone Power continues with the tale of Tyrone Power vs. the opposite sex.).

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