EXTRA! ACTOR WANTS TO ACT!
Sidney Fields [1950]

Tyrone Power Applause is Not Enough
The publicity blurbs that movie studios send in are usually filed in my trash basket. but the one on Tyrone Power contained one literary beat. I thought Tyrone himself would like to read, so I showed it to him:

"Success apparently is in his blood. There are some himans whom fate can never keep down. They march forward and take by divine right the best the world affords. But success after all is nothing more than courage....the will to fight and keep on when everything seems darkest. Of such stuff is young Tyrone Power made."

"The guy who wrote that is probably writing my next movie script," Tyrone said, and I'm sure he blushed.

He admits to 35, stands about six feet, has dark brown hair and eyes, an easy grace, and an eagerness to please. He had just returned with his new wife, lovely Linda Christian, from Italy, where they had been married with much hoopla.

While in Europe Tyrone made two movie epics; one a little $4,500,000 thing called "Prince of Foxes," which The Darryl Zanuck insist is the last of such extravaganzas because the poverty-stricken movies can no longer afford them; and the second, named "The Black Rose," filmed in Morocco in England.

Propagating The Powers
Tyrone and Linda say they will settle down first and start a family and will try for two kids and she won't do any acting. Tyrone spent the last 17 months in Europe and Africa, and not too long ago piloted his own plane over 26,000 miles of south America. He's made about 30 movies these past 14 years....

"Which is fine," he says, "except you get tired of doing the same story over and over again. After we get settled I'd like to do a small picture, no spectacle, just a story about people who live and breather."

In spite of the 30 movies with "the same story over and over again," Tyrone started on the stage. Both his mother and father were actors and he knocked over the road with them. When they separated he lived with his mother. At 16 he went off to Chicago from his native Cincinnati to join his father, who was working with Fritz Leiber, the Shakespearean actor...

"I was with Leiber too. Excuse me. I mean I carried a spear in his plays for a short while. Then my father took me to Hollywood where he was to make a movie. But he died when it was half finished."

So at 17 Tyrone was on his own. He chauffeured a writer around, made hamburgers and malted milks in a drive-in, and was a mail clerk in a bank. Then he slipped into a show at the Pasadena Playhouse...

"The show as 'Lo and Behold,' longest revue on record. the curtain was up at 8:15 p.m. and came down at 1:30 a.m. to what I would generously call 'scattered applause.' The audience was quite scattered too.

"I recall a girl in the show named Eunice Quedens who changed her name to Eve Arden. Me? I sang and danced and was as stiff as a poker. Only thing I got out of it was learning how to tie a bowtie. I had four changes into a full dress suit."

Then Tyrone got involved in Chicago Fair exhibition called "Hollywood At the Fair," in which he informed the citizens how movies are made. He had only been in one up to then.

The Unspectacular Rise
After the Fair he besieged New York, haunted the casting offices, and was finally hired by Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic-as an understudy to three men: burgess Meredith, a Hugh Williams, and a John emery, who distinguished himself by withstanding a few years of marriage with Tallulah Bankhead and compared that tumultuous even to the decline and fall of the Roman empire. anyway, after a summer of stock Tyrone returned to appear in Cornell's "Romeo and Juliet," and "St. Joan"...

"No. Not opposite her. Just small parts. then my agent arranged a screen test and I got to Hollywood. It was as unspectacular as that."

His long stretch of movie making was interrupted only twice: When he came to Westport to act in "Liliom," and when he enlisted as a private in the Marine Corps, became a lieutenant and a transport pilot and spent three and half years flying around all the Pacific hellholes from Kwajalein to Japan.

Tyrone says he'd like to arrange his life so he could spend half the year in Hollywood and half in New York acting in real plays, a familiar sing-song by movie people. A Hollywood veteran might find a play tough going...

"Have you been to Morocco lately?" he asked tartly. "Only movie people would get up at 6 a.m. and walk into a sandstorm to shoot a scene." Then he sighed: "But you do get lazy in Hollywood. Awfully lazy."

Which means that he has the applause of the multitude, but he would like more than anything else to win his own self-approval. I don't think he has it yet.

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JOHN FORD'S THE LONG GRAY LINE
New York Sunday News, January 9, 1955
Little Old New York

You can guess that director John Ford decided to do the story of West Point because he could tell through the Irish eyes of Sgt. Marty Maher, whose career is one of the legends of the U.S. Military Academy. Ford, four-time Academy winner as a result of "The Informer," "The Grapes of Wrath," "How Green Was My Valley and "The Quiet Man," is a one-man chamber of commerce for Ireland.

And that is as it should be, because Ford's real name is Sean O'Fearna. Jus why he surrendered that lilting moniker for his resent nom de screen evades me. Perhaps, back in 1914, he didn't want his parents in Maine to know that he'd cast his lot with the odd people who were hopping around Hollywood, making faces at cameras.

Tearful Piece In The Long Gray Line O'Fearna, who is Ford, has teamed up with two other Celts, Tyrone Power and Maureen O'Hara, and the net result is a magnificent thing, although you'll find yourself throttling back tears as the story builds from one climax to a greater one.

President Eisenhower, Gen. Omar Bradley and other West Pointers who have seen it say that it is the most moving document they've ever witnessed. Ford, with his usual sensitivity, unlocked the emotion-charged story of West Point as it never has been revealed before.

About 14 years ago, when Sean O'Fearna and your reporter both were much younger, he told me that the old western star, Harry Carey, played a most influential part in his career. "I started at the old Universal lot, as a prop man, in 1914," explained Ford. "The next year, I was 19 and was pressed into action to direct a western, "The Sky Pilot." The studio told me that Harry Carey would star in it, but pointed out that as Carey's contract would not be renewed, I could handle him with a minimum of respect.

"Naturally Carey and I became great friends and he gladly helped me on my first picture. He knew all the answers, all the tricks of the business."

John Ford chuckled.

"In fact, we became so enthusiastic that what the studio had charted as a two-reeler ran up to 5,200 feet, FIVE REELS! When the studio saw what we'd done, they fired the both of us.

A Long Shot

"We were saved by 1,000,000-to-1 shot," continued Ford. "The same week we have chased off the premises by Carl Laemmle, justifiably irate, a group of bankers arrived at the Universal lot to check on their investment in the company. They told Mr. Laemmle they wanted to view some completed film ready for the market.

"The only completed film was our five-reeler. Mr. Laemmle showed it to them. They loved it. So I was re-hired at $125 a week and Harry Carey's contract was picked up at $1,600 a week."

Fourteen year ago, in 1941, John Ford's formula for a hit picture was this:

"Louse up your hero," he explained to me. "Get him thrown in jail, as quickly as possible, even if you just picture him stealing a horse, or something. Heroes shouldn't be clay statues, mind you, but for popular acceptance, it helps if the hero's feet are made of clay. Recognition of that fact made Harry Carey a great western star. He was never a holier-than-thou cowboy, like most of his western colleagues."

Ford felt, in 1941, that it was easier to do a picture with competent actors, NOT stars. "Stars have their own ideas," he explained, wryly. But in 1954, Ford teamed up two important stars, Tyrone and Maureen, with happiest results. And Tyrone gets into plenty of trouble-but don't steal a horse; all he steals is Maureen, who is a classy filly.

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The studio at one time thought of using Duchin records but discounted the idea when it was felt the arrangement and recording techniques were out of date. Tyrone Power will finger a dummy piano keyboard on the screen as Duchin, much as Cornell Wilde did for the studio a decade ago in A Song to Remember. Jose Iturbi supplied the recordings for the earlier feature a life of Chopin.

FILM TO RE-CREATED OLD CASINO HERE
Columbia Will Alter Façade of Tavern on the Green for The Eddy Duchin Story
June 4, 1955
Thomas M. Pryor

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. July 3—The Tavern on the Green I Central Park is scheduled for a face-lifting operation with a reverse twist. Columbia Pictures has obtained permission to redesign the exterior of the restaurant so it will resemble the old Central Park Casino.

The Casino, which figures prominently in The Eddy Duchin Story, flourished as an after-dark oasis 25 years ago. The late musician go this start there as a pianist with Leo Reisman's orchestra. Tyrone Power will impersonate Mr. Duching.

Walter Holscher, Columbia's art director, and John Roche, of the studio's construction department, will leave Hollywood Tuesday to await the arrival by train of 49 pre-fabricated set units. These when assembled, will duplicate the facade of the casino. The sets are designed to fit as a shell over the Tavern on the Green.

The picture will go before the camera July 25 with the filming on location sequences in various parts of Manhattan, including the Starlight Roof of the Waldorf Astoria, the Rodin Room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grand Central Terminal and the basement piano storage room Steinway Hall. George Sidney is the director.

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MOTION PICTURE SCENE On Location; Museum Series
August 14, 1955

NEW YORK. New York Memorial Hospital. As the Boston musician who succumbed to leukemia at the peak of his popularity, Mr. Power was revealing the grim medical diagnosis to the English girl he later marries.

"The real tragedy of Duchin's life, and of the picture," said the actor while the pipe-smoking Mr. Sidney arranged another camera angle, "was his dying at such a young age, only 42. Most people don't remember that....Yes, I knew Eddy quite well. Working right here across from the Hospital reminds me of how I used to visit him over there when he was a patient, toward the end.

"But this isn't a tragic picture, by any means. Call it a serious drama with music, intended to follow Eddy as he comes down here form Boston, joins up with Leo Reisman's band, and attains success on his own.

Miss Novak is, of course, the young woman Columbia has groomed for stardom in such predecessors as "Pfffft" and recently "Picnic." Mr. Whitemore appears as Duchin's long-time manager, Wally Weber, and the 13 year old Rex Thompson plays Duchin's son. Miss Shaw has been in the United States exactly three weeks. Encouraged by Bob Hope, during a recent Australian tour, to "look him up some tine” in Hollywood, she did so exactly fourteen days later. The actress was promptly trotted to Columbia by Hope's agent and placed under contract. And she received her current assignment the same day.

Incidentally, the entire week's work on the local scenes will run roughly twenty minutes out of a total length of two hours.

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The Eddy Duchin Story
August 14, 1955

NEW YORK. Tomorrow, having framed its protagonists against authentic local scenery, the seventy-man location unit for Columbia's The Eddy Duchin Story goes home. Last week found director George Sidney, his technicians and cast, headed by Tyrone Power, Kim Novak, Victoria Shaw, James Whitmore and young Rex Thompson, briskly setting up shop for the Cinemascope color project in such random sites as Central Park, the residential upper East Side and the Warldorf Astoria (where amid today's Sabbath quiet Mr. Power will conduct a ban in the Starlight Room, piano-and Duchin-style.)

Tuesday morning, Mr. Power and Miss Shaw, an Australian television actress making her film debut as the musician's second wife (Miss Novak plays the first), went through a tense scene at the foot of the Seventy first Street ramp before New York.

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POWER ROLLS 'SHEBA' HITS LEGIT PLANS HAZY
Variety, Sept. 23, 1958

MADRID, Sep. 23.—Looking biblical in a three-cornered beard, Tyrone Power has arrived here for his filming star in "Solomon and Sheba" opposite Gina Lollobrigida. Old Testament saga in Technirama, financed and to be released by United Artists, is the actor's first in a series of five films abroad.

Power and his Copa Productions partner-producer Ted Richmond are associated with Edward Small in the upcoming religioso spectacle. As currently credited, "Sheba" will be an Edward small presentation produced by Ted Richmond.

Actor failed to confirm stateside reports of his Broadway appearance next spring with Ingrid Bergman in "Anna Karenina." Impressed with the Moscow Art Theater's dramatization of the Tolstoy novel and admitting he will continue to devote a semi-annual portion of his time to stage the spring, Power unbearded a "no definite commitment yet." He said he presumed the "Karenina" announcement was a Gregory Ratoff trial balloon. (Ratoff is slated to stage the venture.)

Power said his next film, tentatively titled "One Against Tomorrow," would be done entirely in Stockholm beginning February, possibly with Leet Thomson ("Ice cold in Alex") as director and a Swedish actress in one of the two femme roles.

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