Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1938)

FRIENDS DON'T KNOW H Hove you heard that Tyrone Power is ungrateful, a poseur, a flirt? Then it's time someone who really has his number sets you right about this lad who's wilier than a politician but still young enough to have ideals published about this young star than almost any other in Hollywood. He has been painted in some quarters as being ungrateful to the people who "knew him when," in others as being a poseur, in still others as being a heartless flirt entirely concerned with breaking lovely women's hearts. All of which stories are nonsense, but which have arisen, I think, from that sort of destructive jealousy people get for personalities they do not easily understand. Tyrone is no Gable, who is able to make everyone like him instantly. He is no Robert Taylor, with a boyish, ingratiating quality about him. He is, instead, at once subtle and shy, at once realistic and romantic and in him there is a sardonic strain of bitter humor that rarely goes with acting talent. Take, for example, the reason for "Sing, Baby, Sing," being his favorite tune. When you know the reason for this, you will understand much of the fellow himself. It will, I think, show you why he is now the triumphant success that he is. It will give you the basis for his deep friendship with Alice Faye, and to me, at least, it is the reason for believing that five years from now he will be an even greater star than today, and ten years from now an even greater star than in five years. Not that I wish to give the impression that Ty bounds out of bed every morning and joyously lilts away on "Sing, Baby, Sing" while bathing. One reason he doesn't is because he is much too moody a soul not to have mornings when he feels like a wet February and wouldn't sing if a His is a complex personality, at once realistic and romantic, but there's reason for his sardonic strain of bitter humor gun were held to his head. The other is that he can't carry a tune even for the short distance between a bed and a bathtub. But he does encourage his friends to "Sing, Baby, Sing" at him and it gives him a fine glow when he enters a restaurant, preferably an expensive one, and hears the orchestra giving out with it. Yet the reason for his liking this tune is as bitter a little pill as anyone was ever asked to swallow. That song was the big hit of the picture of the same name and that picture was the first one that Ty was cast in under his Twentieth Century-Fox contract. I HE story has been told so often that you undoubtedly remember how he got that contract, so right here I'll only repeat that the contract came to Ty only after weary years of job hunting— when, due to his father's swift and sudden death, if he was to eat at all he had to find work. He was just as talented and handsome a boy then as he is now. He had had acting experience, ever since he had, at the age of seventeen, graduated from Purcell High School in his native city of Cincinnati and had taken a job in a stock company. After his father's death he went around to all the managers and agencies where the name of Tyrone Power was respected. His father had been Tyrone Power, the 2nd and he was Tyrone Power, the 3rd, so everyone was very polite in that utterly charming and completely defeating way that is possible only to people in the theatrical profession. In Hollywood they have a word for those ultracourteous profitless meetings. They call them "the brush off," meaning you're in and out of some big shot's office before you know what's happened. Ty went through nearly two years of "the brush off," getting thinner and hungrier and learning more and more about the economic facts of life the while. But finally he did get the tiniest bit in a Broadway show. A talent scout saw him and the Twentieth Century contract resulted. That was, of course, all that he had dreamed of. He was only twenty-two then and his optimism bubbled over. Here was life being served to him with a platinum spoon off a silver platter. IT was, that is, until he was cast in "Sing, Baby, Sing." He appeared on the set early, anxious to show everyone that the great Darryl Zanuck's faith in him was justified. He had studied his role valiantly and had worked out a couple of bits of business that he believed were distinctive. He couldn't possibly have been more eager or more happy than he was that first day. Two days later, he was kicked out of the cast —not only kicked out, but told that he might be Tyrone Power, the 3rd or the 9th, but he certainly was no actor and never would be. Now Ty at that time didn't know Alice Faye at all. She was the star of "Sing, Baby, Sing," you remember. But Alice, alone and unasked, sought out the humiliated, beaten boy, made him come to dinner with her, took him along to a simple restaurant in Beverly Hills that is called "The Tropics" and spent the whole evening talking to him, telling him that he could act, that he would get his chance, that he did have personality, and that, what-the-heck, his life was still before him, wasn't it? Today, star of Hollywood's biggest pictures, sought after, lionized, Tyrone still eats, night after night, at "The Tropics." The place is (Continued on page 7S) 27