The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  Power lined up for his shots when he joined the U.S. Marines, including one by the photographer.

  This return to Tyrone Power, adventurous sex symbol, was seriously curtailed by World War II. In December 1941, America entered the war, and on August 24, 1942, after negotiations with his studio, Tyrone Power enlisted as a private in the Marine Corps. His boss, Darryl F. Zanuck, had himself enlisted and was about to leave Hollywood. Before his departure, Zanuck planned Power’s last movie before his fans would have to, in the parlance of the times, “accept the rationing” of Tyrone Power movies for the duration. (The duration turned out to be longer than anyone expected.) When Crash Dive was released in April 1943, it marked the last new Tyrone Power movie that would appear until November 1946.* (He reported for boot camp on January 2, 1943.)

  More than three full years is a long time for any movie star to disappear, but in the star machine era it could be death. Yet Power accepted his military service willingly, volunteering to serve his country. By all accounts, he was an honorable man and genuinely wanted to be part of the war effort without privilege or special consideration. Not for him was the typical movie star cosmetic assignment to some camp near Hollywood or even a role in the troops that entertained the military or recorded the war with motion picture equipment. Later, when he qualified for officer candidate school, he was commissioned a second lieutenant and went to flight training. In early 1945, he went to the Pacific combat area as a pilot with the Marine Transport Command, where he was based on Okinawa and Guam and ferried supplies to troops on Iwo Jima.

  With their big meal ticket gone, 20th Century–Fox, ever vigilant at the cash register, naturally moved to find ways to keep making money from Tyrone Power. One solution was to rerelease his former hits. In Old Chicago, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and Johnny Apollo were all put back into circulation, and two of his most recent successes, Blood and Sand and The Black Swan, were kept out there, making the rounds, then being rebooked and never brought back for storage. The other way Fox cashed in on Tyrone Power without Tyrone Power was to do what studios always did—try to clone him. During Power’s rise to fame, they had cleverly brought in a handsome young man named Richard Greene.* Born in England, Greene was appearing as the juvenile lead in a Terence Rattigan play in London in early 1938 when a Fox talent scout offered him a seven-year contract. Within weeks he was in America and preparing for his first movie, the prestigious John Ford melodrama Four Men and a Prayer, with Loretta Young. Although handsome and skilled, Greene lacked the underlying sexuality that had lifted Power to the top. Even if he had been a real threat, however, Greene was lost to Fox before America entered the war, having asked to be released from his contract in 1940 so he could return to England. (Greene enlisted in the Royal Armoured Corps of the Twenty-seventh Lancers. Postwar, he had an excellent career as television’s Robin Hood, but never achieved the level of fame that Power did.)

  The World War II Fox “Ty” was an actor named Cornel Wilde, another dark-haired, soft-eyed, mellifluous-voiced charmer. Wilde was a first-rate athlete, a member of the 1940 U.S. Olympic saber team. He entered movies when the Olympics were canceled because of World War II, and bungled around in small roles as a lily-livered heavy (Warners’ High Sierra, 1941) before finding fame as a leading man, most notably in his Oscar-nominated performance as Chopin in Columbia’s A Song to Remember in 1945. Wilde was genuinely handsome and during the war years a solid leading male presence. His ability to do his own dueling inevitably took him into swashbucklers, and he replaced Power on the covers of fan magazines and in the hearts of many female fans while Power was away.*

  When the war ended, Power was honorably discharged as a first lieutenant and returned to the United States on November 21, 1945. His military service had been an important part of his life, so much so that he joined the Marine Reserve Corps.† When Power came back, he was like everyone else who had served in the war—older and changed by his experience. For nearly three years he hadn’t been a movie star. He had lived and worked among non-show-business people. He had a new sense of the world and of himself. He wanted to enact a more realistic kind of man on-screen, and he wanted to fulfill his theatrical heritage. Power could act, and he wanted to do so. Since he was no longer the new kid on the block, he felt it was someone else’s turn to play sex symbol and his turn to be an actor. To Fox, however, he was still Tyrone Power, still the product they had developed. In March 1946, Fox released a short subject in which Power acted as a spokesman for the Red Cross. (This short was the first time his fans saw him in new material on film after the war.) The studio’s plan was to use the Red Cross to say, “And here’s your same old Tyrone Power.” Power’s plan was to use the short to say, “And here’s my new serious presence.” The postwar dance between studio and star had begun.

  Both agreed, however, that to reconnect Power to his fans, his “return” feature should be as prestigious as possible. It was The Razor’s Edge (1946), a multimillion-dollar adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s best-selling novel. Darryl Zanuck planned to spare no expense. He surrounded Power with an all-star cast: Gene Tierney, John Payne, Anne Baxter, Clifton Webb, Herbert Marshall, and Elsa Lanchester. The movie, released on November 19, 1946, was treated as a major media event. It ran a hefty 146 minutes, just to prove how important it was. Power received excellent reviews, and the movie was a great hit, one of the highest-grossing movies of the year. It received four Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress for Baxter, Best Supporting Actor for Webb, and Best Art Direction and Set Decoration. (Only Baxter won.) Power, looking beautiful as always, presented in the best Fox had to offer, seemed never to have been away.

  A closer look, however, revealed small differences. The postwar Power was still an uncommonly handsome man, but where he had once seemed like a joyous bad boy who could be tamed by true love, he now seemed melancholy and even sedentary. Tyrone Power was clearly older, and he no longer looked like a buoyant young swashbuckler. He had a more stolid quality. Part of this is due to the role itself, that of Larry Darrell, a do-gooder on a quest for spirituality and inner peace, and who is always knowing what his friends need better than they do.

  Underneath the movie’s prestigious, allegedly serious surface lay an ugly truth. The Razor’s Edge was designed to let Zanuck and Fox have their handsome old Ty Power and let him think they were going to take him seriously. Power believed The Razor’s Edge was a serious movie—all that spirituality—and a serious property—all those numbers of books sold. But his Larry Darrell was still an object of desire by the leading lady (Tierney), a male character with that sense of the sexually unattainable that audiences found irresistible.

  After The Razor’s Edge, Power was put into the kind of epic costume film that he had excelled at before the war. Captain from Castile was also based on surefire box office potential—the best-selling adventure novel by Samuel Shellabarger. It was perfect “Tyrone Power” material, being the story of a Spanish nobleman who accompanied Cortés on his conquest of Mexico. Power headed a cast that included Cesar Romero, Lee J. Cobb, Barbara Lawrence, and a newcomer, Jean Peters, who would herself go on to become a star for Fox. Knowing the film would be a hit, the studio filmed it on location in Mexico in glorious Technicolor. A postwar shortage of film stock with which to make color prints held up the release of the film, and suddenly a quick Tyrone Power movie was needed.

  Power now pushed hard to fill the void with a small movie that he felt would present him to the public in a completely new way. He talked Darryl Zanuck into buying a novel called Nightmare Alley (written by William Gresham) to be adapted especially to star him in an unsympathetic role. Zanuck worried about this idea from the beginning. During all the story conferences, Zanuck’s memos, as reprinted in Rudy Behlmer’s Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck, indicate his concern that Power’s character was going to alienate his fans. “There must be some way to get a certain amount of sympathy for him … We should feel that there is a certain majesty in Stanton’s decline … Whi
le we want to keep him a man who has this miserable appetite for money and success, there must be a point where we feel sympathy for him” (November 5, 1946, memo).* Most people feel that the resulting movie, also called Nightmare Alley (1947), is Power’s best performance. He himself always thought so. Playing a carnival man who climbs his way to the top over a series of love affairs, Power brought to the role everything he had learned about ruthless people on their way to the top. When the movie was released in September 1947, he received excellent reviews.

  All discussions of Power’s career refer to Nightmare Alley as his best film and as the kind of work he wanted to do after World War II. Movie folklore defines his role as a huge “departure,” because in the end, Power, the world’s most beautiful man, ends up as a circus geek. Looking at the film, however, reveals something else. Power once again plays a cad, a seducer of women. No departure there. His character is ambitious and rises from striped T-shirt and jeans to tuxedo and well-cut suit. No departure there, either. And, yes, Power becomes a down-and-outer, a heavy drinker, and yes, he is offered the job of carnival geek and takes it, but we never see him bite the head off a chicken (the geek’s stunt). Before he is forced to do it, he is rescued by his true love (the lovely young Coleen Gray). Nightmare Alley ends on a redemptive note, with Gray holding Power in her arms, reassuring him of her love and his future.

  In The Kings of the Bs, an anthology of film history and criticism about low-budget movies (edited by Todd McCarthy and Charles Flinn), author Clive T. Miller says Nightmare Alley “is the quintessential B movie spoiled by A production.” It’s the definitive statement on the film. Nightmare Alley is a film noir, with dark and shadowy lighting, and the carny setting of a low-down world full of drifters and grifters. However, compared to some other noirs of the era, like Detour, Gun Crazy, or Criss Cross, its sleaze is fairly sanitary. Miller understands the problem thoroughly: “Tyrone Power had become a star in 1936 … and none of his twenty-four movies since then had lost money for the studio.” As Miller sums it up, “They [the studio] had too much at stake to try something austere.”* Miller points out that Power is in every scene except two, which means that of the movie’s 111 minutes of running time, he is almost always on- screen. He has twenty-eight love scenes, divided among his three leading ladies (Joan Blondell, Gray, and Helen Walker). What one learns is that once Tyrone Power’s kind of stardom is set into the film noir world, things take a turn upward. Glamour interferes with the process. Noirs usually (not always) star lesser names or names that become great in subsequent decades (like Robert Mitchum), but not a glamour boy like Tyrone Power. His stardom is too big to be contained, and it certainly cannot be trashed. He can be tortured, and he can fall in the gutter, but he’s got to get up at the end and accept love, from both the leading lady and his audience.

  It’s not Power’s fault, of course. He gives a good performance, but he was playing a role he had often played before—a hard-edged pushy guy who wants it all, uses women on the way there, learns his lesson the hard way, and then finds true love in the end.

  Nightmare Alley did not find favor with the larger moviegoing public, just as Zanuck had predicted. It was the handwriting on Ty Power’s postwar wall. No matter how ambitious he was to do other things, he would have trouble breaking the chokehold of his stardom. He would wait until the very end of his career before he could again play a really seedy cad (in Witness for the Prosecution [1957]).

  Zanuck had supported Nightmare Alley but had insisted that, in return, Power give the fans the old Ty Power. Zanuck had it waiting in the cans. Nightmare Alley (in black and white) had been put into release on October 9, 1947. The Technicolor Captain from Castile prints were now ready, and the film was released that December. The public responded enthusiastically. This was the Tyrone Power people remembered—in tights and looking good.

  As far as the studio was concerned, everything about Power’s career was peachy. As far as Power was concerned, nothing was peachy. He had tried to return to his regular Hollywood social life, in which he and Annabella entertained their friends in their beautiful home. But on May 20, 1946, when they hosted a party for David Niven and his wife, Primula, she fell down the cellar stairs, struck her head on the cement floor, and died the following day. Shortly afterward, Annabella left Hollywood to appear on Broadway, and even more shortly after that, announced her separation from Power. Their careers, she said, “were incompatible.” It was the usual Hollywood euphemism; the incompatibility was that he was a star and her career had died.

  Power had changed, but the studio had not changed, and the fans agreed with the studio. He wanted to be a great actor, and perhaps he could have been a great actor, but for all his disappointments and complaints, he cooperated with his studio too long. During 1946 and 1947, Power was back where everyone felt he belonged—on the cover of Modern Screen. (He appeared on Modern Screen covers twice in little more than a year, a record for male stars.*) A 1946 article—“Ty Power … Wiped the Slate Clean”—put Power back into the hands of the publicity shapers from his earliest star machine days. The story told how he had entered the service and shed his identity as a movie star. The layout, however, sells the movie star with the usual drivel. There is a full-page photo of Power lounging around on the front steps of his mansion, and there are six other black-and-whites of him in what is no more than a carefully developed puff piece to say, “Don’t worry, he’s got that World War II silliness out of him and is home to stay.” The 1947 issue has a glamour photo of him on the cover, with an inserted small photo alongside, dressed in his Captain from Castile swashbuckling outfit, the way his public liked to see him. The cover story, allegedly written by the movie’s director, Henry King, is laudatory. King, who was a genuine friend of Power’s, had directed In Old Chicago, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Jesse James, A Yank in the RAF, and now Captain from Castile. Again, the story was designed to reassure the fans. Power’s back, and King’s got him. It will be business as usual. Power was young, and his absence from the screen had seemed not to have hurt him professionally. The studio felt they could humor him occasionally by meeting his requests for serious roles, but otherwise they’d continue to cast him in films that followed the pattern the star machine had established in 1937. There were light romantic comedies (The Luck of the Irish and That Wonderful Urge [1948]), lavish costume dramas (Prince of Foxes [1949], The Black Rose [1950], I’ll Never Forget You [1951], King of the Khyber Rifles [1954], The Mississippi Gambler [1953]), westerns (Rawhide [1951], Pony Soldier [1952], and Untamed, a western set in South Africa [1955]), World War II combat-related (Ameri- can Guerrilla in the Philippines [1950]), a Cold War spy movie (Diplomatic Courier [1952]), distinguished literary adaptations (The Sun Also Rises and The Rising of the Moon [1957]), biopics (The Eddy Duchin Story [1956], The Long Gray Line [1955]), and a seagoing disaster movie (Abandon Ship [1957]). From Captain from Castile in 1947 until his death in 1958, Tyrone Power would appear in eighteen movies. Not one of them was truly distinguished, although most did well enough financially and a few actually afforded him an opportunity to act.

  Enthusiasm for film work began to die inside Power. His disappointment showed on-screen. He often seemed to be walking through his roles. Sadly for his ambitions and talents, his disillusionment affected his work and he began to look like an aging movie star whose ability was limited, a former pretty boy who couldn’t act. He became less than he was.

  Two movies well illustrate his last years at Fox: the lavish Prince of Foxes and the less expensive Diplomatic Courier. Prince of Foxes was a shrewd attempt to return Power to familiar territory: an adaptation of another Samuel Shellabarger best seller. Set in the time of the Borgias, the movie had solid assets in European location shooting, still new to most American audiences, and in Orson Welles, who is awesome as Cesare Borgia, a role he was born to play. Power had begun to look slightly dissipated in his close-ups, although perhaps it was only the onset of the heart condition that would ultimately kill him. Certainly he had
lost energy. The electricity that had marked his every entrance into the frame is gone. His eyes are dead. His jaw sometimes seems locked as he delivers his frequently hopeless lines. He’s no longer a crackling young figure whose kinetic presence lights up the screen. The movie chooses to linger too long over his traditional close-ups after he’s dragged on-screen as a torture victim. He’s dirty, bloodied, his hands are bound. His bearded face is swollen, his eyes blackened. Power has allowed himself to be made up to look awful, almost as a punishment for his beauty.

  Power’s frustration is obvious in his postwar films such as Prince of Foxes. Years have gone by, and he’s still wearing tights and curly hair.

  Diplomatic Courier is a postwar spy movie, shot on location in the bombed-out cities of Europe. Power dashes around in a trench coat, but his character is not much more than a pawn. Although in the end he takes action to save his leading lady (Hildegarde Neff), his presence is mostly passive. He is captured, bound, tortured, and laid out naked on a table. A modern story, Diplomatic Courier might have been a chance to create a more mature, postwar Power, but it doesn’t happen. He’s been a movie star for nearly sixteen years, and Hollywood is still taking his shirt off and torturing him for audience pleasure.

  Knowing he wasn’t being given acting challenges, Power became fully dis- illusioned with his status at 20th Century–Fox. After the release of his two 1952 features (in addition to Diplomatic Courier, he made Pony Soldier), Power boldly terminated his Fox contract.* He later summed up his years at the studio by saying, “I’ve enjoyed monetary advantages, true, but all my subsequent contracts and adjustments were largely based on the original 1936 contract I made. I simply had to close my eyes and plunge forward … Fox did a lot for me, and I like to think the feeling is mutual. Let’s face it, though. I’ve done an awful lot of stuff that’s a monument to public patience.” Behind the scenes, off the record, he spoke bitterly of how he had been used and how his years of loyal service had meant nothing to the studio. And the studio was pretty cranky, too. They felt they had made him a star and now he’d quit them. Their 1936 investment was no longer going to pay dividends.