The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  During Power’s last months under contract, Fox released a newsreel with Tyrone Power, the movie star, on location in Europe while making Foxes. Power is presented to Europe as an object to be enjoyed. He is seen diving into a swimming pool outside a villa and swimming the full length while a group of well-dressed Europeans with drinks in their hands stand alongside and watch him. Later, he’s at a cocktail party, sitting on a spindly couch, surrounded by well-coiffed women who are eyeing him as if he were something on their dessert plates. It’s La Dolce Vita time. He also demonstrates a CinemaScope camera to a small knot of Spanish businessmen, all of whom are concentrating only on looking at him. (Everyone is clearly faking it to promote the product.) Power seems lost, unclear about what to do with himself, understanding only that he must be photographed, he must be charming, and he must look beautiful. He rises to the challenge. He flashes a megawatt grin, but his eyes are not smiling. “The secret of charm is bullshit,” he told a friend.

  Power didn’t fare much better in the films he made after he left Fox. Only The Long Gray Line and The Sun Also Rises afforded him an opportunity to stretch himself.† The first cast him in a John Ford movie based on the life of Marty Maher, an Irish immigrant who began working at West Point as a waiter and ended up as assistant athletic director. Power was magnificent in a story about an ordinary man whose life added up to something special. He aged from a feisty young scrapper to a mellowed-out old man, and the true performance range that Hollywood had never allowed to blossom in Power was on full display. Despite its sentimentality, The Long Gray Line succeeds because of Power, who downplays his looks and creates a real human being. The Sun Also Rises was an all-star adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel, with Power in the role of Jake Barnes. Others included Ava Gardner (at the top of her box office appeal) as Lady Brett Ashley, and Errol Flynn, Mel Ferrer, Gregory Ratoff, Juliette Greco, Eddie Albert, and Robert Evans. Power did his best to portray the dignified anguish of the impotent Barnes, but perhaps the saddest comment, an epitaph for his whole career, was written in a review of the movie in The Nation. Said critic Robert Hatch, “It would never have occurred to me that Jake Barnes looked like Tyrone Power.”

  Tyrone Power’s last great role was in Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution, in which his capabilities were given a chance.

  Perhaps the best performance Tyrone Power ever gave was in Billy Wilder’s 1957 Witness for the Prosecution, the one movie Power made in his postwar freelance period that really stands out today. In Witness, Power plays the actor’s worst nightmare: a person on trial. It’s a thankless role that requires mostly sitting and reacting while the district attorney, the defense lawyer, a series of colorful witnesses, even the judge, jury, and trial audience get to ham it up all over the place. Power has only about 30 percent of the movie in which to shine as the slightly debauched but gracefully aging Leonard Vole, who is accused of murdering a rich old widow he picked up after charming her into changing her will for him. Power, at age forty-three, still looks very good. There’s a crow’s foot or two, and even a slight thickening of the face, but he’s still beautiful. This role is about his looks, his charm, his ability to seduce. This time, his charm is a bit too much charm. His richly sexy voice is maybe a bit too rich and sexy. Where once he justified his sex appeal by playing a spoiled young brat, or a wayward youth, he now uses it to play a rotting seducer well on his way to full decay as a wicked old roué.

  The main challenge he faces is playing the role of a man who is playing a role. Slyly, the movie has him watch his old dame try on hats (“voting” for his favorite from outside a hat shop window) and then follow her into a movie theatre for an afternoon matinee. The two people with nothing to do during the day but go to the movies “re-meet” when he complains about her hat—the very hat he endorsed—which is blocking his view of the screen. (And what’s on the screen? It’s Jesse James.)

  Because the film contains a surprise ending and deliberately misleads its audience about his character, Power has to strike just the right note, carefully balancing his performance between charm and rot. Audiences are allowed to see that he’s adorable, but also feckless, lazy, and jobless. (“I’m sort of an inventor,” he tells Charles Laughton, by way of explaining what he does with himself. “If I could just put my egg beater across …”) After the trial is under way, Power has one grand moment in the witness box. Otherwise, he’s reduced to reacting in medium close-up, but his reactions are very important to the story. He has to be a vessel through which the audience can learn how the trial is going; he evaluates its progress for them as he struggles to understand the testimony. In other words, he objectively evaluates, yet at the same time, has to be emotional, to play his part of a man on trial for his life. He gets to show a controlled but triumphant relief when a damning witness is discredited. He has to show deep shock when his wife (a superb Marlene Dietrich) appears as a witness for the prosecution. And he has to show pain when she scornfully says she never really loved him. Yet he has to play these emotions very carefully, because they are false. Once he wins the trial, he plays the young, brash, overly confident Tyrone Power again. And, of course, since audiences know that person so well, he closes by being exactly who and what they always thought he was—Tyrone Power.

  A movie like Witness shows how the careful casting of an actor whose meaning is “male sex object” can pay off. It was possible for someone like Power to be both used as the star presence he represented and allowed to give a serious performance. Stars are story units and must be used as such. Casting must take their accepted “definitions” into account, working either with them or against them. And in a movie in which a trial will take place, setting three characters in an opposition that will not be clarified until the end, the stars need to be of equal weight. Witness has its three: Dietrich, Laughton, and Power. (They are supported by a very strong cast of character players: Elsa Lanchester, Henry Daniell, John Williams, and others.) Since the story is about a struggle of three equal egos, three big names were required. Power’s role is the least of the three (although key). Had it been played by someone who wasn’t a male movie star, the audience would have known instinctively that Vole probably did it. At the very least, they would not have been willing to give him sympathy or the benefit of the doubt. The pivot point of the trial, the barrister played by Laughton, also has to be strong enough to anchor the middle between Power and Dietrich. Her role as the clever minx who delivers all the real surprises has to be a star—even an icon, which she is—because the audience has to buy the fact that she could have called the shots all the way without Laughton knowing. With a lesser name in any of the three main roles, the audience would have felt cheated, or might have caught on. In the end, when they find out Dietrich was the one in control, it is her legendary status that allows them to buy in. “Of course, she fooled us! Of course, she fooled Laughton. She’s Marlene Dietrich.” (If ever there was a star who could trump any ace, it was Dietrich.) Audiences cannot reach the end of a plot like Witness and say, “Well, Veda Ann Borg fooled us.” Star power is star power. It overrules acting every time.

  Too few movie roles like Leonard Vole had ever been available to Tyrone Power. Realizing that he wasn’t growing even after he left Fox, he began to run away from movies as often as he possibly could. During his final decade, he increasingly tried to break out of his movie star jail by working in theatre. His heritage was the stage, and prior to Hollywood he had acted in such productions as Romeo and Juliet, starring Katharine Cornell as Juliet, with Maurice Evans as Romeo, Ralph Richardson as Mercutio, and Florence Reed as the nurse. (Power had played Benvolio.) He also appeared in Cornell’s production of Saint Joan in 1936, in the role of Bertrand. He did two weeks playing the title role of Liliom at the Country Playhouse in Westport in 1941, and took over the London production of Mister Roberts in 1950 in the title role. When Charles Laughton staged John Brown’s Body in 1953, Power appeared with a distinguished cast that included Judith Anderson and Raymond Massey, and
he reunited with Cornell for The Dark Is Light Enough in 1954–55, playing the villainous role of Richard Gettner. There were also appearances in A Quiet Place (a play by Julian Claman) in 1955, in The Devil’s Disciple in London in 1956, and Back to Methuselah for the Theatre Guild in New York in 1958.

  But despite his theatre work, Tyrone Power postwar is still the story of a male movie star, a man the system thought too beautiful to be anything else. No movie role made audiences want to see him as anything but the handsome guy who dueled, or the handsome guy who wooed, or the handsome guy who was no better than he should be until he shaped up. Perhaps the story of what happened to his career—and why he was disappointed by it—is best summed up by looking at two movies he made, one in 1937 when the machine was building him and one when he returned from the war in 1948 when the machine refused to allow him to change. The first movie shows him being developed and the second sadly shows what he was developed into.

  Love Is News (1937) and That Wonderful Urge (1948) were both made for 20th Century–Fox. The latter was a remake of the former. In the original, Power co-starred with the luminous Loretta Young, one of his best leading ladies, with his Fox peer Don Ameche as a desk-banging 1930s-type newspaper editor, and George Sanders as his romantic rival. In the remake his co-star was another of Fox’s particularly beautiful females, Gene Tierney, and the Ameche role, once important to the movie’s comedy, was reduced to a small part played by a non-name, Lloyd Gough. The Count Andre role that Sanders played was reduced in size also, upsetting the balance of the romantic triangle. The actor who plays it (Reginald Gardiner) provides no serious threat to Power.

  The story these movies tell is slight. Both are escapist fare made for reasonably low budgets and built around star names. In the first version, Power plays a smart-assed and fairly ruthless reporter from a newspaper that covers society babes as if they were more important than Madame Curie. Power is slim, lushly beautiful, fast talking, and full of the joyous energy of his new success. His con man character breezes through the movie, all boldness and irresponsibility, with Power exhibiting (and having) all the self-confidence a guy like that would need to pull off the crazy deals he thinks up. It is a fortuitous meshing of Power on his way up with a character who thinks he can do anything and get away with it. The film is fun. Power looks as if stardom happened to him by accident and without his participation. He seems to understand what the deal will be and is comfortable with it. He’s living in a filmed world in which a character like his—if he looked like Tyrone Power—would feel he could get away with anything. It’s a world in which reporters hang out in a bar and play checkers on a black-and-white tiled floor with full shot glasses and beer mugs, and drinking what they capture.

  Loretta Young plays a “tin can countess” and George Sanders is perfect as the smarmy European count who is trying to marry her for her money. The plot is echt-1930s in the screwball format. Back then, the material was still fresh and funny, and the stars, clothes, and settings provided delight for viewers for whom Hollywood represented the ultimate in everything desirable. Furthermore, satirizing the upper classes for the masses, and poking fun at publicity hounds and celebrities was not just innocent fun. It also somehow seemed important, good stuff for a movie to be about.

  By the time Fox tried to get the script on its feet again in the late 1940s, there was no fun left, and certainly no relevance or freshness. (The plot had also been revamped and used in a Betty Grable vehicle called Sweet Rosie O’Grady in 1943. It was given a gay-nineties period setting, and Grable played a famous star who is outed as a former Police Gazette cover girl and beer hall singer.) Most of the supporting roles have been diluted or removed, and the titled sponger trying to marry Tierney (Gardner) has been toned down, defanged. On the other hand, the pain Power inflicts on the leading lady is intensified.

  Power plays with a consummate professionalism but has no energy. He and Tierney are both professionals, and they do their job. It’s just that there isn’t much to do and none of it means anything. They go through their paces as if they know it isn’t really funny and they no longer even believe in their own careers. Both actors worked hard to succeed, and This Wonderful Urge is what they ended up with. It’s not enough, and it shows. Furthermore, the postwar audience, operating on credit to make down payments on tract houses, doesn’t need to envy the rich and poke fun at them quite as much as it did. This type of material has lost its playfulness and its purpose, gone with the winds of war. It would be Power’s last light comedy role.

  Seeing Tyrone Power walk through That Wonderful Urge, however professionally, nails down the source of his disappointment. Having designed him as the dream lover of the 1930s world of playboys, musicians, and adventurers, what does a studio do with a man like Power when he’s a decade older and a world war wiser? There are only two choices: drop him and/or phase him out, or revamp him for the new era. Fox did neither. After the war, they chose to continue exploiting him as if it were still the 1930s, casting him in material beneath his talent. They had developed him to be a beautiful male movie star, and that’s what they wanted him to be: their product, their investment. How he felt about it wasn’t the issue for the studio.

  Power was never the same after the war, but his career unfortunately was the same. Despite his unhappiness, he let it happen. (He assumed the role of the impotent Jake Barnes just a little too easily.) He married a second time, in 1948, to Linda Christian, and had two children. Hildegarde Neff, the German actress, described what it was like to visit the Powers. “Tyrone and Linda stood beside their Roman-style swimming pool, the fairest of the fair gathering. They represented the Hollywood of the rich, famous, and lavishly frivolous, and their guests could have been selected from the latest film calendar.” Power had gone back to living the same life he had lived in the late 1930s with Annabella. After he divorced Christian, he married a third time, to Debbie Minardos, in May 1958. Although he kept on with his career, he seemed just to be going through the motions. He and Minardos were expecting a child* when he began filming yet another costume movie in which he would look pretty, wear costumes, and use a sword effectively. It was to be called Solomon and Sheba, and the great King Vidor would direct. Power’s fellow cast members would be the beautiful Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, and as the villain, his old co-star George Sanders. Power was to be King Solomon. On November 15, 1958, Power and Sanders were filming a dueling scene when Power suddenly collapsed. Shortly after being taken to the hospital, he died. He was only forty-four.† It was a sad and unexpectedly early ending to a career that had at its center a man who could have been a legend. Former leading lady Alice Faye commented, “Ty was the victim of the Hollywood system that grinds actors and actresses down, makes them give their blood and their souls to making movies.”

  Tyrone Power shortly before his death at the age of forty-four.

  The saddest thing about Tyrone Power’s final years is that he himself could only learn what he should have understood from the beginning: Once the machine made him a movie star, he could never be anything but a machine-made movie star. He was born to be an actor, but he had signed on with a system that was driven by money and the need to make it. So it took the easy way to sell him. Had he not been so beautiful, he might have been given more challenging parts, but Hollywood knew people would pay money to see Tyrone Power without his shirt on, whether he was acting or not. For someone without talent, it was the perfect job. For Tyrone Power, who actually could act, it had to have been some kind of hell.

  * A great deal has been made of how women stars were turned into objects of desire or reduced to mere sex objects for “the male gaze.” Not much has been said about how men underwent the same treatment. When the young and gorgeous Henry Fonda enters the story in The Farmer Takes a Wife (1935), he is framed, lit, and photographed the same as if he were the new girl at the studio. He is presented as an object to be desired. (Fonda was being groomed for future profit in his first film, playing opposite an established star, Janet
Gaynor.)

  * Zanuck was aware of the unique quality to Power’s voice. In a memo to Jean Renoir, who was preparing to direct a movie to be called Swamp Water in 1941, Zanuck wrote “When you learn more about [Power’s] work, you will realize he has a voice which would never be adaptable to this locale. His voice is a quality voice and every effort we have made in the past to adapt it to backwoods requirements has completely failed.” (Letter dated May 26, 1941.)

  * In Old Chicago was technically a January 1938 release, but was made in 1937. It was allowed to become “a 1937 feature” in a slightly rule-bending effort by which Fox was able to put character actress Alice Brady up for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. She played Power’s mother, the famous Mrs. O’Leary whose cow kicked over the lantern that started the Chicago fire. She won. In Old Chicago was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Writing, Original Story, Best Score, Best Sound Recording, and Best Assistant Director, the last year that category was included in the annual show.

  * Power would star opposite such beauties as Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable, Maureen O’Hara, Susan Hayward, Anne Baxter, Marlene Dietrich, Ava Gardner, Dorothy Lamour, Myrna Loy, Joan Fontaine, and Norma Shearer. In most cases, however beautiful and talented his co-star was, the ladies themselves always remarked on how often they would be queried about him by people afterward. “All my life,” Alice Faye said in the late 1970s, “I was asked what it was like to kiss Tyrone Power.”