Tyrone Power VII: Popularity

Tyrone Power, wife Deborah Ann Minardos on the set of Solomon and Sheba. Power suffered a fatal heart attack during filming.

Tyrone Power VI: Lana Turner, Sonja Henie, Janet Gaynor

Why do you think that Tyrone Power isn't as well-remembered today as, say, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Gregory Peck, and several other top stars of the studio era?

I love this question because it's such bunk. That's nothing against you — I understand why it was asked, but it's not true. If you go out on the street and ask any twenty-something about any of these people, they'll tell you they don't know who any of them are. I have a friend who is a voice teacher who just recently is getting students who don't know who Barbra Streisand is.

Movie fans know who Tyrone Power is just as much as they know who Clark Gable is. If people are interested, they know. If you're not a movie fan, you probably don't know either one. Go ask a teenager. Ask a twenty-five-year-old — a non-movie buff.

If you're new to films, you won't know him because chances are you are watching Turner Classic Movies, which doesn't show Power's films. They don't own Fox movies. I think they have shown about six, and that's after unbelievable pressure was put on them. However, how unknown can a man be whose photos at auction recently fetched $14,000 — more than Gable, Garbo, or anyone — and who was the "star" of a Bonham and Butterfield auction, where a painting of him estimated for $500 went for $39,500? Somebody knows him somewhere.

There is still a memorial for him yearly, well attended 51 years later; and last year, there was a tribute at the Egyptian Theater on the 50th anniversary of his death that was packed for three nights. If he weren't known, the Tyrone Power box set released in 2007 wouldn't have sold through the roof and sent a panicked Fox into releasing 10 more films as a box set the next year, totally unplanned.

And Power is still in the news, just as he was during his life, during the '60s, and most especially during the big classic film revival of the '70s when there were magazines and books flooding the market. He was always in them.

He's most recently been mentioned in the Clint Eastwood film, Flags of Our Fathers, on The Simpsons, Mad Men, and the British soap Crossroads. The young actor Zac Efron has been said to look like him, and in fact, I have a photo of Efron that I mistook for Power; I couldn't figure out what film it was from. There's also a current play called Filthy Rich where the main character is named "Tyrone Power." When asked where he got the name, the character says, "My mother was a romantic." And of course there's the Batman connection. The night Bruce Wayne's parents were killed, they had just seen The Mark of Zorro.

A friend of mine recently went to the Polo Lounge wearing a baseball cap with Power's picture on it and was stopped by Russell Crowe, who said that Power was one of his favorite actors, and he pulled Vince Vaughan over, and Vince Vaughan said Power was his favorite Zorro. George Clooney told Romina Power that he modeled his whole career after Power's.

Do an eBay search of sold Tyrone Power items. I can't get near them anymore.

What you're talking about is the general public who might know Gone with the Wind, for instance, and that is the chink in the Power armor — the movies. He did not make a gigantic iconic film like GWTW or Casablanca, and that crowd will not know him.

He certainly did make classics — The Mark of Zorro, Blood and Sand, Witness for the Prosecution, which are niche classics, and Nightmare Alley has become a cult classic, though they're not in the Casablanca category. Nearly all of his films were tremendously popular — Jesse James (right) was #4 in 1939 — they garnered several hundred million dollars at a time when movies cost a nickel, a dime, a quarter; I think when he died the average price of a film ticket in the US was $.58. That's a huge number of people. Huge.

[Photo: Tyrone Power on the Jesse James set.]