Will Tyrone Power’s Last Prayer Be Answered?

Steel clattered against steel as the actors lunged, shouting at each other, their swords and shields reflecting the hot, late afternoon sun of Spain. Then the director yelled, “Okay, take five.” The duelling scene of “Solomon and Sheba” hung in mid-air for a shimmering moment and then relaxed.

Tyrone Power brushed his arm across his forehead to push back the hair, wiping away the perspiration that stood out in beads on his forehead. He searched the crowd of people standing along the edge of the scene, and suddenly smiling, he spotted his young wife Deborah. Then he grinned, waved and began to walk over.

He didn’t look like a man who knew his heart was bad. He looked tired, yes. But he had a right to be tired. The rehearsals for the duelling scene were strenuous and there was more to go. His makeup was streaked with perspiration and his voice was a little breathless, but the words were excited, vital, young. “I suppose you know what’s happening to us . . .” he said, putting his arm around his wife.

“Ty, you tell everyone,” Deborah laughed. “How could she possibly help knowing about it?”

“We’re going to have a baby,” Ty persisted. “Debbie and I are going to have a son.

“It’s not that we’re tired of girls,” Ty smiled. “I could have a dozen girls, and I hope we do.” Then, very seriously, “But there has to be a boy, too. At least one. There’s got to be another Tyrone. You know, I’m the seventh Tyrone Power, actor. There’s always been one in my family and it’s like a trust, an unbroken line for seven generations, that one boy will be named Tyrone and that he’ll act. You’d be amazed at how much of my life is wrapped up in that idea. I’m the seventh. And now, at last, there’s going to be an eighth.”

Two days later, at the age of forty-four, Tyrone Power was dead.

The morning of that terrible day, Ty had kissed her softly as he left the hotel for the Madrid sound stage. Through half-closed eyes she had watched him go, smiling a little, as he tip-toed out. “Prospective mothers need their sleep,” he had said the night before. “Don’t get up to see me off. I’ll be very quiet . . .” But of course she had awakened anyway, and had pretended not to, even when he kissed her, even when he turned at the door to look back at her and she had seen him smile again.

And then Ted Richmond came to her hotel room and told her that that smiling man, so alive and healthy, was dead. She had fought against belief and, to make it real to her, they told her the rest. How Ty had been in the middle of a duel with George Sanders— “You know, Debbie, the one where he was supposed to fall to the floor and writhe around . . .”

Yes, she knew.

“Well, all of a sudden, he waved his hand to cut the cameras and started to walk off the set. He looked very pale . . .”

They thought he was having another attack of dysentery; he had had one only a few days before. Or maybe a chill—it was a joke on the set about Ty, who always wore wool socks, summer and winter, having to play the entire movie barefoot on the cold concrete floor. Ray Sebastian, his makeup man and friend for twenty years, started towards him.

“I’m going back to my dressing room,” Ty had called out.

Debbie listened. It was like a story, like a film plot. It was very interesting, but it had no connection with her, or her husband or her life.

“I don’t know now at what point Ty left his trailer but he did,” Gina Lollobrigida told her, “he must have been feeling better, because he came over to my little trailer to talk with me . . . and he was just like usual, just like usual . . . we talked, then he said he had to get back to work. He laughed and said, ‘Life goes on, and went back to his room. So a while later, we went over to see him, Martha and me, and he was standing in the middle of the floor with his hand on the breastplate he wore for the movie, and he . . . there was such a strange expression on his face. . . .”

Martha Labar, Gina’s dialogue coach, picked up the thread. “I never saw such a look. A sort of mixture of surprise and pain—but with such depth to the surprise. I knew. I don’t think he understood, but I did. I prayed without even thinking, ‘Holy Mother, help this man.’ I got Gina out and then I started back in to him, but just then Ray got there, with Ted Richmond right beside him . . .”

When they opened the door and walked in, Ty was leaning helplessly against a wall. His face was contorted Before Ray’s frightened eyes, he began to choke, to gasp for breath. With shaking fingers, Ray loosened the breastplate. “Ty—?”

Ty shook his head. He retched. Ted ran over, and he clung to him. Then his face began to lose its ashen shade, to redden in splotches. He retched again. “Ted,” he said. “Ted—what—?”

“Get a car!” Ted Richmond shouted ou the door. “Hurry!”

They hurried. They half carried Ty into the auto. Ted slid behind the wheel, if pressed his foot to the gas, turned toward the nearest hospital. But on the seat ary side him, Tyrone Power slumped, unconscious—and died.

And because Debbie Ann Power had to believe it and couldn’t, they told it to her over and over again, until Gina had to leave the room weeping, “It’s terrible, terrible . . .”, until Ted’s wife arrived to help Debbie to bed, until a doctor came to give her sedatives and troubled sleep. Until at last she woke up with belief in her eyes and said, “I want to see him, Ted. Take me to him, please . . .”

So they took her to Torrejon Air Base ten miles away because Ty’s body was there now, in respect for his wartime service as a Marine pilot—and there she saw him, and knew it was true.

After that, there was a blur. A blur in which she moved about, going where people told her to, signing the papers they put before her, nodding to the arrangements for the flight home, the funeral in Hollywood.

She had been married for six months, and it was over.

She had gone to Europe with her husband, and now she was bringing him home.

And they told her to think of something else.

“I can’t,” she said.

“I don’t mean you shouldn’t think of him,” the stewardess said. “I only mean—remember the good things. Remember the beginnings, not the ends. You must have had such wonderful times . . .”

“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t . . .”

Later in Hollywood, her friends had said the same things. “Try to remember the good things. Remember him alive . . .”

“My son won’t have any memories at all . . .” she answered them.

And with an odd look on her face, she had walked out of the room. Behind her, her friends looked at each other.

“Doesn’t she ever consider that the baby might be a girl?”

“Before Tyrone died, she did. But now—”

“Now it has to be a boy. I don’t know why, but it has to be a boy . . .”

But Debbie Ann Power knew why. Knew it, and clung to it. It was that knowledge, that dream, that began from that moment to bring her back to life. It was that that gave her the strength to live. It was that that got her through the funeral, enabled her to sit during the services beside the coffin, touching Ty’s hand with her fingers, praying—and not breaking down.

Because suddenly she had work to do during the six months ahead. Work that left her no time for other thoughts. Almost no time for sorrow.

“I think,” someone said, “that she’s building a world for her son.”

It was absolutely true.

Her own words: “My son will have no memories . . .” had stayed with her. They echoed over and over in her mind. And Ty would have hated them.

He had such strong memories himself. He believed in a past. In linking yourself with a tradition, becoming part of it. He believed in his own past—in the good things, say, that had kept him friendly with his first wife, Annabella, had made him bring Debbie for a lunch with her in Paris. And she had been glad to go, for Annabella was part of Ty’s past and therefore precious. He believed in remembering his father and his grandfather, had loved to tell stories of them. One of his dearest possessions was a recording of his grandfather’s voice—one of the first records ever made—reading “Hamlet.”

He believed in the past the way he believed in the future. And to Ty Power—his future was his son.

So for a while it seemed to Debbie that even greater than her own tragedy was the tragedy of their son—who would have no memories. She had carried that grief with her across the ocean, unspoken, the worst of all. It had been hard for her to say it out loud.

But she took a great step when she did.

For in that moment, she knew what she should have known all along.

She could give her son his past.

It was in her power to do it. “Remember the good things,” the stewardess had said, and she had wept, “I can’t.” For herself, perhaps not—perhaps they hurt too much. But for the sake of her son, for the sake of her husband, she could do it very well indeed.

So through the long months of waiting, Debbie Minardos Power collected in her mind the stories she would tell her boy. The stories that would make him know his father, feel the link with the Power men who had been named Tyrone and had grown up to act on the stages of the world. The stories that would re-create the man who would have loved him so much, the life he had lived . . .

Stories like the one of how they met, his mother and his father . . .

“You see, I had been married once before and your father had been married twice. Now, his second wife—her name was Linda—had a sister, who had a husband who was a friend of mine. Well, I guess this friend knew that your Daddy and I were both lonely so one day he asked your father if he could bring a friend to lunch with him. And your father said yes. So he brought me. And you know what was the first thing your father ever said to me in the world? He said, ‘Good grief, you look just like me!’ Later on, when we would go out on dates together, people thought we were related to each other. But I didn’t think about that then. All I thought about was, ‘That’s the man I’m going to love. And he—he was thinking about someone else. You know who? He was thinking about you. Yes, you. That very day, when we hardly knew each other, he started telling me how much he wanted you, how he wanted a son who looked like him and carried his name, and would be a great actor. And who would sail on the boat he wanted to get and go all over the world with him. Even if he did die before you were born, you had just as much love as some children get in a whole life. Oh yes, your father loved you very much indeed . . .”

She could give him that, for a memory.

And more—so much more. Stories of their one summer together—for that was all they had had, really—six months of marriage, a spring, a summer, a little bit of fall. But six wonderful, wonderful months. They had been married quietly in Memphis with just a few friends. Debbie’s mother gave her in marriage and her stepfather was Ty’s best man. They had honeymooned in Dallas and she had been so proud—her face was always one perpetual blush at the way Ty talked about her to others. With awe in his voice he would say, “She’s unbelievable. She doesn’t want to be an actress. She doesn’t care about expensive clothes and jewels. You know what she cares about? Me! My success, my welfare. Isn’t that amazing? She’s—impossible.” So she would blush. Because when he told her she was beautiful or brilliant she could laugh and deny it—but it was no use denying the other. Ty was all she cared about.

And it was a wonderful six months. Ty took some time off for the first time in years. They bought the boat he wanted, a 45-footer with sails and a motor and an automatic pilot—all the latest gadgets. They docked it at Newport and every weekend they’d get there as fast as possible. They spent a lot of time with Natalie Wood and Bob Wagner, and Claire Trevor and her husband—with everyone who had a boat. Ray was with them of course, and Martin Steckler and Bill Gallagher, two other good friends who worked for Ty. One day Ty went out with Nat and Bob on their boat and around noon a friend called by to pick Debbie up in a motor boat and take her out to join them. They took off from the dock, racing through the waves, and suddenly Debbie heard her own voice shouting above the motor, “If you don’t slow down I’m going to have my baby right here!” And, just as suddenly, she knew it was true, for sure. She began to picture how Ty would react—would he laugh, kiss her, faint, call her folks—what?

She never dreamed she would see tears in his eyes.

That too would make a good memory.

Six months they had lived together. Six months of laughing and loving. Not long, compared to the lifetime most people had. But long enough, if it had to be.

Through the long grey days while she waited alone for her baby to be born, Debbie Ann Power went over those six months time and time again, sorting her memories, weaving them into a story.

A story beautiful enough to erase the nightmares from her mind—to make her forget, almost, the other stories of pain and death. A story long enough to keep her son-to-be from being born into a void, into a featureless past.

A story that would make of him the Tyrone Power IV his father had dreamed of for so long.

Because, of course he would be a boy.

If—by any chance—the baby were a girl, she would be loved. Loved by Debbie with all her heart, the way Tyrone would have loved her, the way he did love his two daughters. And she would mean that Ty’s death was meant to be the end of the Powers, that it was God’s will that the dream should not come true, the line should be no more.

But waiting for her baby, Debbie Power does not believe that that can be. Counting over her memories, she believes they are for more than one child—for the generations of babies still to be born with the Power name, the Power tradition, the Power ties to the past.

The ties she is fashioning herself out of memory and courage, for the son . . . the son she is praying to have . . . the son Tyrone Power prayed to have.

THE END

—BY CHAROLOTTE DINTER

 

It is a quote. PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 1959