The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  Audiences could enjoy any of Power’s first movies. They were handsomely decorated, well cast in supporting roles, and they put Power alongside a beautiful woman. What was not to like? Yet there was something slightly negative about Power’s presence. Even at the beginning of his career, Power could suggest the larcenous qualities a very handsome young man might develop. In Ladies in Love, he romances Young but ditches her without a guilty conscience. In Love Is News, he’s a ruthless reporter, and in Cafe Metropole, a gambler who has squandered all his inheritance. In Second Honeymoon he toys with his ex-wife, spoiling her new marriage without a shred of guilt. What Power could do—and his studio noted it—was bring out of himself the qualities of a spoiled brat. It was totally believable that a man who looked like Power could be a spoiled brat, of course, even a cad. It’s the same quality that the young Elizabeth Taylor, to some effect a female look-alike for Power, would present on screen a decade later. Audiences could easily believe that such gorgeous creatures would have learned early in life that they really weren’t going to have to work hard to get their way.

  For Power’s final movie of 1937, Fox went all out. The response to everything he had done that year had been superb, and Power was now the studio’s male star with the most unlimited potential. He was young, gorgeous, popular, and best of all, genuinely talented, with a strong understanding of professional discipline. Fox felt its investment was secure, so Darryl F. Zanuck featured Power in three costume movies replete with decorative settings and exciting historical contexts. These would give the public a Power whom Fox knew they had already liked, and give Fox a chance at blockbuster returns. Power’s last 1937 movie was scheduled to be In Old Chicago, set during the Chicago fire of 1871. Following that, he would make 1938’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band (which would start in 1911 and move forward to modern times) and Suez, about the building of the canal.

  For In Old Chicago, Zanuck and Fox would blow the budget on a twenty-minute climax in which “old Chicago” would, indeed, burn down. (The fire cost $150,000 to stage.) They would put the popular singer Alice Faye in the female lead, making the movie a sort of musical historical epic. They would cast their other popular dark-haired leading man, Don Ameche, himself an up-and-coming name, as a foil to Power. (Ameche and Power were to play brothers.) They would surround everyone with a terrific supporting cast (Andy Devine, Alice Brady, Phyllis Brooks, Brian Donlevy, and others). Best of all, they would make the sexy, amazingly beautiful Tyrone Power into a complete bad guy, picking up on the menace and danger that lurked beneath his elegant appearance. Power’s character gambled, owned a saloon, wooed Faye, and became a crooked politician who used his wife as a decoy to hide his cheap tricks. This was the real beginning of making Power into something more than a pretty boy, run-of-the-mill junior heartthrob, of shading his general category of “male sex symbol” into a more specific type. (As Variety succinctly put it, “Casting of Power as a heavy is contrary to what most of his fans might expect.”)

  His next movie, one of his most successful of the period, was Alexander’s Ragtime Band, co-starring him again with Don Ameche and Alice Faye in an attempt to repeat the success of In Old Chicago. The movie would be Power’s first musical, and it was inevitable that Fox, a studio that developed beautiful blond female stars for the genre, would think of him as the perfect dark-haired male co-star even though he neither sang nor danced.* Power plays a wealthy Nob Hill snob who becomes the leader of a jazz band and behaves selfishly, losing the love of his life (Alice Faye) until he learns his lesson. Power’s credibility as someone who was too ambitious, too spoiled, too selfish, was put to full use, even though the plot has him shape up in the end. The movie incorporated a passel of Irving Berlin tunes and threw in Ethel Merman (slim and perky and singing her lungs out), Jack Haley, John Carradine, Jean Hersholt, and Helen Westley. The result was magical, and the film still holds up today as one of the liveliest musicals of the period. It received Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Score, Best Song (“Now It Can Be Told”), Best Art/Set Decoration, and Best Film Editing. (Only music director Alfred Newman won.) What fans loved most in Ragtime was the love scene in which Faye sings “Now It Can Be Told” while Power conducts his band. She looks longingly at him, singing directly to him in close-up. The movie cuts back and forth from Faye to Power to show him slowly responding and smoldering back at her. (These cuts were said to bring out squeals of delight from females in the audience.) Across the performance of a musical number, Faye and Power conducted a hot exchange without touching each other. The box office soared.

  While Fox counted its money and congratulated itself on putting Power under contract, negotiations were under way with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to loan him out for the only time in his career at Fox. The movie was a fourth costume film, the sumptuous historical drama Marie Antoinette (1938), a starring vehicle for the First Lady of MGM, Norma Shearer, who was going to be coiffed and gowned and jeweled to a fare-thee-well. Shearer, the wife of MGM’s head of production, Irving Thalberg, had not been in a movie for the nearly two years that followed his death. Marie Antoinette had been in the planning stages before Thalberg died, and huge sums had already been expended to make the movie the lavish tribute to Shearer that Thalberg had wanted it to be. Although he was said to regret it later, Zanuck agreed to loan Power out to play the role of Count Axel de Fersen, the man alleged to have been the queen’s Swedish lover.

  Tyrone Power is billed over the title, to the right of Shearer’s name. To have his name alongside hers, and over the title, meant that other powerful figures in Hollywood were endorsing Power’s stardom. Power’s loan-out to MGM indicated that the entire business saw him as having long-range potential, real drawing power, and the acting chops to guarantee him decades of roles. Since Power was not under contract to MGM, however, they used him to support their star. Power’s presence in Marie Antoinette represents an aspect of stardom seldom discussed: As in Ladies in Love, Power is here to provide development of the leading lady’s character. In movie terms, that a man this good-looking would love Marie Antoinette means she isn’t a bad person. She’s okay if she deserves Tyrone Power, since he represents the physical embodiment of what Shearer is entitled to as star, queen, and character. (There would be no bad smell clinging to Tyrone Power when he was supporting Norma Shearer in an MGM movie!)

  The story is well under way before Power first appears, seen walking along a Paris street at night, accompanied by a minor player. Suddenly, from a balcony above a lavish residence, a beautiful woman appears. She is decked out in a powdered white wig, with diamond stars in her hair, a fan in her hand, and ruffles at her wrists. “Are you a Russian?” she calls. (She is in danger of forfeiting her diamond necklace—stones the size of hen’s eggs—unless she can produce a Russian for the game she’s playing.) Power inquires as to whether a Swede will do. He then enters the house and the domain of the soon-to-be queen of France. Shearer swirls down a curving staircase to greet him, her skirts wider than she is tall. He enters, gives his hat and coat to a flunky, and comes up the stairs toward her. They meet in profile halfway up, her star presence to what, it is suddenly clear, is his star presence. As Shearer greets him and really looks at him, she makes a small, startled movement backward and then says, “Oh! Why, you’re perfect!” And indeed he is. Her remark is followed by a medium close-up of a calmly smiling Tyrone Power, a male actor absolutely ready for the A list.

  Power returned to Fox to make Suez (1938), which had been rescheduled because of his loan-out. It would be his last movie with Loretta Young. Again, he was in a costume film, playing a real person, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man who built the Suez Canal. Called by The New Yorker “the most frankly inane of all the historical films” (a real challenge!), Suez featured Power wearing a head of curly black hair, Loretta Young wearing hoopskirts that reached to the edge of the frame, a wind machine blowing up a gigantic sandstorm, and both Disraeli and Louis Napoleon standing around. Despite critical scorn, it made a fortune. For Tyrone Powe
r, it was personally significant. A young French actress named Annabella was cast as a devoted young girl who cannot make de Lesseps forget his lost love, the beautiful Loretta. Offscreen, Power and Annabella began dating, ultimately falling in love and marrying in April 1939.

  The marriage was Power’s first conflict with the star machine and his first disappointment in the studio’s attitude toward him. The Fox publicity department had sold him to his fans as a romantic object. Unmarried. When news of his new bride hit, the studio immediately received a barrage of unfavorable mail. (One fan magazine said, “The producers’ groans could be heard from here to the Stork Club.”) Studio flacks had to go to work to resell Tyrone Power to keep him afloat as a sex object. (It didn’t help much that his new wife did not enjoy publicity, was French, was not particularly charismatic, and looked like a boy.)

  Since there was nothing Fox could do about Power and Annabella, they set about shaping the way the fans should see their union. The fan magazines cooperated with the studio in a rapid retooling blitz on Power’s image. One article said, “There’s an unwritten law, or a general understanding, … that in Hollywood a handsome young romantic actor loses his romantic appeal to his fans when he takes on a ‘little woman.’ It’s all right for tough guys like Jimmy Cagney, Pat O’Brien, and Humphrey Bogart to acquire brides, but for the dreamy boys with the melting eyes—no.” The article is actually a clever piece of manipulation. It suggests that the average, unkind, intolerant, not-too-bright fan might feel that way, but smart, devoted, attractive fans (like the one reading the article) would understand and keep on loving Power and going to his films. The article claims that “a great deal of mail” was arriving from women (“between the ages of 14 to 40”) who are “apologizing for having written [Power] bitter letters after his marriage to Annabella.” By planting such carefully crafted articles, the studio took custody of the problem, told the readers to get over it, and hinted that Power wouldn’t love them anymore if they didn’t. They also collected “testimonies” from his leading ladies that Power was still the “most exciting guy on the screen.” “If the glamour girls who work with him week in and week out, under the most nerve-wracking and provoking conditions, still think he has romantic appeal after marriage, then he must have it, but good.” Linda Darnell, who was working with him in 1939’s Day-Time Wife, went the limit, saying, “I think he gained in romantic appeal when he married Annabella. Before his marriage, he was very brittle and harsh. He was very dashing, and he had great charm, but he was so restless! Now he has great depth, which he never had before.” Since a studio publicist undoubtedly wrote her quote, there’s a hint of how they really felt about the marriage—they were willing to punish Power in the middle of compliment.

  Like most actors in the beginning, Tyrone Power had been happy to be cast, and having been cast, was even happier to assume the lead, and having assumed the lead, was happy to become a movie star—a well-paid movie star, a movie star with an overwhelmingly positive response from the fans. It had all seemed so joyous, so satisfying. Suddenly his marriage to the woman he loved had provoked negative responses from both his studio, the people he thought had his best interests in mind, and from his fans, the people he thought loved him for who he was. He was shocked. Friends marked his marriage as the moment in which Tyrone Power began to think about exactly what it might mean to have become a hot movie star property. Privately he complained bitterly about the studio’s attitude toward his marriage and refused to consider that it might affect his status with fans. Publicly, he began to draw somewhat back into himself but passively accepted his situation.

  After Suez and despite Annabella and his first clash with studio rules, Power’s career continued to roll. So far, his movies had been fairly uniform, and the studio planned to keep it that way. He had made only three kinds of movies: romantic comedies, costume dramas, and musicals, each of which had paired him with a big-name female co-star. For 1939, and possibly in response to fan mail regarding his marriage, Zanuck lined up five movies for Power, a heavy schedule. Two would be lighthearted romantic stories of the sort Power had done well with before—a sort of insurance policy on his career. One of those was Second Fiddle (1938), with Sonja Henie, a musical with Irving Berlin songs, fancy ice-skating “ballets,” and a cute story about a publicity hunt for the right girl to play the lead in an epic literary adaptation. This idea, inspired by the search for Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, was fun, and Power, as the fast-talking publicity chief, was charming. Since he and Henie had conducted a highly publicized love affair during 1936 and 1937, their pairing added spice to the story and helped offset the fans’ sense of Annabella’s permanency. The other comedy was the lackluster Day-Time Wife, Power’s last film of 1939, which used him to boost the career of newcomer Linda Darnell.

  Power’s other three movies, however, were designed to explore shadings to his on-screen type. (Whatever might be said about Power’s career, its limitations, and his being locked into a studio contract, he was given careful handling by Zanuck, who looked for a variety of genres in which to star him.) First, Power was scheduled to appear in a western, a new departure for him, as Jesse James (1939). Then he would return to co-starring with Alice Faye in a musical (Rose of Washington Square), but in an edgy, more challenging role, and finally he would portray an Indian doctor in the prestigious literary adaptation of Louis Bromfield’s celebrated best seller The Rains Came (1939).

  While Jesse James was shooting on location in Pineville, Missouri, in 1938,* Power hit a peak of popularity. The studio was monitoring his rise to fame closely, tracking fan mail, box office returns, reviews, the willingness of the non-studio media outside of Hollywood to promote the star, and any awards and honors earned (which existed for newcomers also). These categories are self-explanatory, but there was also one insider’s tool. In 1931, the business magazine Motion Picture Herald began publishing the results of an annual poll of movie house exhibitors as to who they thought had been the top box office draws that year. These “top ten” lists were unscientific and today are considered highly suspect. Nonetheless, the lists were taken seriously and can still stand as a strong indication of who was popular with moviegoers and exhibitors.*

  While Power was in Missouri, Fox received word that the motion picture exhibitors had voted him 1939’s “King of the Boxoffice.”† (His “Queen” was Jeanette MacDonald.) Much has been made of Clark Gable’s having been elected to the same title for the year 1938, but Power held it for three years in a row. His 1939 title was repeated in 1940 and 1941. Oddly, Gable, not Power, retained the title of king all his life. (Power was a prince, not a king.)

  On the set of Jesse James, Power was clearly deferred to as the major star presence, despite the illustrious lineup of other actors. He plays the title role and is the official star. His supporting cast, in addition to Henry Fonda, includes Randolph Scott and, as the main villain, the stalwart Brian Donlevy, who could also carry a picture as leading man. Power for the first time was not paired with one of Fox’s great beauties or box office queens. His romantic leading lady was a lesser light, Nancy Kelly. Power’s real co-star, a sort of quasi-romantic lead, was Henry Fonda, playing Frank James. The two men are spectacular together, both at ease, both handsome and young, and both more than able to play their roles with full force.

  Fonda and Power are in their prime—not one, but two beautiful leading men, both of whom are more photogenic than Nancy Kelly. Shot in Technicolor and on location outdoors in Missouri, Jesse James was a big box office hit. Power looks great as a train robber—his hat pulled low, a red bandanna across his face, with only his beautiful thick-lashed eyes showing. He is intense and stunning in his first color film. In the romantic scenes, there’s no question about who matters. When Nancy Kelly puts her head on Power’s shoulder or goes to embrace him, it is his face that is seen in profile, not hers, and it is his face that takes the key light. With very few exceptions, in any scene in which he appears, the camera favors Tyrone Power.

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bsp; The basic plot of Jesse James, which has excellent action sequences, is a domestic one. Despite the film’s robberies and political background, the emphasis is on Jesse’s love for his wife, Zee, and his desire to be a good husband and father. On the one hand, he’s an angry, wild outlaw who, Fonda says, is “getting meaner every day.” On the other, he’s also the loving father and husband who finally says no to a return to the outlaw life. Fox was creating an ambiguous presence for Power, one that allowed him to be both bad and good, and that increased his box office appeal accordingly. This ambiguity made him popular with both men and women, as well as giving him a chance to play both a “male” action presence and a “female” romantic one. Fox began to look for roles that, consciously or unconsciously, allowed Power to further develop this ambiguity.