Power embodied romance, glamour, and sophistication, and his name still conjures up all of those qualities. The recent play Filthy Rich has as its main character a detective named Tyrone Power. ("My mother was a romantic," the character says.) Homer Simpson frequently suffers by comparison to Power on The Simpsons; one of the series creators is a huge fan. Women adored him, and those women included lovers Lana Turner, Mai Zetterling, Anita Ekberg, Judy Garland, Sonja Henie, Vogue editor Mary Roblee, and his three wives: the actresses Annabella, Linda Christian, the mother of his daughters, and Debbie Minardos, the mother of the son born after his death, Tyrone Power IV. The desire for children probably contributed to the dissolution of his first marriage, as in a love letter his ex-wife Annabella wrote him, she ended by saying, "Our little baby - why didn't he ever come? All the praying, all the hoping..." His daughters, Romina and Taryn, were his great joy, and he excitedly awaited the birth of his son. My generation, the same as theirs, grew up with the Power children, Romina, Taryn and Ty IV. We crowded around TVs at work to watch Ty Power Jr. on Cheers, watched Taryn, her father's expression blazing from her beautiful face on The Hardy Boys, and looked at photos of the dazzling Romina singing, acting, and modeling in Rome.
After being contacted about the American Cinematheque event all year via the Internet by fans and people who had met and worked with Power, and after Twentieth Century Fox's release of a ten-film box set of his films a year after the enormous success of his first, the huge audiences and their enthusiastic reactions didn't surprise me. What surprised me was my own response.
Before getting up in front of an SRO group to speak at the memorial service on Saturday morning, I saw the triangular display case with the American flag inside (Power served in the Marines during World War II and was a major in the Reserves when he died). My father died a year ago, and my family has this exact display. A lump the size of an apple formed in my throat. Then I saw Ty Power, Jr., who looks so much like his famous dad, and I thought, well, I'm not going to be able to talk. I did, however, with a good deal of choking and sputtering along the way. When Romina Power, Tyrone's oldest child, got up and read a letter she received from her father right before he died (she was 7) and then read her response, written not long ago in reply, we needed life rafts to get out of the chapel as the place was flooded in tears. She has spent her life looking for her father, a man she doesn't remember, while my own father, so recently gone, is a man I'll never forget. Celebrating the legacy of Tyrone Power's films, I pondered the true meaning of legacy.
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