Tyrone power biography book

Reading this bio of Tyrone Power after having read Linet’s exploration of the life of Alan Ladd is an interesting exercise, for the parallels between the two stars are striking. Both were in their own lifetime legendary icons of the Hollywood golden age, both were frustrated actors manipulated by heartless studios that only saw in them cash cows, both were intensely private men who held secrets, both were famous for their handsomeness, and both died shockingly young but looking much older. Arce is a much better writer than Linet, and his book is definitely superior. His writing is lively, sometimes ironic, always precise. He’s uncovered a lot of previously unknown facts about Power (some of them quite jaw-dropping for 1979, when the book came out), and he’s talked with many people who were intimate with the actor. He seems to have understood who the man behind the gorgeous star was or may have been, and he intelligently addresses his torments. The result is a complex and riveting portrait. Tyrone Power was a man full of contradictions, at the same time blessed and cursed by his angelic beauty, torn between his desire to be successful and the hope to be recognized as a true acting talent, unable to come to terms with what his demanding bisexual appetites really asked of him and of his partners. He led a double life in more ways than one, and that slowly demolished him. As Arce points out, there is something of the portrait of Dorian Gray in him, as his demons end up damaging his once stupendous beauty the same way Gray’s portrait shows all the signs of its subject’s depravity. The details about Power’s affairs with men are the big revelations that Arce came up with, at a time when it was still very taboo to be gay in Hollywood. Those details certainly are quite juicy. But almost 40 years later, Arce’s work is weakened by a simple fact: when the book was written and published, many gay men in the Hollywood closet that Tyrone Power knew were still alive, and Arce did not want to out them. So, he probably censored himself from telling the whole truth. One senses that many more details that he may have unearthed were kept secret. One wonders, for example, about the so-called “friendship” that linked Power and Cesar Romero in the forties, or Power and Rock Hudson in the fifties. Since then, William J. Mann has written an exceptional history of gay Hollywood, and Scotty Bowers, Hollywood’s most famous male escort, has published his own memoirs, full of very intimate revelations, some of them concerning Tyrone Power. In Arce’s book, Bowers is only presented under a pseudonym and his quotes are rather tame in comparison to what Bowers himself writes. What Arce does disclose about Power was surely explosive in 1979, but what he’s keeping out is very obvious and makes his work feel dated, or at least uncomplete. His dismissive opinions of some of Power’s movies – most of them typical of the studio era - are questionable: time has actually proven nicer to many of the actor’s films than Arce would have expected. A lot of them may not be masterpieces or landmarks, but they appear today as beautiful examples of a kind of moviemaking that doesn’t exist anymore. Despite those flaws, the book is nonetheless quite an engrossing and clever analysis of one of the great male stars who was fabricated and then destroyed by the Hollywood star system. It does open windows on the complicated life of a true matinee idol, and it does provide quite a few wonderful insights into the way the studios (in that case Twentieth Century Fox, under the guidance of ruthless Darryl F. Zanuck) and the stars under contract worked. The book is very informative in that regard. It is also a joyfully gossipy read. The portraits that Arce makes of people such as Linda Christian - one of Power’s wives and a bigger than life vamp whose life seems straight out of a Harold Robbins novel - are quite amusing.