5 - Tyrone Power: International ‘Cover Boy’

Summary

In Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine, Anthony Slide asserts that during Hollywood's Golden Age, most film fan magazine cover stars were women, because male stars did not sell magazines (2010, 4). Only during the Second World War, he declares, ‘male members of the film community’ began to appear ‘for the first time’ on fan magazine covers; even then, however, these images were not dedicated to stars in uniform ‘but primarily feature players designated 4F’, or unfit for military service, such as Frank Sinatra (2010, 142). As I have demonstrated in my monographs on Robert Taylor (Kelly 2019) and Tyrone Power (Kelly 2021), however, this is not factually accurate: both these actors began appearing regularly as fan magazine cover stars long before this, directly after signing with their respective studios, MGM and 20th Century Fox, in 1934 and 1936.

Taylor and Power were not, of course, the only male cover stars appearing at this time; nonetheless, I consider them particularly useful examples of this phenomenon, because of their similarities in terms of their appearance and audience appeal. Both stars were known especially for their good looks, which were showcased in many brightly lit close-ups within their on-screen work, a mode of presentation often reserved for glamorous female stars. It was only natural, then, that these famously handsome faces would also be displayed on the cover of fan magazines, where they could be expected to provide a strong selling point to the magazines’ target audience of mostly young, uneducated, heterosexual women (Allen and Gomery 1985, 24), which also formed the primary audience of their films.

To demonstrate the importance of such cover stars, it is crucial to understand the cover design of film fan magazines at this time. As opposed to modern-day gossip magazines such as the UK's Heat, or Star in the US, which boast crowded covers awash with unflattering paparazzi shots and shock headlines, fan magazine covers of this earlier era usually consisted of a single image of an individual star or screen couple, either in the form of a photograph or painted image in their likeness.