On this day in 1951, impressionist painter, Frank Weston Benson, died in Salem, Massachusetts at the age of 89. Born 24 March 1862 in Salem.
Perhaps best known for his Realistic portraits, American Impressionist paintings, watercolors and etchings. He began his career painting portraits of distinguished families and murals for the Library of Congress. Some of his best known paintings (Eleanor, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Summer, Rhode Island School of Design Museum) depict his daughters outdoors at Benson’s summer home, Wooster Farm, on the island of North Haven, Maine. He also produced numerous oil, wash and watercolor paintings and etchings of wildfowl and landscapes.
In 1883 he travelled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. He enjoyed a distinguished career as an instructor and department head at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He was a founding member of the Ten American Painters, American Academy of Arts and Letters and The Guild of Boston Artists.
The Final Footprint – Benson is interred in Harmony Grove Cemetery in Salem alongside his wife Ellen Perry Benson. Their graves are marked by a large upright marble marker.
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The Sisters, 1899, Terra Museum, Chicago
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Eleanor Holding a Shell, 1902, Private collection
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Calm Morning, 1904, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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Evening Light, 1908, Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio
Red and Gold, 1915 -
On this day in 1958, US Marine Corp veteran, actor Tyrone Power died from a heart attack in Madrid, aged 44. Born Tyrone Edmund Power III in Cincinnati, Ohio on 5 May 1914.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, Power appeared in dozens of films, often in swashbuckler roles or romantic leads. Perhaps his best known films include The Mark of Zorro, Marie Antoinette, Blood and Sand, The Black Swan, Prince of Foxes, Witness for the Prosecution, The Black Rose, and Captain from Castile. Power’s own favorite film among those that he starred in was Nightmare Alley.
Though largely a matinee idol in the 1930s and early 1940s and known for his striking good looks, Power starred in films in a number of genres, from drama to light comedy. In the 1950s he began placing limits on the number of films he would make in order to devote more time to theater productions. He received his biggest accolades as a stage actor in John Brown’s Body and Mister Roberts.
Power was one of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors until he married French actress Annabella (born Suzanne Georgette Charpentier) on July 14, 1939. They had met on the 20th Century Fox lot around the time they starred together in the movie Suez. Power adopted Annabella’s daughter, Anne, before leaving for service. In an A&E biography, Annabella said that Zanuck “could not stop Tyrone’s love for me, or my love for Tyrone.” J. Watson Webb, close friend and an editor at 20th Century Fox, maintained in the A&E Biography that one of the reasons the marriage fell apart was Annabella’s inability to give Power a son, yet, Webb said, there was no bitterness between the couple. In a March 1947 issue of Photoplay, Power was interviewed and said that he wanted a home and children, especially a son to carry on his acting legacy. Annabella shed some light on the situation in an interview published in Movieland magazine in 1948. She said, “Our troubles began because the war started earlier for me, a French-born woman, than it did for Americans.” She explained that the war clouds over Europe made her unhappy and irritable, and to get her mind off her troubles, she began accepting stage work, which often took her away from home. “It is always difficult to put one’s finger exactly on the place and time where a marriage starts to break up,” she said “but I think it began then. We were terribly sad about it, both of us, but we knew we were drifting apart. I didn’t think then—and I don’t think now—that it was his fault, or mine.” The couple tried to make their marriage work when Power returned from military service, but they were unable to do so.
Following his separation from Annabella, Power entered into a love affair with Lana Turner that lasted for a couple of years. In her 1982 autobiography, Turner claimed that she became pregnant with Power’s child in 1948, but chose to have an abortion.
In 1946, Power and lifelong friend Cesar Romero, accompanied by former flight instructor and war veteran John Jefferies as navigator, embarked on a goodwill tour throughout South America where they met, among others, Juan and Evita Peron in Argentina. On September 1, 1947, Power set out on another goodwill trip around the world, piloting his own plane, “The Geek”. He flew with Bob Buck, another experienced pilot and war veteran. Buck stated in his autobiography that Power had a photographic mind, was an excellent pilot, and genuinely liked people. They flew with a crew to various locations in Europe and South Africa, often mobbed by fans when they hit the ground. However, in 1948 when “The Geek” reached Rome, Power met and fell in love with Mexican actress Linda Christian. Turner claimed that the story of her dining out with Power’s friend Frank Sinatra was leaked to Power and that Power became very upset that she was “dating” another man in his absence. Turner also claimed that it could not have been a coincidence that Linda Christian was at the same hotel as Tyrone Power and implied that Christian had obtained Power’s itinerary from 20th Century Fox.
Power and Christian were married on January 27, 1949, in the Church of Santa Francesca Romana, with an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 screaming fans outside. Christian miscarried three times before giving birth to a baby girl, Romina Francesca Power, on October 2, 1951. A second daughter, Taryn Stephanie Power, was born on September 13, 1953. Around the time of Taryn’s birth, the marriage was becoming rocky. In her autobiography, Christian blamed the breakup of her marriage on her husband’s extramarital affairs, but acknowledged that she had had an affair with Edmund Purdom. They divorced in 1955.
After his divorce from Christian, Power had a long-lasting love affair with Mai Zetterling, whom he had met on the set of Abandon Ship. At the time, he vowed that he would never marry again, because he had been twice burned financially by his previous marriages. He also entered into an affair with a British actress, Thelma Ruby. However, in 1957, he met the former Deborah Jean Smith (sometimes incorrectly referred to as Deborah Ann Montgomery), who went by her former married name, Debbie Minardos. They were married on May 7, 1958, and she became pregnant soon after with Tyrone Power Jr., the son he had always wanted.
The Final Footprint
In September 1958, Power and his wife Deborah traveled to Madrid and Valdespartera, Spain to film the epic Solomon and Sheba, directed by King Vidor and costarring Gina Lollobrigida. Probably affected by hereditary heart disease, and a chain smoker who smoked three to four packs a day, Power had filmed about 75% of his scenes when he was stricken by a massive heart attack while filming a dueling scene with his frequent costar and friend George Sanders. A doctor diagnosed the cause of Power’s death as “fulminant angina pectoris.” Power died while being transported to the hospital in Madrid.
Power was interred at Hollywood Forever Cemetery (then known as Hollywood Cemetery) in a military service on November 21. Henry King flew over the service; almost 20 years before, Power had flown in King’s plane to the set of Jesse James in Missouri, Power’s first experience with flying. Aviation became an important part of Power’s life, both in the U.S. Marines and as a civilian. In the foreword to Dennis Belafonte’s The Films of Tyrone Power, King wrote: “Knowing his love for flying and feeling that I had started it, I flew over his funeral procession and memorial park during his burial, and felt that he was with me.”
Power was interred beside a small lake. His grave is marked with a gravestone in the form of a marble bench containing the masks of comedy and tragedy with the inscription “Good night, sweet prince.” At Power’s grave, Laurence Olivier read the poem “High Flight.”
Power’s will, filed on December 8, 1958, contained a then-unusual provision that his eyes be donated to the Estelle Doheny Eye Foundation for corneal transplantation or retinal study.
Deborah Power gave birth to a son on January 22, 1959, two months after her husband’s death. She remarried within the year to producer Arthur Loew Jr.
On this day in 1959, farmer Herbert Clutter (48), his wife Bonnie (45), their daughter Nancy (16), and their son Kenyon (15), were found bound and shot to death in various rooms of their home, on the family’s River Valley Farm on the outskirts of Holcomb, Kansas. The murders, arrests and convictions of Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith were the basis for author Truman Capote‘s acclaimed book, In Cold Blood, which was serialized in The New Yorker magazine in 1965 and first published in book form in 1966. Capote actually began work on the book several days after he read a news article in a New York paper in 1959 about the murders. Capote was assisted in his research by his childhood friend, Harper Lee.
The Final Footprint – The Clutters are interred in Valley View Cemetery in Garden City, Kansas.
O
n this day in 1990, chesnut colt and American thoroughbred race horse, Alydar, died at the age of 15. Foaled 23 March 1975 at Calumet Farms in Lexington, Kentucky; sire Raise a Native, dam Sweet Tooth, damsire On-And-On. Trained by John M. Veitch and ridden by jockey Jorge Velasquez, Alydar finished second to archrival Affirmed in all three Triple Crown Races in 1978. A feat never accomplished, before or since. In my opinion, their matchup in the Belmont Stakes ranks as the most exciting race in the history of the sport. Affirmed won by a head to claim racing’s 11th Triple Crown Winner. I watched all three races on television. Both horses were beautiful chestnuts and I was a fan of both, but I was hoping that Affirmed would win. Alydar was a major success as a stallion. His offspring include; Easy Goer, Alysheba and Strike the Gold.
The Final Footprint – On November 13, 1990, Alydar appeared to have shattered his right hind leg in his stall at Calumet Farm in Lexington, Kentucky. Emergency surgery was performed the next day in an attempt to repair the injury, but the leg broke again. On November 15, Alydar was euthanized. At the time the owner of Calumet Farm was in dire trouble financially, but suspicions of foul play by the management were not raised until federal prosecutors investigated in the late 1990s. John Thomas (J.T.) Lundy was indicted and convicted in 2000 on separate but related fraud charges—bribing a bank executive for favorable loans—and served nearly four years in prison. The farm’s former attorney, Gary Matthews, was also convicted and received a 21-month prison sentence. The Texas Monthly described Alydar’s death as “a sweeping saga of greed, fraud, and almost unimaginable cruelty that could have been lifted straight from a best-selling Dick Francis horse-racing novel.”
In Houston federal court, MIT professor George Pratt testified that Alydar had to have been killed. He speculated that someone had tied the end of a rope around Alydar’s leg and attached the other end of the rope to a truck that could easily have been driven into the stallion barn. The truck then took off, pulling Alydar’s leg from underneath him until it snapped; he testified that the force involved was at least three times that which a horse was able to exert. About five days before Alydar’s injury his original night watchman, Harold “Cowboy” Kipp, testified that he was at work on the farm when he was ordered to take Tuesday, November 13 off.
Alydar was given the rare honor of being buried whole (traditionally only the head, heart, and hooves of a winning race horse are buried) in the Calumet Farm Equine Cemetery in Lexington.
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