Tyrone Power’s Fans Keep Legend Alive : Ritual: About 75 people, including the late actor’s daughter, attend the 35th annual memorial service.

Under a palm tree near the white marble tomb where Tyrone Power is buried, housewife Ada Tucker waxed poetic about one of Hollywood’s most enduring rituals.

“There’s a sense of family among the people who still come here for this,” said Tucker, who visits Power’s grave at least twice a month and sets aside Nov. 15 to observe the anniversary of his death.

She is typical of loyal fans, who, along with a few of the actor’s remaining friends and relatives, gather quietly each year at Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery to mark the occasion.

About 75 people came last week, 35 years to the day since his death on a movie set in Spain.

Among them were Taryn Power, the daughter whose first memory of her father was as a 5-year-old kneeling at the graveside.

“It’s very moving to see people come to honor him after all these years,” said Taryn, a teacher’s aide who lives in Agoura Hills. She had son Tony Tyrone, 11, and daughter Valentino, 10, in tow.

The actor’s daughter said she has attended at least 20 of the memorial services and that “they have taught me a great deal about my dad that I never knew.”

The younger of two daughters born to Power and actress Linda Christian--the second of his three wives--Taryn has no memory of her father while he was alive.

“I’ve tried to fill in the pieces as best I can,” she said. “That’s one reason why I always try to come.”

Her parents were often apart after she was born, and Taryn and her sister, Romina, who lives in Italy, spent most of their early years with a nanny and grandmother in Mexico City.

On orders from the actor’s third wife, the girls and their mother were banished from the funeral, which was held in a cramped cemetery chapel and marred when 3,000 shoving fans mobbed the celebrity mourners.

“We had our own Mass at a church and later that afternoon my mother brought us here,” recalled Taryn, standing next to her father’s grave.

She said she remembers clutching a wreath of white carnations, her father’s favorite flower.

The grave is beside a small lake, around which rest some of the great names of Hollywood’s heyday. Actresses Marian Davies and Janet Gaynor are nearby, as are directors Cecil B. DeMille and John Huston.

Rudolph Valentino is entombed in a mausoleum a stone’s throw away. Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s stately crypt lies at the end of a long reflecting pool past a nearby clump of trees.

Although the number of people with any real connection to Power has dwindled, turnout for the memorial service hasn’t.

“If anything, I think we’ve picked up a few,” said Bud Testa, 79, a former press agent for Mickey Rooney and others, who emcees the event and keeps it going.

Christian, who has attended often in past years, sent word from Rome that she could not come, Testa said.

Most of the half a dozen speakers at the 50-minute service had never met Power or knew him only peripherally.

An exception was actor and restaurateur Nicky Blair, who served with Power in the Marine Corps during World War II.

Blair brought along a photo of Power and fellow crew members posing in front of a DC-4, the aircraft Power piloted between Hawaii and Guam during the war.

“I’ve been wanting to come to this for years. I don’t know what took me so long,” he told the actor’s daughter, presenting the photo as a gift.

The program blended the solemn with the zany.

There was the elderly Trouper’s Club chaplain who offered a joke before each of two prayers.

(“Yogi Berra used to say it ain’t over till the Fat Lady sings,” Chaplain John Kelley said, “but she couldn’t be here today so here I am. Let us pray. . . . “)

There was a ceremonial grave cleansing by a group of Native Americans, whose leader, Ernie Salas, offered a prayer on behalf of “our brother Tyrone.”

Asked about the ritual afterward, Salas said he didn’t mean to imply that Power was part American Indian.

“All of us are brothers,” he said, adding, “besides, there were Indians in some of his movies.”

Gunnery Sgt. David Vergun represented the Marine Corps, placing a wreath in front of the tomb.

Ordinarily there would have been a full color guard, he explained afterward, but it had been booked for an event elsewhere featuring former President Ronald Reagan and Walter Cronkite.

Such things could have scarcely mattered to the faithful.

“It was just beautiful,” beamed Marge Weatherford, 72, who said she became enthralled with Tyrone Power as a schoolgirl in the 1930s. She hasn’t missed a service in a dozen years.

Once it ended, she and others encircled Taryn like old friends at a reunion.

The actor’s daughter lingered until the last guest had departed. Then she rounded up the children, who had wandered off to watch a grave being dug, and headed home.