Have Nymphet, Will Travel

"There has never been any question but that I was meant for movies," says Romina Power, the 15-year-old daughter of Linda Christian and the late Tyrone Power. "But I want to be discovered for myself, not just because of my parents' name."

Not a chance. Wherever Romina goes, her actress mother is just a step behind. "She will do everything," says Linda. "She sings beautifully. She paints, she dances like a dream. She even writes poetry." Linda, now 42, considers herself not a pushy stage mother but a servant of destiny. Her astrologer, she explains, prophesied that Romina would have "all and everything Napoleon had without the downfall. I was told this at her birth, so I was able to prepare." But Hollywood was not prepared for Linda's big Power play. During the past month, she has waged a selling campaign that ought to win an Oscar for Haughty Hokum and High Hucksterism. "Before Romina is 21," declares Linda, "she'll be making more money than Elizabeth Taylor. Liz will need a wheelchair by that time, the way she's carrying on."

"Anatomic Bomb." The way Linda is carrying on, she will need a pogo stick. She has rented a magnificent Spanish mission house for $2,500 a month and set up a kind of Power Placement Center. She installed ten telephones and planted a nude statue of herself in the foyer as a reminder of the days when, billed as "the Anatomic Bomb," panting tabloids recorded her various amorous adventures.

Nowadays Linda stages large dinner parties, stalks studio executives day and night. After she cornered Paramount Production Chief Robert Evans last month, she came away with a four-picture contract, beginning at $7,500 for a week's work in The President's Analyst. Romina was to portray Snow White, a teeny-bopper who gets seduced by James Coburn. "That's more money than Ty was making when he was tops at Fox!" exulted Linda. "That's the cocktail, isn't it?"

It was more like a Mickey Finn. A few weeks later--even before shooting began--Coburn complained that he would feel uncomfortable making movie love to such a young thing, so the studio decided to drop Romina for someone a little older. Linda telephoned Evans a dozen times a day, demanding explanations and offering script revisions that would accommodate Romina's talent for projecting "pure love through poetry." Asked if her budding starlet might take some acting lessons, Mommy exclaimed: "Are you crazy? Do you want to spoil that gift?"

Kissing Lessons. If no more picture contracts are forthcoming, the dynamic duo may return to their home in Rome. There, Romina's reputation as an ingenue is less than snow white. Two years ago, when the De Laurentiis studio gave Romina the role of a child bride in Home Life, Italian Style, Linda swooped in and demanded "American prices" because "Romina is Romina." Romina's success in the picture led to another nymphet role in How I Learned to Love Women, in which, says Linda, "she absolutely wiped the screen with her leading man." And, she adds proudly, "her name was put above the title," which in the advertisements was accompanied by a shot of Romina sprawled nude on a towel decorated with water melons. The caption: HAVE A SLICE. Both films were banned for minors by the Italian censors, and some of Romina's racier scenes in Women, for which Mother had to give her ''private kissing lessons," were scissored at the insistence of the Vatican.

Never one to pass up a publicity play, Linda allowed her daughter to don bikini bottoms and pasties with dangling disks for a picture spread in Men, Italy's equivalent of Playboy. Romina, a slightly sullen girl who combines traces of baby fat with the dark good looks of her father, reacted like a real trouper; when the makeup man had difficulty applying the pasties, she said: "Hurry up, will you? I'm late for a cocktail party." In another instance, Linda rejected all the picture poses proposed by the German magazine Der Stern, finally hit on the homey scene of mother and daughter sitting nude in a bathtub.

Last week, while Mother wheeled and dealed, daughter spent her spare time in her bedroom listening to rock 'n' roll and contemplating a huge poster of her father. At times, Romina seems dazed by all the hoopla, as if she were trying to remember where she mislaid her childhood. Then, the little girl in her peeping through, she sighs: "I would like to play a fairy because it can make things happen, and it's pure and innocent and beautiful the way people basically are."

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