The Last Chairlift

10. NOT TARZAN

Not only did I put off going to Aspen for the longest time, but I almost waited too long. Whatever man my mother met in Aspen in 1941 wasn’t the only mystery in the area of what happened (or didn’t) between my mom and men. Exactly what transpired between my mother and a different man would remain vague, but he became somewhat famous—both famous and infamous—and, at least for a while, everyone knew his name.

An American actor, Lex Barker was best known in North America for playing Tarzan of the Apes. In five years, between 1949 and 1953, Lex Barker starred in five Tarzan movies. Little Ray refused to see them. When I asked her why—I would have been eight—all she said was, “Tarzan is an ape, sweetie.”

Nora and I saw the first one (Tarzan’s Magic Fountain) together. By the time we saw the second one (Tarzan and the Slave Girl), Nora had heard the stories about Lex Barker and my mother. No one had told me anything.

“Tarzan went to Exeter, Adam,” Nora informed me. “You weren’t born, I would have been a toddler, and Henrik was still shitting in his diapers. Tarzan was three years older than your mom. When Ray was thirteen and fourteen, Tarzan was sixteen and seventeen,” Nora said. “You can imagine how my mother and Aunt Martha would have found it ‘completely inappropriate’—namely, that this big gorilla was hitting on Little Ray.”

“How did Tarzan get into Exeter?” I asked Nora.

“The actor, Adam—not the half-naked man swinging on vines, or fooling around with Jane and that chimpanzee. Lex Barker, the actor, went to Exeter—before he was Tarzan,” Nora explained. I must have looked lost. I was eight; the concept of Tarzan hitting on my mom surely went over my head. “I don’t mean they dated, Adam—you know, they never went out. I don’t know if they ever spoke to each other,” Nora said. “But something happened. Maybe Tarzan gave Ray a funny look—he gave her the once-over, in an unwelcome way—or he creeped her out with a certain kind of smile.”

Naturally, I was imagining that Tarzan gave my mother one of his ape calls, or he beat his bare chest. Nora always knew what I was thinking. “Adam: Tarzan wouldn’t have been wearing just the loincloth, not at Exeter,” Nora assured me. “I’m almost certain he had his shirt on when this happened, whatever it was—if anything actually happened. Something about the guy just freaked out your mom. Or the big ape did something that my dumb-fuck mother and Aunt Martha saw, and they were freaked out—probably because they could see that Tarzan had the hots for Ray.”

I could imagine that happening, of course. In the area of appropriateness or suitability, it didn’t take much to freak out Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha. For example, Nora was away at school when Lex Barker’s third and fourth Tarzan movies—Tarzan’s Peril and Tarzan’s Savage Fury—came out. I was nine and ten when those two Tarzan films were playing at the Ioka. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha insisted on seeing them with me; they didn’t think it was suitable for me to see them alone. Henrik came along, too. In those years, Henrik was thirteen and fourteen. With his mother and Aunt Abigail sitting between us, Henrik couldn’t reach around them to punch me in the arm or snap my ear with his fingers, which he was fond of doing.

I remember very little of the two movies. I was distracted by Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha; they were in their forties, at least a decade older than Lex Barker, and their moral outrage was palpable. Their clenched fists, their heavy breathing, the looks that flashed between them—especially when Tarzan was socializing with Cheetah, the chimp, or cozying up to Jane.

When we were leaving the Ioka after Tarzan’s Savage Fury, Aunt Abigail said, “Tarzan is more chimp than human.”

“I feel for Jane!” Aunt Martha chimed in.

Lex Barker’s last Tarzan film (Tarzan and the She-Devil) was in 1953. Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan took me to the Ioka to see it. This was the first time I’d ever been in a movie theater with them. Once again, Nora wasn’t in town. Now eighteen, she might have been at Mount Holyoke already.

I would have been surprised by my uncles’ behavior at the Ioka, if Nora hadn’t forewarned me.

“My dad and Uncle Johan are weird—they think everything is a comedy, even tragedies,” Nora had told me.

“Is that a Norwegian thing?” I asked her.

“It’s just a weird thing, Adam,” Nora insisted. “They laugh all the way through most movies.”

Maybe that was why Henrik didn’t come with us to see Tarzan and the She-Devil, which was not a comedy—at least not intentionally. Or Henrik had decided he was too old for Tarzan movies.

The evil ivory hunters burn Tarzan’s tree hut, and capture Tarzan and Jane. Tarzan takes the elephants’ side, opposed to ivory poaching. Tarzan summons the elephants; they stampede, trampling the villainous Raymond Burr. Lyra, the She-Devil, gets shot. Cheetah, the chimpanzee, provides the only comic relief—he gets caught stealing ostrich eggs. Yet Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan roared with laughter at everything. Parents with small children changed their seats, distancing themselves from the North Conway Norwegians’ crazed howls. Jane, held captive by the ivory hunters, provoked the loudest guffaws from Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan.

They were still laughing when we left the Ioka. “Almost as funny as foreign films, Adam,” Uncle Martin, Nora’s father, told me.

“The ones with subtitles,” Uncle Johan, Henrik’s dad, chimed in.

“I’ve never seen a movie you have to read,” I pointed out to them politely. Films with subtitles never came to the Ioka.

“We’ll soon remedy that!” Uncle Martin shouted.

“There’s a French film coming to the Franklin next week, Adam. French films are hysterical,” Uncle Johan told me.

I knew Nora would have assured me that not all French films were hysterical, but I was eager to see a foreign film with subtitles—even (perhaps especially) a tragedy.

Thus, because I saw Tarzan and the She-Devil with my uncles, I was invited to go with them to the Franklin Theatre in Durham to see my first foreign-language film with subtitles. I knew about the Franklin from Nora; her dad and Uncle Johan had taken her to see foreign films there. The University of New Hampshire was in Durham. It was a college town, and the Franklin was the nearest art-house movie theater around.

Nora had told me that Henrik was too impatient to read films with subtitles. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha associated all foreign films with sex. Unless they took Nora with them to the Franklin, Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan drove to Durham by themselves. From Exeter, it was a slow half-hour drive. The Franklin Theatre changed my life. Someone said it’s now a Thai food place. I don’t want to know. I will always remember my first time at the Franklin, and my first trip to Durham.

“Is the French film a comedy?” I cautiously asked Uncle Martin, who was driving.

“Of course it is!” Uncle Johan shouted from the shotgun seat.

I knew from Nora what my uncles thought of comedies and tragedies. As it turned out, my first film with subtitles was a comedy, and I laughed as much as Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan.

Directed by and starring Jacques Tati, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot—in English, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday—won me over. At twelve, I couldn’t tell the Marxist intellectuals from the fat capitalists, or recognize the other prototypes of the French political and social classes, but I understood they were all being mocked. Without meanness, the film makes fun of everyone—Mr. Hulot included.

Jacques Tati was a gentle and intelligent introduction to French cinema and movies with subtitles. The Franklin Theatre would become my film school. Those foreign films I saw in Durham made me want to be a screenwriter. Moby-Dick had introduced me to the nineteenth-century novel; I would soon read Great Expectations. The Franklin was my introduction to European cinema. In contrast, American movies seemed juvenile.

Take Tarzan, for example. The sexual scandals of many American movie stars outlast the short-lived fame of their films. Yes, I know—sexual infamy lives longer than movie stardom, not only in the United States. But just look at what happened to Lex.

Lex Barker and Lana Turner were married from 1953 to 1957, about as long as Lana usually stayed married. She was married seven times—eight, if you count her marrying Joseph Crane twice (their first marriage was annulled). In 1958, a year after Lana kicked out Lex, Lana’s then-boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, was stabbed to death in the Beverly Hills home Lana shared with her fourteen-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane. Cheryl stabbed Stompanato with a kitchen knife, either in self-defense or to protect her mother.

“That girl should have stabbed Tarzan!” Aunt Abigail declared, when she heard about the Stompanato killing.

“I’m sure Cheryl must have wanted to kill Tarzan,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

All my mother said about Cheryl Crane and the Stompanato stabbing was: “Poor Cheryl would have been only ten when her mom married Tarzan. She was thirteen when Lana kicked him out.”

“You weren’t too young for Tarzan. The big monkey took an interest in you, Ray,” Aunt Abigail reminded her.

“Meaning you were way too young, Ray, but that didn’t stop Tarzan!” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“I wasn’t that young—I wasn’t as young as poor Cheryl,” my mom said softly. She was almost whispering.

Little Ray was thirty-six when Johnny Stompanato was stabbed. I would have been sixteen, a student at Exeter—old enough to be part of a conversation about scandalous sexual behavior.

“Lana Turner and Lex Barker were guests at the Hotel Jerome,” my mother told me, but not when my aunts were around—we were alone. The Hotel Jerome had figured prominently in my mom’s conversation, but never concerning Tarzan.

“Lana and Lex were in Aspen when you were there?” I asked her.

“Heavens, no, sweetie—they were guests at the Jerome when they were married, after I was there. I just saw their picture in a movie magazine,” Little Ray said. My question hurt her; she misjudged what I was thinking. “No, I never skied with Tarzan—we weren’t in Aspen together, before the ape married Lana,” my mother suddenly said. “Look at yourself, Adam. You must be fully grown, or near to it. You’re five feet six; even if you’re still growing, I’ll be surprised if you get to five feet seven. Lex Barker was six feet four, sweetie. Sometimes I think you don’t know me at all. Tarzan couldn’t be your father.”

At sixteen, I knew that Lex Barker couldn’t be my father. The ape man had big hands. My father was no Tarzan. I felt badly that I’d asked my mom about him. It was sad how much she hated that she’d ever attracted Tarzan of the Apes.

On one of our trips to the Franklin Theatre, I queried my uncles about Lex Barker’s time at Exeter. Aunt Abigail had told me Tarzan looked like a monkey in his 1937 yearbook picture, when he was just a sophomore.

“That monkey never graduated,” Aunt Martha had chimed in. The ape man left Exeter without a diploma.

“That monkey looked like a man among boys,” Aunt Abigail had said. “Even when he was a beginning monkey.”

Lex Barker had quite a career in Europe—not only after his Tarzan roles but after Lana. Tarzan spoke French, Spanish, Italian, and German. In 1961, Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan and I saw Barker in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. In case you missed him, Lex was Anita Ekberg’s fiancé or husband. Martin and Johan burst out laughing when they saw the ape man, tears wetting their cheeks.

Lex Barker made more than twenty films in German, including Karl May’s European Westerns. Seven times, the former Tarzan was Old Shatterhand—the German friend and blood brother of Winnetou, a fictional Apache chief.

“Did Tarzan learn all those languages at Exeter?” I asked my uncles. They might have known. Uncle Martin taught French and Spanish at the academy, while Uncle Johan taught German.

“I know he played football,” Uncle Martin said. “I know he didn’t take French or Spanish with me.”

“Tarzan was never in my German class—I know that,” Uncle Johan told me. “He definitely did track-and-field.”

“Did he ski?” I asked my uncles.

“Tarzan on skis!” Uncle Martin cried.

“Skiing in his loincloth!” Uncle Johan shouted. Life was a comedy; my uncles once more dissolved into laughter.

In 1988, thirty years after the Johnny Stompanato stabbing, when Cheryl Crane was forty-five, she published her autobiography, Detour: A Hollywood Story. In the book, Cheryl revealed that, between the ages of ten and thirteen, she was repeatedly raped by Lex Barker. When Cheryl told her mom, Lana kicked the ape man out.

In 1988, Lana Turner and Little Ray were sixty-seven and sixty-six, respectively. Lex Barker wasn’t alive to read about himself in Cheryl Crane’s autobiography. He had died of a heart attack in 1973, at the age of fifty-four. Tarzan was walking down a street in New York City, on his way to meet his fiancée, Karen Kondazian. She was an actress, twenty-three at the time—thirty-one years younger than Tarzan of the Apes. Not counting Jane, she would have been the ape man’s sixth wife.

How did my mother respond to the news that Lex Barker had serially raped Lana Turner’s young daughter, beginning when the girl was prepubescent? All my mom said, softly, was: “Poor Cheryl.”

Later, Little Ray spoke more pointedly—if not in much detail—to me. “I’ve told you, Adam—please don’t ask me again, sweetie. Not Tarzan.” This time, I felt badly that I hadn’t asked my mom about him—not for thirty years.