“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.