In 1977, the same year Uncle Johan accelerated as he drove off the Kancamagus, Clara Swift, who played the teacher in The Kindergarten Man, gave birth to Paul Goode’s child. To be sure, they’d been an item since they made that first film (of their many films) together—when Paul Goode was forty-six, and Clara Swift was twenty years younger. But the age difference between them wasn’t what got the goat of the Hollywood press and the scandalmongers in the media. What ticked off the tabloids was how pregnant Clara Swift was when they got married—she was already showing.

THE BRIDE WORE WHITE—A WHITE MATERNITY DRESS! was one headline. FLAUNTING IT! was another one. And, of course, there was HAVE YOU NO SHAME?

Nora was six when I was born. “I remember what your mom looked like when she was pregnant, kiddo—your dad definitely married a woman who reminded him of your mom,” Nora told me. Well, okay. In 1977, there was so much gossipy media about Paul Goode and his much younger, pregnant bride, even my uncles must have made the little mountaineer connection. Nora said her dad and Uncle Johan surely would have seen the resemblance to Little Ray in the pregnant Clara Swift.

Em and I kept it to ourselves. Clara Swift was no less attractive to us when she was hugely pregnant than she was when we first saw her in The Kindergarten Man. What also appealed to Em and me about Clara Swift was that she refused to be interviewed; she would not talk to journalists, period. “You would have to be a journalist not to like that about her,” Em wrote me.

As for the former Paulino Juárez, he continued to do interviews, in which he remained calm—he kept his cool, even with the worst questions—and he always seemed to care about being clear. He was refreshingly candid about his less-than-successful efforts to find work in the movie business after the war. As a veteran of the Tenth Mountain Division, he could always get a job in Aspen—from the first, at the Hotel Jerome, later both at the hotel and on the ski mountain. With the help of the G.I. Bill, he’d enrolled in the film program at USC, but things didn’t take off for him in Hollywood until he met Lex Barker and Lana Turner at the Hotel Jerome.