Not surprisingly, my mother remained mute on the subject of the advice and assistance Lex and Lana gave my father. At the time, Lex was done making Tarzan movies for RKO Radio Pictures, but he still must have known people at RKO, and Lana would have been under Louis B. Mayer’s wing at MGM. According to Paul Goode, he couldn’t remember if it was Lex or Lana who advised him to change his name. Paulino Juárez was only half-Mexican, and no one ever said he looked Mexican, but either Lex or Lana told him that his name begged the question. The choice of “Paul” was easy. It was Lex, not Lana, who came up with the “Goode”—with the e on the end. Lana had worried about “Goode”; it looked British, not American, to her. Lex said British was better for an actor.

In his interviews, when Paul Goode talked about his stage name, he always credited Lex Barker with the “Goode,” and with telling him about the Latin origins and various meanings of “Paul.” “ ‘Paul’ means ‘small’—also ‘humble,’ ‘scarce,’ and ‘rare,’ but mainly ‘small’—like me,” Paul Goode had said. He also liked to tell the story of what Lana Turner had told him.

“You’re small and dark, small and handsome, and small and strong. But you’re mainly small,” Lana had said.

Yet even with help from Lex Barker and Lana Turner, it took a long time for Paul Goode’s career in Hollywood to take off. “I had a lot of time to write, because my life as an actor was slow to start,” Paul Goode liked to say. The Wrong Car (1956) was his first speaking part; he was already thirty, and the role of the getaway driver didn’t make him a star. He didn’t count what he called the “uncredited” characters he’d played in earlier films, those roles where he was unnamed but typecast as small—Small Man on Escalator, Small Man with Large Woman, Small Man Attacked by Big Dog.