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.
11. SMALLNESS AS A BURDEN
Downtown Exeter wasn’t much to speak of. At the intersection of Water and Front Streets, there was a bandstand; there were occasional appearances of a band. Below the falls, where the Exeter River ran into the Squamscott, the water was brackish and filthy. Because the Squamscott was a tidal river, the academy crew couldn’t row at low tide. Because the Squamscott was polluted, the mudflats stank. A rower would one day tell me: “You can usually spot a beetleskin in the mud at low tide.” We called condoms beetleskins. The Ioka wasn’t much of a movie theater, but it’s the only downtown building I remember.
Because I was the grandson of a principal emeritus of Phillips Exeter (or so I thought), the academy—even before I attended it—was my part of town. Front Street bisected the Phillips Exeter campus. I grew up in my grandparents’ red-brick house on Front Street, within hearing distance of the bells that heralded the changing of classes. Principal Brewster’s house was Georgian—the front door framed by two white columns, white window trim, black shutters. From the cupola window in my attic bedroom, I could look along Front Street and almost see the academy clock tower, where the bells tolled.
When I told her I could see the Roman numerals on the clockface of the tower, Nana said this was an early sign that I had the imagination to become a fiction writer. She knew it was impossible to see any part of the main academy building from our attic.
Nora put it more plainly: my imagining I could see the academy clock tower from my attic bedroom didn’t indicate to her that I had a fiction writer’s imagination—only that I was a slow learner.
To the Exeter faculty—most of all, to the faculty wives—I was “the Brewster boy,” not necessarily because I was the grandson of a mysteriously mute principal emeritus. It was more remarkable that I had my mother’s maiden name, and that pretty Rachel Brewster was noticeably unmarried; she was also away for months at a time.
Exeter was a small town, though not as small as the claustrophobic community of a single-sex boarding school. It wasn’t unnoticed that Principal Brewster had stopped speaking—at which time, I presumed, he’d been relieved of his headmasterly duties. This was around the time my mom got pregnant, but before she began to show. I don’t remember who told me that he’d not been principal for long. I don’t remember when Nora told me that he’d never been principal at all. It was only Lewis Brewster’s fantasy, all because he believed he should have been Exeter’s headmaster.
“Those damn Brewster girls indulged him,” Nora told me. “In truth, Granddaddy Lew is just another faculty emeritus. He was only an English teacher—a strict grammarian, big on rules. When he used to talk, he went on and on about punctuation marks. Saltonstall has been the principal at Exeter since before I was born. Salty will probably be principal forever.”
As would always be true of Nora, she was mostly right. William Gurdon Saltonstall was the principal of Phillips Exeter from 1932 until 1963, when he left to direct the Peace Corps in Nigeria. Salty appeared to be beloved.
Here was another Brewster family secret I hadn’t known. Nora apologized for not telling me sooner. “I thought I’d already told you, Adam; I must have assumed that everyone knew the ‘principal emeritus’ was deluded, long before he stopped talking.” But how would I have known that Granddaddy Lew was delusional? He’d never spoken to me. It unnerved me to think there were faculty members (and their families) who knew more about me and the Brewster family than I did. Other than what Nora told me, I’d been kept in the dark. And after Nora went off to Northfield, and later, to Mount Holyoke, I was alone a lot.
The Front Street house, where I lived with my grandmother and the grammarian emeritus—Principal Punctuation Mark, as I thought of our silent family lunatic—was in easy walking distance of the academy athletic fields and the school gym. Best of all was the Thompson Cage. A 1929 brick edifice with skylights, the cage contained two indoor tracks. On the dirt floor of the cage was a running track; above it, a sloped wooden track circumscribed the dirt track below. I liked to run, but I loved the old cage.
Did I like running because my mother loathed it? Probably, in the beginning. When I began to run, I’m sure this was part of the same perverse psychology that persuaded me to dislike skiing. But the more I ran, the more I liked the aloneness of it. My mom didn’t run, but she understood solitary compulsions.
My mother was almost as obsessed with her off-season training for skiing as she was with skiing; she took those exercises very seriously. She did lunges and squats and wall sits, everywhere and all the time. Her lunges never failed to startle the bogus principal emeritus. They were single-leg lunges, which she held for forty-five seconds or a minute (each leg). The squats were deep ones—her butt hit her heels—and the wall sits, which she held for over a minute, were done at ninety-degree angles with her back against a wall and her knees perfectly aligned to her middle toes. “If you can’t see your big toes, you’re doing it wrong,” she would explain to me repeatedly.