Alma Gonzales, Richard Thomas’ First Wife, Stayed Silent After 1993

Alma Gonzales spent an afternoon in January 1982 with a reporter from People magazine, inside the Hollywood Hills home she shared with her husband, actor Richard Thomas. She described her overnight feeding routine for newborn triplets and, in some detail, her plans for a tubal ligation. She has not spoken publicly since their divorce became final in 1993.

Gonzales and Thomas, known for playing John-Boy Walton on the CBS series The Waltons, had married seven years before that interview and would stay married for eighteen years in total. By January 1982 they had four children, a son born in 1976 and triplet daughters whose birth five months earlier had put the family in the national press.

Fast facts on Alma Gonzales

Meeting Richard Thomas

Gonzales grew up in California, the daughter of Mexican parents. She never trained formally as a dancer. She picked it up at nightclubs around Los Angeles that hosted live folk dancing, working in the years before her marriage as a part-time waitress, a secretary for a press agent, and a saleswoman for a company that imported rugs, according to that 1982 People profile.

It was at one of those nightclubs, a Middle Eastern spot known for its dance floor, that she met Thomas. His parents had performed with the New York City Ballet, and he later said that night was the first time he had ever joined a dance circle like that, but he could not stop watching her move. Their first date was a Betty Boop cartoon festival. About a year later, on Valentine’s Day 1975, they married at the Baptist church Thomas had attended as a child, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

The triplets born in 1981

Their son, Richard Francisco, was born in 1976. Five years later, sonograms during Alma’s second pregnancy suggested twins. That changed when she went into labor three weeks early and a doctor found a third heartbeat. She reached Thomas by phone in New York, where he was finishing a run of the play Fifth of July on Broadway, and told him, “There are three of them. They’re coming out tomorrow, so get here.”

Barbara Ayala, Gwyneth Gonzales and Pilar Alma Thomas were born by cesarean section on August 26, 1981, at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, minutes apart:

• Barbara Ayala Thomas, 6 pounds 1 ounce
• Gwyneth Gonzales Thomas, 4 pounds 9 ounces
• Pilar Alma Thomas, 5 pounds 8 ounces

Triplet births happen in roughly 1 out of every 9,300 pregnancies. The family used birthstone earrings at first to tell the identical babies apart, until their personalities made it easier. Barbara was the calm one, Gwyneth ate fastest, and Pilar fussed the most. Tenor Luciano Pavarotti was reportedly among the first visitors to see the newborns outside the family. Alma later described the exhaustion of those first months. Overnight feedings rotated between her and Thomas, and when all three woke at once, she called in her own mother to help. She kept a television running through the night shifts just to stay awake.

The divorce and the years since

The family did not stay out of the public eye after the triplets were born. Alma, Richard and all four children appeared together in television commercials for Minute Maid orange juice during the 1980s. The triplets turned one on August 26, 1982. Their birthday party, delayed roughly two weeks by Thomas’ filming schedule, turned into a Mexican-themed celebration at the family’s Hollywood Hills home, with a piñata, homemade tamales, and guests including actors John Ritter and Sally Struthers. Thomas often credited his wife with holding the household together while he worked, once telling reporters she had “a great sense of pride and accomplishment” in the role.

That public visibility did not last. In the spring of 1992, Alma told Thomas she wanted to separate. His friend Bruce Davison, who had co-starred with him in the 1969 film Last Summer, later said Thomas was blindsided by it. The divorce was finalized in 1993, after eighteen years of marriage, with both citing irreconcilable differences. Alma sought joint custody of their four children. In comments later republished in several profiles, she called the split “amicable, thank goodness, because we have four terrific kids.” By some accounts, Thomas went into therapy afterward to work through it.

Gonzales has given no public interviews since, a sharp reversal from the woman who once spent an afternoon walking a reporter through her nursing schedule. Her current city, whether she has remarried, and any figure for her net worth have never been published, not in the original 1982 profile and not anywhere since. Thomas remarried in 1994, to art dealer Georgiana Bischoff, and the two have now been married longer than his first marriage lasted.

Timeline

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