10. NAMING AND UNNAMING (part one)

Edward Everett Horton – How would it have altered your life to have such a name? His two colleagues (see earlier post) Frederic March and Florence Eldridge both changed their names for their careers; Horton did not. All three are famous for being well-spoken stage actors who could impress audiences when sound came to movies; and the very first talkie, The Jazz Singer, involves a young Jewish man who changes his last name from Rabinowitz to Robin to become — not a Jewish cantor as his family would prefer — but a performer, in blackface. 

At birth my father was named John Lawrence Levy. He went through some stuff because school kids rhymed Levy with Heavy.

He had the notion too that a Jewish sounding last name would hinder his career as a performer. Like generations of performers before and after him, he understood America\’s opportunity hierarchies:  that opportunity accrued more easily to white Protestants than other groups (America is pro-Protestant and anti-other). An \”ethnic\” last name could make him less commercially viable, and wide audience appeal was his livelihood.

My parents announced their engagement and my grandmother supplied the text to the newspaper in my mother\’s small home town in Michigan. Before she submitted it though, she revised it. It seemed that my mother had omitted my father\’s (Jewish) last name, and my grandmother felt that wasn\’t true or right, that my mother should not start out being secretive about my father\’s … difference. 

My grandparents announce the betrothal of my mother, featuring my grandmother\’s name edits

Or, maybe my grandmother had not yet recognized the independent streak in the new young couple, out to make of themselves something new, in a new place, California….because my father had already legally changed his name to omit his last one.

Later they often laughed over it; but I think my grandmother also touched my father in some enduring way by the episode, letting him know that she was ready to be his \”mother\” too.

(I won\’t ever know all the thoughts and feelings either family had to work with to support the mixed marriage; I only know that families on both sides showered me and my siblings with unstinting kindness and affection.)

My father renamed my mother too, deciding that Kay would better suit their new lives than \”Beverly\”.

Does the name you have mean something to you? Is it a burden or an asset? Does it say something about you, or is it perhaps a good cover that can protect you? Does it connect you to something important to you? How do you feel about that connection? How hard would it be to inspire you to change it? Why, why not?