What’s in a Name?
One of Norway’s best-selling novelists is a 64-year-old lesbian named Anne Holt. She’s written about 20 crime thrillers, often with politically correct messages. (In Offline, a series of bombings attributed to Muslims turn out to have been committed by Norwegian nationalists.) Educated as a lawyer, Holt spent several years at the left-wing state TV network, NRK, before serving as Minister of Justice in the 1996-7 Labor Party government .
She’s a famous face — and voice. Which is why it was downright hilarious the other day when Klassekampen, a taxpayer-funded Communist newspaper with pretensions to influence and importance, ran an interview with Anne Holt that turned out not to be an interview with Anne Holt after all.
Jean Simmons’s first marriage was to Stewart Granger, the swashbuckling star of movies like Scaramouche and the remake of Prisoner of Zenda. In fact his real name was James Stewart.
Well, that’s not exactly right. It was an interview with Anne Holt. The problem was that it was an interview with the wrong Anne Holt. Klassekampen’s reporter, wishing to have a chat with the celebrated crime writer, apparently found a phone number someplace, dialed it, had a lengthy interview with the woman who answered, and printed her comments, believing that she’d spoken with the famous Anne Holt. The funny part is that nothing that the non-famous Anne Holt said is any less thoughtful or interesting or intelligent than the kind of stuff that the famous Anne Holt routinely says to the press. My own theory is that this is why the famous Anne Holt went berserk over this incident, declaring it outrageous and infuriating rather than finding it comical.
In fact, she should be grateful. Anne Holt is a pretty common-sounding Nordic name. If this is the first time she’s had a problem like this, she’s lucky. My late friend Martha Sherrill, a gifted singer and actress, shared her name with a novelist and Washington Post reporter with whom she was constantly being confused. Another recently deceased friend, Marsha Hunt, was a stately, sophisticated movie star during the Golden Age of Hollywood, appearing in a number of classic films alongside the likes of Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. But her Wikipedia page identifies her as “Marsha Hunt (actress, born 1917),” underneath which you can read: “For the later American actress of the same name, see Marsha Hunt (actress, born 1946).”
And what is the “later American actress” known for? She appeared in the London production of Hair, slept with glam-rocker Marc Bolan, and gave birth to one of Mick Jagger’s eight kids.
Speaking of actresses, am I the only one who ever noticed that the characters played by Katharine Hepburn in Summertime (1955) and Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) were both named Jane Hudson?
Then there was a certain English novelist who was born in 1912 and died in 1975, and whose Wikipedia page contains this information: “Kingsley Amis described her as ‘one of the best English novelists born in this century.’ Antonia Fraser called her ‘one of the most underrated writers of the 20th century.’” Her name: Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor was her married name. Her first book came out in 1945, the year after her Hollywood namesake hit it big in National Velvet. Why on earth didn’t she decide at that very moment to write under her maiden name, Coles, rather than choose to spend her life being “the other Elizabeth Taylor”?
There are other downsides to sharing a name — especially when you share it with lots and lots of people. These days, the Internet makes it incredibly easy to find somebody — but not always. For years I knew a Michael Smith who worked on Capitol Hill. Sweet guy. He’d put me up when I was in Washington, D.C. Years ago, I left the U.S., and he left D.C., and we lost touch. I’d love to reconnect with him. But trying to find somebody with that name is an exercise in masochism. Even more challenging is my best friend from eighth grade, who’d escaped from Cuba with his anti-Castro journalist father. The boy’s name: José Díaz. Track him down. I dare you. I’ve been trying for decades, with no luck.
One case has always particularly galled me. In my early teens I developed a crush on Jean Simmons, the beautiful, refined actress who was the love interest of Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls, Richard Burton in The Robe, Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, and Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry. She was, not to put too fine a point on it, the epitome of elegance, poise, sensitivity, and grace. And then who came along? Gene Simmons of Kiss, who, as Wikipedia puts it, “is known for his long tongue, which he frequently sticks out while performing, and on stage is known for his demonic figure by spitting fire and vomiting stage blood.” He shacked up briefly with Cher, who once explained in an interview how they’d met: a friend asked her if she wanted to meet Gene Simmons, and she said yes because she thought the friend meant Jean Simmons.
Oh, and by the way: Jean Simmons’s first marriage was to Stewart Granger, the swashbuckling star of movies like Scaramouche and the remake of Prisoner of Zenda. In fact his real name was James Stewart; when he got into acting, he changed it for obvious reasons.
Which brings us to moi. When I was a fledgling writer, my father — a doctor and medical editor who’d funded his education by selling radio plays to NBC — was encouraging. But my mother? Her passion was the performing arts, and when her studious perusal of showbiz magazines led her to be aware of the existence of a male model named Bruce Bauer — same name as me, only spelled Bauer, not Bawer — she started following his career with a degree of enthusiasm that she couldn’t quite work up for mine.
I’m not suggesting that she wasn’t a reader. She loved those showbiz magazines, after all. Plus she read TV Guide religiously (in fact, she collected them, like that guy whom Elaine meets on the subway on Seinfeld), and she never missed a new thriller by Sue Grafton or Mary Higgins Clark. It’s just that the kind of stuff I was banging out just wasn’t up my mother’s alley. The sole exceptions were my movie reviews for The American Spectator, which she gobbled up delightedly because, hey, they were about movies. Later, when I wrote books that led to interviews on national TV, that excited her, too — not because she had the slightest interest in the books themselves, but because being on TV, in her eyes, was a big deal.
In any case, I learned not to bother her with every little detail of my professional activities. An article in the New York Times, a poem in Paris Review — honestly, what did it matter? On the rare occasion when I did slip and mention some small professional accomplishment, she was usually kind enough to feign interest. In return, I feigned interest when she gushed — as she regularly did — over the latest feat of my near-namesake, who, she insisted proudly, was on the fast track to modeling stardom. I tried not to let her palpable excitement about this total stranger hurt my feelings. If she was interested in him, I reminded myself, it was only because he and I shared the same name. Which made her preoccupation with him, albeit in a rather odd way, a sign of affection for me. Right?
Anyway, I originally ended this piece with the above sentence. I submitted it, turned on the TV, and what was on? The Seinfeld episode in which Elaine — yes, Elaine again — was so freaked out by the fact that her new boyfriend shared a name with the recently arrested serial killer Joel Rifkin that she urged him to change his name to Dion or O.J.
Yes, O.J. The episode debuted on November 18, 1993, seven months before the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, no?
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