The late Marianne Faithfull had the perfect name for a convent-educated pop singer in the early 1960s.
Even better, it was her real name, unlike other stars of the time such as Cilla Black (born Priscilla White), Dusty Springfield (Mary O’Brien), Cher (Cheryl Sarkisian) or Diana Dors (Diana Fluck).
Back then, if you wanted to be a star, it was almost obligatory to change your name. Money-minded manager Larry Parnes, known by many as ‘Parnes, Shillings and Pence’, forced almost all his proteges to switch their names to something flashier.
So Ron Wycherley became Billy Fury, Reginald Smith became Marty Wilde, and Clive Powell became Georgie Fame. Sometimes, Parnes’s judgment went haywire: Joe Brown wisely refused to take the name Parnes chose for him: Elmer Twitch.
As the years went by, Marianne Faithfull’s image changed from saint to sinner, and her voice grew careworn and more gravelly. At this point, she might have regretted not adopting her mother’s wonderfully decadent surname, to become Marianne von Sacher-Masoch.
Names are important. Why else would Reg Dwight have changed his to Elton John, or David Jones changed his to David Bowie?
Would Stefani Germanotta have achieved the same success if she had not become Lady Gaga? And in the refined world of ballet, it’s hard to imagine Margot Fonteyn reaching the same heights if she had stuck with Margaret Hookham.
Boris Karloff in Frankenstein would never have sent shivers down filmgoers’ spines as William Pratt.
The late Marianne Faithfull (pictured) had the perfect name for a convent-educated pop singer in the early 1960s
Even better, it was her real name, unlike other stars of the time such as Cilla Black, who was born Priscilla White
People who yearn for fame also yearn to be someone else, someone more exciting than they suspect themselves to be (pictured: Dusty Springfield, whose real name was Mary O’Brien)
Yvette Stevens, James Osterberg, Marvin Aday and Vincent Furnier sound like partners in a Philadelphia legal office. But they wisely decided to change their names, and gained stardom as Chaka Khan, Iggy Pop, Meat Loaf and Alice Cooper.
People who yearn for fame also yearn to be someone else, someone more exciting than they suspect themselves to be. Small wonder, then, that David Evans became The Edge, Paul Hewson became Bono, George O’Dowd named himself Boy George and Gordon Sumner became Sting.
Of course, just as many successful performers stick with their original names, however ordinary. Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison kept theirs. The only Beatle to change his was the dullest: Richard Starkey chose Ringo Starr on the advice of Alan Caldwell, who had become Rory Storm.
Other name changes are rather more baffling. Having set his heart on becoming a country star, young Harold Jenkins was told by his manager to pick a name with star quality.
Accordingly, he opened a map of the US and stuck a pin in two towns: Conway in Arkansas and Twitty in Texas. You or I might have tried again, but he stuck with this peculiar combination. Conway Twitty’s song It’s Only Make Believe reached No1 in the US and 21 other countries.
Some pop stars have gone the other way. Thinking their names too exotic – or, at least, too foreign-sounding – they chose something more basic. So Georgios Panayiotou became George Michael, Frederick Austerlitz became
Fred Astaire, Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, and John Deutschendorf became John Denver.
Others change their names for more prosaic reasons. I once met a thriller writer whose publishers had made him change his surname to something between D and L in the alphabet. They didn’t want anything positioned too high up or too low down on airport bookshelves for the casual browser.
Actress Diana Dors’ (pictured in the film A Kid for Two Farthings) real name was Diana Fluck
Straight-talking diva-legend Cher’s real name is Cheryl Sarkisian
Norman Lewis is widely regarded as the greatest travel writer of the 20th century, yet he remains less famous than Wilfred Thesiger, Patrick Leigh-Fermor and Laurens van der Post. Why? In his introduction to a wonderful new edition of his work, John Hatt suggests that Lewis had ‘the bad luck of having an unmemorable name’.
Of course, some people are blessed at birth with ideal names for their professions. What better name than Alfred Hitchcock for a horror director or Grigori Rasputin for a sex-mad monk?
And how could a girl christened Cindy Birdsong grow up to do anything more perfect than sing with The Supremes?
