It seems almost unimaginable for any 21st-century movie star to send his children out among the Hollywood elite equipped with ordinary names like Michael, Eric, Joel and Peter, as Kirk Douglas once did.
This point was driven home again last week, when Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband, Chris Martin, the frontman of the band Coldplay [both pictured, left], named their newborn son Moses. It was an unlikely enough name for a baby boy born in 2006, but perhaps less startling than the much discussed (and mocked) handle his sister, Apple, born two years ago, will carry through life.
Not that a name like Apple Martin stands out among celebrity children anymore. The director Peter Farrelly plucked that very name for his daughter before Apple Martin came along.Skeptics scoff at the mad rush by stars to come up with exotic baby names as another means for the attention-hungry to grab headlines. But psychologists and others who have worked with high-profile performers say that the naming of children can function as a window into a psyche. Perhaps subconsciously, they say, stars seize the opportunity of parenthood to express their obsessions, ambitions and inner quirks in a way that is, for a change, unscripted and not stage-managed by publicists.
Mr. Jillette, for example, managed to satisfy a number of interests and objectives when he and his wife, Emily, gave their daughter her highly individual name.
“You’re likely to be the only one in any normal-size group with that name,” Mr. Jillette said by e-mail, adding, ” ‘Moxie’ is a name that was created by an American for the first national soft drink and then went on to mean ‘chutzpah,’ and that’s nice.”
Besides, Moxie CrimeFighter fits right into the creative world.
“Everyone I know with an unusual name loves it,” he wrote. “It’s only the losers named Dave that think having an unusual name is bad, and who cares what they think. They’re named Dave.”
Not all performers present their decisions in such terms.
“Apples are so sweet, and they’re wholesome, and it’s biblical,” Ms. Paltrow said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2004. “And I just thought it sounded so lovely and clean.” (”Moses” meanwhile is a song that Mr. Martin wrote for Ms. Paltrow in 2003.)
But while middle-class parents increasingly trade in standard names like Karen and Joseph for fancier ones like Madison and Caleb, movie stars seem compelled to push the baby naming further. The names may be merely distinctive (say, Maddox, Angelina Jolie’s Cambodian-born adopted son) or bizarre, like Makena’lei Gordon, Helen Hunt’s daughter, inspired by a place name in Hawaii. Celebrities may not so subtly be saying that for them ordinary rules need not apply.
If celebrities are the new American aristocracy, the exotic baby name can sometimes function as the equivalent of a royal title, a way for a privileged caste to bestow the power of its legacy on future generations.
“There’s a sense of ‘I’m special, I’m different, and therefore my child is special and different,’ ” said Jenn Berman, a clinical psychologist in Beverly Hills, who has worked with actors. “It’s unconscious, but they think, ‘We’re a creative family, you have the potential to be creative, so here, I bestow you with the name ‘Joaquin,’ ” Dr. Berman said.
As artists, actors often consider it their duty to shake up assumptions, defy conventions and push the frontiers of the possible. To settle for a tedious name for the child would almost be a form of spiritual surrender, said Stuart Fischoff, a psychologist, who has also worked with Hollywood clients.
“They’re expressing their creativity, and they’re also expressing their fear,” Dr. Fischoff said. “It would be very embarrassing for people to think of them as normal.”
The unusual celebrity baby name is not new. Decades ago, Anthony Perkins named his sons Osgood and Elvis, and Marlon Brando named his daughter Cheyenne. And Ms. Paltrow, the daughter of the actress Blythe Danner and the director and producer Bruce Paltrow, is named Gwyneth, after all.
But those who track the popularity of baby names say that the pressure for stars to come up with creative names for their children has grown in recent years, particularly as Hollywood members of Generations X and Y have moved into their peak years of child rearing, carrying with them their generation’s taste for obscure pop cultural references, iconoclasm and smirky irony.
Just as Frank Zappa proved himself the classic hippie prankster by naming his children Moon Unit and Dweezil in the 1960’s, the actress Shannyn Sossamon, 26, established herself as a proud product of her times by naming her son, born in 2003, Audio Science.
“A name is free, it is something that everyone has, so if you are a celebrity, you are going to have to work that much harder to set yourself apart as a person with a specialized knowledge or a rarefied taste,” said Pamela Redmond Satran, who has written baby-name books with Linda Rosenkrantz, including “Beyond Jennifer and Jason” (St. Martin’s). She said a competitive impulse among stars seems to account for the recent bonanza of unlikely baby names.
“In a weird way, it’s like anorexia” in Hollywood, Ms. Satran said. “Anyone can be thin. The famous have to be thinner.”
They also have a traditional role as tastemakers. It’s hardly a coincidence that the name Ryder, which was the 901st most popular boy’s name in the country in 2001, according to Social Security Administration statistics, jumped to 341 in 2004, the year Kate Hudson and Chris Robinson chose it for their newborn son.
But as regular people — the sort who wait in line at restaurants and pay for their own clothing — try to catch up, the stars are pushed further into the realms of obscure names, in an effort to stay ahead of this particular fashion curve. So stars troll deeper into the Old Testament for name ideas (both Bono and Wynonna Judd have an Elijah, and Cynthia Nixon has a Charles Ezekiel), into world geography (David and Victoria Beckham have a Brooklyn, and Summer Phoenix and Casey Affleck have an Indiana) or even into Grandmother’s attic. (Jude Law dusted off the name Iris for his daughter, and Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams exhumed the name Matilda for their first child last fall.)
Some therapists said the celebrity impulse to foist odd names on their children amounts to simple narcissism by the parents, and the resulting status comes at the child’s expense. The children, after all, are the ones who will have to raise their hands every time a teacher calls out “Coco” or “Eulala.”
“It’s like having a mini me,” said Robert R. Butterworth, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles, who has had actors on his patient roster. “The child is a part of them, not an individual. It’s an appendage.”
The burden of celebrity falls even on the unborn. The child Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are expecting has already been a cover subject for magazines.
Other psychologists, however, believe fears for the child’s well-being are overblown. If, for example, Harvey Keitel’s son, born in 2004, feels a bit conspicuous being named Roman, he will at least have company. Both Cate Blanchett and Debra Messing named sons Roman that year.
Besides, the offspring of the Hollywood elite have other matters to discuss in therapy, said Dr. Berman, who said she has counseled several: “With kids of celebrities, in all honesty, the other issues are so big this one pales in comparison.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com
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