Actress Claire

To anyone who does crossword puzzles, the name in the headline of the obituary leaped from the page of the newspaper. Ina Claire, the Broadway star of the 1920s who never quite made it in films, had died in San Francisco at age 89 (another source says that she was 92). Though she hadn’t been on a stage in years, her name regularly graces the crossword puzzles, so it was startling to find it so out of place in a headline. And it was enlightening to read the many credits of a woman otherwise known in the clues only as “Actress Claire.”

Her name might fade altogether were it not for her enduring fame in the crosswords. A similar honor has been bestowed on Theda Bara, Yoko Ono, Abba Eban and Erle Stanley Gardner, whose names, like Ina Claire’s, have the right sequence of consonants and vowels to help crossword-puzzle makers out of many jams. Regardless of their contributions to stage, screen, art, diplomacy and whodunit fiction, they have achieved a certain permanence through orthography.