Mistaken ID : Having the Name of One of the Glamorous Can Be Clamorous for Those Whose Life Styles Are Unlike the Rich and Famous
She can’t sing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” and sequined dresses and feathered boas aren’t part of her wardrobe, but Diana Ross of Arleta is still Diana Ross.
Ross is one of several San Fernando and Santa Clarita valley residents who share a name with a celebrity, a circumstance that can lead to confusion over which one is the real McCoy.
“Actually, it gets me places,” confided Ross, a gregarious 20-year-old cosmetician.
Her name’s renown helped when she recently started her own business at the Bijan a Salon in Van Nuys, offering facials and hair waxing. She said that after she mailed flyers, “people wanted to come in and see if it was really Diana Ross.”
Although she never would be mistaken for the 43-year-old singer, heads still turn whenever she is paged.
“At beauty school they used to page me, and that’s how I would meet a lot of people, because they would wait and turn around to look and say, ‘Oh, God, where is she?’ ”
But, when Ross was younger, the experience was a bit more painful. While working at May Co., she was paged to return to her department. “I waited about five seconds until everybody turned away. I was so embarrassed,” she said.
Her name can bring out some people’s higher instincts, as when a 12-year-old Ross was rushed to a hospital emergency room with a cut lip. Upon hearing that Diana Ross was there, “everybody came to my rescue,” she said, laughing.
“All the nurses were telling everybody in the whole building that Diana Ross was here, and here was this little blonde white girl!”
Scripture Begets Her Name
Although she was born at a time when the singer was cresting on the wave of Motown popularity, Diana’s name had more to do with a supreme being than the Supremes.
“I went through the Bible, because we’re Christians and I wanted to have a biblical name,” explained her mother, Joan, who selected Diana’s siblings’ names the same way. “Diana was the goddess of silver in the Old Testament, and I thought, ‘Isn’t that lovely?’ ”
Trumpet player Sam Davis, 66, of San Fernando, recalled that when his former band, the Samuel Davis Quartet, performed locally 10 years ago, people often came to hear them thinking the famous black singer was appearing. However, at 6-foot-1 and 180 pounds there is no way he could be mistaken for the diminutive crooner.
“It used to happen all the time,” chuckled Davis, now an architectural draftsman and president of his own cable TV satellite system company, the Samuel Davis Co. “But I didn’t see any reason to change my name.”
Sam Davis Jr. met Sammy Davis Jr. a few decades ago when they were booked on the same bill. “He was playing the Orpheum circuit at that time, a chain of theaters from New York to Los Angeles,” recalled Davis, who dropped the Jr. from his surname when his father died.
“It was like vaudeville. In those days, what most of the theaters would do is play two grade-B movies and then have a pretty good vaudeville show.
“Sammy Davis started out with an uncle and his father. And I was playing with a group on the same billing.”
Their encounter, he said, was brief. “He wasn’t exactly famous, a household word, at that time.”
These days, though, when strangers are intrigued or amused by his name, “it usually is an opening for a friendship to develop,” Davis said.
Neil Diamond of Hidden Hills has had a few experiences with mistaken identity he’d like to forget.
At 48, the tall, dark-haired optometrist looks like the popular singer of “Solitary Man,” and occasionally has found himself wanting to be in that state.
“I don’t get a lot of enjoyment out of it,” he said.
Norma Diamond, 42, who works in her husband’s Simi Valley office, said the most embarrassing situation occurred during a salmon fishing trip in British Columbia. Checking into a Hilton Hotel, Norma Diamond paid for the room with a credit card, then joined her husband for several hours of fishing. When they returned to their room, two dozen red roses from a fan club greeted them.
“They were waiting in the bar,” she said. “They” turned out to be a group of about a dozen ecstatic women, mostly in their 20s.
Diamond bought them all a drink.
Even though Diamond’s name is preceded by the word “Dr.” in the phone book, he still gets fan mail, and it’s not from patients. Nordstrom department store wrote asking him to autograph a ball to be auctioned off for charity. “Periodically, people call him from back East,” Norma said. And, occasionally, a fan magazine will print the optometrist’s address. “Then he’ll get calls, or they’ll write letters and send us pictures to autograph.”
Chuck Norris of Canyon Country might not sound anything like the karate champion and star of the movies “Delta Force” and “Good Guys Wear Black,” but East Coast businessmen always return his calls.
“I usually don’t sit on hold as long,” said 31-year-old Norris, manager of a Sears catalogue sales center.
Most people think he is pulling their leg. “It kind of breaks the ice,” he said.
Having famous names runs in the Norris family. Norris’ 7-year-old son is named Christopher Lee, the same as the star of several British Dracula films. Norris and his wife, Vicki, had expected to have a girl and planned to name her Christie Marie. “We just wanted something that rhymed with Christie Marie,” he explained.
Christopher Lee, Norris said, “likes to tell his friends that his father is Chuck Norris. And, being first-graders, they’re pretty impressionable. They all get a kick out of that.”
Norris does go to see Chuck Norris’ movies, but acknowledges: “I like Bruce Lee better.”
Pedro Guerrero of Sepulveda is a welder for Atlas Steel in Chatsworth. The 28-year-old father of two said he gets calls, some long-distance and at night, asking if he is the 31-year-old Dodger outfielder.
Sometimes he feels like joking and replies, “ ‘Yes, I’m the little one, his brother,’ ” he chuckled.
He explains that they have called the wrong number and tells them, “ ‘It’s the same name, but a different guy, you know? He comes from the Dominican Republic, and I come from Mexico, from Guadalajara.”
Jimmy Carter of North Hollywood said that, when his namesake was in the Oval Office, he “heard every bad presidential joke for four years. You say the first line, and I can repeat the rest of it!”
A clerk in the office services department of Columbia Pictures, the 43-year-old Missouri native still speaks with a slight drawl and added mischievously, “people think we are related.”
Despite the jokes, the name has paid off. A professional saxophonist for 25 years and member of the Musicians Union, Local 47, Carter said, “I used to get work calls because the name was unique. Sometimes I think I would get a call to work before someone else.”
He supported the Democratic president and enjoys the notice their common name still receives.
“Sometimes,” Carter said, “you’d like people to forget your name.
“But no one does.”
