Word: gramont
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...surprised several weeks ago at dinner when a friend of mine, the writer Ted Morgan, born French as Sanche de Gramont but years ago Americanized, launched into a rhapsody about professional football. Ted, whose Sundays are lost from September to Super Bowl, loves what he calls "the beauty" of pro football--its power, its grace, its intelligence. Ted explains that football is a symbolic re-enactment of America's westward conquest of territory--while baseball is a "post-settlement" enterprise in which each team by turns pacifically yields the field to the other...
...biographer himself has been transformed. Morgan changed his name from Sanche de Gramont in 1977 when he became a U.S. citizen. The son of a diplomat had been raised as a hereditary count in one of France's oldest aristocratic families. A graduate of Yale, Morgan detailed his affection for the U.S. in Rowing Toward Eden (1981). Now at work on a one-volume life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Morgan says, "I think about him constantly. The subject is something that you can't get out of your head. They said that when William Manchester was working...
...storytelling or good sense. Meanwhile, what about this name change? Why Morgan? Why not Carnegie or Rockefeller? Why not Svensen or Von Humboldt or Verrazanno or Sun Yatsen? Well, Morgan explains, he threw away his first name, Sanche-a contraction of St. Charles -and scrambled the letters of De Gramont. Among the anagrams that resulted were Dr. Montage, R.D. Megaton and Ted Morgan. Morgan, he felt, was someone you would lend your car to. Dogs and small children would like...
Nancy Morgan objected that the anagram was a "remuddling of an already felt confusion." His brother George, both a De Gramont and a brand manager for Lipton Tea, said that Morgan was throwing away a valuable brand name. (Sanche de Gramont had written several books, including an astringent national portrait, The French, and a good popular history of the Niger River, The Strong Brown God.) The author ignored all this and became Morgan...
...Mark Rothko); Michael Igor Peschkowsky (Mike Nichols). If Columbus had hung around, he might have called himself Collins. By the end of the volume does the reader feel a giddy temptation to throw away his own first name and mess around with the letters of the rest? As De Gramont-Morgan proves, that requires a lot of thought. - S. Wok (formerly John Skow...