Exotic baby monikers the name of the game for celebs

It's a measure of what we have come to expect from celebrities to consider that if Henry Fonda were alive and having children today, it would seem as likely for him to name his daughter, say, Hanoi, as to call her Jane.

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, 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. Even that name seems drab compared with Hollywood baby names like Pilot Inspektor, cooked up by Jason Lee, the star of My Name Is Earl, or Banjo, the inspiration of the Six Feet Under star Rachel Griffiths, or Moxie CrimeFighter, a name chosen last year by the comedian and magician Penn Jillette for his daughter.

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.

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," 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," Paltrow said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2004. "And I just thought it sounded so lovely and clean."

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.