Sometimes people ask me if “Lindy West” is a pseudonym. They wonder
if I made it up so that I could make fun of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
with impunity. Or they think I’m a fictional character invented
by The Stranger. Or that my real name was something
so ridiculous that I came up with Lindy West as a savvy PR move.
Usually I say, “Oh no, ha ha,” or “Get away from me, please,” but
once in a while I remember that that last part is actually kind of
true.
My paternal grandfather was an old-timey radio
producer—Burns and Allen, Gene Autry—and in the 1940s,
when he took a job at CBS, it was suggested that he change his name
from the unwieldy (and, perhaps, uncomfortably Austrian) “Rechenmacher”
to the more radio-appropriate “West.” My dad became Paul West Jr. and
now I am Lindy West. My name was foisted upon me by CBS radio, Kunta
Kinte–style (except, you know, minus the slavery and the LeVar
Burton). The nerve.
Seventy or eighty years removed, my grandparents’ Old Hollywood
party-time existence seems impossibly glamorous to me. I never knew
either of them, but I imagine loud laughter and natty suits.
Hats on heads, hats in hat boxes. Whiskey in the winter, gin in the
summer. Grandma Winnie was a singer. When my dad was a little boy, in
the ’30s, she worked in movies, dubbing the vocal parts for leading
ladies who couldn’t sing.
It’s difficult—especially if you don’t try very hard, like
me—to find information about classic movie dubbing: The studios
kept it quiet, and most of the singers went uncredited. But I found a
website compiled from “more than forty years of
compulsive-
obsessive data-gathering” that lists hundreds of movie
roles and the invisible voices who dubbed them.
Grandma Winnie was on there three times (under her real name and her
professional name, Mona Lowe): International Settlement (1938)
for Dolores del Rio; Ready for Love (1934) for Marjorie Rambeau;
and White Woman (1933) for Carole Lombard. Two more seconds of
Googling, and I found two of them for sale on another website.
Both movies (White Woman and International Settlement)
are entertaining if insignificant melodramas about feisty ladies and
restless natives. In White Woman, Carole Lombard’s eyebrows are
insane. Charles Laughton makes a magnificent jungle ham.
International Settlement stars George Sanders, famous for his
1972 suicide note (“Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I
feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in
this sweet cesspool—good luck.”).
But my parents and I were just watching them for the singing.
“That’s her!” my dad said, as Dolores del Rio vamped on a Shanghai
stage, her voice a dark, purring alto. “That’s definitely
Mother. That’s her.” I still have goose bumps. 
