Is the rumor true that "Geraldo Rivera" is really "Jerry Rivers"??
Okay, so it's not a rumor. My daughter saw him for the first time and couldn't believe he was really hispanic. She thought his real name was probably Jerry Rivers.
FWIW -
Joan Rivers - Comedy Queen ? (orig. Joan Sandra Molinsky)
Johnny Rivers - "Whiskey A Go-Go" (orig. John Ramistella)
A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a tramp. - Joan Rivers
According to snopes.com -
Geraldo Rivera's father, Cruz Rivera, was the son of a Puerto Rican sugar plantation worker. After immigrating to New York, Cruz married a Jewish woman named Lilly Friedman, touching off the first of the Rivera family's name changes:
My father Allen Cruz Rivera worked for Republic [Aviation]. "Allen" was Dad's nom de mariage, taken to assuage his Jewish in-laws when he married my mother Lilly Friedman. Cruz, which translates as "cross" in English, was Dad's real first name, but he worried that my mother's family would choke on the Christianity of it.
HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT!