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A brash young lawyer-turned-journalist named Geraldo Rivera burst upon the New York news scene in the early 1970s as a reporter for WABC-TV, and by 1972 he had garnered national acclaim and an Emmy Award for his series of investigative reports exposing deplorable conditions at the Willowbrook State School for the Mentally Ill, which led to a government investigation of the facility, court intervention, and the subsequent closing of much of the institution while reforms were implemented. After this promising beginning, however, much of the viewing public became disenchanted with Rivera as he moved through higher-profile national stints on ABC (Goodnight, America; Good Morning, America; and 20/20 Newsmagazine) and NBC (Geraldo), where he was perceived as eschewing the substantive in favor of the sensational, the tawdry, and the bizarre in segments such as Devil Worship: Exploring Satan's Underground (an excuse for airing more pointless and rambling interview footage with Charles Manson), The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault (a live, two-hour tease for the opening of the famous gangster's vault, which yielded nothing but a few old bottles), and an on-air talk show brawl with neo-Nazis which left Geraldo with a broken nose when he was hit in the face with a chair. Rivera's image problems continued during his work for Fox News: While covering American military activity in Afghanistan in 2001 he was criticized for taking a gun into a war zone and derided for misplacing the scene of a friendly fire incident by 300 miles (he later said he has confused two different incidents, although the other incident didn't take place until three days after his report), and while covering the war in Iraq in 2003 he was censured by the U.S. military (and reportedly booted out of Iraq) for broadcasting details that revealed tactical information about an upcoming U.S. attack. Of all the professional criticisms leveled at Geraldo Rivera over the years, one of the most common is also the one of the most unfair -- the claim he was born Jerry Rivers and shamelessly adopted the stage name Geraldo Rivera to appeal to Latino viewers and stand out from the crowd by claiming a counterfeit ethnicity: Although Geraldo Rivera was known by some slight variations of his given name in his younger days, those variations were not the product of a crass effort on his part to appear more ethnic by turning a distinctly Anglo name into a Latino one. Rather, they came about through his having parents from different ethnic backgrounds who meddled with their own names and their children's to accommodate others, through differences between English and Spanish versions of common names, and through people's natural tendency to use nicknames in place of formal names when addressing relatives and other close acquaintances. 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: But even though Geraldo's family name was unquestionably Rivera, his mother's finagling with the birth certificates of her children created a confusing situation in which Geraldo and some of his siblings bore surnames different than the family name: Yearbook photos from Geraldo's high school and college (the University of Arizona) document that his name was never Jerry Rivers -- his given name was indeed Gerald, and his surname alternated between the family name, Rivera, and his mother's continentalized spelling of it, Riviera: As one would expect, friends and acquaintances took to calling him by the less formal Gerry, while relatives on his father's side of the family knew him as Geraldo, the Spanish equivalent of Gerald. According to Geraldo himself, the epiphany which led to his opting for one version of his surname over the other occurred in his early 20s, while he was working as an assistant manager in a South Bronx department store: The final alteration came in 1969 when Geraldo Rivera, by then a law school graduate and a practicing lawyer, came to the attention of WABC-TV through his representation of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican activist group: While one might find much to criticize about Rivera's reportorial techniques, his ethnicity is genuine. His father's surname was Rivera, his given name was Gerald, and the only concession he made to fashion was to agree to go by the Spanish pronunciation of his given name to satisfy an employer who wanted an identifiably Puerto Rican reporter. In the world of television, that's practically a refreshing authenticity.
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