Mr. Bear is smarter than this...

[Don Dresden]

Might this be the true explanation for his mysterious name change, from Klempner to Bear, at the height of the Vietnam draft era????

I believe it was because Bear's father, John Klempner, was blacklisted by Hollywood for his Communist activities.

Here is Bear's spin on it:

My father, John Klempner, was an accountant for 25 years at Westvaco. He started writing novels in his 40s. 20th Century Fox bought the rights to his Letter to Five Wives and hired him to work on the screenplay. This man who had literally never been more than 30 miles from Times Square suddenly had a bungalow and two secretaries on the Fox lot in Hollywood. While he worked on the screenplay, Joseph Manckiewicz did the lion's share, and won the Oscar for best screenplay for it. My father got a mention at the awards ceremony.

And then he was blacklisted. This was the McCarthy era, and, while I don't think he ever joined anything, he played bridge and tennis with the 'wrong' people. For a year or so, he got some work, including turning his novelette Three for Jamie Dawn into a low-budget movie (but with real stars of the time: June Havoc, etc.). He only wrote one other movie (yes, Gus has tracked that one down, too!), and then went back to being an accountant.

When our first book proposal was accepted (by Harcourt Brace) in the late 60s, we told my father about the name change, suggesting (among other things) that two authors with the name John Klempner was perhaps one too many. His immediate and unexpected response was, "No, two to many. I've always wanted to change my name, but I never had the courage to do it." He even had his new name picked out, and applauded our courage for doing it.

http://forums.degreeinfo.com/showthread....198&page=2

But like most of Bear's fractured history and apologia, the story doesn't quite measure up to the actual facts.

Before daddy Klempner worked with Mankiewicz to convert his story into a screenplay, he worked with another writer, Vera Caspary.

Caspary made it a practice only to accept jobs of adaptation; she found it more creative and fun, as in the case of John Klempner's book a Letter to Five Wives. To streamline the film, one wife was eliminated by Caspary, and when the script reached production, Joseph L. Mankiewicz removed another one.[2] Due to a loophole in the Academy Awards nomination rules, Mankiewicz alone was nominated and won the Oscar for Best Screenplay. However when the same screenplay won the Writer's Guild of America award for Best Written American Comedy, Mankiewicz was forced to share the award and credit with Caspary, the original adaptor.[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Caspary#Igee

Caspary was an admitted Communist who hosted party meetings in her home, held party fund-raisers, attended party committees, worked on party initiatives, and even visited Russia to confirm her beliefs.

Caspary joined the Communist party under an alias...she claimed to have confined her activities to fund-raising and hosting meetings.[2] Caspary visited Russia in an attempt to confirm her beliefs...she continued to contribute money and support similar causes. ...  Though claiming to never actively trying to recruit anyone, she admits performing Party chores such as fund-raising and hosting the fortnightly Confidences Club meetings at her home....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Caspary

It was while working in Austria on the musical adaptation of Daddy Long Legs, Caspary learned she had been added to the gray list and told to abandon the project. If you had appeared before the HUAC committee and refused to name names, you were blacklisted, if your file indicated that you had signed pledges, attended congresses or contributed to doubtful causes, you were graylisted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Caspary#Igee

Clearly this was not a case of "playing bridge and tennis with the wrong people."   Daddy Klempner was disgraced for consorting with avowed Communists and for refusing to come clean about that fact.

When junior Klempner decided to follow daddy's footsteps and become a writer, he had the shameful burden of his father's disreputable baggage to overcome.  It wasn't, as he tells it, his wife's unpronounceable, inconvenient to hyphenate Russian name that prompted him to jettison his father's name.  Rather, it was the fear that he would be identified either as the offspring of a detestable, blacklisted communist or mistaken for that very person himself.

Bear seems to think that if you tell the same lie over and over that eventually people will believe it is true.  Not here, Comrade Klempner!