In 1952, at age 23, Frank Owen Goldberg, now Frank Owen Gehry, married Anita Snyder. She was a stenographer who helped pay for his Harvard city planning classes. Snyder knew that, as a child in Canada, Gehry had been bullied because he was Jewish. She encouraged Gehry to change his name from the Jewish-sounding Goldberg to Gehry, a name she had made up, because she was afraid that their daughters, Brina and Leslie, would be bullied in the same way. He officially changed his name from Goldberg to Gehry in 1954, at age 25. In a 1999 interview, Gehry told the reporter that he regretted the name change, and wouldn’t do it now. In 1956 Gehry moved the family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in order to take city planning classes at Harvard, though he dropped out after a year. After dropping out, Gehry moved the family back to Los Angeles for three years, then to Paris for a year. In 1961 the Gehry family moved back to Los Angeles.
After seeing a psychoanalyst in the late ’60s who told Gehry to either commit to Snyder or leave the marriage, Gehry decided to leave, and he and Snyder divorced in 1968.