Q & A : ‘I Was in Total Awe of . . .’

Who was your hero when you were growing up, and who is it now?

Stanley Clarke, bassist:

“As a kid, my hero was Miles Davis. I grew up as a musician and studied music, and when I came across Miles when I was about 13 or 14, I was in total awe of him. . . . He spoke of his music as an art.

“And he was very proud to be a black musician. He didn’t say it in a pretentious kind of way. His musical heritage was Louis Armstrong and the blues, and he was very proud of that.

“I remember one day I went to his house and told Miles that he was one of my big influences. And he sort of looked at me and he says, ‘Huh. Influences. Huh.’ Whatever that meant, I don’t know. Was I disappointed in his response? No. He could have punched me in the mouth, and it would have been all right.

“Today I don’t have any specific heroes, but heroes pop up in my life day to day. I don’t really romanticize people like I used to. But if someone performs a great act, like saving 1,000 people, I’m there, I’m their biggest fan.”

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Ava Fabian, owner, Ava’s restaurant and nightclub:

“It’s always been my mom. I love her dearly, she’s always been there for us and she’s always backed me up in everything I’ve done. She was a single mom and raised three children--and she did a good job of raising all of us. We grew up in Upstate New York, and she put us through private school, and we always had clean clothes and food on the table. And she was always pleasant to be around. I still call her every day, we’re friends. And I go home every year on Mother’s Day.”

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Nancy Thomas, curator of ancient art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

“My early heroes were writers--Jack London and Richard Halliburton. With London, I admired the quality of his literature and the subjects he wrote about, adventure and travel. I think ‘Call of the Wild’ was the first book of his I read.

“Now my hero is Dr. Dorothea Arnold, curator of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She’s combined her personal and professional life in a deft and balanced way, and she’s very gregarious and warm and a highly professional curator. I met her while working on a project called ‘The American Discovery of Ancient Egypt,’ which will be here in 1995. She has two very wonderful sons and a husband who’s in the same field, and she’s balanced her life in such a nice way.”

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Billy Grubman, co-founder, Dream Street Foundation, a camp for children with life-threatening diseases:

“My first hero was Superman when I was about 3 or 4 years old. This was a guy who did all good.

“Then when I was growing up, I remember hearing sonic booms. We lived in the San Fernando Valley, and I didn’t know what they were.

“My folks had some friends connected with the aerospace industry, and they knew that it was aircraft. Later I found out that Chuck Yeager was doing this work. The fact that man could travel faster than sound was incredible. That must have stuck with me, because I (learned how to fly) a jet about 10 years ago.

“I don’t think there is one person today I consider a hero. But we deal with kids who are dying and those are heroes. Everything goes wrong for them and nothing ever goes right, and they stand up there and take it, and they’re strong and true inspirations.”

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Brent Bolthouse, nightclub impresario and owner of the new restaurant Babylon:

“Han Solo and Luke Skywalker were my heroes when I was around 11 or 12.

“As I got a little older, in my mid-teens, Salvador Dali and surrealism played an important role in my life. It was the awesomeness of his work--some of his pieces are so huge, so breathtakingly beautiful, and the time and thought and passion that went into those pieces really moved me.

“And in the last few years it’s been Joseph Campbell. Most of the heroes that kids have today--rock stars, actors, people like that--are emotionally crippled. This man was trying to put across a message that was real.

“In many of his works he studies everything, and he understands it all, from Buddhism to Christianity, and takes it all in and finds the common denominators in all of it. Today we don’t have heroes in the sense of Zeus and Aphrodite and a greater thing than ourselves to strive for, especially in America.”