he·ro/ˈhirō/
noun
Defining a hero is pretty straight forward... actually understanding it is another thing... for the purposes of todays submission I'm not going to be discussing the sandwich. I mentioned very early on with this project that I spent a great deal of my time as a child and young adult on rainy Saturday afternoons in a darkened movie theatre and clearly understood the difference between the hero and villains. and for years those movie scenarios and the people who portrayed them sort of summed up my ideology about the whole thing...(Now I have a confession to make about this song in this video... I know the words by heart and the last time I was at The In Between Bar in Waikiki I sang it with a group of people karaoke style and to the astonishment of many I sounded much like Ms Tyler (I still smoked then and drank scotch) |
Bonnie Tyler---Holding Out For A Hero
Before I go any further I think I need to explain something... during my life I've been invited to parties for various reasons... certain parties (which I'll go into more detail shortly) when I was younger when I was fresh faced and reasonably good looking but was also extremely discrete and learned the importance of knowing how to keep secrets... my own and others... and as I got older I think I was on the guest list for many because of how I looked or looked at someone's side... but also I'm one of the few people I know who can be ready for any Black Tie or White Tie affair with little notice.... I like to believe today I get invited because I can bring something to the party with my devilish charm, intelligent conversational style and ebullient sparkling personality (truth be told perhaps it's still that I can still be ready for any Black Tie or White Tie shindig at the drop of a Top Hat)
But back to those dark movie houses of my youth... I had crushes on many leading men and even a few of their side kicks and adversaries... and they were for me the first time I started thinking about people as heros... but deep down I always equated a hero for some reason with being saved or protected... I think perhaps because of some of the issues and events that played out during my childhood I wanted someone to save me or protect me from them somehow... My first real life hero is someone I knew who never came home from Vietnam and died in a military hospital in Okinawa.
Now about some of those Hollywood parties I attended... You have to understand it was a different time and place and it was very difficult for anyone to comfortably go to gay bars without fears of repercussions of some sort or another particularly if you were in the entertainment business in movies or television... so there were private parties held in the homes of a few people (I know what you are thinking it was nothing like that... or none that I attended anyway) where men could come and meet other men and talk openly and make plans to meet again or not... it was basically a cocktail party... I met a lot of nice and interesting people and had a few admirers and made a few actual friends... but sadly I learned that a few of the people I had idolized when I was younger were vain, mean and bitter... someone I met at one of these parties explained to me later that one can be posing as a hero or a villain and actually be entirely something else and that all of these larger than life people were simply human with the same strengths and foibles as everyone else; and how they conducted their lives were the important issues... I don't think some of those men ever learned that sadly but it was really the first step I took to understanding the meaning of being a man of strength and integrity.
I'll never, ever tell you the names of the people I met and became friends with or a few others I became a bit more friendly with... it's all part of what I said in (Click on I've Got A Secret)... I can keep a secret and I'm taking these to my grave... One of the people I never met at these parties (or ever... but I'll get to that) was Dominick Dunne but I certainly heard his name bandied about a few times by a few people and I sort of forgot about him until heard the news about his daughters murder in the early 80's and when I read "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles" on a long flight when I was captivated with his writing style and subsequently in the following books how he wove a composite of actual people (some of whom I knew... or knew about) into some of the characters and it was just as fun to put the puzzle pieces together of who he was referencing... and I came to admire his contributions for Vanity Fair magazine... (I used to get invited to a great many of the VF parties mostly because of people I knew there at the time) and in the late 90's when he wrote "The Way We Lived Then" Vanity Fair was giving a party in his honor to celebrate and promote the book (I had seen an advanced copy of the book) and was delighted to be invited to the party because as far as I know he and only he had the answer to a question and puzzle I had been trying to solve about a mutual friend... sadly I was rushed to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy the night before the party... I took it as a sign that I needed to let go of the question and the puzzle I was trying to decipher; and truth be told I'm not sure he even had the answer or would have told me if he did...
OK now back to about the time I was running around in Southern California when I first met someone who made a tremendous impact on my life later... (yesterday I went and reread some of these entries because I was positive I had told the story.... but I did not apparently) one Saturday morning I was returning home after a rather frisky Friday night adventure and was doing the walk of shame... with messy hair, unshaved face, rumpled clothing smelling, like scotch, cigarettes and sex and I ran into my mother and one of her friends on Wilshire Boulevard... I'll call her Mrs. Brisson because that was her name and they were talking to who turned out to be Audrey Hepburn... well the look on my mothers face did not betray that she hoped the sidwalk would suddenly open and swallow me before she was forced to introduce me... because of that moment I've never left home (or anywhere else for that matter) with out having done some basic grooming, hygiene and un-rumpling myself as much as possible... several years later I met Miss Hepburn again in the Swiss Air departure lounge and we visited and by fate ended up sitting next to each other on the way to New York... she became one of my heros partly because of how graciously handled my reminding her the details of our first meeting but in the duration of the flight I learned what a loving and devoted mother she was; not in what she said but in how she spoke about her life and children... and I was captivated on how she conducted herself and lived her life... one of the things being she flew in economy on short flights so as not to waste money... but mostly I was so impressed with the work that she did with UNICEF. The last time I saw her was a UNICEF party at The Waldorf Astoria (I was somebody's +1... remember I have a tuxedo in the closet ready to go)... somewhere but lost to time is a photo of she and I visiting with Ralph and Ricky Lauren...
Perhaps the person who has been the biggest influence on me in defining a hero is Jill Kinmont-Boothe who was paralyzed from the shoulders down in a skiing accident when she was 18 and subsequently wrote a book that was adopted into the screenplay for the movie "The Other Side Of The Mountain"... I first met her at the Mammoth Ski area in the mid-70's and a couple of years later at a fund raising event at The Beverly Hills Hotel (If that tuxedo could talk... I finally had to buy a new one a few years ago that has not had nearly the social life my first one had)... my memory of her and her experiences went through my mind almost everyday when I was facing the challenge of walking again and rebuilding my life... and after I learned a harsh lesson as she had that life had gone on with out me after I left the race... it was up to me to work with what I had left and what I had to offer the the world and myself and needed to join life and the living again... for me I was able to walk away from a wheel chair where she could not but from it... but she helped bring about change in legislation and awareness for people living with physical disabilities but maybe most importantly brought hope and inspiration... and that for me is the foundation of defining a hero and most importantly for me not waiting to be saved but taking the necessary actions to save myself and become my own hero.
I mentioned some of my sports heros listed here (Summer Wishes... click to read)
and some other Hollywood heros in (Living Legends... click and scroll to bottom) but I have to add a mention to Mark Spitz who I met in 1965 at the Maccabiah Games in Tel Aviv and again briefly at the Olympics in 1972
He was the first person to achieve the perfect record in Gold in seven events... while he inspired me in other ways he has inspired others to work to break his records... he also became the first swimmer to make a monetary splash with endorsements... and although he failed in his attempted comeback in 1992... he inspired me for trying.
The list could go on and on with various people for many reasons from Helen Keller to Rosa Parks and John F Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and everyone who died and survived the Holocaust ... but I'll close with John Glenn who was one of the Mercury 7; the first test pilots chosen by NASA to become astronauts and he was the first American to Orbit the earth... and the oldest member on the Discovery Space Shuttle... and for his 24 years of dedicated service in the US Senate...
And although I never met him like the others he helped me find my own inner strength and vision to help myself and hopefully in some way inspire others... See you next week!
