6 Top Careers : San Diegans Tell of Finding Path to Success

They easily rank as six of San Diego’s biggest successes--the best and the brightest. They vary in age but only slightly in intensity. Most consider themselves to be lucky, but believe luck is mainly a virtue of being prepared--of working hard. Most see hard work as a testament to integrity--as the reason they’re successful.

All believe in risks. Some have taken one big one, others a series of ongoing chances. Each believes, like the Chinese proverb, that danger can be a pathway to opportunity--in some cases, golden opportunities that come along as gifts and can never be ignored.

Each operates from a strictly held system of values, compatible with goals, risk-taking and keeping failure in sharp perspective.

Many could have been chosen, but these illustrate best in 1987 San Diego what being a success is all about--and why it’s happening to them right now. They come from the arts and sports, business and law, literature and academia, science and medicine.

They are male and female, black and white, but hold far more parallels than differences. A lot of it has to do with taking gambles, working hard, being brave enough to move past failure.

Most of these success stories went looking not for luck but for an edge--and found one. Most say hard work is great--within reason. They all say failure is merely part of the risk.

Here are the stories of six successful San Diegans:

Des McAnuff

Not long ago, Des McAnuff found himself getting angry--really angry. He was working with a “very gifted fellow” who seemed unable, and deliberately unwilling, to pair dedication and hard work with the talent he held so abundantly.

“I’ve never gotten so angry about anything as I did about him,” McAnuff fumed.

He believes hard work must accompany talent, no matter how plentiful the latter. He believes risks have to be taken but well-chosen. McAnuff--who works seven days a week and rarely takes a day off--appears to have taken the right risks.

At 35, he is artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, a position he has held since 1982. Many consider the playhouse the best regional theater in the United States. “Big River,” a Tony Award-winning musical that originated in McAnuff’s theater, is one he directed. “Big River” later went to Broadway and is now a touring road show.

McAnuff, who called “Big River” a risk that worked, has learned to keep topping himself. One has to, he said.

Theater, in his view, tends not to be linear.

“It’s like passing from world to world,” he said. “Each project is a thoroughly new experience. Just at the moment you think everything is going tremendously well . . . you fall off the cliff.”

McAnuff said he has probably fallen off dozens of times. Critics would have trouble proving it, and many would scoff at such modesty.

A bright, articulate man who favors silky New Wave threads and red or black Reebok shoes, McAnuff is a former rock singer born in Illinois. His father, an Irishman born in Canada who was a Spitfire pilot, was killed in a car wreck six months before McAnuff was born. He was raised in Toronto by his mother and grandparents, who stamped his success with attention and adoration.

“Obviously, my father’s death was a great family tragedy,” he said. “But I was very much removed from it. I was definitely smothered with attention when I was a baby. I don’t think it left any major scars on my psyche. In a sense, I was replacing my father’s life in the family.”

McAnuff said he’s motivated by the desire to do well, the wish to express himself as an artist, and by a love of the theater and his feeling that it may be an endangered art form. His work fills him with joy, he said, and joy is the main motivation that anyone should have for work.

McAnuff’s mother taught him that to be successful you have to make your hobby your work. He sees this “wonderfully wise advice” as the secret to anyone’s success:

Make your hobby your work!

He sees his hobby “as a window to the times we live in. In order to understand ourselves, we need forms to make it possible. Theater is a great place to do that. I’m a very curious person. One thing I’m addicted to is the opportunity of entering a new world, whether it’s arms control (‘A Walk in the Woods’), the world of the immigrant (‘The Matchmaker’) or a black man and a white boy floating down the Mississippi (‘Big River’).”

Another factor imbuing McAnuff is the sense of living as a missionary--”To make people aware that culture is more a right than a privilege.” He’s troubled by the lack of support plaguing the arts and said his own rise came in an era of unparalleled generosity.

His career blossomed when the Canadian music scene was booming. Unlike most of the competition, however, he emerged as an adolescent. His Toronto is home to The Band, Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell, all of whom were hot when he began. At 13, he was writing and playing his own tunes. At 14, he was opening for folk singer Arlo Guthrie in Canadian nightclubs.

After “going electric” as a teen-ager, he auditioned for the touring road show of “Hair” and made it to the final cut. The requirement of learning the music inspired him. He then wrote his own musical, which the high school principal agreed to stage despite its risky, controversial overtones. He doesn’t know where he would be right now if the principal had said no.

By the age of 19, McAnuff had written a portfolio of plays and musicals, which were later performed in some of the top theaters of Canada. By the time he got to New York in 1976, he held an edge in experience--and in risk-taking--that Yankee counterparts could never match.

His play, “Leave It to Beaver Is Dead,” won the Soho Arts Award for best off-Broadway play. As co-founder of the Dodger Theatre, he directed its first production, “Gimme Shelter,” which won the Soho arts award for best direction. He later immersed himself in directing Shakespeare.

He credits several mentors with having been influential: Canadian artist Eric Aldwinckle, who taught him painting and chess before McAnuff turned 11; acting teacher Basya Hunter; New York theater executive Joseph Papp, “with helping me run an institution,” and Michael Langham and John Hirsch, for molding his handling of Shakespeare.

McAnuff loathes taking or making assignments, believing true art comes from the soul of the person who creates it.

Once an idea, or dream, is conceived, then, he said, “You work like hell” to make it happen.

Those who are talented but don’t work hard “just don’t make it.”

Sherley Anne Williams

Sherley Anne Williams is working on a screenplay. And that’s a challenge, because Williams, “a 43-year-old grandmother,” has never done a screenplay before. She has written a novel--”Dessa Rose”--which was published a year ago and immediately set critics to fawning.

The fact that one of those critics wrote for the Sunday New York Times Book Review--and gushed more than any other--only sugar-coated Williams’ success.

“Dessa Rose” is the book that will one day become a movie, although Williams, with a lusty sense of humor, had to laugh about that.

“This project did have a deadline,” she said. “But that baby just came and went.”

Ironically, the success of “Dessa Rose,” her first novel, has allowed Williams to dabble in a strange new form.

“I’m learning new skills, new ways of telling a story,” she said. “It enlarges the number of things you can do as a writer. Doing a screenplay is both frustrating and exciting. It’s almost like learning a new language.

“Words don’t fit together in a screenplay the same way they do in a novel. It’s a much more objective medium. Prose and poetry are very intimate kinds of expressions--there’s nothing between you and the audience except the words on the page. In film, a lot of different things are interposed between the writer and the audience.”

No matter how talented the writer or the genre she chooses, Williams said hard work is and always has been the dictator of success.

“Hard work is the only way you have of manifesting your talent,” she said. “The better you get at something, the more you realize how much better you can be. The older you get, the more your definition of fine is exacting and rigorous. Rather than resting on your laurels, you have to work harder and harder just to please yourself.”

Williams teaches at UC San Diego. Her specialties are Afro-American literature and fiction writing. She plans to return to teaching later this month, after a heady sabbatical, in which she sold her book to the movies and took in all of the laurels it continues to reap. She is now in the midst of a national book tour to promote its paperback sales.

Williams has prospered with the sale of the book, but not nearly as much as she and her wildest fantasies--much less her friends and family--were led to believe. Writing a book, even a hot one, hardly ensures millionaire status. Still, life is better, and finally, she’s winning the recognition that for years was as fleeting as feeling rich.

Williams grew up in the dusty San Joaquin Valley, the daughter of migrant laborers. Income usually came in a welfare check. She admits monetary reward is part of her motivation, but to have it as the prime motivation, she said, would be silly for a writer.

“I was so far down,” she said with a laugh, “that it’ll be years ‘fore this one’s on Easy Street.”

She said a prime motivation is the desire to be a great writer. She would love to win a major literary award and hasn’t yet. She does appreciate money for the freedom it’s given her.

“If you want to continue to be a working writer, you stay in the trenches,” she said. “Money doesn’t change the fact that you still have to spend a certain number of hours doing it, every day. The material success is supposed to allow more time and energy to be in the trenches. It hasn’t done that as much as I would have liked.”

Williams said failure is crucial to any real success, but in ways that aren’t always apparent.

“The central failure of my life was not getting my first novel published,” she said. “It was a contemporary novel, and it just never got published. So, I turned to writing poetry (and published a collection nominated for the National Book Award called ‘Some One Sweet Angel Chile.’). By having worked in that medium, I was much better able to write ‘Dessa Rose.’ I think it enhanced the lyrical quality of the prose. That came directly from writing poetry--and that came from failure.”

Tony Gwynn

Last year, Tony Gwynn felt like a failure.

He was mulling the possibility of bankruptcy. He had co-signed a number of loans, taken out by a former agent, who failed to make good on the payments. A series of bad investments only worsened the stew. Finally, Gwynn did file.

Bankruptcy at 27.

He was never more embarrassed.

“Here I was, a better-than-average baseball player with a six-year contract making a lot more money than the average man,” he said. “And here I was having problems.”

The public scarcely could have noticed. Gwynn finished the 1986 season as the No. 3 hitter in the National League with a .329 average. For the first time in his career, he won a Gold Glove for outstanding play in right field.

He filed for bankruptcy in May of this year, then went on a hitting streak that continues unabated. He’s batting .371 and leading the league. Gwynn said airing his financial problem in public--his most humbling moment in an otherwise charmed existence--fueled his desire to play better.

“When it finally broke, it was like a mountain being moved off my back,” he said. “Sometimes, failure is necessary. It toughens you up, opens your eyes. It makes you realize that not everything surrounding this game is easy. There are people out there trying to take advantage of you. You have to be careful.

“Some things you have to work through. I don’t just jump in and do things anymore. I’m glad it happened now, though, and not later in my career. Now I’ve got a chance to start over.”

Gwynn said he had never felt like a failure on the field. But, strangely, neither does he feel like The Natural. On a recent afternoon, he was contemplating his batting average (at the time, .368) and thinking it wasn’t good enough.

Teammates say he’s a gifted perfectionist with a sweet swing, a low-key, affable personality who burns for improvement. They also say he’s the first player to arrive every day and the last to leave.

He works hard, he said, believing he has to in order to succeed. But a desire for greatness also spurs Gwynn. He would like to be the next .400 hitter--there hasn’t been one since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941--and he thinks there probably won’t be one, “but why the hell not try?” To that end, he’s obsessed with the game, with getting better.

Gwynn spends much of his free time listening to jazz and rhythm and blues but also watching himself on videotape, hoping to better his almost-perfect swing. He studies and catalogues every pitcher in the National League the same way. He tapes their games off a satellite dish, probing strengths--and weaknesses--during hours of rewinding and fast-forwarding. He spends the rest of his time with his wife, Alicia, and their two children.

He even spends time at the plate with them. Strangely, Gwynn, the consummate hitter, said he never daydreams in the sanctuary of the outfield--only at bat, where most would agree he knows few equals.

“It’s the weirdest thing,” he said. “A lot of times up there, I’m waiting for the pitch and wondering what the kids are doing, how Alicia’s feeling. I’m wondering if the kids are in their seats or up in the baby room. And then all of a sudden, there’s the pitch, and I have to swing.”

During his own childhood, he never dreamed he would play major-league baseball--he thought professional basketball was his calling, and even then only for a year or two. (He played both basketball and baseball at San Diego State University.) He feels he was blessed not only with talent but also with splendid mentors, most notably Jim Dietz, his baseball coach at SDSU and the man who accelerated his perfectionist passion for the sport.

Dietz took Gwynn’s talent and fortified it with fundamentals. At the end of a spring training workout during his rookie season, then-Padres manager Dick Williams scolded his outfielders for not backing up bases, thus letting the opposition pad its lead with giveaway runs. Only Gwynn escaped Williams’ wrath--he was credited with impeccable fundamentals, with never making mistakes.

Williams’ praise relieved Gwynn of the burden of having to prove himself. He believes in the “taste concept”--you taste a little success, you want more. Pride yourself on the little victories, Gwynn said; they may become big ones.

As a result, his personality has changed. He said he’s no longer the shy, frightened person he felt he was at SDSU. He’s outgoing and unintimidated, eager to engage just about anyone in conversation.

He recently felt age creeping up.

“I can’t get by on pure talent like I used to,” he said, rewinding to his rookie year of 1982. An athlete’s life on the field just isn’t that long, so, he said, work habits are as crucial as the breaths you take.

Gwynn arrives at the park every day no later than 2:30 p.m. (for a night game starting at 7). He dresses, sits on the bench around 3:30, meditates by visualizing what might happen later, does “extra” hitting (before usual batting practice), shags fly balls in the outfield and then steps in “the cage” for several minutes of slapping the ball to left field, then center, then right.

On a recent night, everything went poorly. Gwynn felt angry, restless. The routine just didn’t feel like normal. He was sure the night would go badly.

In five trips to the plate, he had five hits.

“I can’t explain it,” he said, shaking his head, pointing out that, sometimes, success is like that.

“Never question it,” he said. “It might go away. Sometimes, it’s like the wind.”

Milton J. Silverman Jr.

Milton J. Silverman Jr. most enjoys that moment in the courtroom when “things are out of control, when the witness is at risk and you’re at risk. Suddenly, you adjust to what the witness is saying, which may be totally unexpected. You’re out of control, you’re gonna crash, then suddenly, you’re a success. You hear what you want to hear, or you like what you hear, even though you didn’t expect it.

“In being a trial lawyer, things work best when it isn’t planned and perfect. You learn to expect that, to flow with it.”

Silverman, 43, who scored “at the orangutan level” on the law school admissions test and would have flunked out of high school “had it not been for band,” has emerged as one of the city’s top lawyers. He recently enhanced his reputation with his successful defense of Sagon Penn, a young black man charged with murdering a San Diego police officer and wounding his partner and a civilian riding in a police car.

The case was tried twice. In the first trial, Penn was found innocent of murder and attempted murder in the slaying of police officer Thomas E. Riggs and the shooting of officer Donovan Jacobs; the jury deadlocked on lesser charges.

In the retrial, Penn was acquitted of attempted murder and attempted voluntary manslaughter in the shooting of civilian Sarah Pina-Ruiz; attempted voluntary manslaughter in the shooting of Jacobs, and voluntary manslaughter in the slaying of Riggs.

Silverman credits the verdict not to his own flamboyance, which television seized on (thus missing the point, he said), but to homework and dogged tenacity.

“Preparation is No. 1,” he said. “Without it, you’re nowhere.”

He said that, in a decade of practicing law in San Diego, he has outworked the competition “every single time--because I have to.” He puts a premium on hiring some of the best investigators available.

“You’ll be hitting the wall, hitting the wall, not getting it, then suddenly,” he said with a smile, “you get it.”

Just such a moment occurred in the second Penn trial. On the last day he was presenting evidence, Silverman heard from one of his investigators about Nathaniel Jordan, a former police officer who is black.

Jordan testified that Donovan Jacobs, the policeman wounded in the shootings, frequently used words such as nigger and boy in dealing with blacks. Thus, Silverman was able to show that Jacobs may have been racially motivated in his attack on Penn, who felt he was acting in self-defense.

Jordan testified that Jacobs escalated racial conflicts. He led Silverman to another former officer, Drew MacIntyre, a white minister who called Jacobs “one of the most prejudiced white people I’ve known” and “an ideal candidate for the Ku Klux Klan.” Silverman sees the 11th-hour testimony of Jordan and MacIntyre as crucial to the outcome.

He claims to give little thought to the future, saying he focuses on a case at a time, trying to do well on each. He said that to look ahead is to cheat what happens in the present. And that, he said, can be death for a trial lawyer.

Silverman says he is motivated by the thrill of courtroom drama. He also likes cases that operate as an extension of personal values. The Penn case was important to him, he said, because of its stand against racism. He says an attorney who operates from a system of values has to take cases that support his philosophy, his view of life. But, Silverman warned, he has to balance those against cases that pay, and sometimes pay well. Cases motivated mainly by finance are important, he said, because they pay for more emotionally lucrative involvements.

He said he harbors no ambitions about being a high-profile national attorney, on the order of an F. Lee Bailey, his hero. He also plans to stay in San Diego, his home for most of his life. (He and his wife and children live in Coronado; Silverman works in Golden Hill.) He would like to write another book. His first, “Open and Shut,” was published in 1981.

He said he hates to admit it, but he “likes to hit. You know, hit . When you’re in the pit, eyeball to eyeball with the other guy, be it a witness or another lawyer, and you’re taking your best shot, and he’s taking his. I only like it, though, when I’m doin’ it.”

He paused for a few seconds and added: “I don’t like it beforehand. It’s like a dread, a fear of the unknown. Trials are like death in that way.”

He said he has able to survive the dread and to hit with the best--to slug, in fact--because he harbors no fear of death. He said he owes his commitment, his sense of security, in and out of a courtroom, to Christianity. He said faith is the reason he never worries about the future nor bothers to plan for it, except in the way a Christian does (accepting Christ as the means of salvation).

He calls life in the courtroom--like life itself--an ongoing, every-second risk. He has lost his share of cases, which stay with him “as vividly as a horrible nightmare.” He believes in hard work, but unlike a Des McAnuff or a Tony Gwynn, his work is more a feast-or-famine existence.

He may loaf for months, then suddenly his calendar explodes. In working on the Penn case one day, he and his investigators, Bob McDaniel and Suzanne Berard McDaniel (who married because of “one too many surveillances together,” Silverman said) began work at 7 a.m. on Dec. 31 and didn’t stop until 4 a.m. Jan. 1. He talked of a vague recollection of car horns being honked and firecrackers igniting at midnight.

“We were just engrossed,” he said, “and sometimes, it’s like that.”

He treasures such moments and said he loves the law for the place it has given him in life. He talked of being sadly, even comically, mismatched by other callings.

“I didn’t go to prep school,” he said. “My mother didn’t send me away wearing knickers. And yet there’s a place in society for a guy like me to do something important. (Being a lawyer) takes an ability to talk regular with human beings and be honest and open, where you don’t have to make straight A’s and be real brainy, where you need common sense and an empathy for human beings.

“It’s remarkable to me that there’s a place in the world for a person like me. I couldn’t be a doctor--you’d have to know chemistry. I couldn’t be an engineer--I count on my fingers. There aren’t many slots available . . . Thank God, I found one.”

David Hale

David Hale drives to work each morning around 7. He puts in a grueling day, leaving for home each night around 6:45 or 7. Unless he has dinner with a client, which he frequently does, he eats at home with his wife and four children. After the kids are tucked in, around 8:30, he works two to three more hours at home.

Yet he’s surprised by his success.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “I am. Quite. I can’t say I’ve sat and planned any strategy to be successful, I just have been. On the other hand, I work very hard at what I do. And I set very high standards, for myself and the people I work with.”

Hale, 38, believes the world is brimming with talented people, and the only way other talented people can gain an edge is by whipping the competition with a simple formula:

You outwork them.

Hale seems to have done that in a deliriously short time.

He is president and chief executive officer of Gensia Pharmaceuticals, which was formed, according to company literature, “to discover, develop, manufacture and market novel therapeutic drugs for the treatment of human disease.” Gensia, started in 1986 by two UC San Diego scientists, is developing purine-pyrimidine compounds to be used in drugs prescribed for victims of heart attacks and angina.

Hale came from Hybritech Inc., which was sold to Eli Lilly & Co. in 1986 for $490 million. He worked at Hybritech from 1982 to 1986 and was credited with having molded the company into one of the most visible and innovative in the nation in the field of biotechnology.

Hybritech developed a series of monoclonal antibody-based diagnostic kits, which are used in detecting pregnancies, allergies and various diseases.

Hale has mixed feelings about the sale to Lilly, a major medical conglomerate.

“Hybritech could have continued to be successful as an individual company,” he said regretfully. “But the agreement with Lilly was the best thing possible for Hybritech shareholders. So, yes, I have very mixed feelings.”

Hale says that part of his motivation in business is building a fledgling company into a juggernaut--into helping it make money. He says he likes the “mere thrill of working hard” and feels rejuvenated at the thought of taking a little company and making it big, in as short a time as possible. He also likes “bringing a team into shape.”

A stocky man with a round, kind face, Hale was born in Alabama and graduated from Jacksonville State College. The son of a laborer, he wanted to be a doctor and feels he settled for the next best thing--a job in the business end of health care.

He was asked if who you are is more important than what you are. He seemed puzzled by the question.

And then he said, “Most of the time you can’t separate the two. Who you are is what you are--your values, your integrity and how they relate to your work.”

What makes Hale special? Why is he so successful? What sets him apart?

“I think it’s setting very specific objectives, both short- and long-term. I think I’m good at seeing the big picture, although I’m not very good at details.

“Even though there are risks involved--this whole business is a bit of a risk--I’m not afraid, have never been afraid, to take risks.”

Elizabeth Barrett-Connor

Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor works hard. Sometimes, the hours seem almost interminably long. The work--medical research--is at times difficult, certainly tedious. But the stresses, for whatever reason, have never bothered her. That alone may be a reason for her success--having the constitution to survive the self-imposed stress of research.

She said she has also learned that life is fuller than the confines of an office, longer than the outline of a grant proposal, deeper than the joy of hitting a peak professionally. She adores her family, she loves to travel, and being deprived of literature, theater or opera would be, to her, a form of hell.

Barrett-Connor is chair of the department of community and family medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine in La Jolla. She is both an administrator and a researcher. She is a physician, trained at Cornell University Medical College, who went on to internship at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, residency at the University of Miami, and spent a year as a fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Recognized in Field

She joined the UCSD School of Medicine in 1970 and has since been recognized for her work in the field of epidemiology, which identifies the incidence, distribution and control of disease in specific populations. She has studied the epidemiology of diabetes, tuberculosis, herpes, sickle cell anemia and head trauma.

She has worked since 1972 with a test group of elderly patients headquartered in Rancho Bernardo. The Rancho Bernardo project has been used to study the types of diseases that affect individuals through the process of aging.

Many of Barrett-Connor’s recent honors have involved her work on the aging. In July, she won the Merit Award from the National Institute of Aging. She also has been named Doctor of the Year by the San Diego Health Care Assn. and received similar honors in recent years from the American Diabetes Assn. and the American College of Preventive Medicine.

Barrett-Connor says much of her motivation involves finding out what helps a person grow old gracefully. For that reason, she’s probed the diseases of diabetes and hypertension with particular interest and made major discoveries in regard to both. She is now considered one of the country’s leading authorities on epidemiology, particularly as it relates to the elderly.

Barrett-Connor, 52, says she’s an overachiever, but for reasons that sound surprising.

See Colleagues Smarter

“I must be,” she said. “I’m just not as smart as a lot of my colleagues.”

She says she isn’t a workaholic. A workaholic, she said, is someone that focuses on nothing but work. She finds life a lot more stimulating and enjoyable--a lot richer--than “work, work, work.” Her biggest frustration is not having the time to overachieve at work and fully enjoy the rest of her life as well.

She’s married to a man who had two children when she met him. Together, they have had three children, ages 19, 18 and 16.

Asked if she’d ever felt like a failure, she said it’s impossible to be a parent and not feel guilt, not second-guess yourself, not always wonder if you’ve done the right thing.

Her fears about the future sound a curious parallel to her work. She worries about aging, about being incapacitated by disease, not being able to continue, whatever the reason.

“To be honest, though,” she said, “I feel more success than I deserve. (She once received a Living Legacy award, along with astronaut Sally K. Ride and opera singer Beverly Sills. The award is given by the Women’s International Center of La Jolla.) I feel extremely successful. I never expected to be nationally known in epidemiology. I live in a city I like. I have healthy, normal kids. My husband still thinks I’m cute. What more could I want? I not only feel successful, I feel happy, and in that sense, very, very blessed.”