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 Charlton Heston by John H. Richardson | Jul 01 '01
CHARLTON
HESTON He starred in Touch of Evil for Orson Welles. He did theater with
Laurence Olivier. He's done more Shakespeare onscreen than anyone else alive.
His favorite actress is a Maoist named Vanessa Redgrave. He can talk about
politics, but he'd rather not. The unexpected life of Charlton Heston, actor.
THREE YEARS AGO, he had hip-replacement surgery. He moves a bit
stiffly through the locker room, surprising a group of naked college athletes. As
they step aside to let him through, someone makes a joke about parting the Red
Sea. He doesn't seem to notice. They find him an empty spot and a seat, and he
waits as actors always wait, wearing his NRA socks and a pair of Speedo swim
shoes and talking about old shows and old troupers--the night Dean Martin got
too drunk to go onstage; Sam Peckinpah's constant pacing; Katharine Cornell's
terrible stage fright. Which was something he never suffered from, thank
goodness. "I always thought I could do it. You have to believe you can do
it." He smiles. "I got bad notices, but I never believed them."
Then he gets up to peek around the barrier into the auditorium.
It's filling up, six or seven hundred students so far. In the front row, a
group of kids in ape masks hold up signs saying, GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE, APES
KILL PEOPLE. He shrugs it off. "When you've played Cardinal Richelieu and
Andrew Jackson, these things are not so bad." Besides, actors are used to
getting bad notices. And the good side is that college students are so
motivated; they really wrestle with the issues, which is what makes it so keen
to come to a place like this and be part of the process.
When he gets his cue, he marches right out and points at the
protesters. "Take your stinking paws off of me, you damned dirty
apes!" he booms. It gets a big laugh, which he rides into his story about
the guy who went up to Kirk Douglas and said, You were so great in Ben-Hut.
"And Kirk Douglas says, 'But that wasn't me. That was another fella.' And
the guy says, 'Well, if you aren't Burr Lancaster, then who are you?'"
Another big laugh. Then he gets serious and tells the students
about the soldiers walking in bloody bandages at Valley Forge and the glory of
this American democracy of ours and those old, dead geniuses who wrote our
Constitution. Because the important thing is freedom, he says. No matter what
your politics, freedom is precious. It's something worth fighting for. And he
may stumble a bit and repeat a line or two, but when it's over, the students
rise to their feet and give him a standing ovation.
Backstage again, he's very pleased. "That's what my kid calls
the Standing O." The fellows in the ape masks were a gift that got him the
laugh. After that he had them.
He
marched with Martin Luther King Jr. He was in the gallery when
the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act, one of the proudest moments of his
life. He's been in eighty movies and five unions and at least a thousand civic
groups. As the head of the NRA, he's helped recruit more than a million new
members and may well have tipped the balance in the last presidential election.
But, really, he seems happiest telling stories about his favorite
actors. "When we were preparing to do A Man for All Seasons at the Savoy,
the stage version, I ran into Johnny Gielgud at some reception and said, 'John,
you've played at the Savoy, haven't you?' He said"--and here Heston does a
startlingly perfect John Gielgud voice--"'Oh, yes, often.' I said, 'I've
seen plays there, but I've never been backstage. Is the star dressing room
comfortable?' He said, 'Oh, yes. It's quite nice. No loo, of course.'"
This is at his home in Los Angeles, a dramatized ranch house with
swooping ceilings and endless canyon views. Over the fireplace, there's an
Andrew Wyeth painting of an old Conestoga wagon and a lovely pencil drawing of
Sir Laurence Olivier as King Lear. They were friends, he and Larry. Did two
projects together. Always wanted to do more.
All this comes as a surprise, just like the whispery Gielgud voice
suddenly emerging from such a craggy slab of Americana. In recent years, the
political image he's cultivated has so overwhelmed the actor that you have to
remind yourself that he did strong, dark work in movies like Touch of Evil and
Soylent Green. And goofy comedies like The Private War of Major Benson.
But we were talking about Johnny Gielgud. "I remember he used
to say, 'Chuck, why don't you find some sort of part for me? I could play your
father.' Then when we were doing the film, I thought how good he would be for
the cardinal. So I called him up and said, 'John, I'd love to have you do the
cardinal in this if you would.' He said, 'Oh, I don't know, Chuck. Orson was so
large in the part.' I said, 'I think you can equal Orson's weight.' He said,
'Yes, it is quite a good part, isn't it?' And I said, 'I think it's the best
one-scene part I know of.' And he said, 'Yeees, well, then I will.'"
And Heston laughs happily. "He was marvelous in it. Just
marvelous."
People
glow when they meet him. And he keeps the glow going, noticing little
details about their appearance and charming them with quips. With a courtly
smile, he lifts women's hands to his lips without actually kissing them, not so
much a gesture as the theatrical outline of a gesture, which has its own
weirdly formal charm. When people start whipping out cameras, he always
cautions them: "Don't shoot with two cameras, or three or four. It'll
spoil the shot."
Today he's signing his sixth book, The Courage to Be Free. Two
hundred people stand in line for a chance to shake his famous hand. One guy has
brought his baby, another an old flintlock, another the cast album of Ben-Hur.
One kid is dressed like Moses. "Please don't ever stop speaking up,"
a woman says. "I just admire you so much." A longhaired man tells him
he's a class act. Someone else calls him "Mr. President." Someone
wants to know what it was like working with Orson Welles. "Besides the
Lord Jesus and John Wayne, you're one of my heroes," says the next man.
"Thank you for standing up for us," says the next. "Can I shake
your hand in the Ben-Hur style?"
There is a protester. There are always protesters. Responsible gun
control now. Not one more. Why can you have the right to a gun but not health
care? Heston ignores him and concentrates on signing the books. Right up to the
very last one, he makes an effort to keep his autograph perfect. And he signs
the gun.
So
what about this NRA thing?
He shrugs. "They asked me."
He starts to elaborate, but first a story about Ralph Richardson.
"When we were making Khartoum, we had a scene where the prime minister
meets secretly with Gordon before he sends him to Egypt. We're out at Pinewood,
and I remember getting out of the car one day, and there was Richardson getting
out of his Bentley. I thought, Well, I shouldn't go over to him because I've
not met him yet. I'll meet him inside. But I was watching him. He got his
briefcase and he closed the door carefully and he said, 'Goodbye, old girl,
back in a while.' He was saying goodbye to his car."
This
is the way he is, at least much of the time. You don't see it in
the media because it muddies the story line. Like today in Minnesota, when this
guy from Outdoors Weekly asks him why more actors don't support hunting and the
Second Amendment--clearly looking for the red-meat quote about goddamn
Hollywood pinko liberals. Heston just laughs. "I would say there's not a
lot of support for playing baseball, either. They might watch it on TV, but
they don't play it."
What about Rosie O'Donnell being against guns and then letting her
kids' bodyguard apply for a gun permit? Isn't that typical liberal hypocrisy?
"Uh, obviously I disagree with her," Heston says. "But she does
a good show."
The same thing happens later in another interview. The guy keeps
trying, but Heston won't trash even the Democrats. "There are good people
in the Democratic party," he says. "Good men and women. They're
dedicated."
And, no, he isn't packing. He doesn't even keep one in his car.
"I could get a carry permit, but I don't want to do that. It's a bore.
I've worn so many guns on my hip in westerns."
Some
pertinent history: He grew up in the Michigan woods, a Tom Sawyer
life of hunting and fishing. He went to a one-room schoolhouse. His father was
a Republican and a deputy sheriff who "spent a lot of time chasing
rumrunners into Canada." On cold winter days when the snow was deep, he
would drop young Chuck off at school and almost always say the same thing.
"Do your best, keep your promises." That stuck. "I thought, That
makes sense. 'Cause no one can do more than his best. And you can keep your
word." He takes pride in having never missed a single day's work his whole
life. Not one day. "If you say you're gonna do something, you're supposed
to do it."
When he was ten, his parents divorced. In one blow, he lost his
father and his idyllic life wandering the woods. "Aside from World War II,
it was the most traumatic experience of my life," he says. "It was
terrible. I don't think I fully recovered from that until I met my wife. So, yeah,
it was a very difficult time for me. I don't mean that I lay in the corner for
hours or anything. I cried for a couple of days."
So
why did he become president of the NRA? "It seemed
like a good idea at the time," Heston says. "It's just like enlisting
in the Army in World War II or joining the civil-rights march. Why civil
rights? The guys who headed the studios were right, really. It was just gonna
make trouble. But it seemed like a good idea, too. Or to be president of the
Screen Actors Guild for longer than anyone else, including Reagan, or going on
cultural missions to Nigeria and Egypt for the State Department or going to the
AFL-CIO meeting as a SAG delegate or chairing meetings for unions of
international performers in Holland and Mexico or serving on an arts and
humanities committee for the Kennedy Center. Then I was chairman of the
American Film Institute. Also the American delegate to the Berlin Film
Festival. I belong to four unions. Helped found a fifth, now defunct. So when
you ask me why do I do it, I don't really know. I certainly don't seek them
out. By this time, I've done so much of it that people in various areas of life
say, You know, Chuck Heston does this kind of shit-he'll do it."
But
Shakespeare, there's a subject! He's proud to say that he's
done more of the Bard's works on film--not onstage--than any other American
actor. And it just astounds and amazes him that so many of today's greatest
actors seem so afraid of stepping into tights. "A year or so ago, I was
meeting my wife in a restaurant down in Santa Monica, and there was Robert De
Niro, whom I had never met. I think he is the best American film actor of his
generation. So I had the temerity to go over to him, and I said, 'Mr. De Niro,
we've not met, but I can't miss the opportunity to tell you that I think you're
the best American film actor of your generation.' He said thank you, and I
said, 'But you have to do Shakespeare. Those are the best parts.' He said,
'Yeah, people tell me that all the time.' I said, 'They're right. Those are the
parts. If you don't do those parts, you're not in the game.' And I realized
that I had irritated him, and I had no right to do that. So I said, 'I'm
disturbing you. I apologize for that. But I'm right.'"
At
dinner, he talks about working with Orson Welles on Touch of Evil. He'd
have loved to have done another picture with him, but Orson never seemed all
that interested in executing his dreams once he'd dreamed them. Maybe the
dreaming was enough. And Vanessa Redgrave--what a talent! "She's a Maoist
but a marvelous actress. The best of her generation. I'd work with her in a
minute."
After dessert, he gets up and says a gracious thank you.
"When an actor gets a free meal and gets to tell all the jokes, that's a
good night."
Sorry
to be a bore about this, but how do you get from marching with Martin
Luther King to the presidency of the NRA? Not to mention running your own
political-action committee (the Arena Pac), which steers money and support to
right-wing candidates. "I cast my first presidential ballot for Roosevelt,
when I was still overseas in World War II. And then I voted for Truman and
worked for Stevenson, and worked with the increasing feeling that each of these
guys was better than the other ones. And I thought that about Jack Kennedy,
too--although in later years we've come to feel, Johnny, we hardly knew you.
And then I was upstate doing The War Lord, and I'd drive out to the location,
which was a fair distance, maybe twenty miles every morning. You go out very
early 'cause you gotta get there, certainly by 7:00 A.M. And you mostly sleep
in the car or run over your lines. And there was a crossing on the highway.
Very little traffic, but there was a stop sign. I noticed a sheet with Barry
Goldwater's picture on it, and the only text was the words, on a blue
background, IN YOUR HEART, YOU KNOW HE'S RIGHT. And I would just look at that
sort of dismissively, still sort of involved with the idea of Kennedy and these
other guys. And one morning there was a big truck going by, so we were sitting
there a little longer than usual, and I thought, Son of a bitch, he is
right."
How is that possible? Barry Goldwater? The guy who fought so hard
to stop integration? So soon after marching with King? Isn't there a tiny
little fleck of contradiction there? He seems almost puzzled by the question.
People
always ask if he wants to run for office, and he always says the
same thing--he's already been the president three times. "I play these
formidable authority figures. That's just what I do, you know? Cardinals and
kings and prophets and presidents and generals." At one point in his
autobiography, he muses on the fringe benefits of playing great men: "I
know what it is to conquer a city."
In person, he's happy to elaborate. "To listen to a thousand
people say, 'Cid! Cid! Cid!' That's pretty great. It really is. It's marvelous
to have them screaming and waving. And, of course, it's like the chariot race
in Ben-Hur. The people just automatically spilled out into the arena. They just
did it. And it was so great. That's how acting can become real for the
actor-for moments."
And has it changed him, a life spent pulling on the boots of
formidable men? The question seems important to him. He thinks hard and answers
slowly. "I have become closer to these dead guys who I've played than--I'm
a different man than I would have been had I not played them. I think ...
there's also a possibility that my affinity with these guys has-dare I use the
word disdain?--made me a little disdainful of people who don't do that. You're
supposed to be on time. You're supposed to know your words. You're not supposed
to fuck up. Now, people fuck up in this business all the time. We all do. But
it distresses me when I do it. If I miss a line, which I don't very often, it
irritates me terribly."
So
the political work is like acting? "It is acting," he
says. Which brings us to the National Rifle Association's annual meeting,
where's he's raising an old flintlock rifle and intoning--the only word for his
deep Liberty Bell quaver--the line that has become his NRA signature:
"From my cold dead hands!" And the audience explodes in applause,
automatically rising to its feet to give him the Standing O. Even his loving
son seems a little embarrassed by this bit of political hokum, which seems so
much like a moment from one of his cornier movies. "I wondered why he did
that myself," he says. "But the fact that we're talking about it is
maybe the point."
And here he is at a gun club outside Minneapolis, posing for
photographs with one of the marines who raised the flag at Iwo Jima and giving
his speech about the men who walked in bloody bandages at Valley Forge and the
threats to liberty manifest all around us, which reminds him of the time he
asked his stunt coordinator what would happen if he couldn't get the horses to
go fast enough to win the race in Ben-Hur. "He stretched and said, 'Chuck,
just make sure you stay in the chariot. I guarantee you're gonna win the damn
race.'" Somehow it all mixes together, the bloody bandages and Hitler and
Stalin and the lost piney pleasures of a boy hunting alone in the Michigan
woods, and he raises his fist and boosts his voice to that theatrical tremble.
"So again, I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, stay in the damned
chariot."
Later,
in his hotel room, he answers a question about what would happen if
they did ever try to outlaw guns. "Then we'd have a little fun, wouldn't
we? I'm a better shot than most liberals."
He seems to be kidding around, but then his voice gets serious.
"We wouldn't be the first country to go down. Look at Russia. Look at
China. Look, even, to a frighteningly large degree, at Britain. France, surely.
They're all socialist countries. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, as
Mr. Washington said."
Don't
turn up the house lights yet, not quite yet. Because here's
the old trouper at a conference on overpopulation, standing in front of a group
of tweedy Malthusians (they asked him to come) to answer questions about one of
his favorite movies, which they have all just finished watching. "Where
was the soylent green plant?" one scholar asks.
"That was in El Segundo," he says. And the euthanasia
facility? "That was the Sports Authority."
Then Heston interrupts himself. "I think it's very important
to say that the best performance in the film was by Eddie Robinson," he
says. As it happened, Eddie, Edward G. Robinson, was very ill at the time, and
the thing Heston wants to get across is that when Robinson filmed his death
Scene, the one where he goes to the euthanasia clinic and lies there looking at
the forbidden movie of the natural world that progress has destroyed, he must
have known this would probably be his last moment on a film set. Except for a
few moments of celluloid, he'd be as extinct as the beautiful creatures on the
screen. "I thought many times what it must have been for him to lie there
exchanging the dialogue with me and to know that this was the last time he
would ever hear a director say, 'Turn over, speak, action.'"
In the somber pause that follows, the director of the movie takes
the microphone. "I have to tell you something about Chuck. When we were
shooting that scene, I shot Eddie Robinson first. When it was over, I turned
around, and there was Mr. Heston right behind me, the tears brimming out of his
eyes. He cried through the whole time we were shooting that scene."
Heston nods humbly. "Yes, that's true."
Then the questions resume. Can he suggest ways to alert people to
the population crisis? "I'm an actor," he says. "I pretend to be
people."
What did they use for the soylent wafers?
Heston laughs. "People," he says.
Is Charlton Heston his stage name or his real name?
"It's my name," he says.
And then he thanks them, graciously, for coming out to see his
movie.
THE
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