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" CHARLTON HESTON He starred in Touch of Evil for Orson Welles. He did theater with Laurence Olivier. He&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;d rather not. The unexpected life of Charlton Heston, actor. BY JOHN H. RICHARDSON 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&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;s constant pacing; Katharine Cornell&amp;#039;s terrible stage fright. Which was something he never suffered from, thank goodness. &amp;quot;I always thought I could do it. You have to believe you can do it.&amp;quot; He smiles. &amp;quot;I got bad notices, but I never believed them.&amp;quot;  Then he gets up to peek around the barrier into the auditorium. It&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;T KILL PEOPLE, APES KILL PEOPLE. He shrugs it off. &amp;quot;When you&amp;#039;ve played Cardinal Richelieu and Andrew Jackson, these things are not so bad.&amp;quot; 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. &amp;quot;Take your stinking paws off of me, you damned dirty apes!&amp;quot; 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-Hur. &amp;quot;And Kirk Douglas says, &amp;#039;But that wasn&amp;#039;t me. That was another fella.&amp;#039; And the guy says, &amp;#039;Well, if you aren&amp;#039;t Burt Lancaster, then who are you?&amp;#039; &amp;quot; 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&amp;#039;s something worth fighting for. And he may stumble a bit and repeat a line or two, but when it&amp;#039;s over, the students rise to their feet and give him a standing ovation. Backstage again, he&amp;#039;s very pleased. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s what my kid calls the Standing O.&amp;quot; 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&amp;#039;s been in eighty movies and five unions and at least a thousand civic groups. As the head of the NRA, he&amp;#039;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. &amp;quot;When we were preparing to do A Man for All Seasons at the Savoy, the stage version, I ran into Johnny Gielgud at some recep-tion and said, &amp;#039;John, you&amp;#039;ve played at the Savoy, haven&amp;#039;t you?&amp;#039; He said&amp;quot;--and here Heston does a startlingly perfect John Gielgud voice--&amp;quot; &amp;#039;Oh, yes, often.&amp;#039; I said, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;ve seen plays there, but I&amp;#039;ve never been backstage. Is the star dressing room comfortable?&amp;#039; He said, &amp;#039;Oh, yes. It&amp;#039;s quite nice. No loo, of course.&amp;#039; &amp;quot;  This is at his home in Los Angeles, a dramatized ranch house with swooping ceilings and endless canyon views. Over the fireplace, there&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;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. &amp;quot;I remember he used to say, &amp;#039;Chuck, why don&amp;#039;t you find some sort of part for me? I could play your father.&amp;#039; Then when we were doing the film, I thought how good he would be for the cardinal. So I called him up and said, &amp;#039;John, I&amp;#039;d love to have you do the cardinal in this if you would.&amp;#039; He said, &amp;#039;Oh, I don&amp;#039;t know, Chuck. Orson was so large in the part.&amp;#039; I said, &amp;#039;I think you can equal Orson&amp;#039;s weight.&amp;#039; He said, &amp;#039;Yes, it is quite a good part, isn&amp;#039;t it?&amp;#039; And I said, &amp;#039;I think it&amp;#039;s the best one-scene part I know of.&amp;#039; And he said, &amp;#039;Yeees, well, then I will.&amp;#039; &amp;quot;  And Heston laughs happily. &amp;quot;He was marvelous in it. Just marvelous.&amp;quot;  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&amp;#039;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: &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t shoot with two cameras, or three or four. It&amp;#039;ll spoil the shot.&amp;quot;  Today he&amp;#039;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. &amp;quot;Please don&amp;#039;t ever stop speaking up,&amp;quot; a woman says. &amp;quot;I just admire you so much.&amp;quot; A longhaired man tells him he&amp;#039;s a class act. Someone else calls him &amp;quot;Mr. President.&amp;quot; Someone wants to know what it was like working with Orson Welles. &amp;quot;Besides the Lord Jesus and John Wayne, you&amp;#039;re one of my heroes,&amp;quot; says the next man. &amp;quot;Thank you for standing up for us,&amp;quot; says the next. &amp;quot;Can I shake your hand in the Ben-Hur style?&amp;quot;  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. &amp;quot;They asked me.&amp;quot;  He starts to elaborate, but first a story about Ralph Richardson. &amp;quot;When we were making Khartoum, we had a scene where the prime minister meets secretly with Gordon before he sends him to Egypt. We&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;t go over to him because I&amp;#039;ve not met him yet. I&amp;#039;ll meet him inside. But I was watching him. He got his briefcase and he closed the door carefully and he said, &amp;#039;Goodbye, old girl, back in a while.&amp;#039; He was saying goodbye to his car.&amp;quot;  This is the way he is, at least much of the time. You don&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;t support hunting and the Second Amendment--clearly looking for the red-meat quote about goddamn Hollywood pinko liberals. Heston just laughs. &amp;quot;I would say there&amp;#039;s not a lot of support for playing baseball, either. They might watch it on TV, but they don&amp;#039;t play it.&amp;quot;  What about Rosie O&amp;#039;Donnell being against guns and then letting her kids&amp;#039; bodyguard apply for a gun permit? Isn&amp;#039;t that typical liberal hypocrisy? &amp;quot;Uh, obviously I disagree with her,&amp;quot; Heston says. &amp;quot;But she does a good show.&amp;quot; The same thing happens later in another interview. The guy keeps trying, but Heston won&amp;#039;t trash even the Democrats. &amp;quot;There are good people in the Democratic party,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Good men and women. They&amp;#039;re dedicated.&amp;quot; And, no, he isn&amp;#039;t packing. He doesn&amp;#039;t even keep one in his car. &amp;quot;I could get a carry permit, but I don&amp;#039;t want to do that. It&amp;#039;s a bore. I&amp;#039;ve worn so many guns on my hip in westerns.&amp;quot; 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 &amp;quot;spent a lot of time chasing rumrunners into Canada.&amp;quot; On cold winter days when the snow was deep, he would drop young Chuck off at school and almost always say the same thing: &amp;quot;Do your best, keep your promises.&amp;quot; That stuck. &amp;quot;I thought, That makes sense. &amp;#039;Cause no one can do more than his best. And you can keep your word.&amp;quot; He takes pride in having never missed a single day&amp;#039;s work his whole life. Not one day. &amp;quot;If you say you&amp;#039;re gonna do something, you&amp;#039;re supposed to do it.&amp;quot; When he was ten, his parents divorced. In one blow, he lost his father and his idyllic life wandering the woods. &amp;quot;Aside from World War II, it was the most traumatic experience of my life,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It was terrible. I don&amp;#039;t think I fully recovered from that until I met my wife. So, yeah, it was a very difficult time for me. I don&amp;#039;t mean that I lay in the corner for hours or anything. I cried for a couple of days.&amp;quot;  So why did he become president of the NRA? &amp;quot;It seemed like a good idea at the time,&amp;quot; Heston says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;t really know. I certainly don&amp;#039;t seek them out. By this time, I&amp;#039;ve done so much of it that people in various areas of life say, You know, Chuck Heston does this kind of shit--he&amp;#039;ll do it.&amp;quot; But Shakespeare, there&amp;#039;s a subject! He&amp;#039;s proud to say that he&amp;#039;s done more of the Bard&amp;#039;s works on film--not onstage--than any other American actor. And it just astounds and amazes him that so many of today&amp;#039;s greatest actors seem so afraid of stepping into tights. &amp;quot;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, &amp;#039;Mr. De Niro, we&amp;#039;ve not met, but I can&amp;#039;t miss the opportunity to tell you that I think you&amp;#039;re the best American film actor of your generation.&amp;#039; He said thank you, and I said, &amp;#039;But you have to do Shakespeare. Those are the best parts.&amp;#039; He said, &amp;#039;Yeah, people tell me that all the time.&amp;#039; I said, &amp;#039;They&amp;#039;re right. Those are the parts. If you don&amp;#039;t do those parts, you&amp;#039;re not in the game.&amp;#039; And I realized that I had irritated him, and I had no right to do that. So I said, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;m disturbing you. I apologize for that. But I&amp;#039;m right.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; At dinner, he talks about working with Orson Welles on Touch of Evil. He&amp;#039;d have loved to have done another picture with him, but Orson never seemed all that interested in executing his dreams once he&amp;#039;d dreamed them. Maybe the dreaming was enough. And Vanessa Redgrave--what a talent! &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s a Maoist but a marvelous actress. The best of her generation. I&amp;#039;d work with her in a minute.&amp;quot; After dessert, he gets up and says a gracious thank you. &amp;quot;When an actor gets a free meal and gets to tell all the jokes, that&amp;#039;s a good night.&amp;quot; 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. &amp;quot;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&amp;#039;ve come to feel, Johnny, we hardly knew you. And then I was upstate doing The War Lord, and I&amp;#039;d drive out to the location, which was a fair distance, maybe twenty miles every morning. You go out very early &amp;#039;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&amp;#039;s picture on it, and the only text was the words, on a blue background, IN YOUR HEART, YOU KNOW HE&amp;#039;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.&amp;quot; How is that possible? Barry Goldwater? The guy who fought so hard to stop integration? So soon after marching with King? Isn&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;s already been the president three times. &amp;quot;I play these formidable authority figures. That&amp;#039;s just what I do, you know? Cardinals and kings and prophets and presidents and generals.&amp;quot; At one point in his autobiography, he muses on the fringe benefits of playing great men: &amp;quot;I know what it is to conquer a city.&amp;quot; In person, he&amp;#039;s happy to elaborate. &amp;quot;To listen to a thousand people say, &amp;#039;Cid! Cid! Cid!&amp;#039; That&amp;#039;s pretty great. It really is. It&amp;#039;s marvelous to have them screaming and waving. And, of course, it&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;s how acting can become real for the actor--for moments.&amp;quot; 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. &amp;quot;I have become closer to these dead guys who I&amp;#039;ve played than--I&amp;#039;m a different man than I would have been had I not played them. I think . . . there&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;t do that. You&amp;#039;re supposed to be on time. You&amp;#039;re supposed to know your words. You&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;t very often, it irritates me terribly.&amp;quot; So the political work is like acting? &amp;quot;It is acting,&amp;quot; he says. Which brings us to the National Rifle Association&amp;#039;s annual meeting, where&amp;#039;s he&amp;#039;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: &amp;quot;From my cold dead hands!&amp;quot; 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. &amp;quot;I wondered why he did that myself,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;But the fact that we&amp;#039;re talking about it is maybe the point.&amp;quot; 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&amp;#039;t get the horses to go fast enough to win the race in Ben-Hur. &amp;quot;He stretched and said, &amp;#039;Chuck, just make sure you stay in the chariot. I guarantee you&amp;#039;re gonna win the damn race.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; 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. &amp;quot;So again, I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, stay in the damned chariot.&amp;quot; Later, in his hotel room, he answers a question about what would happen if they did ever try to outlaw guns. &amp;quot;Then we&amp;#039;d have a little fun, wouldn&amp;#039;t we? I&amp;#039;m a better shot than most liberals.&amp;quot; He seems to be kidding around, but then his voice gets serious. &amp;quot;We wouldn&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;re all socialist countries. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, as Mr. Washington said.&amp;quot; Don&amp;#039;t turn up the house lights yet, not quite yet. Because here&amp;#039;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. &amp;quot;Where was the soylent green plant?&amp;quot; one scholar asks. &amp;quot;That was in El Segundo,&amp;quot; he says. And the euthanasia facility? &amp;quot;That was the Sports Authority.&amp;quot; Then Heston interrupts himself. &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s very important to say that the best performance in the film was by Eddie Robinson,&amp;quot; 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&amp;#039;d be as extinct as the beautiful creatures on the screen. &amp;quot;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, &amp;#039;Turn over, speak, action.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; In the somber pause that follows, the director of the movie takes the microphone. &amp;quot;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.&amp;quot; Heston nods humbly. &amp;quot;Yes, that&amp;#039;s true.&amp;quot; Then the questions resume. Can he suggest ways to alert people to the population crisis? &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m an actor,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I pretend to be people.&amp;quot; What did they use for the soylent wafers? Heston laughs. &amp;quot;People,&amp;quot; he says. Is Charlton Heston his stage name or his real name? &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s my name,&amp;quot; he says. And then he thanks them, graciously, for coming out to see his movie. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a929/esq0701-july-heston-rev-3/>