Wishing well to a Heston with humor

Some years ago, I was assigned by a national magazine to discuss

the pros and cons of male nudity in the movies with actor Charlton

Heston. He was suggested because he had just done a nude scene in

“Planet of the Apes.” I had a connection with Heston, and he was

amused at the subject and agreed to speak to it.

I remembered all this when Heston -- with typical frankness --

announced a few days ago that he has symptoms similar to those of

Alzheimer’s disease. The announcement sent me to my files, where I

found a hilarious transcript of that interview embracing a side of

Heston that has almost disappeared from public view since he became a

spokesman for the National Rifle Assn. It also triggered a train of

other Heston memories that started with a nationally syndicated

newspaper profile I did of him, followed by several magazine pieces,

his visit to my film class at UC Irvine and to my home, and

negotiations for a book with him that reached the contract stage

before they hit a lethal snag.

When all of this took place some 25 years ago, I would have found

absurd the possibility that he would one day surface as the poster

boy for the NRA. The subject of guns never came up in any of my

conversations with him, and his history to that point would have made

an NRA connection seem unlikely -- largely because I didn’t

understand then that gun people included a broad cross-section of

political and social convictions. It was hard for me to connect up

the NRA with Heston’s involvement with Martin Luther King Jr. in the

civil rights movement and his long stint as head of the Screen Actors

Guild. But the most difficult connection for me was Heston’s

self-deprecatory humor. He hasn’t been a barrel of laughs since he

took over the NRA cause.

In another time and place, for example, in explaining movie

nudity, he told me: “The bathing scene has a long and honorable

cinema history. The Legion of Decency can be against nudity, but they

can’t be against clean girls. So nudity as it relates to the bath is

almost unchallengeable. That’s as close as the screen has come thus

far to dealing aesthetically with the male nude. Actors of my size

are usually put in a small wooden tub or a wash boiler with a beard

and a cigar.”

He spoke routinely in epigrams that were often very funny. Talking

about “Ben-Hur,” he told my film class: “Doing an epic film is like

raising dinosaurs. How can you survive without being trampled in the

process?” Then he described “Ben-Hur” director William Wyler this

way: “Working for Willie is like getting the works in a Turkish bath.

You nearly drown but you come out smelling like a rose.”

He followed George Murphy and Ronald Reagan as head of the Screen

Actors Guild but resisted suggestions that he follow them into

political life. At the same time, he strongly defended politically

active entertainers, telling me: “I suppose what it comes down to is

that the public simply has to accept the perhaps unjust influence

that performers have in all sorts of activities outside their own

field. It comes down finally to an exercise of taste and judgment.”

Those who -- like me -- would question both in the manner in which

his prestige and visibility have been used to fight the most basic

types of gun control should also weigh in another quality of Heston

that I found just as pervasive as his humor: his strong adherence to

principle as he saw it. For example, he once returned his entire

salary to Columbia Pictures after insisting on the shooting of costly

additional scenes he felt were essential for a movie in which he was

starring called “Major Dundee.”

Another case in point is the movie he brought to my UCI class, a

western called “Will Penny” that Paramount soured on and didn’t

promote. It disappeared quickly and then became a cult movie that

Heston seemed to regard with more affection than all of his film

epics -- and spent a good deal of time and money trying to get into

theaters again.

Principle also entered our book negotiations. He had agreed to the

financial arrangements and to make the necessary research time

available to me. We were ready to sign the contracts when the word

“autobiography” popped up. While the publishers saw it in the

first-person voice, both Heston and I thought it was a third-person

biography. The change was OK by me, but not by Heston. He couldn’t

countenance a ghost-written book, even though this was a common

biographical device. If the first-person voice was required, then he

would have to write it. And so the project went down the tubes.

This is not surprising from a man who spent eight months on a USC

practice field learning how to throw a football with the skill and

accuracy of a professional quarterback for a small movie called “The

Pro.” “I learned to drive a chariot in two months,” he told me, “but

it took four times as long to learn how to throw a football

properly.”

In his announcement of the onset of the Alzheimer’s-like symptoms,

Heston said he is “neither giving up nor giving in,” and he has a

whole lifetime of conviction and a fine and loving family to add

credence to that promise.

Heston -- who was a B-24 tail gunner in World War II -- once

hitchhiked his way through Vietnam just hanging out with American

troops in places entertainers didn’t normally reach. “I went there,”

he told me, “filled with misgivings and doubts that colored much

American thinking. I found little of that reflected in the troops.

These men were wholly committed to what they were doing there.”

Chuck Heston is also committed to what he is doing, and right now

that means getting on with his life. A lot of people like me who

disagree with him about guns will be wishing him well in that

journey.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.