It’s a moment that washed-up comedians and humorless TV hosts still use when they’re running low on material. On May 20, 2000, Charlton Heston lifted a revolutionary-era style flintlock long rifle over his head at the 129th National Rifle Association convention in Charlotte and announced that if the government (and Al Gore, who was running for president at the time) wanted his gun, they would have to take it from his “cold, dead hands.”
He had used the line before; but this was post-Columbine, and the cameras were rolling. The left had been using the shooting at the Colorado high school to attack the NRA leadership as cold-hearted men who loved guns more than children, and Heston’s remark was easily construed. Michael Moore used the clip in Bowling for Columbine; in Hollywood, people would ask Heston’s son Fraser, “Why is your dad a proponent of child murder?”
Heston had only worked in a handful of films since 1990, going back, instead, to television, where he had gotten his start. After the NRA speech, however, even the TV work dried up. A man who owned fewer guns than some of Hollywood’s richest liberals and had played the lead in some of the most commercially successful movies —The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), Planet of the Apes (1968)—became persona non grata in an industry he had done so much to support. And shortly after Heston was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2002, George Clooney happily made fun of the aging actor and his illness. When a reporter asked if that was in bad taste, Clooney replied: “I don’t care. Charlton Heston is the head of the National Rifle Association. He deserves whatever anyone says about him.”
In this excellent book, Marc Eliot notes the irony of Heston’s “graylisting” by the children of blacklisted actors and directors of the 1950s. What’s more unfortunate is how Heston’s defense of the Second Amendment in his final years has overshadowed his accomplishments as an actor, his early support of the civil rights movement, his service to filmmaking, and his staunch independence. Heston was a Roosevelt liberal for most of his life, but what mattered to him in politics was helping others, not advancing a particular ideology. So while many of his fellow actors avoided associating too closely with the civil rights movement for fear it would hurt their box office draws, Heston helped happily and publicly, participating in a peaceful march in Oklahoma City in 1961, at the invitation of a friend, and in the March on Washington in 1963, at the invitation of Martin Luther King himself.
He visited American soldiers in Vietnam to tell them “that America hadn’t forgotten them” (as Eliot writes), not to advance a particular position on the war, which he admitted had “no easy solution.” He saw thousands of young men, many of them wounded, and offered to call loved ones—parents, wives, girlfriends—for them when he returned to the United States. By the time he got back home, he had 400 names, and called every one.
Born John Charles Carter near Evanston, Illinois, in 1923, Charlton Heston’s values were created partly by childhood loss. He was something of a loner as a boy and enjoyed hunting and fishing with his father, and reading. When he was 10, his parents divorced, and he moved with his mother and her new husband, Chet Heston, to Wilmette, north of Chicago. It was a double loss for the young Heston: He only saw his father once during his adolescence and never returned to the woods he loved dearly. Family and natural beauty would remain important to him for the rest of his life.
In high school, Heston began to act. His first role, he would write in his memoir, “began my life.” He earned a partial scholarship to study theater at Northwestern, where he met Lydia Clarke, also studying theater. After a two-year courtship, during which Heston proposed multiple times, the two married in March 1944. (Heston had been called to active duty three months earlier. A few weeks before he was to be shipped out, he wrote to Clarke, proposing once again. This time she accepted and took a train to North Carolina for a quick ceremony. The marriage would last until Heston died in 2008.)
When Heston returned from the war—he saw little action—he and Lydia moved to New York, where the two struggled in the theater world, Heston working part-time as a model for art students. Heston loved Shakespeare, and his first real break came when he got the part of Proculeius in a production of Antony and Cleopatra by the Broadway producer and director Guthrie McClintic. Then, thanks to his role in Antony and Cleopatra, he landed a small role in a CBS production of Julius Caesar. It was his first television role and would quickly lead to others. Hal Wallis noticed Heston and signed him to play the lead in Paramount’s gritty Dark City (1950), which follows the misfortunes of an out-of-town card player. The movie was panned but Heston’s performance was praised by critics.
His career was transformed when he met the director (and cofounder of Paramount) Cecil B. DeMille. One morning, on his way to the airport, Heston stopped by Paramount to say hello to a few friends. As he passed through the arched Bronson Gate, Heston smiled and waved to DeMille, who was standing outside his office. As it happened, DeMille was casting for his new film, The Greatest Show on Earth. Kirk Douglas had turned down the lead, and DeMille had previously concluded that Charlton Heston was too sinister in Dark City. But he told his secretary that he liked the way Heston waved and smiled: “We’d better have a talk with him about the circus manager.”
According to Heston, DeMille would “never say ‘I’m considering you for the part’ or ‘I’m told that you might be good in this. . . .’ He certainly would never have you read for a part. He would merely talk about it, which left you at a loss for a response. . . . [A]ll I could say was, ‘Certainly is interesting. Sounds like it would make a fine film.’ ” After meeting with DeMille a half-dozen times, Heston was cast as the lead—what would begin one of the most fruitful relationships in Hollywood. The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) was a huge success, as were The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959), films that made Heston one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.
Heston’s eventual move to the political right was motivated by the left’s radicalization—”America is not spelled with a K,” he once said—and its abandonment of what he regarded as traditional values. He also came to deplore Hollywood’s glorification of promiscuity and cynicism. But he was hardly a doctrinaire conservative. Heston was appointed to Lyndon Johnson’s National Council on the Arts in 1966 and was always a strong supporter of the National Endowment for the Arts. He served as board chairman and, later, president of the American Film Institute. And yet, despite his work over the decades for the AFI, and his own accomplishments in film, the AFI never gave Heston its Life Achievement Award. (It did create a Charlton Heston Award in 2003, but family and friends thought that too little, too late.)
When Heston died, Time‘s Richard Corliss wrote that he “was a grand, ornery anachronism, the sinewy symbol of a time when Hollywood took itself seriously, when heroes came from history books, not comic books.” Hollywood still takes itself seriously, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with comic-book heroes. But humility and heroism, self-sacrifice and persistence, all found in Heston’s own person and his characters, are in short supply in Hollywood.
Micah Mattix is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and associate professor of English at Regent University.
