THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 17, 1995 TAG: 9509150638
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
When actor Charlton Heston appeared on the Family Channel's ``700 Club'' in Virginia Beach last week, all he had to do to get a prolonged standing ovation was show up.
Gray-haired but still square-jawed, the 70-year-old actor with the Mount Rushmore mug seemed to have grown into the living image of his most famous role, Moses, in Cecil B. DeMille's biblical epic ``The Ten Commandments.'' It's hard for some of us to believe that Heston made the film in 1956, almost four decades back. The performer noted that he retains as a treasured movie memento the sturdy staff he once employed on the Red Sea.
``It still works,'' Heston confided to TV host Ben Kinchlow. ``I can part the pool with it. Just kidding!''
The actor had come to promote not the Tablets but his new autobiography, In the Arena (Simon & Schuster, 592 pp., $27.50). Heston's book comes across the way he does - substantial and straightforward, if occasionally a bit stiff. But always interesting; after all, he worked with everybody, and which of us has not already spent many unforgettable cinematic moments in this man's company?
The actor seems appropriately ossified into an American monument. Raised in Michigan, his father a mill operator, Heston early on seized on performing as his life's work, earning an acting scholarship to Northwestern University's School of Speech. After serving as a radio operator with the 11th Air Force in the Aleutians, he and his wife, Lydia, moved to New York and began the arduous but ever upward climb to stardom.
Among a myriad of roles, Heston has played Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Moses, John the Baptist, Michelangelo and Sir Thomas More. An Oscar winner for ``Ben-Hur,'' he has also been president of the Screen Actors Guild, chairman of the American Film Institute and co-chair for the President's Task Force on the Arts and Humanities.
But it's the stories he tells, not the certification he supplies, that engage. Like the night Heston was leaving a London steak house in the company of Gary Cooper. A gang of tough rockers at a nearby table spotted them, and one of them growled, ``Oh, there goes the big cowboy star.''
Coop stopped, turned in his tracks and looked steadily at the young man. ``When you say that, smile,'' he said softly. The kid couldn't have realized that was a line from Cooper's first hit film, ``The Virginian,'' but it didn't matter.
Suddenly, he wasn't in a cozy London restaurant anymore, but standing all alone on a dusty Western street, with a chill wind on the back of his neck. No one at the table moved or looked up. Coop stood there for fully 30 seconds, cold-eyed, then smiled slightly, turned on his heel and walked out.
Life imitates art.
So what's Charlton Heston really like?
He pronounces his own performance as Moses ``generally impressive.'' In poverty, he was a liberal; in wealth, he is a conservative. A grandfather, he has been happily married for 50 years.
Charlton Heston's as square, solid and stolid as a cinder block.
But he is able to regard the grotesquerie of stardom with a reasonable man's instinctive dread:
They can make you a living god, but they may ask your life in return. While you dance on the edge of the abyss, they'll forgive you anything, applaud your worst excess, laugh at your most obscene folly. Like Babe Ruth, James Dean, Judy Garland, Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, you can do anything, but in the end, the unspoken bargain is that you have to pay the bill.
You will lie naked and broken in the rainy mud, while they stand on the bank, survivors, looking down at you.
Or up at you, if you happen to be Heston.
Who else, on location at Mount Sinai, would have been capable of the following exchange with director DeMille after shooting the scene with the burning bush?
Cecil: ``We'll bring your mountain, not to Mohammed, but to millions who can never stand here, where God spoke to Moses, from the fire.''
Chuck: ``Mr. DeMille, when we were filming that today, I was trying to imagine God's voice. Surely I hear Him inside my own head, my own heart. I think it should be in my own voice, too.''
Thus the already huge part fattened further, and Heston became the voice of the Lord. Not for the last time. At Christmas just three years ago, the Arts & Entertainment Network offered ``Charlton Heston Presents the Bible,'' in which the actor played not only God, but Adam, Eve and the snake.
He probably could have done the cast of thousands, too. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by JACKIE SEOW
Jacket photo by PHOTOFEST
by CNB