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Charlton Heston: A Tribute
This month marks the passing of one of the true greats from Hollywood’s golden age. On April 6, 2008 actor and political activist Charlton Heston died in Beverly Hills, at age 84, six years after revealing that he had Alzheimer’s. The tragedy of Heston’s final years was that he suffered from the disease and the slow mental death that it brings – as in the final years of another great American, Ronald Reagan, whose career as actor-turned-political activist (and “conservative icon”) often has been compared with Heston’s. But, also as with Reagan’s, the triumph of Heston’s life was that it was a complete one, filled with tremendous achievement. Both in the characters he portrayed on the screen and in his political advocacy, Heston championed the dignity of the individual, and it is his pro-individualist legacy for which he will be remembered. Born in 1923 as John Charles Carter, Heston studied acting at Northwestern University, in his hometown of Evanston, Illinois, where he met his wife of 64 years, Lydia Clarke (who was at his bedside when he died). At age 17 he appeared in his first film, a 1941 version of Peer Gynt. During World War II he served in the Air Force; then, after the war, appeared as Marc Anthony in filmmaker David Bradley’s Julius Caesar, described as a low-budget film that became a staple of 1950s and `60s high school English classes. He made his broadway debut in Anthony and Cleopatra in 1947. His stage experience, coupled with many late-40s roles in early TV programs, gave Heston sufficient reputation to land the lead in his first Hollywood feature, the 1950 crime thriller/film noir Dark City. He immediately became a star and was cast as a circus manager in Cecille B. DeMille’s over-the-top 1952 film, The Greatest Show on Earth. Then came Heston’s signature role as Moses in the last and biggest film DeMille directed: The Ten Commandments in 1956. That blockbuster was the first of the “big three” historical epics in which Heston starred; the other two were 1959’s Ben-Hur (winner of 11 Oscars, including best picture and Heston’s best actor) and 1961’s El Cid, a portrait of Spain’s legendary hero that until recently was one of the most-wanted movies on DVD. (A two-disc deluxe edition of El Cid finally was released just earlier this year.) Perhaps it was Heston’s larger-than-life screen persona that made him particularly well-suited for historical epics: besides the previously-mentioned “big three,” he also starred in the Civil War epic Major Dundee (1965), the medieval action drama The War Lord (1965), and the story of British general Charles George Gordon’s defense of Khartoum (1966). He also played Cardinal Richelieu in director Mark Lester’s entertaining romps, The Three Musketeers and its sequel, The Four Musketeers (1973-74). And he played Andrew Jackson – one of his most convincing historical portrayals – in two films, The President’s Lady (1953) and The Buccaneer (1958). (The Buccaneer is a personal favorite of mine, in which Heston as General Jackson is so convincing that he almost steals the movie from its star, Yul Brynner, playing pirate Jean Lafitte at the time of the Battle of New Orleans.) Heston starred in just a couple of Westerns – The Big Country (1958), where he played a ranch hand, and Will Penny (1968), one of his personal favorite roles, as a middle-aged cowpoke – but he also starred in the quasi-Western, set in the jungles of South America, The Naked Jungle (where he co-starred with Eleanor Parker and millions of red ants). Heston’s film career was rounded out by starring roles in several science-fiction and disaster films in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Planet of the Apes (1968), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), The Omega Man (1971), Soylent Green (1973), Earthquake (1974) and Airport 1975. Mike Clark, in his cover-story obituary in USA Today (“Heston’s epic style defined an era,” April 7), summed up Heston’s film career by quoting film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, whom (Clark wrote) “said it best: `Charlton Hestron might be said to achieve his apotheosis as Moses – unless one decides that it’s Moses who’s achieving his apotheosis as Heston.’” Equally memorable with his film performances – and equally important, as a legacy of Charlton Heston’s life – was his political activism. Most of the media’s obituaries last week described Heston’s activism as starting with a “liberal” bent: campaigning for Democrat presidential candidates Adlai Stevenson in 1956 and John F. Kennedy in 1960, picketing the opening of one of his films at a segregated Oklahoma theater in 1961, and joining with Martin Luther King, Jr. in his historic 1963 march on Washington. “But,” the obituaries then pointedly reported, Heston’s political activism turned to the “right,” with his support for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964. Typical of the media coverage of Heston’s political activism is the feature article by Peter Eisler in USA Today (April 7), the headline of which proclaimed that “Through the years, Heston’s politics defined classification.” After noting that Heston “drifted right” in 1964, the article added, “but he maintained ties across the political spectrum. From 1966 to 1971, he led the Screen Actors Guild – the longest tenure of any SAG president.” However, the article also notes, he backed Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election and campaigned for Ronald Reagan in 1980. His friendship with Reagan allegedly made him “more partisan” – meaning, more active in promoting conservative causes – for, like Reagan, he had concluded that the Democratic Party had left him while his values remained the same. By the late 1980s he was an outspoken foe of abortion and an advocate of gun rights, serving as president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) from 1998 to 2003. His presidency of the NRA made him a full-fledged “conservative icon,” the article reports. At the 2000 NRA convention, Heston blasted Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore for his anti-gun stance, memorably raising an antique gun in the air and declaring Gore would have to wrest the right to bear arms “from my cold, dead hands.” Many NRA members displayed bumper stickers on their cars, proudly declaring “Charlton Heston is my President.” Only left-wing paternalist/elitists would see any contradictions in Heston’s politics. His early-60s “civil rights” activism is entirely consistent with his late-90s activism on behalf of gun rights, for the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is one of the most important (and, because it is based on the individual’s natural right to self-defense, one of the most fundamental) “civil rights” we Americans have. (Indeed, the NRA is truly the nation’s largest civil-rights organization. It certainly has a better claim to the label “civil rights” than do other so-called civil rights groups that, rather than championing the rights of the individual, seek to increase government’s coercive power over individuals and to erase individuals’ uniqueness by classifying them according to race or sex.) The difficulty some people have in seeing the consistency in Heston’s career as a political activist is one of the great fallacies caused by a “left” versus “right,” “liberal” versus “conservative” view of politics. Those popular, traditional labels of political orientation are virtually meaningless and quite misleading, for they have no relevance to the fundamental political issue of our time: the freedom of the individual versus the tyranny of the collective. Rather than “defying classification,” Heston’s career of political activism is that of a consistent, life-long defender of individual rights. Wayne LaPierre, NRA vice president, nicely summed up this side of Heston’s legacy by noting he was “an American who devoted himself to civil rights, to correcting injustices . . . and for standing up for what he knew was right.”
| Link to this Entry | Posted Tuesday, April 15, 2008 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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