This Heston was a fan of the Bard

The obituaries written after the death of Charlton Heston in April suggested a man whose public and private images were virtually indistinguishable. Discussing his acting, almost all the press played the same note. USA Today’s Mike Clark said Heston was best suited to “holding stone tablets or looking at home in a loincloth.” Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal wrote that he was “always solid, if sometimes bordering on stolid.” Even the New York Times seemed to qualify its praise of his acting, calling attention to his “monumental jut-jawed portrayals.”

Such assessments seemed to forget that Heston was equally good at playing modern men of less-than-epic proportions. “Touch of Evil,” “Earthquake,” “Skyjacked,” “Will Penny,” “Dark City,” “Ruby Gentry,” “Airport 1975,” “Lucy Gallant,” “Bad for Each Other,” “Two-Minute Warning,” “The Pigeon That Took Rome,” “Number One.” Perhaps the films weren’t as good as “Ben-Hur,” but that was no fault of Heston’s. He could even do comedy and poke fun at himself as in “Wayne’s World 2,” “The Dame Edna Experience” and “The Milton Berle Show.”

Casting a further pall over these judgments of Heston the actor was the image of Heston the National Rifle Assn. advocate, holding a rifle above his head and saying, “From my cold dead hands.” I am not aware that any of Heston’s detractors -- and there were many -- ever asked him if he were pro-Constitution or merely pro-gun or both. Many had suggested that Heston’s position was at least partially responsible for an increasingly violent United States in which television’s evening news serves us blood slaughter along with our buttered spinach.

Although I am not a supporter of the NRA’s stance, my attitude toward Heston was slightly schizoid. I remembered that he had called for gun control after the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy; that he had taken a stand against the McCarthy witch hunts, the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon; and that he had campaigned for civil rights. I found it hard to reconcile that Heston with the public Heston of the last decade.

And I had my own back story with Heston. We weren’t friends, but, yes, I knew him. We played our roles on a different stage. I, as a professor of film studies and English literature; he, as an actor as gifted at playing Shakespeare’s Macbeth or Antony as at playing Ben-Hur or Moses.

My interest in Heston’s work with Shakespeare had begun as long ago as 1950, when I read “Julius Caesar” as a sophomore at Phoenix Union High School in Arizona. Coincidentally, that same year, Heston’s involvement with Shakespeare made the national press -- as Antony, he stunned audiences in David Bradley’s version of “Julius Caesar,” a student production made on a shoestring.

--

Making his Marc

It was the first or second of perhaps a dozen Shakespearean Antonys that Heston was to play -- as he would later say, “All the good roles are Shakespearean.” And partly on the strength of his performance in the film, Heston was summoned by Hollywood. (Despite this, he seems not to have been considered for Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1953 “Julius Caesar,” in which Marlon Brando was cast as Antony.)

Fast-forward 20 years. With a doctorate from Stanford, I was in my second decade of teaching at Arizona State University. I had taught, not a few times, courses on Shakespeare and on film history. I also had my own TV interview show.

In the ‘70s, the Bradley movie had finally been made available on 16-millimeter film for classroom use. And Heston by that time had reprised the role of Antony in another film version of “Julius Caesar,” disastrously directed by Stuart Burge. In both those films, a near-nude Heston was shown running the race on the Feast of the Lupercal. A hunk when he ran for Bradley, the somewhat overweight Heston running for Burge was not necessarily a pleasant sight. God only knows why my students didn’t lynch me when I had them write a paper comparing Antony in the Bradley, Mankiewicz and Burge films, but I lived to tell this tale.

And to write Heston a personal letter when his own 1972 film version of Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” failed to find a U.S. distributor. Heston again played Antony in the film, which he had directed in London. This time around, Heston’s more mature body was better suited to Shakespeare’s mature Antony than it had been to the younger Antony in the Burge film. The problem now was Hildegarde Neil’s wooden performance as Cleopatra. Without a strong Cleopatra, the film was doomed to fail, and fail it did.

Thus, when I wrote Heston and asked to show a 16-millimeter print of his “Antony and Cleopatra” for my classes, he did me one better. He called me with a generous offer: He would send his personal 35-millimeter print and come with it for a question-and-answer session with my class -- if I could find a way to screen the print.

Enter Dan Harkins, the owner then of a few local movie theaters, now the emperor of a chain of theaters crossing state boundaries. He had been a student in the first film class I taught. All it took was a phone call: Harkins offered me his Valley Art Theatre in Tempe free of charge.

The print came by courier a few days before Heston’s scheduled arrival. My students packed the theater. But would Heston really turn up? On Nov. 1, 1973, I was pacing in front of the Valley Art, waiting, I suppose, for Moses to drive up in a stretch limo, when I spotted Heston walking down Mill Avenue. He’d had his driver let him off a few blocks away, so he could get a feel for Tempe.

--

A generous man

For the next few hours, Heston was anything but the movie star. He was gentlemanly, generous with his time, willing -- nay, eager -- to talk with my students. He was the professional Shakespearean actor, a lover and thoughtful interpreter of the works of Stratford’s Bard. When he told me to call him the next time I was in L.A., I was stunned. I’d been told similar things by other stars I’d interviewed, only to learn later that most were just being polite. Somehow, I knew Heston meant it.

So, when in 1975 he called to invite me to see his “Macbeth” during its run in L.A., I wasn’t completely surprised. Flabbergasted, perhaps, as I accepted his offer. He was playing Macbeth, opposite Vanessa Redgrave and John Ireland, and said he would let me backstage after the performance. Entering his dressing room, I found him with his wife, Lydia, and son Fraser. Heston introduced me and took me to meet Redgrave and Ireland. When Michael York and his wife, Pat, also came backstage, I met them too.

Then Heston asked me, almost hesitantly, if I had a few minutes to discuss the performance in private. “Was he kidding?” I wondered. “Charlton Heston wants to know what I think of his Macbeth?” Then it hit me: He was treating me as the equal I didn’t feel I was. He knew I shared his great love of Shakespeare and, like two pros, we discussed the production and his performance for about 20 minutes. That was our second meeting.

We would meet one more time. In 1978, Heston put together a one-man show in which he showed clips from his favorite movies and took questions from the audience. He had decided to preview the show in Phoenix and called to see if I might attend. I can’t say if he thought my saying no was an option, but he made it clear he didn’t want to impose.

He arrived at Sky Harbor Airport with Lydia. They were staying at a Ramada Inn, where I spent two hours interviewing him for my television show. We talked about Orson Welles and Sam Peckinpah and George Stevens. I never once asked him about politics, nor did he bring up the subject.

--

Quite a moving show

That night, I sat in the audience with Lydia Heston while he commanded the stage. The audience loved him. Perhaps the night’s most moving moment was his emotional retelling of Eddie Robinson’s death scene in “Soylent Green”; both actors knew that Robinson was dying in real life and that they were immortalizing their last Earthly goodbyes on film.

When the Hestons left for L.A. the next morning, Heston and I said goodbye in person for the third and last time. For the next two years, every so often he would send me a script he was considering and ask what I thought, then discuss it over the phone. By the time all the NRA stuff made the news, we had gone our separate ways.

But I would read the news items, those that praised him and those that demonized him, and ask myself if this was the same man who had asked me if the changes he made to the text of “Macbeth” were too drastic -- the Heston who played for me, with apparent ease and utter truthfulness, the role of soft-spoken gentleman and thoughtful Shakespearean.

--

Salerno is professor emeritus of Victorian literature and film studies at Arizona State University and for years served as a film critic in print and on television.

calendar@latimes.com