North Star Joins Galaxy of American Screen Heroes : The Leading Man of Hearings Has Hollywood Talking

It was inevitable that future film star Oliver L. North would become an American hero when he testified at the Irangate hearings in Washington.

Good-looking guys in clean uniforms always make an impression (Superman leaps to mind in a single bound) and this one--with his bobbed forelock and his Huck Finn smile--had women swooning and men envious long before his act opened Tuesday.

But no one seemed prepared for the impression Ollie made this week as he calmly accepted his role as the point man in a weird political undercover operation that involved selling missiles to Iran to finance the glue needed to patch up the resistance movement in Nicaragua.

If Irangate had been a movie before it was a scandal, it would have been a Cannon film starring Harry Dean Stanton, with a three-day growth.

The Irangate issues hardly resemble the issues in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in which James Stewart became a folk hero for revealing corruption in Congress, but Mr. Smith should have been so popular as Ollie.

The news media, recognizing information for the entertainment it is, have turned the hearings into Hollywood-on-the-Potomac. It’s fun, it’s exciting, it’s . . . “Ollie and the Beasts.” Oprah will be by any day to do her show from Capitol Hill. Robin Leach will look into the life styles of some of the rich and famous. Dr. Ruth will be along to explain why people get sexually aroused every time North’s attorney starts screaming.

So far, the best sideshow has been the polls, daily tallies of public opinion that have consistently shown Ollie whipping his interrogators by a ratio of about 9 to 1. The reaction has been so overwhelming that “The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather” went out Thursday looking for people who might be able to explain it. They found people on the street in Little Havana. They found Alexander Haig. They even found me.

The questions I was asked were whether North was coming over in the grand tradition of movie heroes, and if so, which ones. I used up about seven minutes worth of videotape blathering on about the parallels between Ollie’s appeal and that of Dirty Harry. They are both characters of unquestionable commitment, I reasoned, who will get their jobs done even if the system they’re serving seems as much an enemy as the enemy.

The name of Rambo was introduced, but I dismissed that. North’s rigid ideology scares me, but I wouldn’t compare him to a mad dog running amok with a submachine gun.

“CBS Evening News” closed its Thursday half hour with the celebrity segment. Reporter Bernard Goldberg summarized the Marine’s apparent appeal by saying that in a “world where so many lack convictions, we’re drawn to people who passionately believe in what they’re doing and then do it.”

Film clips were then shown of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo and of Eastwood as Dirty Harry, who snarled the immortal words, “Go ahead, make my day.”

My own fuzzy contribution was that North’s verbal skills add a weapon to Dirty Harry’s arsenal. The colonel can actually speak, I said, while tongue-tied “Dirty Harry can only pull out his gun and fire.”

Frankly, I felt pretty silly trying to place North in big screen context. Physically, he is a wimp next to Eastwood, John Wayne and the screen’s other macho legends. And try to imagine each of those stars taking a meeting to consider playing a starched bureaucrat in a movie where the best action sequence involves an office machine that eats paper.

North did issue a crowd-pleasing challenge to terrorist Abu Nidal to meet anywhere, anytime and on equal terms-- mano a mano. I’ll take North right now and give you 5 to 1 against Abu. But during much of his testimony, North seemed to be giving Richard Nixon’s Checkers speech, holding his family up like a pet dog to explain how the Ayatollah’s money came to pay for his home security system and a couple of pairs of leotards for his daughters.

No matter. To a nation starved for heroism, people take their role models where they find them--at congressional hearings, in New York subways. And to North’s obvious abilities (dependability, reliability, deniability) we have to add his willingness to take on the system. He is, as we would all like to be, simultaneously cool and indignant, facing up to a gang grilling and giving back as good as he gets.

It is the stuff of legend, if not the substance.

This isn’t the last time you will read about Col. North in a movie column. Call Bill Welch at the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. I’ll bet he’s already got a prime spot picked out on Hollywood Boulevard for a North star.

Media wags have spent part of the week casting “The Oliver North Story,” with look-alike Treat Williams favored for the title role while Fawn Hall seems a unanimous choice to play herself. I haven’t heard any suggestions for the role of Mrs. Belly Button, the sly code name for North’s wife, but somehow Cher seems right for it.

If Hollywood tradition has its way, North will play himself. He has leading man looks. His voice crackles in outrage the way Jimmy Stewart’s voice crackled in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” He has a sense of humor. He even has his own wardrobe and ribbons.

There is precedent for good-looking American heroes portraying themselves on screen. Olympic champion Bob Mathias starred in “The Bob Mathias Story” in 1954, then went into politics. Elroy Hirsch, a pro football receiver with an erratic gait, played himself in the 1953 “Crazylegs.” And in the most relevant example, World War II hero Audie Murphy reenacted his own gallantry in the 1955 war film “To Hell and Back.”

Murphy, of course, had a real film career. Before his death in 1971, he starred in 39 movies, nearly half of which had hell, bullets, guns or battles in the titles. Most of his movies were Westerns. In his best movie, John Huston’s “The Red Badge of Courage,” he played a coward.

North may be a little old (and he is certainly set in his ways) to begin a career as a Hollywood leading man. Murphy was 24 when he made his first film. North is 43.

But for the starring role in a movie about his own life (suggested title: “To Capitol Hill and Back”), there isn’t a more valid candidate than a Marine who, if the President asked him, would stand on his head in a corner and, if told by a superior to tell a lie, would “salute smartly and charge up the hill.”

Oliver North is a director’s dream.

Radio, TV stations besieged by callers supporting Oliver North. Page 5.