Ice-T’s Opportunity

I was bemused to read in Calendar that Dick Wolf, producer of the superb “Law & Order,” has hired the rap “artist” formerly known as Ice-T to star as the criminal hero of a series in which the baffled police employ bad guys to catch bad guys (“After ‘Cop Killer,’ Ice-T Will Lay Down Law on TV,” Aug. 7).

Wolfe is one of the best producers in television; if anyone can bring this concept off, he can. Ice-T deserves the right to make a living. I wish them both well, not least because I helped get Ice-T fired four years ago by Time Warner, the largest entertainment conglomerate in the world.

He was then under contract to Warners, which had just released a disc called “Cop Killer,” obscenely celebrating the murder of policemen. Fortunately, Time Warner had an annual meeting scheduled, open only to stockholders. Since I held a few hundred shares of TW, I attended and confronted Gerald Levin, then as now chairman of the company. He attempted a feeble defense of the disc on 1st Amendment grounds, but fell silent when I simply read the lyrics, along with those of another “song” in which Ice-T fantasized the sodomizing of Tipper Gore’s 12-year-old niece in language The Times cannot print. I walked out of the huge room to stunned silence.

A week later, TW pulled the record; a month after that it canceled Ice-T’s contract. Aside from my work on civil rights with Martin Luther King in the early ‘60s, before it got fashionable, there is no public sector activity of which I’m more proud.

Do well, Mr. Wolf. You’re a gifted man.

Ice-T, I wish you well, too. Be a better man.

CHARLTON HESTON

Beverly Hills