Learning more about the man known as Moses

A friend once remarked that you don’t really get to know a man until he’s dead.

It was a comment made at the memorial service for a bartender who worked at a newspaper hangout in Oakland called the Hollow Leg.

The friend was talking about the eulogies offered on behalf of the bartender whose name was Nels; how he had lived such a noble life beyond pouring Scotch and mixing martinis.

He learned about Nels through those who knew him best, and that’s one of the ways I’m learning about Charlton Heston, through a friend named Peter Dennis.

I knew Heston, who died April 5, only as an actor of chiseled features and deep, stentorian tones who played heroic roles on the big screen. Later, we all came to know him as Moses until he took on a more insidious public role in 1998.

He became president of the National Rifle Assn., an organization that lobbies for gun ownership, and in 2000 stood onstage, a rifle held high, and proclaimed that the government would have to wrest it “from my cold, dead hands.” Heston had become what I deplored, and I wrote that the firearms he was so loudly supporting were wresting the future from the cold, dead hands of students dying in school massacres.

Peter Dennis is also an actor and was a friend of Heston. They had connected through a mutual affection for a little bear named Winnie the Pooh. Heston loved the stories of Pooh and bore the nickname “Tigger,” a character in the A.A. Milne tales. Dennis is famous for portraying the stories onstage, and in 1987 their worlds coincided.

He was performing Pooh at the Coronet Theater in West Hollywood. Heston was in the audience. “He came into my dressing room after the performance,” Dennis remembered during an interview at his Sunland home. “I looked up when the door opened and there was Moses reflected in my mirror. He wrapped his arms around me and said it was the most wonderful evening he had ever spent in the theater.”

Coincidentally, I was also at that performance, captured by the gentle magic of the evening. I was taken by Dennis’ first words from a poem that begins, “Wherever I am, there is always Pooh . . . “ Thereafter, he brought Pooh’s characters brilliantly to life.

“Shortly after that,” Dennis, a native of England, recalled, “I had the cheek to write Heston and ask if he would support my application for a green card. He said it would be a pleasure to do so.” Dennis became a U.S. citizen four years ago.

His friendship with Heston grew closer. They both appeared at public readings from the Pooh books, and eventually Dennis came to know Heston’s family, and Heston through the family.

They didn’t see him as Moses. He was an adored father and grandfather who read Pooh stories to the kids. He was Tigger, the joyful, bouncing tiger in the “100 Aker Wood.”

Their friendship was tested by Heston’s presidency of the NRA and his macho “cold, dead hands” declaration that became a mantra for gun owners. Dennis’ adult son had been killed by gunfire seven years earlier, an innocent victim of a drive-by shooting in St. Louis. The memory continues to burn.

Talking about it brought tears to Dennis’ eyes. “It made me hate guns,” he said, his voice tightening. “It made me loathe guns.”

Did Heston’s association with the NRA affect their relationship? “I thought about it,” he said, hesitantly. “But I never resented him. I saw the man that he was.”

Having spent years performing Milne’s stories, Dennis understands the gentling quality of Pooh. No one could love the little bear and his friends -- Piglet, Kanga, Eeyore and the others -- as Heston loved them and be evil, Dennis says.

“Being at his home with family and friends, I got to know people who knew and loved him, and through them I got to know him.”

I guess that’s what my friend meant after listening to the eulogies for Nels. He began to know the man he never really knew through those who did.

Dennis maintained his friendship with Heston, even as the man who turned Moses into an iconic movie hero lay in the clouding stages of Alzheimer’s. He would read Pooh stories to him, and Heston, somehow perceiving them, would smile.

“The last time I saw him was at a Christmas party at his home. He was in bed. I held his hand and said” -- Dennis whispered the words -- “ ‘Wherever I am there is always Pooh . . .’ His eyes flickered and there was the slightest smile. He died four months later.”

Driving home, I thought about a note I had received from Heston after one of my columns. It began, “I know you don’t like me . . .” I don’t recall what the rest of it said, but I replied, “It isn’t you I dislike, it’s what you stand for.”

Had I known him better, I might have been able to separate the two.

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almtz13@aol.com