20 Questions: Charlton Heston

We sent Contributing Editor David Rensin to find out why Charlton Heston has chosen to speak out lately on a variety of public issues and to see what sort of man lives behind his history of larger-than-life roles. Rensin told us, I arrived at Heston's huge house at 8:30 A.M., noticing the Guard dogs on duty, Stay in car and beep horn sign as I negotiated his winding driveway. He met me at the door and we settled into facing Eames chairs for three hours. Heston took great pains to make each point absolutely clear; but in relaxed moments, he took himself a good deal less seriously than the public might expect. He has a weakness for peanut butter, and he makes good coffee."

1.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that the media are taking pot shots at you because of your extraprofessional activities?

[A] Heston: I've taken fairly exposed positions for some time now, back to the civil rights days. But I have never felt myself terribly ill used by journalists. If you're going to take a public position on some issue, press coverage is to your advantage. If you can't handle it so that it comes out reasonably supportive, then it's your fault. Then there's the entire legitimacy question. Every time I'm asked, "How do you think we should regard what you and Paul Newman say about the nuclear freeze?" I say, "Very skeptically. I hope you regard what anybody says about the nuclear freeze very skeptically."

2.

[Q] Playboy: Just because you're an actor?

[A] Heston: That's right. Actors are not presumed to be professionally involved in that issue. When I talk about the Screen Actors Guild, on the record, it can be presumed I know what I'm talking about. I feel that I have a right to shoot my mouth off. Unfortunately, it's the media that would prefer to have me and Newman debating the nuclear freeze than Edward Teller and Admiral Turner. In our favor is that we're supposed to know how to communicate effectively. Besides, I don't think I should have to abandon my right as a citizen to speak out in public. And if I sound like a jerk, there's a faint risk that someone will, out of context, distort what I say and make me seem a jerk. But that's a small risk. And what can I do about it, anyway? It's up to me to sound as reasonable and moderate as I can. It's not a question of propriety. Just a question of not looking like an asshole, you know?

3.

[Q] Playboy: Considering all the heat you took in your battles with Ed Asner and in the midst of continuing controversies within the Screen Actors Guild, why did you choose to speak out on the nuclear issue? What drew you into the debate with Newman?

[A] Heston: When this nuclear-freeze thing started, I was quite sure it was a mistake--that it was unverifiable, unnegotiable and unfair. But I also thought, Come on, Chuck, take a pass on this one. Then Paul called a press conference. The spine of his support of the freeze was "What's all this nonsense about the Soviet Union's not keeping its treaties? It keeps its treaties as well as anybody else." And I thought, That does it. There are much better arguments he could make.

Although Paul and I have never been close, I've always respected him. He's a Democrat, I'm independent, but we've often found ourselves in support of the same candidate. And I think he's a fine actor. The casual encounters we've had have always been amicable. Therefore, I was shocked when I went in to do the debate and he wouldn't shake hands with me. I said, "Hi, Paul. How are you?" And he said, "I hate this personal shit you've been doing." Which is not true. I think it's a great mistake to make personal attacks on anyone with whom you're differing on a public issue. I understand it's a debating technique if you want to make someone mad. I remember when I made my first statement. I thought very carefully about what I would say about Paul. I mentioned the clear refutations of record of his position on the Soviets' abrogation of treaties. I said that if in the face of that Paul felt that the Soviets had kept their treaties, he was singularly innocent. That's not a very pejorative comment to make about someone. I could have said he was a stupid son of a bitch. But I didn't feel it. I remain hurt that he would take personal offense at that. Unlike Asner, I separate out the personal. It was stupid of Asner to call me a cocksucker within range of 17 microphones.

4.

[Q] Playboy: HOW friendly are you and President Reagan? Do you call him Ronnie?

[A] Heston: I am a great admirer and supporter of President Reagan's, but our intimacy is exaggerated. A few weeks ago, a reporter asked if I could just pick up the phone and get the President. I said I hoped not. And I certainly wouldn't try. If there is something that I want to bring to his attention, I can call somebody like Mike Deaver. But I can't imagine the circumstances that would make me call Reagan directly.

We've sat around in social situations. I've known him for years. But it would never occur to me to call him Ronnie now--though I did when we were on the S.A.G. board together. I call his wife Nancy, but I've known her longer. I've spent a lot of time with people of some significance and it's never occurred to me to try to increase the informality of our relationships.

5.

[Q] Playboy: But you've been to the White House. How's the food? Ever get lost there?

[A] Heston: By and large, the food's very good. I know the first floor and the ground floor reasonably well, but it is awfully easy to get lost. I spent most of my time there when I was working on the arts task force. They have a whole basement area of offices and it's very complicated geography. You say, "I have to go to the bathroom. Which way is it?" And someone says, "Go down the hall, turn right." If you take the wrong turn, you suddenly see this big guy asking, "Can I help you?" You don't get lost there for long.

6.

[Q] Playboy: You've spent a good deal of time in period costumes. What do you wear around the house?

[A] Heston: Tennis clothes a lot. And warm-up clothes. My wife and my daughter both tell me that I don't have very good taste in picking clothes, and I'm willing to rely on their judgment in that area. Clothes aren't very important to me. I like old clothes. For instance, these trousers I'm wearing were made for The Omega Man. These boots, which I have in both black and brown, are copies of some Arabian boots made for Ben-Hur. The originals were a fawn color with purple patterned overlays. I remember taking them to Maxwell's, a bootmaker in London. I said, "Could you guys make me a pair of these?" The guy said, "I don't think we can do that kind of thing, sir. No, (continued on page 205) Charlton Heston (continued from page 139) no, no." I said, "I don't mean in this color. Black would be fine." He said, "Oh, yes. In that case, we could make them." You could see on his face the real revulsion he felt for those yellow-and-purple boots.

7.

[Q] Playboy: Do you wear Jockey shorts or boxer shorts?

[A] Heston: Jockey. I hate boxer shorts. They look tacky.

8.

[Q] Playboy: What do you know about Charlton Heston that everyone else, after all these years, still misses?

[A] Heston: People don't perceive me as a shy man. But I am. I am thought of mostly in terms of the parts I play. I am seen as a forbidding authority figure. I only wish I were as indomitable as everyone thinks.

9.

[Q] Playboy: In your book, you describe Barbara Walters as "ball-cutting." Do tough women intimidate you?

[A] Heston: I don't think anybody intimidates me. I find tough women off-putting, I guess. And dispiriting. Emasculation is the unconscious intent. I have more empathy for women's condition than I'm generally thought to have. I know better than most people how tough it is for actresses. There are fewer parts for them, and their careers are shorter. It also takes them longer to get dressed and made up, and people get restive about that. All those things are unfair. But being confrontational is no more helpful for a woman than it is for a man. I know a lot of ladies who do very well without behaving that way. Women like Bella Abzug have done the women's cause a lot of harm. The white-lipped belligerence with which some women, understandably, have assaulted the inequities has harmed their search for equality more than it has helped.

10.

[Q] Playboy: You've been married to the same woman for 40 years. What's the secret?

[A] Heston: Well, you've got to be a superb husband. That's my joke answer. Actually I think of myself as a remarkably tolerant fellow. My wife and children tell me that this is not necessarily true, that I am quite idiosyncratic and sometimes contrary. Bu I think my wife would also say that I'm easy to get along with. Part of the secret is recognizing that your partner has different priorities, different anxieties, different needs; that they may be in conflict with yours, let alone different from yours. Then, a definition of being in love with someone is willingness to subordinate your needs to hers--not invariably but if it's an issue that really counts. I have sometimes misread those needs. But people also say that the first year of any relationship is the hardest, so perhaps one of the best things about my marriage is that I spent the first year overseas. We squeaked by with no problems.

11.

[Q] Playboy: What's better than sex?

[A] Heston: Getting it right. Getting it right one time. One thing about being an actor or a painter is that you never do get it right--but always, maybe you're going to. Sex is great. You get it right. It's predominantly fantastic. You say, "It's never been so good." But painting the Sistine Chapel or trying to write a symphony or play Hamlet, you never fucking get it right.

12.

[Q] Playboy: What sort of advice would you give to young actors? What do you know that they will find out?

[A] Heston: In the beginning, when you're studying acting, it's like a religion and you're an acolyte of the true faith. And anybody who doesn't do it the way you do it is an agent of the antichrist. The more you do it, the more you find out that you don't know everything you thought you did. You become a catholic, with a small c. What counts is "Does it work?" There's a wonderful story about Laurence Olivier on the stage in Othello. His is considered very possibly the best performance by any actor in any part in living memory. I certainly have never seen anything like it. Maggie Smith, who was Desdemona, told me this: One night, at the final curtain, there was the silence and then the ovation, as always. But the actors couldn't believe how remarkable, how much better than ever it had been. So Maggie wanted to talk with Olivier--though usually, afterward, you just say goodnight. She knocked on his dressing-room door. He was sitting in the inner room, still in wardrobe, with a large whiskey in his hand and the make-up still on and the sweat running down his face, looking absolutely desolate. He didn't even look up when she came in. Maggie said, "Larry, you know how good that was, don't you?" He said, "Yes, but I don't know how I did it." In the context of that story, something he once said to me works: "Sometimes the gods breathe in your ear. That's fine and you're home free. But you have to find a way when they don't. And they won't do it all the time."

13.

[Q] Playboy: You say that Robert De Niro is one of your favorite actors. In terms of the consistency of Oscar-quality performances, how does his work in Raging Bull stack up against yours in Ben-Hur?

[A] Heston: There are parts I can play that De Niro couldn't. And vice versa. But acting is not competition. I, along with most of my colleagues, deplore that idea. Every actor should set standards for himself that are higher than those anyone else will set. What was that bit, though slightly off the mark, about when Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn first worked together? She had a debate with him about whether maybe she should have first billing. He was not receptive. She said, "Well, you know, ladies first." He said, "Honey, this is a movie, not a lifeboat." And acting is not a foot race.

Also, Ben-Hur is not my favorite performance. I have never given a performance with which I was totally pleased. I would be surprised if De Niro were as pleased with Raging Bull as I was. I have done some work that I like better than others: Khartoum, Will Penny, El Cid, parts of Soylent Green. I admire De Niro's willingness to extend his range, to try things beyond the apparent limits of his physical range.

14.

[Q] Playboy: When you get philosophical, what do you say?

[A] Heston: If it happens to you, it's your fault. It's amazing how much energy the human animal spends on assigning the blame elsewhere. It's nonsense. I like to think that my best quality is that I will accept the responsibility for my life on every level. You can also simplify your life if, when you've made a mistake, you say, "I was wrong. I shouldn't have done that." Many people find that hard to do. I think the recent history of the world might have been different if on the day after the Watergate break-in, President Nixon had said, "Some of my employees and supporters, in misguided zeal, committed a felony break-in for which I must accept full responsibility."

15.

[Q] Playboy: Who really runs America?

[A] Heston: It's not the multinational corporations. That's bullshit. The news departments of the major television networks have an unfair influence. The media have become almost a fourth arm of Government, something the fellas who wrote the Constitution didn't figure on. Dan Rather is more important than anyone in Government except the President--and the Constitution provides for the President's enormous power to be properly checked and balanced by Congress and the Supreme Court. Nobody got to vote for Rather. Now, I know what he says: "You do get to vote for me. You can turn me off." Well, people can turn him off, but that's the news. He has enormous influence on events without the responsibility for life-and-death decisions. Of course, a free press is essential to a free society, but on a certain level, you could say it's an ornament of a free society. No one has yet begun to adequately measure the power of the moving image. But Lenin understood it. Goebbels understood it. More than armies or ambassadors, the moving image can shape the way we perceive ourselves, other people, the world, what's happened and what's going to happen.

16.

[Q] Playboy: What were your thoughts while parting the Red Sea?

[A] Heston: I was hoping that the dump tanks would work. Actually, I don't think the actor exists who really lives a role. You can't. You've got to keep close enough to reality to control what's happening. But there are situations in which you can surrender for a moment. For example, to stand in the desert before 8000 people, 5000 animals and 27 assistant directors and lift that stick and say, "Bear us out of Egypt, O Lord, as an eagle bears its young upon its wings"--that's remarkable.

17.

[Q] Playboy: Women still go crazy over you. Men are respectful. You probably have the major franchise on presence. Do you ever feel it slipping away when you look in the mirror? Do you catch yourself saying goodbye to all that?

[A] Heston: That's what comes from having your nose broken. Well, obviously, it happens as you age. I think men are luckier in that regard than women. I suppose that up to a certain point, the face I have improves with age. My daughter saw El Cid years after I had done it. She said, "Oh, Daddy. You were beautiful then." I laughed, of course. But my face is, perhaps, more useful now than it was 30 years ago.

18.

[Q] Playboy: You have three guard dogs. Who named them? Who feeds them? What are your conversations with them like? Which of the three is most politically aware-- dogs go?

[A] Heston: I named them. The dogs are all named after historical characters: Pompey and Ramses and Portia--after Brutus' wife, not the car. They're fed by the housekeeper, though their grandfather was fed by me and their mother and father were fed by my kids. Our conversations are complicated by the fact that their grandfather was a really great dog and their mother and father really good dogs. So I suppose I regard these three somewhat pejoratively for not living up to their forebears, which is unfair. We have a cordial relationship. Their political awareness is part of their problem. For so long, they were just the troupe following behind. Now they are the only dogs and they don't know how to handle it.

19.

[Q] Playboy: Even though it has elected a former actor President, isn't the public's fear of the politically involved actor just fear of being manipulated by someone who may, after all, not be sincere--just acting?

[A] Heston: That's an interesting point. The only people who take the comment that they perform something well as a compliment are actors. To anyone else, performance is phony, a deception and unfair. But any good political leader has to be a marvelous actor. Churchill, De Gaulle, Mark Antony, for God's sake, were all superb actors. Churchill didn't rally the Western world with the blood, sweat and tears, fight them on the beaches, fight them on the landing fields just on the spur of the moment. He wrote it, rehearsed it; he learned his speeches by heart. That was performance. Actors are regarded more skeptically because they are known to be actors. But giving actors a break and judging them on the merits of what they say rather than on the basis of what they do--that doesn't have a high priority with me. We're members of one of the world's oldest minority groups. People are generally skeptical of us. We're regarded as thieves, drunks and wife stealers. Sometimes with good reason.

20.

[Q] Playboy: Who are Charlton Heston's heroes?

[A] Heston: I've played a couple of them: Jackson and Jefferson. I admire inordinately the extraordinary man. We live in the century of the common man, and I think we have become skeptical of the possibility of the genuinely great man. But believe me, great men have existed. That there don't happen to be any around right now doesn't mean great men and women have not moved the world. In fact, I think the possibility, the potential of the extraordinary individual is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the species. I suspect that reindeer and horses and turtles don't have that wide a potential. It's admittedly a sardonic view of life. But whether or not that extraordinary individual who comes along every half-billion people or so is enough to save the race, I don't know. What's the old joke that ended, "We'd be up to our ass in crocodiles"? We're very close to that right now.

"I am seen as a forbidding authority figure. I only wish I were as indomitable as everyone thinks."