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When he argued with director George Stevens to show John the Baptist’s head being cut off in The Greatest Story Ever Told, Stevens told him, “Remember Chuck, this isn’t a movie about John the Baptist.”
“I remember shooting the baptisms in the Colorado River,” Heston recalled. “I had a swimsuit underneath my fur tunic but it was still pretty cold. George came walking down and asked how it was going. I said, ‘Fine. But if the Jordan had been as cold as the Colorado, Christianity would never have gotten off the ground.’”
Most people probably think of The Ten Commandments when Heston’s name comes up, since his role as Moses is shown on television every Easter. Cecil B. DeMille cast Heston because he thought he looked like Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses. And while Heston used his own voice for when the Burning Bush speaks, it was someone else who spoke as God when Moses comes down Mt. Sinai with the tablets. “They never told me who it was,” Heston confided. “It would have been wrong for me to do that voice.”
The director Willy Wyler once said that after playing Moses, John the Baptist, and Judah Ben-Hur the Episcopalian Heston was the best imitation Jew in Hollywood.
Heston considered Wyler a perceptive director of actors because “he wouldn’t quit. When we were shooting Ben-Hur, early in the shoot he came to see me and said, ‘Chuck, you have to be better in this part.’ I said, ‘Okay. What should I do?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. If I knew I’d tell you. And he left. I sat for a long time with a drink in my hand. And in the end I was better. I don’t know how or why, but he was the best director of performance of any director I ever worked with.”
The film that achieved cult status was Planet of the Apes, based on Pierre Boulee’s boo. “I was not overwhelmed with the book,” Heston admitted. “But the idea was marvelous. Though it took two years to get a studio interested. They kept saying, ‘For Christ’s sake, talking monkeys? Buck Rogers? Get out of here.’ Then Dick Zanuck, who was running Fox, said, ‘You’re not going to use monkeys, there’s going to be actors in makeup, right?’ He said, ‘I’ll give you $50,000 to develop the makeup. If it looks good, we’ll do a test scene. If the test looks good, I’ll take it to New York and show it to the board of directors. If they don’t laugh, you’ve got a picture.’ And that’s how it turned out. Planet of the Apes was really the first of the space operas, before they did Lost in Space or 2001.”
The ending of Planet of the Apes stands as one of the most memorable in American cinema history, when Heston and a few others come across a half buried Statue of Liberty on the beach. That’s when it dawns on him that the planet they are on is the Earth, and Heston’s character shouts out, “You finally really did it, Goddamn you, Goddamn you all to hell.” But the studio resisted him saying those words. “Dick Zanuck was there when we discussed the ending. Dick said I couldn’t say that and I said, ‘Dick, I’m not swearing, I’m calling on God to damn the people who destroyed civilization.’ He said, ‘That’s pretty good, that will fly.’”
Pauline Kael’s review of the 1968 film was positive. “All this wouldn’t be so forceful or so funny if it weren’t for the use of Charlton Heston in the [leading] role. With his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body, Heston is a god-like hero; built for strength, he is an archetype of what makes Americans win. He represents American power—and he has the profile of an eagle.”
There were a lot of sequels to Planet of the Apes, though Heston felt they were just going to be “further adventures about the monkeys.” But he agreed to be in the second one as long as they had him disappearing in the first scene and killed at the end, which they did. But Heston ranked the original among his best work.
“You’ve got to put the Shakespearean films in another category, because those are the parts—no question. Shakespeare is the greatest artist who ever lived. No contest. So if you’re working with Mr. Shakespeare, you can’t do anything better. But I’m very proud of Planet of the Apes and I still get checks,” he told me.
Heston included Planet of the Apes as one of five films he thought would hold up in the year 2050. The four others: Ben-Hur, Ten Commandments, El Cid, and Touch of Evil. Of the roles he was most personally proud of he included Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur; his roles as Sherlock Holmes and Long John Silver in Treasure Island; the two Marc Antony’s in Julius Caesar and in Antony and Cleopatra; and the eight different Macbeths. His favorite scripts were Khartoum, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.
Besides being called the all-time king of prestige epics by Pauline Kael, Heston led the way with another genre, the disaster film—or “multiple jeopardy film” as he preferred to call them. In Earthquake, his character wasn’t supposed to die in the end, but he persuaded the producers that he should. “The leading man isn’t supposed to die, but I said—the way it is, my mean wife drowns and my nice girlfriend saves me and we go out together. Why not have him die trying to save his wife? That’s the way it worked out.”
Heston pointed out that he had probably been killed in more films than any leading actor in movie history. “It’s nice if you have a few things to say in the end. “My best death scenes have been in Antony and Cleopatra and Gordon of Khartoum. And El Cid—he’s mortally wounded in battle, but then he gets to die in his wife’s arms.”
His own favorite moment on film was not the parting of the Red Sea or the 15-minute chariot race in Ben Hur, but in El Cid, “in the scene where his troops take Valencia. We were shooting outside a real eleventh century castle. I led a troop of mounted armored horsemen up the beach; there were at least a thousand people inside and outside the gates. They were all screaming ‘Cid, Cid, Cid!’ And I rode through the gate in armor, got off the horse, turned and walked up a forty foot circular staircase to the top of the wall and turned and watched as they screamed again, ‘Cid, Cid, Cid!’ So I know what it’s like to take a city. I really know what it feels like. Better than sex.”
When he reflected on his many roles he said, “Most of the parts I’ve played have been either angry men or messianic men, presidents, kings, cardinals—I’ve played so many of those guys that I feel some bonding to them. To play Richelieu or Andrew Jackson or Gordon of Khartoum or Marc Antony, you are playing genuinely great men—and great men are more interesting than the rest of us. I know how men like Richelieu feel. There’s a line in Three Musketeers that I put in. In the novel, Cardinal Richelieu is the villain, but in reality he created France as a modern nation—fantastic man. One of my henchmen says to me, ‘Eminence, it must be difficult to have so many enemies.’ And the line I put in was: ‘I, I have no enemies. France has enemies.’ That’s the best line I ever wrote.”
Another of his favorite lines, which he didn’t write, was in Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, when he gets annoyed with the owner of the team, Cameron Diaz, and he says to one of his entourage, ‘I truly believe that woman would eat her young.’ I love that line.”
What he didn’t love was working with camels, which he had to do in Ben-Hur and Khartoum. “Camels are not only ugly, they are very bad tempered, and capable of and quite willing to bite you on the ankle when you’re on them. I hate camels.”
He also hated the way Marlon Brando became a defender of the Indian, asking me, “Does Brando know anything about Indians?” When I said he actually did, Heston challenged me: “I don’t know if I would look to Marlon as the sum source of much of anything. By and large, the Indians were attacking the settlers. There’s a kind of a point of view now that the Indians are these wonderfully native people, which is not true. They killed settlers. And the settlers killed them. And the Army killed them. But to say that they were an endemic group of special people, I don’t think that’s accurate.”
I wondered whether the decline of Westerns in the seventies was directly related to our involvement in Vietnam. Heston thought about it and said, “Probably so, and that’s too bad. Along with jazz, if you figure that film is the art form of the century, then Americans do it better than anyone else, and certainly the Western. I’m happy to have a couple of the best ones. Will Penny is one of the best.”
As our conversation wound down, I wondered who Charlton Heston might like to sit at his all-time dinner table. Though his three heroes were Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, he didn’t choose any of them. “Not Michelangelo,” he said, “if he said he would come, he might not; if he did, he wouldn’t have showered, he would stink, and he probably wouldn’t talk to you; if he did talk, he would say something insulting. I suppose Shakespeare—one knows so little about him, and apparently he was liked by everyone around him.”
When I asked him what he might change about himself if he could do it all over again he answered, “Just do it better. In terms of my personal life I’ve been very fortunate. My wife, children, grandchildren seem to be turning into good people. The older ones are already good people. To have a chance to make a living as fruitful as mine has been doing something you’d really do free if they’d feed you, I can’t ask for more.”
And, as we shook hands goodbye I wondered what would be a fitting epitaph for Charlton Heston. How would he like to be remembered?
“As a good man,” he said, “a good father, a good American, and a good actor.”
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