When Charlton Heston, who was recently re-elected as president of the National Rifle Association for an unprecedented third term, was a high-school football player, he fell while catching a pass, significantly rearranging his nose. The new nose, he believes, changed his life. It gave his face a rugged, stoical cast; it added an aspect of masculine suffering to his wholesome, blond demeanour. Importantly, it made him look exactly like Michelangelo's statue of Moses. When this was pointed out to Cecil B de Mille, Heston was cast as Moses in The Ten Commandments. The epic career, and everything that was to come afterwards, beckoned.
Now you can see the nose in a new role, on "The Official Charlton Heston Second Amendment Collector Plate in first-quality porcelain", as advertised on the internet for $34.99. On the plate, Heston wears a cowboy hat and, with a shotgun cocked over his shoulder, appears to be looking warily into the middle distance, eyes narrowed, wide mouth pursed, bushy eyebrows hanging like ledges of foliage over his face.
But the damaged nose sets off the whole thing. The peaked, calcified bridge, standing out like the prow of a ship, gives Heston's face a kind of pioneering strength and vigour. Next to his face on the plate is a script that reads: "If you want to feel the warm breath of free- dom upon your neck . . . if you want to touch the pulse of liberty that beat in our founding fathers . . . you may do so through the majesty of the second amendment." In other words, Charlton Heston says it's fine to bear arms. As indeed it is, according to the second amendment, although the qualifying text of the amendment - "for the purpose of maintaining a well-regulated militia" - is carefully elided by Chuck and his NRA colleagues.
For the American gun lobby, having the leadership of Heston must feel like an extraordinary piece of luck. There are those who believe that his involvement in the gun lobby has turned it around at a difficult moment; after the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing and the recent high-profile school shootings, Americans - especially women - are joining the NRA in their hundreds of thousands. Heston once said: "I suspect, in fact, that there are more film-makers who are closet gun enthusiasts than there are closet homosexuals." To the NRA, it must be like having the backing of all the heroic, righteous characters that Heston has played - not only Moses, Michelangelo, Ben-Hur, Thomas More, Richelieu, Mark Antony and three American presidents, but also astronauts, sports stars, saints and even God himself.
These guys - rugged, broken-nosed, stripped for action - who have, with few exceptions, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, are the people Heston identifies with in real life. "Affirmative action," he has said, "is a stain on the American soul." When liberals expressed concern over recent Congressional spending cuts, including a reduction in the budget for school dinners, Heston said: "Hey, just a damn minute . . . did I miss something here? Whatever happened to peanut-butter sandwiches and an apple?"
As Heston is fond of saying, he never got a free lunch himself, at least not until he was in the army. He grew up in the rural Midwest during the Depression; naturally, guns played a big role in his life. In the Michigan woods where Heston's family lived, ordinary people still routinely hunted for food. Being able to handle a gun was part of being a man, a provider. The young Heston roamed the woods alone, shooting at partridges and rabbits. "To this day," he admits, "I am an inadequate wing shot." To many Americans, Heston says, this is a "serious character flaw".
The character of the gun-toting young Heston, then, was moulded by hard times; his father left his mother when he was a kid, and his stepfather, Chet Heston, was forced to trawl around the country looking for work. At one point, the family lived in a single room; later, they slept in a tent. Finally, Chet found work in a Chicago steel mill, at 85 cents an hour, although he caught his hand in a press and lost his right forefinger. Soon, however, to his stepson's great admiration, Chet learnt to shoot "both his rifles and his shotguns with his middle finger". But Chet never took Chuck hunting.
Heston was called up during the war and served in the Army Air Corps, although even here he was barely threatened by guns. Having fallen in love with his girlfriend, Lydia, and thinking he was about to be whisked away to the Pacific theatre, he proposed, "unable to bear even the idea of going off and leaving her for some 4F jerk". Heston's proposal was accepted, but he was posted only as far as Alaska, where "we awaited the return of the Japanese, an increasingly unlikely event". He and his fellow soldiers used their guns to shoot caribou, which "had never been hunted. It was like shooting cows." Still, as he has pointed out, the army rifles he used were heavy-duty; if you were to leave any meat on the animals, you had to be accurate.
So there he was, hanging around the frozen north, shooting animals and dreaming of his future wife. One thing hanging over Sergeant Heston, as he was in 1945, was the prospect of taking part in Operation Downfall, the proposed invasion of Japan. Heston believed the Pentagon's predictions that half a million Americans would die in this action; as it was, 125,000 Japanese died instead, in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Yeah, I know," says Heston. "Indeed I know. The politically correct view is that the atomic bombs were inhumane, even a shameful atrocity. Never say that to any of us who were facing Operation Downfall."
Weapons, by and large, have been good to Heston. He has never, for instance, been threatened by guns. His biggest problem was during the LA riots, when, he claims, people kept ringing him up and asking to borrow his guns. They would say: "I tried to buy one, but they have this waiting period." Heston would reply: "Yeah, I know; I remember you voted for that." He has a clear message: now that the bad guys have guns, the good guys should get guns, to deter the bad guys from using their guns.
In the days building up to Operation Desert Storm, Heston became a leading advocate for the "manifest destiny" school of American foreign policy: manifestly, it was the destiny of American forces to go into the troublesome Gulf region with all guns blazing in order to teach those Iraqis a lesson. In a televised confrontation, Christopher Hitchens asked Heston to tell the viewers a little bit more about the nation he wanted to flatten. What countries, for instance, bordered Iraq? Heston was stumped, but eventually he decided that the Soviet Union shared a border. Evidently, he had mistaken Iraq for Iran. The "debate" ended with Hitchens telling Heston to "keep your rug on".
Now there's an interesting thought. According to Gore Vidal, "Charlatan" Heston wears two toupees: "The first is of very verisimilitudinous grey, thinning hair. Then, on top of that, he wears another toupee. This he removes when he goes into make-up, revealing what appears to be his real hair underneath, ready for the poor make-up artist to dress with some leonine mane." Vidal has also said that it was his idea to play a scene between Heston and another character in Ben-Hur as if the two had been gay lovers; the director, William Wyler, apparently said: "Don't you say a word to Chuck, or he'll fall apart." Vidal's point is that hardman Chuck is really "made of balsa wood". He is a "clown-actor. To talk about him in any other terms would be to confer him with a political virtue he doesn't deserve."
As a kid hunting rabbits in the woods with a .22 rifle, Heston often found his concentration drifting; he would pretend, instead, "to be Davy Crockett hunting Comanche with a long rifle". In a way, he might still be doing the same thing. As president of the NRA, he is popping off shots at liberals. But who does he really think he is? Is there, somewhere deep in Heston's soul, a zone where reality is eclipsed by the hyper-reality of the epic mindset? Is he Moses, standing proud, his broken nose defying Edward G Robinson's nasty little authority figure? And would anybody be listening to him if he hadn't caught that pass in a football game 60 years ago?
Charlton Heston Presents the Bible, by Charlton Heston (Good Times Publishing), is available for those wishing to look for it
