Fire Power

Once again, it’s Charlton Heston into the breach.

His newest political role as first vice president of the beleaguered National Rifle Assn. is merely his latest act in an on- and off-screen career of imparting a heroic, broad-shouldered presence to movies and real-life issues.

In four decades, the 72-year-old Heston has soldiered in the early civil rights movement, campaigned against the nuclear freeze, raised money to fight breast cancer and formed his own political action committee to fund conservative candidates.

In fact, it’s difficult to write a story about Heston’s sometimes-dramatic entries into these causes without using the word “Moses� and invoking the memory of the actor leading his forces out of the wilderness in “The Ten Commandments.�

Even those who disagree with Heston use that image. Explaining why Heston was able to sweep onto the board of the NRA and best Neal Knox, the incumbent first vice president, Knox’s wife, Jay, said, “Mr. Knox feels very flattered that they had to bring in Moses, the voice of God, and Ben Hur to knock him out of his chair.�

Heston is still eager to oblige that notion, which he described in his recent autobiography as “my expanded persona, riding the tiger.�

“It’s an amazing thing--my whole career I seem to find myself pushed into these things, or, at the very least, invited in,� he said in a phone conversation a day before he began several weeks of traveling. His first stop was in service of his day job--he went to the Cannes Film Festival. Then he went on to Washington, D.C., for political kibitzing and to New York for a dinner with Prince Andrew honoring the American Air Museum in Britain.

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You could call him the predecessor of the contingent of fur-denouncing, old-growth-redwood-tree-defending celebrities. It’s just that most activist actors today are liberal, and Heston is not. But even if you have trouble reconciling an image of a man who led a group of artists in the 1963 march on Washington with the one who now stands side by side with gun lobbyists, you can’t deny one thing: He’s consistently active in something.

He ticks off some of his civic accomplishments--six terms on the board of the Screen Actors Guild (and a former presidency), civil rights marches (“in ‘61, long before it became fashionable�) and co-chairman of President Reagan’s 1981 task force examining the fiscal worthiness of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Heston was defending the existence of the NEA during one of the earliest right-wing sieges. (He’s gotten harsher. In his recent autobiography, he denounces the organization’s financial wastefulness.)

He’s long been one of the NRA’s more visible members, but this is his first time taking on a position of leadership in the organization, which has suffered a public relations nightmare for its hard-line stand against gun control and suggestions that it is linked to extremist groups.

Earlier this month at a convention in Seattle, NRA members swept Heston onto the national board, where he narrowly beat out incumbent Knox.

“Well, I could be useful, as I was with the National Endowment for the Arts,� Heston explained, his voice full of the stateliness he employs whether he is addressing an audience of a thousand or a lone reporter. “And Dr. King was kind enough to say I was useful with civil rights. I have a public face. I know how to do interviews. In the case of the NRA, one of the most useful things I can do is have access to just about any office on the Hill. I’ve done this for years for many causes.�

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Heston has made his activism into a systematic part of his life. Consider: He has a Washington-based political consultant, Tony Makris, who briefs him on issues. Through his ArenaPAC, which permits him to contribute his time and services more freely than an individual under federal law, he made appearances in 21 states on behalf of 54 candidates for federal offices--all but one of them Republican--in the 1996 election.

In Heston’s 1995 autobiography, “In the Arena� (Simon & Schuster), he describes how he felt after participating in a small and peaceful demonstration in the early ‘60s in front of several Oklahoma City restaurants that refused to serve blacks: “I suppose this small civil rights activism, before it got popular, was a significant milestone for me. A certain Scots contrariness and a tendency to shoot my mouth off were to involve me in a good many more public-sector issues.�

Said Makris: “I think Charlton Heston is a man motivated by commitment. He’s married to the same woman, Lydia, for 53 years--his first and only love, the first woman he ever had a date with.�

Makris met Heston in 1982 when the actor was campaigning against the liberal nuclear freeze movement. Makris, a former deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Defense under Caspar Weinberger, was involved in a pro-Defense organization. Makris, who envied the Democrats’ ability to corral liberal celebrities, thought Heston could give the GOP the same kind of shot in the arm.

“I thought . . . this guy learns the issues and is extremely persuasive,� he said.

Heston had campaigned for Democratic presidential candidates Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy but since the mid-’80s has been registered as a Republican.

In 1984, Makris called Heston and asked him to become more politically involved, offering to do research and briefing papers. “He came to the Republican Convention, he saw how it worked. He and Arnold [Schwarzenegger] were together. We sort of grew from there.�

It was Makris who alerted Heston in 1992 to the fact that Time-Warner was under fire for putting out rapper Ice-T’s controversial “Cop Killer� CD. Heston, who owned several hundred shares of Time-Warner stock--he’s since sold it--went to the stockholders’ meeting in Beverly Hills that summer and denounced the media company for putting out an album that contained lyrics viciously attacking police officers.

To do this, Heston stood up and, in his sonorous voice, read the profane lyrics to “Cop Killer�--as well as every lewd lyric in another sexually explicit song on the album.

Several weeks later, Time-Warner--under intense national pressure and criticism--parted ways with Ice-T, citing a dispute over album artwork. But record industry observers say Heston was indeed effective.

He still savors that moment.

“Ah, that is a treasured memory,� Heston said in a phone interview. “I can’t tell you the pleasure it gave me to shame [Time-Warner executives]. There were 1,000 people there, most of whom had never heard language like that.�

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In conversation, Heston was his usual affable self--a kind of old-school combination of courtliness, disarming self-mockery and perfect diction. He sounds so spontaneous that it’s surprising to find that he uses many of the same phrases over and over, almost like a politician on the stump. (He insists he’s not running for political office.)

For instance, when he argues that the Second Amendment was not only intended to justify citizenry building militias for their countries, but was also intended to protect private people bearing arms. He says fondly of the framers of the Bill of Rights: “Those wise old dead white guys knew what they were about.�

In fact, this is one of his favorite sound bites. He loves taking a phrase used by some liberals--intended to denigrate the narrow scope of the founding fathers--and turning it around. In his book, he recalls with bemusement the criticism he took for saying during a political commercial for a Senate candidate: “We have to get back to the values and perceptions of those wise old dead white guys who invented this country.� Heston says he taped a response: “Let’s see now. They were wise, they were old, they’re dead, they were white guys, and they invented this country. Which word in that sentence don’t you understand?�

Heston, who said he learned to use a shotgun at age 10 in rural Michigan and prides himself on a personal arsenal of 20 to 30 firearms (some are collectors’ items) at his Beverly Hills home on a sparsely populated ridge, said he figures his best asset to the NRA is his fame.

“It’s because I’m so pretty,� he quipped. “And access in Congress. You know why I can get in? They say, ‘You’ve got to have pictures [taken] with all the secretaries.’ That counts.�

Both gun lobbyists and gun control advocates who monitor the NRA say Heston’s primary value lies in being a credible conservative.

“I think he can do precisely what he did that weekend in Seattle,� said Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), an NRA member. “He can make sure that people understand that the NRA is a mainstream organization . . . and deflect some of this criticism that the NRA represents the fringe elements of society. Charlton Heston is not a fringe person.�

Heston made a breakfast appearance in Georgia on Barr’s behalf during the 1996 campaign, getting Barr onto the front pages of smaller local papers.

Barr attributes the scope of Heston’s appeal not only to his stardom but to a reputation untarnished by the sexual and drug-related peccadilloes that dog so many celebrities. “His career is utterly untouched by scandal.�

Heston insists he is still an actor first. (He works more than you think. He went to Cannes to promote Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 “Hamlet,� in which Heston portrayed the Player King.)

“When I was making my little pitch to be elected, they said, ‘Can you give us all your time?’ I said, ‘No, I can’t give you all my time. If I have a movie I want to do, I’ll do it. But I think I can give you useful time.’ �

Whether he’s acting or campaigning, Heston always seems to have time to write letters. He’s become known as an inveterate writer of letters to newspapers.

Last year he indignantly dueled with liberal author Gore Vidal over Vidal’s suggestion that the author had written a scene into “Ben Hur� that implied a homosexual relationship between Heston’s character and another male character.

A few years before, after Times columnist Jack Smith suggested water could be conserved in drought-stricken Southern California if men simply used the garden instead of the bathroom (no toilets to flush), Heston wrote to Smith in support.

“Early every morning, when I go for the paper with my dog along our ridge,� Smith quoted Heston, “we mark adjacent trees, as I also did once in the Bohemian Grove, with Henry Kissinger at the next redwood.�