The Graven Image

About the only decorous thing that Charlton Heston can do now is to retire until Hollywood is ready to film The Lyndon Johnson Story. In two decades in movies and theater, the 41-year-old actor has played just about every other notable, including Moses, John the Baptist, Ben-Hur, El Cid, Macbeth, Michelangelo, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, as well as the off-camera voices of Franklin D. Roosevelt and God. Of course, the studios would never let him retire. He is, in the trade term, one of the most "bankable" box-office stars going.

Heston's latest movie, Khartoum, in which he plays a sort of Grauman's "Chinese" Gordon (TIME, Aug. 5), is smashing records in Manhattan. Reruns of his The Ten Commandments are drawing so well that the film could become the second biggest grosser in Hollywood history, edging out his own Ben-Hur and nearing the $41 million record of Gone With the Wind. And that just counts the North American take. Overseas, Heston is an even bigger favorite. He is also taken seriously as an actor. Despite the critics' First Commandment--thou shalt not worship a graven performance--Heston's stony acting has won him a German Bambi, three Belgian Uilenspiegels, and a U.S. Oscar for Ben-Hur.

Outspoken Spokesman. The secret of Heston's success is his capacity for appearing virile without being lecherous in Olympian roles. He is tall in the saddle (6 ft. 2 in.) and so adamantine that Jennifer Jones broke her hand slapping his face in a scene from Ruby Gentry. Furthermore, it is a virtuous, earnest face that most women would not want to slap. In his films, he is usually too busy dabbing away at a Sistine ceiling or chasing chariots to chase girls.

Offscreen, Heston is president of the Screen Actors Guild and a frequent industry spokesman. He has made four tours from Nigeria to Australia for the State Department. Last week he spent two days in Washington testifying before a Senate subcommittee on community-antenna television. As early as 1961, when most of his colleagues were ignoring the Negro revolution, Heston joined a civil rights demonstration in Oklahoma City. In 1963 he publicly attacked Hollywood's "sorry record" of discrimination.

Directors say that Heston is the most conscientious actor in town. He subjected himself to a crash reading program on the Dead Sea Scrolls and a shelf full of theological tomes before tackling The Ten Commandments. He has uncomplainingly walked sandalless on his flat feet up Mount Sinai, and for his role of Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy jammed a plastic noodle into his nose to push it properly out of joint. He took a lengthy driver's course in the chariot for Ben-Hur, polished an English accent with a speech teacher and nightly tapings for seven weeks before Khartoum. "Just once," he admits, "I'd like a role in which I can say ain't."

Heston is simply a professional perfectionist. "Like any art," he says, "acting is imperfectible. That is why acting is more interesting than cutting chicken or selling insurance, which are perfectible, I suppose. Hemingway finally blew his brains out because he realized that for him there were no more chances to try for perfection."

Skinny Years. The pursuit of perfection began at the age of five when Heston played his first role in the one-room schoolhouse he attended in northern Michigan. At Northwestern University, he worked with Classmates Patricia Neal and Ralph Meeker, met another hopeful actress, Lydia Clarke, who has been his wife for 22 years. After some skinny years in Manhattan, he got a supporting role in Katharine Cornell's Antony and Cleopatra ("Miss Cornell is a tall woman and likes to have tall actors around"). From there, it was roles in TV and a lead in his first film, Dark City. Today, Heston commands $500,000 a picture, plus 10% of the gross, gets control over cast and script. Says he, ruefully and rightfully: "I suppose I'm still not selective enough."

For all their affluence, the Hestons, their son Fraser, 11 (who played the infant Moses in The Ten Commandments), and adopted daughter, Holly Ann, 5, live sedately in an eight-room house on a ridge high over Coldwater Canyon near Hollywood. His major indulgence is a private tennis court, onto which he likes to coax name pros, who regularly clobber him. Otherwise, "Chuck" Heston, as friends call him, mostly stays inside doing calisthenics and culling scripts. It doesn't bother him to be called a square. "So," he says, "were Moses and Ben-Hur."

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