In the Arena
Heston, Charlton
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "In the Arena" The Best in Heston: A Memoir for All Seasons In the Arena: An Autobiography by Char/ton Heston Simon & Schuster 592 pages / $2750 REVIEWED BY Terry Teachout The ninth edition of Halliwell's...
...Does anybody with an IO in excess of 85 really want to hear anything Marlon Bran-do has to say, other than his lines...
...This volume of his shorter writings—essays, reviews, one polemic and one memoir—helps explain why...
...it's their offstage lives that have no meaning, save to those whose lives mean even less...
...In between costume epics, he racked up an impressive number of appearances in smart films, among them Touch of Evil, The Big Country, Will Penny, Khartoum, Number One, and Soylent Green...
...To use his own phrase, he "fills his space...
...Even the august Richard Nixon weighed in on the side of those who called for Genovese's immediate dismissal...
...That's a rave...
...Heston just stands there and acts...
...In this they were doomed to fail, "for at the bottom," he continues, "their relations with their slaves rested on injustice and violence...
...in 1955, he played Moses in DeMille's The Ten Commandments...
...Not that Genovese is a partisan of free-market economics, or at least of unbridled laissez-faire—far from it...
...The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War by Eugene D. Genovese University ofMissouri Press 320 pages / $29.95 REVIEWED BY Mark Falcoff It must be frilly thirty years now since my attention was first drawn to the phenomenon of Eugene Genovese...
...It is a tale that could have been milked, Oprah-style, for its inherent pathos...
...It helps, of course, that Heston has such terrific characters about whom to write...
...He sounds like the kind of guy you'd want to sit across from at dinner, except that you wouldn't exactly look forward to swapping stories with him: How could you possibly top learning to race a chariot, or hanging out with Gary Cooper...
...For his troubles he became a major issue in the gubernatorial race in New Jersey, where I was then a graduate student...
...He didn't try to charm...
...I welcome it...
...His fascination with the slavocrats has MARK FALCOFF is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...It's a real book, perhaps the most readable memoir by a movie star since David Niven's The Moon's a Balloon, and in our present age of Low-Fat Celebrity Reading Product, such efforts deserve an extra helping of praise...
...Therein lay the tragedy that has made them, individually and as a class, the most arresting of Americans...
...Genovese's field is the history of the slave South, which he has explored from the point of view of both masters and slaves...
...Instead, Heston has given us a good old-fashioned yarn about growing up and making it, written with gusto and —glory be!—without assistance...
...For the most part, though, Heston sticks to memories and shop talk, not gossip—if you read celebrity memoirs in search of titillating anecdotes about the rich and perverse, In the Arena will leave you snoozing...
...If this is a Marxist, one feels like shouting, then we really must have more of them...
...In fact, I'm pretty sure he had no preconceived idea of the whole film...
...I rarely have much use for Hollywood biographies and autobiographies (not that there's any great difference between the two genres, outside of the ghostwriter's choice of pronouns...
...The Best in Heston: A Memoir for All Seasons In the Arena: An Autobiography by Char/ton Heston Simon & Schuster 592 pages / $2750 REVIEWED BY Terry Teachout The ninth edition of Halliwell's Filmgoer's and Video Viewer's Companion, by which I usually swear, has this to say about Charlton Heston: "A careful and successful actor, Heston has been blessed with the kind of impressive face and physique that inevitably got him cast as a succession of epic heroes...
...In fact, he has comparatively little to say about politics in this autobiography...
...Bradford, and his The American Spectator • January 1996 69...
...On judicial activism: "Why have a Constitution at all, if a majority of an appointed Supreme Court—the organ of state least accountable to public opinion—can make the Constitution say whatever it wishes...
...On the Declaration of Independence: "Demonstrably, the signers did not understand the Declaration to mean what modern egalitarians claim it means...
...Actors get paid to act, so I suppose it's possible that Heston is the biggest jerk in Hollywood, but after reading this autobiography, I'd be surprised if it were true...
...Staying home the other day to nurse a cold, I tuned in Arrowhead, one of Heston's pre-Moses films...
...As I said, there isn't all that much about politics here, though Heston 68 January 1996 • The American Spectator Brooklyn's Man of the South does describe one skirmish in the culture wars I'd have loved to see in person: the day he stood up in front of a Time Warner stockholders' meeting and recited the lyrics to rap star Ice-T's "Cop Killer," four-letter words and all, a star turn that led within days to the company's pulling the album...
...Still, the most memorable character in In the Arena is Charlton Heston, and my other favorite part is the beautifully told story of his youth...
...On the subject of liberal Protestant theologians: "As an atheist, when I read much Protestant theology and religious history today, I have the warm feeling that I am in the company of nonbelievers...
...The best thing in the book, not surprisingly, is the chapter about the filming of Touch of Evil, a wonderfully vivid sketch of Orson Welles at work: He swung open the door of the house he was renting, a looming figure in a flowing black Moorish robe from his Othello...
...In 1952, he made The Greatest Show on Earth, his first picture for Cecil B. DeMille...
...The absence of ghost-buffed polish is one of the nicest things about In the Arena, which sounds as if its author simply sat down at the typewriter one day and started reminiscing...
...taken Genovese along some interesting highways and by-ways, and we are offered a fairly broad sample in the essays in this book...
...And he still does an occasional play whenever he can find the time...
...In fact, what attracts him to the Southern brand of American conservatism is precisely his view that over the years it has "resisted bourgeois society, its atomistic culture, and its marketplace morality...
...Palance is all revved up in his very best pardon-mewhile-I-steal-this-scene mode...
...TERRY TEACHOUT is music critic for Commentary...
...The Charlton Heston of In the Arena adores his wife, dotes on his kids, is loyal to his friends, knows his lines, shows up on time (he's never missed any part of a shooting day in his entire film career), and has his ego firmly under wraps...
...Not bad for an ex-nerd who, by his own testimony, was "shy, skinny, short, pimply, and ill-dressed" as a teenager...
...rolled twice around the entry hall...
...They say it's tough to be a conservative in Hollywood, but you wouldn't know it from In the Arena...
...Governor Richard Hughes stood his ground...
...But, unlike today's talk-show whiners, Heston did not repine: he treated his stepfather with respect, worked hard in school, met and married the girl of his dreams, found his way to New York, and started to get parts, working briefly in golden-age TV before going west tobecome a movie star...
...in 1959, he won the best-actor Oscar for Ben-Hur...
...He refers to the American civil war as "the War of Southern Independence...
...The book has a genuinely conversational tone, and a raconteur's feel for scene and character...
...We should all have been so nerdy...
...He plays an Indian-hating cavalry scout, and Jack Palance a psychotic Apache...
...In case you were wondering how stars get to be stars, that's how...
...His "Hello, Chuck...
...his Republican challenger lost...
...Where he learned to write I don't know, but he learned it well (though they obviously forgot to teach him how to use parentheses properly, a dead giveaway that his book is no phony...
...His latest book, A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, is out in paperback from Vintage...
...In recent times he has become interested in the varieties of contemporary American conservatism, about which he has written with occasional sympathy and considerable understanding...
...Here's mine: I bought a second copy of In the Arena to give my mother for Christmas...
...It should be enough to recall that a slaveholder wrote it, and that slaveholders signed it...
...This is, evidently, a very treacherous field from an ideological point of view, since it brings Genovese into direct confrontation with the "abolitionist" bias that has informed American historiography for more than a hundred years...
...I was taller, but he filled the room with his voice, his energy . . . with himself...
...In addition to being one of the postwar era's biggest screen presences, Charlton Heston is also a conservative...
...Except for one brief and furtive meeting the following year, he didn't see his father again until 1943...
...If, on the other hand, you want to know what it was like to work with, say, William Wyler, Charlton Heston is your man: He was abstracted, digging inside himself for the scene till he got to the root of it, then giving it to the actors...
...I'm proud of what I did," he writes, "though now I'll surely never be offered another film by Warners, nor get a good review from Time...
...Throughout his career he has been concerned with Southern conservatism, the role of religion in antebellum society, the slavocratic intelligentsia and literary class, even with Black nationalism...
...On the theological quarrel over slavery in the run-up to the civil war: "The God-fearing southern people turned to the Bible to justify slavery, and the Bible did not disappoint them...
...On the other hand, I doubt I'll get a traffic ticket very soon...
...But In the Arena is an exception...
...Again, unlike the stage, there is no film till months after the shooting's done...
...he wasn't particularly eloquent in conveying his vision...
...This explains his generous appraisal of the late M.E...
...If you can't make a career out of two leads for DeMille," he once said, "you'd better turn in your suit...
...True enough, but not enough...
...He isn't apologetic about his heterodoxy, but he doesn't make a big deal of it, either...
...Guess who walks away with the movie...
...Genovese is also the most readable of American historians...
...Heston's parents divorced in 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression, and a golden childhood spent in the Michigan woods went sour in the course of a single week...
...On Western civilization: "Contrary to current lying, [it] has been distinguished not by racism, imperialism, and the denigration of women, which have disfigured all civilizations, but by its extraordinary and partially successful movements of opposition to those enormities...
...His view is not that the slave-holders were uniquely evil, but rather that they were "good and decent people who tried to live decently with their slaves...
...At the time he was an obscure assistant professor at Rutgers University—a confessing Marxist—who made the rather (for then) provocative statement that he "did not fear a Viet Cong victory in Vietnam...
...Professor Genovese went on to become one of the most important historians in the United States, if not the most important of his generation...
...He was willing to let the scene, and the movie, become what it would become...
...The true life of most actors is .the one we see on stage or screen...
...They just stand there and act—because they can...
Vol. 29 • January 1996 • No. 1
