Farewell to one of the good guys.
That would have been Donald Pleaseance, who was unable to defeat Michael Myers (who appearead to have a David Letterman mask on his face); but since Heston withstood being messed with by Michael Moore (who has a similar name and whose face has appeared on Letterman); it all comes around.
The curtain has closed on a true legend of the screen. Requiescat in pace, Chuck.
Heston mentions that role in his autobiography. He said he’d asked why he was approached to do the role. The answer was that the producers thought he was about the only person they could get who could plausibly intimidate Arnold. And I noticed that for all the age he was showing, he’d kept his figure fairly trim.
I don’t want to make this a hijack, but I loved James Coburn in the film as the one-armed scout and Jim Hutton and his little howitzer.
Well, yes it was, and the writing even worse, but that was Heston’s forte. He could take total cornball material and deliver it in a total cornball way and make you believe it.
Nobody else in Hollywood could have pulled off The Ten Commandments!
I didn’t believe it. 
But RIP, Chuck.
Yup. With a snarl, a big scar and an eyepatch, he was good to go!
Whoa, just found this out from the BBC. When Heston was cast in Touch of Evil, the producers asked him if he’d have any problems working with Orson Welles. Heston’s response, “Well, if you’re going to have Orson in the film, why don’t you have him direct it? After all, that’s what he does.” How many other actors would have done that? I wonder.
So, a couple of years ago Gore Vidal returned to the U.S. after selling his palatial residence in Italy.
Since then- Norman Mailer, former Vidal enemy: Dead. William F. Buckley, Jr., former Vidal enemy: Dead. Charlton Heston, former Vidal enemy: Dead. And I’m sure there are others.
If I were Ted Kennedy or Nancy Reagan, I’d start sending the fruity old basketcase monthly fruit baskets pronto.
How did Ted Kennedy piss him off?
By emerging from the same womb as his arch-nemesis Bobby Kennedy and former friend turned enemy JFK. (Not that emerging from Rose’s womb is a real status symbol; though they hid it from the public, Rose Kennedy continued producing offspring well into her 90s, though with Joe Kennedy no longer around to fertilize them most of them were sterile Mexican worker Kennedys.)
TCM’s changed its schedule for this Friday:
(All times ET)
2:30 PM Private Screenings: Charlton Heston
3:30 PM The Buccaneer
5:30 PM The Hawaiians
8:00 PM Private Screenings: Charlton Heston
9:00 PM Ben-Hur
1:00 AM Khartoum
3:30 AM Major Dundee
Y’know, they didn’t mention that at all when I visited the JFK Presidential Library in Boston a few years back. Jeez, what a ripoff!
Who did you think those gardeners with the strange (“si señor, you can pock the cah in the yod…”) accents were? They were Rose’s later pupae.
So is Ted the new Queen?
OK, so how did JFK & RFK piss off Vidal?
And WHERE was Vidal on November 22, 1963?
I vaguely recall Vidal’s mother being married for a spell to Jackie Kennedy’s stepfather. Wikipedia confirms this. Must be wrapped up in that somehow.
Heston admired Welles tremendously, but always shook his head in amazement at Welles’ knack for self-destruction. The way he put it was, “Orson wouldn’t have a problem if he were a painter or a novelist. But film is one of the art forms where the raw materials are too expensive for the artist to buy for himself. He had to go, hat in hand, to the money men, the business people, and he HATED that. He reckoned that they had no talent, that they couldn’t understand his craft, and he treated them with utter disdain and contempt.” And Heston couldn’t understand that at all. He’d seen how charming and magnanimous Welles could be to actors, to stage crews, even to busboys and waiters… and he could never understand why Welles refused to show just a LITTLE of that charm to people he was going to hit up for millions of dollars.
Interestingly, Heston worked on the stage several times with Vanessa Redgrave, and they seem to have thought the world of each other, personally and professionally, despite being as opposite politically as two people could be.
As Siam Sam mentions, Vidal and Jackie are quasi-related by marriage; both were the children of relatively penniless but aristocratic divorced mothers who married millionaire Hugh Auchincloss and both had a sort of “outsider looking in” upbringing on the rim of great wealth, and their relationship gained him access to Camelot. He and JFK (according to Gore) were good friends for a time in the late 50s when Gore was canvasing for JFK and entertaining his own political aspirations (he ran for Congress a couple of times but never won election).
At some point there was a falling out between Gore and JFK. Gore is a self-admitted lush and in his memoir he tells stories about being present when Tennessee Williams drunkenly made suggestive talk about and to JFK at a White House function (in his memoir Gore always shines of course) and his all around snootiness and bitchiness probably had something to do with any falling out. Anyway, it reached climax when “something happened” at a 1961 dinner party where Gore and Bobby almost came to a fight. There are many versions, but this barebones one is from an obituary of George Plimpton:
JFK of course backed RFK (though I’m guessing it wasn’t that huge a deal to him- by some accounts he actually was more upset by the Bay of Pigs than by losing Gore Vidal’s sweet and gentle friendship) and Gore was sent to dwell in the land east of Camelot (i.e. Italy).
Bringing it back to Heston, Vidal’s feud with him came over the supposed gay subtext of Ben Hur. Vidal is known to have worked on the screenplay to the movie, though exactly how much he wrote is a matter of serious disagreement, and claims to have made a not-for-film backstory in which Messala and Ben Hur former teen lovers with Messala (Stephen Boyd) wanting to renew the affair as adults and Judah spurning him. Per Vidal, Boyd was in on the tweak and agreed that for the first time the plot made sense, but all were informed never to inform Heston, who in later years blasted Vidal’s account in interviews and his autobio. (Vidal is not listed in the credits of Ben Hur and many, including Heston, claim he contributed very little if anything that was actually used in the script.)
Vidal is notoriously litigious and sued Capote and Mailer and others who slammed his writing or his accuracy. The fact he never sued Heston probably has much to do with the fact that Vidal was used to picking on men like Capote (who was always overspending himself in an attempt to keep up with the jet-set) and Mailer (who had 182 ex-wives, children, young girlfriends, and agents to support) and non-celebrity journalists and reviewers (he’s sued them to for various reasons), Heston was very rich and very well liked and could easily have afforded both attorney’s fees and aggravation of a lawsuit and his reputation would not have suffered in the least, but I think it also lends a bit of credence to Chuck’s version of the story. I think Vidal probably told his own gay version (though he has never admitted he’s gay- he’s one of those bisexuals who just doesn’t like sex with women) so often that he believes it but its truth content is probably blown out of all proportion.
Probably in a bar getting drunk while waiting for a meeting with his lawyer to sue a critic who described one of his utterly lifeless and bitchy novels bitchy and utterly lifeless.