Charlton Heston: Hollywood's Last Icon

by Marc Eliot

Overview

The most definitive biography of Hollywood icon Charlton Heston—one of the most popular, engrossingly complex and, at times, controversial personalities ever to emerge from American cinema.

Charlton Heston starred in American movies for more than six decades, in roles that ranged from the Biblical leader Moses in The Ten Commandments to the title role in William Wyler’s definitive Ben-Hur, to the heroic astronaut George Taylor in 1968’s sci-fi classic Planet of the Apes, in addition to hundreds of other
screen, theater, and television roles. He also served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and more controversially, as the head of the National Rifle Association, which placed him at odds with Hollywood’s then-prevalent left-leaning power elite.

New York Times bestselling author Marc Eliot’s definitive biography, which benefits from extraordinary access to friends, family, and private papers, unravels the epic life story of one of America’s most iconic actors, bringing to light Heston’s greatest achievements as well as his greatest failures and regrets—culminating in an account that is informed, moving, artful, and honest. In it, Eliot lays bare the story of how a boy from the backwoods of Michigan went on to become Hollywood’s go-to action and historical actor and left a legacy that helped define American movie heroes of the twentieth century. From Michigan to New York City to Hollywood, Eliot traces the footsteps of this extraordinary figure and sheds new light on one of America’s greatest stars.

In glistening detail, he examines and celebrates the lasting legacy of Charlton Heston, taking advantage of never-before-heard stories of Heston as husband, father, and unremitting actor whose stamp on Hollywood grows stronger every year.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062420466
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/17/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	566
Sales rank:	389,308
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Marc Eliot is the New York Times bestselling author of more than two dozen books on popular culture, among them the highly acclaimed Cary Grant, the award-winning Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince, and American Rebel: The Life of Clint Eastwood. His work has been published in more than twenty-five languages, and he writes for a number of publications and frequently speaks about film to universities and film groups, and on radio and television.

Editorial Reviews

Dense biographies about high-wattage Hollywood stars with limited acting chops can be tricky business for a writer and a reader alike. The former has to instill in the latter a belief in why we should care beyond yet another exegesis of celebrity, while readers, ideally, find a way to open themselves to seeing old works anew.

Marc Eliot has this kind of challenge in hand with Charlton Heston: Hollywood's Last Icon — a voluminous, and possibly definitive, study one of the big screen's paragons of brawn and masculinity. Its subject looms large in our cultural memory while remaining a limited thespian whose go-to move was leaning forward, iron jaw extended, as if forever contemplating where to get a good steak.

But if Heston lacked range, he didn't lack self-consciousness. He was an ardent diarist, and those writings are counted on to provide new vantage points, Heston's prose teaming up with Eliot's, as it were, in a joint mission to tell us why we should care more than we already do about this Tinsel Town icon.

For starters, we should care because of the people Heston worked with, and what his relationship with them reveals. Consider, for example, Orson Welles, with whom Heston paired in 1957 to film the still incredibly odd, incredibly creepy B-noir Touch of Evil. Throughout this book we see Heston launching himself into intense workouts to get in shape for his parts, like he's training for some epic last-man-standing competition, with lots of tennis worked in. He often comes off as a pawn for cagey directors but a thinking pawn all the same, with a sensitive B.S. detector making up the deficiencies of top-shelf mental acumen. In college he screened and loved Citizen Kane, and it was Heston who got Welles the directing gig for Touch of Evil, when no one in Hollywood would so much as prod Welles's corpulent midsection with a barge pole.

Like so many Welles projects before it, Touch of Evil was hamstrung by what producers considered over-artiness, with Heston quite rightly realizing that he was a pretend star — behind Welles — in a picture that was only being made because he could draw an audience. Heston found himself having to act as go- between for the studio with an increasingly disconsolate director, who believed his leading man was a turncoat in part responsible for shearing his vision from him.

But outings like this one were the exceptions, of course. Heston was an action man, and Eliot's book is structured around the monuments of his stardom: films like The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, and Planet of the Apes. It's a list that not only defines Heston's career but a considerable chunk of what is still well remembered from Hollywood in the late 1950s and 1960s. If you've seen any film in your life outside of a Netflix- and-chill context in the most perfunctory film class — or hell, if you just ever leave the TV on at Easter — you've assuredly seen at least one of them. And if you've not seen Planet of the Apes, you've seen its ending spoofed somewhere.

Heston's physicality and the toll taken by the Ben-Hur shooting were integral, we see, to his performance. Worn down, almost like he'd been rubbed into the nitrate itself, Heston cries real tears as his character watches the Christ figure die in the film's final shot. You watch the performance and you're surprised, perhaps, how truly this stoic figure is emoting, with some context now worked in to flesh out one's understanding of a scene. Ben-Hur becomes even more human a picture, and there even seems to be something preternatural about the fact that Heston performed all but two parts of the epic chariot race.

Eliot's portrait of Heston's life does take some turns off the set, and we catch glimpses of a fascinating political figure, so far as actors go, one considerably more protean than we now think — teaming with Martin Luther King, Jr. one moment and regularly stumping for the NRA the next. (In fact, Heston's positions on guns are more nuanced than the anti-firearm brigade would likely expect.) But Eliot's clear preference is the world of film, putting us right there with Heston as he mulls scripts, trains, launches himself bodily and mentally — both so far as each aspect of him went — into epics, biopics, big pictures, small pictures, more or less equally.

Charlton Heston is at its best here, revealing its subject as downright ruminative while working on The Ten Commandments, having prepped to the hilt to ready himself to play Moses. You even get the sense of some bonding/twining across the ages going on between the Red Sea parter and the Hollywood hunk: "All the Mosaic literature I'm working through, all the times I've read the script, mean little compared to the weeks I've spent wearing Moses' clothes and breathing the air he knew." A post-shooting bath prompts a joke about trying to part the water in the tub. You don't expect sly wit from Heston. But when you see it on view in these pages, you realize how his performances gained in power from that push-and-pull between what was emoted and what was held back — which fosters a unique actorly visual all its own. After all, a biographer could always provide a more fulsomely emotional display — almost like production notes for a life and career — and now one has.

Colin Fleming writes for The Atlantic, Slate, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times Book Review and publishes fiction with The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Boulevard, and Black Clock. His first book, Dark March: Stories for When the Rest of the World is Asleep, is forthcoming from Outpost19, with his second, Between Cloud and Horizon: A Relationship Casebook in Stories, to follow from Texas Review Press. He is at work on two novels: one about a piano prodigy who would rather be anything but, called The Freeze Tag Sessions, and another, told entirely in conversations, called Musings with Franklin, which is set in a bar in what may or may not be hell, where the regulars — Writer, Bartender, and the guy from the suburbs who dresses up as Ben Franklin — gather.

Reviewer: Colin Fleming

The Barnes & Noble Review

An entertaining picture of a complicated cinema icon.” — Kirkus Reviews

” Charlton Heston: Hollywood’s Last Icon follows the iconic late actor’s life and career in intimate detail, thanks to author Marc Eliot’s unprecedented access to his personal journals and estate.” — Parade

“Marc Eliot’s hefty, compelling and intimate biography stands as the definitive portrait of the complicated and controversial Oscar-winning actor and political activist.” — Shelf Awareness

“The book covers [Heston’s] personal and professional lives in equal measure, and there are plenty of behind-the-scenes stories for the movie buffs in the crowd. Another winner from a dependable biographer.” — Booklist

“Marc Eliot’s insightful biography provides an admiring yet even-handed reassessment long overdue for one of Hollywood’s most popular stars.” — Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers

“A welcome event if only because it restores a sense of balance, offering some overdue appreciation to an actor whose belief system mitigated against a full appreciation of his worth.” — Wall Street Journal

“Brilliantly corrosive.” — Sunday Times (London) on Walt Disney

“A fascinating portrait.” — Newsweek on Reagan: The Hollywood Years

“Elucidates how a skinny guy with zero sex appeal molded himself into an enduring star.” — Entertainment Weekly on Jimmy Stewart

“A fascinating and thorough portrait . . . Eliot does a good job of cracking the screen fantasy.” — Esquire on Cary Grant

From the Publisher

A welcome event if only because it restores a sense of balance, offering some overdue appreciation to an actor whose belief system mitigated against a full appreciation of his worth.

Wall Street Journal

” Charlton Heston: Hollywood’s Last Icon follows the iconic late actor’s life and career in intimate detail, thanks to author Marc Eliot’s unprecedented access to his personal journals and estate.

Parade

Brilliantly corrosive.

Sunday Times (London) on Walt Disney

A fascinating portrait.

Newsweek on Reagan: The Hollywood Years

Elucidates how a skinny guy with zero sex appeal molded himself into an enduring star.

Entertainment Weekly on Jimmy Stewart

A fascinating and thorough portrait . . . Eliot does a good job of cracking the screen fantasy.

Esquire on Cary Grant

Marc Eliot’s insightful biography provides an admiring yet even-handed reassessment long overdue for one of Hollywood’s most popular stars.

Lisa Ko

Marc Eliot’s hefty, compelling and intimate biography stands as the definitive portrait of the complicated and controversial Oscar-winning actor and political activist.

Shelf Awareness

The book covers [Heston’s] personal and professional lives in equal measure, and there are plenty of behind-the-scenes stories for the movie buffs in the crowd. Another winner from a dependable biographer.

Booklist

A welcome event if only because it restores a sense of balance, offering some overdue appreciation to an actor whose belief system mitigated against a full appreciation of his worth.

Wall Street Journal

The book covers [Heston’s] personal and professional lives in equal measure, and there are plenty of behind-the-scenes stories for the movie buffs in the crowd. Another winner from a dependable biographer.

Booklist

A fascinating portrait.

Newsweek on Reagan: The Hollywood Yearse

A fascinating portrait.

Newsweek on Reagan: The Hollywood Years

Marc Eliot’s insightful biography provides an admiring yet even-handed reassessment long overdue for one of Hollywood’s most popular stars.

Associated Press Staff

Elucidates how a skinny guy with zero sex appeal molded himself into an enduring star.

Entertainment Weekly on Jummy Steward

2017-02-13
A new biography attempts to understand the many sides of one of the 20th century's most famous actors.Charlton Heston (1923-2008) was a man of contradictions. The 1960s activist who fought to convince studios to make more films in the United States is the same actor whose most profitable pictures, including The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, and El Cid, were shot overseas. Eliot (American Titan: Searching for John Wayne, 2014, etc.), biographer of such Hollywood conservatives as Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, and Cary Grant, shows how Heston, a one-time Democrat who marched in the earliest civil rights protests and fought to preserve public funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, became a Nixon supporter who detested the "Woodstock-flavored counterculture that wanted to blame the soldiers" for the Vietnam War and, most notoriously, became the president of the National Rifle Association. Eliot writes insightfully about Heston's acting. "Heston's interpretations rarely went beneath the surface" of his characters, a style that nonetheless worked well in costume dramas such as The Greatest Show on Earth and later sci-fi films such as Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green. The prose is workmanlike throughout, however, and the book is hagiographic: Eliot criticizes the lesser films—Julius Caesar, The Hawaiians, The Call of the Wild—but not Heston, except to acknowledge that he "remained weakest in the romance department in his films" and that his late-life politics cost him acting jobs. Still, readers will enjoy the many inside-Hollywood anecdotes, such as Heston chatting with the Ten Commandments crew about "what he imagined Moses's sex life might have been like" and the director, Cecil B. DeMille, finding the editing of the film "a surgical chore" when he discovered that some of the extras in the orgy scene were "behaving a little too much like true Method actors, blurring the line between acting and real life." An entertaining picture of a complicated cinema icon, albeit viewed through rose-colored glasses.

Kirkus Reviews