Parting the waters.

From My Cold, Dead Hands: Charlton Heston and American Politics, by Emilie Raymond (Kentucky, 416 pp., $27.95)

BEFORE neocon became standard liberal code for Bush-lover or warmongering Jew, the usual insulting reference tossed at the rare uncloseted Hollywood conservative was Charlton Heston. As in: Charlton Heston, crazed gun nut. Or: Charlton Heston, aging, ultra-square star of corny hit movies like The Ten Commandments or Planet of the Apes. You can't be serious! Charlton Heston? Why would anyone be on the same political side as him?

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Other than being employed as terms of disapproval and having some overlap in political philosophy, Heston and the neo-cons wouldn't seem to have much in common. But in her long, strained slog of an argument, From My Cold, Dead Hands, Virginia Commonwealth University history professor Emilie Raymond has expanded an academic thesis into an entire book insisting that, well, they do. The end result is just like going to the movies, in that it depends on suspension of disbelief.

The book is only partly, and superficially, a biography; it is chiefly, as the jacket copy informs readers, "a chronicle of the resurgence of American conservative thought and, in particular, the birth of neoconservatism." But the connection between Heston and the neocons is artificial and depends almost entirely on passages such as the following, about Heston's distaste, when he was Screen Actors Guild president, for racial politics in casting:

  The actors Iron Eyes Cody and Kid Chissell complained that "everybody
  is playing Indians" except Indians. Heston took the conservative side
  of the debate, arguing that the Guild "cannot make actors totally
  interchangeable and cannot deny the producer the right to cast the
  actor he thinks is right for the role." Heston's was a judgment with
  which the neocons would have agreed.

That's pretty much what you're in for here, except when Raymond adds some variety by beginning with the neocons and ending, after some pretzel-like twisting, with Heston: "But it was not until McGovern's nomination that he left the party for good, concluding finally that it was 'not hospitable to any degree of conservatism.'"

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Heston? No, Irving Kristol. But Raymond continues: "Heston experienced a similar revelation over Memorial Day weekend in 1972." Okay, then! Apparently, Heston experienced this revelation without picking up the special hotline a casual reader of this book might have thought existed between the actor and Neocon HQ, because at no point does Raymond suggest that Heston and any prominent neocon ever actually met.

The author is a noticeably passive biographer as well as an unenterprising political historian: Although she conducted an interview with the actor before Alzheimer's forced him to retire from public life in 2003, she apparently never bothered to ask him if he considered himself a neocon. Nor did she ever call any of the neocons mentioned in her book to ask what they thought of Heston--which is beyond lazy.

Even for an ivory-tower academic, Raymond seems remarkably immune to anything of topical interest. The title phrase, "from my cold, dead hands," gained a new level of notoriety when Michael Moore spliced together a few of Heston's gun-rights speeches (which included it) in his documentary Bowling for Columbine. After the film won an Oscar in 2003, pro- and anti-Moore bloggers warred over the accuracy of the film's Heston scenes. None of this is in Raymond's book; just about all she mentions is that "Moore let the camera linger on Heston's painful gait, then left a framed photograph of a gun victim on Heston's stoop." (Incidentally, Beverly Hills homes do not have stoops.)

Because the book tries to examine all of American conservatism through the prism of one Hollywood star, allow me to provide a little context, and describe what it's really like to be a conservative in Los Angeles. First of all, a Hollywood conservative is something that most people here assume you cannot be. Their eyes practically roll back and read TILT--or they look embarrassed for you, as if you'd just announced that you're the ambassador from Pluto.

Right before the 2000 election, TV Guide asked me to interview Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David about his new show. After the interview, we were waiting for our cars, and I mentioned how five years as a public-school parent had turned me into a Republican. Then I admitted that, yes, this meant I was voting for Bush. David's jaw quite literally dropped. (The cartoon version would have shown it actually crashing to the floor.) When I got home there was a message from him on my voicemail, referring me to a Gail Sheehy article about Bush in that month's Vanity Fair, which I guess he assumed would change my mind about voting Republican. I read it and it didn't, because, you know, for one thing, it was by Gail Sheehy. But whatever you think of Bush, he did get around 48 percent of the vote even then, so he was never exactly a fringe candidate. Yet if I'd said I was voting for Nader, or even Lyndon LaRouche, people here would have just smiled and nodded.

And not so long ago, some entertainment-industry friends sold their West L.A. home in a heated bidding war. Who was the winner? "He's a Republican," the wife said, lowering her voice as if covenants were being violated, which informally I suppose they were. "But ... very nice!"

It is sort of okay to be a libertarian conservative in Hollywood, because after the 1992 riots, even Democratic money people began to resemble the proverbial liberal who'd been mugged. And back to Charlton Heston: Suddenly his name could be mentioned in polite society sans the usual accompaniment of mimed retching. When Heston became president of the National Rifle Association in 1998, the L.A. Times ran a follow-up feature that was, although tinged with sarcasm, not entirely unsympathetic. It began: "Let's hear it for Chuck Heston, America's new Top Gun."

Raymond is so determined to advance her Heston = Neocon thesis that she ignores or downplays evidence that he has always seemed more in tune with the libertarians, and not only because of his devotion to the Second Amendment. It's true, of course, that not everyone in Hollywood quite knows what "libertarian" means. They do know that libertarians are for legalized drugs, and against any criticism of bad language or sex in the Hollywood product, so ... great! Once a TV producer told me that he liked libertarians, but not those awful neocons, who want to cut funding for after-school programs. I didn't have the heart to point out that, actually, cutting funding for after-school programs is more of a libertarian thing. When you're on the right in Hollywood, you take whatever approval you can get.

Catherine Seipp is a Los Angeles writer who publishes the weblog Cathy's World. She is also a contributor to National Review Online.