Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1962)

THE HESTON AFFAIR continued “That story you’re writing about Charlton Heston’s happy marriage — maybe you better hold off on it for a while,” my wife said sweetly across the breakfast table. “Why?” I asked, taking a sip of coffee. “Well, it says here” — my wife pointed with a butter knife at a Hollywood gossip column in a newspaper — “that there’s trouble, ‘big trouble,’ between Charlton and Lydia, and the item hints that there’s ‘another woman' involved.” I reached over and grabbed the paper and read the column for myself. “What do you think?” my wife asked after I’d finished. “Phooey.” I jumped up from the table and hurried into my room. In a few seconds I was back, carrying some evidence I thought would disprove the item. “Listen,” I yelled, thumbing through my Heston interview notes, “and tell me if this sounds like the kind of thing a guy would say when he’s about to split up with his wife. “Here, listen to this. It’s a direct quote from Charlton himself: ‘When you go into marriage, you undertake the most intimate and interdependent human relationship. To come to know someone well enough takes time — you must have enough love to want to do it and enough maturity to be able to do it. Lydia and I had the love to begin with, and we’ve developed the maturity along the way, and as for time ... all I can say is we’ve been married happily for seventeen years.’ “That’s what Charlton said to me,” I said. “And I remember that at this point in the interview he put his hand on Lydia’s, not hammily, but easily and naturally.” My wife said nothing for a minute. Finally, as she poured me another cup of coffee, she asked softly, “But how about that reference to ‘another woman’? Charlton Heston is very attractive and . . “. . . and nothing,” I broke in. “Look, I’ve got the answer to that, too. Or rather, Charlton’s got the answer to that. Here, here it is, something he said to a Photoplay writer: ‘I suppose there are some people who think Lydia and I are oldfashioned . . . because we believe in the sanctity of marriage. . . . Perhaps I’m puritanical, but I can’t agree with the conduct of European husbands who boast that a flirtation — even an affair — with another woman is perfectly all right as long as their wives never find out. . . . “I happen to like my marriage” “ ‘I’ve been in love with Lydia since I was seventeen, and the reason I’ve never cheated and never wanted to is that I happen to like my marriage. Nothing would be worth jeopardizing it. I know, too, that if I were unfaithful it would destroy everything I believe in. And, besides, who wants to land on the front pages of every newspaper in the country and wreck his career?’ “Furthermore,” I said, “in my notes I’ve got the answer — again from Charlton — to this ‘apartness’ problem: ‘Often when I’m away from Lydia on public relations junkets or brief location trips, I get a clearer idea than most men what it is like to be alone. No matter who I go out to dinner with or play tennis with, I feel alone. It is possible for me to be alone when I’m in the middle of a crowded room. Being away from my wife is really pointless. “ ‘It’s not that I depend on her. It’s not that I lean on her. It’s just . . . just I’m a part of something else, of someone else. Of Lydia.’ ” After this my wife was quiet for a longer time. At last she said, “The columnist must be wrong.” A little while later I sat in my own room before the typewriter. I shuffled my notes, put a blank sheet in the typewriter and pecked out, in my inimitable two-finger style, “The Charlton Heston Story.” Was there “another woman”? Two hours later, all I had on the page was that title. It just wouldn’t go. Gould the columnist be right? Was there trouble between Lydia and Charlton and might there be “another woman”? A couple of times during the afternoon I started to put through a call to Lydia in California, but I didn’t complete any. What could I ask? “Is it true that your husband is running around with another woman?” What could she say if it were true? It would be better not to ask at all. Later, I read the evening papers and there it was again, in the middle of another column — an item stating that all Hollywood was abuzz with the rumor that the Charlton Hestons were breaking up. In the next few hours, I checked over my interview notes. What had seemed so true, so real, so believable before, now seemed altogether untrue — a mockery! I even started to doubt the stuff they’d told me about their courtship and the early years of their marriage. About how, when she first dated him at Northwestern, she’d reported to her mother, “I’ve just gone out with the most uncivilized, rude and crude, wildly untidy man on the campus.” About how their friends, on hearing that Lydia and Charlton had gotten married in Greensboro, North Carolina, on St. Patrick’s Day 1944 — just before he, as a member of the Air Corps, was to go overseas to the Aleutians — had all prophesied that the marriage would be “over in three weeks.” Lydia’s father had shaved this even closer by announcing, “I give you two weeks!” But they were so sure. . . . About how miserable she felt during the three years he was overseas. At our interview she’d told me, “I had a passion for him — beyond logic.” And I’d believed her. Now I questioned even that. What I did believe, in checking my notes, was what they had told me about their differences in taste and temperament. Oh, sure, they had related these things to prove how time, patience and love can enable people to work out their problems and adjust to each other. But I now saw their differences as proof of their incompatibility. They’d admitted it themselves. Charlton was prompt and Lydia was tardy. And she was orderly and he was disorderly. Everything out in the open Then there was the business about their fights. Of course, they’d put their disagreements in the best light. They’d talked about the “need to communicate” and agreed it was best to “get everything out in the open, quarrel and get it over with,” but now I wondered if this had all been window-dressing. The important fact was not in their “maturity and adjustment to each other,” as they had claimed, but the fact that they did fight. That incident about their quarrel when they lived in a cold-water, walk-up flat in New York during the first years of their marriage, for instance. When they’d told me about it, they put it forward as an example of the way they used to fight before they learned “not to go to sleep before working out a disagreement.” Now I saw it in its true light: as an example of the way they fought then and must be fighting even now — years later. They’d had a violent quarrel (during the interview they insisted they couldn’t recall what the squabble was about, but now I questioned that, too), and Charlton had stomped out of the apartment. Lydia had gone up and down the street looking for him, without any luck. Finally, from a pay phone, she’d called a friend. “My husband’s left me,” she sobbed. Her friend’s husband and another man 72