THE BELL CURVE:

Charlton Heston died Saturday, Moses and Ben Hur struck down by a disease that ravages mere mortals.

Reading his lengthy obituary sent me to my files for a look at my history with him that almost resulted in a collaboration on his biography. He wasn’t yet serving as poster boy for the National Rifle Assn. when that happened.

I would have had a tough time dealing with that phase of Heston’s life, played off against the Heston who related vigorously and with great good humor to the students in my film class at UCI three decades ago.

That class examined the social impact of various types of motion pictures, and in the Western category, I chose a character study called “Will Penny” in which Heston played an aging cowboy, in direct contrast to the epic figures he’s mostly remembered for.

He came to my classroom — and later to my home — with easy candor and respect for his craft well-seasoned with frankness and humor.

That’s the Heston I like to remember — the one who once played an astronaut named Taylor who crashed on a distant planet ruled by English-speaking apes that clambered about the surrealistic backdrop of my campus for several weeks making a movie.

Heston did a nude scene — his first — in “Planet of the Apes,” and I found the notes of a conversation that so well caught his flavor that I had with him then about the growing frequency of nude scenes in movies and how he felt about being asked to do one.

He responded: “I have no idea why I’ve been selected to be the spokesman for the male nude. In ‘Planet of the Apes,’ the scene of my nudity was extremely important, and I would have fought like a tiger if there had been real opposition to leaving it in because it was essential to making the point of Taylor’s dehumanization. But I think it’s important to bear in mind that the male is never stripped naked for aesthetic reasons. The history of the female nude in films is happily a little longer and is often used for aesthetic effect — and I must say I’m in favor of it.”

When I asked him what he meant by “aesthetic,” he said: “Just that it’s good to look at a naked girl, but the male nude has so far only been used for comic effect, as in the almost obligatory bath scene that has a long and honorable cinema history, back to the early films of Cooper and Gable. The artful construction of the bathtub is really unchallengeable.

“The Legion of Decency can be against nudity, but never against cleanliness. So that’s as close as the screen has come to dealing aesthetically with the male nude.”

He talked like that, in sly epigrams that came out almost as if they had been written for him. For example, again in my notes: “Doing an epic film is like raising dinosaurs. How can you survive without being trampled in the process?”

Or: “Doing a movie for Willie Wyler” — who directed ‘Ben-Hur’ — is like getting the works in a Turkish bath. You damn near drown, but you come out smelling like a rose.”

Or: “Boredom is a confession of personal inadequacy, not of the inadequacies of the world or of the people about you.”

Because I had written a half-dozen magazine and syndicated newspaper profiles of Heston, I was approached by a book publisher to explore an “as told to” autobiography of him.

Heston was agreeable to the idea, and it got to the contract stage before it hung up with various agents on the issue of how credits would be handled. Heston, having second thoughts during the delay, withdrew, and did the book himself several years later.

Throughout Heston’s glory years and the character parts that followed, his sense of responsibility to society that prompted him to join the 1963 civil rights march in Washington was always present. He did, for example, follow George Murphy and Ronald Reagan as head of the Screen Actors Guild, but resisted running for public office, himself.

When I asked him whether he questioned the fairness of well-known actors using their fame for political ends, he mused:

“I suppose what it comes down to is that the public simply has to accept the perhaps unjust influence that performers have in all sorts of areas outside their own field. It comes down finally to an exercise of taste and judgment.”

I never heard either his ethics or his professionalism or his tireless commitment to his work questioned.

“I learned to drive a chariot,” he once told me, “and conduct an orchestra in two months, but it took me eight months on a USC practice field learning to throw a football with the accuracy and skill of a professional quarterback for ‘Number One’ — the first film I created from scratch.”

The danger in assessing the life of Chuck Heston is the possibility of being entrapped either in one large tapestry of virtues or in his unreserved embrace of the lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Assn. He deserves some slack on the latter.

For many years — before the encroachment of Alzheimer’s and the NRA — he was probably the most visible example of the prototype American; the tough, hard, lean outdoorsman, raised in a small Midwestern town of middle-class parents. Highly individualistic, philosophically curious, temperamentally stable, viscerally outspoken and strongly principled.

Maybe, now, he’s finally meeting up with Moses. The real one.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.