Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 7 Experts in Marble and Stone

THE MONEY JOE PAID me never went very far. I was always looking for ways to earn more. As my English got better, and I could explain how to train, I would give seminars at Gold’s and other gyms. Each netted $500.

I also launched a mail-order business out of my apartment. It grew out of the fan mail I was getting. People wanted to know how I trained my arms, my chest. And they asked how they could get fit themselves. I couldn’t answer all these letters, so in the beginning, I got the writers at the magazine to help me with standard letters that I could send out. That gave me the idea of selling a series of booklets.

In America, unlike Europe, there weren’t a million obstacles to starting a business. All I had to do was go down to city hall and pay $3.75 for a permit, and then rent a post office box to receive the orders. Next came the California Board of Equalization and the IRS. They’d ask, “How much do you think you’ll make?”

“I hope a thousand dollars a month.” So you’d pay $320 for the first estimated payment. There was no interrogation. They were kind, sweet, accommodating. When Franco and I started a bricklaying business, it was the same thing. We walked out shaking our heads, and Franco said, “This is why they call this the land of opportunity.” We were so happy.

Basically, my booklets were the articles I’d been writing for Joe, which the writers and photographers helped me flesh out by adding more details and photos. We made a booklet for arms, one for chest, one for back, one for calves and thighs, how to get a more symmetrical body, how to gain weight, how to pose, and so on—ten different courses. You could order the whole set for $15 or $20 or pick and choose for $1 or $2 each. People asked for photos of me also, so I had an album printed up of my favorite shots. Joe Weider was big in mail order, of course, but he didn’t really see his bodybuilders as competition. I talked him into giving me free advertising space in his magazines. “You can always start paying me for using me in your ads,” I said, “but I’d like it if you just give me an opportunity.” I figured Joe would go for this because he always hated to part with cash. And he agreed, and he was very supportive: he said I could start with a full-page ad that we would make into a double page if the thing really took off.

Many bodybuilders failed at mail order because they’d accept the money but not get it together to mail the product. You had to fill your orders within a certain time by law. If the post office received complaints, it would take away your post office box, and your business would be gone. You might even go to jail. But I was superefficient. I took the doors off my bedroom closet to make an alcove and had a friend build shelves and a little fold-down desk. Each booklet had its own numbered niche, and there were bins for incoming mail, checks, envelopes, and outgoing orders.

My booklets were a success. Soon I added an Arnold Schwarzenegger weight-lifting belt and other products, enough for a double-page ad. That brought in even more business. It built to the point where I could afford to hire a secretary to come in a few days a week and handle most of the mail.

I always showed Joe any ad I wrote before putting it in the magazine because he was a merchandising genius. He would pick apart my language almost word by word. “Why didn’t you write ‘fill within days’?” he’d ask. “Put that in the ad! People want to know you’re dependable. And you should say ‘This booklet is a limited edition.’ People love limited editions.”

I loved being an American entrepreneur. With mail order I was doing what Charles Atlas had done!

Soon I started another business, this time with Franco. His idea was that we should work in construction, because he’d done that in Italy and Germany, and it seemed like people would want to hire two strong guys. But when we went to the union hall, we found out it could take months to join.

I said to Franco, “Why don’t we just start our own company?” Franco knew bricklaying, and I knew business. So that’s what we did. We put an ad in the newspaper that said “European bricklayers. Experts in marble and stone.” We got our first job right away, building a wall for a guy in Venice whose house once belonged to the silent-film star Rudolph Valentino.

Franco and I had noticed that Americans loved foreign names: Swedish massage, Italian design, Chinese herbs, German ingenuity. We decided that we should highlight being European. The fact that Franco was Italian was especially good. Look at the Vatican! You can’t beat Italian architecture. I’d also noticed that Americans like to bargain a little bit and feel like they’re getting a deal—unlike Germans, who are more willing to accept the quoted price. So Franco and I had a whole routine. I’d bring a tape measure and take measurements and come up with the estimate—which was always in meters and centimeters, adding to the European mystique. Then I’d show it to Franco, and we would start arguing in German in front of the client.

The guy would ask, “What’s going on?”

“Well, I don’t have to tell you about Italians,” I’d say, rolling my eyes. “I don’t get it why he thinks this patio will cost eight thousand dollars. He wants to order x number of bricks, which is way more than we’re going to need. I mean, between you and me, I think we can build it for seven thousand. We’ll have all these extra bricks, and we can return them and get the thousand dollars back.”

The guy would start to trust me right away. “That’s really nice that you’re trying to give me the best price.”

“Well, we want to be competitive. I’m sure you got other estimates, right?”

“Oh, yes, yes.”

“You see, Franco?” I’d say. Then we would argue some more in German, and the guy would be happy with the $7,000 deal.

We loved bricklaying and felt very productive. We also had a lot of fun. One time a woman had a competing bid for $5,000 to get her chimney replaced. That included $1,000 to demolish the old one. “A thousand dollars?” said Franco. “Let me look at this.” He climbed up on the slope of the roof, braced his back against the shingles, and did a leg press that pushed over the whole chimney. It almost landed on the woman standing below. But instead of getting mad, she was grateful. “Oh, thank you so much for helping us! This was very dangerous. It could have fallen on somebody’s head.” She not only gave us the job but let us keep the old bricks, which I then sold to another customer as “vintage bricks.”

Another customer wanted to replace a wall around his house. We had the idea that demolishing the old wall would be strenuous enough to serve as our workout that day. We rented the biggest sledgehammers we could find. I told Franco that we should make it a contest. “You start at that end and I’ll start at this end,” I proposed, “and let’s see who gets to the middle first.” We were hammering like maniacs, and I would have won except that a chunk flew off the wall and broke the customer’s antique stained-glass window. There went our profit.

Franco and I hadn’t even been in business a year when a big earthquake hit the San Fernando Valley on February 9, 1971. Patios heaved up. Walls cracked. Chimneys fell down. You could not have asked for a better opportunity. Franco and I ran our advertisement in the Los Angeles Times right away, and we were busy around the clock. For extra hands, we recruited bodybuilders off the beach—at one point, we had fifteen of them mixing cement and carrying bricks. It was a very funny sight, but we couldn’t depend on the bodybuilders. They couldn’t handle working every day. Just like Joe said, some of those guys were lazy bastards.

With the money we made, Franco and I were able to buy better cars and pay for more college classes. We were also able to afford our first investment. In those days, the airlines were planning to introduce supersonic planes, and there was a proposal to build a supersonic airport in Palmdale, right over the mountains fifty or sixty miles northeast of Los Angeles.

I wanted to be rich very quickly. When I heard that, I said to myself, “This could be a great investment.” Sure enough, a month or two later, we got a copy of the local paper, the Antelope Valley Press, and right there on the front page was a magnificent rendering of the proposed airport: monstrous, very futuristic, exactly what I envisioned America was all about. To think big! In Graz, they used to worry about whether the airport should have three or four planes land a day. I said to myself, “This is major.”

I figured that when you build an airport on that scale, you’ve got to have warehouses around it, and shopping malls, restaurants, housing developments, government buildings—growth, growth, growth. So I said to Franco, “Let’s find out if there’s anything for sale.” It didn’t take long before the Antelope Valley Press had another front-page story about how companies were buying up huge plots and subdividing and selling the land.

A gentleman from a development company took us out to see a piece of property. At that time, Antelope Valley was undeveloped, just desert. It took us two hours to get there on the bus, and the whole way, the guy talked about the plans. He explained how they were going to build a freeway into Palmdale, and that the airport would be intercontinental. Ultimately, it might even be used for space planes. We were impressed. When we got there, he showed us where the power and water would go, which confirmed my sense that the opportunity was real. I bought ten acres for $1,000 apiece and Franco bought five, right next to where the runway was going to be and near where a complex of high-rises might be built. We didn’t have $15,000 in cash, so we agreed to $5,000 down and $13,000 in principal and interest payments over the next several years.

Of course, none of this took into account the issue of sonic booms and how they would affect people living under the flight paths. It became a huge fight, not just in the United States but around the world. Eventually governments concluded that airliners should go supersonic only over the oceans—and Franco and I ended up stuck with acres of desert. The developer kept insisting that all this was just a temporary setback. “Don’t sell it,” he said. “Your grandchildren are going to benefit.”

I wasn’t lying to Joe Weider when I said that Franco and I would both be champions. The speed with which Franco transformed himself into a world-class bodybuilder was truly amazing. As training partners, we had a big advantage. When we started working out together in Munich, there was no way for us to know much about what American bodybuilders were doing, so we had to learn on our own from scratch. We discovered dozens of training principles and techniques that we would write down. We were constantly on the lookout for new exercises and variations: it could be something as significant as the thousand-pound calf presses I learned from Reg Park, or as subtle as doing a curl with the wrist turned a certain way. Once each week we would choose an unfamiliar exercise and each do sets and reps until we couldn’t do any more. Then we’d analyze the next day which muscles and sections of muscles were sore, and note it down. Working this way, we spent an entire year making a systematic survey of our bodies and building an inventory of hundreds of exercises and techniques. (Eventually this provided the basis for the Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding, which I published in 1985.)

A key discovery we made was that you can’t just copy someone else’s routine, because everyone’s body is different. Everyone has different proportions of torso and limb and different hereditary advantages and disadvantages. You can take an idea from another athlete, but you have to understand that your body may respond very differently from his or hers.

Experimenting like this helped us find ways to fix particular weaknesses. For instance, Franco had bowlegs, and we figured out how to fill out his inner thighs by having him do squats in a wider stance. Then we figured out techniques to build up his inner calves. He would never fool the judges into thinking his legs were perfectly straight. But they would be impressed by how he’d toned down the problem.

For the showdown with Sergio Oliva, I was determined to take my posing to a new level. Franco and I practiced our routines for weeks. To win, you have to be able to hit every pose for minutes at a time. Most bodybuilders will be able to do a vacuum pose, for example, which involves sucking in your stomach to call attention to the development of your chest. But often they can’t hold the pose, either because they’ve pumped up too much backstage or because they’re out of breath from previous poses. Or they have to let the pose go because they cramp up or start shaking.

So one of us would hold a pose for minutes while the other called out what needed to be done. I would be in a bicep pose, and Franco would say, “I see your arm shaking. Stop shaking.” So I’d stop it from shaking. Then he’d say, “Okay, smile,” and “Give me a little bit of twist in the waist,” and then, “Okay, now go into a three-quarter-back pose. Ah, you took an extra step. No good. Start again.”

You practice every pose and every transition because that extra step is the very thing that could make you lose in front of the judges. They’ll think, “That’s unprofessional. You’re not ready for the big time. You are a fucking idiot; get off the stage. You can’t even stand still in the pose. You haven’t even practiced the simplest things.”

At the Mr. Olympia level, what is most important is not necessarily what goes on in the middle of a pose. The judges assume you know how to do that. What becomes crucial is what you do between one pose and the next. How do the hands move? How does the face look? What is the posture? It’s like in ballet. It’s all about the straightness of the back, the head up, not down. Never, ever take an extra step. As you move from pose to pose, you have to visualize yourself as a tiger, slow and smooth. Everything smooth. And precise, without ever looking as if you are straining, because that too shows weakness. You have to be in total command of your face. Maybe you are struggling and completely winded, but you must breathe through your nose while keeping your mouth relaxed. Panting would be the worst. Then when you come back for the next shot, you need to look confident and exactly the way you’re supposed to look.

My preparation for going up against Sergio didn’t stop at the gym. I bought a movie projector. I assembled a whole collection of his performances in competition, and I watched those films at home again and again. Sergio really did have a stunning physique, but I realized that he had been using the same posing routine for several years. This was knowledge I could use to plan for the final one-on-one pose-off at Mr. Olympia. I memorized his moves in the order in which he hit them, and I got ready for each one with three poses of my own. I rehearsed this and visualized it over and over: “When he hits this, I will do this, and this, and this!” My goal was to overwhelm every move Sergio made.

Late that summer, the phone rang one day in Gold’s Gym, and the manager called out from the desk, “Arnold, there’s a guy on the phone by the name of Jim Lorimer.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants to talk to you about the Mr. World competition.”

“Tell him to call back. I’m in the middle of working out.”

That call turned out to be one of those magical things that happened to me that I never could have planned. Jim still laughs about it today. When I called him, he explained that he was the organizer of the world weight-lifting championships, which were being hosted that year by the United States in Columbus, Ohio, and that after the championships, there would be a bodybuilding competition for the title of Mr. World. He wanted me to enter.

I’d never heard of Jim Lorimer and called around to see if anybody knew him. It didn’t take long to learn he was for real. Jim was a former FBI agent, about twenty years older than me, and an important force in American sports. He’d been chairman of the United States Olympic Committee. He’d been a pioneer in building up the women’s teams to compete against the Soviet bloc. He made his living as an executive at Nationwide Insurance, the largest employer in Columbus, and was a suburban mayor and a very well-connected politician. He’d been running the US weight-lifting championships and the Mr. America contest in Columbus on behalf of the AAU for years, and my friends said that those events were always very well organized. That was a big reason that Columbus had been chosen to host the 1970 world championship, and Jim had been asked to step up and run it.

I looked at the calendar and realized that the Mr. World event was on September 25, the Mr. Universe competition in London was on September 24, and the Mr. Olympia contest was in New York on October 7. I thought, “Wow, I could, theoretically, go and win the Mr. Universe in London, then come to Columbus, Ohio, and win the Mr. World, and then go to the Mr. Olympia. That would be unbelievable.” In the space of just two weeks, I could cover the three federations that controlled all the bodybuilding competitions. Winning all three would be like unifying the heavyweight title in boxing: it would make me the undisputed world champ.

I was totally excited until I dug into the airline schedules. Then I called Jim Lorimer. “I want to come,” I began. “But there is no way to make it from Mr. Universe to Mr. World in time. The earliest plane from London after Mr. Universe doesn’t get to New York until two in the afternoon. And there’s no connecting flight from New York to Columbus until five o’clock, which is when your competition already starts.

“Unless you can perform miracles, there is no way I can make it. I’ve talked to the other top bodybuilders from the Mr. Universe contest, like Franco Columbu, Boyer Coe, and Dave Draper, and they’d all be willing to come with me. But we don’t see how it’s possible.

“I hear you’re a big-league organizer and you’re very well connected. So let’s see if you can pull it off.”

It took Jim only a day. He called back and said, “We’re sending a jet.” It was a corporate jet belonging to Volkswagen, one of the event sponsors. “They’ll fly to New York and pick you up.”

I couldn’t believe it when my idol Reg Park signed up to compete in the London Mr. Universe contest. I thought he was on my side! When a reporter asked me how it would feel to compete against the greatest Mr. Universe ever, I lost my usual happy-go-lucky attitude. “Second greatest,” I corrected him. “I’ve won the title more times than him.”

Ex-bodybuilding champs come out of retirement all the time to show off their training or refresh their image or who knows why. Reg had won his Mr. Universe titles at widely spaced intervals, in 1951, 1958, and 1965, and maybe he wanted to put a final stamp on the event. Or maybe I was receiving so much attention that he wanted to show that the older generation was still in charge. Whatever was motivating him, it put us at odds in a way I’d never expected.

When we saw each other in the warm-up room, we barely said hello. The competition felt awkward for everybody. The judges were uncomfortable. The fans were uncomfortable. Normally before a contest, other bodybuilders will come up and tell you, “You’re looking great, you’re going to win.” But the people who liked us both didn’t know what to say to one of us with the other man standing right across the room.

The reality is that a bodybuilder simply cannot train as hard when he’s over forty as he can when he’s twenty-three. I was in better shape than Reg—not even necessarily because of effort but just because of youth. His skin wasn’t as fresh, his muscles were slightly in decline rather than in bloom. A few years earlier, it might have been different, but now it was my turn to be king. Reg was good enough that day to beat all the other contestants, including a former Mr. Universe who was only twenty-eight. But he was not good enough to beat me.

I felt good about winning but at the same time sad. My sights were set on Sergio Oliva, and I didn’t need to defeat Reg Park to reach my dream.

The Volkswagen jet that Jim Lorimer had promised was waiting for us on the tarmac in New York the next day. Private jets were much less common than they are now, and for me and the other bodybuilders, it was a thrilling moment; we felt like we were finally getting the royal treatment like other big-time athletes. We flew to Columbus and drove to the Veterans Memorial Auditorium, walking in as the other bodybuilders were already in the middle of pumping up.

I was totally shocked to find Sergio Oliva there. He was a secret entry that nobody had told us about. “Fuck!” I said to myself. He looked like he was in top form, too. I was expecting a showdown with him in two weeks, not now.

It took me a few minutes to snap out of it and figure out what an opportunity this was. Although I hadn’t known that Sergio was coming, I realized he had known about me. That meant he had come to Columbus in order to surprise me and take me out, so that I’d be beaten even before we reached New York, and he would have a clear victory in Mr. Olympia.

But, I reasoned, what could work for him could also work for me. “If I beat him today,” I thought, “that’s it for him in New York.”

I needed to kick it into a higher gear. It was like when you have a superfast sports car with a nitrous injector on the engine: you press a button and get an extra hundred horsepower when you need it. I needed to hit that racing button now.

I took off my clothes, put on the oil, and started pumping up. They called us, and we went out on stage.

Mr. World was by far the biggest bodybuilding event I’d ever seen. Five thousand spectators packed the hall, twice the size of the crowd at the championships in London and New York. What was more, there were lights and cameras and announcers from ABC’s Wide World of Sports; this was the first bodybuilding competition ever to be taped for national TV.

It did not matter if it was five thousand or five hundred seats, I knew that if I could get the crowd going using my salesmanship and charm, that would influence the judges and give me the edge. Sergio was playing the same game, strutting and waving and blowing kisses to his fans; he had a big following, and it was obvious that several dozen had shown up. The four top competitors were me, Sergio, Dave Draper, and Dennis Tinerino. We all came onstage at the same time to let the panel of seven international judges get a first look at us. The emcee asked each of us to show off a few of our favorite poses. The crowd clapped and cheered seeing us all perform at the same time. The energy was tremendous.

Compared with all the other bodybuilders I’d ever faced, Sergio really was in a class by himself. I was struck by that again the minute we were onstage. It was so hard to look impressive next to him with those extraordinary thighs, that impossibly tiny waist, those incredible triceps. I thought that I might have a little extra edge in the judges’ minds because I’d just come from winning Mr. Universe. Or maybe Sergio had a slim edge because he was much more accomplished in Olympic weight lifting, and most of the judges came from that world.

To psych myself up, I looked for the slightest possible advantage. Now that we were in the bright TV lights, Sergio seemed a little soft to me. That was encouraging. I found that I really could anticipate his moves, and I started matching each pose. The crowd loved it, and you could see the TV cameras swiveling from him to me and back again. When we left the stage, I felt like I’d won that round.

It only got better from there. Sergio had been too free with the oil backstage, it was dripping off him when he posed and made him look more smooth than cut. Also, during his individual routine, he went through the poses a little too fast for people to fully take them in. When my turn came, I made sure I took the time to connect with crowd, so that each pose made them cheer a little louder, and they didn’t want me to leave. It was like Sergio was onstage competing for the first time, and I was totally composed and comfortable.

In the final pose-off, I was 100 percent on. No matter what shot Sergio did to show his strength, I had a matching shot to show my strength. More important, I was the one who was willing to go all out. I was more eager than Sergio. I wanted the title more than he did.

The judges gave me first place unanimously. That shouldn’t have been a surprise, but Sergio had been the champ for so long that he was really shocked. I stood there for a minute repeating to myself, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I just beat Sergio.” The prize was a huge silver trophy, a high-tech electric watch, and $500 in cash—and new popularity and momentum to carry to New York.

When I walked offstage with my trophy, I was careful to do two things. First, I thanked Jim Lorimer. “This is the best organized competition I’ve ever seen,” I told him. “When I retire from bodybuilding, I’m going to call you, and you and I will be partners. We’ll be right here on this stage running the Mr. Olympia contest.” Jim just laughed and said, “Okay, okay.” It was probably the weirdest compliment he had ever heard, especially from a kid.

Second was to mess with Sergio’s head. It’s foolish to leave anything to chance when you’re trying to unseat a three-time reigning Mr. Olympia. If the contest in New York was close, I told myself, the judges would give it to him. I had to blow him away onstage and make it easy for them to pick me. So I told him I thought I’d won today because I’d gained a lot of muscle size since he’d beaten me in New York the previous year. He was a little light, and that’s why he lost, blah, blah, blah. I wanted him going away thinking he’d have to gain a few pounds to compete. He was soft today, and I wanted him softer in New York.

Mr. Olympia was scheduled two weeks later for a cushy Manhattan theater, and around noontime that day a bunch of us got together at the nearby Mid City Gym. The minute I saw Sergio, I started teasing him about eating, and Franco joined in, asking him if he’d lost weight. That made everybody laugh except Sergio. In fact, as I was soon to see, he had taken the bait. He’d added ten pounds in the two weeks since Columbus, and nobody can gain ten pounds in two weeks and still look cut.

The Town Hall theater had 1,500 seats, and it probably had never seen a crowd as rowdy as this. His fans were chanting “Sergio! Sergio! Sergio!” and mine trying were to outshout them, chanting “Arnold! Arnold! Arnold!” At the end of a long afternoon, the judges called us back for a final pose-off onstage. Sergio went through his standard repertoire, and, just as I’d planned, I went into high gear, ripping off three poses to every one of his. The crowd really loved this.

But the judges kept calling out poses until finally I was thinking, “We’ve been posing a long time.” It seemed like it wasn’t because the judges were uncertain about their decision; it was just because people were on their feet and going berserk, and the judges were saying, “Let’s keep this going; the people love it.”

We were exhausted. That’s when I went for the kill. An idea came into my head, and I said to Sergio, “I’ve had it. I think those guys ought to know now, however the chips fall.”

He said, “Yeah, you’re right.” He walked off one side of the stage and I started to walk off the other—but I walked only two steps. Then I stopped and hit another pose. And I turned toward his side and shrugged as if to say, “Where’d he go?”

Sergio came right back onstage a little confused. But by this time “Arnold!” was the only name they were chanting, and some of the fans were even booing him. I used the moment to execute my best professional posing and shots. Then it was over. The judges held a little meeting backstage, and the emcee came out and announced that I was the new Mr. Olympia.

Sergio never said anything to me about how I’d mocked him, but he told other people he felt he’d been had. That’s not how I saw it. It was a primal moment. I’d finished him off by instinct in the heat of a competition that I’d dominated by then all the same.

Still, the next morning was strange, because Sergio, Franco, and I were sharing a hotel room. As soon as Sergio woke up, he amazed me by doing all kinds of push-ups and exercises. He was such a fanatic. Even the day after competition, he was pumping up in the hotel!

I have to admit that then I felt sorry that he’d lost. He was a great champion and an idol for many people. For years my mind had been fixed on wanting to destroy him, take him out, make him second, make him the loser. But the morning after beating him, I woke up and saw him next to me and felt sad. It was too bad he had to lose to make way for me.