Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 8 Learning American

IN BODYBUILDING I WAS king of the mountain, but back in everyday LA I was still just another immigrant struggling to learn English and make a life. My mind was so fixed on what I was doing in America that I rarely gave a thought to Austria or Germany. If I was competing in Europe, I’d go home to visit, and I kept in touch with Fredi Gerstl in Graz and Albert Busek in Munich. Often I would cross paths with Albert and other European friends on the bodybuilding circuit. I regularly sent pictures and letters home to my parents, telling them what I was doing. Whenever I won a championship, I’d send them the trophy, because I didn’t need it in my apartment, and I wanted them to be proud. I’m not sure any of this meant much to them at the start, but after awhile they put up the photos and built a special shelf in their home to show off the trophies.

My dad would answer my letters for both of them. He always enclosed my original letter marked up in red ink—correcting my mistakes in spelling and grammar. He said this was because he thought I was losing touch with the German language, but he’d done the same thing with the essays he required Meinhard and me to write for him as kids. This kind of thing made it easy to believe that my parents and Austria were frozen in time. I was glad to be away living my own life.

Meinhard and I hardly kept in touch. Like me, he’d finished trade school and served a year in the army. Then he’d gone to work for an electronics company, first in Graz and later in Munich while I was living there. But our paths rarely crossed. He was an elegant dresser and a hard partyer and had a wild life with girls. Lately he’d been transferred to Innsbruck, Austria, and he’d gotten engaged to Erika Knapp, a beauty who was the mother of his three-year-old son, Patrick, and he showed signs of finally settling down.

He never got the chance. The spring after I won Mr. Olympia, in 1971, the phone rang in our apartment one day when I was out of town. It was my mother calling with the terrible news that my brother had been killed in a car accident. Meinhard crashed while driving alone drunk on a mountain road near the Alpine resort of Kitzbühel. He was just twenty-five years old.

I was away in New York, and Franco took the call. For some reason, the news made him feel so stricken that he couldn’t tell me. It wasn’t until three days later, when I came back to LA, that he said, “I have to tell you something, but I have to tell you after dinner.”

Eventually I got it out of him that my brother had died.

“When did it happen?” I asked.

“Three days ago I got the phone call.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

“I just didn’t know how to tell you. You were in New York and you were doing your business. I wanted to wait until you got home.” If he had called me in New York, I could have been halfway to Austria already. I was touched by his worry for me, but also frustrated and disappointed.

I called my parents right away. My mother was sobbing on the phone and was barely able to speak at first. But then she told me, “No, we’re not going to have the burial here; we’re going to keep Meinhard in Kitzbühel. We’re going tomorrow morning, and we’ll have a very small service.”

“I just found out about it,” I said.

She said, “Well, I wouldn’t try to come now, because even if you get the first plane, with the nine-hour time difference and the long flight, I don’t think you’ll get here in time.”

It was a terrible blow to the family. I could hear the devastation in both my parents’ voices. None of us was good at communicating feelings, and I didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry? It’s terrible? They knew that. The news left me numb. Meinhard and I were no longer close—I’d seen him only once in the three years since I’d moved to America—but still my mind flooded with memories of us playing as kids, going on double dates when we were older, laughing together. We would never have that again. I would never see him again. All I could think to do was push this out of my mind so I could go on with my goals.

I threw myself into my Los Angeles life. Going to school, training five hours a day at the gym, working in the construction and mail-order businesses, making appearances, and going to exhibitions—all of it was happening at the same time. Franco was just as busy. We both had incredibly full schedules, and some days stretched from six in the morning until midnight.

Becoming fluent in English was still the hardest thing on my to-do list. I envied my photographer friend Artie Zeller, who was the kind of person who could visit Italy for a week with Franco and come back speaking Italian. Not me. I couldn’t believe how difficult learning a new language could be.

At the beginning, I’d try to translate everything literally: I would hear or read something, convert it in my head back into German, and then wonder, “Why do they have to make English so complicated?” There were things that I seemed unable to grasp no matter who explained them to me. Like contractions. Why couldn’t you say “I have” or “I will” rather than “I’ve” and “I’ll”?

Pronunciations were especially dangerous. As a treat, Artie took me to a Jewish-Hungarian restaurant where the dishes were the same as Austrian food. The owner came to take our order, and I said, “I saw this one thing here on the menu which I like. Give me some of your garbage.”

“What did you call my food?”

“Just bring me some of your garbage.”

Artie jumped in right away. “He’s from Austria,” he explained. “He means the cabbage. He’s used to the cabbage from Austria.”

Gradually, though, I started making progress, thanks to my classes at Santa Monica College. Going there really fired me up to learn. On my very first day in English as a Second Language, all of us foreigners were sitting in the classroom, and the teacher, Mr. Dodge, said, “Would you guys like to be inside or outside?”

We all looked around trying to figure out what he meant.

He pointed out the window and explained, “See that tree over there? Well, if you want, we can all sit in the shade and have our class there.”

We went out and sat on the grass under the tree in front of the college building. I was so impressed. Compared to the way school worked in Europe, so formal and structured, this was unbelievable! I thought, “I’m going to take a college course sitting under the tree outside, as if I was on vacation! After this semester, I’m signing up for another class!” I called Artie and told him he should come by the next week and take a picture of us sitting outside.

In fact, the next semester I signed up for two classes. A lot of foreign students feel intimidated by the idea of jumping into college, but the community college dealt with me in such a low-key way and the teachers were so cool that it was a lot of fun.

Once Mr. Dodge got to know me a little bit and I told him about my goals, he introduced me to a counselor. The guy said, “Mr. Dodge suggested I should give you some other classes besides English. What do you like?”

“Business.”

“Well, I have a good beginning business course where the language is not that difficult—a lot of foreigners take that class—and you have a good teacher who understands foreign students.”

He put together a little program for me. “Here are eight classes you should take besides English. They’re all business courses. If I were you, I would also take some math. You need to hear the language of math so that when someone says ‘division,’ you know what that means. Or ‘decimal,’ or ‘fraction.’ These are the terms you hear, and you may not understand them.”

And I said, “You’re absolutely right, I don’t.” So I added a math class where we did some decimals and easy algebra, and I started relearning the language of math.

The counselor also showed me how to fit classes into my life. “We understand you are an athlete, and some semesters maybe it doesn’t work out. Since the fall is when you have your big competitions, then maybe you only take one class in the summer. You could go one night a week, from seven to ten, after your training. I’m sure you can handle that.” I thought the way he worked with me was terrific. It felt great to add getting an education to my goals. There was no pressure, since nobody was saying to me, “You better go to college. You better get a degree.”

I also had a math tutor at Gold’s Gym: Frank Zane, who had been an algebra teacher in Florida before coming to California to train. I don’t know why, but as a matter of fact, several of the bodybuilders had been teachers. Frank helped with my assignments and translations, explaining and taking the time when I didn’t understand. In California, he had gotten deeply into Eastern philosophy and meditation and relaxing the mind. But that didn’t rub off on me until later.

If I’d thought there would be a serious challenge to my dominance, I’d have stayed 100 percent focused on bodybuilding. But there was nobody on the radar. So I diverted some of my energy to other ambitions. I always wrote down my goals, like I’d learned to do in the weight-lifting club back in Graz. It wasn’t sufficient just to tell myself something like “My New Year’s resolution is to lose twenty pounds and learn better English and read a little bit more.” No. That was only a start. Now I had to make it very specific so that all those fine intentions were not just floating around. I would take out index cards and write that I was going to:

• get twelve more units in college;

• earn enough money to save $5,000;

• work out five hours a day;

• gain seven pounds of solid muscle weight; and

• find an apartment building to buy and move into.

It might seem like I was handcuffing myself by setting such specific goals, but it was actually just the opposite: I found it liberating. Knowing exactly where I wanted to end up freed me totally to improvise how to get there. Take that twelve more college credits I needed, for example. It didn’t matter which college they would come from; I would figure that out. I’d look at which courses were available and what the credits cost and whether they fit my schedule and the rules of my visa. I didn’t need to worry about the exact details now, because I already knew I was going to get those dozen credits.

Immigration status was one of the obstacles I had to work around putting myself through college. I had a work visa, not a student visa, so I could only go part-time. I could never take more than two classes at once in any one school, so I had to jump all over. In addition to Santa Monica College, I went to West Los Angeles College and took extension courses at the University of California at Los Angeles. I realized this would be a problem if I wanted to earn a degree, because I’d have to link all those credits to make them all count. But a degree wasn’t my objective; I only needed to study as much as I could in my available time and learn how Americans did business.

So at Santa Monica College, those English classes became English classes, math classes, history classes, and business administration. At UCLA, I took courses from the business school in accounting, marketing, economics, and management. I’d studied accounting in Austria, of course, but here it was a whole new thing. Computers were just happening: they were using big IBM machines with punch cards and magnetic tape drives. I liked learning about that, which I thought of as the American way of doing things. College appealed to my sense of discipline. I enjoyed studying. There was something really nice about having to read books in order to write reports and participate in class. I also liked working with the other students, inviting them over to my apartment to have some coffee and do our homework together. The teachers often encouraged that, so that if one person didn’t know something, the others could explain it to him. It made the classroom discussions much more effective.

One course required us to read the business news every day and be prepared to talk about the headlines and stories in class. That became the first thing I did every morning: open the newspaper to the business page. The instructor would say, “Here’s an interesting article about how the Japanese bought an American steel mill and dismantled it and set it up back in Japan. Now they’re producing steel more cheaply than we can and selling it to us at a profit. Let’s talk about that.” I never could predict what was going to make a big impression on me. A guest lecturer at UCLA told us that in sales, the larger the salesman, the more he tended to sell. I found this fascinating, since I’m a big guy. I thought, “Well, I’m two hundred fifty pounds, so when I go out to sell something, my business ought to be huge.”

I also found a steady girlfriend, which was a settling influence in my life. Not that meeting women was hard. Bodybuilding had its groupies just like rock ’n’ roll. They were always there, at the parties, at the exhibitions, sometimes even backstage at contests offering to help guys oil up. They’d come to the gym and the beach to watch us work out. You could tell right away who was available. You could go down to Venice Beach and collect ten phone numbers. Barbara Outland was different because she liked me as a human being—she didn’t even know what bodybuilding was. We met at Zucky’s Deli in 1969. She was a college kid a year younger than me, waitressing for her summer job. We started hanging out together and having long conversations. Pretty soon my buddies at the gym started teasing, “Arnold is in love.” When she went back to school, I thought about her, and we even wrote letters—a first for me.

I liked having a girlfriend; someone you saw more often. I could enjoy Barbara’s life, her teaching career, her school, her goals. I could share my ambition and my training and my ups and downs.

She was much more of a girl-next-door type than a femme fatale: blonde, tan, and wholesome. She was studying to be an English teacher and obviously wasn’t just looking for a fun time. Her girlfriends who were dating guys in law school and med school thought I was strange, but Barbara didn’t care. She admired me for writing down goals on index cards. Barbara’s parents were wonderful to me. At Christmas, each family member had a gift for me—and later, when I brought Franco with me, gifts for him too. Barbara and I went to Hawaii, London, and New York together.

When Barbara graduated in 1971 and came to LA to start work, Franco was getting ready to move out. He was settling down too; he was studying to be a chiropractor and he’d gotten engaged to a girl named Anita, who was a full-fledged chiropractor already. When Barbara suggested moving in with me, it seemed totally natural, since she was already spending a lot of time at my place.

She was totally on board with my habit of saving every penny. We had barbecues in the backyard and spent days on the beach instead of going someplace fancy. I wasn’t the best candidate for a relationship because I was so wrapped up in my career, but I liked having a partner. It was great to have someone there to go home to.

The fact that Barbara was an English teacher was great. She helped me a lot with the language, and she helped when I wrote papers for school. She was also very helpful with the mail-order business and writing letters, but I hired a secretary early on. Even so, we learned that when you have a relationship in a foreign language, you have to be extra careful not to miscommunicate. We’d get into ridiculous fights. One time we went to see the movie Death Wish, and she said afterward, “I like Charles Bronson because he’s very rugged, very masculine.”

I said, “I don’t think Charles Bronson is that masculine. I mean, he’s a skinny guy! I would call him more athletic than masculine.”

“No,” she said. “You think I’m saying he’s muscular, but that’s not what I mean. I’m saying he’s masculine. Masculine is something else.”

“Masculine, muscular, same fucking thing, I think that he’s athletic.”

“But to me he’s very masculine.”

I said, “No, that’s the wrong …” and kept arguing. I went straight to the dictionary the minute we got home. Sure enough, she was right. Being masculine meant something totally different from being muscular—it meant that Bronson was manly and rugged, which he was. I said to myself, “How stupid. Oh God, you’ve got to learn this language! It is so stupid that you argue over something like that.”

After I won Mr. Olympia, Weider started sending me on sales trips all over the world. I’d climb on a plane and make shopping mall appearances wherever he had distribution or was trying to expand. Selling was one of my favorite things. I’d stand in the middle of a shopping mall with a translator lady—for instance, the Stockmann shopping center in Finland—surrounded by a few hundred people from local gyms, because they’d have advertised my visit in advance. I’d be selling, selling, selling. “Vitamin E gives you fantastic extra energy for training hours every day to get a body like mine! And of course I don’t want even talk about the sexual power it gives you …” People would be buying, and I was always a huge hit. Joe sent me because he knew that the hosts would then say, “We sold a lot of stuff. Let’s make a deal.”

I’d be wearing a tank top and hitting poses every so often while I made my pitch. “Let me talk about the protein. You could eat as many steaks as you want, or as much fish as you want, but the body can only take seventy grams at a time. That’s the rule: a gram for every kilo of body weight. Muscle-building shakes are the way to fill the hole in your diet. So you can have five times the seventy grams if you want! You can’t eat enough steak to make up for protein powder, because it’s so concentrated.” I would mix the shake in a chrome shaker, like the kind used to make martinis in bars, drink it, and say to someone in the crowd, “You try it.” It was like selling vacuum cleaners. I’d get so excited that I’d rush ahead of the translator.

Then I’d move on to selling vitamin D, vitamin A, and special oil. By the time I finished, the sales manager would see all the interest. He would order Weider food supplements for the coming year. Plus barbell sets and dumbbells made by Weider. And Weider would be in heaven. Then a month later, I’d travel to another mall in another country.

I always went by myself. Joe would never pay for anyone else because he felt it was a waste of money. Traveling alone was perfectly fine, though, because no matter where I went, there was always someone to pick me up and treat me as if we were brothers because of bodybuilding. It was fun to go around the world and train in different gyms.

Weider wanted me to get to the point where I could sit down with the mall management to make the deal myself, and meet with publishers to line up more foreign-language editions of his magazines, and eventually take over the business. But that was not my goal. The same with the offer I received in the early seventies to manage a leading gymnasium chain for $200,000 a year. It was a lot of money, but I turned it down because it would not take me where I wanted to go. Managing a chain is a ten- to twelve-hour-a-day job, and that would not make me a bodybuilding champion or get me into movies. Nothing was going to distract me from my goal. No offer, no relationship, nothing.

But getting on a plane and selling was right up my alley. I always saw myself as a citizen of the world. I wanted to travel as much as I could because I figured if the local press was covering me there now as a bodybuilder, eventually I would be back as a movie star.

So I was on the road several times a year. In 1971 alone, I flew to Japan, Belgium, Austria, Canada, Britain, and France. Often I would add paid exhibitions to my itinerary to make extra cash. I was also giving free exhibitions and seminars in prisons around California. That started when I went to visit a friend from Gold’s who was doing time in the federal prison on Terminal Island near LA. He was serving two years for auto theft and wanted to continue his training. I watched him and his friends work out in the prison yard. He had made a name for himself as the strongest prisoner in California by setting the state prison record in the squat with six hundred pounds. What impressed me was that he and the other serious lifters were all model prisoners, because that was how they won training privileges and permission to bring in protein from outside to help them become these strong animals. Otherwise the prison authorities would say, “You’re just training to beat up on guys,” and take away the weights. The more popular bodybuilding grew in prisons, I thought, the more guys would get the message to behave.

Being weight lifters also helped them after they got out. If they came to Gold’s or other bodybuilding gyms, it was easy to make friends. Whereas most prisoners were dropped off at the bus station with $200 and ended up wandering around with no job and no connection to anybody, people at Gold’s would notice if you could bench press three hundred pounds. Somebody would say, “Hey, do you want to train with me?” and you’d have made a human connection. On the bulletin board at Gold’s there were always cards offering work for mechanics, laborers, personal trainers, accountants, and so on, and we would help the ex-prisoners find jobs as well.

So in the early 1970s, I went to men’s and women’s prisons all over the state to popularize weight training: from San Quentin, to Folsom, to Atascadero, where they kept the criminally insane. It never would have happened if the guards had thought it was a bad idea, but they supported it, and one warden would recommend me to the next.

In the fall of 1972, my parents came to Essen, Germany, to watch me in the Mr. Olympia contest, which was being staged in Germany for the first time. They’d never seen me compete at the international level, and I was glad they were there, although it was far from my best performance. They’d seen me in only one competition—Mr. Austria, back in 1963—and they’d come to that because Fredi Gerstl invited them. He’d helped line up sponsors and trophies.

It was a great experience to see them in Essen. They were very proud. They saw me crowned Mr. Olympia for the third time, breaking the record for the most bodybuilding titles. And they realized, “This is what he used to talk about—his dream that we didn’t buy into.” My mother said, “I cannot believe you are up there on the stage. You’re not even shy! Where did you get that from?” People were congratulating them on my success, saying things like, “You sure put some discipline into that boy!” and giving them the credit they deserved. I handed my mother the trophy plate to take home. She was very happy. It was an important moment—especially for my father, who’d always said about my weight training, “Why don’t you do something useful? Go chop wood.”

At the same time, my parents seemed to feel out of place. They didn’t know what to make of this scene of giant musclemen, one of them their son, parading in little briefs before thousands of cheering fans. When we went for dinner that evening and during breakfast the next morning before they left, it was hard for us to relate. My head was still in the competition, while they wanted to talk about matters much closer to home. They were still struggling with the devastation of Meinhard’s death, and now their grandson was without a dad. And it was difficult for them that I was so far away. There wasn’t much I could say to them, and I felt depressed after they left.

My parents didn’t realize that I wasn’t in the best shape for the Mr. Olympia contest. I’d been spending too much time on school and not enough time in the gym. My businesses and the sales trips and exhibitions had taken bites out of training. On top of it, Franco and I had been getting lazy, skipping workouts or reducing our sets by half. To get the most out of my workouts, I always needed specific goals to get the adrenaline pumping. I learned that staying on top of the hill is harder than climbing it.

But I had no such motivations leading up to Essen because defending the championship had been so easy up to now. I’d coasted to my second title as Mr. Olympia, in Paris in 1971. The only possible challenger had been Sergio—nobody else was in my league—and he’d been barred from the contest because of a dispute between federations. But in Essen, it seemed like all the top bodybuilders turned up at their very best except for me. Sergio was back, even more impressive than I remembered. And a new sensation from France, Serge Nubret, was also in top form, huge and really defined.

It was the hardest competition I’d ever been through, and if we’d been before American judges, I might well have lost. But German judges were always more impressed by sheer muscular mass, and fortunately I had what they were looking for. Winning narrowly did not make me feel good, however. I wanted my dominance to be clear.

After any competition, I always sought out the judges to ask for their input. “I appreciate that I won, but please tell me what were my weak points and what were my strong points,” I’d say. “You’re not going to hurt my feelings. I will still do a posing exhibition for you if you produce a show or anything like that.” One judge at Essen, a German doctor who’d followed my career ever since I was nineteen, told me bluntly, “You were soft. I thought you were massive and still the best up there, but you were softer than I would like to see you.”

From Germany, I went to do exhibitions in Scandinavia, and from there to South Africa to do seminars for Reg Park. Seeing him again was great; we’d gotten past the hard feelings from my having beaten him in London. However, the trip didn’t turn out too well. I was scheduled for an exhibition near Durban, but when I arrived, I discovered that nobody had given any thought to supplying a posing platform. But I was in construction, right? So I said what the hell and built one myself.

Midway through my routine, the whole thing collapsed with a scary crash. I landed flat on my back with my leg pinned under me and a badly wrecked left knee—the cartilage was torn and the kneecap was pulled way out of place under the skin. The South African doctors patched me up enough to finish the tour with bandages. Except for this mishap, it was a wonderful trip. I went on safari and gave exhibitions and seminars, and coming back I stuffed thousands of dollars of earnings into my cowboy boots so nobody would steal it while I slept on the plane.

On my way home through London, I called Dianne Bennett to say hello.

“Your mother has been trying to find you,” she said. “Call her. Your father is ill.” I called my mother and then went home quickly to Austria to stay with them. My father had suffered a stroke.

He was in the hospital when I got there, and he recognized me, but it was terrible. He couldn’t talk anymore. He was biting his tongue. I kept him company, and he seemed aware, but he was off in upsetting ways. He was smoking, and he’d become confused and try to put out the cigarette on his hand. It was painful and upsetting to see a man who had been so smart and so strong—an ice-curling champion—lose his coordination and his ability to think.

I stayed in Austria for quite a while, and he seemed stable when I left. Around Thanksgiving, back in Los Angeles, I had surgery on my knee. I’d just gotten out of the hospital on crutches, with my entire leg in a cast, when a call came from my mother. “Your father has died,” she told me.

It was heartbreaking, but I didn’t cry or freak out. Barbara, who was with me, got upset that I didn’t seem to react at all. Instead, I focused on practical matters. I called my surgeon, who told me not to fly with the heavy cast—so once again I couldn’t attend a family funeral. At least I knew that my mother had an enormous support system to organize the service and attend to all the details. The gendarmerie would close ranks to bury one of its own, and the band that my dad had led for many years would play, just as he had played at many funerals. The local priests, whom my mother was close to, would handle the invitations. Her friends would comfort her, and our relatives would come. Nevertheless I wasn’t there, my parents’ only surviving child, and that was the bottom line. I know she really missed me.

I was in shock and paralyzed. Yet frankly, I was also glad that the knee injury kept me from going, because I still wanted to separate myself from that whole side of my life. My way of dealing with the situation was deny and try to move on.

I didn’t want my mother to be alone. In less than two years, both my father and brother had died, and I felt like our family was rapidly coming apart, and I could scarcely imagine the grief she must have felt. So now I had to take on responsibility for her. I was still only twenty-five, but it was time to step up and make her life wonderful. Now it was time for me to pay her back for the endless hours and days of nurturing and everything she’d done for us as babies and growing up.

I couldn’t give my mom what she most wished for: a son close to home who would become a cop like Dad, marry a woman named Gretel, have a couple of kids, and live in a house two blocks from hers. That was the way in most Austrian families. She and my father had been okay with my move to Munich, which was 250 miles away and reachable by train. But I now realized that when I’d left for America without warning in 1968, I had shocked and hurt them. I wasn’t going back, of course, but I wanted to make up for that too.

I started sending her money every month and calling her all the time. I tried to convince her to move to the United States. She didn’t want to. Then I tried to have her fly over to visit. She didn’t want to do that either. Finally, in 1973, about six months after my father died, she did come, and stayed with Barbara and me for a few weeks. She returned the next year too, and every year after that. I also found more and more of a connection with Patrick, my nephew. When he was little, and I went to Europe, I made sure to visit him and Erika and her husband, a military man who was a devoted stepfather. Then when Patrick got to be about ten, he became fascinated with the idea of his uncle living in America. He started collecting my movie posters. Erika would ask me for memorabilia; I sent him a dagger from Conan and T-shirts from The Terminator and other movies, and wrote letters for him to show off at school. In high school he would periodically ask me to mail him twenty or thirty autographed photos, which he used for who knows what entrepreneurial purpose. I helped send him to an international school in Portugal and, with Erika’s permission, promised that if he kept up his grades, he could come to Los Angeles for college. He became my pride and joy.

Even though the supersonic airport no longer looked superpromising, and Franco and I were still making payments on fifteen acres of desert, I continued to believe that real estate was the place to invest. Many of our jobs entailed fixing up old houses, and it was eye opening. The owners would pay us $10,000 to fix up a house they’d bought for $200,000. Then they’d turn around and sell it for $300,000. Clearly there was real money to be made.

So I put aside as much money as I could and started looking around for investment possibilities. Two of the bodybuilders who had escaped from Czechoslovakia and come to California just before me had taken their savings and bought a little house to live in. That was fine, but they still had to pay the mortgage. I wanted an investment that would earn money, so that I could cover the mortgage through rents instead of having to pay it myself. Most people would buy a house if they could afford it; it was very unusual then to buy a rental property.

I liked the idea of owning an apartment building. I could picture starting with a small building, taking the best unit for myself to live in, and paying all the expenses by renting out the rest. That would let me learn the business, and as the investment paid off, I could expand from there.

Over the next two or three years, I did research. Every day I would look at the real estate section in the newspaper, studying the prices and reading the stories and ads. I got to where I knew every square block of Santa Monica. I knew how much the property values increased north of Olympic Boulevard versus north of Wilshire versus north of Sunset. I understood about schools and restaurants and proximity to the beach.

This wonderful real estate lady named Olga Asat took me under her wing. She might have been Egyptian; she’d emigrated from somewhere in the Middle East. Olga was older, short and heavyset, with frizzy hair, and she always wore a black outfit because she thought it made her appear leaner. You might look at someone like that and think, “Why am I dealing with her?” But I was drawn to the human being, the heart, the motherly love: she saw me as a fellow foreigner and really wanted to see me do well. She was such a pistol.

We ended up working together for years. Eventually, with Olga’s help, I knew every building in town. I knew every transaction: who was selling, at what price, how much the property had appreciated since it last changed hands, what the financial sheet looked like, the cost of yearly upkeep, the interest rate on the financing. I met landlords and bankers. Olga was a miracle worker. She would try so hard, going from building to building to building until we found the right opportunity.

The math of real estate really spoke to me. I could tour a building, and as I walked through it, I would ask about the square footage, the vacancy factor, what it would cost per square foot to operate, and quickly calculate in my mind how many times the gross I could afford to offer and still be able to make the payments. The selling agent would look at me in a weird way as if to say, “How did he figure that out?”

It was just a talent I had. I’d get out a pencil and say, “I cannot go any higher than ten times gross because I think the average maintenance expense on a building like this is 5 percent. You have to leave that 5 percent available. And the interest rate is now 6.1 percent, so the loan will cost such and such annually.” I would write it all down for the agent.

Then he or she would argue, “Well, you’re right, but don’t forget that the value of the property is going to rise. So maybe you have to put in a little bit of your own money along the way. At the end of the day, the value goes up.”

“I understand,” I’d say, “but I never pay more than ten times gross. If the value goes up in the future, that’s my profit.”

Interesting bargains began to appear after the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and the start of the recession. Olga would call and say, “This seller is in trouble financially,” or “They really extended themselves, I think you should make a quick offer.” In early 1974 she found a six-unit apartment house on Nineteenth Street just north of Wilshire—the more desirable side of Wilshire. The owners were trading up to a bigger building and wanted to sell fast. Even better, their deal on the bigger building was so good that they were willing to come down on price.

The building cost me $215,000. It took every dollar I’d saved—$27,000—plus another $10,000 borrowed from Joe Weider to make the down payment. The place wasn’t much to look at: a sturdy early-1950s two-story structure of wood and brick. But I was happy with it from the minute Barbara and I moved in. It was in a nice neighborhood, and the apartments were roomy and well maintained. Mine was 2,400 square feet, extra large, and had a balcony in the front, a two-car garage underneath, and a little patio out back. It had other benefits too: I rented the other apartments to entertainment people. Actors I met in the gym were always looking for places to stay, so eventually there were four actors living there. It was a way to build connections in the business I wanted to get into. Best of all, I’d moved out of an apartment where I had to pay $1,300 a month in rent and into a property that paid for itself from Day One, just as I’d planned.

Seeing me pull off a $215,000 deal left my old friend Artie Zeller in shock. For days afterward, he kept asking how I had the balls to do it. He could not understand because he never wanted any risk in his life.

“How can you stand the pressure? You have the responsibility of renting out the other five units. You have to collect the rent. What if something goes wrong?” Problems were all he could see. It could be terrible. Tenants would make noise. What if somebody came home drunk? What if somebody slipped, and I got sued? “You know what America is like with the lawsuits!” and blah, blah, blah.

I caught myself listening. “Artie, you almost scared me just now.” I laughed. “Don’t tell me any more of this information. I like to always wander in like a puppy. I walk into a problem and then figure out what the problem really is. Don’t tell me ahead of time.” Often it’s easier to make a decision when you don’t know as much, because then you can’t overthink. If you know too much, it can freeze you. The whole deal looks like a minefield.

I’d noticed the same thing at school. Our economics professor was a two-times PhD, but he pulled up in a Volkswagen Beetle. I’d had better cars for years by that time. I said to myself, “Knowing it all is not really the answer, because this guy is not making the money to have a bigger car. He should be driving a Mercedes.”