Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 9 The Greatest Muscle Show Ever

AS MR. OLYMPIA, I WAS the three-time winner of a world championship that 99 percent of Americans had never heard of. Not only was bodybuilding obscure as a sport, but if you asked the average American about bodybuilders, all you’d hear was the negative stuff: “Those guys are so muscle-bound and uncoordinated, they can’t even tie their shoes.”

“It will all turn to fat and they’ll die young.”

“They all have inferiority complexes.”

“They’re all imbeciles.”

“They’re all narcissists.”

“They’re all homosexuals.”

Every aspect of its image was bad. One writer said that the sport was about as easy to promote as midget wrestling.

It’s true that bodybuilders look in the mirror as they train. Mirrors are tools, just like they are for ballet dancers. You need to be your own trainer. When you do dumbbell curls, for example, you need to see if one arm trails the other.

The sport was so far down, it was nowhere. To me bodybuilding had always seemed so American that I was still surprised when people couldn’t guess what I did. “Are you a wrestler?” they’d ask. “Look at your body! No, no, I know, you’re a football player, right?” They’d pick everything but bodybuilding.

In fact, the audiences were much larger in third world countries. A crowd of twenty-five thousand turned out to see Bill Pearl at an exhibition in India, while ten thousand showed up in South Africa. Bodybuilding was one of the most popular spectator sports in the Middle East. A great milestone in Joe Weider’s career came in 1970, when the international community agreed to certify bodybuilding as an official sport. From that point on, bodybuilding programs qualified for state support in dozens of nations where athletics are subsidized.

But I’d been in the United States for four years, and basically nothing had changed. Each big city still had one or two gyms where the bodybuilders would train. The biggest competitions never aimed for more than four thousand or five thousand fans.

This bugged me because I wanted to see bodybuilding thrive, and I wanted to see the athletes and not just the promoters make money. I also felt that if millions of people were going to come to my movies someday, it was very important that they know where the muscles came from and what it meant to be Mr. Universe or Mr. Olympia or Mr. World. So there was a lot of educating to do. The more popular the sport became, the better my chances of becoming a leading man. It was easy for, say, New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath to get into commercials and films. In the major sports—football, baseball, basketball, and tennis—the stars would just cross over and make a lot of money. I knew that would never happen to me. I had to do more. I wanted to promote the sport, both so that more people would take part and to benefit my career.

Joe Weider was pretty set in his ways, though. He didn’t want to try broadening his audience beyond the bodybuilding fans and fifteen-year-old kids—no matter how much I teased. “These are comic books!” I’d say about his magazines. “ ‘How Arnold Terrorized His Thighs’? ‘This Is Joe’s Biceps Speaking’? What kind of silly headlines are those?”

“It sells the magazine,” Joe would say. His approach was to keep the products consistent and take every opportunity to expand their distribution around the world. Probably that was smart, because the business kept growing. But I realized that if I wanted to promote bodybuilding to a new audience, I’d have to find my own way.

I was passing through New York on the way to Europe in the fall of 1972 when I met the two people who would set me on the path: George Butler and Charles Gaines. Butler was a photographer and Gaines was a writer, and they were working as freelancers for Life magazine. They were on their way to cover the Mr. Universe contest that Joe Weider was staging in Iraq. They’d been told that they should talk to me to get background on bodybuilding.

I couldn’t believe my good luck. These were the first journalists I’d ever really talked to from outside the bodybuilding world. They had access to maybe a million readers who’d never heard of the sport. They were about my age, and we hit it off really well. Gaines already knew quite a bit about bodybuilding, it turned out: he’d just published a novel called Stay Hungry, which centered on a bodybuilding gym in Alabama. It was a bestseller. That summer, he and Butler had teamed up on a story for Sports Illustrated about a contest called Mr. East Coast in Holyoke, Massachusetts. And they were already talking about continuing with the subject after the Life story and doing a book. They knew they were onto a fascinating subject that was unfamiliar to most Americans.

I wasn’t going to be in Baghdad, but I promised that if they wanted to check out the bodybuilding scene in California, I’d make the arrangements and show them around. Two months later, they were sitting in my living room in Santa Monica getting acquainted with Joe Weider. I’d just introduced them, and it was somewhat confrontational at first. The visitors came on like cocky young guys who knew it all, even though Charles had been involved in bodybuilding for only three or four years, and George for less than that. They kept asking Joe why he wasn’t pushing the sport in this or that direction, why he wasn’t signing up corporate sponsors, and on and on. Why didn’t he get ABC’s Wide World of Sports to cover his events? Why didn’t he hire publicists? I could see that Joe thought they knew absolutely nothing, they were journalists, they saw everything from the outside. They had no understanding of the characters and personalities in the sport or what a challenge it was to try to bring in the big companies. You couldn’t just snap your fingers and say, “Here’s bodybuilding!” and have it be equal to tennis or baseball or golf.

But the discussion ended up being productive. Weider invited them out to his headquarters in the San Fernando Valley the next day, and they hung out with him and observed his operation. It was the start of bodybuilding going mainstream. I think at first it was a struggle for Joe. He was trying to figure out how to deal with a whole new kind of attention and not feel like someone was trying to take away his business, outdo him, or steal his athletes. I think there was a certain fear there. But he came to appreciate their way of looking at bodybuilding from the outside. Pretty soon he was including photos taken by Butler and stories by Gaines in his magazines.

I was right in the middle. I could see both sides, and I welcomed this development because I knew the sport needed fresh blood. I wondered if by working with Butler and Gaines, I could step into the mainstream too—get enough distance to reimagine bodybuilding and find ways to raise its public profile.

Over the coming months, the book they’d envisioned began to take shape. Doing research for Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding, George and Charles became familiar faces at Gold’s. They were fun to hang out with and added a completely different dimension to the usual cast of characters. Charles Gaines was a good-looking, self-confident guy from a rich family in Birmingham, Alabama, where his dad was a businessman and his friends were part of the country club. He’d had a wild adolescence, dropped out of college for a while, and hitchhiked around the country. He always said that discovering bodybuilding helped settle him down. Eventually Charles became a teacher and outdoorsman. By the time we met, he lived in New England with his wife, a painter.

He’d figured out that there was a whole world of fascinating sports subcultures that weren’t getting covered broadly: not only bodybuilding but also ice climbing and ice skiing. He was athletic, so he would try these sports himself and then write about them. Charles could convey what it felt like to improve as a weight lifter; to be able to bench thirty pounds more than he could a month earlier.

George Butler seemed even more exotic. He was British and had been raised in Jamaica, Kenya, Somalia, and Wales. His father was very British, very strict. George told stories about what a tough disciplinarian he was. He also described how, as a little boy, he’d spent half his time in the Caribbean with his mother while his father was off someplace. Then at a young age, he was sent away to boarding school. Later on, he went to Groton and the University of North Carolina and Hollins College, and he came out of it all with a million connections in New York society.

Maybe because of his background, George could strike you as cold and kind of prissy. He complained about little things. He always had over his shoulder an L.L. Bean bag containing his camera and a journal in which he wrote down things twenty-four hours a day. It seemed artificial to me, as if he had copied Ernest Hemingway or some famous explorer.

But George was exactly what bodybuilding needed to forge its new image. He was able to photograph it in a way that would make people say, “Wow, this is wild, look!” He didn’t do straight-on muscle poses, which didn’t excite the general public; instead, he’d photograph a bodybuilder as a little figure against the background of a huge American flag. Or he’d photograph the astonished faces of Mount Holyoke girls watching the bodybuilders compete. The Weider brothers did not think of things like that.

George could make something out of nothing. Or maybe it wasn’t nothing; maybe it was just nothing to me because I saw it every day and I was part of it, whereas to him it was really something. Once, after a day spent shooting photos at Gold’s, he asked me, “How do you walk around so fast in the gym and never touch anybody?”

To me the answer was obvious: when someone comes by, you move out of the way! Why bump into them? But George saw much more going on. A few weeks later, I heard him turn it into a story at a dinner party with his intellectual friends. “When Charles and I were in the gym, we watched very carefully the way these men moved around. And would you believe that in the four hours we spent there, we never saw any of these enormous bodybuilders bump into one another? Even though it was tight and there was a lot of equipment and not enough room, no one ever bumped. They just went by one another, just like big lions in a cage; they gracefully went by without touching.”

His listeners were mesmerized. “Wow, they never bumped into each other?”

“Absolutely not. Here’s another fascinating thing: Arnold never, ever had an angry look while he was training. He was lifting huge amounts of weight. He’s always smiling. I mean, think about that. What must be inside his head? What must he know about his future, that he is always smiling?”

I thought, “This is brilliant. I would never be able to articulate it this way. All I would say is that I find joy in the gym because every rep and every set is getting me one step closer to my goal.” But the way George expressed it, the scene he created of it, and the psychology he used made me say to myself, “This is perfect marketing.”

Once he realized that I was funny and that I liked meeting new people, George started introducing me around New York City. I met fashion designers, heiresses, and people who made art movies. George loved bringing together worlds. He made friends at one point with a guy who published a magazine for firefighters. “This will be the new thing,” George told everybody, “specialty magazines that cater to firemen, or law enforcement, or plumbers, or the military.” He was way ahead of that trend.

In addition to being a photographer, George had aspirations as a filmmaker too, and he really liked the idea of putting me on the screen. He made short films of me training or going to school or interacting with other people and would show them to acquaintances and say, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to put this guy in a movie?” He started trying to raise money for a documentary on bodybuilding to build on the book’s success.

Charles Gaines, meanwhile, was making friends in Hollywood. He introduced me to Bob Rafelson, the director of Five Easy Pieces, who had bought the movie rights to Stay Hungry. While Charles was working with George on the Pumping Iron book project, he also started collaborating with Rafelson on the screenplay. I met Rafelson when Charles brought him to watch me work out on Venice Beach. Bob’s wife, Toby, came along and took a bunch of pictures of Franco and me training, and she just loved it.

Connecting with Bob Rafelson suddenly swept me up into a whole different orbit. With him came a lot of the “New Hollywood” crowd: actor Jack Nicholson and director Roman Polanski, who were in the process of making Chinatown; as well as actors Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, who had made Easy Rider with Rafelson’s producer Bert Schneider.

Gaines and Butler were pushing Rafelson to cast me in Stay Hungry. There was a main part for a bodybuilder named Joe Santo. Rafelson was a long way from making up his mind, but I remember sitting hypnotized in my apartment one night in early 1974 listening to him talk about what that would mean for me. “If we did this movie, I want you to know it will be a life changer for you. Remember what happened with Jack when he did Five Easy Pieces? Remember what happened to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda when they did Easy Rider? They all became superstars! I have a very good feeling for picking people, so when we do this movie, it will change your life. You won’t be able to go anywhere where people don’t recognize you.”

I was dazzled, of course. One of the hottest directors in Hollywood was talking about making me a star! Meanwhile, Barbara was sitting next to me on the couch staring into space. I could sense the wheels turning. What would this do to our relationship and to me? My career was pulling me away from her. She wanted to settle down, get married, and have me open a health food store. She could see a huge storm coming.

Of course, her instinct was right. My focus was on training, acting, and making sure Rafelson hired me, not on getting married and having a family. But after Bob left, I told Barbara not to worry about what he’d said; it was just the marijuana talking.

I liked getting swept up into a cloud of celebrities. Nicholson’s house was part of a “compound” up on Mulholland Drive next door to Polanski, Warren Beatty, and Marlon Brando. They’d invite me and some of the other bodybuilders up for parties, and sometimes people from that crowd would come to my building and we’d have barbecues on the little patio. It was hilarious: neighbors walking past on the sidewalk couldn’t believe it when they saw who was there. But at the same time, I told myself not to get carried away. I was barely scraping the outside of that world. At that point, I was only a fan of those people.

I was being exposed to a world I didn’t know. It was good to hang out, to watch them, to see how they operated and made decisions, and to hear them talk about movie projects, or building their homes, or building a house on the beach, or girls. I asked about acting and about the secret to becoming a leading man. Nicholson and Beatty, of course, were big proponents of method acting. They talked about how they prepared, how many times they rehearsed a role, and how they were able to live in the moment and improvise. Jack was shooting One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and he described how challenging it was to play a patient in an asylum. Meanwhile, Polanski, who had directed Nicholson in Chinatown, told of the differences between making a movie in Hollywood and making one in Europe: in America, the opportunity was grander, but the moviemaking was more formulaic and less artistic. They all had such enormous passion for their profession.

I thought that maybe down the road I’d get a chance to be in movies with them, in some kind of supporting role. But mostly I was thinking, “What a great promotion for bodybuilding, that this crowd now is accepting the sport.”

My Hollywood career might never have taken off if not for a chain of events that started with Franco and me organizing a bodybuilding competition in Los Angeles that summer. I was still focused on wanting to see bodybuilding go mainstream. It frustrated me that bodybuilding shows were never advertised to the general public. That seemed totally wrong. I mean, what did we have to hide? People complained that reporters were always negative about bodybuilding and wrote stupid stories. Well, that was true, but who was talking to the press? Had anyone ever sat down and explained what we were doing? So Franco and I decided that if bodybuilding in LA was ever going to break out of its little shell, we had to promote it ourselves. We rented a big auditorium downtown and arranged the rights to host the Mr. International competition for 1974.

There were little signs that the time was right to do this. Lots of actors were starting to work out at Gold’s. Gary Busey came regularly. Isaac Hayes, who’d won an Oscar for writing the Shaft theme song, would pull up in his Rolls every day and train. Up till then, the only actors working out in public were ones who reinforced the gay stereotype about bodybuilding. Actors like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson were muscular and had terrific bodies onscreen. They were working out, but in secret. Whenever somebody commented on their muscles, they’d say, “I was born this way.” But that was starting to change, and weight training was becoming more acceptable.

Another positive sign was that more women were turning up at Gold’s—not to ogle the guys but to ask about joining. At first, they weren’t allowed. From a practical standpoint, it would have been hard for Joe Gold to let them in, because there was only one set of toilets and showers. But the real truth was that the guys were not yet ready for it. Bodybuilding was too much of a man’s world. The last thing you wanted was to worry about what you said in the gym. There was a lot of cursing and a lot of man talk. I told Joe that he should include women. I’d seen the benefits in Munich: having women in the gym made us train harder, even if you had to watch your language a little.

Sometimes the women who asked to join were sisters of bodybuilders or girlfriends. Sometimes they were girls who were already working out at the beach. If a woman needed to train for a physical test—to join the police or the fire department, say—Joe would always give special permission. He would tell her, “Come in at seven in the morning when there are fewer guys here, and you can work out. Be my guest; you don’t have to pay anything.”

Joe never made a decision without the bodybuilders’ consent. Should there be a radio playing? Should he carpet the floor? Or would that ruin the dungeon effect? This was a hard-core gym that catered to the hard-core guys. We had endless discussions about letting women join. Finally we agreed to open the membership, but only to the hard-core women who signed a statement that said in effect: “We understand there’s crude language, we understand there are weights dropping on feet and there are injuries, we understand there is only one set of bathrooms, and we will use the bathrooms on the beach.” I wanted bodybuilding to open up completely to women, including women’s championships. At least this was a start, and you could see the interest was there.

We felt bodybuilding contests were never big enough—it was always the same five hundred or one thousand spectators—and it felt very disorganized. Sometimes there was no music or the emcee was bad or the lighting was shitty. No one came to meet us at the airport. Everything was wrong. There were exceptions, like the Mr. World event in Columbus and the Mr. Universe event in London, but most competitions were amateurish. We made a list of everything we wanted to see fixed and started calling people for advice.

Franco and I scheduled our show for August 17. The hall we rented was a grand, old 2,300-seat theater in downtown LA called the Embassy Auditorium. The next thing we did was hire a publicist, Shelley Selover, who had an office right in Venice. When Franco and I went to see her, I doubt that she’d ever given bodybuilding a thought. But after asking a lot of questions and listening for a while, she agreed to take us on. “I can do something with this,” she said. That was an important vote of confidence.

Shelley hooked us up right away with a veteran Sports Illustrated writer named Dick Johnston, who flew over from his home in Hawaii to check out our sport. Shelley coached us carefully before we met. “He wants to make the case to his editors that bodybuilders are athletes, serious athletes, and do a big story,” she said. “You think you can help him with that?” So I went into the interview with all kinds of examples about how if this athlete hadn’t picked bodybuilding, he’d have been a baseball star, and that guy would have been a boxer. They would be athletes anyway, but it happened that bodybuilding was their passion and was where they thought they had the most potential. Dick Johnston liked the idea and arranged to come back to cover our event.

Franco and I really hustled to put together the show. We knew we could never make ends meet with ticket sales alone. We had to pay the airfares for the bodybuilders coming in from around the world, we had to pay the judges, we had to pay for the hall and for advertising and promotion. So we looked for sponsors. Isaac Hayes suggested that we talk to his friend the great boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, who had a foundation. “He’ll be into this,” he told me. “His foundation is really for the underdog, you know? He gives money to inner city kids and minorities. So you just have to explain that as an Austrian in California and a bodybuilder, you’re a minority!” Franco and I thought that was pretty funny, that we should be minorities. Franco was thrilled at the idea of meeting one of the greatest fighters of all time. I was excited too—I remembered seeing Robinson in newsreels as a kid. By 1974, he’d been retired for almost ten years.

When we arrived at his foundation, there were many people in the waiting room. I thought about everybody who must be hitting him up, and how great he was, as an ex-champ, to be spending his time on his foundation.

Finally, it was our turn. Sugar Ray brought us into his office and was incredibly warm. We were in such awe that we didn’t even hear what he said the first few seconds. He took his time and listened to our pitch asking for money to purchase trophies for our event. By the end, he was laughing. It was just so weird, two foreigners trying to run an international championship in bodybuilding in LA. He gave us $2,800 for the trophies—which was a lot in those days. We went out and bought really nice ones with little plaques that said, “Donated by the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation.”

We discovered that people really weren’t negative about bodybuilding. They were open to it, but nobody was talking to them. This was open-minded America, ready to learn something new. Our approach was to educate the people. I had the personality. I knew Gaines’s stories had gotten a good reception. You know how real estate people say “Location, location, location”? Our motto was “Presentation, presentation, presentation.”

As Mr. International drew near, we put up posters headlined THE GREATEST MUSCLE SHOW EVER in YMCAs and gathering places all over town. The poster featured pictures of me (five times Mr. Universe, four times Mr. Olympia), Franco (Mr. Universe, Mr. World), Frank Zane (Mr. America, Mr. Universe), Lou Ferrigno (Mr. America, Mr. Universe), Serge Nubret (Europe’s greatest bodybuilding star), and Ken Waller (Mr. America, Mr. World).

To my amazement, Shelley not only lined up newspaper interviews but also succeeded at getting me invited onto nationwide talk shows, including The Merv Griffin Show, The Tonight Show, and The Mike Douglas Show. That was when we realized we were right: there was actually an interest here; it wasn’t like we were just imagining it.

Of course, given bodybuilders’ stereotypical image, nobody was going to put me on the air without a preinterview well in advance. I had to go to the studio in the afternoon, hours before the show, so they could check out whether this muscleman could open his mouth and make sense. So I’d chat with the preinterviewer, who after awhile would say, “This is great! Now, can you say all this stuff when you’re under pressure and in front of an audience?”

I would tell him, “Well you know, the interesting thing is, I don’t see the audience. I’m so into it that I don’t see them. So don’t worry; I can block it out.”

“Great, great.”

The first show I did was Merv Griffin. The comedian Shecky Greene was the guest host that day. I sat down, and we exchanged a few lines, and then Shecky went quiet for a beat just looking at me. Then he burst out, “I can’t believe it! You can talk!” That got a big laugh.

When somebody sets the bar that low, you cannot go wrong. Shecky kept complimenting me. He was very funny, and he made me funny as a result. This wasn’t just a boost for me, it was a boost for bodybuilding in America: the viewers were getting to see a bodybuilder who looked normal when he was dressed, who could talk, who had an interesting background and a story to tell. All of sudden the sport had a face and a personality, which made people think, “I didn’t realize these guys are funny! This isn’t weird, it’s great!” I was happy too, because I got to promote Mr. International.

Franco and I felt pretty nervous about our upcoming event especially after we talked to George Eiferman, one of the ex-bodybuilding champions we’d lined up as judges. George was an elder statesman of the sport (Mr. America 1948 and Mr. Olympia 1962) who now owned gyms in Las Vegas. A week before the contest, he came to visit and give advice. He met with Franco, Artie Zeller, and me at Zucky’s.

George said, “Now make sure you that you have everything there.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I ran these competitions in the past. Sometimes we forget the simplest things.”

“Like what?” I started sweating, wondering what it could be. I’d been concentrating so much on selling seats that maybe I’d overlooked some important details.

“For instance, do you have the chairs for the judges at the front table? Who is going to get you those chairs?”

I turned to Franco. “Did you take care of those chairs?”

Franco said, “You’re such an idiot. How do I know about chairs for the judges?”

I said, “Okay, let’s write this down.” So I made a note that the next time we went to the auditorium, we had to figure out where to get this table to put in front of the stage and where to get nine chairs.

George went on: “You need a nice tablecloth on the table—a green one preferably, so it looks official. Also, have you thought about who is going to buy the notepads for the judges?”

“No.”

He said, “Make sure the pencils you bring have erasers.”

“Oh, shit.”

George walked us through the whole thing. We had to figure out how the stage should look, how to arrange the backstage area and have weights there ready for pumping up, where those weights would come from, and how to get them into the back of the auditorium. “Have you worked that out?” he asked. “I’m sure this auditorium is governed by unions, so what are you allowed to lift and carry and what has to be done by the union guys?”

Franco and I, of course, didn’t like the idea of having to obey union work rules. But we reminded ourselves that everything was much easier to do here compared to what it would be in Europe. Getting the permits and paying the taxes were much simpler, and the taxes were lower. Also, we had a lot of enthusiasm from the people who ran the auditorium.

In the end the competition was packed. Franco and I personally picked up all the bodybuilders from the airport, and we treated them exactly the way we would have wanted to be treated. The top bodybuilders were there. There was good, experienced judging. We invited judges, sponsors, and contestants to a reception the night before, which Franco and I paid for. All our publicity efforts really filled the hall, so that we ended up having to turn away two hundred people. Most important, the seats were filled by people from all walks of life, not just bodybuilders.

The ripples from my success on The Merv Griffin Show extended into the fall. Shelley booked me onto more talk shows. It was always the same. Since there was no expectation at all, I’d be spontaneous, and the host would respond, “This is fascinating!” Pretty soon I realized that in an entertainment interview, you could just make up stuff! I’d say things like, “In 1968 Playboy did a survey, and eighty percent of women hated bodybuilders. But now it’s turned around, and eighty-seven percent of women love guys with muscles.” They loved it.

Being on Merv Griffin led to another unexpected payoff. The morning after the show, I got a call at the gym from Gary Morton, the husband and business partner of Lucille Ball. “We saw you last night,” he said. “You were funny. She has a job for you.” Lucille Ball was then the most powerful woman in television. She was world famous for her sitcoms I Love Lucy, The Lucy Show, and Here’s Lucy, and was the first woman in TV to break from the studios and run her own production company, which made her rich. Morton explained that she was working on a TV special with Art Carney, best known as Ed Norton on the 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners. She wanted me to play the part of a masseur. Would I come in that afternoon and read from the script? All of a sudden Lucy was on the phone. “You were fabulous! You were great! We’ll see you later, right? Come in, we love you.”

I went to their office, and somebody handed me the script. The show was called Happy Anniversary and Goodbye. I got really excited as I read it. Lucille Ball and Art Carney were playing a middle-aged couple named Norma and Malcolm. Their twenty-fifth anniversary is coming up, but instead Malcolm declares he’s tired of Norma and suggests they get a divorce. Norma is tired of Malcolm, too. So they agree on a trial separation, and Malcolm moves out. But he goes back to the apartment to pick up something he forgot, and there is Norma, lying half naked on a table getting a massage. She plays it up to make him jealous, which leads to a hilarious fight, with the masseur, whose name is Rico, caught in the middle.

That masseur would be me. It was a seven-minute part of the hourlong show, and I thought, “This is great exposure; I will be on camera with Lucille Ball and Art Carney!” Since Hercules in New York had never been released, this would be my screen debut, and it would have an audience in the millions.

I was daydreaming about it when they called me in to read. Lucy, Gary Morton, and the director were all there, and she was very welcoming. “You were really funny last night!” she said. “Here, let’s read.”

The whole thing was so foreign to me, I had no idea that reading from a script means that you are supposed to actually act out the role. I sat and literally spoke my lines word for word, as if I was showing the teacher I knew how to read. “Hello my name is Rico and I’m from Italy and I was a truck driver there but now I’m a masseur.”

And she said “Oooo-kay.” I noticed the director looking at me. Under normal circumstances, they would have said, “Thank you very much; we’ll call your agent.” In my case, they couldn’t have done that, because I didn’t have an agent. But this wasn’t an ordinary audition because Lucy really wanted me to play the part and nobody else was auditioning. I was there just so she could get Gary and the director on board.

She jumped right in to try to save me. “Great!” she said. “Now, do you know what the scene is about?” I said yes, and she said, “Tell me, just briefly.”

And I said, “Well, it seems to me that I’m coming into your apartment because you’ve asked me to come and give you a massage, and you are getting divorced or a separation, or something like that, and I have these muscles because I was a truck driver in Italy, and I came to America, and I made some money not as a truck driver but as a masseur.”

“That’s exactly what it is. Now, can you tell me this again at the right moment when I ask you?” This time we played out the scene, starting with me ringing the doorbell, walking in with the massage table, and setting it up. She’s gaping at my muscles and saying, “How did you get like that?”

“Oh, I actually come from Italy. I was a truck driver and then I became a masseur guy, and I’m very happy to be here today to massage you”—she is losing it as I’m saying this—“and after that I have another massage someplace else. I make a little bit of money massaging, and it’s also good for the muscles.”

“Now let’s improvise,” she said. So I made up a line. “Lie down so I can work you over.”

She said, “Great, great! What do you think, guys?”

“That was funny, the way he explained it, and the Italian accent,” the director said.

I said, “No, it’s a German accent, but to you guys, it all sounds the same.” They laughed and told me, “Okay, you’ve got the job.”

Art Carney, Lucy, and I rehearsed that scene every day for a week. Carney had just won an Academy Award for his leading role in the movie Harry and Tonto. He was a very funny actor who turned out to have even more trouble than me memorizing lines. Finally, on Friday they told me, “On Monday when you come back, we’re going to shoot live.” I felt ready and said great.

Monday I waited backstage in the green room with some of the other actors. Then somebody came in and said, “Your scene is ready.” They led me behind the stage to the door I was supposed to go through. “Stand here, and when the green light goes on, ring the doorbell and take it from there, just like we rehearsed.”

So I waited, holding my massage table by the handle. I had on shorts and sneakers and a jacket I was supposed to strip off during the scene to reveal my tank top and my muscles underneath all pumped up and oiled up.

The green light came on, I rang the bell, Lucy opened the door, and I stepped onstage and said my first line, “I am Rico.”

All of a sudden there was laughter and applause.

Which we hadn’t rehearsed. I had no idea that “We’re going to shoot live” in this case meant that we would be videotaping in front of three cameras and a studio audience. I’d never heard the expression before—what did it mean to me, a bodybuilder who had never been involved in TV? Meanwhile, Lucy was in character as Norma, acting hypnotized by my bulging legs and getting a big laugh by saying, “Oh, y-yes … won’t you come in … Oh, you are in,” and hurrying behind me to shut the door.

My next line was supposed to be “Where do we do it, here or in the bedroom?” But I’m standing frozen, holding the massage table and looking into the lights and listening to the applause and laughter of a thousand people filling this studio up to the rafters.

Being a total pro, Lucy saw what was happening and ad-libbed. “Well, don’t just stand there looking at the art! You came to give me a massage—right?” I remembered my line, and from there the scene went great. There was applause throughout.

She was so good that I really thought she was asking me questions that I had to answer; I didn’t feel like I was acting. It was a real lesson, and instead of getting paid, I should have paid them. Lucy followed my career like a mom for many years after that. As tough as she was by reputation, she was a sweetheart to me and would write me a letter of praise whenever a new movie came out. I ran into her many times at celebrity events, and she always gave me a big hug and just went off the deep end. “I take full credit for this man. He’s going to become a big star,” she’d say.

Lucy gave me advice about Hollywood. “Just remember, when they say, ‘No,’ you hear ‘Yes,’ and act accordingly. Someone says to you, ‘We can’t do this movie,’ you hug him and say, ‘Thank you for believing in me.’ ”

I had to be careful not to let my adventures in television sidetrack me from training. In July, Franco and I shifted to workouts at maximum effort twice a day to get ready for the competitions of the fall. I was defending my Mr. Olympia title for the fourth straight year, but in some ways it was far from routine. For the first time, the contest was going to be at Madison Square Garden, New York City’s top location for rock concerts and sports. True, we were in the 4,500-seat Felt Forum rather than the 21,000-seat arena. But still, Madison Square Garden was where people came to see Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fight for the first time and to watch Wilt Chamberlain and Willis Reed play. It was where they came to listen to Frank Sinatra and to the Rolling Stones. It was the place for championships and major tournaments in college sports.

So bodybuilding was taking a big step up. People had seen me on TV. The book Pumping Iron was about to come out. And thanks to George Butler’s tireless networking, the 1974 Mr. Olympia contest was getting buzz like it never had before. Charles Gaines’s friend Delfina Rattazzi, an heiress to the Fiat fortune and later Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s assistant at the Viking Press, would be hosting a book party at her apartment after the competition. She was inviting dozens of hip and trendy people who would have turned up their noses at bodybuilding before. I didn’t know where it would all lead, but I knew I wanted to be in top form.

Joe Weider’s magazine writers outdid themselves working to whip up excitement for this event, calling it “the Super Bowl of bodybuilding.” The venue was a “modern Roman Colosseum.” The contestants were “gladiators in a mortal vascular combat.” The event itself was “the great muscle war of ’74” and “the battle of the titans.”

This year’s drama revolved around bodybuilding’s new wunderkind, Lou Ferrigno, a six-foot-five, 265-pound giant from Brooklyn. He was only twenty-two and getting better and better each year. He’d won both Mr. America and Mr. Universe in 1973, and now he was training to knock me off as Mr. Olympia. They were hyping Lou as the new Arnold. He had a terrific frame, wide shoulders, incredible abs, out-of-this-world potential, and nothing else on his mind except training and winning. To be precise, Lou was training for six hours a day, six days a week—more than even my body could stand. I loved being the champ. But how much more was there to prove after winning Mr. Olympia four straight years? Plus, my businesses were growing, and maybe I had the start of a movie career. As we trained for New York, I made up my mind that this Mr. Olympia would be my last.

Ferrigno had won the Mr. International contest that Franco and I had organized in Los Angeles. He was massive and symmetrical, and if I’d been a judge, I’d have picked him too, even though he was still undefined—like me when I first came to the America—and his posing needed work. If I’d had his body, I could have shaped it in a month to beat anyone—even me. I liked Lou, a nice, quiet guy from a sweet, hardworking family. He’d been partly deaf from the time he was a kid and had a lot to overcome growing up. Now he made a living as a sheet-metal worker, and his coach was his father, a New York City police lieutenant who drove him really hard. I could see how bodybuilding gave Lou pride. It made him somebody with a body. I loved the idea of a guy beating all the obstacles. I knew how he must have felt about me. He’d been a fan of mine growing up, and so he now saw me the way that I had once seen Sergio Oliva: as the champion he would ultimately have to beat.

But I didn’t think he’d be ready. This wasn’t going to be his year. So I trained carefully and kept things low-key and took it lightly when people would say to me, “Arnold, you’ve gotta be careful. If the judges want to look for a new face …” Or “Maybe Weider thinks you’re too independent. Maybe he wants a new star.”

Lou showed up in New York a few days before the competition, fresh from defending his Mr. Universe title in Verona, Italy. His father boasted at a press preview that if Lou won, he’d hold the title for a decade. “There is nobody on the horizon to challenge him.” But Lou skipped a talk show on the morning of the competition to which he’d been invited along with Franco and me. “He’s shy, he must be really shvitzing,” I guessed. On the air I joked, “He is probably sitting at home watching my body and moving around his television set, posing, to see if he should compete.”

At Madison Square Garden that night, it wasn’t even close. By the final pose-off Lou was looking depressed, like a rookie who’d made a mistake. And he had. He’d tried so hard to add muscle definition that he’d lost too much weight, so his big body actually looked stringy and less muscular than mine. Onstage in front of a capacity crowd, I copied his poses, doing each one better than him. Then came a moment when we were face to face in matching biceps poses, and I gave Lou a little smile that said, “You are beaten.” He knew it, the judges knew it, and so did the crowd.

Franco and I didn’t stick around for very long after the contest; we ducked out with the Weiders and my old friend Albert Busek, who had flown from Munich to cover the event, to go to the Pumping Iron book party at Delfina’s. The moment I walked in the door, I was the rookie. Delfina had a giant three-floor apartment, very decorated, very hip. There were paintings on the ceilings rather than on the walls so you could lie around getting stoned and look up and see the art.

An endless stream of people filled the huge rooms. The party was catered and seemed really well done, although I had never witnessed anything like this before, so I had no way to know. It was extraordinary. I had never seen this quality of people, the elegance, the high heels, the jewels, the extraordinary-looking women, actors, directors, people from the art scene, people from fashion, and a lot of people I did not know at all. I could see that it was kind of a Euro-thing, with people very sophisticated, with their clothes, or lack thereof, gay people, strange people—everything was there.

All I could do was shake my head and say, “This is going to be an interesting life.” I did not at all expect this. I was getting my first taste of what came with show business and fame in New York. No matter how many times you go there as a tourist or on business, you’re never an insider. But now I felt I was being accepted—or at least like I was watching the show from the front row.