Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 10 Stay Hungry

BOB RAFELSON WAS STAYING at director-producer Francis Ford Coppola’s apartment in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel facing Central Park, and the day before the Mr. Olympia contest, he brought me up to see it. I didn’t know an apartment could be like that. It was as big as a house. It made quite an impression. I’d stayed only at Holiday Inns and Ramadas. And to have such a place and not even be there! Coppola was using it just for friends to stay in. The apartment had beautiful paintings and furniture, plus full hotel services day and night. I was amazed by his library of videotapes: an entire wall of movies categorized by genre—musical, action, drama, comedy, history, prehistoric, animated, and so on.

The next night at the book party, Rafelson’s friends were all hanging out and watching me. Bob had brought them because he wanted to know what they thought. Did they like my personality? Would I be good for his movie?

Gaines and Butler had been pushing all along for him to cast me in the lead bodybuilder role in Stay Hungry. I’d been pushing too. “Where else are you going to find a body like this?” I asked him. “Looking for a professional actor is bullshit! I can do all that stuff! I’m sure I can act if you direct me right.” The plot of the movie sounded like fun the way that Charles described it to me. He’d set the story in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, where he grew up. The hero, Craig Blake, is a young southern aristocrat who has inherited a lot of money and needs to find himself. He’s stuck in the country club set, and he’s working as the front man for crooked developers who are secretly trying to take over a block of downtown. One of the businesses they need to buy out is a bodybuilding gym.

The minute Craig walks into the gym, his world starts to change. There’s a pretty receptionist he likes, a country girl named Mary Tate Farnsworth. And he becomes fascinated by the bodybuilding scene. The lead bodybuilder, Joe Santo, is a Native American training for the Mr. Universe contest. He’s a playful, funny guy who sometimes works out in a Batman costume. Meeting him and the other bodybuilders inspires the hero, and he starts to buy into Joe Santo’s philosophy: “You can’t grow without burning. I don’t like to be too comfortable. I like to stay hungry.” Once Craig gets involved with the people at the gym, he realizes that he can’t sell them out, and the plot takes off from there.

Rafelson had already hired his friend Jeff Bridges as Craig—which was very exciting because Bridges was a hot new talent who had starred in The Last Picture Show and Clint Eastwood’s new movie Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Charles thought I would be perfect as Joe Santo, and changed the character from an American Indian to an Austrian.

Maybe it was seeing me in the television skit with Art Carney and Lucille Ball that finally caused Rafelson to make up his mind. He called me after Happy Anniversary and Goodbye aired in late October and told me the part was mine. “You’re the only one who has the body and the personality,” he said. “But before you start to celebrate, we’ve got to get together tomorrow and talk.”

When we sat down at Zucky’s in Santa Monica the next day for lunch, Bob was all business. I’d never seen him in movie-director mode. He took charge of the conversation, and he had a lot to say. “I want you to play this lead role in the film, but I’m not going to give it to you,” he began. “You have to earn it. Right now I feel you are not capable of being in front of the camera and selling all the different beats that I need.” I didn’t know what a beat was, but as he continued, I began to catch on.

“Most people think of a bodybuilder as a guy who will walk into a room and crash into everything and break it. When he talks, it’ll be rough talk.

“But I bought the book partly because this guy, besides being powerful, is sensitive. You’ll see him lifting hundreds of pounds of weight, but in the next scene, he might pick up a glass and say, ‘Do you know what this is? This is Baccarat crystal. Look how gorgeous it is, how delicate it is.’ That’s just one example. He loves music. He plays the fiddle. He can get off on the quality of a guitar. He has a sensitivity and intuition that are almost like a woman’s. That’s what makes the character; he’s able to shift gears. That’s very hard to pull off.” I made a mental note: I would have to take a few fiddle lessons.

“For instance,” Bob was saying, “you’ve told me that bodybuilding is an art. But I want you to be able to sit with the leading lady, and when she says, ‘Wow, look at your calves!’ and say, ‘Well, the calf is a very important body part. To win the competition, you cannot just have a blob of muscle there. It needs to be a heart shape; an inverted heart shape. See? And the measurements of the calf and the upper arm and the neck all have to be the same. It goes back to the Greeks. When you see Greek sculptures, they are beautifully proportioned—not just big biceps but also big shoulders and calves.’ ”

Bob said he wanted me to be able to explain all that not as a bodybuilder would explain it, but with feeling, more like an artist or art historian. “And you have to do it on camera. I’ve heard you talk like this sometimes, but can you pull it off when I say, ‘Action’? Can you pull it off when I do the close-up, and the cross-angle shot, and the master shot, and the top shot? Can you stay in character for that, and then snap into the same character the next day when the script calls for you to do a wild training session where you and the other guys bounce around with huge weights? That’s what makes this part unique.”

He wasn’t finished with his list of requirements.

“Also, if you’re Joe Santo, you have to deal with the southern country club scene, where they have big parties and where all these silly people are drunk all the time. Everything you have you’ve earned through hard work. Now here’s this new acquaintance, Craig Blake, who inherited a lot of money, walking around in a nice suit, and he wants to be your friend. How do you feel about that?

“I think you can learn to do all this. But I want you to take acting classes before we shoot.”

Bob must have been expecting me to put up a fight because he seemed surprised when I agreed. I was excited. Not only was somebody finally explaining to me what movie acting was actually about, but also he was making it a challenge. I wasn’t being hired just because he’d watched me win Mr. Olympia and I got along with his movie-star friends. I had to earn it, which was what I liked to do.

Bob had another condition, and this one was harder: he wanted me to cut down to 210 pounds from 240. “The camera makes the body look bigger,” he explained, “and I don’t want you to overwhelm the other actors with your size. You can weigh two-ten and still sell the idea of being Mr. Universe.”

This was a big request. I knew that the only way I could get down to 210 was to let go of my vision of myself as the world’s most muscular guy. I couldn’t have it both ways. So I was forced to make the decision I’d been leaning toward anyway: to retire from competition. I’d been bodybuilding for twelve years already, and the philosophy of the movie spoke to me. I liked the idea of staying hungry in life and never staying in one place. When I was ten, I wanted to be good enough at something to be recognized in the world. Now I wanted to be good enough at something else to be recognized again, and even bigger than before.

The teacher Rafelson sent me to, Eric Morris, had been Jack Nicholson’s acting coach. He had an LA studio, and I still remember the address and phone number by heart because I sent so many people to him in the following years. As you walked into the studio, there was a sign next to the entrance that read DON’T ACT. I wondered about that the first time I saw it. But the production company was paying for three months of private lessons and classes, and I was ready to give it a chance.

Morris turned out to be a skinny guy in his late thirties, with shaggy blond hair and penetrating eyes. His full motto was “Don’t act. Only be real.” He was always talking with great enthusiasm about the discoveries he’d made and what was missing from other theories of acting. I didn’t know any other theories of acting. But I did know that the world he opened up to me was mind blowing.

It was the first time I’d heard anybody articulate ideas about the emotions: intimidation, inferiority, superiority, embarrassment, encouragement, comfort, discomfort. A whole new world of language appeared.

It was like going into the plumbing business and suddenly hearing about parts and tools that you need, and you say to yourself, “I don’t even know how to spell the things we are talking about here.” It was like a whole new sea of words that you’re hearing over and over until you finally ask, “What does that mean?”

It was broadening my horizons to things that I’d ignored. In competition, I’d always walled off emotions. You have to keep your feelings under control or you can be knocked offtrack. Women always talked about emotions, but I considered it silly talk. It did not fit into my plan. Not that I usually admitted this to them, because it did not make them happy—instead I’d half listen and just say, “Yeah, I understand.” Acting was just the opposite. You had to let things affect you and keep your defenses down because that was how you became a better actor.

If you had to enact an emotion in a scene, Morris would get you to go back and connect to some sense memory. Let’s say that you associated the smell of coffee brewing with a time when you were six years old and your mother was making coffee, probably not for you but maybe for your dad. You visualized being in the kitchen, the way it looked with your father and mother there, and that got you into a certain emotional state. It was the smell of coffee that took you there. Or the smell of a rose: maybe the first time you got flowers for some girlfriend. You could see her in front of you, how she smiled, how she kissed, and that got you into a certain mood also. Or if you heard sixties rock ’n’ roll, that took you back to a time when somebody was playing the radio in the gym while you lifted. Morris was trying to help me identify the triggers for specific emotions I might need in Stay Hungry. He’d say, “When you were competing and winning, were you exhilarated, over-the-top excited? Maybe we can use that in a scene.”

I had to explain that actually I was not especially exhilarated when I won, because to me, winning was a given. It was part of the job. I had an obligation to win. So I did not feel “Yeah! I won!” Instead I’d say to myself, “Okay, did that. Let’s move on to the next competition.”

I said that I always found surprises much more exhilarating. If I passed all my classes at UCLA, I would walk out ecstatic because even though I expected to pass, it was still a pleasant surprise. Or going to a Christmas party and getting an unexpected gift. I explained that to him. Then Morris would simply say, “Okay, let’s go back to those moments.”

He probed and probed. When did I feel in love? When did I feel excluded? How did I feel when I left home? How did I feel when my parents told me it was time to start paying them Kostgeld—food money—if I wanted to keep living in their house? Americans don’t usually do that, so how did it feel? He would latch onto different things until he found the emotion.

I hated it at first. I told him, “I have not dealt with any of this stuff that you are talking about until now. It’s not the way I live.” He didn’t believe a word of it. “You sell yourself as being the kind of guy who doesn’t experience emotion, but don’t delude yourself. Not paying attention to it or dismissing it doesn’t mean that it is not part of you. You actually have the emotion because I see it in your eyes when you say certain things. You can’t fool a fooler.”

He was teaching me to access all the emotions that were stored in my mind. “Everyone has them,” he said. “The trick in acting is to summon them up in the quickest way. Why do you think certain actors can cry when they want? Not just mechanical crying, but real crying, where your whole face contracts and your lip quivers. It means that the actor can recall something very, very upsetting very quickly. And it’s very important for the director to capture that in the first two takes, because the actor can’t do it again and again without it becoming mechanical. You can’t mess with the mind that often,” he said. “But I’m not worried about that with Bob Rafelson because he is definitely the right director. He’s very much aware of all this.”

There is a scene in Five Easy Pieces where Jack Nicholson cries. Eric told me how Rafelson stopped filming and talked to Nicholson for two hours until he saw him getting choked up. They were talking about something in his life, too quietly for the other people on the set to hear. Then Bob announced, “Great, Jack, stay with that,” the other actors moved in, they shot the scene, and he cried. “Bob got him into that,” Eric said. “Sometimes it’s difficult, sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it doesn’t happen and then you have to try another day.

“What I’m trying to do is give you the tools,” he continued. “Maybe you didn’t cry when your brother died, you didn’t cry when your dad died. But is it upsetting to you that here you are, they died, and now you and your mother are left alone?” He was trying every angle. But we hit a wall there. I couldn’t figure it out. Nothing worked. We decided that crying on cue had to wait.

Besides the private lessons, I also took his group classes three nights a week from seven to eleven. It was twenty people, and you all worked on scenes or did exercises, and some of it was fun. He would pick a topic like, say, anger and frustration. “I want everyone to talk about it. What makes you frustrated?” For the first hour, we’d all tell stories of when we were angry and frustrated. Next he’d say, “Good. Let’s save that emotion. Now somebody give me some lines, make up some lines that show that frustration.” We would ad-lib frustration. The next class might revolve around reading from a script cold, or auditioning, and on and on.

Those nights were a lot less fun when Morris would take stuff I’d told him in private lessons and trot it out in front of the whole acting class. It was his way of going for the raw nerve. He didn’t hesitate to push me or embarrass me. I might be reading lines we’d rehearsed from the Stay Hungry script, and he’d interrupt me and say, “What the fuck was that? Really, that’s all you have in you? This afternoon when you and I did it, I felt goose bumps. Now I feel no goose bumps. Now I feel like you’re trying to do a show or you’re trying to do the Arnold shtick here. This is not Arnold shtick. This is something totally different. Do it over.”

The private lessons all focused in one way or another on the script. Morris told me, “We’re going to go through it line by line and analyze even the scenes that have nothing to do with you, because you’ll see, in fact, that they do. We’ve got to figure out why you are in the South; what it means when you meet the country club people who are throwing around their inherited money and having their cocktails at night. We’ve got to understand the weather, and the bodybuilding gym, and the crooks who are ripping off everyone.” So we worked through the script page by page, line by line. We would talk about each scene, and I’d start learning the dialogue, and then we’d analyze it again. I’d do the dialogue for him and then again in the class at night in front of the twenty people—he’d assign one of the girls to read the lines of Mary Tate.

Then he’d bring me to read for Bob Rafelson. I got to see the parade of actors, men and women, passing through Bob’s office auditioning for the other parts. In case I was wondering, that reminded me how big a deal this movie was. Rafelson made a point of showing me the ropes and teaching me lessons that went beyond just acting. He was always explaining why he did things. “I picked this guy because he looked like a country club boy,” and “We’re shooting in Alabama because in California we’d never get lush green landscape and oyster bars and the backdrop we need to make the story authentic.”

When he picked Sally Field to play Mary Tate, he wanted to make that a big teaching point. “You see?” he said. “I’ve been auditioning all these girls, and the one who is actually the best is the Flying Nun!”

“What is the flying nun?” I asked.

He had to back up and explain he meant Sally Field, and that everybody knew her as the flying nun because she’d played the part of Sister Bertrille for years on a TV sitcom. After we got that straight, he had a bigger point to make. “Everybody thinks they know what a girl has to do to get the part,” he said. “The perception is that you get the job by banging the director. And there were girls with big tits and great hair and great bodies who came in and offered that to me. But in the end the Flying Nun got the job. She doesn’t have big tits, she doesn’t have a curvaceous body, she didn’t offer to fuck me, but she has what I needed most in this part, which is talent. She was a serious actor, and when she came in and performed, I was blown away.”

Because this was my first big movie and I wasn’t an actor by profession, Bob also felt it would be good for me to hang out and see movies actually being made. So he called a few sets to arrange for me to come by to watch for an hour. It was good to experience how silent it gets on the set when they say, “We’re rolling.” It was good to learn that “action” doesn’t necessarily mean action—the actors still might be adjusting and asking, “What’s my first line?”

This was Bob’s way of teaching me that, yes, there will be thirteen takes, and, yes, this is normal, but just remember only one will be seen. So don’t worry when I say for the thirteenth time, “Let’s do it again.” No one will know. And don’t worry if you cough in the middle of a scene, he told me. “I’d cut around it, I’d cover it from this angle and that angle.”

The more I hung out on the set, the more comfortable I felt.

After he cast Sally Field, Bob became especially fanatic about the need for me to lose weight. She’s so petite he worried that if I didn’t slim down, I’d make her look like a shrimp. “When we get to Birmingham, if I put you on a scale the day before shooting and you’re not two hundred ten, you are not in the picture,” he threatened. There was no Eric Morris class for a star bodybuilder to get rid of muscle, so I was on my own. First I had to redo myself mentally—let go of the 250-pound image of Mr. Olympia that was in my head. I started visualizing myself instead as lean and athletic. And all of a sudden what I saw in the mirror no longer fit. Seeing that helped kill my appetite for all the protein shakes and all the extra steak and chicken I was used to. I pictured myself as a runner rather than a lifter, and changed around my whole training regimen to emphasize running, bicycling, and swimming rather than weights.

All through the winter, the pounds came off, and I was pleased. But at the same time, my life was getting too intense. I was working on my mail-order business and on my acting classes, going to college, training for three hours a day, and doing construction. It was a lot to juggle. I often felt overwhelmed and started asking myself, “How do I keep it all together? How do I not think about the next thing while I’m still doing this thing? How can I unplug?”

Transcendental meditation was popular with people on the beach in Venice. There was one guy down there I liked: a skinny guy who was into yoga; kind of the opposite of me. We would always chat, and eventually I found out that he was a Transcendental Meditation instructor. He invited me to one of his classes at this center near UCLA. There was a little bit of hokum involved: you had to bring a piece of fruit and a handkerchief and perform these little rituals. But I paid no attention to that. Hearing them talk about the need to disconnect and refresh the mind was like a revelation. “Arnold, you’re an idiot,” I told myself. “You spend all this time on your body, but you never think about your mind, how to make it sharper and relieve the stress. When you have muscle cramps, you have to do more stretching, take a Jacuzzi, put on the ice packs, take more minerals. So why aren’t you thinking that the mind also can have a problem? It’s overstressed, or it’s tired, it’s bored, it’s fatigued, it’s about to blow up—let’s learn tools for that.”

They gave me a mantra and taught me to use a twenty-minute meditation session to get to a place where you don’t think. They taught how to disconnect the mind, so that you don’t hear the clock ticking in the background or people talking. If you can do this for even a few seconds, it already has a positive effect. The more you can prolong that period, the better it is.

In the middle of all this, Barbara was going through changes too. She and Franco’s wife, Anita, signed up for EST (Erhard Seminars Training), a popular self-help seminar. They asked if we wanted to come, but Franco and I felt we didn’t need it. We knew where we were going. We knew what we wanted. We had control over our lives, which is what EST claimed to teach.

As a matter of fact, the gimmick in the opening session was that no one could leave the room to go to the bathroom. The idea was if you cannot even control your own piss, how are you ever going to get control over yourself or have control over anybody else around you?

I was amazed that people would pay for that! Still, if Barbara and Anita wanted to try it, I didn’t mind.

Barbara and Anita were all sunny and positive when they came home after the first weekend they went. Franco and I were thinking that maybe we should go to EST too. But the second weekend, something happened that sent Barbara and Anita both off the deep end. They came back all angry and negative, thinking everything was wrong with their lives and ready to blame everybody around them for it. Barbara was furious with her father. She was the third of three daughters, and she thought he treated her like the son he never had. I gave her hell for that. I really liked her father and wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand. To me there was no indication that he treated her like a boy. Then she accused me of being on a power trip and not paying enough attention to her.

We usually got along very well and had lived together for more than three years. But she was a normal person who wanted normal things, and there was nothing normal about me. My drive was not normal. My vision of where I wanted to go in life was not normal. The whole idea of a conventional existence was like Kryptonite to me. When Barbara saw me moving away from bodybuilding and into acting, I think she realized we had no future. Right after I left for Alabama to start shooting Stay Hungry, she moved out.

I felt really sad about the whole thing. Barbara was part of my life. I’d developed feelings I’d never had. The comfort of being with someone and sharing our lives, so I wasn’t just putting up my own pictures on the wall but sharing the wall space and choosing the furniture and rugs together. Feeling included in her family was comforting and wonderful. We’d been a unit, and all of sudden it was ripped apart. I struggled to understand. I thought at first that maybe Bob Rafelson had told her, “I need Arnold to get more sensitive. I need to see him cry. If you want to help our movie, move out and fuck him up bad.” Otherwise it seemed crazy that she split.

I knew I was losing something valuable. My emotions told me we should stay together, while rationally I could see her point. It wouldn’t work in the long run. Barbara wanted to settle down, and I needed to be free to change and grow. The years with Barbara taught me a great lesson: how having a good relationship can enrich your life.

Birmingham turned out to be a small industrial city about the size of Graz, and the shooting of Stay Hungry was the biggest excitement in town. We got there in April 1975, and within a few weeks, you could already feel the sticky summer heat. I loved it there. We shot for three months and got to know the city very well, all the bars and oyster bars and restaurants. The hotel the cast stayed at was great. The people were extraordinarily friendly, and, of course, Charles Gaines was a native son, so we were invited to a lot of parties. Having just broken up with Barbara, I was glad to spend some time away from home.

As soon as I started rehearsing with Sally Field, I saw what Rafelson had been talking about. She was in total command of her craft, and within seconds she could cry or get angry or whatever was required. She was fun to be around too, always bubbly and full of energy. I was grateful to her and to Jeff Bridges for helping me learn. Jeff was very low-key, a little bit of a hippie, into playing his guitar, a comfortable person to hang out with, and very, very patient. I worked hard holding up my end of the deal. I invited other cast members to critique my acting, and I made Jeff promise to tell me what he really thought.

At first it was hard not to take criticisms personally. But Rafelson had warned me that changing careers would be tough. In this world, I wasn’t number one in the universe; I was just another aspiring actor. He was right. I had to surrender my pride and tell myself, “Okay, you’re starting again. You’re nothing here. You’re just a beginner. You’re just a little punk around these other actors.”

Yet I liked the fact that a movie is the effort of dozens of people. You need the people around you for you to look good, whereas bodybuilding is much more me oriented. You have your training partner, of course, but in competition you always want to throw a little shit on the other diamonds to make sure you’re the only one who sparkles. I was ready to get away from that.

In bodybuilding, you try to suppress your emotions and march forward with determination. In acting, it’s the opposite. You look for the sense memories that would serve as emotional keys. To do that, you have to strip away the calluses. It takes a lot of work. I’d remember the flowers I picked for my mother for Mother’s Day, which would remind me of being at home, being part of the family. Or I’d tap into my anger at Joe Weider for reneging on a promise to pay for something. Or I’d think back to when my father didn’t believe in me and said, “Why don’t you do something useful? Go chop some wood.” To live your life as an actor, you can’t be afraid of someone stirring up your emotions. You have to take the risk. Sometimes you’ll be confused, sometimes you’ll cry, but that will make you a better actor.

I could tell that Bob Rafelson was happy with the way things were going because after the first two or three weeks, he stopped checking my weight. I was already back up to 215 by the time we shot the Mr. Universe pose-off. That sequence comes near the film’s end: the bodybuilders in the Mr. Universe contest suspect Joe Santo of having stolen the prize money, and they all spill out onto the Birmingham streets. Once the real bad guy is caught, the bodybuilders notice that they’ve attracted a crowd and spontaneously start a posing exhibition. The crowd gets so into it that soon everybody’s posing in this big, happy climax. Shooting the scene was just like that: the extras and the onlookers in Birmingham got mixed up, and everybody was laughing and doing muscle poses, and Rafelson was on his megaphone shouting, “Please do not touch the bodybuilders.”

George Butler came to Alabama in the middle of all this to turn all my new plans upside down. He’d always talked about turning Pumping Iron into a documentary, but he wasn’t able to raise the money while they were finishing the book. Now things had changed. With all the publicity around Mr. Olympia, the book had become a surprise bestseller. And because I was making a movie with Bob Rafelson, the money was easier to raise. Also, George’s wife, Victoria, was a smart investor, and as long as I was in the film, she was willing to put in money.

“So we can do it!” he announced when we sat down to talk. His idea was to make the documentary hinge on me competing in the next Mr. Olympia contest, which was scheduled for November in Pretoria, South Africa. I had to remind him that I’d shifted my goal to acting and completely changed my training routine. “I’m retired,” I said. “Look, I’ve taken off all this muscle.” The conversation grew pretty heated.

“Well, there is no Pumping Iron if you’re not in it,” George insisted. “The other guys can’t carry the movie with their personalities. You’re really the only one in bodybuilding who brings life to the sport. I need you to be in it. Otherwise I can’t raise the money.” Then he claimed that working on the project would be good for my acting career.

“I don’t need it for my career,” I said. “You can’t get any better than this movie with Bob Rafelson. As soon as I go back, I want to continue with my acting—that’s where the opportunity is.”

George tried playing another card: “We’re prepared to pay you fifty thousand dollars to do this.” This was a number he’d thrown around already the previous year. Back then it sounded good because I was just buying the apartment building in Santa Monica and taking on a lot of debt. And I still liked the idea of that kind of money coming in. At this moment, however, it rubbed me the wrong way. “I don’t really want to go back into competition,” I said.

I didn’t owe George anything, but there was a lot to sort out. He was the best promoter I’d ever met, and I knew he would throw himself into this project. A Pumping Iron film by him would be an opportunity, maybe a great opportunity, to present bodybuilding as a sport to people who normally would never pay any attention. I felt that I couldn’t turn my back on bodybuilding. So much of my life was wrapped up in it and so many friends.

There were business dimensions to think about too. Backstage in Columbus, Ohio, years before, I’d told promoter Jim Lorimer that I wanted to partner with him someday to produce bodybuilding events. After my last Mr. Olympia tournament, I’d called him. “Remember how I said when I retired from competition I’d get in touch?” I asked. We agreed to go into business together, and we were putting together a bid with other investors he knew to make Columbus the home of future bodybuilding competitions. If anyone had the business skill and the connections to bring bodybuilding into the heartland and the American sports mainstream, it was Jim. Of course I still had the Arnold mail-order business, which was now bringing in $4,000 a year and growing.

And I was still attached to Joe Weider. Joe and I had battled—for example, at times he’d gotten mad when I signed up for a competition that he didn’t sponsor. But there was always that father-and-son bond. Joe adjusted to my movie career by covering the filming of Stay Hungry in his magazines. All the fans knew I was retiring, and the way he framed it was “Arnold is going into this other arena, and he is going to carry bodybuilding with him no matter what movie he does, so let’s follow him and support him.” When he realized I was serious about acting, Joe gave up gracefully on the dream of having me take over his business. But he would have freaked if he’d thought he would totally lose me, because I was the goose that laid the golden egg.

Finally, George convinced me to compete again. I looked at what I wanted to accomplish. Besides being the bodybuilding champion I was by now convinced that bodybuilding itself was ready for a big push. George and Charles had started the ball rolling with their articles and book. The seminars I taught were full. Working with reporters, I’d made the media a support system for whatever I wanted to sell. I felt it was my responsibility, as the bodybuilder with personality and the large following, to carry that on. I shouldn’t think only about my own career but also about the big picture: the need for fitness in the world and how weight training could make you a better tennis or football or soccer player. And we could make bodybuilding fun.

A Pumping Iron film could have a huge impact. Documentaries such as Marjoe, about an evangelist named Marjoe Gortner, and The Endless Summer, about two young surfers traveling the world in search of the perfect wave, were very hip at that point. The films would move from city to city, using money from the last showing to finance the next screening.

I told George that to get my body back into shape for competition was like turning the Titanic. Mechanically, it was an easy decision; I knew all the training steps I would have to take. But it was much harder to buy into psychologically. I’d deprogrammed myself from being onstage in competition and from needing that glory. Now starring in movies was the motivating thing. That shift had involved months of adjustment. So to go back now was a real challenge. How would I convince myself again that that body was the most important thing?

Still, I thought I would be able to win. I’d have to increase from 210 pounds back to competition weight, but I’d done something like this before, after my knee surgery in 1972. My left thigh atrophied from twenty-eight inches down to twenty-two or twenty-three, yet I’d built it back up bigger than ever in time for Mr. Olympia that year. My theory was that muscle cells, like fat cells, have a memory, so they can grow back quickly to where they were. There was some uncharted territory, of course. I would want to perform even better than I did at Madison Square Garden, so should I come all the way back to 240 pounds, or should I come in leaner? Whatever the answer, I thought it was doable.

The idea of constantly having Butler’s cameras on me while I trained was tempting. You always want to look better when the camera’s on you, so it’s a great motivator. I thought that maybe the camera crew would eventually feel like just part of the woodwork, and I’d no longer be self-conscious around it— and that would be great for my acting career.

For at least a week, I’d sit in the hotel weighing the pros and cons, and then I’d go shoot another scene of Stay Hungry. Then I’d go back and think about it some more, and hang out and talk to other people. Charles Gaines had decided to move on to other writing projects and not work on the documentary with George. He thought my returning to competition would be a mistake. “You are on your acting mission now,” he told me. “You need to show the community that you’re serious about it. After this movie, they’ll want to see you continue with acting classes with talented actors and directors. But if now all of a sudden you’re competing again, it’ll look like you have one foot in and one foot out so that you can go back to bodybuilding in case acting doesn’t work. Is that the impression you want to give?”

All my life, my goals had been simple and linear, like building up a muscle with hundreds of thousands of reps. But this situation wasn’t simple at all. Yes, I had committed 100 percent to becoming a lean and athletic-looking actor—how could I undo that and refocus myself on winning Mr. Olympia again? I knew the way my mind worked, and that to accomplish anything, I had to buy in completely. The goal had to be something that made total sense and that I could look forward to every day, not just something I was doing for money or some other arbitrary reason, because then it wouldn’t work.

In the end I realized I had to think about the problem a different way. It could not be solved from a purely selfish point of view. I felt that even though I was on the trajectory to launch an acting career, I owed too much to bodybuilding to reject it. So I had to do Pumping Iron and compete for Mr. Olympia again—not for myself, but to help promote bodybuilding. I would pursue my acting career at the same time, and if my actions were confusing to people like Charles, I’d just have to explain.

A month after I got back from Alabama, my friends threw a twenty-eighth birthday party for me at Jack Nicholson’s house. The organizer was Helena Kallianiotes, who looked after his property and who had a small part in Stay Hungry. She was a dancer and understood the hard training and dedication involved in bodybuilding. In Birmingham, she’d become a good friend, helping me rehearse and showing me around the oyster bars. Later, when I wrote Arnold’s Bodyshaping for Women, Helen was the first person I consulted to get more into a woman’s mind about training.

The party was a great success. Many people from Hollywood came, as well as my friends from Venice Beach—this amazing mix of actors, bodybuilders, weight lifters, karate guys, and writers, plus visitors from New York. There were about two hundred altogether. For me, this was heaven because I could introduce myself to so many new people.

I got to know Nicholson, Beatty, and the rest of the Mulholland Drive crowd a little better now that I was back. They were so hot in those days, with movies like Chinatown, The Parallax View, and Shampoo. They were on the covers of magazines, they went to the trendiest nightclubs. They were always together, and in winter, the whole clique would fly to Gstaad, Switzerland, to ski. I was not inside enough to be partying with them all the time, but I did get exposed to how stars at that level lived and operated, what they were into, and how they moved around, and it inspired me to be there myself in a few years.

Jack Nicholson was very casual and low-key. You would always see him with his Hawaiian shirt, shorts or long pants, sunglasses, and disheveled hair. He owned the most expensive Mercedes, a maroon 600 Pullman, with all-leather interior and extraordinary woodwork. The person who actually used this car was not Jack but Helena. Jack himself drove a Volkswagen Beetle, and that was his shtick: “I’m so rich that I’m going to sell myself like an ordinary person. I’m not into money at all.” He would drive his little Beetle to the studio lot on the way to a media interview or a discussion about a film. The guard at the gate would say, “Oh, Mr. Nicholson, of course. Your parking spot is right over there,” and Jack would putt-putt in as if the car could barely get there. It was genuine. He was more comfortable in the VW than in the Mercedes. I would have loved the Mercedes.

A photographer friend from New York visited and took me to Warren Beatty’s house on the beach. Warren wanted the photographer to see the plans for the new house he was building on Mulholland Drive. Beatty was famous for never making up his mind and debating every decision for thousands of hours. He was accomplishing a lot: he’d recently starred in The Parallax View directed by Alan Pakula, and was cowriting and starring in Shampoo, and was directing scenes for the Russian Revolution movie that eventually became Reds. But hearing him talk, you wondered how he got anything done at all. I thought this was not the way I would operate if I were at that level. But I was also learning that born actors are always a little artsy and strange. You can identify the type. When you hang out with businessmen, they act like businessmen. Politicians act like politicians. These guys were entertainers, and they acted like entertainers. They were Hollywood. It was a different thing.

The one who did not fit this picture was Clint Eastwood. The Mulholland Drive bunch liked to go for dinner at Dan Tana’s restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard. They would sit together, and Clint would be there eating at his own table on the other side of the room. I went up to him and introduced myself, and he invited me to sit for a minute and chat. He was a bodybuilding fan and worked out regularly himself. He wore a herringbone tweed jacket, very similar to the one he’d worn in his 1971 movie Dirty Harry. Later I learned it wasn’t just similar, it was the same jacket. Clint was a very frugal guy. After we became friends, he told me that he always kept the clothes from his movies and wore them for years and never bought anything new. (Nowadays, of course, he likes to deck himself out in beautiful clothes. Maybe he still gets them for free.) It made a lot of stars uncomfortable to see a celebrity eating alone. But, in fact, Clint was totally at ease and un-self-conscious.

Costarring in a soon-to-be-released Bob Rafelson movie didn’t get me very far when I tried to find an agent. One guy who approached me was Jack Gilardi, who represented O. J. Simpson, the top running back in the National Football League. O.J. was at the peak of his athletic career, and Gilardi was getting him parts on the side in movies like the disaster flick The Towering Inferno. The studios liked to have O.J. in there just for the name, so football fans would go to see the movie. That’s how you manufactured an audience. But it was never the starring role, and nobody who mattered in Hollywood paid attention.

Jack wanted to do the same thing for me. He figured if I was in a movie, then all the bodybuilding fans would buy tickets. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I have a good Western script and a meeting with the producers, and there’s something in here for you.” It was maybe the sixth or seventh most important role.

This was not at all what I had in mind. Whoever represented me had to buy into the big vision. I didn’t want an agent who would say, “I’m sure you must have something in your movie for Arnold, maybe a minor supporting part with a few lines where he can be listed in the cast.” I wanted an agent who would pound the table on my behalf. “This guy has leading-man potential. I want to groom him for that. So if you can offer us one of the top three parts, we’re interested. If not, let’s just move on.”

I couldn’t find anyone at the big agencies who saw it this way. William Morris and International Creative Management were the dominant agencies in town, and that was where I wanted to be because they always got first look at the big movie projects, they handled all the big directors, and they dealt with the top people at the studios. An agent from each place was willing to meet with me because I’d just shot a picture with Bob Rafelson.

They both said the same thing: there were too many obstacles. “Look, you have an accent that scares people,” said the guy from ICM. “You have a body that’s too big for movies. You have a name that wouldn’t even fit on a movie poster. Everything about you is too strange.” He wasn’t being mean about it, and he offered to help in other ways. “Why don’t you stay in the gym business, and we can develop a chain of franchises? Or we can help you in lining up seminars and speaking engagements. Or with a book or something like that about your story.”

I understand it better today that there’s so much talent all over the world that these big agencies don’t really have the time or the desire to groom someone and nurture him to the top. They’re not in the business of doing that. It has to happen or not happen. But at the time, I felt stung. I knew I had a strange body. I knew my name was hard to spell—but so was Gina Lollobrigida’s! Why should I give up my goal because a couple of Hollywood agents turned me down?

The accent was an issue I could do something about. That summer I added accent removal lessons to my schedule, along with acting classes, college courses, running my businesses, and training for Mr. Olympia. My teacher was Robert Easton, a world-famous dialect coach whose nickname was the Henry Higgins of Hollywood. He was a gigantic guy, six foot three or four, with a big beard, a tremendous voice, and the most precise enunciation. The first time we met, he showed off by speaking English first with a High German accent and then a Low German accent. Next, he shifted into an Austrian accent and then a Swiss accent. He could do English accents, southern accents, and accents from Brooklyn and Boston. Robert had been a character actor mainly in Westerns. His diction was so perfect, I was scared to open my mouth. His house, where I went to practice with him, contained thousands of books about language, and he loved each one. He would say, “Arnold, the book over there on the fourth shelf from the bottom, third book in, pull it out, will you? It’s about the Irish,” and off he would go.

Easton had me practice saying “A fine wine grows on the vine” tens of thousands of times. It was very difficult with the f, the w, and the v together, because the German language doesn’t have a w sound, only the v. When we drink wine, we spell it wein and pronounce it “vine.” So now I had to say “wuh, wuh, wuh, wine. Why. What. When.” Then there was v, as in “We’re going to vuh, vuh, Vegas.” Also, German doesn’t have the same s and z as English: “the sink is made of zinc.” Bob explained it was the harshness of my accent that made people feel threatened, so rather than get rid of it completely, I only had to soften it and be smoother.

Meanwhile, George Butler had launched into filming Pumping Iron like a wild man. He made a big impression on the bodybuilders by darkening the skylights at Gold’s because it was too bright for the movie cameras. He and his crew shot scenes at Venice Beach. They followed Franco to Sardinia on a visit to his childhood village way up in the mountains and shot footage of his humble roots. They came with me to Terminal Island, where I did a posing exhibition and gave weight-training lessons for the prisoners. He lined up a New York City ballet instructor and filmed her coaching Franco and me on our posing in the New York studio of Joanne Woodward, the Academy Award–winning actress and wife of Paul Newman.

Every movie has to have an element of conflict, and George decided that Pumping Iron would focus on the rivalry between Lou Ferrigno and me in the 1975 Mr. Olympia competition, and the suspense of whether or not Lou would knock me off as champion. He was fascinated by Lou’s relationship with his father, and the fact that we were both sons of policemen. The contrasts between us were perfect. George went to shoot Lou working out in his small, dark gym in Brooklyn, the exact opposite of Gold’s. Lou’s personality was dark and brooding, while mine was sunny and beachy. Normally, Lou came to California to train and get a tan before major competitions, but George persuaded him to stay in Brooklyn to heighten the contrast even more. That was fine with me because it would make him even more isolated and easier to beat.

My job, of course, was to play myself. I felt that the way to stand out was not just to talk about bodybuilding, because that would be one-dimensional, but to project a personality. My model was Muhammad Ali. What separated him from other heavyweights wasn’t only his boxing genius—the rope-a-dope, the float like a butterfly, sting like a bee—but that he went his own way, becoming a Muslim, changing his name, sacrificing his championship title by refusing military service. Ali was always willing to say and do memorable and outrageous things. But outrageousness means nothing unless you have the substance to back it up—you can’t get away with it if you’re a loser. It was being a champion combined with outrageousness that made Ali’s whole thing work. My situation was a little different because bodybuilding was a much less popular sport. But the rules for attracting attention were exactly the same.

Coming up with outrageous things to say was easy because I was always thinking them to keep myself entertained. Besides, George was egging me on. During one interview, I made bodybuilding sound sexy by comparing the pump, when you inflate your muscles with oxygenated blood, to an orgasm. I claimed I’d skipped my father’s funeral because it would have interfered with my training. I philosophized that only a few men are born to lead, while the rest of humanity is born to follow, and went from that into discussing history’s great conquerors and dictators. George had the good sense to cut such stuff from the movie, especially my remark that I admired Hitler’s speaking ability, though not what he did with it. I still didn’t know the difference between outlandish and offensive.

It was stressful having the cameras on me all the time: not just when I was working out but also when I was at home, visiting friends, attending business school or acting class, evaluating real estate, reading scripts. Again, I was grateful for Transcendental Meditation, especially because the TM centers wouldn’t allow cameras inside.

Putting the psych on Lou and his father was part of the drama for the movie. I started setting them up that autumn by pretending to be scared.

“I hope that you screw up your training,” I told Lou’s father. “Otherwise he’s going to be very dangerous for me at the Olympia.”

“Oh, we’re not going to screw anything up.”

Lou himself was easy to rattle, like Sergio Oliva, Dennis Tinerino, or any of the bodybuilders who were so inward that they’d didn’t pay that much attention to the world. You could say casually to Lou, “How have you been doing with your abs?”

And he’d say, “Fine. Why? Actually, I feel pretty ripped.”

“Well, it’s … No, never mind, don’t worry about it, they look great.” As you said it, he’d start looking at his abs, and then afterward, Lou would pose in the mirror as the insecurity took hold.

You can see in Pumping Iron how I kept teasing him and his dad right up to the moment of the competition. Like when I tell Lou, “I already called my mother and I told her that I won, even though the competition is tomorrow.” Or, on the morning of the event, when he and his parents invite me to breakfast at the hotel, and I say, “I can’t believe this. You ignore me all week, and now you want to have breakfast on the morning of the competition? You are trying to psych me out!” I pretend I’m so scared that my scrambled egg is shaking on my fork. All this was mainly show, so that audiences would walk away from Pumping Iron saying, “Can you believe that guy? He literally talked his opponent into losing.” But it also had its effect on Lou, who came in third as I won the Mr. Olympia title for a record sixth time straight.