Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 11 Pumping Iron

PUMPING IRON WAS ONLY half finished, and George was out of cash. Rather than give up on the project, he hit on the idea of staging a posing exhibition in a New York City art museum to try to attract wealthy patrons. We weren’t sure whether this idea was stupid or really brilliant. The Whitney Museum of American Art, which was known for unconventional stuff, leaped at the opportunity.

The event was advertised as Articulate Muscle: The Male Body in Art, and the museum stayed open to host it on a Friday night in February 1976. The idea was to present live posing by Frank Zane, Ed Corney, and me next to slides of Greek statues and great works by Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rodin. A panel of professors and artists would add commentary along the way and afterward. This was the first time anyone had a serious public discussion about the meaning of bodybuilding.

George was hoping for a few hundred people, but despite a snowstorm that night, more than 2,500 showed up and the line stretched around the block. The museum’s fourth-floor gallery overflowed with people standing and sitting on every inch of floor space. In the middle was a raised, revolving platform on which we were to take turns posing.

Probably two-thirds of the crowd had never even seen a bodybuilder before. They were from the media and the New York art scene: critics, collectors, patrons, and avant-garde artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe. People magazine, The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Daily News all had reporters there, and actress Candice Bergen was shooting photographs for the Today show. She was a great photographer and of course very beautiful. All of sudden, bodybuilding was hip. We’d made it out of the sports world and the carnival world and into international pop culture.

Frank, Ed, and I were proud to be posing at a real museum. We’d planned our exhibition to be artistic, leaving out hard-core bodybuilding poses like the “most muscular.” We wanted each pose to look like a sculpture, especially because we were on a rotating platform. When my turn came, Charles Gaines narrated as I hit the standard shots and showed off some of my trademark poses, like the three-quarters back shot. Gaines said, “Arnold owns this pose. And in it you see all the muscles in the back; you see the calf; you see all the thigh muscles.” I wrapped up my ten minutes with a perfect simulation of The Thinker by Rodin and got a lot of applause.

We put on our clothes after we finished posing and went back out and joined the discussion with the art experts. Their talks were fascinating, in a way. For one thing, they showed that you can make a debate out of anything. One professor said this gathering marked “the entry of the highly developed, beautiful masculine form into the sphere of official culture.” The next guy thought that because of Vietnam, America was looking for a new definition of virility, which was us. But then he tied bodybuilding to Aryan racism in 1920s Europe and the rise of the Nazis and warned that we symbolized the possible growth of fascism in the United States. Another professor compared our poses to the worst Victorian-era kitsch. He got booed.

The whole thing was mainly a publicity stunt, of course. But I thought that talking about the body as sculpture made sense. My Joe Santo character in Stay Hungry described it that way. Art fascinated me, and if the comparison to sculpture attracted outsiders and helped them understand, then great! Anything was better than the stereotype of bodybuilders as stupid, gay, narcissistic, muscle-bound freaks.

Unfortunately, much less was happening in Hollywood than in New York. Stay Hungry was my first experience in how movie marketing can go wrong. Upon the film’s April release, it received good reviews but fizzled at the box office, playing for ten or twelve weeks before disappearing. The problem was that the publicists and marketing people at United Artists could not figure out how to promote it. Rafelson let me sit in on a meeting before the release, and they were talking about putting posters in gyms. Then when the film came out, they had Sally Field and me on The Mike Douglas Show showing the fifty-year-old host how to exercise. Each time we did something like that, I felt like we were moving in the wrong direction. Stay Hungry should have been sold as a Bob Rafelson picture—“from the director of Five Easy Pieces!”—and they should have let the exercise dimension be a surprise. Then moviegoers would have walked away saying, “That’s Rafelson. He always introduces us to some weird world.”

Although my instincts told me that the marketing was embarrassing, I didn’t have the sophistication or confidence to say it. I assumed that the studio would have its act together much more. Of course, later on, I realized that studios work by formulas. If you’re even a little outside the box, they don’t know what to do with you.

Rafelson wasn’t happy either, but the problem with directors when they get a big reputation is that they can be their own worst enemy. They just want to do everything themselves, cut the trailers, do the advertising. You can’t tell them anything. Then the big battles begin, and the fine print in the contract usually dictates who wins. In this case, it was the studio. Bob butted heads with the marketing people but never got anywhere. They thought he was not a team player.

One good thing did come of it, though. I finally found an agent on the strength of having costarred in Stay Hungry: Larry Kubik, whose small talent agency Film Artists Management also represented Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone. His phone was ringing for me, but with the wrong kinds of offers. He was searching for leading roles where I might fit, and in the meantime, we were turning down lots of junk. Somebody asked me to play a bouncer. They wanted me to play a Nazi officer, a wrestler, a football player, a prisoner. I never took jobs like that because I would say to myself, “This isn’t going to convince anybody that you’re here to be a star.”

I was very glad I could afford to say no. With the income from my businesses, I didn’t need money from acting. I never wanted to be in a financially vulnerable position, where I had to take a part I didn’t like. I saw this happen all the time to the actors and musicians who worked out at the gym. An actor would complain, “I’ve been playing this part as a killer for three days, and I’m so glad it’s over.”

“If you hated it, why did you do it?” I’d ask.

“They gave me two thousand dollars. I have to pay for my apartment.”

You could argue that, no matter what the part, being in front of a camera was always good practice. But I felt that I was born to be a leading man. I had to be on the posters, I had to be the one carrying the movie. Of course I realized that this sounded crazy to everybody but me. But I believed that the only way you become a leading man is by treating yourself like a leading man and working your ass off. If you don’t believe in yourself, then how will anyone else believe in you?

Even before Stay Hungry, I had a reputation at the gym for turning down film work. Someone would call and say, “Can we have a few strong guys come over for an interview?” Some of us would go, and the stunt coordinator or director’s assistant would say, “What we want you to do is pull yourself up onto this roof, sprint across, have this fistfight, and then jump off the roof into a stunt pad…” I would say to myself, “That’s not really what builds a leading man’s career” and tell them I wasn’t interested.

“But we love you. The director loves you. You are the biggest guy, you have the right face, you’re the right age. We’ll give you seventeen hundred dollars a day.”

“I’d love the seventeen hundred a day, but I don’t really need the money,” I’d say. “Give it to one of my friends here; they need it much more.”

Larry agreed that I should be picky, but it drove his business partner, Craig Rumar, crazy to see us turn jobs away. I always got worried when Larry was on vacation. Craig would get on the phone with me and say, “I don’t know if I can get you anything. No one is doing movies now. Everything has gone foreign. It’s really tough out there. Why not do commercials?”

Larry’s biggest triumph that year was that after an endless number of tries, he got me an appointment to see Dino De Laurentiis. Dino was a legend in the movie business for producing classics like Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954) and campy hits like Barbarella (1968), as well as lots of flops. He’d gotten rich and then gone broke making movies in Italy and then started over in Hollywood. Lately, he’d been on an incredible roll with Serpico, Death Wish, Mandingo, and Three Days of the Condor. He liked to adapt comic books to the screen and was looking for somebody to play Flash Gordon.

When Larry and I showed up at Dino’s office, it was just like a setup from The Godfather. Dino sat behind his desk at one end of the room, and at the other end of the room, behind us, was a connection of De Laurentiis’s from Italy, a producer named Dino Conte.

De Laurentiis was like an emperor. He had this huge, ornate antique desk: long and wide and maybe even a little taller than a standard desk. “Wow, look at this desk,” I thought. Dino himself was a little guy, very short, and I had this urge to say something complimentary but also funny. What popped out of my mouth was “Why does a little guy like you need such a big desk?”

He looked at me and said, “You havva an accent. I cannot use-a you. You can-a not be Flasha Gordon. Flasha Gordon is American. Ah.”

I thought he must be joking. “What do you mean I have an accent?” I said. “What about you?” The whole thing was going south. De Laurentiis announced, “The meeting is over,” and Larry and I heard Dino Conte stand up behind us and say, “This way, please.”

Larry exploded as soon as we got to the parking lot.

“One minute and forty seconds!” he screamed. “This was the shortest meeting I’ve ever had with any producer, because you decided to fuck it up! Do you know how long I worked on this fucking meeting? Do you know how many months it took to get into this fucking office? And you say to the guy that he’s little instead of saying maybe the opposite? That he is tall; that he’s much, much taller than you thought he was? He’s a monster! He’s as big as Wilt Chamberlain! And maybe forget about the desk and just sit down and talk to him about your acting career?”

I realized he had a point. My mouth got in the way. Again.

“What can I tell you?” I said to Larry. “You’re right. That was a real forehead move. I’m sorry.” Forehead was a term I’d picked up from my bodybuilder friend Bill Drake, who used it all the time. “Look at that Archie Bunker over there,” he’d say. “What a forehead!” Meaning, What a lowbrow idiot.

It was more than a year after shooting Stay Hungry before I landed another lead role: this one in an episode of a popular TV series called The Streets of San Francisco, starring Karl Malden and Michael Douglas as police detectives. In the episode “Dead Lift,” they have to track down my character, a bodybuilder who loses it and unintentionally breaks the neck of a girl who mocks his body. The investigation leads them deep into a fictional San Francisco bodybuilding and arm wrestling scene, which meant that I was able to get bit parts for Franco and a lot of my other friends. Having the whole Gold’s Gym gang on the set was very funny. As it happened, the 1976 Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia competitions were only a few weeks away, so the guys were more focused on preparing than on performing for the cameras. They drove the director crazy by wandering off to go train.

I knew that The Streets of San Francisco was a good credential that would help get Hollywood to take me more seriously. It was also a way to build up recognition among the television audience. The scene where I kill the girl was intimidating, though. Hurting a woman, yelling, ripping down paintings, and throwing around furniture was not me at all. Reading the script, I thought, “Jesus Christ, how did I ever get into this?” Considering how many hundreds of people I went on to wipe out in the movies, that’s funny in retrospect. In the end I just did the scene, not thinking too much about it, and the director was pleased.

My deeper worry was about getting typecast. I thought that playing a villain or an ass kicker onscreen was the worst thing for me. When Robert De Niro kills in Taxi Driver, he’s the little guy, and people are 100 percent behind him, so it’s good for his career. But for a man of my size and with my looks and accent, bad-guy roles seemed like a dead end. I asked Bob Rafelson about this, and he agreed. His suggestion was that I do the unexpected and play against type. I grew fascinated with the idea of doing a remake of the “The Killers,” an Ernest Hemingway story in which an ex-boxer named the Swede is hunted down by a couple of Mafia hit men. I imagined myself playing the victim, the Swede. But the idea never went anywhere.

Luckily, the buzz for Pumping Iron kept building. George Butler had raised the money he needed to finish it, and now he was hustling nonstop to promote it. Probably his smartest move was hiring Bobby Zarem, the king of New York publicists. Bobby was a balding guy of about forty who grew up in Georgia and went into the PR business straight out of Yale. He liked to come across as a crazy professor, with his tie missing, his shirt out, and his hair sticking out in tufts on the sides. He always talked like he was completely confused and the world was coming to an end. He’d moan, “I don’t know what I’m doing, I’ve never seen it this bad, I have to go to my shrink, this guy’s not returning my phone calls, and I think the whole project is coming down.” Hearing him talk that way about Pumping Iron scared me until I realized it was shtick. Inevitably, somebody would say to him, “No, no, Bobby, everything’s okay. You’re going to pull this off,” and he loved that.

Bobby had set up his own firm only a year or two before, and I think he took on Pumping Iron partly to prove what he could do. Certainly George Butler wasn’t paying him very much. But in the eleven months from the Whitney show until Pumping Iron’s release, Zarem worked behind the scenes, building the buzz. He’d arrange for a screening room, invite twenty or so serious hitters from the worlds of art, literature, and finance, and play scenes from the work in progress. He always made sure that one or two members of the media were at these events, even though they were off the record. Often I’d go with him—that’s how I met TV journalist Charlie Rose, for example, whose then wife, Mary, became a financial supporter of the film. Bobby would always introduce the screening with a short talk about bodybuilding as a fascinating link between sports and art or as a leading indicator of the trend to fitness—just enough hype to make the guests feel they were in the vanguard. Afterward, there would be a thousand questions.

I was in awe watching Bobby work the media. He taught me that ordinary press releases were a waste of time, especially if you were trying to get the attention of TV reporters. “They don’t read!” he said. Instead, he knew dozens of journalists and their editors personally. He would customize a story for a particular reporter, call, and say, “I’m sending this over. Please call me back as soon as you get it. If you don’t call back, I’m going to assume you don’t want the story, and then you won’t have much.” Bobby was famous for his long, old-fashioned handwritten proposals. He let me read a four-page letter to the editor of Time explaining why the magazine should do a major story on bodybuilding. Editors and news directors all over New York were willing to meet with him and talk seriously. And if newspapers or TV stations were competing on a story, he would brew up a different angle for each, so they weren’t just following one another. He would study the story, work on it, and talk to people at night—he hung out at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side mixing spot for literati, journalists, and celebrities.

Bobby’s job was promoting Pumping Iron, but I took a page from his book to get recognized for my work in Stay Hungry. Even though the movie had missed at the box office, I’d been nominated for a Golden Globe award for best debut by a male actor. (Hercules in New York had been such a wipeout that Stay Hungry counted as a debut film!) There were four other nominees—including Harvey Spencer Stephens, the five-year-old who played Damien in the horror film The Omen, and author Truman Capote for his part in the comedy whodunnit Murder by Death. Of course this brought out the competitor in me. How could I make sure I stood out? The strategy I hit on was to take out ads in the show business trade papers Variety and the Hollywood Reporter thanking the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, whose members select the Golden Globe winners, for nominating me.

I also invited association members to a dinner and an advance screening of Pumping Iron. Bobby Zarem didn’t really like this idea because my nomination was for Stay Hungry, not Pumping Iron, and he thought that Pumping Iron was too cutting edge for the Hollywood foreign press. But I felt it could only help. For one thing, critics like to see your latest work, even if it’s not actually what’s being judged, because they like to feel they’re voting for someone who is on a roll. Also, in Pumping Iron I was able to be myself much more, so why not give them both: Stay Hungry with my acting and Pumping Iron with my outrageousness? Besides, I figured that the foreign press automatically would be sympathetic toward an immigrant struggling with a sport in America. And even if none of these reasons held up, I was very proud of the work I’d put into Stay Hungry and wanted to do everything possible to call attention to it. A lot of the writers came to the screening, and when it ended, people gave me a big hug and said things like “You were terrific!” and “This is wonderful!” so I knew it had worked.

A week before the January 1977 premiere, Pumping Iron was in the gossip columns because of a lunch that Bobby masterminded at Elaine’s. Delfina Rattazzi was the hostess, I was the guest of honor, and celebrities such as Andy Warhol, George Plimpton, Paulette Goddard, Diana Vreeland, and the editor of Newsweek showed up. But the woman who stole the show was Jackie Onassis. She was known for keeping a low profile and never giving interviews, and I was flattered that she came in spite of the fact that she knew the press would be writing about it. I think she did it partly as a favor—Delfina was now her editorial assistant at Viking Press—and partly out of curiosity, because she enjoyed being involved with art, trends, and new things.

She stayed for the entire lunch, and I got to talk with her for fifteen minutes. JFK had been synonymous with America to me as a kid growing up, so meeting Jackie was like a dream. What impressed me most was her sophistication and grace. She’d obviously come prepared, because she didn’t ask anything clumsy or vague, like “What is this movie about?” Instead, she made me feel that Pumping Iron was important and that she appreciated what we were trying to do. She asked all kinds of specific questions: How do you train? How do you judge a competition? What’s the difference between Mr. Olympia and Mr. America? Would this be something beneficial for my teenage son? At what age can you start with a workout routine? I was predisposed to liking her before we met, and that conversation made me a big fan.

Of course people of her caliber have the social skills to make it seem like they are very much aware of you and that they know a lot about what you are doing. It was very hard to say whether she was truly interested. My guess was that she probably was a naturally curious person. Or maybe she really did think that John F. Kennedy Jr. might like to train. Or maybe she was just doing a favor for Delfina. But she certainly gave Pumping Iron a big publicity boost, and the fact that she brought her son to the New York premiere a week later convinced me that she was genuine.

For the premiere, Bobby Zarem and George Butler pulled out all the stops. They invited five hundred people to the Plaza Theater on East Fifty-eighth Street. There were photographers, TV cameras, police barricades, limos pulling up, searchlights crisscrossing the sky—the works. The temperature was near zero, but a dozen teenage fans were waiting for me and started chanting, “Arnold! Arnold!” when I showed up. I got there early with my mom, who’d flown over from Austria for the event, because I wanted to circulate and kiss all the pretty girls and welcome people as they arrived. For the first time in my life, I wore a tux. I had to get it specially tailored because even though I’d slimmed down to 225 pounds, nobody had a rental that would fit a fifty-seven-inch chest and thirty-two-inch waist.

The crowd was a fantastic medley of writers, socialites, hipsters, entertainers, executives, critics, artists, fashion models, and bodybuilding fans—including Andy Warhol; Diana Vreeland; actresses Carroll Baker, Sylvia Miles, and Shelley Winters; actor Tony Perkins and his wife, fashion photographer Berry Berenson; writer Tom Wolfe; the model Apollonia van Ravenstein; porn star Harry Reems; and half the cast of Saturday Night Live. James Taylor came with his wife, Carly Simon, who was pregnant. She flexed a biceps for the cameras and told a reporter that her hit song “You’re So Vain” wasn’t about a bodybuilder.

The bodybuilders themselves made a dramatic entrance. While everybody was milling around in the lobby sipping white wine, in swept six of the giants from the film, including Franco, Lou Ferrigno, and Robby “the Black Prince” Robinson, who was decked out in a black velvet cape and wearing a diamond earring.

Pumping Iron was finally doing what we’d hoped: bringing bodybuilding into the mainstream. I’d been interviewed in the media all week. And lots of good reviews showed that the critics were getting the message. “This deceptively simple, intelligent movie humanizes a world that has its own cockeyed heroism,” wrote Newsweek, while Time called the movie “beautifully shot and edited, intelligently structured and—to risk what will surely seem at first a highly inappropriate term—charming. Yes, charming.”

The audience at the Plaza liked the movie too, applauding wildly at the end. They stayed in their seats for the bodybuilding demonstration that followed. My main job for the night was to be the emcee. We led off with Franco’s strongman routine, which included bending a steel bar with his teeth and blowing up a rubber hot-water bottle with his lungs. Just before the hot-water bottle exploded, you could see people in the front rows covering their ears. Then the other bodybuilders joined Franco onstage and demonstrated poses as I narrated. At the end, actress Carroll Baker in a slinky dress ran up onstage and started feeling everyone’s triceps, pectorals, and thighs before pretending to faint with ecstasy right into my arms.

My new tuxedo had its second major outing two weeks later at the Golden Globes. The ceremony was at the Beverly Hilton hotel, and again my mom was my date. She spoke only a few words of English and could barely understand what was being said unless I translated. But the hoopla in New York had amused her, and when the photographers yelled, “Pose with your mother!” she grinned and let me give her a big hug. She was impressed that the studio sent a limo to bring us to the Golden Globes. She was really excited about seeing Sophia Loren.

A lot of stars showed up for the Golden Globes because it was less stuffy and more fun than the Oscars. I spotted actors Peter Falk, Henry Fonda, and Jimmy Stewart over near the bar. Actresses Carol Burnett, Cybill Shepherd, and Deborah Kerr were there. I traded jokes with Shelley Winters and flirted with the gorgeous Raquel Welch. Henry Winkler came over to say nice things about Stay Hungry, and I explained to my mom in German that he was the Fonz, star of a big TV sitcom called Happy Days. When we sat down to dinner, I spotted Dino De Laurentiis with Jessica Lange. She was the sexy leading lady in King Kong, which Dino had produced, and was up for the best debut by an actress award. Dino took no notice of me.

Also sitting near us was Sylvester Stallone, whom I knew a little bit because Larry Kubik was his agent too. His movie Rocky was the blockbuster of the year—at the box office, it had blown away all the other hits that were up for awards, including Network, All the President’s Men, and A Star Is Born—and was nominated for Best Film. I congratulated him, and he told me enthusiastically that he was writing a new movie about wrestlers and that there might be a part for me.

After dinner Harry Belafonte, who was emceeing, came onstage. I felt my competition calmness come over me—here, like in bodybuilding, I knew I could relax because I’d done everything in my power to win. When my category came and I won, Sylvester Stallone led the applause. Then Rocky won, and he went nuts, kissing every woman he could reach on his way to the stage.

It was an incredible feeling to get my first award for acting. Winning the Golden Globe confirmed for me that I wasn’t crazy; I was on the right track.

I was spending almost as much time in Manhattan as in LA. For me, New York was like a candy store. Hanging out with all of these fascinating characters was so much fun. I was proud and happy to be accepted, and I felt lucky to have the kind of personality that put people at ease. They didn’t feel threatened by my body. Instead, they wanted to reach out to me, help me, and understand what I was trying to do.

Elaine Kaufman, the owner of Elaine’s, was known for being tough and difficult, but she was a sweetheart to me. She made herself my mother on the New York scene. Every time I came in, she would escort me from table to table and introduce me—we’d go to director Robert Altman’s table, and then Woody Allen’s table, and then Francis Ford Coppola’s table, and then Al Pacino’s table. “You guys have got to meet this young man,” she’d say. “Arnold, why don’t I pull out a chair for you, sit down here, let me get you some salad or something.” Sometimes I felt extremely uncomfortable, because she’d have interrupted their conversation, and maybe I wasn’t even welcome. But there I was.

I made some dopey mistakes—like telling the great ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev that he shouldn’t lose touch with his home country and he ought to go back and visit, not realizing that he’d defected from Russia in 1961. But Elaine’s regulars were usually curious and friendly. Coppola asked a lot of questions about the bodybuilding scene. Andy Warhol wanted to intellectualize it and write about what it meant: How can you look like a piece of art? How can you be the sculptor of your own body? I connected with Nureyev because we were each having our portrait painted by Jamie Wyeth, a well-known artist in his own right and the son of the famous painter Andrew Wyeth. Sometimes Nureyev would invite Jamie and me to join him at Elaine’s. He’d sweep in late at night, after one of his performances, wearing an extraordinary fur coat with a big collar and a flowing scarf. He was not tall, but he commanded the room with his attitude. He was the king. You saw it in the way he walked, the way he took off the coat, with every movement striking and perfect. Just like onstage. At least it seemed that way to me: in the presence of someone like that, your imagination takes over, and they become bigger than life. He was a sweet guy to talk to, and he told me about his love for America and the New York scene. Still, I was in awe. Being the top ballet dancer was different from being the top bodybuilder. I could be Mr. Olympia for four thousand years and never be as big as Nureyev. He was on a different plane, like Woody Allen, who could show up for a black-tie event wearing a tux and white tennis shoes, and nobody would object. It was his way of saying “Fuck you. The invitation said black tie, so I wore the black tie, but I also came as Woody Allen, on my feet.” I admired the audacity that he and Nureyev shared.

As for downtown, the Greenwich Village restaurant One Fifth was a great spot. Late on Saturday nights, following Saturday Night Live, that was where cast members John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and Laraine Newman would hang out. Often I’d watch them perform the show at NBC Studios in Rockefeller Plaza, and then meet them down at One Fifth—after which we’d all head back uptown to Elaine’s.

The best downtown parties were thrown by Ara Gallant, a skinny little guy in his midforties who always wore tight leather or denim, high-heeled cowboy boots with silver toes, a little black cap with jingling gold charms, black sideburns, and, at night, eyeliner. In the fashion world, he was famous as a photographer and as the hair and makeup stylist who created the seventies disco look: red lips, spangly clothes, big hair. He’d invite every model he could think of to his parties in his big, exotic apartment, which had red lights, thumping music in the background, and a constant haze of pot smoke. Dustin Hoffman would be there, along with Al Pacino, Warren Beatty, and Gallant’s best friend, Jack Nicholson—all the major players from the movie world. To me it was heaven. I went to every party I was invited to and was always one of the last to leave.

Andy Warhol had loaned Jamie Wyeth space in his famous studio, the Factory, to paint a portrait of me. Usually late in the afternoon I’d go there to pose, and by eight or nine o’clock Jamie would be finished, and we’d head for dinner. But one night Warhol said, “If you want to stay, you are more than welcome. I’m doing some photos in a half hour or so.”

I was fascinated by Warhol, with his blond spiky hair, his black leather, his white shirts. When he talked to you, even at a party, he always had a camera in one hand and a tape recorder in the other. It made you feel like he might use the conversation in his magazine, Interview.

I said yes; I was curious to see him at work. A half-dozen young men came in and took off all their clothes. I thought, “I may be part of something interesting here.” I was always ready for a discovery or new experience. If it got flaky, I would tell myself, “God has put me on this path. He means me to be here, or else I’d be an ordinary factory worker in Graz.”

I didn’t want to stare at the naked guys, so instead I casually walked around talking to Andy’s assistants. They were putting up old-fashioned spotlights around a table in the middle of the studio. It was a big, sturdy table with a white cloth on top.

Now Andy asked a few of the naked guys to climb up on it and form a pile. Then he started moving them around. “You lie there. No, you lie across him, and then you lie across him. Perfect. Perfect.” Then he stepped back and asked the other naked guys, “Who is flexible here?”

“I’m a ballet dancer,” somebody said.

“Perfect. Why don’t you climb up, get one leg underneath here and one leg on top, and then we will build it sideways …”

Once he had the pile just the way he wanted, he started snapping Polaroids and adjusting the lights. The shadows had to be just so—he was fanatical about it. “Come over here, Arnold. See? This is what I’m trying to get. It’s not there yet. I’m frustrated.” He showed me a Polaroid that didn’t look like people, just shapes. “It will be called Landscapes,” he explained.

I said to myself, “This is unbelievable, this guy is turning asses into rolling hills.”

“The idea,” he went on, “is to get people talking about and writing about how we got that effect.”

Listening to Warhol, I had the feeling that if I’d asked in advance to watch him work he’d have said no. With artists, you never know what reaction you’ll get. Sometimes being spontaneous and jumping on an opportunity is the only way you can see art being made.

Jamie Wyeth and I became good friends, and months later, when the weather warmed up, he invited me to the family farm in Pennsylvania, near the Brandywine River Museum, where some of his father’s best paintings are displayed. I met Jamie’s wife, Phyllis, and then he brought me next door to an old farmhouse to meet his dad.

Andrew Wyeth, then sixty, was fencing when we walked in. No one else was there, but it definitely looked like he was facing an opponent because he even had on the mask. “Dad!” Jamie called, waving to get his attention. They talked for a moment, and then Wyeth turned toward me and took off the mask. Jamie said, “Dad, this is Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he’s in Pumping Iron, and I’m painting him.”

After we chatted for a while, Andrew asked, “Do you want to drive up with me to see the field where I’m painting right now?”

“Sure!” I said. I was curious to see how he worked. Wyeth led me out back to a beautiful, gleaming vintage sports car from the Roaring Twenties called a Stutz Bearcat: a two-seater convertible with huge exposed wheels, big, swooping fenders and running boards, exposed chrome exhaust pipes, and big headlights separate from the hood. It was a beautiful pimp car. I knew about the expensive, rare Stutz Bearcat because Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. each owned one. We started driving up a dirt road, with Wyeth explaining that he’d gotten the car from a vodka company in exchange for working on an ad. Meanwhile, I was noticing that we weren’t driving on a road but on a farm track with ruts for the wheels and with weeds growing up on both sides and in the middle—clearly not meant for cars like this. Then even the track ended and yet Wyeth kept driving up a hill, bumping through knee-high grass.

Finally, we arrived at the top, where I noticed an easel and a woman who was sitting on the ground wrapped in a blanket. She wasn’t beautiful, exactly, but sensuous, strong looking, and captivating—there was something unique about her. “Take it off,” Wyeth said. She dropped the blanket and sat with her breasts exposed, beautiful breasts, and I heard him mutter, “Oh, yeah.” Then he said to me, “I’m painting her now,” and he showed me the beginnings of a painting on the easel. “Anyway, I wanted you to meet because she speaks German.”

This was Helga Testorf, who worked at a neighboring farm and who was Wyeth’s obsession. He drew and painted her hundreds of times over many years, in sessions they kept secret from everyone. A decade later the story of the paintings and the obsession ended up on the covers of Time and Newsweek. But in 1977 I just happened to be there, and he let me in.

Running around promoting Pumping Iron ate up a lot of time, but I enjoyed the work. At the Boston premiere, George Butler introduced me to his longtime friend John Kerry, then a first assistant county district attorney. He was there with Caroline Kennedy, JFK and Jackie’s nineteen-year-old daughter who was an undergraduate at Harvard. She seemed reserved at first, but after the movie we all went to dinner and she warmed up. Caroline told me she wrote for the Harvard Crimson, the university’s daily student newspaper, and asked if I would come speak the next day. Of course I agreed happily. She and other Crimson staff members interviewed me about government and my sport. Someone asked who was my favorite president. I said, “John F. Kennedy!”

All of this was fun, and it was also a good investment in my future. By promoting Pumping Iron and bodybuilding, I was also promoting myself. Every time I was on the radio or TV, people became a little more familiar with my accent, the Arnold way of talking, and a little more comfortable and at ease with me. The effect was the opposite of what the Hollywood agents had warned. I was making my size, accent, and funny name into assets instead of peculiarities that put people off. Before long people were able to recognize me without seeing me, just by name or by the sound of my voice.

The biggest promotion opportunity on the horizon was France’s Cannes Film Festival, in May. In preparation, I decided to do something about my clothes. Up until now, my uniform had pretty much been double-knit pants, a Lacoste shirt, and cowboy boots. One reason for this was lack of money. I couldn’t afford to have a wardrobe custom made, and the only off-the-rack clothes that could be made to fit came from big men’s stores, where the waist had to be taken in by a foot and a half. Another reason was that up to now, clothes were just not part of the plan. Every dollar should be invested to turn into two or three dollars and make me financially secure. With clothes, the money was gone. George told me the best tailor in New York was Morty Sills. So I went to him and asked, “If I had to pick one suit to own, what would it be?”

“Where are you wearing it?” he asked.

“First of all, a month from now, I’m going to the Cannes Film Festival.”

“Well, that’s a beige linen suit. There is no debate about that.”

So Morty made me a light beige linen suit and picked the tie and the shirt so that I would look really snappy.

Without question, the clothes were important when I got to Cannes. Decked out in the suit I was so proud of, with the right shirt, the right tie, the right shoes, I circulated among the thousands of journalists there and drummed up a lot of press for Pumping Iron. But the biggest splash I made there was on the beach, where George had the idea of staging a photo op featuring a dozen girls from Crazy Horse, the Parisian strip club and cabaret. They were outfitted in frilly summer dresses, bonnets, and bouquets—and I was just in my posing trunks. Pictures of that scene appeared in newspapers around the world, and the Pumping Iron screening was packed to overflowing.

So many famous stars were at Cannes—like Mick and Bianca Jagger!—and I was part of it. I kicked around a ball with the great Brazilian soccer star Pelé. I went scuba diving with French military frogmen. I met Charles Bronson for the first time. The woman who headed European distribution for his movies hosted an evening for him at the hotel on the beach. She sat next to him at the head table, and I was close enough to hear their conversation. It turned out that Bronson wasn’t an easy guy to talk to. “You’re contributing so much to our success,” she said to him. “We’re so lucky to have you here. Isn’t the weather wonderful? We’re so lucky to have sunshine every day.” He waited a beat or two and then answered, “I hate small talk.” She was so shocked that she turned to her other dinner partner. I was stunned. That’s the way he was, though: rough around the edges. It never seemed to hurt his movies, but I decided I’d stay with a friendlier style.

Now that I was interested in clothes, my agent Larry Kubik was happy to take me shopping after I got back to LA. “You can find those same pants in this other store that’s not on Rodeo Drive for fifty percent less,” he’d say. Or, “Your brown socks won’t go with that shirt. I think you should have blue socks.” He had a good eye, and for both of us, shopping was a welcome diversion from turning down terrible parts. The most recent offers were for me to play a muscleman in Sextette, starring eighty-five-year-old Mae West, and, for $200,000, to be in commercials about automobile tires.

For months it seemed like the only action for me in LA was in real estate. Partly because of inflation and partly because of growth, Santa Monica property values were going through the roof. My apartment building wasn’t even on the market, but around the time that Pumping Iron came out, a buyer offered me almost double what I’d paid for it in 1974. The profit on my $37,000 investment was $150,000—I’d quadrupled my money in three years. I rolled the whole amount into a building twice the size, with twelve apartments rather than six, with the help of my friend Olga, who, as always, had found just the place to buy.

My secretary, Ronda Columb, who had been running the Arnold mail-order business and organizing my crazy schedule for years, was tickled to see me turning into a real estate minimogul. She was a transplanted New Yorker, four times divorced and ten or twelve years older than me. Her first husband had been a bodybuilding champ in the 1950s. I’d met her through Gold’s Gym. Ronda was like an older sister. Her latest boyfriend was a real estate developer named Al Ehringer.

Out of the blue one day she said, “You know, Al loves you.”

“He gets to go home with my secretary; of course he loves me!” I said.

That got a laugh. “No, really, he loves you and wants to be in business with you. Would you think about doing business with him?”

“Well, find out what he has in mind, because there’s a building for sale down on Main Street, and if he wants to get involved …” Al had a reputation as a shrewd real estate brain, very good at sensing which areas to develop. He’d played a major role in reviving the historic district of Pasadena, California, with shops and lofts. I thought Santa Monica might be ripe for the same treatment. Main Street, which ran parallel to the ocean a few blocks in from the beach, was run down and full of drunks and drifters, and there was a lot of property for sale. I was looking to invest $70,000 I’d saved up from Pumping Iron and other work.

Al was already familiar with the building that had caught my eye. “That property and three others are for sale now,” he said. “Pick which one you like, and I’ll go in with you.” So Al and I bought the building and started organizing the turnaround of Main Street.

Our building started to pay for itself almost immediately. It came with three small houses out back, facing onto the next street, and we sold those off for enough money to reimburse our entire down payment. That made it easy to get a big loan and do a total renovation. And because the building was more than fifty years old, it qualified for historic status and a big tax advantage. This was yet another reason to love America: back in Austria, if you tried to get a building declared historic, they’d laugh at you unless it was five hundred years old.

Making money this way doubled my confidence. I adjusted my life plan: I still wanted to own a gymnasium chain eventually, but instead of making money from movies, like Reg Park and Steve Reeves did, I would make it from real estate.

Ronda always put public appearance requests in a pile for me to consider. The one that grabbed my attention that spring was an invitation from the Special Olympics signed by “Jacquie Kennedy.” It asked if I would fly to the University of Wisconsin to help with research on whether or not weight training made sense for mentally handicapped kids.

If I’d stopped to think, I would have realized that this wasn’t the Jackie Kennedy whom I’d met—that woman’s last name was now Onassis, she didn’t spell her name Jacquie, and she lived in New York. But I thought that maybe she was the honorary chair or something. So I said impulsively to Ronda, “I’ll accept.” I was already doing seminars on weight training and on how to be a winner, and I thought that consulting at a university would be a nice credential that would elevate bodybuilding as a sport, even though they weren’t offering to pay. I wasn’t sure if weight training could help intellectually challenged kids, but it fascinated me that they wanted to try, and for me this would open up a whole new world.

There was still snow on the ground in April when I arrived: this was the university’s northern branch, way up in Superior, Wisconsin, near Duluth. The two women who picked me up were both research scientists with PhDs. They introduced me to Jacquie, a slim, lively person from the Special Olympics, and showed me to the weight room in the gymnasium where the kids would be the next morning.

“What exercises can we have them do?” Jacquie asked.

“I don’t know how handicapped those kids are,” I said, “but a safe thing to do is bench press. Another safe thing is dead lift, another safe thing is the curls, another safe thing is …”

“Okay,” Jacquie said. “The first day, let’s just keep it at that.”

So we set up the equipment and the camera, checking to make sure there would be enough light to film, and made a plan for the next day. That night I lay in bed wondering how I would deal with the kids. Rather than worry, I decided just to improvise.

There were about ten boys in their early teens, and the minute I walked in the room, it was clear what to do. They milled around me and wanted to touch my muscles, and when I flexed for them, they exclaimed, “Wow! Wow!” I realized that they were putty in my hands. Authority for them was much more visual than intellectual—they would listen to me not because I’d studied physical therapy or anything like that but because of the biceps.

I started with the bench press, just the bar with one ten-pound plate on each side, and had the boys take turns doing ten reps each, with me there to position the bar and lower it down to their chest. The first couple of kids were fine, but the third boy panicked when he felt the weight and started to scream because he thought it would crush him. I lifted the bar off his chest, and he jumped up.

“That’s okay,” I said to him. “Don’t worry. Just breathe, relax, stay here, and watch your buddies.”

So he stood and watched the others taking their turns and lifting the weight up and down ten times. After a while I could see that he was interested again. I suggested, “Why don’t you try now?” and he agreed. He had a little bit more confidence when I put the empty bar on him, and he did ten reps. “Hold the bar,” I said. “You’re really strong; I think you can handle the plates now.” I added the plates, twenty pounds total, and he not only did ten more reps easily but also asked me to put on more. I realized I was witnessing something unique. This kid had been completely intimidated twenty minutes before, and now he had all this confidence. I did sessions with other groups of kids over the next couple of days, trying different things until the researchers had gotten all the data they needed. One observation that emerged was that weight training was a better confidence builder than, say, soccer. In soccer, sometimes you make a good kick and sometimes not, but in weight training, you know when you lift four plates that the next time you will be able to lift four plates. This predictability helped the kids gain confidence quickly.

Out of this work came the power-lifting events at the Special Olympics, which now draw more competitors than any other sport. We looked for the lifts that would be safe; sometimes because of their handicap, the kids don’t balance well, for instance, so we left out squats. We narrowed it down to the dead lift, where nothing can go wrong because you’re simply lifting the bar until you stand straight up, and the bench press, where you can have spotters present to steady the bar if needed.

One of the researchers had a dinner for me at her house, and in the course of conversation, Jacquie asked about my education. “Well, I’ve taken five thousand courses but never went for a degree because they’re at a mishmash of three colleges,” I said.

And she said, “We have the biggest off-campus learning program in the country, so maybe you can finish your degree here. Why don’t you mail us your transcripts?”

I followed up after I went home, and after analyzing my records, they wrote back that I was missing only two courses for a degree: basic science and physical education. I had to laugh about the second one. But we made a plan to fill in both gaps.

When Bobby Zarem called in early August with a real Kennedy invitation, I almost said no. It was to play in the Robert F. Kennedy Celebrity Tennis Tournament in Forest Hills, New York.

“I don’t know how to play tennis,” I told him. What sense did it make to show up if you couldn’t really contribute to the occasion? I’d turned down celebrity golf tournaments for the same reason.

“You should go,” Bobby said. “This is a tough invitation to get.” He explained that he’d been able to grab a last-minute spot for me because actor James Caan had dropped out. “Think about it at least, okay?”

This was just the sort of dilemma Larry loved, so I called him. “Take it,” he said, almost before the words were out of my mouth. “You just need to get a coach. Why don’t you use the guy Bruce Jenner used? He got invited there, and he’d been taking lessons from this guy for only a year, and he won.”

Bobby called again and had Ethel Kennedy, Robert Kennedy’s widow, on the phone with him. That convinced me.

I said to myself, “Don’t be stupid. You can’t turn down Ethel Kennedy! And don’t you like to jump into things?” Plus, it was for a great cause. So I told them yes and started driving up to Malibu three times a week to hit with Olympic star Bruce Jenner’s tennis pro.

The tournament was scheduled for August 27, so we had only three weeks. At first balls were flying all over the place, but I practiced enough to be able to hit the ball back and forth. Also, I was good at running around, which helped. Larry and Craig would take time off from work and volley with me when I didn’t have the pro. They wanted to make sure I looked as good as possible among all the celebs out there on the court.

It was a new experience, training for something I had no hope of winning. I didn’t even mind if people laughed—I expected it. But I hoped to make a good showing, and it was good for the cause.