Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 13 Maria and Me

ALTHOUGH MARIA AND I were on opposite sides of the fence politically, it was politics that brought us together geographically, when she moved to California to work on Teddy Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign. In American politics, it was almost unheard of for an incumbent president running for reelection to be challenged from within his own party. But Jimmy Carter’s first term had been so disappointing, and America was in such a depressed state, that Teddy decided to run. Of course, when any Kennedy ran for office, it was all hands on deck. If you were a family member, you were supposed to put your life on hold and campaign.

The first thing that Maria and her friend Bonnie Reiss did was plaster Kennedy ’80 posters and bumper stickers all over my Jeep. I had a brown Cherokee Chief that I was really proud of. It was massive compared to ordinary cars—the first-ever sport-utility vehicle—and I’d gone all the way up to Oregon to take delivery so that I could get $1,000 off the price. I’d had my Jeep outfitted with a loudspeaker and siren for showing off or scaring other drivers out of my way. But now when we drove around town, I’d sink a little lower in the seat, hoping that no one would see me. It was weird pulling up at the gym every day: like most of the people there, I was known as a Republican, and now here I was with the Teddy stickers.

Personally, I was hoping that Ronald Reagan would be elected president, but no one was asking my opinion; it was Maria they wanted to see. Hollywood, of course, is a big liberal town, and her family connections went deep. Her grandfather Joe Kennedy had been heavily involved in movies, running no fewer than three studios in the 1920s, and the Kennedys were famous for involving entertainers in political campaigns. So everyone in the family was very much aware of Hollywood, and they turned to actors, directors, and executives for help in fund-raising. Maria’s uncle Peter Lawford was a big star, and buddies with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. She’d heard about those guys in the “Rat Pack” growing up, had seen them at her parents’ house, and had been to their places in Palm Springs, California. No sooner did she arrive in 1980 than she got to know their wives.

The Kennedy campaign center would call the studios and talent agencies and line up appointments for Maria with big shots and celebrities. “Maria would like to visit you and talk about an event we have coming up,” they’d say, and almost invariably the reaction would be “Omigod, a Kennedy is coming!” and doors would open. Usually Maria would go with other campaign staff, but sometimes I’d tag along or even drive her. Teddy’s candidacy was so controversial that winning endorsements wasn’t easy. Often I’d listen to people like producer Norman Lear explaining to Maria why they didn’t support Teddy and were either backing the independent candidate, Illinois congressman John Anderson, or sticking with Carter.

Maria wasn’t even twenty-five, but already she was a force to reckon with. That had been clear to me early on. In 1978, about six months after we first met, I posed for a photo essay in Playgirl magazine. Ara Gallant, my trendy New York photographer friend, had the assignment, and I came up with the idea that we should do a beer hall scene. It would be a traditional beer hall, but instead of hefty German women serving the beer steins and pretzels and sausages around me, it would be young sexy girls with bare tits. It was one of my crazy ideas and Ara loved it. But when I described this to Maria and said, “We’re just now working on the layout,” she told me instantly that the whole thing was a mistake.

“I thought you wanted to go into movies,” she said. “So if you pose with those girls with their tits hanging out, is that going make producers say, ‘Hey, wow! I want this guy’? I doubt it. What’s your goal in doing this?”

I had to admit I had no answer to that. I’d just been in a silly mood and said to Ara, “Let’s do something funny.” I wasn’t trying to get anything out of it.

“Well, since there’s no goal and it’s not going to lead anywhere, kill it. You don’t need it. You had your fun, now move on.” She was relentless and so convincing that I ended up talking Playgirl into killing the story and paying $7,000 to reimburse the magazine for the shoot.

She was wise about public perception because that was the world in which she’d grown up. Maria was the first girlfriend I ever had who didn’t treat my ambitions as an annoyance, some kind of madness that interfered with her vision of the future: namely, marriage, kids, and a cozy little house somewhere—and the stereotypical all-American life. Maria’s world wasn’t small like that. It was gigantic, because of what her grandfather did, what her father did, what her mother did, what her uncles did. I’d finally met a girl whose world was as big as mine. I’d reached some of my goals but a lot of my world was still a dream. And when I’d talk about even bigger dreams, she never said, “Come on, this can’t be done.”

She’d seen it happen in her family. She came from a world where her great-grandfather was an immigrant and her grandfather made a vast fortune in Hollywood and the liquor business, real estate, and other investments. It was a world in which seeing a relative run for president or senator was not out of the ordinary. She’d heard her uncle John F. Kennedy pledge in 1961 that by the end of the decade the United States would land a man on the moon. Her mother had created the Special Olympics. Her dad was the founding director of the Peace Corps and had created the Job Corps, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), and Legal Services for the poor, all under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. And Sargent Shriver had been Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s ambassador to France. So if I said, “I want to make a million per picture,” it didn’t automatically strike Maria as absurd. It just made her curious. “How are you going to do that?” she’d ask. “I admire how driven you are. I don’t understand how anyone can have this discipline.” What’s more, by watching me, she got to see something she’d never actually witnessed firsthand: how you make one dollar into two, and how you build businesses and become a millionaire.

The way she was raised gave her huge advantages such as an exceptional education and her parents’ extensive knowledge and wisdom. She got to meet the influential people and hear their conversations. She got to live in Paris when her father was ambassador, and was able to travel the world. She grew up playing tennis, skiing, and competing in horse shows.

But there were drawbacks too. Eunice and Sarge were so forceful that the kids never got to develop their own opinions about things. The two of them made a point of letting the kids know that they were smart. “This is a very good idea, Anthony,” I’d hear Eunice tell her youngest son, who was only starting high school. “The way I would approach it is thus and so, but it’s a very good point you have. I didn’t think about that.” But the household was a strict hierarchy in which the parents, usually Eunice, made the choices. She was a very dominating personality, but Sarge didn’t mind.

When you grow up that way, it’s hard to make your own decisions, and eventually you feel like you can’t function without your parents’ input. Eunice and Sarge decided which colleges to consider, for example. Yes, there was some participation on the kids’ part, but overall, the parents ran the show. Then again, many times not even they ran the show, the Kennedy family did. The degree of conformity among the Kennedys was extreme. Not a single one of the thirty cousins was a Republican, for example. If you gather thirty members of any extended family, it’s almost impossible that all of them are the same. That’s why I always used to tease Maria, “Your family’s like a bunch of clones. If you ask your brother to name his favorite color, he doesn’t know. He’ll say, ‘We like blue.’ ”

She would laugh and say, “That’s not really true! Look how diverse they are.”

I’d say, “They are all environmentalists, they are all athletic, they all are Democrats, they all endorsed the same candidates, and they all do like blue.”

The other big disadvantage involved public perception. No matter what you did as a Kennedy or a Shriver, no one gave you credit for your accomplishment. Instead, people would say, “Well, if I were a Kennedy, I could do that too.” For all these reasons, Maria had to fight harder than most people to carve out her own identity.

Sarge and Eunice welcomed me. The first time that Maria brought me to their town house in Washington, Sarge came downstairs holding a book. “I’m just reading about these great accomplishments of yours,” he said. He’d found a mention of me in a book about American immigrants who had arrived with nothing and made a success. That was a nice surprise because I wasn’t expecting to be in books yet. Bodybuilding was such an odd thing. I thought they’d be writing about immigrants like former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, not me. It was so gracious and generous of Maria’s dad to notice that passage and show it to me.

Eunice put me right to work. She was thrilled to hear that I’d been involved with Special Olympics research at the University of Wisconsin. Before I knew it, I was helping her push the idea of adding power lifting to the Special Olympics and conducting workshops on weight training for the mentally handicapped wherever I traveled.

If the Shrivers hadn’t been so gracious, the first dinner I had at their house could have been difficult. Maria’s four brothers, Anthony, Bobby, Timothy, and Mark, ranged in age from twenty-three to twelve, and right away one of the younger ones piped up, “Daddy, Arnold loves Nixon!” Sarge was a great friend of Hubert Humphrey’s; in fact, when Humphrey ran against Nixon in 1968, he’d wanted Sarge as his running mate, but the Kennedy family torpedoed the idea.

So I felt really awkward sitting there at the table. But Sarge, always the diplomat, said evenly, “Well, everyone thinks differently about these things.” Later on we discussed it, and I explained why I admired Nixon. It was my reaction against having grown up in Europe, where government was totally in charge of everything, and 70 percent of people worked for the government, and the highest aspiration was to get a government job. That was one of the reasons why I left for the United States. Sargent happened to be a scholar of German, because he was of German descent. He had spent student summers in Germany in the mid-1930s wearing lederhosen, exploring the German and Austrian countryside, pedaling from village to village on his bicycle. During his first summer there, 1934, Adolf Hitler’s recent rise to power as German chancellor didn’t make much of an impression on Sarge. But in his second summer, 1936, he learned to recognize the brown-shirted “storm troopers” of the Nazi paramilitary, the Sturmabteilung (SA), and the black-uniformed members of Hitler’s elite guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS). He read about political prisoners being sent to concentration camps. Sarge actually heard Hitler speak.

He came home convinced that America should try to keep its distance from the growing crisis in Europe—so much so that in 1940 at Yale University he cofounded the antiwar America First Committee with classmates Gerald Ford, the future thirty-eighth president, and future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, among others. Nevertheless, Sarge enlisted in the navy before Pearl Harbor and served throughout the war. We spoke German together many times. He wasn’t fluent, exactly, but he could sing in German.

Family meals in the Shriver household were about as far from my upbringing as you could get. Sarge would ask me at the dinner table, “What would your parents have done if you’d talked to them the way my kids are talking to me here?”

“My dad would have smacked me right away.”

“Did you hear that, guys? Arnold, repeat that. Repeat that. His father would have smacked him. That’s what I should do with you kids.”

The boys would say, “Oh, Daddy,” and then throw a piece of bread at him.

They had that kind of humor at the table, and I was amazed. The first time I was there for dinner, the meal ended with one of the boys farting, another one burping, and another one leaning so far back in his chair that it toppled to the floor. Then he just lay there groaning, “Oh, man, I am fucking full.”

Eunice snapped, “Don’t ever say that again in this house, do you hear me?”

“Sorry, Mom, but I am so full. Your cooking is unbelievable.” Of course that was a wisecrack too. Eunice did not even know how to soft-boil an egg.

“Be happy that you were fed,” she said.

Maria’s parents certainly had a much more casual approach to childrearing than Meinhard and I had experienced. We were always told to shut up, whereas the Shriver kids were encouraged to join in the conversation. If, let’s say, the subject came up of Independence Day and what a great celebration it was, Sargent would ask, “Bobby, what does the Fourth of July mean to you?” They would talk about policy issues and social ills and things that the president had said. Everyone was expected to come up with something and take part.

Although Maria and I lived on opposite coasts, our lives became intertwined. She came to my graduation up in Wisconsin—after a decade of course work, I was awarded a degree in business, with a major in international fitness marketing. She was just starting her TV career, producing local news shows in Philadelphia and Baltimore. I’d visit her there, and once or twice I went on a show with her buddy Oprah Winfrey, who was also just starting out and had a talk show in Baltimore. Maria always picked interesting friends, but Oprah really stood out. She was talented and aggressive, and you could tell she believed in herself. For one of her shows, she came to the gym and worked out with me to demonstrate how important it is to stay fit. Another time we talked about the importance of teaching kids to read and getting them interested in books.

I was proud of Maria. For the first time I saw how determined she was to make her own niche. There were no other journalists in the family. When she went for her job interview, they asked, “Are you willing to work fourteen hours a day, or do you expect to be pampered as a Shriver?” She said she was willing to work hard, and she did.

We traveled together to Hawaii, LA, Europe. Our ski trip to Austria in 1978 was her first Christmas away from her family. I would also accompany Maria to family get-togethers, of which there were many. An aspect of being a Kennedy cousin, I quickly learned, was that you were never completely free. Maria was expected to go to Hyannis Port in the summer, accompany the family on winter vacation, and be home at Thanksgiving and Christmas. If someone had a birthday or a wedding, she had better be there. Since there were so many cousins, the number of command performances was high.

When Maria could get away from work, she visited me in California. She warmed up really well to some of my friends, especially Franco, and also to some of the actors and directors I knew. Others she didn’t like: guys she felt were hangers-on or were trying to use me. She and my mom got to know each other too, during my mom’s annual Eastertime visits.

The more serious we became, the more Maria talked about moving to California. So for us, Teddy’s 1980 presidential campaign was well timed. I was ready to buy a house, and our first major decision as a couple was to look for it together and to call it our place. In late summer we found a 1920s Spanish-style house in a nice section of Santa Monica off San Vincente Avenue. We called it our house, but it wasn’t really. It was mine. It had a curved stairway to the left as you entered, lots of nice vintage tile, a big living room with a beamed ceiling, and beautiful fireplaces in the living room, the TV room, and the master bedroom upstairs. There was a long lap pool and a guesthouse for my mom to stay in when she visited.

The fact that it was our house was just between Maria and me, because she didn’t want her parents to know we were living together—especially Sarge, who was very conservative. She told them she lived a few blocks away, on Montana Avenue, and we actually rented and furnished an apartment so that when Sarge and Eunice visited, Maria could invite them over for lunch there. I’m pretty sure that Eunice knew what was going on, but the separate apartment was important for the family image.

Of course, total anonymity is almost impossible in Hollywood, especially for a Kennedy cousin. One of the real estate agents who knew of Maria’s Kennedy connection said to us while we were house hunting, “I have a fascinating house to show you in Beverly Hills. I’m not going to tell you what makes it so interesting; you just have to see.” We went, and she showed us around. Then she said, “Do you know who lived here? Gloria Swanson!” And she took us to the basement and showed us a tunnel that led to another house nearby. Joe Kennedy had used that tunnel during his and the actress Gloria Swanson’s long-running affair in the late 1920s. Afterward, Maria asked me, “Why did she show us this?” She was partly fascinated and partly mad and embarrassed.

Teddy’s campaign gave me an amazing opportunity to see what it is like to jump into a presidential race. I went to New Hampshire with Maria in February to experience the primary. The campaign staff was staying in a little hotel that buzzed like a beehive with media and campaign staff and volunteers and people with newspapers under their arm scurrying off to read the latest coverage. Organizers would send Maria out to some local factory to shake hands.

The operation seemed Mickey Mouse to me, because I didn’t understand the way campaigns work. Teddy Kennedy was a big-shot politician who made the cover of Time magazine when he decided to run. So I imagined that he would be addressing huge rallies. I’d already been to several rallies for Republican candidate Ronald Reagan that year, and he always drew one thousand to two thousand people, sometimes more. Even if Reagan was just stopping off at a factory somewhere to talk to the workers, it still looked like a rally, with flags, banners, patriotic music.

But there we were in this rinky-dink hotel. Shaking hands, going to shops, going to restaurants. “This is so odd,” I thought. “Why stay at this awful little hotel? Why not a grand hotel?” I didn’t know that when you start out, it is all about one-to-one contact. I didn’t know you can’t have campaign staff staying in grand hotels because somebody will inevitably write a story about how you are wasting the campaign money that hardworking people had donated. I didn’t understand that some events are big and some are smaller and more intimate, depending on the circumstances.

The 1980 Democratic race developed into something especially brutal. Before he jumped in, Teddy was ahead of President Carter in opinion polls by a margin of more than two to one. Everyone was egging on Teddy to run. Journalists were writing about how fantastic and powerful he was and how he would win easily against Jimmy Carter and save the day for the Democrats. He could do no wrong. But as soon as he announced his candidacy in November 1979, everything turned. The attacks were relentless. I couldn’t believe the difference. It didn’t help that in a national interview on CBS, Teddy couldn’t give a convincing answer when asked why he wanted to be president. People challenged his character because of the 1969 car crash on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, that killed his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, a former campaign worker for RFK. They also claimed that Teddy was just living off his brothers’ reputation, even though he’d been a senator for eighteen years.

I was shocked. It was amazing to be in the front row and watch it all play out in front of my eyes.

Teddy lost the crucial early primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, and that caused some of his funding to dry up—which meant that the campaign had to downsize even before the primaries in the larger states. But then he fought his way back enough to win several major states, including New York in March, Pennsylvania in April, and—thanks in part to Maria’s efforts—California in June. However, he lost in dozens of other states, and in the national opinion polls, he never caught President Carter again. Teddy ended up winning only ten primaries out of thirty-four. On the first day of the Democratic National Convention in August, it was clear that President Carter had enough delegates to lock up the nomination, and Teddy was forced to drop out.

All of a sudden, after months of intense effort, it was over, and Maria was sad and depressed. The family had experienced so much devastation just in her lifetime, starting with President John F. Kennedy’s assassination when she was eight, and Bobby Kennedy’s when she was twelve, and the Chappaquiddick incident the following summer. Then on top of those, she saw her father lose in a landslide as George McGovern’s vice presidential running mate in 1972, and lose when he tried to get the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976. And now Teddy had run, and they’d been handed another loss.

She’d put her heart into the campaign. I could see how overwhelming politics can become and how totally out of control. When you run for president, you feel the public pressure every day. The national and local media track everything you say and do, and everyone is analyzing you. Seeing her uncle go through that and lose was really, really tough. I was happy to play a supportive role in these difficult circumstances. “You did a fantastic job,” I told her, “the way you spoke to the media, the way you busted your butt for Teddy.” The experience confirmed Maria’s dim view of politics as a career choice.

I used all the skills I had to cheer up Maria. I whisked her away to a vacation in Europe, where we had a great time visiting London and Paris and going all around France. Soon Maria stopped feeling like a beaten-down campaign worker, and her enthusiasm and sense of humor returned.

Before Maria had left the East Coast, she’d made a gutsy career change. She’d started with the goal of being the producer, the person in the control room. Now she decided to go on camera and compete for one of those scarce top jobs in network news. I’d always advanced by starting with a clear vision and working as hard as possible to achieve it, and I could see that same determination unfolding in Maria. I thought it was great.

No one in the Kennedy family had ever been an on-camera journalist. It was a totally new thing, and it was hers. I’d watched some of her cousins carve out their niches, but it almost always involved specializing in a cause or issue within the framework of the family beliefs. For Maria to go out and be in front of the camera was a real declaration of independence.

As soon as we got back to Santa Monica, she set to work making connections and getting the necessary training, much as I had done with my acting. What did it take to succeed in front of the camera? She had to figure that out. What did she need to change about her looks, her voice, her style? What should she keep the same? Her teachers would say, “Your hair’s too big, you have to cut it down. Or can you pull it back? Let’s try that. Your eyes are too strong; maybe let’s tone down the eyes.” There was all this shaping and molding going on. She had to learn what makes you easy to look at and listen to day after day on TV, and not be overly dramatic and divert attention from the news, which should be the focus.

During my Conan shoot in Madrid the following winter, we couldn’t see each other for five months. She mailed me photos showing that she’d lost ten pounds and shortened her hair and put a little wave in it. Conan, meanwhile, had been scheduled and postponed several times. We were supposed to go on location in Yugoslavia in the summer of 1980, but Yugoslavia became unstable due to the death of its dictator, Marshal Tito, in May. The producers decided it would be cheaper and simpler to move the production to Spain in the fall. Then when Maria and I got back from Europe, I learned that the project had been delayed again until after New Year’s.

This opened the way for a crazy plan that I’d only been toying with up to now: to make a surprise comeback and reclaim the world bodybuilding championship and the title of Mr. Olympia. Bodybuilding had grown tremendously in the four years since Pumping Iron. Health clubs were sprouting up all over the country, and strength training was a key part of what they offered. Joe Gold sold his original gym to franchisers and built a big, new establishment near the beach called the World Gym, which welcomed women as well as men.

The Mr. Olympia competition was thriving. In one of Joe Weider’s periodic pushes to expand worldwide, the International Federation of Body Building (IFBB) was holding this year’s contest in Sydney, Australia. In fact, I was due to work the event as a color commentator for CBS-TV. This would pay very well, but the appeal of doing it melted away once I felt the fire to compete again. The vision became irresistible as it crystallized in my mind. Reconquering the sport was the perfect preparation for Conan. It would show everyone who was the real king—and the real barbarian. Frank Zane had held the title for three years, and at least a dozen contenders were jockeying to win, including guys I saw at the gym every day. One was Mike Mentzer, a five-foot-eight Pennsylvanian with a dark, droopy mustache who’d finished a close second the previous year. He was promoting himself as the up-and-coming guru of weight training and spokesman for the sport and was always quoting the philosophy of the novelist Ayn Rand. Often there were rumors that I would return to competition, and I knew that if I denied everything and waited until the last minute to jump in, the uncertainty would gnaw at people like him.

Maria thought all this was unwise. “You run competitions now,” she pointed out. “You left bodybuilding as the champion and this could turn people against you. Besides, you might not win.” I knew she was right, but the desire to compete wouldn’t go away. “If you have so much extra energy, why don’t you learn Spanish before you go to Spain for the movie shoot?” she said. Having just seen Teddy lose the Democratic presidential nomination, she didn’t want another risk in her life. The night before, she’d freaked when Muhammad Ali, who was coming out of retirement to try to become the first four-time World Heavyweight Champion, was beaten convincingly by the current champ Larry Holmes. It was like that was symbolic.

But I just couldn’t let it go. The more I thought about it, the more I dug in on the idea.

Then one night, to my surprise, Maria turned around. She said that if I was still determined to compete, she’d support me. She became an extraordinary partner.

Maria was the only person I told. Of course Franco guessed. My longtime friend was a chiropractor now and was working as my training partner in preparation for Conan. He’d been saying things like “Arnold, the Olympia is coming up. You must go into it and shock everybody.” Some of the guys in the gym were really uneasy. When they saw me start blasting two-hour workouts twice a day, they couldn’t figure it out. They knew that I was supposed to play Conan, and I’d told them that being ripped was required for the part. Yes, I was going to Sydney, but that was to do TV commentary, wasn’t it? Besides, Mr. Olympia was only five weeks away: nobody could start heavy training this late and get ready! Still, they weren’t sure, and I fed the uncertainty. As weeks passed and the competition drew near, I would drive Mentzer crazy just by smiling at him across the gym.

It was the hardest training I’d ever done, which made it fun. I was amazed by how deeply Maria involved herself in every step, even though she was focused on her own goal. She’d grown up around sports, of course: not bodybuilding, but baseball, football, tennis, and golf, but it is all the same thing. She understood why I had to get up at six in the morning to train for two hours, and she’d come with me to the gym. At dinner she’d see me about to dig into some ice cream, and she’d literally take it away. All the enthusiasm she’d focused on Teddy’s run for president was now transferred to me.

The Mr. Olympia contest was staged in the Sydney Opera House, the spectacular architectural masterpiece shaped like a row of sails on the edge of Sydney Harbour. Frank Sinatra had performed there just before us. It was an honor to appear in such a place—and a sign of how bodybuilding was moving up in prestige. The prize money was $50,000, the most ever offered in a bodybuilding competition, and fifteen champions registered in advance, making it the largest field ever.

An opera house turned out to be the perfect setting because from the day we arrived, the contest was full of drama, emotion, and intrigue. It caused an uproar when I announced that I was there not to observe but to compete. The federation officials had to debate: could a contestant jump in without registering beforehand? They realized there was no rule against it, so I was allowed to participate. Next came a rebellion against certain rules of the competition itself, in the form of a petition signed by all of the bodybuilders except me. The organizers had to negotiate to avoid chaos. After much commotion, they agreed not only to adopt the changes but also asked the contestants to approve the judges.

All this backstage maneuvering brought out a side of Maria that made me think of Eunice in action. Even though Maria tried to separate herself, she had her mother’s political instincts and was wise beyond her years. In politics, when disputes arise and camps form, you have to grasp what’s happening and move very quickly. She was right there with lightning-fast perceptions and really good advice. She talked to the right people and helped me avoid getting isolated or blindsided. She was a total animal. I wondered how someone who had never been involved in the bodybuilding world and who had barely even met the players could step in so quickly and be so effective.

In the end I won my seventh crown as Mr. Olympia. But that victory remains controversial to this day. The judges awarded a split decision, voting 5–2 for me against the closest competitor, Chris Dickerson of the United States. It was the first nonunanimous decision in Mr. Olympia history. When my name was announced, only half the two thousand people in the opera house cheered, and for the first time in my life, I heard boos. Right afterward, one of the top five finishers threw around chairs backstage, while another smashed his trophy to smithereens in the parking lot and yet another announced he was quitting bodybuilding for good.

Training for competition and winning again gave me pleasure, but in hindsight, I have to admit that the episode was not beneficial for the sport. It created a lot of divisiveness, and I could have handled it differently. The old camaraderie of bodybuilding was gone. Eventually I reconciled with all those guys, but with some it took years to patch up.

Conan wasn’t due to start filming in earnest for a couple more months, but I had to fly to London in late October to shoot a preliminary scene. When I arrived, John Milius took one look at me and shook his head. “I’ve got to ask you to retrain,” he said. “I can’t have Conan looking like a bodybuilder. This is not a Hercules movie. I want you to be chunkier. You need to gain a little weight. You have to look like someone who’s been a pit fighter and a warrior and a slave chained for years to the Wheel of Pain. That’s the kind of body I want.” Milius wanted everything to look as consistent as possible. That was logical, even though Conan was entirely a fantasy world. In the scene we shot in England, I was made up to look like Conan the king in his old age, giving a soliloquy meant as the introduction of the film:

“Know, O Prince; that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of … Hither came I, Conan, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, to tread jeweled thrones of the earth beneath my feet. But now my eyes are dim. Sit on the ground with me, for you are but the leavings of my age. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure.”

I was draped in robes and furs, so the Mr. Olympia physique didn’t show. But before we went on location in December 1980, I would have to reshape my body again.

Heading back to LA from Sydney, I thought about how the tribulations of recent months had united Maria and me. I was so glad I’d tolerated those Teddy Kennedy posters on my Jeep and that I hadn’t make an issue about my own political opinions. Because for the first time, I felt that I really, truly had a partner. Throughout that spring and summer, I’d succeeded in helping her with the ups and downs of the campaign, and I felt that taking her to Europe afterward had been exactly the right impulse. And now I saw how she’d gotten involved and been able to help with my thing, which was as foreign to her world as it could be.

I could imagine the pressure she must be under from the Kennedy friends in Hollywood to move on to a more suitable boyfriend. Older women especially—friends of her mother or of Pat Kennedy Lawford, Peter’s ex-wife—used to say to Maria, “Why are you going out with that bodybuilder? Let me introduce you to this wonderful producer,” or “this young, very attractive businessman,” or “Do I have the man for you! He’s a little older, but he’s a billionaire. Let me set you up with him.”

The outside world looked at our relationship in a simpleminded way, as a juicy success story. “Isn’t it amazing that he wins Mr. Olympia and all these bodybuilding championships, and then he gets this big movie contract, and then he gets a Kennedy as his girlfriend?” According to this way of thinking, Maria becomes part of my trophy collection.

But the reality is that she was not a trophy. It made no difference what the name was. If I hadn’t been her style and she hadn’t been mine, we never would have ended up together. Her personality, her look, her intelligence, her wit, what she brought to the table, and how much she was able to participate without missing a beat were what mattered to me. Maria meshed with everything that I was, what I stood for, and what I was doing. That was a very important reason why I was considering that this woman could be my life partner. I got addicted to her. When I reached Spain, it was hard to be without her.

I understood what Maria wanted to accomplish. She wanted to become the next Barbara Walters. And I wanted to become the biggest movie star, so we were both very driven. I understood the world that she wanted to get into, and she understood the world that I was trying to explore and where I wanted to go, and we could be part of each other’s journey.

I also understood why I appealed to her. Maria was such a forceful personality that she would just run over guys. They would become immediate slaves. So here was me, whom you can’t run over. I was confident, I’d accomplished things, I was somebody. She admired the fact that I was an immigrant who had come over here and built a life. She could see from my personality that I’d figure out her family and feel comfortable around them.

Maria wanted to get away from home as much as I did—and what better way than to fall in love with an ambitious Austrian bodybuilder who wanted an acting career? She liked being away from Washington and the lawyers and politicians and Beltway talk. She wanted to be unique and different.

If there was anything in her family for Maria to compare us to as a couple, it was her grandparents. Joe was a self-made man, and I was a self-made man. He was very aggressive in making money, and so was I. Rose had chosen him when he was penniless and she was the daughter of the mayor of Boston, John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, because she had absolute faith in Joe’s ability to succeed. I was relentless, disciplined, hands-on, and street-smart enough to get there too. That was what made Maria want to be with me.

What I represented physically was also a factor. She liked guys who were athletic and strong. Maria told me that when she was a kid and JFK was president, she would hang out with the Secret Service men in Hyannis. At night, when they were on duty and trying to stay awake, sometimes they’d read muscle magazines—with me on the cover! She was too young to pay much attention, but she did notice that those bodyguards were all working out. It stuck in her mind enough that when the book Pumping Iron came out, she bought it as a gift for her oldest brother, Bobby.

We started decorating our house before I had to leave in December for preproduction on Conan. Maria was into floral curtains and a conservative look, which I liked; it was very East Coast and also a little European. She’d inherited a lot of it from her family. They’d all grown up with floral patterns and certain couches and chairs, some with wooden backs and others that were stuffed. All of their houses, all of their apartments, had a piano in the living room, dozens of framed pictures of family members on all the sideboards and surfaces, and on and on.

My style was more rustic, so when we needed a dining room set, I went to an antique fair in downtown LA and bought a heavy oak table and chairs. Maria took charge of the living room. She ordered big, overstuffed couches and had them upholstered with those floral prints, and then easy chairs to be covered in solids so they complemented the couches. One of Eunice’s friends was a great decorator, and she helped with suggestions.

What Maria and I shared was the idea that our home had to be comfortable. Neither of us wanted a place that was so decorated that you couldn’t put your feet up and kick back. I saw that she had taste, so I let her do her thing, and she saw that I had taste. It was great to have someone who also had strong opinions and yet be able to work together, rather than work in a vacuum where I’d have to do everything myself and always be guessing, Does she like this? Does she like that? Is this house just a reflection of me? She brought a great foundation of knowledge and was a great partner to work with because we both grew.

Maria loved it when I took her to the antique shows and we looked at the old stuff. My taste had developed over the years, partly from watching Joe Weider collect his antiques, but it was still not refined, and I did not buy above a certain level. It always depended on how much money I had and how much I wanted to spend. I’d never had a piece of furniture custom upholstered; I would just buy what was on the floor or look for a deal. But now that I was on a roll with Conan, I felt I could open my wallet a little more and get pieces covered with the materials Maria liked.

All of this developed without arguments. It became clear that we were good mates and could live together, which was something we’d wanted to test. I had a taste for art, once again in part due to Joe Weider’s influence. To develop my own taste, I went to a lot of museums, auctions, and galleries, and Maria and I enjoyed going to see art together. I started collecting. In the beginning, less expensive works were all I could afford, such as lithographs by Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí. But I quickly moved up to paintings and sculptures.

The idea of getting married came up shortly before I was scheduled to leave for Spain. I wanted Maria to be with me there and be part of my career. Especially after we’d gone through so much together during that summer and fall, it was obvious that she was the ideal woman for me.

I invited Maria to come to the set and hang out with me, or at least come visit for a month at a time. She said that she couldn’t because her mother and dad would disapprove. It would bother them knowing that she was with me on location and spending nights together, because we weren’t married.

“Well, then why don’t we get married?” I said.

But that was even worse. She kind of flipped out about how Eunice would react. “No, no, no,” she said, shaking her head, “I could never go to her with that.”

Eunice had gotten married late—so late that it was part of the family lore. There were a lot of other things she’d wanted to do first. After she graduated from Stanford with a sociology degree during the Second World War, she worked for the State Department helping returned former prisoners of war readjust to civilian life. Then after the war, she worked on juvenile delinquency for the Justice Department as a social worker at a West Virginia federal prison camp for women and at a women’s shelter in Chicago. Sarge, who was movie-star handsome and managed the Chicago Merchandise Mart for Joe Kennedy, fell in love with her in 1946 and courted her for seven years. He had pretty much given up hope when one day she took him into a side chapel after morning Mass and said, “Sarge, I think I’d like to marry you.”

The bottom line was that she didn’t marry until her early thirties and after she’d accomplished a lot. So Maria felt quite comfortable not marrying now when she was twenty-five but rather waiting until thirty at least. There was a lot she wanted to do first.

I was glad to hear that the problem wasn’t with me, it was just that marriage wasn’t in her plans for the time being. Marriage wasn’t necessarily in my plans either at that point, although I wanted to be with her so much that I would have done it. I knew I would miss Maria greatly on the set. On the other hand, this was actually perfect. We could now continue for years without me hearing “Where is this heading? We’ve been going out for four years now, and you still can’t make up your mind …” Or “Am I not good enough? Are you looking for someone else?” Instead, the subject just faded away.

I could go on for hours about what draws me to Maria but still never fully explain the magic. Ronald Reagan famously would sit and write ten-page love letters to his wife, Nancy, while she was sitting just across the room. I used to think, “Why wouldn’t he just tell her?” But then I realized that writing something is different from saying it—and that love stories are built around people’s idiosyncrasies.