Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 15 Becoming American

BACK IN SANTA MONICA, Maria welcomed me home from Madrid and the Hyborian Age by giving me a little Labrador puppy she had named Conan.

“You know why she gave you the dog, don’t you?” one of her friends teased me.

“Because her family is always into dogs?” I said.

“It’s an audition! She wants to see how you’d handle children.”

I didn’t know about that, but Conan and I—that is, Conan the Canine and Conan the Barbarian—got along very well. I was happy to be back in our house, too, which was totally transformed by the décor that Maria and I had started on together.

The other big change during my absence was the January inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Nobody in Hollywood seemed to know what to make of the fact that he was president, not even the conservatives. Just after his election, Maria and I had dinner with friends of mine from the entertainment business who had worked on his campaign.

“Why did you push this guy?” she asked. “He’s not presidential material. Jeez, guys, he’s an actor!”

Instead of defending Reagan, they said things like, “We know, but people like listening to him.” They didn’t talk about what he’d done for California while he was governor or about his vision or his ideas. Probably they were just being polite. They didn’t want to come right out and say in front of Maria that the time for Democrats was over.

I was amazed to see how negative most of the people in Hollywood remained toward Reagan during his presidency. Never mind that he was bringing the economy back; all I heard was criticism of how he’d cut the parks, or cut public employees’ salaries, or thrown out the air traffic controllers, or not done the right thing by the environment, or kissed up to the oil companies, or gotten rid of Jimmy Carter’s synthetic fuel, wind, and solar energy projects. It was always some complaint. There was no sense of the big picture and of what was being accomplished.

What mattered to me was that he represented the values that had brought me to America. I came because the United States was the greatest country with the best opportunities, and now that it was my home, I wanted to keep it that way and make it even better. After the turmoil and gloom of the 1970s, Americans voted for Reagan because he reminded them of their strength. Maria would say, “I don’t know why you are for this guy.” But that was why.

That spring, I met one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century: economist Milton Friedman. The Nobel Prize winner had shaped Reagan’s ideas about free markets and also had a big influence on me. Friedman’s 1980 public television series Free to Choose was a big hit, and I’d watched every installment, soaking up his ideas like a thirsty sponge. He and his wife, Rose, had written a bestselling book, also called Free to Choose, and I’d sent copies to all my friends as a Christmas present. The producer of the TV series, Bob Chitester, somehow heard about that and tracked me down to ask if I’d like to meet the Friedmans, both of whom had retired from their professorships at the University of Chicago. They lived in San Francisco, where Milton was now a fellow at the Hoover Institution think tank on the Stanford University campus.

Getting ready for the evening, I was like a kid going on an exciting field trip. “Where’s my camera?” I asked Maria. “Do I have on a nice enough tie?” Friedman had become one of my heroes. His concept of the roles of governments and markets in human progress was a giant leap beyond the economics I’d studied in school; it explained so much about what I’d seen in the world and experienced for myself as an American entrepreneur. His core argument, of course, was that markets perform more efficiently when government intervention is reduced. Like Reagan, he was wonderful at painting ideas in ways that everyone could understand. He used a pencil, for instance, to argue for the free market:

“The wood came from Washington State, the graphite came from South America, and the rubber came from Malaya—literally thousands of people on three different continents each contributed a few seconds of time to make this pencil. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate? There was no commissar sending out orders from some central office. Because there was demand. When there’s demand for something, markets find a way.”

I used Friedman’s ideas when debating with Sargent Shriver about the price of milk. Sarge was saying, “I remember we campaigned in Wisconsin, and they had so much milk that the price was dropping. And then we went to Illinois, where milk was scarce and the price was going up, so I got on the phone and complained to the regulators …”

I said to him, “Don’t you think the market could have sorted that out? If there was that much need for milk in Illinois, eventually someone would’ve brought it in from Wisconsin or some other state. I think they wanted to keep milk tight so they could jack up the price. They made that conscious decision in the private sector. But you used government power to interfere with supply and demand, and I don’t feel government should do that.”

Much later I learned that when you get in the trenches, pure laissez-faire principles fall short. There’s a gap between the theory and the reality. Just from a public investment standpoint, it makes sense to put taxpayer money into after-school programs if you want to save many dollars down the line on crime and prisons. You can’t put the burden of a disabled child all on the family if the family is poor. There has to be a social safety net. There has to be investment in the public good.

The Friedmans were short, lively people who seemed perfectly in sync. Someone had told me, “Make sure that you talk to Rose. They see each other as equal partners, but too many people talk to him and ignore her because he’s the Nobel Prize winner.” So I was careful to ask Rose as many questions as I asked Milton. That unlocked the conversation. We spent a wonderful evening talking about economics, their lives, the books they’d written together, and their involvement in the TV series. One of the fascinating things Friedman told me was that he’d worked for the government during the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s program in the 1930s for economic recovery and social reform. “There were no other jobs,” he said. “It was a lifesaver.” Even though he was against most regulation, I was impressed to hear that he favored government relief and government jobs during mass unemployment because this could inspire the economy to grow.

As good as Reagan’s administration was for returning coherence to the US economy, I’d have made more money if Jimmy Carter still occupied the White House. Under Carter, real estate was going nuts, with properties appreciating by 10 percent to 20 percent every year. My partner Al Ehringer and I were about to make a killing on our investment in Denver: a whole city block in a blighted area of town down by the railroad tracks. Thanks to President Carter’s programs for dealing with the oil crisis, the energy business in Denver was booming, and a real estate consortium was planning to build a thirty-story tower on our land. We were ready to sign papers when Reagan came in and put the squeeze on inflation. Suddenly people started looking at energy and real estate in a different light. The project fell apart. The developers told us something like, “Economic growth is slowing down, money’s not as available as we thought. Shale oil exploration has stopped. This whole thing’s not going to happen.” Ultimately Coors Field, home of baseball’s Colorado Rockies, was built a block away, and our big payday came. But for many years that Denver property felt a little like the supersonic airport that Franco and I had bet on years back. This kind of volatility was normal in real estate, where you accept higher risks in hopes of higher returns. Reagan did the right thing to tighten credit, but the tightening hit us the wrong way.

The real estate opportunities I found under Reagan were closer to home. Santa Monica’s Main Street had begun to change just as Al and I had hoped, with the alcoholics and vagabonds slowly giving way to pedestrians and little restaurants and shops. Now you’d actually hear people say, “Let’s go to Main Street.” The revitalization hadn’t reached all the way south to the Santa Monica–Venice border, though, where Al and I were sitting on an entire city block of empty lots. It was land from the old Red Car trolley system that in the 1940s used to connect downtown LA, Santa Monica, and Venice Beach. Now it was no-man’s-land. The last building at that end of Main was a bar called the Oar House. Next door stood a health food store run by guys who wore turbans. And across the street were a little synagogue and a boarded-up building that belonged to a famous comedian. The nearby storefronts were all cheap to rent, and several were occupied by odd little religions and sects. There was a Scientology location. It was all really, really run down, with no foot traffic and very few shops. Our plan was to build a beautiful block-long low-rise red-brick building featuring shops at street level and a couple of floors of office space above. We wanted other investors and businesses to say, “Wow, they’re building that far south; maybe we should also.”

It was a big roll of the dice for us: a $7 million, thirty-nine-thousand-square-foot project capitalized with our profits from the office building we’d redeveloped farther up Main Street. In the last year of the Carter administration, we’d sold it for a $1.5 million profit. Al and I figured that we would control the risk by making sure the building was fully leased the day it opened. To do that, we put together a slide show selling the bright future of the neighborhood. We made the presentations ourselves and accomplished our goal.

I had a good feel for the neighborhood because my office was still right there. Oak Productions—a reference to my nickname in bodybuilding, the Austrian Oak—had moved to a corner loft in an old gas company building in Venice, just a block away from Main. It had a big bank of windows, white-painted brick walls, and a high open ceiling with skylights. I had the idea of leaving the ductwork exposed and painting the pipes bright red and blue. My inspiration was the Centre Pompidou, a postmodern cultural center in Paris, and everyone loved it. The office was also decorated in old oak furniture, red carpet, and a blue L-shaped sofa across from my desk, which gave it a very patriotic feel. The partitions were made of glass so that we could all see each other, and a separate area had little wall-mounted cubicles to store T-shirts and booklets for the Arnold mail-order business.

With my business and movie careers expanding, I’d finally broken down and hired more assistants. Ronda was still my mainstay. She’d worked for me since 1974, and now she was in charge of investments and keeping the books. Although she had run a toy store, she had no formal training as a businesswoman, so she took business classes at Santa Monica College and UCLA. I remember a few years later, the first time we got a million-dollar check as part of a real estate deal. She came running into my office holding it and said, “Oh my God, I’ve never held this much money. What am I supposed to do with it? I’m so nervous.”

Anita Lerner, a thirty-year-old assistant who had to learn about travel, took over scheduling and trip planning, while the mail-order business went to an artist in her twenties named Lynn Marks. We’d bring in a fourth assistant to handle special projects such as books, photo permissions, seminars, and bodybuilding events in Columbus in partnership with Jim Lorimer. Mail order still provided a lucrative income stream because of those Ohio events and because stories about me were still a key element of Joe Weider’s magazines. Scarcely an issue of Muscle & Fitness or Flex appeared without at least one picture of me, attached to an Arnold retrospective, or an essay under my byline about training or nutrition, or a report on my adventures in the movie world. Every mention helped sell more Arnold courses and T-shirts.

Sales of my books, meanwhile, were going great guns; I had a mainstream publisher and a literary agent taking care of those. We were just putting the finishing touches on the Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding, a huge project I’d been working on for three years with photographer Bill Dobbins. To cash in on the fitness craze touched off by Jane Fonda’s exercise videos, I also did my own video, Shape Up with Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well as updated editions of my books Arnold’s Bodyshaping for Women and Arnold’s Bodybuilding for Men. All this involved my going out on more promotional tours, which I didn’t mind a bit.

We all had new things coming our way. Lynn might point out, for example, “We’re getting an enormous amount of mail from people who want a lifting belt like you wore in Pumping Iron.”

“Let’s add that,” I’d say. So then we’d all team up to create the product. You couldn’t buy the belts ready-made, or there would be no profit. So where would we get the leather? We’d need to commission a manufacturer. And what about the buckle? How would we make the belt look aged and spotted with sweat so that it seemed authentic? We all started calling our contacts and calling companies and found all the elements. Within a couple of days, we’d have it figured out. Then the next question would be, How do we package the belts? How do we deliver them fast and cheap?

I was pushing all the time, and from the perspectives of Ronda, Anita, and Lynn, the work could be incredibly hectic. We were juggling projects in movies, in real estate, in bodybuilding. I was flying around constantly, schmoozing with people from all walks of life. Everything just nonstop. But they were not average workers with a punch-the-clock mentality. They became like members of my family. They looked out for one another and saw me as a challenge. They would accelerate to my speed, and when I sped up, they sped up.

Fostering this atmosphere didn’t require extraordinary effort or management genius. For starters, all three were warm, wonderful people. I paid them fairly and drew on my Austrian upbringing to make myself a good employer. A pension plan and great medical insurance were automatic—nobody had to ask for that. And I paid fourteen months of salary per year rather than twelve—the thirteenth month was your summer vacation pay, and the fourteenth was your holiday bonus so that you could take care of your family at Christmas. That was the tradition in Austria, and my office was not on a tight budget, so I could afford it.

My other technique was to make them feel included. They were learning on the job just like I was. When I was in the office, we would analyze all the stuff that was happening to me. The women would sit around, and each would give her point of view. Even if I didn’t agree, I’d take it in. The funny thing was, they were all liberal Democrats. Even as we added more people, it was rare to find another Republican besides me in the office for many years.

To me the work didn’t feel intense at all—just normal. You do a movie or a book, you promote the hell out of it, you travel around the world because the world is your marketplace, and in the meantime, you work out and take care of business and explore even more. It was all a joyride, which is why I never thought, “Oh my God, look how much work there is. It’s so much pressure.”

When I had to work at night, it might mean going to a meeting to talk about movies. How bad was that? I was talking about movies! Or some business guys would ask me to fly to Washington. That was great too—always the laughs and the stogies. I’d get to see Ronald Reagan give a speech. Then at midnight, we’d all go to adult shops and look at the latest of the latest. Seeing the other side of some of these straitlaced conservative guys was pretty funny.

So for me work just meant discovery and fun. If I heard somebody complaining, “Oh, I work so hard, I put in ten- and twelve-hour days,” I would crucify him. “What the fuck are you talking about, when the day is twenty-four hours? What else did you do?”

I loved the variety in my life. One day I’d be in a meeting about developing an office building or a shopping center, trying to maximize the space. What would we need to get the permits? What were the politics of the project?

The next day I’d be talking to the publisher of my latest book about what photos needed to be in it. Next I’d be working with Joe Weider on a cover story. Then I’d be in meetings about a movie. Or I’d be in Austria talking politics with Fredi Gerstl and his friends.

Everything I did could have been my hobby. It was my hobby, in a way. I was passionate about all of it. My definition of living is to have excitement always; that’s the difference between living and existing. Later, when I learned about the Terminator, I loved the idea that he was a machine that never had to sleep. I said to myself, “Imagine what an advantage that would be to have those extra six hours every day for something else? Imagine, you could study a whole new profession. You could learn an instrument.” That would be unbelievable, because for me the question was always how to fit in all the stuff I want to do.

Therefore, I seldom saw my life as hectic. The thought rarely even crossed my mind. Only later, as Maria and I went from being boyfriend and girlfriend to being engaged and then married, did I pay any attention to balancing my work and my home life.

When I wanted to know more about business and politics, I used the same approach I did when I wanted to learn about acting: I got to know as many people as I could who were really good at it. One place to find them was the Regency Club, a newly opened retreat for LA’s business elite. It occupied the top floor and penthouse of a new high-rise on Wilshire Boulevard, with sweeping views of the whole LA Basin. Both the building and the club belonged to David Murdock, one of the city’s richest men. His life was another of those great American rags-to-riches stories. David was an Ohio-born high school dropout who, after serving in World War II, turned a $1,200 loan into a fortune in Arizona and California real estate. Now he owned huge stakes in International Mining, and Occidental Petroleum, as well as real estate and hotels, and was a collector of animals, orchids, fine furniture, and chandeliers. His wife, Gabrielle, an interior designer who was born and raised in Munich, decorated the new club in a formal, elegant, Old World style. That reinforced the tone: very proper, very genteel. You couldn’t go there without a tie.

Pete Wilson, who won his US Senate seat during the months that I was promoting Conan the Barbarian, later hung out there with his whole team. So did George Deukmejian, who’d won the governorship by edging out Democrat Tom Bradley in the same 1982 election. Heavy hitters from the Reagan administration who were passing through town would stop to have dinner and spend time at the Regency. A lot of conservative businesspeople were regulars, and so were some liberal Hollywood agents and show business executives. I started going there to attend events for Wilson, supporting his successful bid to succeed Deukmejian in 1990. Gradually I expanded my circle of friends.

Guido’s restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard was another good place to make business connections and soak up ideas. Likewise, if you wanted to hang out with actors, there was the 72 Market Street eatery in Venice, or the Rock Store in Malibu Canyon if you wanted bikers. I took Maria to the Regency several times; even though she liked Gabrielle’s décor, the conservative crowd and the gentility put her off. I was not really into the formality either, but you just had to be disciplined and embrace it. I felt like there was no reason I shouldn’t be able to play both sides: my very outrageous side, wearing motorcycle boots and leather, and my conservative side, with the elegant suit and tie and British wing-tip shoes. I wanted to feel comfortable in both worlds.

Maria and I circulated in the liberal community too. In fact, it was at Jane Fonda’s invitation that I first connected with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, at a benefit where Jane had agreed to appear as a celebrity and recruit guests. Maria and I were friendly with her and her then husband, activist and California assemblyman Tom Hayden. They invited us to their house several times to meet political or religious leaders, including Bishop Desmond Tutu. On the night of the benefit, Jane introduced me to Marvin Hier, a rabbi from New York who had moved to LA to found the Simon Wiesenthal Center there in 1978. His goal was to combat anti-Semitism and promote religious and racial tolerance. You’d think that in a town with as many powerful Jewish people as Hollywood, he’d have had an easy time. But he was struggling, he told me. “If you’re at all into this, I would appreciate your help,” he said. “You’re a rising star; people will pay attention to you in the future. We’ve had a difficult time getting Hollywood people involved, beyond just buying a seat or a table at a benefit. We need people coming in and joining our board and donating a million dollars, or three million, and holding fund-raisers. That’s where the big money is, and we need it because we’re trying to build a Museum of Tolerance, which will cost fifty-seven million dollars.”

“I’m not at that level,” I warned. But the idea of building a museum made sense to me. If you want to promote fitness and fight obesity, you need gyms; if you want to feed people, you need grocery stores. So if you want to fight prejudice, you have to have tolerance centers everywhere, places where kids can go and learn the history of what happens when people are prejudiced and hate one another.

The more I learned of his mission, the more I felt it was my responsibility to get involved. I’m not a religious person, but I said to myself, “This can only be God’s doing.” Jewish people had played such key roles in my life: Fredi Gerstl, Artie Zeller, Joe and Ben Weider, Joe Gold, my new film agent Lou Pitt. And yet, I wasn’t even sure that I was free from prejudice myself. I’d made prejudiced comments, I’d said stupid things. This was almost like God telling me, “If that’s the way you want to be, then I’m going to put you right here, where the dialogue of tolerance begins, and you’re going to raise funds for them, and you’re going to fight for them, and you’re going to battle against that side of yourself that may or may not be there.” I donated regularly to the center after that and took part in many fund-raising events. The museum, housed in a magnificent building, opened in 1993.

Though I made no secret of my support for Reagan and gave what I could to Republican candidates and causes, I stayed off the political stage. My movie career was my focus. When you promote a movie, you want to win over everybody, and if you give political speeches, you are bound to turn off some percentage of viewers no matter what you say. Why do that?

Besides, I wasn’t famous enough yet for very many people to be interested in my views or for politicians to seek my endorsement. I wasn’t even an American citizen yet! I had my green card, paid my taxes, and considered the United States my permanent home, but I couldn’t vote. I put stickers on my car for the candidates I supported, but I gave no speeches.

I kept quiet about politics when I visited Austria, too. The media there lionized me as a native son made good, and I never wanted to be perceived as some wise guy coming back and telling people what to do. Once or twice a year, when I visited, I’d hang out with my friends and catch up on the latest political debates and developments. My political mentor Fredi Gerstl had become a member of the Graz city council and was an increasingly influential voice in the conservative People’s Party nationally. I found it enlightening to talk with him about how the American and Austrian systems compared: private ownership versus public ownership of industries; representative democracy versus parliamentary government; private funding versus public finance. Fredi gave me an inside view of the political maneuvering in Austria on key issues, such as the push to privatize the transportation systems, as well as the tobacco, steel, and insurance industries, and the fight against the resurgent extreme right wing.

Fredi also introduced me to Josef Krainer Jr., who won the governorship of the state of Styria in 1980. He was a little younger than Fredi, and his whole life had been in politics. His father, Josef Sr., had been the governor of Styria throughout my boyhood—a national figure who’d won election after spending all of World War II in prison because of his opposition to the Anschluss: the occupation and annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938. Josef Jr. had studied in Italy and America, and his beliefs were an interesting blend of economic conservatism and environmental advocacy that I found very appealing. Another good friend of mine was Thomas Klestil, a fast-rising diplomat who’d been the consul general in LA when I first arrived. He was now Austria’s ambassador to the US and was destined within a few years to become Austria’s president, succeeding Kurt Waldheim.

Ties like these made me reluctant to renounce my Austrian citizenship in 1979, when I became eligible to apply in the United States. (I’d had my green card for the required minimum of five years.) I never like to cut things from my life, I only add. So dual citizenship would be ideal. But while it was permitted in America, Austrian law said I had to choose—I couldn’t have it both ways. The rare exceptions were typically for distinguished diplomats, and the decision had to be made by the governor of an Austrian state. I asked Fredi what I should do. He told me that with Josef Krainer Jr. about to run for governor, I’d be wise just to wait. Three years later, I was deeply honored when Josef granted me the exception. I celebrated by taking Maria to dinner at 72 Market Street and applied for my American citizenship immediately.

After another year, it was granted. On September 16, 1983, I stood proudly among two thousand other immigrants in the Shrine Auditorium across from the University of Southern California campus and swore my allegiance to the United States. I’d felt like an American from the time I was ten years old, but now it was becoming real. Raising my hand and repeating the oath gave me a chill, and I felt goose bumps all over my body. Afterward, photographers tracked me down and took pictures of me showing off my naturalization certificate, with Maria beside me, both of us grinning. I told the reporters, “I always believed in shooting for the top, and to become an American is like becoming a member of the winning team.”

At home we had a party for our friends. I put on an American flag shirt and an American flag hat and I couldn’t stop smiling with the joy of being officially an American at last. It meant that I could vote, and I could travel with an American passport. I could even run for office someday.