Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 18 Comic Timing

I LOVED BEING AN action hero, and with my body and background, it was a natural for me. But you can’t spend your whole life running around blowing things up. I’d dreamed of doing comedy for years.

I’ve always believed that everything in life has a funny side. It was funny to be posing all oiled up in little skinny briefs in front of all these people, trying to be the world’s most muscular man. It was funny getting paid millions of dollars to fight a predator from outer space. It was funny going through Lamaze classes trying to pretend that pregnancy is a team effort. I saw great humor in Maria and me coming from totally opposite upbringings. I laughed about my accent, and I loved Saturday Night Live’s Hans and Franz characters takeoff on me. I’d always been the perfect target for jokes; there was so much material to work with. Being Austrian, marrying Maria, being Republican, the accent. With all this going for you, you need a sense of humor so you can join the fun.

In 1985, the year after The Terminator became a hit, I was at a dinner in Denver on the eve of the Carousel Ball, a famous charity extravaganza organized by Marvin and Barbara Davis. Marvin, who was then the owner of Fox Studios, where I was making Commando, was known for his sense of humor. He and Barbara were seated with a bunch of comedians who were due to perform at the gala, including Lucille Ball and her husband, Gary Morton. I was at the next table with the Davises’ son, John, and the younger crowd. There was a lot of laughing at Marvin’s and Barbara’s table, and the jokes were starting to fly thick and fast. I heard Marvin call out, “Hey, Arnold, come over here. Why don’t you tell us a joke?” That was typical Marvin, I later learned. But I was speechless. I didn’t have a joke prepared. I didn’t even know what kind of jokes to make at such an event.

All I could say was, “Give me a little bit of warm-up time here. Maybe tomorrow I tell you,” or something like that.

But Lucille Ball jumped right in. “He’s very funny. You don’t have to worry about him,” she said. “I worked with him.” So she covered for me, and then Gary Morton interrupted with a joke, and then Milton Berle went off on a routine about what would Gary Morton be without Lucille Ball. I was saved, but it was a perfect example of how important it is to be prepared for such moments.

I’d met Milton Berle at the West Coast engagement party for Maria and me in 1985. Berle’s wife, Ruth, and Maria knew each other from the Share Girls, a charity group that Maria joined when she moved to LA; it included Johnny Carson’s wife, Dean Martin’s wife, Sammy Davis Jr.’s wife, and so on, and we called it the rich broads’ foundation. There was a great history between the Berles and the Kennedys because Milton had been a big fan of JFK. They’d hung out together, and Milton had given JFK a humidor that eventually sold at the Kennedy auction for $520,000 to Marvin Shanken, the publisher-editor of Cigar Aficionado magazine. Milton gave me one just like it, one of only three he ever gave away.

So Maria and Ruth became good friends, and Ruth brought Milton to our engagement party. The first thing he did was walk up to some guy I didn’t know and shake his hand. He said, “It’s so nice to be here today at this engagement party. Maria is marrying Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Arnold, this is great, thank you so much for inviting me.”

I totally fell for it. I said, “I am over here!” What a stupid trick, but people were laughing, and that broke the ice, and then he did a whole routine. “Ruthie, my wife,” he said. “Look at her lips. The last time I saw lips like that, it had a hook through it.”

Ruthie, who was sitting next to Maria, said to her, “Oh God, that joke. I’ve heard it a thousand times.”

Berle sat down with us afterward, and we had a great time. Finally, he said, “Let’s get together.”

“Absolutely!” I said.

We met at Caffé Roma in Beverly Hills, and it became our place. We always had lunch there, and I’d hang out with him and his friends like Sid Caesar and Rodney Dangerfield, and Milt Rosen, who wrote a lot of the jokes. Or I would go to his house, where we’d smoke stogies while I asked him a thousand questions about comedy.

Berle was the president of the Friars Club of Beverly Hills, which he founded in 1947 with other comedians like Jimmy Durante and George Jessel. It was on a side street between Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards, in a white building that resembled a bunker from the outside but inside was a private restaurant and nightclub. I would go every month or two for a lunch or a dinner or some event. The Friars had good boxing matches and was famous for celebrity roasts. But Milton was almost eighty, and it was very clear that the club was outdated.

He and his buddies had such a strong lock on it that new comedians weren’t joining. Guys like Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Danny DeVito, and Robin Williams would visit, and you would see them getting frustrated and thinking, “Who are these old farts? I can make jokes that will blow everyone away.”

But I was not a comedian, so I was not putting myself on that level. What’s more, I grew up in a culture where you respect the elders. To me, someone as accomplished as Berle ought to be honored and complimented and pumped up because maybe he didn’t have much going on anymore. It must have been weird to be Milton Berle, and, after becoming a legend as “Mr. Television” and then being a big star in Las Vegas and on Broadway, all of a sudden your only identity is the Friars Club. No matter where he was, Milton tried to steal the show because he still had that craving for attention, which was why he’d become a comedian.

I discovered that all these comedy legends could have a normal conversation, but not often. They would talk about everyday stuff if we were hanging out at Caffé Roma, but then Robin Williams would come by, or Rodney Dangerfield in his Bermuda shorts, and that would stir things up. If you went with that same bunch to an event where there was any kind of audience, the madness never stopped: joke upon joke and attack upon attack, with everyone going after everybody else. But the funniest thing was that a lot of the comedians brought their wives, who were normal-looking hausfraus. They would roll their eyes at the jokes. You could almost hear them say, “Here we go again. Oh God.” In fact, sometimes you did hear one of them say, “Aw, come on, how many more times are you going to use that one?” That was the worst. The old comedians just hated it.

The Friars Club guys didn’t see me as a comedian. They liked me as a person and liked my movies, and they felt that I had some talent for jokes with certain safe material that was not too complicated. They also knew I respected them and admired their talent. That was fine. You have to figure out your potential. So let’s say on a scale of 1 to 10, with Milton Berle a 10, my potential is a 5. In comedy his potential was much greater than mine, obviously, but maybe not in something else. It’s hard to imagine Milton Berle as an action hero.

But the trick is how do you reach 100 percent of your potential? It was the right time in my career to expand into comedy and throw everything off a little bit. But I also knew comedy was a tricky thing to get involved with. Particularly for me as a European, because I didn’t have an American sense of humor, and my timing and delivery of lines tended to be a little cockeyed. So meeting these guys and being included in their world gave me a chance to understand it better. I discovered that I really like being around people who are funny and who write comedy and who are always looking to say things in a unique way—though I had to get used to Milton wisecracking that I had bigger tits than my girlfriend.

He became my comedy mentor. He used to encourage me by saying, “You being funny with your accent is twice as big a deal as me being funny. They expect me to be funny!” He taught me a lot about how to deliver jokes, how to play down the humor and not stress the punch line too much. I would ask how to pick jokes to lighten up a serious situation and tie them in so the humor seems organic. I learned how if you’re doing standup, nothing has to tie together at all. First, you make a few jokes about whatever’s in the news, like Jay Leno does. Then you pick some people in the audience and work them over, and you make sure to throw in some jokes on yourself to take the curse off the fact that you’re making fun of other people.

Often Milton would coach me on timing. “You get a lot of awards when you’re a star, and lots of them are irrelevant,” he said. “But you still have to give an acceptance speech. So here’s what you do. You say, ‘I’ve gotten many awards, but this one … for me …’ —and you have to get emotional here and make like you’re choking up—‘this one … for me … is the most … recent!’ See? You show the emotion so you get the audience going the other way.”

Berle wrote his own jokes—The Milton Berle Show was the biggest and longest-running program on TV in the early days—but he was also famous for stealing from everybody else. Jack Benny once got accused of stealing a joke from Berle, and he said, “When you take a joke away from Milton Berle, it’s not stealing, it’s repossessing.”

His biggest frustration with me was the way I always went over the top. He was helping me get ready once for a roast that he couldn’t attend. On that occasion, I was the person to be roasted, and Milton was giving me jokes to use when my turn came to respond to the other speakers. “Don’t burn, just singe,” he said, reminding me of this old rule about roasts. I didn’t pay much attention. One of the jokes he gave me was about comedian Henny (“Take my wife—please!”) Youngman: “Henny has a weight problem. But it’s not really a weight problem, it’s just water retention. He is retaining Lake Mead.”

On the night of the roast, during my turn to speak, I gestured toward Henny and said, “Look at this fat pig. But he’s not really fat. He has a water retention problem …”

Milton’s friends from the Friars Club knew he’d been coaching me, and the next day they called him up yelling, “How could you tell Arnold to call Henny a fat pig!” Milton said I should call the club members who were offended and apologize. “I thought by going beyond what was written on the card, it would be funnier,” I told them. “But I know it was against the rules, and I’m sorry.”

When I see a great performer, I always start to dream. Wouldn’t it be cool to be a rock ’n’ roll star like Bruce Springsteen? Wouldn’t it be cool to give a speech to the applause of one hundred thousand people like Ronald Reagan? Wouldn’t it be cool to do a hilarious half-hour standup routine like Eddie Murphy? Maybe it’s the Leo in me, the perpetual performer who always wants to be the center of attention.

So with Milton Berle, I was saying to myself, “Maybe I will never get to his level, but if I can learn just a little bit of what he knows …” How many times in life do you have to give a toast? How many times do you have to give a speech for some worthy cause like physical fitness? Or appear at a press conference at some movie festival?

With action movies, the problem is compounded. Fifty percent of the critics will automatically say, “I hate action movies. I like love stories. I like movies you can take the family to see. This guy just kills people, and kids watch it, and then they go out on the street and kill people.” Starting with something disarming and funny is a good way to stand out. You become more likable, and people receive your information much better.

Whenever I watched a comedy, whether it was Animal House or Ghostbusters or Blazing Saddles, I always thought, “I could have done that!” But nobody was going to hire me for that kind of part, and it made no sense to dig in my heels and insist, “My next movie has to be a comedy.” I hadn’t gone all the way with action movies. If I was going to branch into comedies anytime soon, I would need someone to be my cheerleader.

That problem resolved itself at a ski lodge in Snowmass Village, Colorado, outside of Aspen, in late 1986. Maria and I found ourselves hanging out by the fireplace one evening with Ivan Reitman and Robin Williams and their wives. Robin and I were having a good time trading funny stories about skiing and who in Aspen was sleeping with whom. Ivan was the master. He had produced Animal House and produced and directed Ghostbusters and Legal Eagles, and I wanted to work with him really badly, so I was using all the joke-telling skills I’d learned from Milton Berle. It worked. By the end of the evening, Ivan was looking at me thoughtfully.

“You know,” he said, “there’s a certain innocence about you that I’ve never seen come through on the screen, and a certain sense of humor. I think Hollywood wants to keep you pigeonholed as the action hero, but it could be quite attractive to see you play a strong guy with that innocence.”

After we came back from Aspen, I called Ivan and suggested that we develop something together. He agreed. He asked some writers to come up with five ideas for me and gave me all five: two-page memos that each sketched a character and a story. We eliminated four very quickly, but the fifth—about mismatched twins who are the product of a scientific experiment to breed the ideal human—seemed great. Julius Benedict, the Arnold character, who gets all the good genes, is virtually perfect but naïve. He goes in search of his brother, Vincent, a smalltime crook, with comical results. We agreed that the title, The Experiment, didn’t work, given my Germanic background, so the project was renamed Twins. From that point, everyone fell in love with the concept.

I cooked up the idea of casting Danny DeVito as Vincent, because I’d run into Danny’s agent and thought it would be very funny to have the twins look so different physically. Everyone liked that idea. They talked to Danny. He loved the idea, although right away he had reservations. “Okay, it’s a great sight gag, Arnold and me as twins,” he said. “Now how do we sustain that?” Danny liked to have things nailed down. And that is how the project began.

Ivan, Danny, and I made an interesting team. Ivan’s mother was a survivor of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, and his dad had been a resistance fighter; they emigrated from Czechoslovakia after the war. Like many children of Holocaust survivors, Ivan has incredible drive, and he’s combined this with his wonderful talent for directing and producing comedy. Danny turned out to be hilarious to work with, and in spite of his huge successes on TV and in movies, he’s the opposite of a crazy Hollywood personality. He drives normal cars and has a great family and lives a normal life. And he’s extremely well organized financially.

Being realistic and levelheaded about business enabled the three of us to add a little chapter to Hollywood business history. We knew that selling Twins in the usual way would be difficult. In theory, the studios would love the idea: you just had to picture me and Danny DeVito next to each other on a movie poster. But in reality, what we were proposing was an offbeat picture by three expensive guys. If each of us got paid his going rate, the budget would be so top-heavy that we thought no studio would touch it. And yet none of us wanted to take a pay cut because working for less can hurt your negotiating power in future deals.

So when we pitched Tom Pollock, the head of Universal, we proposed to make Twins for no salary at all. Zero. “I can guarantee it will be a hit, because of Ivan and Danny here,” I told him. “But I understand that you see me as an action guy. I’ve never done comedy, and I’m an unknown quantity. Why should you have to take the risk? So don’t pay us anything until we prove we’re worthy.” What we wanted in exchange was a piece of the movie: a percentage of the box-office receipts, video sales and rentals, airline showings, and so on. Hollywood calls this the back end.

Tom was so convinced that the movie was going to be a hit that he said, “I’d rather give you the cash.” But by this time, Ivan, Danny, and I had really gotten attached to our idea. “We don’t want cash,” we said. “None of us is short of cash. Let’s all share the risk here.”

The deal we ended up with guaranteed the three of us 37.5 percent of all the income for the movie. And that 37.5 percent was real, not subject to all the watering-down and bullshit tricks that movie accounting is famous for. We divvied up the 37.5 percent among ourselves proportionally based on what each of us had earned on his previous movie. Because I’d been paid a lot for The Running Man, I ended up with the biggest slice, almost 20 percent. It made the math simple: if Twins was a decent-sized success and made, say, $50 million, it would put almost $10 million in my pocket.

Tom Pollock knew full well how rich these terms could turn out to be. But he didn’t want us to go to another studio and get offered more. Besides, if we made money, Universal would make plenty of money too. He had a great sense of humor about it. We were in his office, and after we agreed, he stood up and theatrically turned his pants pockets inside out. “Okay,” he said. “Now I’m going to bend over. Go ahead. You can steal everything from me and fuck me!” It became one of those legendary lines from a studio executive. We all laughed. Then he said, “I think it’s a good deal. Let’s do it.”

I’d never realized that moviemaking could be so much fun when you’re not covered in freezing jungle mud or getting beaten around by mechanical snakes. We shot Twins in Los Angeles, New Mexico, and Oregon in the early months of 1988. I got to do things on camera that I’d never done before. I got to waltz. I got to sing. I got to play a thirty-five-year-old virgin getting seduced by a beautiful girl (played by Kelly Preston, John Travolta’s wife, who was a joy to work with). I got in touch with what Ivan called the innocent side of me.

Danny DeVito was the Milton Berle of comic acting. He never tried to throw in funny lines, never depended on a joke to create humor—that doesn’t work on camera. Instead, he depended on the circumstances to create the humor. He was so smart in the way that he used his voice and eyes, and the way he threw his body around. He knew exactly what worked for him, what people love about him, what would sell. He knew exactly how far he could take the dialogue, and for all of us, there was a constant back-and-forth with the writers as we fine-tuned scenes and lines. And as a partner on the set, Danny was great! He smoked stogies. He made pasta for us once and sometimes twice a week. He made the good espresso, and he was always ready with the Sambuca and the good after-dinner or after-lunch drinks.

The chemistry between us worked really well right from the start. As shady Vincent, he was always trying to play me like putty. He’d conned a lot of people, and now he was going to con me. And I, as Julius, was an easy mark but at the same time smart enough to figure out the situation and do something about it. I just had to play my character exactly the way it was written: naïve, strong, smart, educated, sensitive, able to speak a dozen languages.

Compared to being an action hero, it was a lot easier to be a comic star. The rehearsals were all about changing the rhythm of my persona. I had to get rid of the stern looks, the hard lines, the commanding, machinelike talk. No more of that Terminator slow monotone. I had to throw out everything I’d learned in action films to telegraph leadership and command. Instead, I had to soften everything. I had to say the words more gently, roll them together, and combine them with gentler looks and smoother turns of the head. There’s a scene early in the movie where a bad guy on a motorcycle zooms up from behind Julius and tries to snatch his suitcase. But Julius doesn’t let go, and the guy wipes out. I had to do that scene without any show of anger or effort—to Julius, it’s just common sense to hold on to his suitcase, and he’s born with such tremendous strength that it’s no effort at all. I’m not trying to make the guy crash. As a matter of fact, I’m worried that he’s hurt and try to help him!

The comedy was there. We knew we had a winner. The idea of opposite twins worked perfectly, and there was always laughter on the set. Every evening when we watched the dailies, cast and crew who had seen us do four, five, or six takes of a scene would still laugh when they saw it on the screen. At first we shot in LA, and then we moved to the desert near Santa Fe, New Mexico.

No matter where we went, people would visit because word spread that it was a happy set. Clint Eastwood dropped by on the day we shot the scene where I sing. Julius is on an airliner listening to rock ’n’ roll on headphones for the first time in his life. He starts singing along to a 1950s hit by the Coasters, “Yakety Yak,” without realizing that all the other passengers can hear. It was my movie singing debut, and let’s just say that I’m no Frank Sinatra. Afterward, Clint said, tongue in cheek, “I didn’t realize you had such talent.” The only time I sing in real life is at the end of a party when I want the guests to leave.

One of the running jokes on the set was, “Never ask Arnold about politics.” Not that I’d get upset, but if you asked me, I’d fill your ear with sales talk about Vice President George H. W. Bush. It was presidential primary season, and he was battling Senator Bob Dole of Kansas and evangelist Pat Robertson for the Republican nomination to succeed Ronald Reagan. The other cast members of Twins were all Democrats, and the joke was that if I started talking, they’d get upset with me, which would threaten the sunny mood.

Something did happen during the time we were filming Twins that dampened my sunny mood, although it had nothing to do with either the movie or US politics. In February the News of the World, a London tabloid, ran a front-page story about me headlined “Hollywood Star’s Nazi Secret.”

The story attacked me, but the focus was my father. It claimed that he’d been a Nazi and a member of the SS, and that he’d rounded up homosexuals and Jews for the concentration camps. It called me “a secret admirer” of Hitler and claimed that I took part in the neo-Nazi movement and held “fervent Nazi and anti-Semitic views.”

Normally I would just blow off criticisms, but I’d never been libeled about something so serious. I knew I would have to respond. My first move after talking to lawyers and publicists was to call the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, whom I’d met before in Aspen. He listened as I explained that the story was false. “I would appreciate it if you don’t print it in America,” I said. “And I would appreciate it if the paper would publish an apology and say that it was a mistake, they got the wrong information. That’ll be the end of it. Mistakes can be made.”

“Well,” said Murdoch, “my guys over there tell me that they did a very thorough investigation. And if it is true, then I don’t think anyone should apologize. But in the meantime, I can promise you that I won’t print it here.”

“I’m not blaming you for every story in all your papers and outlets,” I emphasized. “But I want to bring to your attention that this is an injustice. Please look into it.” Rupert was as good as his word; he never did publish the story in his US publications or report it on his new Fox TV network. But nothing else happened. And while my lawyers sent a formal letter demanding a retraction and prepared to sue, other journalists started asking for my response.

I was in a very uncomfortable position. I knew that what the story said about me was false, but what about the accusations against my father? I thought they must be wrong, but what did I really know? There had been so little conversation at home about the Second World War. I truly had no idea.

So I decided to call my friend Rabbi Marvin Hier at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “I need your help,” I told him. “I know you have a system for tracking down war crimes. Could you check out my father’s war record? I want to know, Was he a Nazi? And second, did he belong to the SS? What was he in charge of during the war? Did he commit any war crimes—actively or passively? Did he do any of those things?”

“Arnold,” the rabbi said, “within a week or two I’ll have everything, because we have access to all the papers.” He called his people in Germany and maybe even the great Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal himself in Vienna, whom I met later. After three or four weeks, he came back with the information. He said, “Your father had the Nazi party membership card, but there is no evidence of any killing or war crimes on your father’s part, against homosexuals or Jews or anyone else.

“He was a sergeant, not in a position to order such acts without the authority of an officer. There is no indication that there was such an order given.”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center sent that information officially so that it could be used in court.

As for the News of the World’s allegations against me, Simon Wiesenthal himself wrote a letter to the court stating that there was no evidence whatsoever to back them up. Having those statements, together with the tabloid’s inability to produce facts to support its story, made it clear that its sources were unreliable. It took many months in court, but the tabloid eventually published a total retraction and paid substantial damages in an out-of-court settlement. The money went to the Special Olympics in Great Britain.

The Twins shoot wrapped just before Easter 1988, in the middle of the presidential primary season. Vice President Bush had been fighting hard battles. Even though he had Reagan’s endorsement, he lost some of the early primaries to Bob Dole. That’s because many people regarded Bush as Reagan’s shadow: what Austrians would call his Waschlappen, or dishrag. I knew the vice president from my visits to the White House. He was always very gracious, a real mensch, and he had his act together because of the important positions he had held previously, such as UN ambassador and director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Contrary to the Democrats’ spin on him, he had tremendous strength of character and will. But of course political campaigns are unfair. You look for vulnerability in your opponent; some flaw that you can make stick. The Democrats knew very well that Bush was fulfilling his office just as the Constitution meant the vice president to do: by supporting the president and standing ready to step in and lead if necessary. But they gained ground at the start by calling him weak. Bush battled back, and by the time we finished shooting, he’d dominated the primaries on Super Tuesday and had the nomination sewed up.

I followed the presidential campaigns that year with great interest and accepted happily when I was invited to take part in the Republican National Convention in New Orleans in August. My assignment was to add celebrity power to one of the “caucus teams” of Reagan administration officials and Bush supporters whose job it was to glad-hand the state delegations and chat them up on key issues.

I’d been to Republican conventions before, but this was the first since I’d married a Shriver. Maria and I believed that we should continue as we always had: she would go to the Democratic convention and to gatherings for all the things she believed in, and she would cover Republicans as a journalist, and I would keep going to the Republican convention. But we needed to be careful to avoid unnecessary controversy. Everything went well in New Orleans until my friend and trapshooting buddy Tony Makris, the PR guru of the National Rifle Association, mentioned that the NRA was holding a brunch in honor of Texas Senator Phil Gramm—would I like to stop by? I’d gotten to know Gramm well by then. When I showed up the next morning, other celebrities were there also, but the reporters converged on me. The Kennedys, having endured two tragic political assassinations, were very antigun, so what was I doing at an NRA reception? I hadn’t even thought about it. If I had, I would have been sensitive enough not to attend this NRA event. They also asked, as a Kennedy by marriage, was I supporting the NRA? What was my position on automatic weapons? Saturday night specials? Sniper rifles? Cop-killing bullets? I didn’t know how to respond. I belonged to the NRA because I believed in the constitutional right to bear arms, but I hadn’t thought through all those issues and details. There was even a question about my very presence at the 1988 Republican National Convention: was it some kind of statement in defiance of the Kennedy family? The truth was that none of the Kennedys cared, particularly not Sargent or Eunice, who depended on support from both parties for their programs and had Republican lawmakers over to their house. But I realized that the NRA was a bigger issue, and I left the brunch before the speakers even began. I was just dropping by, and I didn’t want my presence there to become the story. I’d come to the convention to support George Bush, and I wanted them to write about that rather than guns.

I needed to regroup. The swarm of attention and publicity surrounding Maria’s family was something I was still getting used to. This was the first time I’d really felt its sting. It was a blessing and a distraction, much more intense than what usually comes with stardom. I attended the rest of the Republican convention but skipped the meetings of my caucus group with the individual state delegations.

The contest that autumn between George Bush and the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, boiled down to the whether or not Americans approved of the course that Reagan had set. Just before the election, the vice president himself invited me to campaign with him and introduce him at some rallies. By now Bush had a decisive lead over Dukakis in the polls—something like 55 percent to 38 percent, with 4 percent undecided—so my job was just to help attract crowds and maintain the momentum. But I leaped at the chance; I wasn’t going to turn down a trip in Air Force Two!

We hit Ohio, Illinois, and New Jersey a few days before the election. Peggy Noonan was on the plane to help out during the closing days of the campaign. She was the brilliant speechwriter who’d written many of Reagan’s great speeches. She’d also written the powerful acceptance speech Bush delivered in New Orleans. I loved the passage where Bush talked about who should succeed President Reagan: “In 1940, when I was barely more than a boy, Franklin Roosevelt said we shouldn’t change horses in midstream. My friends, these days the world moves even more quickly, and now, after two great terms, a switch will be made. But when you have to change horses in midstream, doesn’t it make sense to switch to one who’s going the same way?” That was also the speech where Bush told voters, “Read my lips. No new taxes”—a promise that hurt him later, but still a very powerful line. The day after that speech, he shot up in the polls. He’d shown leadership. He appeared determined. It was clear in America that this was our next president.

Our starting point was Columbus, where my friend and business partner Jim Lorimer organized a rally of five thousand people in the big plaza next to the headquarters of his company, Nationwide Insurance. It was a perfect day for speeches, sunny and cool, and the company let out its employees to help make sure that the plaza was full. Peggy Noonan had scripted me, as well as the vice president. You could tell she had fun playing off my action-hero persona. I introduced him as “the real American hero.” I told the crowd, “I am a patriotic American. I saw Ronald Reagan and George Bush take an economy that looked like Pee-wee Herman and make it look like Superman.” And I dissed Governor Dukakis with a line that got picked up in all the media: “I only play the Terminator in my movies. But let me tell you, when it comes to the American future, Michael Dukakis will be the real terminator.” Bush loved my speech and christened me Conan the Republican.

Aboard Air Force Two, we relaxed and kicked back as we flew from stop to stop. We talked about the campaign, about his speeches, about whether he ever lost track of what city he was going to, and how he liked campaigning. Bush had a very casual approach to the campaign trail; not everything had to be set up perfectly.

Our conversation also came around to a specific interest of mine. Back in 1980, at the start of the Reagan administration, I’d turned down an offer to join the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. This was a twenty-four-member advisory panel that, in spite of its imposing title, was no longer part of the White House at all. It dated back to a fitness initiative by President Eisenhower, which, at the height of the Cold War, had been a really big deal—both he and his successor, John F. Kennedy, championed fitness as a way for America to stand strong against the Soviet threat. I especially loved the stories about what Kennedy did to promote fitness and sports. He started out as president-elect by publishing an essay in Sports Illustrated magazine called “The Soft American,” which got a lot of attention. Once he was in the White House, he dug up an executive order from Teddy Roosevelt challenging the US Marines to complete a fifty-mile hike in twenty hours. JFK turned around and issued that same challenge to his White House staff. Being a typically competitive Kennedy brother, Bobby took him up on it and received national attention by hiking fifty miles in his leather oxford shoes. That stunt touched off a national fad of fifty-mile hikes and helped launch many fitness programs on the state and local levels—often promoted and coordinated through the President’s Council.

During Vietnam, however, physical fitness fell out of the spotlight. The President’s Council became an appendage of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare bureaucracy and stayed that way for twenty years. The Council was still prestigious enough: astronaut Jim Lovell chaired it for a long time, and so did George Allen, the legendary NFL coach. But it never got much done. For instance, when the president would invite the US Olympic team or the World Series champs to the White House, the President’s Council was no longer even in the loop. That was why I turned down the invitation in 1980: I didn’t want to be part of a moribund organization. Now, almost ten years later, I felt it could be turned around.

“There’s a huge opportunity there,” I told Bush. I described how great it would be for the White House to reassert leadership on health and fitness—especially by shifting the focus back to the idea that fitness is important for all Americans, not just athletes. “What about the other 99.9 percent of the people who never go out for sports?” I pointed out. “Who is paying attention to the overweight kid? He will never be drafted for a football game or a tennis team or a swimming team or a volleyball team or a water polo team. And what about the scrawny kid with the Coke-bottle glasses? Who is paying attention to that kid?

“A lot of schools have great athletic programs but not great fitness programs,” I continued. “What can we do for the majority of kids who didn’t go out for sports? And what about all the adults who have gotten out of shape or maybe never been in shape? It was good for JFK to highlight competitive sports to inspire people. It was good that Lyndon Johnson had made it the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. But now we should shift the emphasis from competitive athletics to fitness for all, and make sure that everyone participates.”

I knew that George Bush liked sports and kept himself in very good shape. “That’s a brilliant idea if you want to put the time aside,” he said. “It would take some time. If you do something, you want to do it well.”

From Columbus we traveled on to Chicago, where we held a rally at a high school. On the way back to the airport, the vice president noticed this place called the Three Brothers Coffee Shop and said, “Hey, there’s a Greek diner. Let’s stop.” So the cars all pulled over, and we went in. He did it so casually, the way he went into that restaurant and tried all the food and schmoozed with the customers, the waiters, and the kitchen help, I thought it was wonderful. Then as I thought about it afterward, I realized, “Arnold, you schmuck, he’s campaigning against a guy named Dukakis. Of course he’s going to stop at a Greek diner!”

It was a privilege to get such an inside view of a presidential campaign, especially just two weeks before the election. I’d never been involved in even a mayoral election, but now here I was seeing what the candidate does on the plane, how long he sleeps, how he preps for the next speech, how he studies the issues, how he communicates, and how relaxed he makes it all look. I was impressed with how easy Bush was with the people, how he posed for photos and talked to everybody and always knew the right thing to say. And how he kept his energy level up. He took a forty-five-minute nap on the plane. As Jimmy Carter once said, politicians are experts at naps. Then you have to wake up and absorb your briefing quickly. His staff would prep him so that he knew a little bit about the area. His daughter Doro was always along with him to lend moral support.

It was a whole different level of intensity from a movie set because everywhere you go, the media are there. You have no room for mistakes. Every wrong word, every gesture you make that’s a little odd, they will pick up and amplify into some huge thing. Bush dealt with it casually.

By Thanksgiving, as the Republicans were savoring Bush’s victory, we were getting ready to launch Twins. I’d never seen a director fine-tune a movie as methodically as Ivan Reitman. He’d sit in a test screening, talk to the audience, and then go back and change the music or shorten a certain scene and test the movie again. And the crucial “want to see” statistic would now be two points higher. Then he’d make another change, and it would go up another point. We literally drove Twins from 88 to 93, which Ivan said was even higher than Ghostbusters.

The premiere of the movie was a much happier combination of my worlds than the Republican convention had been. Eunice and Sarge engineered a huge benefit event at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where the showing of Twins capped a daylong festival of entertainment in Washington, DC, promoting the Special Olympics. President-elect Bush came with his wife, Barbara, and Teddy Kennedy, Massachusetts congressman Joe Kennedy II, and other members of the Kennedy and Shriver clans all came. Barbara Walters and TV news anchorwoman Connie Chung were there, and even business tycoons Armand Hammer and Donald Trump. Out front there was a traffic jam of stretch limos, along with dozens of cameras crews and hundreds of fans.

A demo of gymnastics and weight lifting by Special Olympics athletes opened the show. Then the president elect got up onstage and praised the athletes for their courage before turning to me. “There are all kinds of courage,” he joked. “There is the courage of my friend Arnold Schwarzenegger, who more than once campaigned with me across this country—then returned home each time to take the heat from his own in-laws.” That got a laugh.

In fact, Eunice and Sarge always went to see my movies, and they would call me the next day to tell me what they thought. But not everyone in the Kennedy family was as enthusiastic about my films, because of the weapons and violence. So Eunice was only half joking when she said, “At last, the family can go see one of your movies.” Twins was the comedy hit of the season, which of course I loved because this was my first Christmastime movie, and it went over the top. The movie had a big opening weekend in mid-December and just kept going and going. Every day between Christmas and New Year’s, our US box office receipts topped $3 million—or more than a half million tickets sold per day. It was a happy ending for everybody who had taken a chance. Ivan went on producing and directing hit comedies, including Kindergarten Cop and Junior with me. Danny kept expanding his amazing talent into directing films like The War of the Roses and producing films like Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty. For Universal, Twins capped a year of five or six successes with a huge hit—and after Tom Pollock retired, he became chief executive of Ivan Reitman’s production company.

Hollywood is the town of copying. Now that I’d added a comedy dimension to my career, everybody started sending me comedy scripts in addition to scripts for action movies. More important, thanks to our unprecedented deal with Universal, I ended up making more money with Twins than I have with any of my Terminator movies. It didn’t take studios long to draw the line. Today nobody can come close to a deal as open ended as the one we had on Twins.

Counting international sales, video rights, and so on, Twins has been worth more than $35 million to me alone—and counting, because the DVDs keep selling and it keeps being shown on TV. For twenty-five years I’ve been trying to convince Universal to do a sequel. It would be called Triplets, and Eddie Murphy, whom I love and admire, would play our unknown other brother. Just recently at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel we agreed to fast-track the project, and now Triplets is on the way.

As my success grew, Sarge was always challenging me to do more for the public good. “Arnold,” he would say, “your movies and your acting are great. Now tell me: how many times do you want to do another car chase?” He didn’t know anything about the entertainment business. In 1978, for the premiere of the first Superman movie, he and Eunice hosted a Special Olympics fund-raiser in a big tent at their house. Seated next to Sarge at the head table was none other than Superman himself, Christopher Reeve.

“What do you do?” Sarge asked him.

“I’m in the movie. I play Superman.”

“That’s fantastic! Superman!” exclaimed Sarge. “But you know, I think it’s more interesting that we have supermen in real life.” There was a side of him that wanted to be diplomatic and respectful but also another side that couldn’t understand how anyone could waste all those hours wearing costumes and makeup. Sarge never read the entertainment pages.

“How many people do you save when you look good on the set?” he’d ask me. He’d tease me about how I’d been awed by James Earl Jones during the making of Conan. “You told me James Earl Jones was in the middle of a speech and forgot his line and how professional he was, how he held his gesture and his pose and said, ‘Give me the line, guys, give me the line.’ And the next line was ‘I am the wellspring, from which you flow,’ and then he said, ‘Oh, yeah … I am the wellspring, from which you flow.’

“So is that what’s important to you? To be able to freeze in the middle of a scene and to have somebody give you your line? Wouldn’t it be much better to go through Africa and show them how to dig wells and how to make vegetables grow and inspire them to plant?”

It was a collision of worlds, but I didn’t disagree entirely. Acting went only so far in terms of real accomplishment. Still, I felt Sarge was hitting below the belt. I was only trying to explain why I admired James Earl Jones. I got him back a year later. He was telling me about traveling with Armand Hammer to make oil deals in Russia after Sarge went back to the private practice of law. He described hanging out at night with Russian oil experts. “You have no idea what great vodka they have,” Sarge said.

“Is that what you really admire?” I asked. “Is that what your life is all about? That you have the best vodka?”

“No, no, no! We made a huge deal.”

“I’m just joking. Remember when you said to me about acting, ‘Is that all you care about, being able to freeze in the middle of a scene and ask for a line?’ ”

“I get it, I get it,” Sarge admitted.

Public service accounted for a lot of the conversation in his and Eunice’s house. “Arnold, you have such an unbelievable personality,” they’d tell me. “Imagine using all of what God gave you to reach out and pump up other people: the Special Olympians, the homeless, the sick, the returning military. It almost makes no difference which cause you pick. You would bring such a spotlight because of your energy and your stardom.”

I was already on a crusade around the world to promote health and fitness to young people. I’d stepped up my commitment to the Special Olympics so that now I was the US national coach of power lifting, regularly conducting seminars and making appearances all over the country. And with my growing popularity as a movie star, I was ready to take on more.

“What else can I do?” I asked Sarge and Eunice. They had plenty of ideas. Eunice was a constant inspiration. What she’d accomplished, to my mind, was larger than the work of most mayors, governors, senators, and even presidents. Not only did she expand the Special Olympics to encompass more than 175 countries, but she also changed people’s thinking around the world. Many nations viewed the mentally challenged as a drag on society or a danger to themselves, to be treated as outcasts or warehoused in mental institutions. Eunice used her name and her influence to free those people to have regular lives and the same social benefits as other citizens. It was a tough challenge, because governments didn’t want to be told they were doing something wrong. They felt embarrassed when Eunice Kennedy Shriver would show up and put the spotlight on the institutions where the mentally disabled were locked up. But one by one, the nations came around—even China, which eventually overcame centuries of social prejudice to host the International Special Olympics Games in 2007. Those were the biggest games in the history of the movement. There were eighty thousand people in the stadium, and the president of China came. I was there too, leading the American team in the opening ceremony.

After the 1988 election, I’d sent word to the president-elect reiterating my interest in the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. I said that I hoped he would consider me when he turned to other appointments after building his cabinet. If he needed help on the fitness council, I’d be more than happy to come in and share my vision. Bush’s staff, of course, was aware of my passion for promoting health and fitness for youngsters. Eunice sent a letter recommending me for the job and pointing out that I was “the number one star” in the United States. The president responded, thanking her for “recommending our man Conan.”

At present, though, she was much more focused on the production of grandchildren. Eunice had become very concerned when Maria and I didn’t have kids right away. We’d been married now for almost three years. She kept saying to Maria, “Why don’t you have kids?” and Maria kept saying, “I have my job; it doesn’t fit in yet. And Arnold is too busy; he’s always on sets.” And so on. Those obstacles were real. Maria had become one of the top personalities of NBC News. Not only was she coanchor of the Sunday Today show and Main Street, NBC’s award-winning monthly newsmagazine for young people, but also she anchored the weekend news and was a regular stand-in for Tom Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News and other news programs. All of these shows were based in New York. In summer 1988 Maria had won an Emmy as coanchor of NBC’s coverage of the Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. She was making well over $1 million a year and traveling all the time—hardly the right circumstances for becoming a mom.

But her mother felt, “No, there has to be another reason. Maybe they’re having problems getting pregnant.” So Eunice started looking into the effects of steroids on male reproduction. She never talked to me about it, but she sent Maria a five-page scientific briefing by one of the doctors connected to the Special Olympics. I could visualize exactly how it had come about. Eunice had done what she always did, which was to go to her office and say, “Get me an expert to help with this issue” or “Get me someone to write this speech” or “Get me the White House on the phone.”

It was a very thorough report, custom written for Maria. It explained that if you have sex regularly and you’re trying to get pregnant but you don’t, there are many possible reasons, but one might be if your husband has used or abused steroids. Then it went into explaining everything medically.

I just happened to see the report on Maria’s desk, so I read it, and I was laughing my head off. I said, “Your mother is out of control.”

“I know, I know,” Maria said. She was laughing too. “Can you believe that? I have to calm her down.”

It was typical for Eunice to try to plant herself in the middle of the action. I used to joke that she wanted to sleep between us in bed on our honeymoon in order to supervise. In the Kennedy family, this wasn’t completely far fetched: the legend was that when Eunice and Sarge went on their honeymoon to France, they arrived at the hotel to discover Teddy in the lobby. Joe had sent him as a chaperone.

Apart from all this, however, Maria did hear the ticking of the biological clock. She had just turned thirty-three, a year older than Eunice had been when she and Sarge had their first baby. So in 1989, we decided to get going, and Maria became pregnant with Katherine.

I was back in action-hero mode that spring, making Total Recall, but fatherhood was never far from my mind. One day in my trailer, wading through scripts, I came across a draft of Kindergarten Cop. I couldn’t put it down; the idea of a tough detective who has to go undercover teaching a bunch of preschoolers made me laugh. People in Hollywood always said, “Never act with kids or animals. They’re impossible to work with, and then they look so cute onscreen that they steal the show.” I’d already had experience with animals as Conan, and they’d been fine. But I’d been interested in doing a movie with kids for years, and the prospect of becoming a dad inspired me. I thought, “Great! Let the kids steal the show. As long as the movie succeeds.” I called to make sure the script was available. Then I asked Ivan Reitman if he’d direct me again. We both wanted changes in the script to add social relevance: I wanted to add a physical fitness theme, and he wanted it to touch on broken homes, child abuse, and family life. But we agreed to go ahead. Since Ivan already had Ghostbusters II in the works for the 1989 holidays, we started planning Kindergarten Cop for Christmas 1990.