Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 19 The Real Life of a Terminator

WHEN OUR FIRST BABY arrived in December 1989, I was right there in the delivery room with the video camera.

“Hold it right there!”

“No, we have to pull the baby out.”

“No, no, wait. Just let me make sure I got the shot.” Those people in the delivery room probably have seen it all.

Maria and I had made all the preparations that first-time parents make. As her due date neared, we had a Lamaze teacher come to the house. Of course, I did all that; as the father, you have to. You have to show extraordinary interest in the pregnancy and the childbirth and the afterbirth and cutting the cord and all that, unlike in my father’s world, where the guy was totally out of the picture. (Somebody made a video of me imitating our Lamaze class, and seeing that helped convince Ivan Reitman to do the movie Junior, in which I play a scientist who becomes pregnant as part of a scientific experiment.)

The whole Lamaze thing was horrifying to both our mothers.

“You’re down there helping pull out the baby?” my mother asked. “You’re videotaping her vagina? I’m sorry, this is too much for me.”

Eunice’s reaction was more or less the same. “Good for you if it makes Maria happy. For myself, I wanted them to give me a shot and put me out. Sarge wasn’t allowed to come in for three days. And when he did come, I looked like a picture postcard, and the only thing different was the baby.”

Seeing Katherine’s birth, I felt the most unbelievable joy. I said to myself, “Fuck! This is my first baby!” That’s the interesting thing about the human mind, that you can be so overwhelmed by something that billions of people in history have done. Of course, I took charge of the situation right away: working with the nurse to clean up the baby, bringing her over to get weighed, putting the little hat on her so she didn’t get cold, and putting on the little outfit and the diaper—and, naturally, taking endless photos and videos. Maria was crying for joy, and I stayed with her while she rested, and after awhile the nurse came in and showed us how to breast-feed. Whenever I heard guys say that they cried after their baby was born, I always thought, “That is such bullshit.” But sure enough, when I went home and called my friends about Katherine’s birth, I cried.

Maria’s parents were in Washington, and my mom was in Austria. “We are not going to come until you invite us. This should be your moment together,” Sarge and Eunice had said. Maybe Maria told them to say that, I don’t know. But while childbirth was definitely not Eunice’s thing, Maria was her only daughter, and the next day, she was there. I didn’t mind; we’d had our private moment. Maria felt it was the first thing we’d done in a big way alone, without her mother interfering. She loved just the two of us going to the hospital.

A dozen paparazzi were shooting from across the parking lot when we left the hospital the next night, but we got Katherine home, and then the whole drama of the adjustment began. Because from that moment on, your life as a couple has changed. Even after your kids leave home, you will still feel responsible. I had others to look after now: Maria and me, my mom, Katherine, and more children would follow. Maria always wanted to have five kids because she came from a family of five, while I preferred two because I came from a family of two. I thought we would settle somewhere in the middle.

When Maria came home, and Sarge and Eunice arrived from Washington a day later, we tried to work out the rhythm of the breast-feeding and the diaper changing and the question of how the baby room should be decorated. Pretty quickly a nanny came into the picture, and I felt my importance kind of slipping away. Baby care became a dialogue between her and Maria. At first I didn’t pay much attention to this, but then I read something and also saw something on TV about “gatekeeping.” I said to myself, “Yes! That’s exactly what’s happening to me! I’m getting aced out, I can’t make a move that is right, everyone is always worried that I’m holding the baby the wrong way.” I decided I had to break through all that and have more fun with it.

It must have been in some magazine I picked up in a doctor’s office, because normally I wasn’t into reading about how to take care of the baby. I felt that there were no magazines or books around in the Stone Age, and yet every schmuck took care of babies back then, so how wrong could you go? As long as you love the baby, you figure it out, just like with everything you love doing. Caring for babies is hardwired into the brain. I’ve sat on an airplane many times and felt startled by even the tiniest peep from a baby twenty rows back.

In fact, I felt lucky, because Maria was a fabulous mother, which is not something you can necessarily tell about a person in advance. In spite of the gatekeeping, I admired how totally in control of the situation she was. I didn’t have to worry at all. She had the instincts, she had the knowledge, she’d studied enough books, and she worked closely with the nanny—there was no shortcoming there whatsoever, which I could see even as I was being pushed aside.

Even so, I was determined that gatekeeping would not happen again. So a couple of years later, in July 1991, when we had Christina, I put my foot down from Day One. Not that I said, “No, you can’t tell me to leave the room anymore.” Instead, at night when we went to bed and when Maria finished breast-feeding Christina, I would take the baby from her immediately and put her on my chest. Christina would be kind of spread-eagled, with her hands and feet hanging off the sides. I don’t know who’d told me to do this; it was some guy who said, “I always put my baby on my chest.”

“How can you sleep like that?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. Somehow it works. I have no idea. Maybe I never slept that deeply, but it was okay because it was for the baby.”

I said to myself, “Yes! That’s what I’m going to do.” I found that with Christina on my chest, I would sleep, but not so soundly that I would turn and roll over on top of her. Nature had built in that safeguard. I’d be lying there asleep, and all of a sudden I’d hear the baby making little stirring noises. I’d look over at the clock and see that four hours had passed. It was just like the nurse in the hospital had said: “You’ll need to breast-feed every four or five hours.” So I’d hand the baby to Maria, she’d breast-feed her again, and I’d take the baby back for a couple more hours of sleep.

I was much more on top of the diaper situation too. I started changing them right away and said to the women, “Now, girls, I totally failed with the first baby because for every hundred diapers Maria did, I did maybe one. That’s not fair. Not fair to the baby, not fair to you, not fair to me. I want to participate more this time.” I would just close the door, and lock it if they tried to hover.

So I just moved right in there, boom, boom, boom, and did it. Within a week or two, I graduated to the level that when we heard the baby, I was allowed to go upstairs and change her diaper without anyone following me.

“This is an enormous breakthrough,” I said to myself. It felt like heaven, being in the room alone, just looking at this little girl, with no one hanging over my shoulder, and changing the diaper. It calmed down Christina, and all of sudden she went back to sleep, and I felt like, “I did that!” It was such a great sense of accomplishment and great joy of participating.

But then with our third baby, it was a battle again, because Patrick was the first boy. He had to be treated differently, “like a boy,” whatever that meant. We both were ecstatic, and I had not expected Maria to be that over-the-top ecstatic about the idea that it was a boy. She was really into being the force in his growing up. So, again, it was very hard at first to share parenting, but we did. And by the time Christopher, our second son, arrived in 1997, we were very good at the balancing act. When the boys come, instead of buying Barbie dolls, all of a sudden you’re into trucks and remote controls, cars and tanks. You buy building blocks and build castles and locomotives. You get into knives and later take them shooting with pistols, shotguns, and rifles. All of which made me very happy.

The birth of our daughters came just as I reached the stratosphere with my movie career. By Christmas 1990, a few weeks after Katherine’s first birthday, Time magazine put me on the cover as Hollywood’s top star and called me “at forty-three, the most potent symbol of worldwide dominance of the US entertainment industry.” Kindergarten Cop was in the theaters that holiday and was already a major hit.

But I had an even bigger project in the works: Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Seven years had passed since The Terminator lifted both our careers, and Jim Cameron and I had always felt committed to a sequel. He’d directed a couple of huge pictures since then—Aliens and The Abyss—and, finally, in 1990 he got the rights and preliminary financing in place for Terminator 2. Still, I was a little thrown when Jim sat me down at a restaurant and told me his concept for my character in the film.

“How can the Terminator not kill anyone?” I asked. “He’s a terminator! That’s what people want to see, me kicking in doors and machine-gunning everybody.” I was suspicious that the studio was pulling back and trying to make the Terminator into something rated PG. That had destroyed Conan and I didn’t want to see it happen to the Terminator.

“No, no,” said Jim. “You’re still really dangerous and violent. But this time the Terminator comes back when John Connor is a kid, and he’s programmed to protect him. He’s not the villain anymore. The villain is a new, smaller, even scarier terminator—the T-1000—that is programmed to kill Connor. Your terminator has to stop it.” The killing was still there, but it was done by the T-1000. As soon as I understood that the movie was going to stay R-rated, I relaxed.

As T2 began taking shape, my other businesses were booming. I’d used some of the money I’d earned in films as capital to expand in real estate. Now I owned three good-sized apartment buildings in LA with a total of more than two hundred units, plus the Denver property, which Al Ehringer and I were developing into offices, restaurants, and shops. Our gamble on the run-down side of Santa Monica had paid off too: 3110 Main was now a thriving complex of offices and shops, and the neighborhood had become hip. Our first set of tenants—boring corporate tenants like a bank, an insurance agency, and a real estate office—had given way to producers, directors, and entertainers. Johnny Carson had his office on the second floor, and I split the third floor with Oliver Stone. “Why don’t I take the space to the left of the elevators,” he suggested, “and you take the space to the right? That fits with our politics.” I laughed and agreed, which is why my office is where it is today. A little later, LA Lakers basketball star Shaquille O’Neal moved into the building, and then other producers and sports managers followed.

I was also launching a huge public service project. Very soon after Katherine’s birth, I got the call from the White House that I’d been hoping for. “The president would like you to chair the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports,” the representative told me formally, adding, “He says he wants you to do just what you proposed during the campaign: to put fitness for everybody back on the national agenda.” Being named “the president’s fitness czar,” as the media called it, was the most satisfying development in my work life. I saw this as part of the crusade I’d started decades ago, promoting bodybuilding as a means to fitness and health. Also, by working with the Special Olympics, I was selling the idea of sports and fitness for everyone, not just athletes. This was why I’d been so emphatic with President Bush about wanting the job. So much could be done with it. The White House always made the mistake of appointing big sports names, but not people who had a record of getting the job done or had the ability to follow through. You needed an athlete or idol, yes, but someone who would do the work, not just sit on the throne. I had a clear vision of what had to be done. And by this time, I was addicted to public service, especially doing things for kids. It had nothing to do with fame anymore.

This news was almost as gratifying to my mother-in-law as it was to me. Eunice had written personally to President Bush to recommend me—she felt passionately about fitness not only because of her leadership of the Special Olympics but also because the strongest presidential champion for fitness since Teddy Roosevelt had been her brother Jack. When I called to thank her, she asked immediately, “How are they planning to announce it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What would you suggest?”

“First of all, I’d have you meet with the president in the Oval Office. Have them take a picture of that meeting and release it to the public. After the meeting, I’d have you and the president come out of the White House together and talk to the press. You should be ready to make a statement about what you bring to the table and what your mission as chairman is going to be. You always have to have a mission and a reason why you’re the right choice.”

Eunice had the Kennedy political genius. She knew that a job appointment at this level was not normally considered big enough to justify a press conference. The president has all kinds of councils: the Council of Economic Advisers, the health council, the drug council, the job creation council, and on and on. Ordinarily, for an appointment like mine, the White House press office would simply put out a statement along the lines of: “Today President Bush announced that he has chosen Arnold Schwarzenegger to be the chairman of the President’s Council on Fitness.” After that, it would be an uphill battle to get anybody’s attention. But if the press sees you coming out of the Oval Office with the president, you’ll win respect.

The president, it turned out, was totally on board—he had his guys orchestrate the announcement to make me look like a big shot. It was very close to what Eunice had envisioned. I went outside the White House to where the journalists were. I talked about my appointment, my meeting in the Oval Office, my enthusiasm, my vision, my mission statement.

The challenge of being fitness czar really excited me, and by the time I met with the president again, up at Camp David in Maryland a few weeks later, I’d done my homework. I wanted to bring back and expand all the sports and fitness events that JFK had held. I’d asked Sarge and Eunice what they thought I could do with this appointment. They’d been around when Jack was in charge; what was his vision? Why did he hold fitness events in front of the White House on the South Lawn? I wrote down everything. I met with the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Agriculture, and White House officials. That’s how I started building an agenda. I also sought out experts like John Cates of the University of California, San Diego, implementer of the country’s first Youth Fitness Camps. So I was ready with a detailed proposal.

“The council has been thinking small,” I told President Bush. “We need to change that.” I described how we would bang the drum in DC and get the departments in charge of health, education, and nutrition to coordinate on a national fitness campaign. We’d also make fitness much more visible at the White House. “Let’s do a public fitness demo on the White House lawn this spring,” I suggested.

I sketched how this would work: we’d set up stations for golf, tennis, aerobics, weight training, baseball, rope climbing, and other activities that the average person could undertake. We’d invite trainers, athletes, parents, grandparents, and kids, and the national media, especially the morning shows. “We’ll get everyone involved,” I said. “Then you and Barbara can come out of the White House and take the lead and try things. It’ll be a celebration, like Fourth of July, and it will show that fitness is fun.”

The president became very enthusiastic. “When we get back to Washington on Monday,” he said, “I want you to meet with the White House staff and get this under way.” I also proposed restoring the presidential awards program, the fitness certificates and medals that JFK had handed out. “People were very proud of those certificates and medals,” I said. “They lead to challenges in schools, and that’s how you get the kids involved in the movement.” He liked that idea too.

My own mission, I explained, should be to get out and promote. Digging into the realities of fitness in United States, I’d realized that I would have to address it both state by state and locally. Some states had a governor’s council on fitness, some didn’t. Some had statewide programs, others left it up to local governments and the schools. Only one state actually required daily physical education in schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I felt very strongly that I had to carry to all fifty states the message that fitness was a national priority.

“You’re going to all fifty states?” he asked.

“You’ll see,” I told him. “I love being on the road and meeting people and selling. That’s what I do best.”

At the first meeting at the White House to plan the Great American Workout, about fifteen government officials were present. And they all said no. The guy from the parks department said no because so many people would ruin the lawn. The guy responsible for public safety said, “The weather in Washington can get very hot in May. People will be fainting, and they’ll need water and food, and we don’t have a budget for that.” The guy from the Secret Service said, “We can’t cover that many people if the president is moving from station to station. Too much risk.”

Afterward, I told Jim Pinkerton, the White House policy advisor I’d been working with, that it was the worst meeting I’d ever had. “Let me explain this to the president, and you should talk to him too,” he said. I saw President Bush a couple of days later and described the official reaction I’d gotten.

“Oh, that’s typical government.” He laughed. “It always starts out like that. But don’t be discouraged. Let me talk to them.”

At the next planning meeting, they all sat down and said, “It’s a great idea. We found a way around the problems. It’s very complicated, but the president wants to do this.”

So on Tuesday, May 1, 1990, at precisely 7:19 a.m., President and Mrs. Bush emerged from the White House to join what he declared was the first annual Great American Workout. Two thousand visitors were already on the South Lawn doing the activities we’d set up across four or five acres: aerobic dancing, exercise machines, horseshoe pitching, hoop shooting, soccer, and ball playing. The cameras followed as the president and Barbara went from activity to activity. We’d put together a spectacle that would have impressed even JFK. It put across both the importance and the joy of physical activity.

We’d done a walk-through the day before. I didn’t think about it at the time, but watching the preparations, I learned things that I would put to use later in my own campaigns. I saw firsthand how to plan and stage the event for the media: figuring out where you want them to be part of it, where you don’t want them to be part of it, and when and how they would be invited. The Great American Workout was officially open from seven to nine o’clock in the morning. The reason the president joined at 7:19, I learned, was that 7:19 was the moment of peak viewership on the Today show and Good Morning America. Until then, I’d made dozens of appearances on morning TV and never paid any attention to what time I was scheduled to be on the air. But from then on, I would always insist on appearing sometime right around 7:30.

Not long after the Great American Workout, I took time out from being fitness czar to fly to Cannes. I went primarily to promote Total Recall, which was scheduled for release that June. But the ride over, on the Carolco jet, was all about Terminator 2. Jim Cameron had just finished the script with his coauthor and had promised to bring it along for everyone to see. He handed it out after we took off. By the time we landed, we’d read it and were jumping all over the airplane in excitement about how big and technologically sophisticated the story was. I never expected T2 to be just an ordinary sequel: Cameron is a big believer in surprising the audience, and I felt confident that Terminator 2 would be as amazing and unexpected as the original. But this script blew me away. I asked a lot of questions about the shape-shifting Terminator 1000 that my character would be fighting against—it was a challenge even to imagine a machine made of liquid metal alloy. That’s when I realized that Cameron’s knowledge of science and the world of the future went way beyond the ordinary. After we reached Cannes, the foreign distributors flipped over the script and couldn’t wait to sign up. No one batted an eye that Terminator 2 would cost $70 million to produce—more than ten times as much as the original. They knew it was going to be a huge success.

T2 was always meant to be much bigger than The Terminator. Not only did it have a giant budget, but also it took eight months to shoot rather than six weeks. We were in a race against the clock: the movie had to be ready for summer 1991 to meet its financial commitments. The preproduction was so complicated that filming couldn’t start until October 1990, and by the time production finished in May 1991, T2 had become the most expensive film project in history, at $94 million.

Cameron told a reporter, “Every time I start a film, I have a fantasy that it will be like a big family, and we’ll have a good time, and we’ll have all of these wonderful, creative moments together. But that’s not what filmmaking is; it’s a battle.” What made my character challenging is that this time the Terminator is adopting human behavior patterns as the plot unfolds. It was typical Cameron genius to have character development in a machine. The kid says to the Terminator, “No more killing; promise,” and orders me to talk less like a dork and more like a person. So the part has me transforming from being a killing machine to something that’s attempting to be human but not always getting there. I’m not very convincing the first time the kid gets me to say “Hasta la vista, baby.” Gradually the Terminator becomes humanized, but only to a certain extent. It’s still very dangerous and causes a lot of mayhem. Still, compared to the T-1000, I am definitely the good guy.

We were shooting the scenes out of sequence, so we were always having to figure out the right degree of humanity for the Terminator to show for that stage in the plot. For the first several weeks, I was constantly asking Jim, “Is he too human now, or not human enough?”

T2 opened whole new possibilities in visual effects. The T-1000 is made of liquid metal and can morph before your eyes to mimic any person or object it touches. The computer-graphics guys handled that challenge. But the movie also required grueling work from the actors and stunt doubles. Cameron would push his brother Mike, who was creating props and stunts, and Mike would push the envelope and us.

We started rehearsing the stunts months in advance. In the spectacular chase scene in the dry Los Angeles drainage canal, the Terminator is supposed to blast away one-handed with a sawed off ten-gauge lever-action shotgun while driving a Harley: pull out the gun, aim, fire, spin it to recock it, fire again, and so on. It all sounded great in the script, and it was doable—just a matter of reps, reps, reps. But the preparation was pure pain and discomfort. I couldn’t wear a glove because it would get stuck in the gun mechanism, and I tore the skin off my hand and fingers practicing a hundred times until I mastered the skill. Then I had to learn to do it while riding the Harley. Then I needed to put the riding and the gun skill together with the acting. It’s hard to watch where you’re driving and look where the director wants you to look at the same time. In one shot, I had to bring the front wheel of the moving bike almost to the lens of the camera on a truck in front of me. Simultaneously I was supposed to be shooting out, not looking down. And it would ruin the shot to have my eyes darting around.

I also had to ride the Harley toward a chained gate and shoot open the padlock before crashing through it. That took weeks of practice, first with gun alone, then on the bike, and then to do it all with cool. I did the takeoff of a spectacular jump with the bike into the canal bed. The other adult leads, Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor and Robert Patrick as the T-1000, had it just as tough. Linda put herself through months of three-times-a-day physical conditioning to make herself convincing as a survivalist warrior. All of the stunts were so big that they took a lot more perspiration than in T1.

Every few weeks, when there was a break in the shooting, I’d morph from being the Terminator to being President Bush’s fitness czar. The job and my friendship with the president quickly became a very big part of my life. My compensation for the movie included a Gulfstream III jet, the perfect vehicle for visiting the states. My plan was to cover all fifty during President Bush’s first term in office. That gave me three years. I put the map of the United States in front of me and looked to see which states were close together. My idea was to group them and, whenever I had a few days free from shooting or other business, hit four or six at a time—leaving room for improvisation, of course, because the governors wouldn’t always be available when I was. Many times if I had other business—a seminar, say, or a contest in Columbus, or a vacation in Hawaii—I’d organize the surrounding states.

When I visited the governors, I assured them that politics wouldn’t come into play. This was pure fitness and sports. For many governors, that was hard to understand. “The Terminator is coming from the Republican White House to expose me as not paying enough attention to children,” they would think, worrying that I would steamroll in and embarrass them. But we made it clear in advance that this was not our agenda. I wasn’t preaching a Republican philosophy but a fitness philosophy. Word got around, and suddenly the governors were at ease. We started to be welcomed. Everyone joined the fitness crusade.

It was a great, great learning experience to see firsthand the way state and local governments work. I’d never seen so many instant advocates for physical fitness. I figured out that we could do two states a day. Usually we’d start with breakfast with the governor, and I’d talk to him or her about improving fitness in the state. Every state was different, so I had to study up. Then we’d head to a school and join the kids in a fitness class. Next would come a press conference. In some states they were huge: a whole gymnasium packed with parents and kids would welcome us, with the school band playing. I’d always present the governor with a Tony Nowak jacket with the President’s Council logo, and help him put it on, and there would be a photo op of him surrounded by kids.

The final step was always a “fitness summit,” where we invited people from the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, the governor’s staff, education officials, health club owners, the YMCA, the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, and so on. Usually it would be a crowded meeting room with fifty to one hundred people. We’d talk about the importance of fitness for kids and the health risks of not exercising. And they would make recommendations about how to work together. Then we’d get back on the plane, go to the next state, and do exactly the same thing in the afternoon.

Later on, I realized that it had a lot in common with a campaign trip. You’re on a tight schedule, you have to be there at a certain time, do the speech, pump everyone up. The school bands welcome you, and the local politicians come out and drum up a storm of support. After being the fitness czar, running for governor of California felt like déjà vu.

Interestingly, nobody ever objected to my using my own plane. If people asked, “Is the government paying for this?” it was good to be able to tell them, “No. I’m paying for everything myself. Including the stationery. I’m not doing this for money. I’m doing it to give something back. My talent is fitness and, therefore, this is something I can give back.” It felt great to be echoing Sarge.

Those fitness summits were like a crash course in politics. In California, when I urged the attendees to step up the physical education in the schools, they jumped on me.

“Well, tell our governor to put more money into education, so we can hire phys-ed teachers.”

“But there’s a recession,” I said, “and from what I’ve read, our state is getting less revenue, so our governor doesn’t have the funds.”

“He should reallocate funds from other programs. This is for the kids.”

“But if there’s no money, why don’t you look somewhere like the YMCA or one of the local sports clubs, and see if they can provide trainers to help out?”

“Oh! So the schools should use volunteers instead of teachers? That’s a good one. In fact, if you read our state law, Arnold, you’d know it’s illegal to fill an existing teaching slot with a volunteer.”

I was running into a teachers’ union taboo against volunteers in the schools. Encountering that attitude was a real eye-opener. It was not about the kids, as they claimed. It was about getting more teachers jobs. Of course, I understood that’s what unions do: fight for their own.

Of all the governors, the one who made the deepest impression on me was Mario Cuomo. New York was about the tenth state I visited. From a distance, I’d never liked Governor Cuomo because of the way he’d attacked Reagan in his 1984 Democratic convention keynote address: “Mr. President,” he said, “you ought to know that this nation is more a ‘Tale of Two Cities’ than it is just a ‘Shining City on a Hill.’ ” But when I met him and we talked about fitness, he was responsive and complimentary. He gave very valuable pointers. For example, he advised, “You have to mention more about kids’ health, and you’ve got to talk about the costs. That is big, big, big. Talk about the health disaster that will develop and what it will cost the taxpayer if kids don’t get fit.” He was very supportive of what I’d done. I could see why Cuomo was so well liked in his state and why he was a great leader.

Then we went before the media, and he did a whole spiel about how great it is for me to travel around the United States and to use my own money and do all this voluntarily. “This is what service is about,” he said. I thought, “He knows that I’m a Republican and that I represent a Republican president; it’s really gracious and generous of him to make this much of an effort.” More than that, I thought he was right. I still had forty states to go, and I was able to incorporate his suggestions in my message.

My friendship with President Bush was warm from the time we first met during the Reagan years. I felt honored when he asked me to attend the inauguration and to introduce him at some of the surrounding events—although introducing him was also somewhat uncomfortable at times, I have to admit. There were so many people who perhaps would have been more worthy. In particular, I remember a Martin Luther King Day celebration where there were a lot of African-Americans in the audience and many black speakers. If I’d been sitting there, I’d have wondered, “Why is he the one introducing the president?” But that’s the way Bush was. He didn’t care about any of that. If you had talent and did him a favor or he liked you, he would push you forward whether it made sense or not. He was a different breed, a sweetheart of a guy. Both he and Barbara were really courteous and kind. Every single thing I did for them, he would drop me a handwritten note or call to say thanks.

We grew quite close after he chose me for the fitness job. I could go over to the White House and see him anytime I was in Washington. We had that kind of relationship. Anytime. John Sununu was his chief of staff in the beginning, and he also was welcoming to me. It was never “The boss is busy now, come back tomorrow.”

We felt honored to be invited many times to join the president and Barbara at Camp David. The White House can be very confining, and they loved to get away there on the weekend, even though the president always brought along work. I would fly up with them on the helicopter or meet them there. We’d go out to local restaurants and go to church on Sunday. And, of course, President Bush loved physical activity and games.

One time, when a journalist asked him, “Mr. President, did Arnold show you some exercises?” he laughed and said, “Oh, when he comes up to Camp David, we work out together all the time. He teaches me weight training and I teach him about wallyball.”

“Wallyball? You mean volleyball.”

“No, no, wallyball.”

“What’s wallyball?”

“We have this indoor arena where we play volleyball, and we have special rules that let you play the ball off the wall. Arnold has played several times already, and he’s getting better.”

I bowled up there with the president. We threw horseshoes. We swam. We lifted weights. I went trap shooting with him! (When does the Secret Service ever let you carry a gun around the president?) On a snowy weekend in early 1991, just as Katherine was learning to walk, the three of us visited the Bushes and went tobogganing. Unfortunately, I did not know the toboggan. It’s different from a sled, which you can steer with your feet; the toboggan is flat, and it slides differently. The president and I came down the hill too fast and crashed into Barbara, and she ended up in the hospital with a broken leg. I still have the photo President Bush sent me afterward. It shows him and me on the toboggan and is inscribed, “Turn, dammit, turn!”

Heavy meetings went down at Camp David after Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It was so strange to shuttle back and forth between a real-world crisis and the make-believe threat to the future on the Terminator 2 set in LA. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would come up to Camp David to brief the president and hold decision-making sessions. By fall, President Bush had launched Operation Desert Shield, the massive buildup of US and coalition forces along the Saudi Arabian border with Iraq and Kuwait. I made my own small contribution to the military effort after reading a newspaper report that American troops in the desert were doing their weight training using pails of sand. Of course, a person’s muscles don’t care where the resistance comes from. Still, I thought we could do much better for the troops. I remembered how I’d carried weights and a training bench on my tank in the Austrian army. So I went to General Powell and asked him what he thought of sending over proper weight-training equipment. He loved the idea, and within a few days, I was able to enlist manufacturers to donate forty tons of weight machines, benches, barbells, and other gear for Operation Desert Shield. Sending it aboard a cargo ship would have taken many weeks, so instead Powell and Cheney worked out a way to have it airlifted from Oklahoma along with private contractors’ shipments. Within two weeks, the gear was delivered to the troops, and I started receiving extraordinary letters and photos thanking me and describing how soldiers were training in shifts to maximize access to the new equipment.

I’ve always felt appreciative of the armed forces because I’ve benefited from the American dream, and their courage and dedication is what safeguards it. From my early days as a bodybuilding champion, I made a point of visiting military bases and warships whenever I had the opportunity. As I got into movies, it was natural to add USO appearances to my promotional tours abroad. I often visited marine detachments at American embassies too, in Japan, Germany, South Korea, Russia, and many other countries. There’s no school to teach you how to entertain the troops, but I traded notes with other celebrities like Jay Leno and developed a shtick. I’d talk about my movies, do a little standup (the grosser the better), bring along a new movie for the troops to watch, and maybe hand out some stogies. It was all about pumping them up—and saying thank you. Much later, when I was governor, people in the state capital of Sacramento always asked, “Why do you spend so much time on the armed forces? Why are you fighting for them to get a free education? Why are you helping with their student loans? Why are you fighting for them to get jobs? Why are you fighting to speed up the construction of veterans’ homes and build more veterans’ housing than any governor in California history? Why are you battling to get the establishment to acknowledge post-traumatic stress syndrome and help these young men and women when they come back?” The answer was simple: America wouldn’t be the land of the free if it wasn’t the home of the brave. When you see the work they do and the risks they take, you realize what we owe our military.

Only once at Camp David did I personally witness serious business. The conference room that served as the president’s command center was normally off-limits to guests, of course. But one afternoon in February 1991, while I was visiting and sitting in my room reading a script, the president called. “Come on over, meet the guys,” he said.

They were relaxing around the big conference table taking a sandwich break. He introduced me and said, “You know, we’re making some important decisions about the Middle East war.” The air-attack part of Operation Desert Storm was already under way, and for months the United States and its coalition partners had been massing their armored forces. “Look at these pictures,” the president said, showing me aerial reconnaissance photos. Then he played a video taken with a tanker’s helmet camera, showing how close to the border they were. The tank divisions were maneuvering, feinting attacks on the border and then pulling back, and he explained that one day soon they would just keep going into Iraq and Kuwait. “So they’ll get hit by surprise, and at the same time, they’ll get nailed with—” and he showed me the ship positions in the Persian Gulf where the navy was ready to launch cruise missiles plus an amphibious landing by US Marines. “They’re going to get hit with so much, they won’t believe it,” he said.

The war planning picked up informally around the table where it had left off. The conversation had a kind of intensity and focus that made me think of doctors in an operating room. Yes, they were dealing with life and death, but they’d made decisions like this before and knew what they needed to do. There was no panic. The informal tone was just a reflection of Camp David—it was less fraught than the White House, which was why they loved meeting up there.

When they finished eating, the president said, “Okay, I’m going to take Arnold over and show him this horse, and I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

I left the next day knowing that the ground war was going to start in forty-eight hours. It was a Thursday, and two days later, on February 23, they were going to attack. I walked around thinking, “I know something no one else knows except in that circle. Not the press, nobody.” The fact that President Bush put such trust in me had a powerful effect. I felt there would never, ever be a time, no matter what happened, when I would violate that trust or let the man down.

The rest of 1991 was golden for me: at home, in my public service work, and in my movies. Terminator 2: Judgment Day opened in theaters on the Fourth of July weekend and quickly became the biggest box-office hit of my career. Just three weeks later, Christina was born. I also became the proud owner of the world’s first civilian Hummer, whose military counterpart, the HMMWV or Humvee, had played a big role in the Gulf War. I’d noticed the Humvee just the summer before, up in Oregon, while we were shooting scenes for Kindergarten Cop. A convoy of US Army Humvees drove by, and I fell in love. It was the best-looking, most rugged SUV I’d ever seen. The Humvee had as standard equipment features that guys would spend thousands and thousands of dollars adding to their Jeeps or Chevy Blazers: oversize wheels and mirrors, high ground clearance, extra lights, including infrared, a brush bar in front, and a winch for hauling yourself out of trouble. The Humvee looked ballsy without having to add anything!

Not only did I want one for myself, but also I knew there would be a ready-made market if I could talk the manufacturer into building a version for the public. That was my sales pitch when I went to see the CEO and other executives at AM General in Lafayette, Indiana, which made Humvees for the military. I finagled permission to buy one, and then turned it over to a company to make it street-legal and civilize the interior, and then sent it back to AM General, saying “Now, copy this.” That’s what it did, and that’s why the Hummer became so closely identified with me when it went on the market.

There was an interesting business adventure that year too. I joined Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis in New York that October for the official launch of a glitzy new moneymaking machine: a celebrity restaurant and merchandising chain called Planet Hollywood. Every celebrity you can think of was there. It was not just an event, it was the beginning of an empire.

The idea was to put Planet Hollywoods all over the world and make them a magnet for people who loved American movie stars. Movie memorabilia and props would be the décor—like Tom Cruise’s flight suit from Top Gun, Jayne Mansfield’s swimsuit from The Girl Can’t Help It, and a motorcycle from The Terminator. The restaurants would host premieres and visits by the stars and sell specially designed jackets, T-shirts, and other souvenirs. It was the brainchild of Keith Barish, a movie producer, and Robert Earl, who had built up the global restaurant business based on music memorabilia, the Hard Rock Café. Keith had convinced Robert that Hollywood-themed restaurants could be even bigger than music-themes ones—especially now that the Iron Curtain had fallen and the whole world was wide open to American culture. The two brought the idea to me. “We want you to be our business partner,” they said. “We don’t want a crazy celebrity who doesn’t understand. You have a business mind. And you’re the number one star. If you do this, others will follow.”

I thought the idea made sense, and word got around fast. Pretty soon my lawyer, Jake Bloom, who also represented Sly and Bruce, said they were asking to sign on. “Would you mind if they’re in on it?” he asked.

“Absolutely not,” I said. I was especially happy about Sly. Jake knew that Stallone and I had been feuding for years. This went back to the early Rocky and Rambo days, when he was the number one action hero, and I was always trying to catch up. I remember saying to Maria when I made Conan the Destroyer, “I’m finally getting paid a million dollars for a movie, but now Stallone’s making three million. I feel like I’m standing still.” To energize myself, I’d envisioned Stallone as my archenemy, just like I had demonized Sergio Oliva when I was trying to take the Mr. Olympia crown. I got so into hating Sly that I started criticizing him in public—his body, the way he dressed—and I was quoted as bad-mouthing him in the press.

I couldn’t blame him for hitting back. In fact, he’d escalated the fight by secretly feeding negative stories about me to the media. For a while he even paid the legal bills for a British journalist whom I’d sued for libel. But time had passed, I was a lot more confident about being a star, and I wanted to make peace. I said to Jake, “Tell him that he is welcome to be in it, and it’s my way of being gracious and making up.”

So Sly, Bruce, and I became a team. We’d fly to the latest Planet Hollywood opening, greet the local celebrities, wave at the cameras, talk to the press, and do everything we could to reward the loyalty of the fans. On the airplane, Sly and I were smoking stogies and constantly trading jokes. We never talked about the feud. We were typical guys, totally in denial, as if there had never been any problem and nothing had ever happened. That’s how we moved forward.

Even with all this going on, I could feel myself starting to get restless. It reminded me of the restlessness I’d felt after winning my third or fourth Mr. Olympia. All of a sudden the idea of having the most muscular body didn’t mean that much to me anymore. It was a phase I’d gone through and a means to an end: bodybuilding had brought me to America and launched me into the movies. But I grew out of that phase as much as I’d grown out of playing with little wooden trains as a kid. Of course, I always wanted to promote the sport of bodybuilding, and I wanted to promote fitness. But being the most muscular man didn’t mean anything to me anymore.

Becoming the biggest action star had been the next challenge. Eventually I’d accomplished that as well. Then I’d gone another step, into comedies. But I’d always known I’d grow out of that too.

In the seven years between the two Terminator movies, my feelings about the business had changed. Throughout the 1980s, I was enthusiastically grinding out the films. I was gunning for the top, trying to double my salary with every project and have the number one movie at the box office and be the biggest star. I literally hated having to sleep. When I did The Terminator, I dreamed of being able to operate nonstop like a machine. Then I could shoot all night on the set with Jim Cameron, and in the morning just change wardrobe and drive over and do a daytime movie on a daytime set with a daytime director. “Wouldn’t that be cool?” I thought. “I could do four movies a year!”

But now, after Terminator 2: Judgment Day, I saw things completely differently. I had a growing family. I wanted to have a nice life. I wanted to enjoy my wife and kids. I wanted to see Katherine and Christina grow up. I wanted to be able to go to events with them and take them on vacation. I wanted to be home when they came home from school.

So I tried to figure out how to balance my time. I thought that doing one movie a year might be the perfect pace. People now accepted the fact that I was one of the biggest stars, so I didn’t have to prove anything. But they were expecting more movies, so I had to make sure I came back and gave them good ones. If I heard an idea or saw a script that was exceptionally good and triggered something in me, I wanted to be able to make that movie. But there were other opportunities out there as well, and movie acting was no longer enough.

I thought that maybe the way to keep myself interested was to do what Clint Eastwood does and spice up the movie career with directing and producing every so often—sometimes appearing in the movie and sometimes not. And so on. I loved the idea of new challenges, along with new dangers of failure. Clint was one of the very few Hollywood personalities who had his head screwed on straight. He was good in business. He never lost money. He was wise in the ways he invested. He was always getting involved in ventures he felt passionate about, like his restaurant business and his golf businesses in Northern California. From the time I came to America, he was always someone I’d idolized. I didn’t know if I had that kind of talent, but maybe I could try to be like Clint when acting was no longer enough for me and I was looking for the next challenge.

Then there was a completely different path I could see myself taking. Clint had been elected mayor of Carmel, California, his hometown. That too appealed to me, although I did not know at that point which office I might seek one day. Still, I couldn’t help but feel influenced by being around the Shrivers and the Kennedy family, even though we were on different sides of the fence politically.

In November 1991 a surprise push in the direction of running for office came from Richard Nixon. He invited me to stop by his office before a fund-raiser and the opening of a holiday exhibit at his presidential library, scheduled a few hours after the opening of the Reagan library. I knew how Nixon was hated by many people, and I was aware of the Watergate scandal and the hardship it put the country through. Taking that out of the equation, however, I admired him and thought he was a terrific president. I suspect he knew I was a fan, because I’d praised him in the media even at the height of his unpopularity. I especially loved talking about him then because of the side of me that likes to be rebellious and shock people.

He’d told me on the phone when he invited me to his event, “I want you to enjoy it, Arnold.” In fact, he was setting me up to make a speech without telling me. So I agreed unsuspectingly and brought along my nephew Patrick, the son of my late brother and his fiancée, Erika Knapp. Patrick, now in his midtwenties, had graduated from the University of Southern California Law School and had been hired as an associate by my entertainment lawyer, Jake Bloom. I loved hanging out with him and teaching him the ropes. We went down and greeted President Nixon at the holiday opening, which drew about thirteen hundred people.

Nixon was very good at paying attention to you. He would get into your head, and I was impressed. He said, “Arnold, I want you to come into my office.”

“Can my nephew come in with us?”

“Oh, absolutely.” We walked into his office, and he closed the door and pumped me for information about all kinds of things: what was I doing, how was it going with the movies, what made me a Republican, why was I involved in politics. After answering, I told him what was in my gut: “I came to America because it’s the greatest place in the world, and I’m going to do everything I can to keep it the greatest place. For that to happen, we can’t have schmucks running for president or hanging out at the White House. We need good leaders, and we need to move the agenda forward and have it be the same in the states and the same in the cities. So I always want to make sure that I vote for the right person and that I campaign for the right person. I need to know what they stand for, how they’ve voted in the past, how did they represent their state, were they great leaders, and all those kinds of things.” I told him about the challenges facing California in the areas of health and education, based on what I’d learned as the fitness chairman. And I talked about the challenge of making the state more business friendly.

Then someone came in and said, “Mr. President, they’re almost ready for you.” So we stood up. He turned to me just before we went and said, “You must run for governor of California. If you run for governor, I’ll help you all the way.” That caught me by surprise because we hadn’t been talking about that at all. He was the first ever to mention it to me in a serious way.

He sent Patrick to take a seat but told me, “Stay up here; stand over near the podium.” There were others standing there as well, including Bob Hope and other celebrities, and I joined the group.

He then got in front of the microphone and started talking. The speech was good, relaxed, and I was impressed because he had no notes. He spoke eloquently about the library and its mission, certain things that he had accomplished in his life, certain policies that must continue, and so on. “And, of course, I have a great following here. You people are responsible for making this all happen, and I am very grateful for your support,” he said. “But now I want to bring someone up who is the future of this state and …”

I didn’t hear what he said after this because my heart was racing.

“Maybe he just wants to mention me,” I thought. But I knew he was about to ask me to speak. The two sides of my mind immediately started a debate. One was saying, “What the fuck? Jeez, I’m not ready for this,” and the other side was saying, “Man, President Nixon is talking about you. Be happy!”

I heard the president say, “Arnold, come on up here.” And there was huge applause.

So I stepped out in front of all those people and stood there shaking his hand. Then he whispered to me, but so that you could still hear it clearly over the microphone, “I think you should say a few words.”

Luckily, when you feel good about someone and you know specifically why, it is not difficult at all to speak from the heart. I didn’t miss a beat. I even made a joke of it. “Well, I always like to be called up for a speech without any prior notice, but thank you very much.” That got a little bit of a laugh. I went on and spoke for a few minutes about how I became a Republican. I told the story of seeing Nixon on television for the first time during the 1968 presidential campaign “when he was talking about supporting law enforcement!” A few people applauded. I said, “He was supporting the military, the Pentagon, military expansion, and America can be powerful only if you have a strong military.” More applause.

“And he was talking about building an economy that is a global economy. He was talking about eliminating tariffs and barriers to trade, and ultimately it is our prosperity we have to protect, not labor!” Still more applause. “I loved hearing all those lines from him. And coming from a socialist country, I especially liked hearing someone say get government off our back.” Applause and cheers.

“Therefore, I became a big fan of this man. I was a big supporter of his, and I’m here today because I’m still a big supporter of his. We need more leaders like him!” Now everyone was applauding and cheering. It was heaven.

Afterward, President Nixon took me back to his office and said, “Remember what I told you about running for governor.”

I figured that the idea of eventually ending up in politics was not that far fetched when someone like Nixon suggested it. But my sense of it was never so intense that I felt “this is definitely going to happen.” It was never one of those “I’ll do it this year” items. I didn’t dwell on it, didn’t put a timeline on it. I was very relaxed.