Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 21 Heart Trouble

MAKING MONEY WAS NEVER my only goal. But I always kept an eye on my earning power as a gauge of success, and money opened the door to interesting investments. True Lies and Junior were both hits in 1994, and that put my movie career back on track. I had plenty of work, and the money poured in: during the rest of the 1990s, almost $100 million from movie paychecks alone. Each year, I was collecting additional millions from videos, cable distribution, and broadcasts of my old films. Even my first film, Hercules in New York, was making money as a cult movie, although I didn’t get a cut. Tens of millions more came in from real estate, Planet Hollywood, books, and other business ventures.

Like many Hollywood stars, I also made money doing commercials in Asia and Europe. Making commercials in the United States would have undermined the Arnold image and the Arnold brand, but commercials by American celebrities had cachet abroad, especially in the Far East. The makers of products such as instant noodles, canned coffee, beer, and Vffuy, a Japanese vitamin drink, were willing to pay me as much as $5 million per ad. And the commercial was usually shot in one day. The deal always included a “secrecy clause” holding the advertiser responsible for not letting the commercial reach the West. That possibility no longer exists—shoot a commercial today, and it’s all over YouTube—but in the mid-1990s the internet was just an odd new idea.

As my business interests expanded, I knew that we’d eventually get into territory where I no longer had time to tend them all and where Ronda would be overwhelmed. She’d been taking business classes, true, but at heart she was an artist. That’s exactly what happened in 1996. She came to me and said, “This is so much money now, it’s beyond me. I don’t feel comfortable anymore.” I loved Ronda and was determined never to make her feel like she was being replaced. I promised that she could keep the work she was comfortable with and that, meanwhile, I’d get help with the bigger projects, where more and more money was at stake.

I always felt that the most important thing was not how much you make, but how much you invest, how much you keep. I never wanted to join the long list of famous entertainers and athletes who wiped out financially. It’s a staggering list, including Willie Nelson, Billy Joel, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Bjorn Borg, Dorothy Hamill, Michael Vick, and Mike Tyson. All those people had business managers; I remember Burt Reynolds and his manager showing up in Palm Springs each driving a Rolls-Royce. Then the money was gone. No matter what you do in life, you have to have a business mind and educate yourself about money. You can’t just delegate it to a manager and tell him, “Half has to stay locked in investments so that we can pay the taxes, and I’ll keep the other half.” My goal was to get rich and stay rich. I never wanted to have the phone call where the manager says, “Something went wrong with the investment. We can’t pay our taxes.” I wanted to know the details.

My interests were so diverse that I could have ended up with a whole grab-bag of specialist advisors. Instead, I worked closely with an extremely smart investment banker named Paul Wachter, whom I’d known for years. Paul was a longtime friend of my brother-in-law Bobby Shriver’s—they became pals after law school in the 1970s while clerking for judges in Los Angeles—and we’d gotten quite close. You wouldn’t think I had much in common with a Jewish lawyer and banker from Manhattan’s Upper East Side who’d never been near a weight room or a movie set in his life. It seemed strange to other people how well Paul and I got along. But he had a strong Austrian heritage: his father was a Holocaust survivor from Vienna, and his mother was from a German-speaking part of Romania. German had been Paul’s primary language at home growing up. And his father, unlike many post–World War II immigrants, had maintained strong connections with the Old World. In fact, his business was importing and exporting ham and other meat products between the United States and places like Poland and Bavaria. Paul had spent his summers in Europe as a kid and later worked as a ski instructor in the Austrian Alps.

Compared to most Americans, he thought a lot like me. We both had alpine scenery in our blood: the snowy landscapes, the pine forests, the big fireplaces and chalets. For example, when I told Paul that I dreamed of building a large chalet overlooking LA for my family, he understood. We were both extremely competitive, and I would challenge him at tennis and skiing. From his father, whom I really liked also, Paul understood the immigrant mentality of coming to America and starting a business and making good.

So here was someone I trusted who was funny and athletic—a guy I could hang and schmooze with; ski, play tennis, and go golfing with; travel with; and shop with. Those things are important to me. I never like business relationships that are purely work. Maria and I are very different in that way. She grew up in a world where a sharp line was drawn between friends and the help. With me, there is almost no line. I find it valuable to work with people I can also be friends with, go river rafting with, go to Austria with and hike in the mountains. And I’m like a little kid who loves to show off and share things that I have experienced. If I go to the top of the Eiffel Tower for lunch and have an extraordinary meal, and someone comes with the cart with five thousand stogies in it, and I like the way they present the cigar and light it, I want all my buddies to experience that. So the next time I’m promoting a movie overseas, I’ll figure out how to arrange for some of them to come along. I want them to see the Sydney Opera House. I want them to see Rome. I want them to experience World Cup soccer games.

When I was doing the Planet Hollywood deal, Paul was my unofficial rabbi. He’d encouraged me to bring in my own lawyer when everybody else was using the company’s man. He’d also insisted that we take the time to do the deal right. We spent almost two years negotiating my ownership stake, and while the other stars focused mainly on including freebies and perks in their contracts, the arrangement I ended up with was more lucrative and had more safeguards built in in case the business went south. Over time Paul and the investment bank he worked for, Wertheim Schroder & Co., helped me on other deals. His official specialty at Wertheim was gaming and hotels; he’d sold golf courses, tennis clubs, and ski resorts. But I saw him in action enough to know that he had much greater range. No matter what was thrown at him—a production studio, a winery in Napa, California, a shopping mall development—he always cut to the heart of the deal. He was the quickest study I knew.

He and I had been working together informally for years when Ronda reached her limit. Common sense had been telling me that I needed to diversify beyond real estate, which was the only sector I really knew. The economy was booming, new companies and industries were starting up, and the stock market was expanding like crazy. I wasn’t interested in buying and selling stocks per se or spending my time researching companies. But I knew that the overall market had appreciated in real terms more than sixfold since Jimmy Carter was elected. I wanted to tap into that growth. Paul arranged for me to buy an ownership interest in a privately held mutual fund company called Dimensional Fund Advisers, which had offices right in Santa Monica. I met the founder, David Booth, a student of my hero Milton Friedman, and Paul couldn’t say enough good things about the business.

“I’ve seen hundreds of companies, but never a group of people like this,” he told me. “They are extremely ethical, they are brilliantly intellectual, and they are good businesspeople.” Though still small and under the radar, DFA was poised to dominate a part of the index mutual fund business that the industry giant, Vanguard, didn’t serve. I jumped at the opportunity, and Dimensional quickly became one of my most valuable assets.

I’d been pushing Paul to go out on his own, and in 1997 he set up shop in my building as an independent wealth manager with exactly one initial client: me. We understood each other so well by then that I gave him just a few instructions. The first was my old motto: “Take one dollar and turn it into two.” I wanted big investments that were interesting, creative, and different. Conservative bets—the kind that would generate 4 percent a year, say—didn’t interest me. Offshore corporations and other gimmicks didn’t interest me; I was proud to pay taxes on the money I earned. The more we paid the better, in fact, because it showed I was making more money. I also wasn’t interested in the investments that often attracted Hollywood business managers, such as trendy hotels and clubs. I could tolerate big risks in exchange for big returns, and I would want to know as much as possible about what was going on. My openness to new ideas and my involvement, plus the amount of money coming in, attracted Paul. He knew there would be plenty to do.

The idea of buying a Boeing 747 snuck up on us slowly. We had an acquaintance in San Francisco, David Crane, whose investment firm had gotten into the aircraft leasing trade. Aircraft leasing is a whole industry that exists because airlines often don’t like to own their airplanes. Owning ties up a lot of capital and can be a big distraction when your real business is flying around passengers and freight. So the airlines often lease the planes from somebody else. In a lease arrangement, the airline operates and maintains the plane for, say, eight years, and then returns it to the owner, who is free to sell it or lease it out again.

David’s firm was working with Singapore Airlines, which I knew had the best reputation in the airline business. It planned to expand its route system aggressively, and to free up capital, it was selling planes and leasing them back through contracts backed by Singapore government guarantees. I did some reading about airlines and leases and let it all simmer in my mind. Then one day I woke up, and the vision was crystal clear: “I’ve got to own one of those 747s!”

As far as I could tell, the opportunity was solid. I also felt a little of the same impulse that came over me when I saw my first Humvee. The 747 was the ballsiest airliner, and the price was as big as the plane. A new one cost anywhere between $130 million and $150 million, depending on the model and on options like the cabin and seating, cargo capacity, instrumentation, and so on. Of course, you wouldn’t pay the entire amount because buying a jet for lease is a little like buying a commercial building for lease. You invest, say, $10 million, and take out bank loans to cover the rest.

We got in touch with David Crane. He was skeptical. Aircraft leasing deals are the realm of huge financial institutions like GE Capital. Individuals had never done it. “I doubt it, but I’ll check,” he said, promising to ask his clients in Singapore.

A week later, he came back to me. “It’s impossible. You can’t do it. They don’t want any individuals, only institutions.”

“Well, I can understand why,” I said. “They probably think this is some Hollywood schmuck who’s made some money overnight, and all of a sudden he thinks that he can buy a 747. But by the time they put together the deal, his movie falls through or something, and he backs out. They don’t want to deal with these Hollywood drug addicts and weirdos. I understand that. So can we get them to meet? Do they ever come to Los Angeles on business?

“Let me check it out.”

The next day, we learned that his clients had a West Coast trip planned in two weeks and were willing to come to my office. “Ah,” I thought. “As is so often the case, something that is impossible slowly becomes possible.” By the time the Singapore Airlines executives arrived, we’d done our homework, and it was easy to sell them on the idea. I spent the beginning of the meeting reviewing the deal, mainly just to show them that I understood how it worked. You could see them relax right away. After thirty minutes, we were taking pictures together and the deal in principle was done. I gave them Terminator 2 jackets as souvenirs, plus Predator gimme caps and bodybuilding T-shirts. I knew that deep down they were fans.

Now came the hard part—for Paul. Sometimes when you look at a deal and you don’t have all the knowledge or are not overly smart about what’s involved, you see less danger and you’re too willing to take the plunge. I saw just what was in front of me, and it all seemed good. Sure, it also looked and smelled risky. But the more risky things are, the more upside there is.

It was my job ultimately to say, “I like this thing.” It was Paul’s job to make sure it was really okay and that we understood the risks. The idea of owning this giant thing … You are signing documents and you think you have no liability because maintenance and safety are the responsibility of the airline—but was that totally true? Paul uncovered wrinkles that were bizarre. For example, if the plane crashed, you’d certainly have trouble sleeping at night, but at the same time, there was ample insurance to cover the loss. On the other hand, if other Singapore Airlines planes crashed and the reputation of the airline was ruined, then the value of your investment would be hurt. Other airlines might not want your plane after the lease was up and Singapore Airlines gave it back.

“That’s one way this whole thing could go south,” David Crane explained. “You’d be sitting there with a 747 nobody wants and you’d still have to make your payments to the bank.” It was true that the profitability of the investment depended heavily on this so-called residual value. And residual value could be affected by everything from the reputation of the airline, to the state of the world economy, to oil prices, to technological innovation ten years from now. But when I heard David’s worst-case scenario, I had to laugh. “Right!” I said. “That’s exactly what’s going to happen to me.” I just had faith that it wouldn’t.

Finally, we were comfortable with the deal. I was excited. “You should talk to other people in Hollywood,” I told Paul. “They might like the idea too, and you can do a little business.” He actually went and pitched it to five or six top executives and stars but came back empty-handed. “They looked at me like I had three heads,” he told me. “Mostly what I saw in their eyes was fear. Like the whole thing was just too big and too weird for them.”

The plane we ended up with cost $147 million. Before signing the papers, we went to the airport to see it. There’s a picture somewhere of me literally kicking the tires of my 747. We signed all kinds of confidentiality agreements, of course, but the banks couldn’t help themselves, and the news leaked the first day. I loved it because everybody thought I had bought the 747 to fly around in, like the sheik of Dubai. It didn’t dawn on anyone that we’d do such an outlandish deal as an investment. It paid off very handsomely in profits, in tax benefits, and in pride of ownership. I’d hear guys bragging about their new Gulfstream IV or IV-SP, and then I’d get to say, “That’s great, guys. Let me talk about my 747 …” It was a great conversation stopper.

Buying the plane was a happy adventure in an otherwise difficult time. During the filming of Batman and Robin, late the previous year, I’d learned at my annual physical that I would have to make room on my calendar for a major heart operation.

The timing had been a surprise, but the problem itself wasn’t—for twenty years I’d known I had a hereditary defect that would someday need to be repaired. Way back in the 1970s, during one of my mother’s springtime visits, I’d brought her to the hospital because she was feeling dizzy and nauseous. They discovered that she had a heart murmur due to a faulty aortic valve, the main valve leading out of the heart. Eventually it would need to be replaced. Middle age is often when you detect those things, the doctor said, and she was then in her fifties. I was only thirty-one, but they checked me too and found out that I shared the defect.

The doctor had told me, “Your valve won’t need treatment for a long time. We’ll just keep an eye on it.” So every year I would get my heart checked. He would listen to the murmur and say, “There’s nothing to worry about, just stay in shape and keep your cholesterol low” and blah, blah, blah. And I’d push the problem out of my mind for another year.

Eventually, when they told my mother that it was time for surgery, she refused. “When God wants to take me, I’m ready to go,” she declared.

“That’s funny, you didn’t say that when you had your hysterectomy,” I pointed out. “And you’ve fixed every other health problem all along. So why all of a sudden now with the heart are you are talking about God? God is the one who made the science possible. God trained the doctors. It’s all in God’s hands. You can extend your life.”

“No, no, no.” It was one of those Old World things. Still, even without the repair, she seemed healthy enough and was now seventy-five.

But I wasn’t fine. The first sign of real trouble came after making True Lies. I was home swimming laps in the pool and felt this weird burning in my chest. It was a signal that the valve was beginning to fail. The doctor said, “This is now going to deteriorate slowly and then eventually it’s going to deteriorate very fast. We want to catch it just at the beginning of that rapid slide—that’s the best and safest moment to do the repair. If you wait beyond that, the aorta gets affected and the heart gets enlarged, and you don’t want that. But I can’t tell you when that moment will be. It could be next year, it could be five years from now. Everyone is different.”

I didn’t feel any more symptoms and continued doing my thing. I skied, I made movies, I went to Planet Hollywood openings, I did my public service. But at my annual checkup in 1996, the doctor said, “The moment has come. You need heart surgery. It doesn’t have to be tomorrow, but do it this year.”

I visited three hospitals to talk to the surgeons. I believe you should get three opinions when facing a big medical decision. The doctor I chose was Vaughn Starnes at the USC University Hospital. He was a trim guy with rimless glasses who was totally matter-of-fact about the problem and the risks. He also could understand where I was coming from.

“I love your action movies, and I want to see you keep making them,” he said. “So I don’t want you running around with an artificial valve.” The better course was to put in a replacement valve made of living tissue, he explained. With a mechanical valve, I would have to take blood thinners and limit my activity for the rest of my life. But with an organic valve, “You can continue doing stunts, you can continue doing sports, you can go skiing, you can go motorcycle riding, horseback riding—whatever you want to do.”

That was the upside. The downside was risk. The particular procedure he recommended worked only six times out of ten. “I want you to understand that in sixty percent to seventy percent of cases the surgery works, but in thirty percent to forty percent of the cases, the replacement valve fails,” he said. “Then we have to go back in and try again.”

Big risk, big reward. That made sense to me. “It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll take the risk.”

We scheduled the surgery for immediately after I finished Batman and Robin, so that I could come back without missing a beat. After the operation in April, I wanted to promote Batman and Robin that summer and then shoot my next picture, whatever it might be, in late 1997.

I didn’t tell anybody about my heart surgery. No one knew. Not my mother, my nephew, my kids or anybody. Because I didn’t want to talk about it. To ease my anxiety, I pretended that it wasn’t really heart surgery; it would be more like getting a wisdom tooth removed. I would go in, get it done, and then go home.

I didn’t even want to tell my wife. Maria was in the middle of a difficult fourth pregnancy, and I did not want her to be upset. She had a tendency to blow things up into high drama, even things that were not life and death, whereas I would play everything down. For instance, I would never tell her, “Three months from now, I’m going to Norway for a speech,” because from that point on, she’d fret that I would be gone that week and she would be by herself. She’d be relentless: “What flight are you going to take? Why leave on Saturday rather than Sunday? Do you really have to go for that long? What are those two extra meetings?” By the time I got on the plane, I couldn’t enjoy it because I’d talked too much about it. So I always told Ronda and Lynn, “Never share my calendar with anybody,” and I would tell Maria only a few days in advance. I’m a person who does not like to talk about things over and over. I make decisions very quickly, I don’t ask many people for opinions, and I don’t want to think too many times about the same thing. I want to move on. That’s why Maria always said I was just like her mother.

Maria is the opposite. She’s a genius with medicine, and her method is to flesh everything out by talking to a lot of people. She’s an outward processor, while I keep things bottled up. I was afraid that if she did that, word would get around before I had surgery. I also was concerned that she would second-guess me so that every night there would be a discussion. I needed to be in denial. I’d made my decision in the doctor’s office, and I never wanted to deal with it again. If she were to bring it up all the time, then my denial trick wouldn’t work. It would disrupt my way of coping with life and death. So I felt it was better never to let Maria know until just before the trip, or in this case, just before I went to the hospital.

As the surgery approached, I let Dr. Starnes in on my plan. “I will tell my family that I’m going to go to Mexico,” I said. “I’ll say I need a little vacation for a week. And then we do the heart surgery. You said I will be out of the hospital after five days. So after five days, I’ll go to a hotel. I will lie in the sun and get tanned, I will look healthy, and then I’ll go home, and no one will even know I had heart surgery. How about that?”

The doctor seemed a little surprised. He looked at me and then said in his straightforward manner, “Won’t work. You’ll have pain, you’ll need help, you’ll never be able to fake it. I strongly recommend that you tell your wife. She’s pregnant. She should be included. I would tell her now.”

That night I said casually to Maria, “Interestingly enough, do you remember I said one time that someday down the line I will need to have the valve replaced? The doctor has a slot available for me in two weeks, and I said to myself that’s actually a good idea because if I do it right now, I’m in between movies, and I don’t have to go to Europe for the Batman promotion for another six or seven weeks. So I can squeeze it in. This is a good time to do it, so I just want you to know.”

Maria said, “Wait! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute, are you telling me you need heart surgery?”

It was as if I’d never talked about it before. From that point on, she did talk about it continuously, but she also helped me keep it secret. My mother was staying with us for her annual spring visit, and we didn’t even tell her.

The night before I was due at the hospital, I shot pool until one in the morning with Franco and a bunch of friends. We drank schnapps and had a great time, and I didn’t tell any of them where I was going the next day. Then at four in the morning, Maria got up and drove me to the hospital. We used the family van, not the fancy Mercedes. At Maria’s suggestion, I’d arranged to be admitted under a different name. The parking attendant was expecting us, and we got whisked into the garage. By five I was being prepped and hooked up to the machines, and by seven o’clock the surgery was in full swing. I loved that. Go in at five, start the surgery at seven, and by noon it’s over. Bang, bang, bang. At six o’clock that evening, I woke up ready to shoot some more pool.

Well, that was the idea. They agreed to dress me in my Hawaiian shirt after the surgery so that when I woke up, I’d feel like I wasn’t actually in the hospital. That was the whole theme. Sure enough, it worked. I woke up, saw Maria sitting there, felt fine, and went back to sleep. When I woke up again the next morning, Maria was still there, and I glanced over and saw a Lifecycle stationary bike that had been ordered for me to use later in the week. Within two hours, I was out of bed and on the bike. The doctor came in and was stunned. He said, “Please, you’ve got to take this Lifecycle out of here.”

“There is no resistance on it,” I said. “It’s just for me, for my head, that I am sitting on the Lifecycle right after surgery.”

He examined me and was pleased with my progress. But that evening, I started coughing. Fluid was building up in my lungs. The doctor came back at nine o’clock and ordered a bunch of tests. A little later, after Maria went home to see the kids, I tried to sleep. But the coughing got worse, and soon I was having trouble getting air. At three in the morning, the doctor came back in. He sat down on the bed and held my hand. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “but this didn’t work. We have to take you back into surgery. I’m putting together the best team. We are not going to lose you.”

“Lose me?” I said.

“We are not going to lose you. Just hang in there tonight; maybe we’ll give you some medication so you sleep. Where’s Maria?”

“She’s home.”

“Well, I have to call her.”

“Look, she will freak out. Don’t even tell her.”

“No, she has to be here.”

There’s a moment going into surgery that I really hate. It’s the moment when the anesthesia starts to take hold, when you know you’re going out, when you’re losing consciousness and don’t know if you’ll ever wake up. The oxygen mask felt like it was suffocating me—I was gasping for air, short of breath.

This was a much bigger version of the claustrophobia I fought when I was having face and body masks made to play the Terminator or Mr. Freeze in Batman and Robin. For me, Stan Winston’s special-effects studio was torture. To make the masks, they need a mold, and to make the mold, they place these huge, heavy casts on your head. A lot of actors hate it, so Stan and his helpers have a whole routine.

When you first arrive, the music is on, everyone is happy and welcoming, “Yay, it’s good to have you here!” Then they sit you down and say, “This is going to be a little challenging. Are you claustrophobic?”

“Nah,” I’d always answer, trying to play ballsy.

So they start wrapping you with strips of fabric dipped in cement. Soon your eyes are covered, and you can’t see anything. Then your ears are closed, and you can no longer hear. One by one, all your senses are shut off. Now your mouth is sealed, so you can no longer talk. Finally, they cover your nose, except for two little straws poking out of your nostrils to let you breathe.

You have to wait maybe a half hour for the cast to set. The mind starts to play tricks. What if you can’t get enough air? What if a little bit of cement gets in one of the straws and blocks off a nostril? Because they’ve had so many actors freak out, they try to keep things light with the music and casual conversation. After you can’t hear anymore, you still feel them moving around you as they’re applying the wrap. They tell you ahead of time that if you feel you are really flipping out, “I’m right here. Just signal with your hand or tap me on the arm.”

After awhile the real fear sets in. You feel the cast getting hard, which means it’s no longer possible to just rip it off your head. Now it will have to be cut. You noticed the tools when you sat down—the little electric circular saw they use to cut off casts—but you didn’t ask enough questions when you had the chance.

So now you’re thinking, “Wait a minute. How do they know how deep to cut? What if that saw slices into my face?”

The first time I went through this, I worried so much about the saw that I started hyperventilating. I couldn’t get enough air through my straws, and I started feeling really freaked. I tried to calm down. “Stop thinking about that, stop visualizing that saw,” I ordered myself. “Push it out of your mind … Yeah, okay, I’ve got it out of my mind now. Okay, now let’s think about something else. Maybe I should think about the ocean. Maybe I should think about a great forest, something pleasant; maybe birds chirping and leaves rustling in the wind and in the distance people working and the sound of a … chainsaw!” And I’d be anxious again. Of course, by this time, the attendants had disappeared. Maybe not out of the room, but I didn’t know where they were. Maybe they’d told me, “Okay, just ten more minutes,” but I couldn’t hear. I was locked in. There was no one around. And so I was just kind of hoping for the best.

Surgery reminded me of that.

Maria was so frightened to get a call from Dr. Starnes at four o’clock in the morning that she telephoned her friend Roberta and asked her to come with her to the hospital. Roberta Hollander, a CBS news producer, had been like a sister to Maria when she first got in front of the camera—a strong leader and tough broad who really knew how to deal with people. A few hours later, she and Maria sat in Dr. Starnes’s office as I went back under the knife. He had a huge monitor in his office that let him see and hear what was going on in the operating room because there were parts of the procedure, like taking the patient off the heart-lung machine, that he didn’t perform. He’d go back to his office, see other patients and hold his meetings, keeping track in case he was needed. Maria told me later that she looked away many times. She couldn’t watch when they cut open my chest, used surgical pliers to undo the wires holding together my rib cage from the first operation, and exposed the heart. But Roberta pulled her chair right up to the screen. “Did you see that?” she said. “They just cut the aorta, and they’re stitching in the new valve!”

So I got a second or third lease on life, depending on how you count it. I woke up from the surgery and discovered Roberta there with Maria, giving moral support. Again I felt good. The painful coughing was gone. I could breathe. “Amazing!” I said. “This is great! When did the doctor say I could go home?”

We’d found an Austrian guy in the hospital kitchen who knew how to fix Wiener schnitzel, and the first two days I had that. It tasted delicious. But on the third day, when the attendant came in with the food, I said, “Can you please take that away? I cannot stand the smell.” It smelled like rotting garbage.

From that point on, I could only stomach ice cream and fruit. Everything smelled bad. I lost my sense of taste. I hated everything they put in front of me and began to feel really low.

The doctor had warned that open-heart surgery often leaves people depressed. But after what we’d just been through, Maria was very concerned. “This isn’t like you,” she said. When a couple of days passed, and I didn’t bounce back emotionally, she thought that the doctors were being too blasé. “You’ve got to do something,” she told them. “We can’t have him like that. When I come back tomorrow, you’d better have him cheery.”

The residents had the idea of sneaking me a cigar, because they knew I love stogies. They thought that would really do it. There was an area on the roof where they could shoot baskets to unwind, and they brought me up there to smoke. Little did they realize that I had no sense of taste and that I hated everything. I put the cigar in my mouth and almost threw up. “No, thank you, I just can’t,” I said. I ended up sitting in the wheelchair watching them play basketball, like a character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I was just staring. I didn’t even know what I saw, just bodies jumping around. There was nothing in it for me, that was for sure. Eventually they wheeled me back down to the room. I did feel a little bit better, I guess, to be outdoors a bit.

Eventually I came around, especially after I got home. I played with the kids and little by little started working out in the gym. Not bench presses, of course, but riding the Lifecycle a little and afterward walking up the hill to Will Rogers Park with Conan and Strudel, our black Lab that Franco gave me on one of my birthdays. A little later I could go back to weights, but heavy training was out of the question from now on because it would put pressure on the valve. No forcing, no struggling, the doctor said. Not ever again.

I never realized how badly the news of my surgery was going to hurt me in Hollywood. We announced it because word had started to circulate anyway, and it would have seemed suspicious not to tell the public. Immediately I got phone calls from executives at the studios I’d been working with. “Don’t worry about the script,” they said. “We are going to hold it for you. Just take care of yourself and feel better. And as soon as you’re ready, let us know.”

I should have known it was not that simple. The more you promote yourself as the ultimate action hero, and the more you advertise how fit you are and how you do the riding, jumping, and fighting yourself, people form a larger-than-life perception of you. They see you as an actual action figure, not just some guy in a costume on the screen. And the heart symbolizes it all. It’s the center of the body, the physicality. It’s the foundation of courage and will. The heart is emotion too—it’s love and passion and compassion. Heart, heart, heart, heart, it’s the center of everything.

Now all of a sudden people hear that you’ve had surgery. This thing that has driven you for decades is being operated on. And they talk: “What happened? Did he have a heart attack? Oh, a valve change; I don’t know what that is, really. But Jesus Christ, open-heart surgery. They had to stop his heart and open it up and change parts in there. And having to do two surgeries must mean there’s something really wrong. Sounds like terrible news. Poor guy. I mean, fuck, it’s over!”

People reacted totally differently to David Letterman’s coronary bypass surgery ten years later. Within two weeks, he was back on the show, and life went on. But no one expected him to lift up the set or run through flames or swing from the ceiling. Commonly after heart surgery, you can go back to your normal everyday life. But my everyday life was anything but normal. My stunts were not normal, and my movies were not normal, so I was seen differently. It was more like when a theoretical physicist has brain surgery. Everyone goes off the deep end and says, “Well, they said one-third of his brain was affected, and this is a disaster.”

Access Hollywood and other celebrity-gossip shows went to town on the situation. So-called medical experts who had never even met me and didn’t know of my hereditary condition or the specifics of my treatment were interviewed on TV. They’d say things like, “Under normal circumstances, when you have a surgery like that, it means you’ll have an artificial valve, and you’ll be taking blood thinners, and you would have to avoid strenuous activity that might cause injury, like a movie stunt, which might cause severe internal bleeding, and you could die immediately.” We could clarify that I hadn’t received a mechanical valve and didn’t need blood thinners, of course, but the damage was done. The studios were making decisions based on inaccurate information. People thought, “We won’t be seeing Arnold in any action movies anymore.”

In spite of all this, I did experience the wonderful physical rebound that often results from a heart repair. I felt as vigorous as Hercules, ready to leap back into work. In July, I was already traveling around the world promoting Batman and Robin. And, as usual, I had projects at various stages of development, with roles that interested me. With Wings as Eagles was a film in which I would have played a German army officer in the closing months of World War II who ignores orders to kill Allied POWs and saves them instead. Minority Report was envisioned as a sequel to Total Recall, with a script by the same writer. I would have played the detective role that eventually went to Tom Cruise. In Noble Father I would have played a widowed cop trying to raise three daughters and fight crime. There was a proposed movie version of S.W.A.T., a 1970s TV action series; a movie called Crossbow, based on the legend of William Tell; and Pathfinder, about a Viking orphan raised by Native Americans at the time of the first European explorations of North America.

I didn’t even notice at first that the studios were holding back. But when I started submitting stories and scripts I wanted to do, people were slow responding. I became aware that the studios seemed reluctant to commit really big money. Fox was backing away from the idea of Terminator 3. Warner put the brakes on I Am Legend, a postapocalyptic vampire script that I was supposed to shoot that fall with Ridley Scott directing. He wanted a budget of $100 million, while Warner wanted to spend only $80 million. That was the reason the studio gave for pulling back, anyway—the real reason was my heart surgery.

In the midst of all this, I was also trying to keep Planet Hollywood from going up in smoke. Was it a fad, or was it a real business? The startup had become, to put it mildly, a crazy adventure. In the past eighteen months, I’d taken part in restaurant openings in Moscow, Sydney, Helsinki, Paris, and more than a dozen other cities all over the world. Often these openings were more like national events. Ten thousand people turned out in Moscow, and forty thousand in London. Our opening in San Antonio, Texas, turned into a citywide celebration where more than one hundred thousand people were partying in the streets. It was a huge sensation. There was no press that didn’t cover it. Planet Hollywood was like the Beatles: a genius idea with sophisticated promotion and the best marketing.

An impressive number of stars signed up as owners and participants as the company grew: Whoopi Goldberg, Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas, Cindy Crawford, George Clooney, Will Smith, Jackie Chan, and on and on. We had a lineup of athletes that was just as fantastic, including Shaquille O’Neal, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, Sugar Ray Leonard, Monica Seles, and Andre Agassi. The athletes were associated with the Official All Star Cafe, Planet Hollywood’s chain for sports celebrities. When Planet Hollywood went public in 1996, it had the busiest first day of trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange ever, and the total value of the company stood at $2.8 billion.

It was clear that Planet Hollywood was a great venue for a party. When we held the premiere celebration for Eraser at the Official All Star Cafe in Times Square, traffic was gridlocked for blocks. Inside, for $15, you could get a burger and a beer and watch George Clooney, Vanessa Williams, me, and the rest of the cast and our guests hanging out on the main floor below. There were interesting nostalgia displays, like part of Charlie Sheen’s collection of baseball memorabilia and a preserved slice of wedding cake from Joe DiMaggio’s wedding to Marilyn Monroe. There were counters where you could buy specially designed clothing and souvenirs.

The Planet Hollywood trips, openings, and events were all fun. Sometimes I would bring Maria and the kids, and we’d make the trip a minivacation. Sly, Bruce, and I got together and hung out. It was always interesting to meet the local celebrities, too, who were an essential part of the business. Every city has celebrities, whether it’s a football star or an opera singer or whatever. When we opened in Munich or Toronto or Cape Town or Cancún, we always involved both the international stars and the locals, and that’s what made the celebration. Local celebrities would join in because they could mingle with the international stars, and often they would have financial participation in that particular restaurant. After the grand opening, the international celebrities would draw back, and the locals would support the restaurant as a regular hangout, throw parties there, have screenings there—almost every Planet Hollywood was built with a screening room.

Going public gave the company capital to expand. But we saw very quickly the drawbacks of being publicly owned, too. Compared to regular restaurant chains such as Ponderosa or Applebee’s, Planet Hollywood had high expenses, and if you weren’t on the inside, or out there promoting the business, it was hard to see why certain big-ticket items made sense.

For instance, corporate jets: Planet Hollywood spent lots of money flying celebrities around. Actually, this was the best way to cement the loyalty of the stars; even more effective than the stock options they also received. Big-time celebrities don’t like flying commercial, and yet very few have their own planes. For this reason, the Warner Bros. studio operated its own little air force for twenty or thirty years, keeping a set of planes to fly Clint Eastwood and other major actors and directors around. Warner also had houses in Acapulco, Mexico, and Aspen and apartments in New York. These were like candies for celebrities. If you were part of the Warner family, you could use all of that for free. And those actors and directors stayed with the studio, signing contract after contract, because they knew if they went to, say, Universal, there would be no more corporate jet. We had that same magic working for us, and yet shareholders would say, “Wait a minute, why are you wasting all this money on celebrities? I don’t want to pay for that.”

They complained about the design expenses also. The restaurants all sold merchandise, from cool-looking bomber jackets to caps to key chains, and these were being refreshed and updated constantly. Fans would try to see how many Planet Hollywood T-shirts from different cities they could collect. Sometimes a customer would show up at an opening with thirty T-shirts for me to sign because he or she had been to thirty cities all over the world. It was a good, good spin. But stockholders would still want to know, “Why are you designing jackets and merchandise all the time? Why don’t you keep the same ones?”

The biggest pressure from the public markets was to expand. Wall Street was in the heat of the internet boom, and investors demanded fast growth. The founders, Robert Earl and Keith Barish, were each now worth about $500 million on paper because they still owned 60 percent of the stock. They promised to increase both total sales and the number of locations by 30 percent to 40 percent a year. This meant building restaurants in lots of second- and third-tier US cities like Indianapolis, Saint Louis, and Columbus, as well as in dozens more cities abroad. In April 1997, the month I had my heart operation, the company made a deal with Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal to open almost three dozen Planet Hollywoods across the Middle East and Europe, starting with Brussels, Athens, Cairo, Lisbon, Istanbul, and Budapest. And it made a deal with a tycoon in Singapore, Ong Beng Seng, to build almost two dozen restaurants in Asia.

I kept telling Robert and Keith that this was a mistake. They were losing their grip on the central concept. If you went to the Planet Hollywood in Beverly Hills, you really might see Arnold. If you went to the one in Paris, you really might see beloved French film star Gerard Depardieu. If you went to the All Star Cafe in Tokyo, you really might see Ichiro Suzuki, the great baseball player. And in Orlando, you really might see Shaq during the years that he played there. But if you went to the Planet Hollywood in Indianapolis, would you see Bruce Willis having lunch? It started to feel like bullshit. We couldn’t deliver on that promise. By October, I was worried enough to ask Robert and Keith to come to my office and talk. We sat around the big conference table, just the three of us and Paul Wachter, and I made my pitch to them about fixing the strategy. We now had restaurants all over the world in great locations, I told them, and those held enormous potential that was still untapped. I had a whole presentation prepared on how to do that. For instance, we had a big opportunity to work with the studios on movie premieres. “Hollywood is turning out fifty movies a year,” I said. “Every one of those movies is going to open up across the United States and the world. So where do they hold the party?”

I wanted to bring studio executives into the business, fly them to the premieres, offer them perks, and treat them like kings so they would sit in their marketing meetings and say, “We’re going to open this movie with Planet Hollywood in Moscow, Madrid, London, Paris, and Helsinki—ten cities. In each city, we’ll have a screening at the restaurant, and then a huge screening at a local theater, and Planet Hollywood will host a big after-party. And here’s the good thing, guys: Planet Hollywood will fly the celebrities over and pay for the party. We’ll take care of the hotel rooms and all the other stuff involved in the premiere itself. By splitting the costs, we’ll save, and we’ll still get a ton of attention.”

Pulling off those kinds of deals meant that we would need a point person to schmooze with the studio. My first choice would have been Jack Valenti, the longtime head of the Motion Picture Association of America and Hollywood’s top lobbyist in Washington. Jack was a good friend and had been one of my closest advisors when I was chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. I thought we should go to him and say, “Jack, you’re seventy-five. You have done a terrific job for the movie business, but what are they paying you? A million dollars a year? Here’s two million a year. Relax. And here’s a pension, and here are benefits for your grandchildren.” All of a sudden we’d have Jack Valenti schmoozing all the studios and making the deals.

Another vital matter that I raised: our hamburgers and pizzas were good, but I wanted to serve more interesting food. And I saw huge potential in the merchandise. Rather than cut back our spending on design, I believed that we should do more. I was fascinated by the way fashion designer Tom Ford had gone into Gucci and transformed it from an old-fuddy-duddy company into a source for hip jackets and hip shoes. Before Ford’s arrival, I never bought from Gucci; all of a sudden, I was in their store.

“You’ve got to get a guy like that to design for Planet Hollywood,” I told Robert and Keith. “You need actual Planet Hollywood fashion shows that you can take to Japan, Europe, and the Middle East, so that people will want to have the latest Planet Hollywood stuff. Rather than always selling the same old bomber jacket, the bomber jacket should change all the time, with different kinds of buckles and with different kinds of chains hanging off it. If you make the merchandise snappy and hip and the newest of the new, you’ll sell tons of it.”

Throughout my pitch, Robert and Keith kept saying, “Yes, yes, great idea.” At the end, they promised to get back to me on the points I’d raised. But Paul had been the only person taking notes. “I don’t think they got it,” he said after they left. I’d hoped this would be a game-changing meeting, because promotion and merchandising were realms I truly understood. But I had the sense that Robert and Keith were overwhelmed. The pressure from the market was getting to them. While Robert was supposedly focused on operations and Keith on the strategic vision, mostly they talked about investor deals. And Planet Hollywood had reached a scale where it was no longer possible for two entrepreneurs to do it all. The company needed structure, and it needed people who were expert in managing a global operation. I’m a loyal person, and I stayed committed to the business for several more years. But its popularity declined steadily, and the stock fell and fell until eventually the company went bankrupt. Financially I did fine, thanks to the protections we had negotiated into my deal, although I made nowhere near the $120 million or so my stock had once been worth on paper. I was better off than the many shareholders who lost money, however, and better off than many of the other actors and athletes.

Even so, I’d love to do it again, only have it managed better. Whoopi, Bruce, Sly, and all the other big-name participants would tell you that Planet Hollywood was fun. With the huge parties, openings, and premieres, we met people all over the world and had the time of our lives.