Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 23 A Political Proposition

PEOPLE LOVED TO JOKE about the possibility of me entering politics. At a governor’s council dinner in Sacramento in 1994, Governor Pete Wilson greeted me from the podium, saying, “I’d like to see you run for governor, Arnold. Someone who has played Kindergarten Cop already has the requisite experience to deal with the legislature.” That got a laugh. But it was not far-fetched that someone from Hollywood would run for governor. Ronald Reagan had already blazed the trail.

The year before, in Sylvester Stallone’s sci-fi movie Demolition Man, his character suddenly lands in the year 2032. He does a double take when he hears somebody talking about the Arnold Schwarzenegger Presidential Library. Running for president was off the table for me, of course, because I wasn’t a natural-born US citizen, as the Constitution requires. But I’d fantasize sometimes: what if my mother had gotten frisky at the end of the war, and my father wasn’t really Gustav Schwarzenegger but, in fact, an American GI? That could explain why I always had this powerful feeling that America is my true home. Or what if the hospital where she gave birth to me was actually in an American-occupied zone? Wouldn’t that count as being born on US soil?

I thought I was better suited temperamentally for being a governor than a senator or a congressman, because as a governor I’d be the captain of the ship—the chief executive—rather than be one of 100 senators or 435 representatives making decisions. Of course, no governor calls the shots all by himself. But he can bring a vision to the state and at least feel like the buck stops at his desk. It is very much like being leading man in a movie. You get blamed for everything, and you get credit for everything. It’s high risk, high reward.

I felt tremendous loyalty and pride about California. My adopted state is bigger than a lot of countries. It has thirty-eight million people, or four times as many as Austria. It is 800 miles long and 250 miles wide. You can easily bicycle through some of the smaller states in the US, but if you want to tour California, you should think about riding a Harley and getting your exercise in some more moderate way. California has spectacular mountains, 840 miles of coast, redwood forests, deserts, farmlands, and vineyards. The people speak over a hundred languages. And California has a $1.9 trillion economy—bigger than that of Mexico, India, Canada, or Russia. When the G20 sit down for a summit of the world’s twenty major economies, California should be right there at the table.

The state had gone through fast and slow phases during the years I’d lived in LA, but mainly it had thrived, and I saw myself as a happy beneficiary of that. In my political beliefs, I was conservative in the way that a lot of successful immigrants are: I wanted America to stay the bastion of free enterprise, and I wanted to do whatever I could to protect it from following Europe in the direction of bureaucracy and stagnation. That’s how Europe had been when I lived there.

The 1990s were prosperous years, and California now had its first Democratic governor since the mid-1980s, Gray Davis. He got off to a strong start when he took office in 1999, expanding public education and also improving relations with Mexico. He was a skinny, reserved guy, not much of a showman, yet his programs were popular, and he had a big budget surplus to work with, thanks mainly to the Silicon Valley boom of the eighties and nineties. His approval rating among voters was high: around 60 percent.

The trouble began with the dot-com crash. In March 2000, just before I finished shooting The 6th Day, a sci-fi action film about cloning humans, the internet bubble burst, and the stock market entered its worst decline in twenty years. A big slump in Silicon Valley was bad news for the state, because tax revenues would fall and a lot of hard choices would have to be made regarding government services and jobs. California gets a huge amount of revenue from Silicon Valley. When those businesses drop 20 percent, that ends up as a 40 percent hit on the state’s coffers. That is why I recommended using excess revenues in boom years for infrastructure, paying down debt, or setting aside a rainy-day fund to cover the wobbly economic years. You make a big mistake to lock in programs that require you to keep spending at boom-time levels.

On top of that came the 2000 and 2001 electricity crisis: first, a tripling of electricity rates in San Diego, and then power shortages and blackouts around San Francisco that threatened to engulf the entire state. The government seemed paralyzed, with state and federal regulators pointing fingers at each other instead of taking action, while middlemen—mainly the now-infamous Houston energy company Enron—curtailed supplies to drive prices through the roof. In December 2000, Gray Davis made a point of turning off the Christmas tree lights in the capital right after he lit them, to remind people to conserve electricity and to be ready for power shortages in the coming year. I hated the way this made California look: like some developing country rather than America’s Golden State. It made me angry. Was that our answer to the energy shortage in California? Turning off the Christmas tree lights? It was stupid. I understood it was meant as symbolic, but I wasn’t interested in symbols. I was interested in action.

A lot of this was not Gray Davis’s fault; the economy was just on a slide. But at the halfway mark of his term, people began to think that he would be vulnerable when he came up for reelection in 2002, and soon his approval ratings showed a huge decline. I felt as frustrated as the next guy. The more I read up on California, the more it was like bad news piled on top of bad news. I found myself thinking, “We can’t continue this way. We need change.”

All this played into that long-running debate in my brain about what should be the next mountain to climb. Should I produce movies? Or produce, direct, and star, like Clint? Should I become an artist, now that I’d gotten back in touch with how much I love to paint? I was in no rush to resolve these questions; I knew they’d crystallize into a vision in their own good time. But I still had my old discipline of setting concrete goals each New Year’s Day. Most years, whatever movie I had in the works would be at the top of the list. But while I was committed to a few films in development, including Terminator 3, nothing was actually scripted or scheduled. Instead, on January 1, 2001, I put at the very top of my list “explore running for governor in 2002.”

The very next morning, I made an appointment with one of California’s top political consultants, Bob White, Pete Wilson’s chief of staff for almost three decades, including Wilson’s eight years as governor. Bob had been the guy who made the trains run on time, and he was seen as one of the key Republican power brokers in Sacramento. I knew him from years of fund-raisers and dinners, and when he’d left the statehouse, I’d asked if we could stay in touch.

Of course, hiring Bob and his team of strategists and analysts didn’t mean that I had the support of the Republican Party. I was too much in the political center for the party higher-ups. Yes, I was fiscally conservative, pro-business, and against raising taxes, but everybody knew I was also pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-lesbian, pro-environment, pro–reasonable gun control, pro–reasonable social safety net. My connection to the Kennedys made many conservative Republicans nervous too, including my admiration for my father-in-law, whom they viewed as a big-government tax-and-spend type. You could almost hear them thinking, “Yeah, right, that’s all we need: Arnold and his liberal wife, and then in comes his mother-in-law and father-in-law, and then Teddy Kennedy, and then they’ll all come. It’s the goddamn Trojan horse.” The party leaders were very appreciative that I helped raise funds and talked about their candidates and Republican philosophy on the campaign trail. But it was always, “This was very nice, thank you so much for helping.” I don’t think they had ever really warmed to me.

That wasn’t why I went to Bob and his associates, though. I wanted a thorough, professional assessment of my potential to run and win, along with the polling and research to back it up. Even though I’d been part of campaigns, I also wanted to know what it really took to run for office, given that I wasn’t a typical candidate. How many hours would I have to spend on a campaign? How much money would I need to raise? What would be the theme of a campaign? How do you keep your kids out of the spotlight? Was Maria’s coming from a Democratic family an asset or a liability?

My wife didn’t know about my inquiry to Bob. She read about my possible candidacy in the papers and saw me flirting with the idea, but she assumed that I’d never want the schedule, keeping twenty appointments a day, and the general crap you have to take when you’re in politics. I’m sure she was thinking, “He loves life too much. He’s into the pleasure principle, not the suffering principle.” I didn’t tell her I was seriously considering a run, because I didn’t want endless conversation about it at home.

The consultants identified pluses and minuses right away. The Ronald Reagan factor was my biggest plus. He’d proven that entertainment cuts across party lines: not only do people know your name but also they’ll pay attention to what you say no matter whether they’re Democratic, Republican, or independent—as long as you’re not a flake. Governor Pat Brown and his political handlers totally misjudged the power of celebrity when Reagan beat him in 1966, and I think that power is still hard for politicos to believe. When George Gorton, who had been Pete Wilson’s top strategist, came with me to an after-school event at the Hollenbeck Youth Center, he was stunned to find nineteen TV crews waiting to record my visit for the evening news. That was at least a dozen more cameras than he’d ever seen show up for the governor himself at this kind of event.

The first poll they took, of eight hundred California voters, gave the kind of mixed picture that you would expect. All the voters knew who I was, and 60 percent had a positive image of me. That was a plus. But when they were asked to choose today between Gray Davis and me as governor, they picked Davis by more than two to one. I wasn’t even running, of course, but I was very, very far from being a favorite. The consultants listed other obvious minuses: although I had a strong philosophy and lot of opinions, my knowledge of issues like jobs, education, immigration, and the environment wasn’t so deep. And, of course, I had no fund-raising organization, no political staff, no experience dealing with political reporters, and no track record in getting elected to anything.

One question that came up was whether to campaign for the governorship in 2002 or wait until 2006. Waiting would give me more time to establish myself in Californians’ eyes as a contender. George Gorton suggested that whenever I ran, a good way to lay the groundwork would be to campaign for a ballot initiative. Among all the states, California is famed for its tradition of “direct democracy.” Under the state constitution, legislators aren’t the only ones who can create laws; the people can too, directly, by placing propositions on the ballot in state elections. The ballot-initiative system dates back to Hiram Johnson, California’s legendary governor from 1911 to 1917. He used it to break the power of a corrupt legislature controlled by the giant railroads. Its most famous modern-day application was in the California tax revolt of 1978. That was when voters passed Proposition 13, a constitutional amendment officially titled “People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation.” I’d been in America only ten years at that point, and I remember marveling at how ordinary citizens could limit the state’s power.

If I sponsored a ballot initiative, Gorton pointed out, I could get out in front of the people without having to announce right away for governor. I’d have a reason to build an organization, hold fund-raisers, form alliances with important groups, talk to the media, and do TV ads. And if the initiative passed, it would prove that I could win votes across the state.

But before I tackled any of that, Bob and his colleagues felt they ought to impress upon me what I might be getting into. I was paying them, but they were ambitious guys who wanted to make sure they weren’t wasting time on some Hollywood vanity campaign. In fact, they got ex-governor Wilson himself to deliver the message personally. He took charge of a four-hour strategy session at my office in March 2001. Wilson told me that he hoped I would run and that I had the beginnings of a good team to get it done. But, he added, “You need to be realistic about how this will affect your life, your family, your finances, and your career.” Then he went around the table, and each advisor laid out ways in which my life would change. Don Sipple, a political strategist, talked about how Eisenhower and Reagan had made the transition to political life successfully, while Ross Perot and Jesse Ventura had failed. Perot, a Texas businessman, came from out of nowhere in 1992 to run for president as an independent, and won an astounding 19.7 million votes, or almost one in five votes cast that November. Ventura, my former castmate in Predator and The Running Man, and a former pro wrestler, was midway through a shaky term as governor of Minnesota, after which he would not seek reelection.

The difference between those who adapted and those who didn’t, Gorton said, was a willingness to totally commit. Others talked about how I’d need to put up with media criticism like I’d never imagined; how I’d need to become expert in wonky topics; how I’d need to ask for campaign contributions. I took such obvious pride in my financial independence that they realized the last item would be hard for me.

But what surprised me was the level of enthusiasm in the room. I thought they were going to tell me that this wasn’t right for me and maybe I should try for an ambassadorship or something. That was the way people in Austria had reacted when I said I wanted to be a bodybuilding champ. “In Austria we become ski champs,” they’d said. And it was the way that Hollywood agents had reacted when I said that I wanted to become an actor. “Why don’t you open a gym?” they’d said. But I could tell that these political pros weren’t just stringing me along. These guys knew me from the campaigning I had done for Wilson. They knew I was funny. They knew I spoke well. They saw me as a serious possibility.

Over the next several weeks, I spent a lot of time out of the state: at an Inner-City Games event in Las Vegas, a Hummer promotion in New York, a visit to Guam, a premiere in Osaka, Japan, and Easter in Maui, Hawaii, with Maria and the kids. But along the way, I started sounding out close friends. Fredi Gerstl, my mentor from Austria, was very supportive. As far as he was concerned, nothing was harder than being a good political leader—so many interests, so many constituents, so many built-in obstacles. It’s like captaining the Titanic as opposed to driving a speedboat. “If you like challenges, this is the best,” he said. “Go for it.”

Paul Wachter, my financial advisor, told me he wasn’t surprised—he’d sensed me getting restless over the past year—but he felt obliged to remind me of the money I’d have to pass up if I switched careers. He really liked seeing those $25 million movie paychecks coming in. He pointed out that if I got elected, I’d have to forgo two movies a year at $20 million or more each, plus spend millions of my own money on personal expenses that would not be tax deductible. It wasn’t a stretch to say that the total cost to me over two terms could be more than $200 million.

Another close friend I wanted to touch base with was Andy Vajna, who with his business partner, Mario Kassar, had produced Total Recall and Terminator 2 and owned the rights to make Terminator 3. Andy is Hungarian-American, an immigrant like me, and besides his success in Hollywood, he owns casinos in Hungary and other businesses here. Also, Andy had worked in government in Hungary and was close to Victor Orbán, who became prime minister. I saw Andy and Mario as part of my Hollywood kitchen cabinet for kicking around ideas. So I wanted to sound them out on my running for governor. If they were enthusiastic, I meant to hit them up for a lot of money for the campaign and then have them go out and ask other producers to contribute.

When I went to their office to talk about the governorship in April, 2001, I didn’t expect them to bring up Terminator 3. I’d signed a “deal memo” to star in it if it ever got made, but the project had been in development limbo for years. Andy and Mario had even lost the rights at one point and had to buy them back in bankruptcy court. Jim Cameron had moved on to other projects, and as far as I knew, they didn’t have a director or a script. But as I made my pitch about politics, I saw them looking at me as if to say, “What the fuck are you talking about, running for governor?”

Terminator 3, it turned out, was a lot farther along than I’d thought. A script was almost ready, and, not only that, they’d entered into merchandise and international distribution deals worth tens of millions of dollars. They were planning to start production within a year. Andy was reasonable and friendly but firm. “If you back out, I will get sued, because we sold the rights based on you as the star,” he said. “I’m the last person interested in suing you, but if I get sued, I will have to sue you because I can’t afford to pay all these guys back. With damages! The numbers will be huge.”

“Okay, I got it,” I said.

I pride myself on being able to juggle many tasks, but I could see that running for governor and making a Terminator movie at the same time was a nonstarter even for me. People would think it was totally half-assed.

So now what? I still wanted to do something political. In fact, I was pumped. So when I went back to my political team and broke the news that I couldn’t run, I told them not to stop. I told them that we’d do a ballot initiative instead. They were skeptical about this; it was hard for them to imagine how a person could do justice to a movie and an initiative campaign at the same time. To me, it was no different from what I’d done all my life. I’d gotten a college education while I was a bodybuilding champ. I’d married Maria in the middle of filming Predator. I’d made Kindergarten Cop and Terminator 2 and launched Planet Hollywood while I was the president’s fitness czar. And I had a clear vision of the issue I wanted to pursue.

Working on the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports had made me aware of the problem of millions of kids left after school with nothing to do. Most juvenile crime is committed between three and six o’clock in the afternoon. That’s when kids get exposed to mischief, hustling, gangs, and drugs. Experts contended that we were losing our kids not because they were bad but because they were unsupervised. There had long been cops and educators who campaigned for after-school programs, which provided an alternative to gangs and a place for kids to get help with homework. But the legislators never listened. So the cops and educators became my first allies.

As part of expanding the Inner-City Games, I’d created a foundation to make them a nationwide movement and recruited a close friend of Maria’s and mine, Bonnie Reiss, to lead it. Bonnie is a high-powered New Yorker with curly black hair who is funny and fast-talking and almost as fierce an organizer as Eunice. She and Maria met while Maria was in college and Bonnie was in law school and clerking for Teddy Kennedy; the two of them had moved to LA together to work on Teddy’s 1980 presidential campaign. Later Bonnie founded an influential nonprofit called the Earth Communications Office, which focused on raising money for environmental issues. Essentially she became Hollywood’s go-to person on the environment. She was a big fan of the Inner-City Games as well and welcomed the chance to spread the idea.

Los Angeles still stood out not only because it was the home of the Inner-City Games but also because it was the only big city that had after-school programs in every one of its ninety elementary schools. I went to consult the woman who’d accomplished this, a dynamic educator named Carla Sanger. After I’d asked a million questions, she suggested, “Why don’t you carve out the middle schools and high schools and do programs there?” So Bonnie and I started raising funds to do just that. Our plan was to bring Inner-City Games after-school programs into four schools in 2002 and expand from there.

Pretty quickly, though, I realized that the task was too big. We would never be able to raise enough money to put a program into every middle school and high school that needed it. Even worse, Los Angeles was just one city in a state that had roughly six thousand schools and six million students.

When you run up against a problem that gigantic, sometimes government has to help. But Carla told me that she’d tried many times to lobby for funds in Sacramento, and it was hopeless. State officials and lawmakers just did not see after-school programs as important. I checked with a few state senators and assembly people I knew, and they said she was right.

That left only one possible avenue: putting the issue directly before the California voters as a ballot initiative. I saw in this idea the chance to improve the lives of millions of kids and at the same time to get my feet wet in state politics. This wasn’t the right time for me to run for governor, but I committed myself to spend the next year campaigning for what came to be known as Proposition 49, the After School Education and Safety Program Act of 2002.

I signed up George Gorton as the campaign manager, along with other members of the Pete Wilson brain trust, and they set up a headquarters downstairs from my office, a space we had previously leased to actor Pierce Brosnan and his production company. Soon they were surveying voters, researching the issues, preparing lists of donors and media contacts, networking with other organizations, planning for signature gathering and public events, and so on. I was like a sponge soaking it all in.

In my movie career, I’d always paid close attention to focus groups and surveys, and, of course, in politics opinion research plays an even bigger role. I felt right at home with that. Don Sipple, who was expert in political messaging, sat me down in front of a camera and had me talk at length. Those tapes got edited into three-minute segments to be shown to focus groups of voters. The purpose was to pick out what themes and traits of mine appealed to people and what might put them off. I learned, for example, that people were impressed with my success as a businessman, but when I mentioned on the tape that Maria and I lived in a relatively modest house, the people in the focus groups felt that I must be out of touch.

That fall I’d blocked out two weeks to promote my latest action movie, Collateral Damage, which was scheduled to be released on October 5. This was just one of hundreds of millions of plans that had to change in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Any other year, Collateral Damage would have been exciting big-budget action entertainment, but after 9/11, it just didn’t work. I play a veteran Los Angeles firefighter named Gordy Brewer whose wife and son are bystanders killed in a narco-terrorist bombing at the Colombian consulate downtown. When Brewer sets out to avenge their deaths, he uncovers and thwarts a much larger narco-terror plot involving a hijacked airliner and a major attack on Washington, DC. After 9/11, Warner Bros. canceled the premiere and reedited the movie to delete the hijacking. Even so, when Collateral Damage debuted the following February, it felt both irrelevant and painful to watch in light of the actual events. The irony was that in making the film, the producers had this big debate about whether firefighting was a macho enough profession for an action hero. That was one question that the real-life heroism at ground zero laid to rest.

I learned there is a whole art to shaping a proposition so that it doesn’t put people off or cause unnecessary fights or resistance. For instance, to keep after-school from crowding out existing programs that people liked, we designed it to take effect no earlier than 2004, and only if the California economy was growing again and annual state revenues had gone up by $10 billion. To hold down the overall cost, we made it a grant program to which schools had to apply. And we made it so that wealthy districts that already had after-school programs would be expected to wait in line behind districts that couldn’t afford them.

All the same, when education experts estimated the annual cost—$1.5 billion—we were all in sticker shock. Even in a state with $70 billion in revenue, that was much more than voters would approve. So before we even started campaigning, we scaled down our proposal to cover just middle schools, not high schools. This decision was painful, but something had to go, and the younger kids were more vulnerable and needed the programs more. Narrowing the program cut the price tag by more than $1 billion.

But before we filed it in late 2001, we circulated drafts and went around making presentations to unions and civic groups: teachers, principals, school superintendents, chambers of commerce, law-enforcement officials, judges and mayors and other public officials. We wanted the broadest possible coalition—and the smallest possible number of enemies. Just as Pete Wilson’s guys had predicted, I found the fund-raising part hard at first. The reason I wanted to be wealthy was that I never wanted to ask anyone for money. It was so against my grain. When I made the first solicitation, I was literally sweating. I told myself it wasn’t really me asking, it was the cause.

That first call was to Paul Folino, a technology entrepreneur and a friend of the Wilson campaign, and after a short and gracious conversation, he committed $1 million. My second call was to Jerry Perenchio, a producer and mover and shaker who ended up owning the Spanish-language television network Univision and then selling it for $11 billion. I knew Jerry personally. He promised to raise another $1 million. Those were heavenly calls; I felt so relieved when I hung up the phone. Then I made smaller calls for $250,000. I ended the day flying high.

The next day I went to hit up Marvin Davis in his office in the Fox Studios tower. He weighed about four hundred pounds. “What can I do for you?” he asked. I’d made movies for Fox, and his son had produced Predator. I gave him the whole rap, putting a lot of enthusiasm into explaining what I could do for California. But when I looked up from my notes I realized he’d fallen asleep! I waited until he opened his eyes again, and then said, “I totally agree, Marvin, we have to be fiscally responsible.” He could sleep all he wanted as long as he gave us the check. But instead, he said, “Let me talk to my guys. We’ll be in touch with you. It’s a very courageous thing to do.” Of course I never heard back.

Soon Paul Folino hit on a solution to make me feel more comfortable asking for money. He suggested that we make my fund-raisers low-key: dinner parties and small receptions. We found that as soon as I was in a relatively informal setting where I could schmooze, I was able to pass the hat very effectively.

I loved finding new allies. In November I took our draft of Prop 49 to John Hein, the political chief of the California Teachers Association, the most powerful union in the state. John was used to people asking for favors. I didn’t expect him to be very receptive because Republicans and unions usually don’t mix. So when I made my pitch, I told him right off the top, “We need no money from you. If you endorse this, you don’t have to put a million dollars into the funding or anything like that. I’ll go out and raise the money. But we want to go into this together.” I also made the point that after-school programs not only help the kids but also reduce the strain on their teachers.

To my delight, he approved of our idea. In fact, he recommended only two changes in the proposal, the main one being that we add some language about hiring retired teachers. This wasn’t something I wanted to encourage too much, because young kids relate better to young people, especially after a whole day of teachers and school. They want counselors in jeans and with spiky hair, who can serve as parent figures but who don’t look like them. Still, it wasn’t a lot to ask, and we made the deal. And ultimately it worked out fine because not that many retired teachers wanted to go back to work anyway.

By normal standards, the start of an election year is way too early to put a ballot initiative before the public, since the vote isn’t until November. But I had to juggle Prop 49 and Terminator 3, which was ready to start filming. So we had our kickoff in late February, just before the California state primaries. Instead of some boring press conference, I did a two-day fly-around of cities up and down the state, with rallies and kids and hoopla to get us on TV and pump up support.

Then we went back to the slow, painstaking work of building alliances and raising funds. Just like bodybuilding, campaigning is all about reps, reps, reps. I met with Parent-Teacher Associations, city councils, taxpayer groups, and the California Medical Association. This is when I discovered that raising cash from the set of a movie was a huge advantage, and Terminator 3 was the greatest set of all. People loved coming to see the special effects, the loading of the weapons, the explosions. Sometimes I’d meet them with my makeup still on: an LA Times columnist interviewed me one day when the Terminator had been through a fight. About a quarter of my face and scalp were bloody and torn off, exposing my titanium skull. It was a funny way to be talking about middle school.

The California attorney general, Bill Lockyer, also came to visit, and he was a Democrat! I knew him from T2, when he was a state senator who helped get us permission to film the scene in San José where the T-1000 rides a motorcycle out of a second-story window into a helicopter. I talked to him about the initiative. We needed him because it’s the attorney general’s office that issues an opinion on the cost and legal propriety of every initiative. He was on the set the day I was hanging from the hook of a giant crane. This was like heaven for him. No wonder he went for the initiative.

In September, after Terminator 3 moved into postproduction, I went to Sacramento to ask for endorsements from state senate and state assembly leaders. I was curious to see what they’d say, although I wasn’t holding my breath. The legislature was two-thirds Democrats, for one thing. And elected officials usually hate ballot initiatives because they reduce their power and make the state harder to govern. In fact, our loudest opponent was the League of Women Voters, which was adamantly against what it called “ballot box budgeting” for any program. Still, I had in my pocket a three-page, single-spaced list of all the organizations that endorsed us; we’d built the widest coalition that anybody could remember for a ballot initiative. That was going to be hard for the politicians to ignore.

One of my first stops was Bob Hertzberg, the speaker of the assembly. Bob is a smart, ebullient Democrat from the San Fernando Valley, about the same age as Maria. He’s so friendly that his nickname is Huggy. Within two minutes, we were swapping jokes. “What’s not to like?” he said about our ballot proposition. But he warned me not to expect support from the Democratic Party itself. “God forbid we should endorse a Republican initiative,” he wisecracked.

I got into heated debates with some labor leaders. The head of one of the big state employees unions asked, “What is your funding mechanism?” Other interest groups would claim that we were crowding out their programs. But two years earlier, legislators had approved a pension deal that could potentially involve $500 billion in unfunded liabilities. To the same people who were now asking me about my funding mechanism, I said, “You just committed the state for hundreds of billions of dollars. What’s your funding mechanism? We’re just talking about four hundred million a year for the kids.”

“We take it out of the taxes.”

“Well, you’re crowding out plenty.”

The support of the Republicans was no slam dunk, either. They would normally oppose any additional spending. But assembly minority leader Dave Cox, an older guy who was very gruff on the surface but sweet underneath, became our unexpected ally. He not only endorsed Prop 49 but also invited me to San Diego while the Republican lawmakers were holding a regular powwow. Standing before them, I could see as much skepticism as enthusiasm on their faces as they listened to my pitch. Then Dave got up and turned to the group. “You know why this is a Republican issue?” he asked “Because it is a fiscal issue. You may see this as asking the taxpayer to spend four hundred twenty-eight million more dollars. But, in fact, we are saving almost 1.3 billion.”

Then he described a new study I hadn’t even heard about, by this very prestigious institute at Claremont McKenna College. “For every dollar we spend in an after-school program,” Dave said, “we save three dollars down the line because of fewer arrests and less teenage pregnancy and less trouble in the neighborhood.” You could feel the mood in the room shift. All the Republicans really needed was that fiscal rationale— they voted unanimously to endorse Prop 49.

As November approached, I felt confident we would win, but I wasn’t taking it for granted. California had been in recession, and since the dot-com crash in 2000, household incomes were down and the state was running billions of dollars in the red. Voters were worried about spending more money. Meanwhile, the governor’s race had turned ugly between Gray Davis and his main challenger, a conservative pro-life Republican businessman named Bill Simon. The governor still had low approval ratings, but voters in surveys said they disliked Simon even more.

We wanted to make sure that Proposition 49 didn’t get swept away in some big tsunami of gloom. So in the closing weeks, we added more rallies and poured an extra $1 million into TV ads.

On election night, my advisers thought we should gather at a fancy LA hotel, which was the custom in California races. I insisted we go to the Hollenbeck Youth Center, which was much more relevant to what we were trying to achieve. We ordered food for the neighborhood kids, well-wishers, and people who’d worked on the campaign, and waited around for results. Just before midnight, enough polling data were in for us to declare victory and start a big party on the basketball court. Proposition 49 ended up passing with 56.7 percent of the vote, while Republican candidates lost every election in the state.

Gray Davis won that night too. But it wasn’t much of a reelection to celebrate. After the most expensive campaign in California history, most voters simply stayed home—it was the lowest turnout for a governor’s election in the history of the state. Davis won with only 47 percent of the vote against Simon and the minor candidates. That was a much narrower margin than in 1998, when he’d won by a sizable majority.

To the amazement of the rest of the country, a grassroots movement to unelect Gray Davis started almost the minute his new term began. Outside the state, people thought this was just more evidence that Californians are crazy. But the same direct-democracy provisions of the state constitution that allowed for ballot initiatives also provided a process for recalling state officials through special election. Like ballot initiatives, gubernatorial recalls had a long and colorful history. Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, and Pete Wilson had all faced attempts, but none of their challengers had ever collected enough signatures to get anywhere.

The Recall Gray Campaign started among a handful of activists. It tapped into the widespread feeling that the state was heading in the wrong direction and he wasn’t doing enough to fix California’s problems. There was an uproar in December, for example, when Davis announced that the state budget deficit might be 50 percent more than had been estimated just a month earlier, or $35 billion total—as much as all the other state deficits in America combined. People were still angry about the electricity crisis too. You could see those and other concerns reflected in the recall petition, which accused the governor of “gross mismanagement of California Finances by overspending taxpayers’ money, threatening public safety by cutting funds to local governments, failing to account for the exorbitant cost of the energy fiasco, and failing in general to deal with the state’s major problems until they get to the crisis stage.”

I didn’t pay much attention to the recall campaign at first, because it seemed like a total long shot. Besides, the after-school movement was having a crisis of its own. In February Bonnie Reiss and I were flying around the country promoting the Inner-City Games. We’d just landed in Texas when her cell phone rang. It was a friend calling to alert us that President George W. Bush had just submitted a budget proposal that wiped out the federal dollars for after-school: more than $400 million of annual funding that programs all over the country depended on. Of course, the Texas media couldn’t wait to ask my reaction. Wasn’t this a direct insult to my favorite cause? Was the White House declaring war on Arnold?

“I’m sure the president believes in after-school,” I told them. “The budget isn’t done yet.” As soon as I could, I called Rod Paige, Bush’s secretary of education, to ask what was going on. He explained that the reason Bush gave for zeroing out the money was a new scholarly study claiming that after-school programs really weren’t as effective as we’d thought in steering kids away from crime, drugs, and such.

“You know what?” I said. “That doesn’t mean we should zero it out. It means let’s learn from this study and fix the problem. Why don’t we have a ‘Best of After-School’ summit?” I didn’t think this was a crazy idea. I knew the experts, I had experience making people from the public and private sectors and from both parties work together, and I had a track record of organizing summits across fifty states. How difficult could it be? Secretary Paige liked that idea and said his department might be willing to sponsor it. I’d suggested the summit instinctively, so I laughed when Bonnie interpreted it as a clever political tactic. “I see what we’re doing,” she said after the call. “If the administration holds a summit about how to improve after-school programs, that gives the president cover to reverse his position and put back the funds.”

“Hey,” I said, “we’re just trying to fix the problem.”

We immediately planned a trip to Washington to lobby key lawmakers on the budget. When my political guru Bob White got wind of this plan, he sent me a memo strongly advising me not to do it. Essentially it said, “Let it go. Never second-guess a president from your own party. If you succeed in getting back the money, you seem disrespectful. If you fail to get it back, you look bad as a leader. Either way, you hurt your future chances of running for governor.”

I could see the political wisdom of this, but my own feeling was that protecting after-school was worth the risk. Losing federal funding would do great damage to a lot of kids. I said to myself, “Let’s not pay attention to politics in this case.”

So we went to Washington in early March to make our case. Our first stop was to see Congressman Bill Young, the powerful Florida Republican who chaired the Appropriations Committee. I’d become good friends with him and his wife, Beverly, because their passion was helping wounded veterans at places like Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Hospital. They’d gotten me involved in visiting the hospitals regularly. There were never any cameras or press for these occasions; I went because I loved seeing the young veterans and entertaining them and thanking them for their great work.

When Bonnie and I got to Bill’s office, he was laughing. “Before you say anything, let me tell you a story,” he said. Beverly had come to him the minute she heard about the president’s budget proposal. “What’s the story with the four hundred million that Bush cut out for after-school?” she asked.

Bill said to her, “Well, we’re going to have a debate.”

“Hell no! You are not going to have a debate about this. I’m telling you right now, that money’s back in, do you hear me?”

So Bill assured us that he would do everything he could on our behalf.

Our next stop was Bill Thomas, the Republican congressman from Bakersfield, California, who was the chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means. He was legendary in Congress for his brains and hot temper. Bonnie and I sat down with him and his top aide and had just begun to chat when he said, “You know, this is our first time meeting, and I don’t know if you want to bullshit for a little while or just get down to it.”

I smiled and said, “Let’s get down to it.”

“I know you’re here to get the money back for after-school,” he said. “That’s done, in. Let’s talk about the recall.”

Then he launched into an analysis about why the Gray Davis recall movement was a phenomenal opportunity for me. “In a normal election, you have to raise at least sixty million dollars,” he said. “Then you have to run in the primary, and since you are such a moderate, you might not even get the nomination, because in Republican primaries it’s mostly the hard-core conservatives who come out to vote.

“But in a recall situation, there is no primary! Any number of candidates can get their names on the ballot, and whoever gets the most votes wins.”

I’d assumed that a recall would be just like a normal election. “Let’s back up,” he said and then proceeded to explain how the process worked under California law. If enough voters petition for a recall, the state is required to hold an election within eighty days. The ballot consists of two questions. First, should the governor be recalled? That is a simple yes-or-no choice. Second, if the governor does get recalled, who should replace him? To answer that, the voter chooses one name from a list of citizens who have qualified as candidates. Getting on the list was easy, Thomas explained. Instead of spending millions on a primary, you need to collect only sixty-five signatures and pay a $3,500 fee to enter your name as a candidate. “Of course, that means it’ll be a crowded race,” he said. “It’ll be a madhouse! But the more crowded it gets, the more you have the advantage. Everybody knows you.”

He said he would back me if I ran. But the thing I had to do right now was to step in and be willing to put up a couple of million dollars to collect the necessary signatures to qualify the recall petition. Almost nine hundred thousand signatures were needed under the law, and right now the recall petition was circulating on much too small a scale.

Running for governor of California was not on my list of goals for 2003, of course, but I was fascinated and promised the chairman I’d give it careful thought. Instinctively, though, I knew the strategy he was recommending was wrong for me. If I were to lead the recall, it would seem brazen and disrespectful. After all, we’d just had an election, and Gray Davis had won it fair and square. I could have tried to run against him, but I had to make Terminator 3 instead. It wouldn’t be right for me to suddenly turn around and say, “Okay! Now that the movie’s done, I’m going to take him out; now it’s convenient for me, so please can we have another election?” Instead, I had to keep my distance. If a recall came about, it had to be organic, the will of the people, not something paid for by me. Even so, I followed the recall movement much more closely over the next couple of months.

Just as the congressmen had promised Bonnie and me, after-school funding was restored as the budget made its way through Congress. And the After-School Summit, held in Washington in early June, produced an important breakthrough. When organizers from around the country pooled their experience, we discovered that after-school programs that included academic as well as physical activities were by far the most effective. From then on, homework help became a key element in the after-school world.

The White House was my final stop while I was in Washington for the summit. Like many of the people who’d worked for the first President Bush, I wasn’t close to his son, but the governor situation in California made me want to touch base with his senior domestic advisor, Karl Rove. I did this because, to everybody’s amazement, the prospect of a recall election that fall suddenly seemed very real. The Gray Davis recall campaign had been energized by Congressman Darrell Issa, a wealthy San Diego Republican who had his eye on becoming governor himself. In May he’d decided to pump almost $2 million of his own money into advertising and signature gathering, which pushed the campaign into high gear. Now it had more than three hundred thousand signatures, while the governor’s popularity continued to sink.

Rove greeted me in the reception area on the second floor of the West Wing and led me to his office, just above the president’s study. We talked for a half hour about the California economy, the Special Olympics, and helping with President Bush’s reelection in 2004. Then I said, “Let me ask you, what do you think will happen with the recall? Issa just put in two million dollars, and the signature gathering is gaining momentum.” I pretended to be innocent. “You’re the master behind getting Bush elected. What is your take on the whole thing?”

“It will never happen,” Rove said. “There will be no recall election. Plus, if there were to be one, I don’t think anyone can unseat Gray Davis.” Before I could ask a question or express my surprise, he went on. “As a matter of fact, we’re already focused on 2006.” Then he stood and said, “Come with me.” He led me down the stairs to the first floor, where, almost like they had choreographed it, Condoleezza Rice came walking toward us from down the hall.

“I have someone here who is interested in running for governor,” Rove said to me, “and I wanted you to meet her because this is our candidate for 2006. You should get to know each other.” He said it smilingly, but it was the kind of smile that meant “Arnold, shit in your pants because this woman is going to trample all over you. There won’t be a recall, the governorship will be up for grabs in 2006, and when 2006 comes, I have already planned it, I have it all laid out, and this is going to be the Republican candidate.”

How could Rove have been so wrong? He was a political genius, and he dismissed me! And he dismissed the recall! I understood why Condi was getting the nod. She’s intellectual, she’s Stanford, she’s the National Security Advisor. I’d heard that story before about 2006. At a Rod Paige education dinner, Maria and I were sitting with a group of Republicans, and a woman turned to me and said, “We’ve gotten the signal from the White House to go with Condi.” So I was aware.

By the time I got home, I told this as a funny story, but at the moment it happened, it stung. “What an asshole,” I thought. But I reminded myself right away, “Actually, this is good! This is one of those situations where someone dismisses you, and you come from behind and surprise the shit out of them.” I never argued with people who underestimated me. If the accent and the muscles and the movies made people think I was stupid, it worked to my advantage.

I didn’t sign any movie contracts that summer. If the governorship really became a possibility, this time I wanted to keep my options open. As the recall movement continued to gain momentum, I kept in touch with my advisors and broadcast to the public that I shared the sentiment behind it. “Our elected leaders will either act decisively, or we will act in their place,” I told the audience at a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Proposition 13.

I didn’t exactly say I wanted to be governor, but I couldn’t resist leading off my remarks that night with a joke about Gray Davis. “This is really embarrassing,” I said. “I just forgot the name of our state governor. But I know that you will help me recall him.” It got a good laugh. I sent another smoke signal about running by telling the New York Post, “If the party needs me, I would without any doubt be interested in doing that rather than doing another movie. I would give up my movie career for that.”

Meanwhile, in trying to reduce the budget deficit, Governor Davis found a sure way to commit political suicide: he tripled the “car tax.” This was a fee Californians have to pay when they register their vehicles. Technically, he wasn’t raising the fee, just canceling an abatement, put in place by his predecessor, that was costing the state $4 billion a year in lost revenue. But Californians love their cars, and none of that mattered. The number of signatures being collected each week for the recall petition went through the roof.

Each time Gray Davis made another mistake, I was boiling. What was he doing giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants? Why was he increasing fees rather than pushing back on pensions? Why had he taken campaign money from Indian tribes that owned casinos? Why were we running out of electricity? Why would he sponsor job-killing legislation that would force businesses to flee the state?

I thought about what I’d do: cut taxes, end driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, cut the vehicle license fee. Spend no more than the state is taking in. Rebuild California. Find alternatives to fossil fuels. Make the Indian gaming tribes pay their fair share of taxes. Stop the whole system of money in, favors out. And bring business back to California.

I also had a personal beef with the guy. I’d asked him five times what he wanted from the Governor’s Council on Fitness. He never replied.

I began to despise everything about Gray Davis. When I saw his picture in the newspaper, I didn’t see the picture, I saw a monster. I had a plan. I visualized myself taking him down. (Oddly enough, later, when we met after I became governor, we became friends. I realized it was hard for any governor to make the changes that were needed. Gray Davis couldn’t do it by himself. No one could.)

But I had to ask myself, Why did I want to step into this mess? Why not just stay an actor? The state was staring at a deficit that had grown to $37.5 billion, businesses were moving away, the lights couldn’t stay on, the courts were ordering prisons to release inmates due to overcrowding, the political system was rigged for the incumbents, the spending was locked in by formulas, and no one ever seemed to fix the schools.

But I love it when people say that something can’t be done. That’s when I really get motivated; I like to prove them wrong. And I liked the idea of working on something bigger than me. My father-in-law always talked about how it gives you extra power and energy, but you don’t really feel it until you’re in the middle of it. Plus, I was going to be the governor of California! It is the place where everyone in the world wants to go. You never hear anyone from abroad say, “Oh, I love America! I can’t wait to get to Iowa!” Or “Gosh, can you tell me about Utah?” Or “I hear Delaware is a great place.” California was wrapped in problems, but it was also heaven.

It wasn’t too early to be thinking about a campaign strategy, and I’d begun to envision one that made sense. This was the subject of long, private discussions with Don Sipple, the top media consultant for our after-school campaign. It was essential, we agreed, not to jump in too soon; better to wait until a recall election was formally qualified and scheduled. Don crystallized our approach in a fax called “Some Thoughts,” which he sent me at the end of June 2003.

If I did jump in, my campaign would have to be truly unique, because I was a nonpolitician responding to a populist revolt. We needed to avoid trying to win over the press and instead play to the people. When I went on TV, I’d go on entertaining national shows like Jay Leno, Oprah, David Letterman, Larry King, and Chris Matthews rather than wonky local broadcasts. And then, just as the media decided my candidacy was lightweight, we’d surprise them with speeches that went deep on key issues like education, health care, and public safety. Above all, the campaign had to be big. I was all about leadership and major projects and reforms that could attract massive public support.

I especially liked the way Don channeled my message: “There is a disconnect between the people of California and the politicians of California. We the people are doing our job: work hard, pay taxes, raise our families. The politicians are not doing their job. They fiddle, they fumble, and they fail. Governor Davis has failed the people of California, and it is time to replace him.” These words resonated more strongly than any movie script I’d ever read. I memorized them and made them a kind of mantra.

I shifted gears to promote Terminator 3. It opened across the country on Wednesday, July 2, and became America’s top movie for the Fourth of July weekend. But by then I was half a world away. After the premiere in LA, I flew to Tokyo for the Japanese premiere, and then on to Kuwait. And on July 4, three months after US-led coalition forces had seized Baghdad, I was in the Iraqi capital showing Terminator 3 and entertaining the troops at a former palace of the toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.

I opened, as I always do, with a joke. “It is really wild driving around here,” I told them. “I mean, the poverty, and you see there is no money, it is disastrous financially, and there is the leadership vacuum—pretty much like in California right now.”

From Baghdad, I flew from one Iraqi city to the next and then worked my way back west making appearances across Europe. Then I made promotional trips to Canada and Mexico. During all this, I didn’t even think about running for governor; I stored it in the back of my mind but wasn’t consciously making plans.

On July 23, the last day of my trip, I was in Mexico City when it was announced that the California recall election would go forward. Over 1.3 million voters had signed the petition, almost 500,000 more than were needed. The following day, the special election was scheduled for the first Tuesday in October 2003, less than three months away. Candidates had barely two weeks—until Saturday, August 9—to declare.

The quick deadline didn’t deter people from jumping into the race. Because of the low entry barrier, the recall was a magnet for dozens of fringe candidates, attention seekers, and people who just wanted an interesting item for their résumé. Eventually the ballot listed 135 candidates. We had a porn queen and a porn publisher. We had a bounty hunter, an American Communist, an actress whose main claim to fame was advertising herself on billboards around LA, and a female swing dancer who had also run several times for president. Gary Coleman, the former child star, jumped in. So did author and political pundit Arianna Huffington, who would become my foil in the debate before dropping out. There was an antismoking crusader and a sumo wrestler.

Serious candidates who had political capital and financial backing faced a tough choice about whether to risk getting lost in the circus atmosphere. US senator Dianne Feinstein, a hugely popular Democrat, said she didn’t like the whole idea of recalls—she’d faced a recall attempt at an earlier point in her career when she was mayor of San Francisco. Congressman Issa, who had been a real visionary in bankrolling the signature gathering, stepped away too, saying tearfully at a press conference that he could go back to his job in Washington now that others were prepared to lead.

As soon as the election was confirmed, I knew I had to run. I saw myself in Sacramento, solving problems. I was not the least bit intimidated by the thought of a campaign. It was like every other major decision I’d ever faced. I thought about winning. I knew it would happen. I was locked in automatic pilot.

It was time to talk to Maria.