Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 24 Total Recall

AS EVERY SPOUSE KNOWS, you have to pick the right moment to bring up a loaded subject. The recall of Gray Davis was just a maybe when I flew off to promote Terminator 3 at the beginning of July, and Maria and I hadn’t talked about it or what it might mean for me during the three weeks I’d been away. At home, after the kids were in bed, we often took a Jacuzzi to relax, and that was the moment I chose.

“This recall election is coming up,” I said.

“Yeah, people are saying that you are running, and I tell them they’re crazy,” she said. “You would never do that.”

“Well, actually, I want to talk to you about that idea. What would you think about me jumping in?” Maria gave me a look, but before she could say anything, I said, “Look what’s happening to the state! We’re becoming a laughingstock. When I came here, California was a beacon. I know I could go there and straighten it out.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I’m serious.”

And she said, “No, no, come on, please tell me that you’re not serious.”

Then she added, “Don’t do this to me.”

I said, “Look, I was just … I haven’t made a commitment. I’m just thinking about it. Obviously if you say no, I’m not going to run. But I was just thinking it’s a perfect opportunity. It’s a recall, and there is only a two-month campaign; it wouldn’t be that much. I think we can work our way through these two months. And then I’m governor! And, Maria, I can see it. I can feel it. This can really be done!” I felt a surge of enthusiasm just talking about it.

“I’m tired of this acting stuff,” I went on. “I need a new challenge. I’ve had that urge to do something different for some time. This is a chance to do the kind of public service your father talks about. And I think I could do a much, much better job than Gray Davis.”

As I rattled on, I was astonished to see my wife start to tremble and cry. I just couldn’t believe it. I guess instead I expected a Eunice to emerge and say, “All right, now, if that’s what you want to do, let’s sit down right away and make some decisions. Let’s get the experts and start the briefings.” I expected that kind of Kennedy-esque response. I wanted her to say, “This is unbelievable. We inspired you, and now you’re joining the family business. You’ve grown so much since I’ve known you. Here you’re willing to give up millions to become a public servant. I’m so proud of you!”

But I was dreaming.

“Why are you crying?” I asked. Maria began to talk about the pain of growing up in a political family. I knew that she hated being dragged around to events, always being part of the photo op, and then on Sunday nights having the house invaded by advisors and operatives, and having to get dressed up for that. She’d hated her father’s campaigns, having to be out there at five in the morning in front of the factory, telling people, “Vote for my daddy, vote for my daddy.”

But the part that never registered with me was the trauma she’d felt as a kid. We had been together twenty-six years and married for seventeen, and it was a shock to me that her childhood as a Kennedy—with its intrusions, its humiliations, and its two assassinations—had shaken her to the core. Sure, her father lost his campaigns for vice president and president. I put those in the category of experiences that make you stronger. I didn’t understand the public embarrassment she felt. In politics, everybody knows everything. You’re totally exposed. All your girlfriends in school talk about your stuff. Maria had suffered tremendously: not only her father’s losing two campaigns but also the tragic deaths of her uncles Jack and Bobby. Then there was her uncle Teddy’s accident at Chappaquiddick, with horrible stories in the press. And then tauntings in school and on the sports field and anywhere she went in public. Kids would make cruel remarks: “Your dad lost. What does it feel like to be a loser?” Every time it was like being stabbed.

Given all that, my telling her that I wanted to be governor was like an accident where she saw her whole life flashing before her. All of those upsets and fears came flooding back, which was why she was trembling and crying.

I held her and tried to calm her down. All kinds of thoughts were racing through my mind. Total shock, first of all, to see her in such pain. I knew she had been through a lot of drama, but I thought it was in the past. When I met Maria, she was full of life, excitement, and hunger for the world. She wanted to be a rebel, not have a job on Capitol Hill. That was why she wanted to be a news producer and be in front of the camera and be really good at it. She didn’t want to be lumped in with the Kennedys; she wanted to be Maria Shriver—the woman who interviewed Castro, Gorbachev, Ted Turner, Richard Branson. At the time, I thought, “That’s just the way I am; we really have this in common! We both want to be really good and unique and stand out.” Later on, as we got more serious, I felt like whatever I wanted to do, whatever the goal was, she was a woman who could help me achieve it. And I felt like whatever she wanted to do, I would help her get there.

But, to be fair, politics had never been part of the deal. Just the opposite. When Maria met me, she was twenty-one years old and she felt very strongly that she wanted a man who had absolutely nothing to do with politics. There I was, this Austrian country boy with big muscles who was a bodybuilding champion and wanted to go to Hollywood and be a movie star and get rich in real estate. She thought, “Great! That will take us as far away from politics and Washington as possible.” But now, almost thirty years later, the whole thing was coming full circle, and I was saying, “What do you think about the idea of me running for governor?” No wonder she was upset. I realized she’d shared some of this with me before, but it had gone right over my head.

Later that night, I lay in bed thinking, “Man, this is not going to work. If Maria doesn’t buy into the idea, then it is impossible to go out and campaign.” I never intended to cause her that kind of pain.

What I hadn’t told Maria was that I’d already committed to appear on Jay Leno. The day the recall election was confirmed, I’d bumped into The Tonight Show’s producer at the hairstylist. “Whether you’re running or not running, I’d like to be the first show where you talk about it,” he said. I thought, “If I really run, this would be a cool way to announce it.” So I’d said yes, and we’d agreed on a date of Wednesday, August 6, three days before the filing deadline.

It was not a pretty night. All the tears, all the questions, very little sleep. “If she doesn’t want me to do it, then we just don’t do it,” I thought. This meant I would have to unwind my vision, which would be very difficult because it was now fixed in my mind. I’d have to turn off the automatic pilot and manually fly the plane back to the airport.

The next morning I told Maria, “Running is not the most important thing to me. The family is the most important thing. You are the most important thing, and if this is a tremendous burden for you, then we don’t do it. I just want to tell you that there’s a great opportunity here, and I think that if you want California to do better—”

“No,” she said. “It would be terrible. I don’t want you to do it.”

“Okay, it’s over. I’m not going to do it.”

That evening at the dinner table, she announced to the kids, “You should all thank Daddy because he made a decision that was good for our family: not to run for governor. Because Daddy wanted to run for governor.” Of course, the kids all started talking and having their reactions. “Thank you, Daddy,” said one. And then another one said, “That would be really cool, running for governor, wow.”

Several things unfolded over the next few days. First, Jay Leno called to check in, and I felt obliged to tell him that I was likely not to run. He said, “No problem.” There had been so much speculation about me running that he knew he would get a big audience either way. “You’ll be the first guest,” he said.

Meanwhile, Maria talked to her mother, and Eunice wasn’t happy. She and Sarge were big believers in me and were always encouraging me to serve the public. In fact, after I’d told reporters in June that I was thinking about joining the race, Sarge had sent me a note that read, “You’re making me very happy. I can’t think of any person today that I would rather have in office. If I were a resident of California, I hope you realize that I’d be voting Republican for the first time ever!” As for Eunice, she’d always had the drive to be in public life and the will to move past defeats and tragedies. Maria always joked, “I married my mother.” So now, when Maria told her mother that she didn’t want me to run, Eunice told her to snap out of it. “What happened to you?” she said. “We women in our family always support the men when they want to do something!” I wasn’t there for the conversation, of course, but Maria told me later on. “And by the way,” her mother added, “when a man gets that ambition to run, you can’t put it out. And if you stop him, he’ll be angry for the rest of his life. So don’t complain. Get out there and help him.”

During that time, we were having almost daily talks with my friend Dick Riordan, the former mayor of Los Angeles. He and his wife, Nancy, lived just a mile away. Dick was a moderate Republican like me, who had lost the gubernatorial primary the previous year. Most people expected him to run in the recall, and he had a very good chance to win. He had a terrific campaign manager named Mike Murphy, whom he had already called back in. But then word went around that Dick had taken to skipping political meetings and playing golf instead.

I called to find out what was going on. “I’m not likely to run,” I told him, “and if I’m not running, I want to say I’m endorsing you.”

He thanked me and later invited us to join him and Nancy for dinner at their new beach house in Malibu. We spent the whole meal talking about the Riordans running and us not running. That’s when I noticed a little softening in Maria’s stance.

“Arnold almost decided to run, and then he decided not to because we really didn’t like the idea,” she told them.

“These are the decisions you make,” I added. “I feel good that I made the decision not to run.”

Maria turned to me. “Well, I know this must be really hard on you. But in the end you make the decision that you want to make, and you should do whatever you want to do.”

This threw me. Was she now saying, “I freaked out when I heard about you running, but now I feel a little better about it?”

After dinner, Dick casually took me outside to the terrace. He punched me lightly in the stomach and said bluntly, “You should run.”

“What do you mean?”

“To be honest with you, I don’t have that fire in the belly like you have.” Dick was seventy-three years old. He said, “You should run. Why don’t I endorse you?”

While driving home, I said to Maria, “You won’t believe what just happened,” and I told her about the conversation.

“I thought that there was something off about him during dinner!” she said. “Well, what did you tell him?”

“I told him the story about you, that you are totally against—”

“Look,” she interrupted, “I don’t want to be a spoiler here. I don’t want that responsibility. Maybe you should run.”

And then I said, “Maria, we’ve got to make up our mind by next week.”

It went back and forth like that for days. I could now see her dilemma. One side of Maria was ballsy and brave and wanted to be a strong partner, and the other side was telling her, “This is the same roller coaster you’ve ridden before. Chances are he’ll lose, and that’ll make you a loser too. You’ll be a fifty-fifty partner in an embarrassing mess you didn’t cause.” She would tell me to make my own decision, but every time I sounded like I was getting serious about running, she would get upset again.

I was off my stride too. Up to now, making a career decision had always been an incredible high. Like when I went into acting, and I said I wasn’t going to compete as a bodybuilder anymore. The vision became clear, I made the leap, and that was that. But making a career decision as a husband and a father was a whole different deal.

Normally, I would have called my friends to talk this through. But declaring a candidacy was so loaded that I couldn’t go to anybody. I emphasized to Maria, “This is just between us. We will figure it out.”

In the middle of all this, Danny DeVito asked me over to his house. He had three movie projects he wanted to pitch, including Twins II and one that he’d written himself that he wanted to direct. I said, “That’s a great idea, Danny, I’d love to work with you again.”

Then I added, “But, Danny, you know, California is in terrible shape.”

“Well, yes, probably. But what’s that got to do with my movies?”

“Well it could be that if my wife agrees, I may run for governor.”

“What! Are you crazy? Let’s do a movie together!”

“Danny, this is more important. California is more important than your career, my career, everyone’s career. I’ve got to run if my wife lets me.” He said okay, figuring that it wasn’t going to happen anyway.

Suddenly it was Wednesday, August 6, the day I was supposed to go on TV. I still didn’t know what I would announce. I was in the bathroom that morning, and I heard Maria call from outside the door, “I’m leaving now. I’m going over to NBC. I wrote up something for you that will help you at The Tonight Show.” And she pushed two pieces of paper under the door.

One was a set of talking points that essentially said, “Yes, Jay, you’re absolutely correct, California is in a disastrous situation, and we need new leadership. There are no two ways about it. That’s why I’m here to announce that I’m going to endorse Dick Riordan to be governor, and I’m going to work with him, but I’m not going to run.” Dick still hadn’t jumped in, but she was figuring he would.

The other piece of paper said essentially, “Yes, Jay, you’re absolutely correct, California is in a disastrous situation, and we need new leadership. This is why I’m announcing today that I am going to run for governor of the state of California. I will make sure that we are going to terminate the problems.” And so on.

By the time I finished reading, Maria was already out the door. “Okay,” I said to myself, “she is leaving this to me. We’ve had this conversation for a week. I am not going to think about it again until I’m on the show. Whatever comes out of my mouth, that is how it will be.” Of course I was leaning toward declaring I would run.

No political advisor would ever tell you to announce a serious candidacy on The Tonight Show, but I’d been a guest dozens of times and felt comfortable there. Jay was a good friend. I knew he’d cover me and ask interesting questions and get the audience involved. You don’t hear the roar of the crowd at a press conference.

Leno had announced countless times that I’d be there to make a very important announcement. Everyone from my close friends to the driver taking me to the studio was asking, “What are you going to say?” In the green room, Leno came in and asked the same question. But everything leaks in the political world, where everybody owes a journalist and every journalist wants a scoop. The only way I could truly make news was to answer no one. I never said anything until we were on camera.

By sunset it was done: I was in the race. The Tonight Show airs at eleven but tapes at five thirty in the afternoon California time. After I made my announcement, I answered questions for a hundred reporters and TV crews gathered outside.

The crazy California recall suddenly had a face! Within days, I was on the cover of Time, wearing a big smile over a one-word headline: “Ahhnold!?”

The next day, my Santa Monica office became Schwarzenegger for Governor central. When you launch a campaign, you’re supposed to already have a thousand ingredients in place: themes, messages, a fund-raising plan, a staff, a website. But because I’d kept everybody in the dark, there was none of that. Even a fund-raising team would have been a giveaway. So all I had was my Prop 49 team. We were organizing on the fly.

This was bound to result in ragged moments. On Friday, I got up at three in the morning for interviews with the Today show, Good Morning America, and CBS This Morning. We started with Matt Lauer from Today. As he pressed me for specifics on how I would bring back the California economy and when I would release my tax returns, I realized I was unprepared. Unable to answer, I finally had to resort to the old Groucho Marx stunt of pretending the connection was bad. “Say again?” I put a hand to my earpiece. “I didn’t hear you.”

Lauer ended the interview by remarking sarcastically, “Apparently we are losing audio with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles.” It was my lamest performance ever.

Maria had kept her distance up to now, adjusting to this new drama in our lives. But seeing me stumble on TV roused the sleeping Kennedy lioness. Later that morning, she joined a meeting of the consultants who were scrambling to put together the campaign.

“What is your plan?” Maria asked quietly. “Where is the staff? What is the message? What was the point of these TV appearances? What direction is the campaign going in?” Without raising her voice, she was bringing generations of authority and expertise to bear.

Afterward, she decided, “We need more people and soon. And we need someone to come in on top and stabilize this thing.” She called Bob White in Sacramento, who had helped launch the after-school campaign and who had recommended most of the guys I was working with. “You’ve got to come down here,” she told him. “You’ve got to help.” So Bob opened his Rolodex and guided us to a campaign manager, a strategist, a policy director, and a communications chief. He also stayed on himself, informally overseeing it all. Ex-governor Pete Wilson pitched in as well. Not only did he endorse me but he also volunteered to hold a fund-raiser at the Regency Club and joined me in lining up big donors over the phone.

One of my very first moves as a candidate was to seek out Teddy Kennedy. There was no chance of getting an endorsement; in fact, Teddy put out a written statement that said, “I like and respect Arnold … but I’m a Democrat. And I don’t support the recall effort.” Still, on Eunice’s advice, I went to see him. When she heard that I had to fly to New York for an After-School All-Stars event in Harlem right after I announced—a commitment I’d agreed to months before—she urged me to stop at Hyannis Port and talk to her brother. “You’re not up his alley politically,” Eunice said, “but he has run many campaigns and won all of them except the presidential election, so I would pay close attention to what he says.”

Teddy and I talked for several hours, and he gave me one piece of advice that had a profound effect: “Arnold, never get into specifics.” He told me a little story to explain. “There is no one who knows more about health care than me, right? Well, I once held a four-hour public hearing in which we talked about health care in minute detail. Then I came out of the hearing chamber and went to my office, where the same reporters who’d been at the hearing caught up with me: ‘Senator Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, can we talk to you about health care?’

“ ‘Yes, what do you want to know?’

“ ‘When do we finally get to hear the specifics?’ ” Teddy laughed. “That just shows that you can never provide enough details that they won’t ask for more. It’s because what they really want is for you to trip up and say something newsworthy. Covering a four-hour congressional hearing is one thing, but journalists are trying to break news. That’s what makes them shine.”

Teddy continued, “Right away, from the top, all you say is, ‘I’m here to fix the problem.’ Make that your approach. In California, you need to say, ‘I know we have major problems—we have blackouts, we have unemployment, we have companies leaving the state, we have people who need help—and I will fix it.’ ” Hearing this made a big impression on me. Without Teddy’s advice, I would probably always have felt intimidated when a reporter asked, “When are we hearing the specifics?” It was Matt Lauer demanding specifics that had embarrassed me on Today. But Teddy showed me that instead of responding to that question, I could say confidently, “Let me give you a clear vision for California.”

It was my financial advisor Paul who pointed out that my first campaign challenge was credibility. He, Maria, and Bonnie Reiss were my closest advisors, and Paul had flown back from a family vacation the minute he heard that I’d announced. As the campaign headed into its second week, he reported that he was getting calls about me from friends in business and finance, saying, “C’mon, he’s not serious.” Sure, everybody knew who I was, and at least some people knew of my long track record in public service, but in this recall circus, as the reporters liked to call it, I had to show that running for governor was not just some celebrity vanity project. How could I convince them that I wasn’t just another clown in the clown car?

My campaign team urged me to call George Shultz. He was like the godfather. Secretary of state under Reagan and secretary of the treasury under Nixon, Shultz was now at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and was perhaps America’s most distinguished Republican senior statesman. He was expecting to hear from me, but even so, when I reached him, he growled, “You’ve got two minutes to tell me why I should endorse you.”

I said essentially, “The state shouldn’t spend more money than it has, and it needs a leader to get it into that position. I want to be that leader, and I would appreciate your help.”

That was the right answer.

“I’m in,” he said. I told him I’d like to do a press conference with him.

“Let me call you back,” he said. On our next call, he told me, “I have an idea. Warren Buffett has said positive things about you, and he’s a Democrat. It might be wise for you to call him and have him be in the press conference too. It sends the message that you’re not partisan, you just want to fix the problems. We’ll talk about goals that set you above the political stuff.”

I’d met Buffett, the legendary investor, at a private conference, and we’d hit it off. To my delight, even though he was a Democrat, he’d offered to back me if I decided to run. But, of course, as soon as you actually jump in, people can back away. So I asked Paul, who knew Warren well, to check whether he was still willing to commit. Warren agreed immediately.

With the election barely two months away, the campaign staff was urging me to get out and make public appearances. But while I had passion, vision, and money, I knew that I needed a deeper understanding of the complicated issues the state faced before I could venture out very much as a candidate. Shultz sent a Hoover Institution colleague to give me an intensive five-hour tutorial on California’s debt and deficits. The tutorial was a combination of charts, talk, and readings, and it was so useful and enjoyable that I immediately asked to arrange similar lessons on other big issues. “I want to meet with the best briefers in the world,” I said. “It doesn’t matter what party.” For the next few weeks, I was basically in sponge mode. The staff called it Schwarzenegger University, and the house was like a train station, with experts coming and going constantly. They included Ed Leamer, a liberal economist and head of the Anderson School of Management at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Pete Wilson. Republican politicians who had almost jumped into the race themselves graciously took time to help educate me, including Dick Riordan, Darrell Issa, and Dave Dreier. I was learning about everything from energy, to workers compensation, to college tuition fees. The staff kept trying to cut these sessions short so I could get out and campaign, but I resisted the pressure. I needed the knowledge not just for the campaign but also for running the state—because in part of my mind, I’d already won.

It turns out that the governor of California has more authority to name appointees than any elected official in America except the president of the United States and the mayor of Chicago. The governor can also suspend any state law or regulation by declaring an emergency, and he can also call a special election if he wants to put a proposal directly to the voters—levers of power that might be important.

As Schwarzenegger University wound down, my staff assembled a white binder with the most important content of the briefings. I carried that binder everywhere on the campaign trail. In it were the actions I wanted to take as governor. And at the back, I kept a running list of every promise that I made.

Buffett and Shultz weren’t the types to just to sit back when they endorsed somebody. With our joint press conference approaching, they jumped at the idea of calling a bipartisan summit of business and economic leaders to explore ways to get the economy back on track. We named this the California Economic Recovery Council.

They agreed to cochair this meeting, which would be a two-hour closed-door session preceding the press conference, and they came up with a list of almost two dozen names. Paul and I invited these people to the summit ourselves, phoning them one by one from my kitchen. They included heavy hitters such as Michael Boskin, former economic advisor to the first President Bush; Arthur Rock, a cofounder of Intel Corp. and a pioneering Silicon Valley venture capitalist; Bill Jones, a former California secretary of state; and UCLA’s Ed Leamer. Of course, these were not names that would be familiar to the typical Terminator 3 or Twins fan, but their involvement would signal to the political media and policy establishment that my candidacy was for real.

The meeting, on August 20, generated useful ideas, and the press conference that followed was a smash. We’d taken over the ballroom of the Westin Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport, and it was packed with reporters and video crews from all over the world and was buzzing with excitement. I’d just done a Terminator 3 press conference in Cannes in May, and this one was much bigger.

“Perfect!” I thought. Buffett the Democrat and Shultz the Republican flanked me, dramatizing the fact that I was a candidate for all of California. After they made a few opening remarks, I took questions for forty-five minutes and outlined what I’d do if the voters chose me to replace Gray Davis. Restoring California’s economic health was priority one, I emphasized, and taking fast action toward balancing the budget would be key to that plan: “Does that mean we are going to make cuts in state spending? Yes. Does this mean education is on the table? No. Does this mean I am willing to raise taxes? No. Additional taxes are the last burden we need to put on the backs of the citizens and businesses of California.”

I’d been nervous about this event, because this was the serious media, not the entertainment media. So I was wondering, “Should I change the tone? Should I sound more governor-ly?” But Mike Murphy, who had just signed on as my campaign manager, said, “Show that you’re having a good time. That you love what you’re doing. Be likeable, be yourself, be humorous, have fun. Don’t worry about saying something wrong, just be ready to make a joke about it right away. People don’t remember what you say, only whether they like you or not.” So it was all right to be me. I went out and had a great time. One of the first questions was about Warren Buffett and Proposition 13. A week before, he’d told the Wall Street Journal that a good way for California to generate more revenue would be to rethink that law, which kept property taxes unrealistically low. “It makes no sense,” he said. So now a reporter asked, “Warren Buffett says that you should change Prop 13 and raise property taxes. What do you say about that?”

“First of all, I told Warren if he mentions Prop 13 one more time, he has to do five hundred sit-ups.” That got a big laugh, and Warren, who is a good sport, smiled. Then I said unequivocally that I would not raise property taxes.

There were questions about everything from immigration to how I would get along with the Democrats who controlled the legislature. “I’m trained to deal with Democrats,” I said, pointing out that I was married to one.

Inevitably, a reporter asked when I would provide specifics about my economic and budget plans. I said, “The public doesn’t care about facts and figures. They’ve heard figures for the past five years. What the people want to know is if you are tough enough to clean house. The thing the citizens of California can count on is, I will take action.” It didn’t make sense, I added, to come up with exact positions on complex questions before I was in a position to know the facts.

A reporter asked if I would have to come up with specifics before October 7, Election Day. Silently thanking Teddy, I said simply, “No.”

My advisors were thrilled, and the coverage of my remarks in the following hours and days was overwhelmingly positive. I had to laugh, though, when I saw the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle the next morning:

Tough Talk by Actor to Tame Deficit;

But Schwarzenegger Provides Few Details

Maria, who was just back from a vacation in Hyannis with the kids, told me I’d handled myself well. She was also pleased to find much more order and coherence in the campaign—thanks in large part to the changes she’d set in motion during those first few days. And there was something else as well. I think that for the first time she smelled victory; that it was actually possible for me to win.

From that day on, the campaign picked up steam. We chose a theme a week: the economy, education, jobs, the environment. We also held a press conference at the Sacramento train station, where the legendary Governor Hiram Johnson had given a historic speech denouncing the rail barons and advocating the ballot initiative process as a way for voters to take back the state. I chose the location to emphasize that I would tackle systemic political problems like gerrymandering, which let elected officials decide the shape of their own districts so that they could keep their lock on them forever.

Maria put aside her reluctance and really dove in. When she came into campaign headquarters, you could see she was in her element. She joined in meetings on everything from strategy to slogans. She offered insights and suggestions, sometimes to the staff and sometimes to me privately.

She made one basic suggestion that somehow we’d managed to overlook: she advised us to open a campaign office on street level, so people could actually stop in. “You can’t just stay up here on the third floor,” she said. “People like to be able to walk by and see things are happening. They like to talk and drink coffee and get leaflets that they can go hand out.” We found a large vacant storefront nearby, and the landlord was willing to lend it to us for the campaign. We decorated it with flags, posters, and balloons. Then we held a grand opening party, which was packed. I’d seen movie crowds and bodybuilding crowds and after-school crowds—but there was a different kind of excitement in this scene. This was a real political campaign.

In September Maria and I flew to Chicago to go on the season premiere of The Oprah Winfrey Show. I was delighted to appear because Republicans had stupidly been alienating women, and it was crucial to get them on board. I especially needed to court women because my movie audiences had always skewed heavily male. I had progressive views on issues that are particularly important to female voters—education reform, health care reform, the environment, raising the minimum wage—and Oprah was the perfect vehicle for making my case.

Meanwhile, big-time Democrats were campaigning for Gray Davis. Bill Clinton spent a whole day with him in Watts and South Central LA. Senator John Kerry, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton all showed up. The only key Democrat who didn’t appear was Teddy.

Both President Bush and his father offered to campaign with me, but I declined graciously. I wanted to be the little guy taking on the Gray Davis machine.

Maria followed the polls like a pro. She tracked very closely, for example, how the ultraconservative Tom McClintock, a California state senator, kept chipping away at my support among Republicans. We had staff members constantly slicing and dicing the data too, of course. But Maria picked up on factors that didn’t show up in the numbers. She startled me at one point by saying, “There’s nobody major attacking you. That’s a good sign.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. How could the absence of attacks mean anything?

She explained that if people thought I was crazy, or so bogus that my getting elected would hurt the state, the opposition would be much broader and fiercer. “You’re only getting attacked by the far left and far right,” she pointed out. “That means you’re accepted as a viable candidate.”

What the polls did show by mid-September was that Gray Davis was toast; voters were leaning almost two to one in favor of booting him out.

But the number one contender to replace him wasn’t me, it was Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante. He was the choice of 32 percent of the voters surveyed. I was at 28 percent, Tom McClintock was at 18 percent, and the remaining 22 percent of voters surveyed were either undecided or splintered among our 132 rivals in the circus.

Bustamante was a tricky opponent for me—not because he had great charisma but because he appealed to Democrats who didn’t like Gray Davis. He promoted himself as the safest, most experienced alternative, with the not-very-catchy campaign slogan “No on the recall, Yes on Bustamante.” In other words, I’m not here to undermine my fellow Democrat Gray Davis, but in case you kick him out, pick me!

By now our campaign was in full swing. With my private jet, I could cover a lot of ground in one day. We would travel from airport to airport, and sometimes the rally would be right there, with a thousand people in a hangar. We’d fly in, park the plane, I’d walk to the hangar, pump up the crowd, and then fly to the next city. We also did crazy stunts, like driving around in a campaign bus named “Running Man” and dropping a wrecking ball onto a car to symbolize what I would do to Gray Davis’s vehicle registration fee if I were elected.

Every day, I learned more about policy and government. My press conferences went better: I learned how to compress my preparation for big speeches from a week to one night, and I was faster on my feet, too. Our TV ads were playing really well. My favorite one started with a slot machine labeled “California Indian Casinos,” where you see the number 120,000,000 come up on the slots—$120 million was the amount the tribes had contributed to political campaigns in the Gray Davis administration. Then I come on camera and say, “All the other major candidates take their money and pander to them. I don’t play that game. Give me your vote, and I guarantee you things will change.” People were shocked that I was taking on the gaming tribes. They thought, “He’s the real Terminator.”

Rather than try to sway Bustamante’s partisans, we wanted to attract the millions of independents and undecided voters. The best opportunity to do that was the September 24 debate, just two weeks before the election. For the first and only time, all five of the major candidates to replace Gray Davis were going to mix it up on stage: me, Cruz Bustamante, State Senator Tom McClintock, Peter Camejo of the Green Party, and the TV pundit Arianna Huffington.

The prep for the debate was funny. We cast people from our staff to play my opponents. All the candidates were given the questions in advance, but the debate itself would be open, with participants allowed to speak up when they wished. We worked on policy, every possible attack or rebuttal:

“How can you be for the environment if you fly a private plane?”

“You make thirty million dollars for a movie. How can you be in touch with the poor?”

“Your movies are violent. How can you say you support law enforcement?”

I also had to be ready to attack. I knew I couldn’t beat McClintock at policy—he was a wonk—and I couldn’t outjabber Arianna. Humor was my chance to eliminate them. So we made up one-liners and commissioned jokes from John Max, who writes for Leno, and rehearsed so they’d be at my fingertips. I had a line ready if Arianna challenged me on taxes. If she got overly dramatic, I could say, “I know you’re Greek” or “Switch to decaf.”

We rented a studio and practiced, sitting in a V formation facing where the audience would be. It was reps, reps, reps for three days. I reminded myself: don’t get caught up on detail. Be likable, be humorous. Let the others hang themselves. Lure them into saying stupid things.

The event attracted a huge amount of media. When I arrived, the entire parking lot was full. It looked like a Lakers game. There was a sea of media vans and trailers, and satellite dishes from Japanese, French, and British TV, as well as from all the US networks. It was scary and wild to have so much attention focused on one event.

We were not allowed to bring notes as we took our places onstage. Sixty seconds before we started, I did a mental spot check. “Health care: what would you change?” I quizzed myself. But all of a sudden I could remember absolutely nothing about health care! “Okay,” I thought, “let’s go with the pension issue.” But my mind was a blank. Totally frozen. Once or twice in movies I’d experienced a brain lock like this, but it was very rare. And in movies, you can always ask for your lines. Luckily, I still had my sense of humor. “This will be interesting,” I thought.

The debate started with each candidate addressing the question of whether the recall should be held in the first place. We all agreed that it should, except for Bustamante, who called it “a terrible idea,” which emphasized his awkward position of opposing the recall while promoting his own “just in case” campaign.

Very quickly the exchanges became “feisty” and “spirited,” as reporters described it later. Bustamante wasted no time attacking my lack of experience, prefacing just about every remark he made to me with “I know you may not know this, but …” Being condescending backfired because it made people dislike him and gave me a chance to show people that I did know the issues. That made an impression, and so did my humor. When things got especially intense, with everyone shouting over everyone else, I’d say something outrageous that would make the audience laugh.

Arianna and I got into it a couple of times. At one point, she was blaming the state’s budget crisis on tax loopholes and the immorality of Republicans and corporations. I said, “What are you talking about, Arianna? You are using tax loopholes so big that I could drive my Hummer through.” The next day’s polls put me on top. My numbers jumped from 28 to 38, while Bustamante’s fell from 32 to 26.

But even though Bustamante and I had been the main contenders, the media coverage afterward focused on the sparring between Arianna and me. At one point during the debate, as the candidates discussed the state budget, she complained that I was interrupting her and accused me of being sexist. “This is the way you treat women,” she said. “We know that. But not now.”

I responded jokingly, “I just realized that I have a perfect part for you in Terminator 4.” I meant that she could play the part of the ferocious female Terminator. But she took it as an insult and told a reporter the next day that women were outraged by my remark. “I thought it really hurt him with women, which was already his vulnerability,” she said.

She was drawing attention to the allegations of bad behavior on my part, which had surfaced at various times over the years. The following week, with just five days left before the election, such accusations were the focus of an exposé in the Los Angeles Times: “Women Say Schwarzenegger Groped, Humiliated Them.” My staff went nuts: apparently there is some unwritten rule in politics that you don’t run exposés on candidates in the final week of a campaign. But I hadn’t jumped into this race without expecting to face some heat. As I’d told Jay Leno on TV the night I announced, “They’re going to say that I have no experience and that I’m a womanizer and that I’m a terrible guy, and all these kinds of things are going to come my way … but I want to clean up Sacramento.” I wasn’t campaigning as a social conservative with a values agenda. As soon as I declared, the LA Times had assigned a team of reporters to produce a series of investigative pieces on me. Several articles had run already, including a story on my father’s Nazi past and one on my use of steroids as a bodybuilder. My rule of thumb about damaging accusations was that if the accusation was false, fight vigorously to have it withdrawn; if the accusation was true, acknowledge it and, when appropriate, apologize. So as the earlier stories appeared, I’d acknowledged my early steroid use, just as I had in the past, and I’d worked with the Simon Wiesenthal Center to track down newly available documents about my father’s war record.

None of the groping accusations was true. Even so, I had sometimes acted inappropriately and did have reason to apologize for my past behavior. In my first speech the next day, I told a crowd in San Diego, “A lot of those stories are not true. But at the same time, I always say wherever there is smoke, there is fire. And so, yes, I have behaved badly sometimes. Yes, it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets, and I have done things that were not right, which I thought then was playful, but now I recognize that I have offended people. And those people that I have offended, I want to say to them, I am deeply sorry about that, and I apologize.”

Now, as in the past, many people came to my defense, and my most important ally was Maria. Speaking to a Republican women’s organization that day, she said she deplored gutter politics and gutter journalism. “You can listen to all the negativity, and you can listen to people who have never met Arnold, or who met him for five seconds thirty years ago. Or you can listen to me,” she said, and she praised me for having the guts to apologize.

As our polling had suggested all along, California voters were far more concerned about other issues, like the economy. My speech in San Diego was to kick off a final bus tour to rallies across the state. Three thousand people showed up that morning, and we had six thousand people at the next event in the Inland Empire area east of LA, and then eight thousand people in Fresno Saturday morning. When we finally pulled into Sacramento on Sunday, almost twenty thousand people were massed in front of the capitol to cheer, celebrate, and enjoy the hoopla. I stood on the steps and gave a five-minute speech. Then the band played—a hip band, one that the kids could relate to—and I took out a broom, and that was the photo op: Schwarzenegger is here to clean house. You could feel the momentum. This was it! We were ready to clinch the deal.

The night of the election, I was getting dressed to go to the party. I didn’t know the outcome yet because it was too early, but I felt my chance of winning was really high. As I walked into the bedroom to put on my shoes, I heard an announcer on CNN say, “We can call the election now. The new governor will be Arnold Schwarzenegger.” I had tears streaming down my face. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been counting on it, but actually hearing the news on CNN—the official acknowledgment from an international cable network—was overwhelming. I never thought I’d walk by a TV set and hear “Schwarzenegger is the new governor of California.”

I sat there a little while. Katherine walked in and said, “Daddy, what do you think of this dress?” I wiped away the tears. I didn’t want her to see. Maria, who had been dressing in a separate bathroom, joined me upon hearing the news, and she too was overjoyed: not only did she like the idea of becoming California’s First Lady, but here was a political victory that could help her forget past family defeats.

The people had voted to recall Gray Davis by a margin of 55 percent to 45 percent, and a large plurality had chosen me over Cruz Bustamante and the other contenders. The breakdown of the vote was 49 percent for me, 31 percent for Cruz, 13 percent for McClintock, 3 percent for Camejo, and 4 percent spread among the rest of the pack.

One of the sweet moments of victory came a week later, when President George W. Bush stopped off to see me on his way to a diplomatic mission in Asia. We met at the Mission Inn, a historic hotel in Riverside, California, where ten presidents have stayed. Karl Rove was there with the president when I was shown into the suite, and after we all exchanged greetings, Rove said, “I’m going to leave so the two of you can talk alone.”

President Bush, who knew that his political architect had told me not to run, tried to mend fences. “Don’t be mad at Rove for what he said to you in Washington. Karl is Karl. He’s a good guy. We have to work together.”

I said I’d never let personality conflicts get in the way of what we needed to achieve for America and California. “It will be a pleasure to work with him in the future,” I added. “I know he’s doing a good job.”

Bush then called Rove back in and said, “He likes you.” Karl shook my hand and smiled. “I’m looking forward to working with you,” I said.

They probably guessed what I would say next. After the debate, I’d complained to the media about how much in taxes Californians pay the federal government and how little California gets back compared to other states like Texas. I’d told CNN, “I am not only the Terminator but the Collectinator,” and vowed to get our fair share out of Washington as governor.

So I said, “We can have a good relationship, but I need your help. As you know, for every dollar of taxes we pay, we are getting only seventy-nine cents back. I want to get more money back for the state of California because we are having problems.”

“Well, I don’t have any money either,” the president said. But we had a good dialogue in which he promised to find ways to be helpful, especially on infrastructure programs.

Three weeks later, I was back in Sacramento, on the same steps of the capitol where I’d raised the broom, being sworn in as the thirty-eighth governor of the state. Vanessa Williams, my costar in Eraser, sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the swearing in. Maria held an antique leather-bound Bible on which I put my hand as I took the oath.

In my speech, I reflected on the lessons I’d learned studying to become a citizen: how sovereignty rests with the people, not with the government, and how the United States emerged in a time of turmoil by a coming together of contending factions. That had been called the miracle of Philadelphia, I said, and “now the members of the legislature and I must bring about the miracle of Sacramento. A miracle based on cooperation, good will, new ideas, and devotion to the long-term good of California.” Emphasizing that I was a newcomer, I said that I would need a lot of help. But I let the crowd see how eager I was for this giant challenge. I wanted our state to be a beacon for the world just as it had been for an immigrant like me. The crowd cheered, and a choir sang songs from The Sound of Music as the congratulations began. Gray Davis, who had conceded very graciously, and his three predecessors, George Deukmejian, Jerry Brown, and Pete Wilson, all had come to see me sworn in. They drew me off to the side as we headed toward a reception. They were in a jovial mood.

“Enjoy this day,” said Deukmejian, the oldest of the three. “There is only one other day when you will feel this good.”

“When is that?”

“The day you leave.” The others smiled and nodded. Seeing I was skeptical, they started to explain. “Soon you’re going to be attending funerals of firefighters and law enforcement officers, and you’ll have tears in your eyes. You’ll be devastated that you have to shake the hand of some three-year-old who just lost his dad,” they told me. “And then you will be stuck here in Sacramento for three months every summer not being able to go on vacation with your kids, because those assholes in the legislature won’t pass a budget. You will be sitting here with frustration and anger.”

They bopped me on the shoulder and said, “So have a good time! Let’s go have a drink.”