Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 29 The Secret

DURING MY HECTIC LAST few months as governor, Maria and I went to see a marriage counselor. Maria wanted to talk about the end of my term of office, and we focused on issues that a lot of couples face in middle age—like the fact that our kids were starting to go out on their own. Katherine was already twenty-one, a junior at USC, and Christina was a sophomore at Georgetown University. In a few years Patrick and Christopher would also be gone. What would our lives be like?

But when Maria made the appointment for the very morning after I left office and became a private citizen again (it was a Tuesday), I sensed that this time was different. This time she had something very specific in mind.

The marriage counselor’s office was dimly lit, with neutral colors and minimalist décor—not the kind of room I’d want to hang out in. It had a sofa, a coffee table, and the therapist’s chair. The minute we sat down, the therapist turned to me and said, “Maria wanted to come here today to ask about a child—whether you’ve fathered a child with your housekeeper Mildred. That’s why she wanted to meet. So let’s talk about it.”

In the initial instant, when time seemed to stand still, I said to myself, “Well, Arnold, you wanted to tell her. Surprise! This is it. Here’s your moment. Maybe it’s the only way you’d ever have the nerve.”

I told the therapist, “It’s true.” Then I turned to Maria. “It’s my child,” I said. “It happened fourteen years ago. I didn’t know about him at first, but I’ve known it now for several years.” I told her how sorry I felt about it, how wrong it was, that it was my fault. I just unloaded everything.

It was one of those stupid things that I promised myself never to do. My whole life I never had anything going with anyone who worked for me. This happened in 1996 when Maria and the kids were away on holiday and I was in town finishing Batman and Robin. Mildred had been working in our household for five years, and all of sudden we were alone in the guest house. When Mildred gave birth the following August, she named the baby Joseph and listed her husband as the father. That is what I wanted to believe and what I did believe for years.

Joseph came to our house and played with our kids many times. But the resemblance hit me only when he was school-age, when I was governor and Mildred was showing her latest photos of him and her other kids. The resemblance was so strong that I realized there was little doubt that he was my son. While Mildred and I barely discussed it, from then on I paid for his schooling and helped financially with him and her other kids. Her husband had left a few years after Joseph was born, but her boyfriend Alex had stepped in as their dad.

Maria had asked me many years before if Joseph was my child. At the time I didn’t know that I was his father, and I’d denied it. My impression now was that she and Mildred, who by this time had worked in our home for almost twenty years, had talked it out. In any case, very little of what I had to say seemed to be news to Maria. The issue was out on the table, and she wanted answers.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” she asked.

“Three reasons,” I said. “One is that I didn’t know how to tell you. I was so embarrassed and didn’t want to hurt your feelings and didn’t want us to blow up. Two is that I didn’t know how to tell you and still keep it private, because you share everything with your family and then too many people would know.

“Three is that secrecy is just part of me. I keep things to myself no matter what. I’m not a person who was brought up to talk.” I said this for the benefit of the therapist, who didn’t know me well.

I could have come up with ten more reasons, and they all would have sounded just as lame. The fact was that I’d damaged the lives of everybody involved and I should have told Maria long ago. But instead of doing the right thing, I’d just put the truth in a mental compartment and locked it up where I didn’t deal with it every day.

Normally I try to defend myself. But now there was none of that. I tried to be as cooperative as possible. I explained that it was my screw-up, that she should not feel it had anything to do with her. “I fucked up. You’re the perfect wife. It’s not because anything is wrong, or you left home for a week, or any of that. Forget all that. You look fantastic, you’re sexy, I’m turned on by you today as much as I was on the first date.”

Maria made up her mind that we needed to separate. I couldn’t blame her. Not only had I deceived her about the child, but also Mildred had stayed working at our house all these years. It was Maria’s choice to move out of our house. We agreed to work out an arrangement that wouldn’t totally disrupt the kids. Even though our future as husband and wife was uncertain, we both felt strongly that we were still parents and we would continue to make all the decisions about our family together.

The crisis in our marriage made a difficult year for Maria even worse. She was still grieving for her mother, who had died fifteen months before. And she and her brothers had made the difficult decision to move Sarge, who was now ninety-five, to a memory-care facility.

We’d only begun to sort out our separation and to talk about it to the kids when Sarge died. It was a terrible loss. Sarge was the last of that generation of great public figures from the Shriver and Kennedy clan. The requiem, in Washington on January 22, 2011, was almost fifty years to the day after Sarge had founded the Peace Corps. Joe Biden, First Lady Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, and many other leaders came to the Mass and Maria honored her dad with an eloquent and moving remembrance, during which she talked about how Sarge had taught her brothers to respect women. That may have been partly directed at me, but I’d heard Maria praise her father in similar words many times.

After the funeral, Maria flew back to LA with me and the kids, except for Christina, who stayed at Georgetown. We kept our separation very quiet. In April she moved to a condo attached to a hotel near our house, where there was plenty of room for the kids to stay as they shuttled back and forth between her place and our house.

I asked myself what had motivated me to be unfaithful, and how I could have failed to tell Maria about Joseph for so many years. A lot of people, no matter how successful or unsuccessful they are in life, make stupid choices involving sex. You feel you’ll get away with ignoring the rules, but in reality your actions can have lasting consequences. Probably my background, and having left home at an early age, also had an effect. It hardened me emotionally and shaped my behavior so that I was less careful about intimate things.

As I told the therapist, secrecy is part of me. Much as I love and seek company, part of me feels that I am going to ride out life’s big waves by myself. At key moments in my life I’ve played it close to the vest—like when I left my decision to run for governor until the afternoon I walked onstage with Jay Leno. I’ve used secrecy—and denial—to cope with difficult challenges, like when I wanted to keep my heart surgery to myself and pretend it was just a kind of vacation. Here I was using secrecy to avoid confessing something that I knew would hurt Maria, even though the cover-up ultimately made the problem worse. At the time I found out for sure that Joseph was my son, I didn’t want the situation to affect my ability to govern effectively. I decided to keep it secret, not only from Maria but also from my closest friends and advisors. Politically, I didn’t feel it was anybody’s business because I hadn’t campaigned on family values. I blocked out the fact that as a husband and father, as a man with a family and a wife, I was letting people down. I let them all down. Joseph too—I wasn’t there for him as the father a boy needs. I had wanted Mildred to continue working in our home because I thought I could control the situation better that way, but that was wrong, too.

The world didn’t find out Maria and I had separated until May, when the Los Angeles Times called asking questions. We responded with a statement that we had “amicably separated” and that we were working on the future of our relationship. Predictably, the news set off a media frenzy, amplified by the fact that we hadn’t explained why.

The therapist thought we should include the truth, “so that it’s clear who is the victim and who is the wrongdoer.” I was opposed, on the grounds that I wasn’t a public official anymore and wasn’t obliged to share my private life with anybody. Yet I also had to admit to myself, “I’ve let the public know everything else about me, so why hide the negative side?” But if I was going to talk about bad behavior, I wanted to do it on my own timetable.

It was silly to think I would have any choice. People talked, people wrote e-mails, and within a few days, the Movie Channel started asking questions about a son born out of wedlock. Then the LA Times picked up on the story.

The day before it published the news, a reporter called to let us know and to ask for a comment. I gave a response that said, in essence, “I understand and deserve the feelings of anger and disappointment among my friends and family. There are no excuses and I take full responsibility for the hurt I have caused. I have apologized to Maria, my children and my family. I am truly sorry. I ask that the media respect my wife and children through this extremely difficult time. While I deserve your questions and criticism, my family does not.” I wanted to protect my family’s privacy, which remains a priority of mine today.

And then, knowing that the story would break the next morning, I had to tell my kids. I told Katherine and Christina over the phone, because they were in Chicago with Maria for Oprah Winfrey’s farewell show. Patrick and Christopher were home with me, so I asked them to sit down and told them face to face. In each conversation I explained that I’d made a mistake. I said, “I am sorry about it. This happened with Mildred fourteen years ago and she got pregnant and now there’s a child by the name of Joseph. It doesn’t change my love for you and I hope it doesn’t change your love for me. But that is what happened. I’m terribly sorry about it. Your mother is very upset and disappointed. I’ll work very hard to bring everyone together again. This is going to be a challenging time, and I hope it won’t be too awful with the response of other kids at school, or the parents when you go to your friends’ houses, or when you turn on TV or pick up the paper.”

I should have added “or go on the internet,” because one of the first things that Katherine and Patrick each did was tweet how they felt. Patrick quoted from the rock song “Where’d You Go”: “some days you feel like shit, some days you want to quit and just be normal for a bit,” and added, “yet I love my family till death do us part.” Katherine wrote, “This is definitely not easy but I appreciate your love and support as I begin to heal and move forward in life. I will always love my family!”

It took weeks for them to begin to trust the fact that our family hadn’t totally blown up. Our kids saw Maria and me communicating almost daily. They saw us go out for lunch or dinner. Patrick and Christopher developed a certain rhythm going back and forth between the house and the condo. All of this helped restore a little bit of stability.

I regretted also the impact on Mildred and Joseph. They weren’t used to living in the public eye, and all of a sudden they found themselves besieged by publicity-hungry lawyers and by reporters from gossip shows and tabloids. I stayed in touch with Mildred and helped arrange a more private place for them to stay. Mildred was never adversarial and handled the situation honestly, and when she left our household she told the media we’d been fair with her.

Although Maria and I remain separated as of this writing, I still try to treat everyone as if we are together. Maria has a right to be bitterly disappointed and never look at me the same way again. The public nature of our separation makes it doubly hard for us to work through it. The divorce is going forward, but I still have the hope that Maria and I can come back together as husband and wife and as a family with our children. You can call this denial, but it’s the way my mind works. I’m still in love with Maria. And I am an optimist. All my life I have focused on the positives. I am optimistic that we will come together again.

During this past year, Maria has sometimes asked, “How can you go forward with your life when I feel like everything has fallen apart? How come you don’t feel lost?” Of course she already knows the answer because she understands me better than anybody else. I have to keep moving forward. And she has kept moving forward too, becoming more and more involved in causes associated with her parents. She has traveled all over the country promoting the fight against Alzheimer’s, and is very active on the Special Olympics board, helping prepare for the 2015 International Special Olympics Games in Los Angeles.

I was glad to have a busy schedule after we separated because otherwise I would have felt lost. I kept working and stayed on the move. By the summer, I’d appeared at a series of post-governorship speaking engagements across the northern United States and Canada. I went to the Xingu River in Brazil with Jim Cameron; to London for Mikhail Gorbachev’s eightieth birthday party; to Washington, DC, for a summit on immigration; and to Cannes to receive the Legion d’Honneur medal and promote new projects. Yet while I was as busy as ever, none of it felt the way it should. What had made my career fun for more than thirty years was sharing it with Maria. We’d done everything together and now my life felt out of kilter. There was no one to come home to.

When the scandal broke in the spring of 2011, I was scheduled to give the keynote speech at an international energy forum in Vienna organized in conjunction with the United Nations Development Program. I worried that the media frenzy would hamper my effectiveness as an environmental champion, and half expected the invitation to be withdrawn. But the organizers in Vienna wanted to proceed. “This is a personal matter,” they said. “We don’t think it will affect the great example you set in environmental policy. The million solar roofs are not going to be dismantled …” In that speech, I promised that I would make it my mission to convince the world that a green global economy is desirable, necessary, and within reach.

When I left Sacramento, I knew I would want to pick up my entertainment career. I had taken no salary during my seven years as governor and it was time to get back to paid work. But the media onslaught of April and May made it temporarily impossible. To my embarrassment and regret, painful consequences of the scandal rippled out beyond my family to many of the people I worked with.

I announced that I was suspending my career to work on personal matters. We postponed The Governator, an animated-cartoon and comic-book series I’d been collaborating on with Stan Lee, the legendary creator of Spiderman. Another project that got derailed was Cry Macho, a movie I’d looked forward to making the entire time I was governor. Al Ruddy, the producer of The Godfather and Million Dollar Baby, had been holding this movie for me for years. But after the scandal broke, the material was just too close to home—the plot revolves around a horse-trainer’s friendship with a streetwise twelve-year-old Latino kid. I called Al and said, “Maybe somebody else can star, I don’t mind, or you can hold it for me a little longer.”

He’d already talked to the investors. “They’ll make any other movie with you. But not this one,” he said.

Just as after my heart surgery, Hollywood initially pulled back. The phone stopped ringing. But by summer my nephew Patrick Knapp, who serves as my entertainment lawyer, reported that studios and producers had begun calling again. “Is Arnold’s career still on hold?” they were asking. “We don’t have to talk to Arnold directly, because we understand if he’s still going through this family crisis, but can we talk to you at least? We have this great film we want to do with him …”

By autumn I was back to shooting action movies—The Expendables 2 in Bulgaria with Sylvester Stallone, The Last Stand in New Mexico with director Jee-Woon Kim, and The Tomb, another film with Stallone, near New Orleans. I’d wondered what being in front of the cameras again would feel like. When I was governor and I would visit a movie set, I would think, “Boy, am I glad that I am not hanging upside down in a harness having to do a fight scene.” My friends would ask, “Don’t you miss this?” And I would say, “Not at all. I’m so glad I’m in a suit and tie and I’m about to have a meeting about education and digital textbooks and then give a speech about keeping crime down.” But the brain always surprises. You start reading scripts and visualizing the scene and how to direct it, how to choreograph the stunt, and then you get into it and then you look forward to doing it. The mind unwinds from the political stuff and shifts to the new challenges.

Sly was shooting The Expendables 2 in Bulgaria, and when I arrived on location in September 2011, it was my first time back as an actor, except for cameos in The Kid and I and The Expendables while I was governor. I was eight years out of practice with shoot-outs and stunts. The other veteran action heroes in the cast—Sly, Bruce Willis, Dolph Lundgren, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Chuck Norris—were really nice to me and kind of protective. Normally an action star keeps to himself on the set, practicing his martial arts and looking studly. But these guys really went out of their way. Someone would come over and say, “The safety of that gun is here … This is how you load the shells.” I felt like I was being welcomed back into the craft of action and acting.

The stunts were hard. The work is very physical and it takes conditioning because you have to do each stunt over and over: slamming into some desk, running around with weapons, dropping to the floor, staying low because you’re being shot at. You realize there’s a difference between being thirty-five and almost sixty-five. I was glad that The Expendables 2 is an ensemble movie, where I was one of eight or ten stars. I was only on the set for four days, and never felt that the pressure to carry the movie was on me.

I went from Bulgaria to the American Southwest to shoot The Last Stand. With that movie, a lot of the pressure did fall on me. In fact, the script had been written for me. I play an LAPD drug cop who is near retirement. After my partner gets crippled in a bungled raid, I decide I can’t handle the job anymore. So I go back to my hometown on the Arizona-Mexico border and become sheriff. Then suddenly a major drug gang is headed my way after escaping the FBI. They’re hardened criminals and ex-military warriors, I’m supposed to stop them from crossing into Mexico, and I have only three inexperienced deputies. We’re the last stand. It’s a great, great role. The sheriff knows if he succeeds, it will mean everything to the town. His reputation is on the line. Is he really over the hill or can he do it?

For my next movie, The Tomb, I shift from being the law to being an outlaw. I play Emil Rottmayer, a security expert who gets locked up and put under interrogation for plotting cyberterrorism. The prison is a nightmarish, privately owned super-high-tech dungeon in an unknown location, where Western governments remand people who pose a threat to the establishment. Rottmayer is tortured because he won’t betray his boss, the rebel mastermind, who is still at large. Into this scene comes Sylvester Stallone as the prison world’s top “structural security” expert, Ray Breslin. His specialty is going undercover into ultramax prisons and exposing their weaknesses by breaking out. Only this time, he’s been betrayed by a business partner who stands to make a fortune if the Tomb is escape-proof and Sly never succeeds in escaping. After some confrontations Sly and I team up, and the action takes off from there. To get the hardcore huge industrial prison look, our director, Swedish filmmaker Mikael Håfström, is shooting most of The Tomb in a former NASA plant in Louisiana. The common area for the prisoners, called Babylon, is a cavernous 200-foot-tall chamber where until recently rocket-makers assembled the external fuel tank for the space shuttle. Today the space is empty and intimidating, the perfect backdrop for a movie that pits the heroes against the evils of the global establishment.

Back in real life, I’m taking on a big, fresh challenge. This summer we announced a major new institute at the University of Southern California, the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy. So even though I left office, I will continue to promote the policies that were closest to my heart: political reform, climate change and the environment, education reform, economic reform, and health care and stem cell research.

Just as presidential libraries continue the legacies of former presidents with research and scholarship, our institute will seek to add to the public discourse and inspire change. We will work with some of the best minds in public policy to produce studies and offer recommendations on a world stage.

USC is a perfect fit: it prides itself on being neither conservative nor liberal but open minded. It operates by promoting discussion to draw the best ideas from the brightest minds across the political spectrum. We’ll host summits and workshops and sponsor research in areas where I focused as governor and where California has made historic progress.

I will also have the great honor of being appointed the first Governor Downey Professor of State and Global Policy, a chair named after California’s first immigrant governor, USC cofounder John G. Downey. Professorship will enable me to travel the world and give lectures representing USC and the Schwarzenegger Institute.

My term as governor had to end, but with the institute, I will extend and expand on the work I started in office. I find this compelling because I’m never happy until I can share what I’ve learned and experienced. I think back to Sarge and Eunice, and the way that they always encouraged me to focus on causes bigger than myself. Sarge said it best in a great speech he gave at Yale in 1994. He told the graduating class, “It’s not what you get out of life that counts. Break your mirrors! In our society that is so self-absorbed, begin to look less at yourself and more at each other. You’ll get more satisfaction from having improved your neighborhood, your town, your state, your country, and your fellow human beings than you’ll ever get from your muscles, your figure, your automobile, your house, or your credit rating. You’ll get more from being a peacemaker than a warrior.” I think about those words all the time. The great leaders always talk about things that are much bigger than themselves. They say working for a cause that will outlive us is what brings meaning and joy. The more I’m able to accomplish in the world, the more I agree.