Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 5 Greetings from Los Angeles

THERE’S A PHOTOGRAPH OF me arriving in Los Angeles. I’m twenty-one years old, it’s 1968, and I’m wearing wrinkled brown pants, clunky shoes, and a cheap long-sleeved shirt. I’m holding a beat-up plastic bag containing just a few things and waiting at the baggage claim to get my gym bag, which holds everything else. I look like a refugee, I can’t speak more than a few phrases of English, and I don’t have any money—but on my face is a big smile.

A photographer and a reporter, freelancers for Muscle & Fitness magazine, were on hand to chronicle my arrival. Joe Weider had assigned them to pick me up, show me around, and write about what I did and said. Weider was promoting me as a rising star. He offered to bring me to America to train with the champions for a year. He would provide a place to stay and spending money. All I had to do was work with a translator to write stories about my techniques for his magazines while training to achieve my dream.

The new and marvelous life I had dreamed about easily could have ended just a week later. One of my brand-new gym friends, an Australian strongman and crocodile wrestler, lent me his car, a Pontiac GTO with over 350 horsepower. I’d never driven anything so incredible, and it didn’t take long before I was flying up Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley at autobahn speed. It was a cool and misty October morning, and I was about to learn that the streets of California get very slippery when it starts drizzling.

I got ready to downshift for an upcoming curve. Shifting was something I was good at because all the vehicles in Europe had manual transmissions, including the trucks I drove in the army and my banged-up old car in Munich. But downshifting the GTO slowed the rear wheels abruptly, breaking their hold on the road.

The car spun wildly around two or three times, completely out of control. I was probably down to about thirty miles per hour when momentum took me into the oncoming lanes—which were, unfortunately, very busy with morning traffic. I watched as a Volkswagen Beetle T-boned me on the passenger side. Then some American car hit me, and four or five more vehicles joined the pileup before everything came to a stop.

The GTO and I ended up about thirty yards down from my destination, Vince’s Gym, where I was going to train. The car door on my side worked so I climbed out, but my right leg felt like it was on fire—the impact had wrecked the console between the two front seats, and when I looked down, a big splinter of plastic was sticking out of my thigh. I pulled it out, and now blood started running down my leg.

I was really scared, and all I could think of was to go to the gym for help. I limped in and said, “I just had a big accident.” A few of the bodybuilders recognized me, but the one who took charge was a man I didn’t know, who happened to be a lawyer. “You better get back out to your car,” he said. “Don’t leave the scene of an accident. It’s called a hit-and-run here; hit-and-run, you understand? And you get in a lot of trouble. So go out there, stay with your car, and wait for the police.”

He understood I’d just arrived in the United States and that my English wasn’t good.

“But I’m here!” I said. “And I can look right over there!” I meant that I would easily see when the police arrived and go meet them.

“Trust me, just go back to your car.”

Then I showed him my leg. “Do you know a doctor who can help me with this?”

He saw the blood and muttered, “Oh Christ.” He thought for a second. “Let me call some friends. You don’t have health insurance or anything?” I had trouble understanding what this meant, but we figured out that I didn’t have insurance. Someone gave me a towel to hold against my leg.

I went back to the GTO. People were shaken up and hassled that they had to be late for work and that their cars were damaged and they were going to have to deal with their insurance companies. But nobody jumped all over me or made accusations. Once the cop was sure that the lady in the Volkswagen was okay, he let me go without a citation and just said, “I see you’re bleeding; you ought to get that looked at.” A bodybuilder friend named Bill Drake took me to a doctor and kindly paid the bill to get me stitched up.

I’d been an idiot to cause the wreck, and I wish I had everyone’s names so I could write to them today and apologize.

I knew I’d been lucky: the police in Europe would have been incredibly strict in a situation like this. Not only could I have been arrested but also, as a foreigner, I could very well have ended up in jail or getting deported. The incident definitely would have cost me a lot of money in fines. But the cops in LA took the view that the roads were slick, this was an accident, there were no serious injuries, and the key thing was to get traffic flowing again. The cop who talked to me was very polite; he looked at my international driver’s license and asked, “Do you want an ambulance, or are you okay?” Two guys from the gym told him I’d been in the country only a few days. It was pretty clear I couldn’t really speak English, although I tried.

I went to sleep that night feeling optimistic. I still needed to work things out with the crocodile wrestler, but America was a great place to be.

My first view of Los Angeles was a shock. For me, America meant one thing: size. Huge skyscrapers, huge bridges, huge neon signs, huge highways, huge cars. New York and Miami had both lived up to my expectations, and somehow I’d imagined that Los Angeles would be just as impressive. But now I saw that there were only a few high-rises downtown, and it looked pretty skimpy. The beach was big, but where were the huge waves and the surfers surfing?

I felt the same disappointment when I first saw Gold’s Gym, the mecca of American bodybuilding. I’d been studying Weider’s bodybuilding magazines for years without realizing that the whole idea was to make everything seem much bigger than it was. I’d look at scenes of famous bodybuilders working out at Gold’s, and my vision was of a huge sports club that had basketball courts, swimming pools, gymnastics, weight lifting, power lifting, and martial arts, like the giant clubs you see today. But when I walked in, there was a cement floor, and the whole place was very simple and primitive: a single two-story room about half the size of a basketball court, with cinder-block walls and skylights. Still, the equipment was really interesting, and I saw great power lifters and bodybuilders working out, lifting heavy weights—so the inspiration was there. Also, it was just two blocks from the beach.

The neighborhood of Venice around Gold’s seemed even less impressive than the gym. The houses lining the streets and alleys looked like my barracks in the Austrian army. Why would you build cheap wooden barracks in such a great location? Some of the houses were vacant and run-down. The sidewalks were cracked and sandy, with weeds growing alongside the buildings, and some stretches of sidewalk weren’t even paved.

“This is America!” I thought. “Why wouldn’t they pave this? Why wouldn’t they tear down this abandoned house and build a nice one?” One thing I knew for sure: back in Graz, you would never find a sidewalk that was not only paved but also totally swept and immaculate. It was inconceivable.

It was a challenge moving to a country where everything looked different, and the language was different, and the culture was different, and people thought differently and did business differently. It was staggering how different everything was. But I had the big advantage over most newcomers: when you are part of an international sport, you’re never totally alone.

There’s amazing hospitality in the bodybuilding world. No matter where you go, you don’t even have to know people. You always feel you are part of a family. The local bodybuilders will pick you up at the airport. They will greet you. They will take you into their homes. They will feed you. They will take you around. But America was something else.

One of the bodybuilders in Los Angeles had an extra bedroom where I could stay at first. When I showed up to start training at the gym, guys greeted me and hugged me and made it clear that they were happy to have me over here. The guys found me a little apartment, and as soon as I moved in, this friendliness turned into “We’ve got to help him.” They organized a drive and showed up one morning carrying packages and boxes. You have to picture a bunch of big, muscular guys: huge bears you’d never want near anything delicate or made of glass, who you’d hear in the gym every day saying, “Look at that chest, oh man!” or “I’m gonna squat five hundred pounds today—fuck it.” Suddenly, here they were carrying boxes and packages. One of them says, “Look what I brought you,” opens up this little box, and takes out some silverware. “You need some silverware so you can eat here.” Another one unwraps a bundle and says, “My wife told me that these are the plates I can take; they’re our old plates, so now you have five plates.” They were very careful to name things and give simple explanations. Someone else brought a little black-and-white TV with an antenna sticking out the top and helped me set it up and showed me how to adjust the antenna. They also brought food that we sat around and shared.

I said to myself, “I never saw this in Germany or Austria. No one would even think of it.” I knew for a fact that, back home, if I’d seen somebody moving in next door, it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to assist them. I felt like an idiot. That day was a growing-up experience.

The guys took me over to see Hollywood. I wanted to have my photo taken there and mail it to my parents, as if to send the message “I’ve arrived in Hollywood. Next will be movies.” So we drove until one of the guys said, “All right, that’s Sunset Boulevard.”

“When do we get to Hollywood?” I asked.

“This is Hollywood.”

In my imagination, I must have confused Hollywood with Las Vegas, because I was looking for giant signs and neon lights. I also expected to see movie equipment and streets blocked off because they were shooting some big stunt scene. But this was nothing. “What happened to all the lights and stuff?” I asked.

They looked at one another. “I think he’s disappointed,” one guy said. “Maybe we should bring him back at night.”

The others said, “Yeah, yeah, good idea. Because there’s nothing to see during the day, really.”

Later that week, we came back at night. There were a few more lights, but it was just as boring. I had to get used to it and learn the good places to hang out.

I spent a lot of time finding my way around and trying to figure out how things worked in America. In the evening, I often hung around with Artie Zeller, the photographer who’d picked me up at the airport. Artie fascinated me. He was very, very smart, yet he had absolutely no ambition. He didn’t like stress, and he didn’t like risk. He worked behind the window in the post office. He came from Brooklyn, where his father was an important cantor in the Jewish community; a very erudite guy. Artie went his own way, getting into bodybuilding in Coney Island. Working as a freelancer for Weider, he’d become the best photographer of the sport. He was fascinating because he was self-taught, endlessly reading and absorbing things. Besides being a natural with languages, he was a walking encyclopedia and an expert chess player. He was a die-hard Democrat, liberal, and total atheist. Forget religion. To him, it was all bogus. There was no God, end of story.

Artie’s wife, Josie, was Swiss, and even though I was trying to stay immersed in English, it was helpful to be around people who knew German. This was especially true when it came to watching TV. I’d arrived in America during the last three or four weeks of the 1968 presidential campaign, so when we turned on the set, there was always something about the election. Artie and Josie would translate from speeches by Richard Nixon and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who were running against each other. Humphrey, the Democrat, was always going on about welfare and government programs, and I decided he sounded too Austrian. But Nixon’s talk about opportunity and enterprise sounded really American to me.

“What is his party called again?” I asked Artie.

“Republican.”

“Then I’m a Republican,” I said. Artie snorted, which he often did both because he had bad sinuses and because he found a lot in life to snort about.

Just as Joe Weider had promised, I got a car: a secondhand white Volkswagen Beetle, which made me feel at home. As a way of learning the area, I would visit different gyms. I made friends with a guy who managed a gym in downtown LA, at what was then called the Occidental Life Building. I drove inland and also down to San Diego to see the gyms there. People would take me places, too, which was how I got to know Tijuana, Mexico, and Santa Barbara. At one point, I drove with four other bodybuilders to Las Vegas in a VW microbus. It couldn’t even get up to sixty miles per hour with all the muscle on board. Las Vegas itself, with its giant casinos and neon lights and endless gaming tables, really lived up to my expectations.

A lot of champions trained at Vince’s Gym, such as Larry Scott, who was nicknamed “the Legend” and who had won Mr. Olympia in 1965 and 1966. Vince’s had carpeting and plenty of nice machines, but it wasn’t a power lifter’s gym: they thought basic strength-training exercises like the full squat, bench press, and incline press were old-fashioned strongman stuff that didn’t chisel the body.

The scene was totally different at Gold’s. It was very rough, and monsters trained there: Olympic shot-put champions, professional wrestlers, bodybuilding champions, strongmen off the streets. There was almost no one in a workout outfit. Everyone trained in jeans and plaid shirts, tank tops, sleeveless wife-beater shirts, sweatshirts. The gym had bare floors and weight-lifting platforms where you could drop a thousand pounds and no one would ever complain. It was closer to the atmosphere where I came from.

Joe Gold was the genius of the place. He’d been part of Santa Monica’s original Muscle Beach scene as a teenager in the 1930s, and after serving as a machinist in the merchant marine in World War II, he came back and started building gym equipment. Just about every machine in the place was Joe’s design.

There was nothing delicate here: everything Joe built was big and heavy, and it worked. His cable rowing machine was designed with the footrests exactly high enough for you to work your lower lats without feeling like you were about to launch right out of the seat. When Joe designed a machine, he did it with everybody’s input rather than going off on his own. So on all of it, the angles of pulling down were perfect, and nothing got stuck. And he was there every day, which meant that all the equipment was maintained continuously.

Sometimes Joe would simply invent new machines. He’d created one to do donkey raises. This calf exercise was essential for me because compared to the rest of me, my calves were congenitally puny and hard to build up. Normally you did a donkey raise by placing the balls of your feet on a bar or plank with your midfoot and heels suspended. Then you bent at the waist 90 degrees, braced your arms on a bar, had one or two training buddies climb up and sit on your back and hips as if you were a mule, and worked your calves by lifting them up and down. But with Joe’s machine, you didn’t need riders. You loaded it with any amount of weight you wanted, went underneath it in a donkey stance, and took off the lock. Now you had, say, seven hundred pounds on top of you, and you could do the donkey raises.

Gold’s quickly became home for me because that’s where I felt grounded. There was always a bunch of guys hanging around the desk, and all the regulars had nicknames, like Fat Arm Charlie and Brownie and Snail. Zabo Koszewski worked there for many years and was Joe Gold’s close friend. They called him “the Chief.” He had the best abdominals—he did one thousand reps of abs every day—and was really ripped. My abs weren’t like that, and the first thing Zabo told me when we met was that I needed to go on a diet. “You know?” he observed. “You’re chubby.” Joe Gold nicknamed me “Balloon Belly,” and from then on, I was known as “Balloon Belly” and “Chubby.”

Zabo, who came from New Jersey and whose first name was Irvin, had a whole collection of hashish pipes. We went over to his house every so often to get stoned. He read science-fiction novels day and night. Everything was, “Hey, man, wow!” and “Groovy!” and “Far out!” But that was normal around Venice. To smoke a joint was so casual it was like drinking a beer. You would go to someone’s house, no matter who it was, and he’d light up a joint and say, “Have a hit.” Or light up a hashish pipe, depending on how sophisticated he was.

I learned quickly what people meant when they said, “This is groovy.” “This is cool.” I found out that astrology was a big deal while trying to chat up this gorgeous girl. I said, “You and I, it seems like we really belong together; we should go out for dinner.”

But she said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what sign are you?”

So I said, “Leo.”

“That’s not for me. That’s really not for me. Thank you, but no thank you.”

And she was gone. I went to the gym the next day and said, “Guys, I have a little problem here. I’m still learning.” And I told them the story.

Zabo knew just what to do. He said, “Man, you got to say, ‘I’m the best sign.’ Try that.”

It took only a few weeks before another situation came up. I was talking to a girl at lunch, and she asked, “What sign are you?”

And I said, “What do you guess?”

“Well, what?”

“The best!”

So she said, “You mean … Capricorn?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “How did you know?”

“I’m telling you, it’s amazing because that fits so well with me, and I get along so well with you, I mean, this is like, wow!” She was excited and so happy. So I started reading up on the zodiac signs, all the characteristics associated with them, and how they match up together.

Using Gold’s as my base, it was easy to make friends. The place was a melting pot of characters from all over the world: Australians, Africans, Europeans. I’d work out in the morning and say to a couple of guys, “Hey, do you want to go to lunch?” We’d go, and they’d tell me about their lives, and I’d tell them about mine, and we’d become buddies. At night I’d come back to train again, meet a different set of guys, go out with them for dinner, and get to know them too.

I was amazed by how readily people invited me to their homes and by how much Americans liked to celebrate. I’d never celebrated a birthday until I came to America; I had never even seen a cake with candles. But a girl invited me to her birthday party, and when my birthday came the following summer, the guys at the gym had a cake and candles for me. A guy would say, “I have to go home because it’s my sister’s first day of school, so we’re going to celebrate.” Or “Today is my parents’ anniversary.” I could not remember my parents ever even talking about their anniversary.

When Thanksgiving came, I had nothing planned because I didn’t understand the tradition of this American holiday. But Bill Drake brought me to his house. I got to meet his mom, who served this extraordinary meal, and his dad, who was a professional comedian and was very, very funny. We have a saying in Austria: “You’re so sweet I could eat you!” But because of the translation problem, when I tried using that to compliment Mrs. Drake, it came out really lewd. The whole family burst out laughing.

I felt even more amazed when a girl I dated invited me to her parents’ house for Christmas. I said to myself, “God, I don’t want to disrupt the family holiday.” Not only did they treat me like a son but also every family member gave me a gift.

All of this hospitality was new and welcome, but it bothered me that I did not know how to respond. For instance, I’d never heard of sending a thank-you note, and yet Americans seemed to send them all the time. “That is so weird,” I thought. “Why can’t you just say thank you over the phone or in person?” That’s the way we did it in Europe. But here Joe Weider would invite me and a girlfriend to dinner, and afterward she’d say, “Give me his address because I want to write him a thank-you note.”

And I would say, “Nah, come on, we already thanked him when we left.”

“No, no, no, no, I grew up with manners.”

I realized I’d better get with the program and learn American manners. Or maybe they were also European manners and I’d just never noticed. I checked with friends back in Europe in case I’d missed something. No, I had not; America really was different.

As a first step, I made it a rule to date only American girls; I did not want to hang out with girls who knew German. And I immediately signed up for English classes at Santa Monica Community College. I wanted my English to be good enough so that I could read newspapers and textbooks and go on to classes in other subjects. I wanted to speed up the process of learning to think, read, and write like an American. I didn’t want to just wait till I picked it up.

One weekend a couple of girls took me up to San Francisco, and we stayed in Golden Gate Park. I said to myself, “This is unbelievable, how free people are in America. Look at this! Now we’re sleeping at night in the park, and everyone is friendly.” I didn’t realize until much later that I had arrived in California at a totally crazy cultural moment. It was the late sixties, there was the hippie movement, free love, all this incredible change. The Vietnam War was at its peak. Richard Nixon was about to be elected president. Americans at the time felt like the world was turning upside down. But I had no idea that it hadn’t always been this way. “So this is America,” I thought.

I never heard many conversations about Vietnam. But personally I loved the idea of America pushing back on Communism, so if anybody had asked me, I’d have been for the war. I’d have said, “Fucking Communists, I despise them.” I grew up next door to Hungary, and we always lived under the threat of Communism. Were they going to push through Austria just like they did Hungary in ’56? Were we going to get caught in a nuclear exchange? The danger was so close. And we saw the effect that Communism had on the Czechs, the Polish, the Hungarians, the Bulgarians, the Yugoslavs, the East Germans—everywhere there was Communism around us. I remember going to West Berlin for a bodybuilding exhibition. I’d looked across the Berlin Wall, across the border, and seen how dismal life was on the other side. It was literally like two different weathers. It felt like I was in sunshine and when you looked across the wall at East Berlin, there was rain. It was horrible. Horrible. So I felt very good that America was fighting Communism big-time.

It never struck me as strange that the girls I was dating weren’t putting on makeup or lipstick or painting their nails. I thought having hairy legs and underarms was normal because in Europe none of the women waxed or shaved. In fact, I got caught by surprise by it one morning the following summer. I was in the shower with a girlfriend—we’d watched the Apollo astronauts make the first moonwalk on my little black-and-white TV the night before—and she asked. “Do you have a razor?”

“Why do you need a razor?”

“I hate these nubs on my legs.” I didn’t know what “nubs” meant, so she explained.

“What?” I said. “You shave?”

“Yeah, I shave my legs. It’s so gross.” I’d never heard that expression either. But I gave her my razor and watched her soap her legs, her calves, her shins, her knees, and shave them like she’d been doing it for five thousand years. Later that day I said to the guys at the gym, “Today a chick shaved in my fuckin’ shower. Have you ever seen that?”

They looked at one another solemnly, nodded, and said, “Yeaaah.” Then everybody cracked up. I tried to explain: “Oh, because in Europe, girls are all with the Bavarian look, you know, with the hair all over.” That just made them laugh harder.

Eventually I pieced it together. Some of the girls I dated didn’t shave: this was their protest against the establishment. They felt the beauty market was all about exploiting sex and telling people what to do, so they were rejecting that by being more natural. It was all part of the hippie era. The flowery dresses, the frizzy hair, the food they ate. They all wore beads, lots of beads. They brought incense to my apartment, so the whole place stank. That was bad, but I felt they were on the right track with the freedom of smoking a joint and the naturalness of nudity. All that was wonderful. I’d grown up a little bit like that myself, with the uninhibited scene at the Thalersee.

All that laid-back stuff was great, but my mission in America was clear. I was on a path. I needed to train like hell, diet like hell, eat well, and win more major titles the following fall. Weider had promised me a year, and I knew that if I did those things, I’d be on a roll.

Winning a couple of Mr. Universe contests in London didn’t make me anywhere near the best bodybuilder in the world. There were too many overlapping titles, and not everyone was competing in the same place. Being the best would really come down to beating champions like the guys whose pictures I had hanging all over the walls of my room: Reg Park, Dave Draper, Frank Zane, Bill Pearl, Larry Scott, Chuck Sipes, Serge Nubret. They had inspired me, and I said to myself, “These are the kinds of people I have to go through eventually.” My victories had put me in their league, but I was the newcomer with a lot left to prove.

At the very top of the pedestal was Sergio Oliva, the 230-pound, twenty-seven-year-old Cuban emigré. By now the muscle magazines simply called him the Myth. He’d taken his most recent Mr. Olympia title that fall in New York unopposed: not one of the other four bodybuilding champions invited to compete even showed up.

Oliva’s background was even more unusual than mine. His father was a sugarcane laborer in pre-Castro Cuba, and during the revolution in the 1950s, Sergio enlisted in General Fulgencio Batista’s army alongside his dad. After Fidel Castro and his rebel forces prevailed, Sergio established himself as an athlete. He was an Olympic weight lifter of much higher caliber than me, ending up on the Cuban team in the 1962 Central American and Caribbean Games. He would have led the team in the 1964 Olympics if he had not hated Castro’s regime so much that he defected to the United States along with many of his teammates. He was also a terrific baseball player. That’s what had helped him refine his waist: tens of thousands of reps twisting to swing a bat.

I’d met Sergio at the 1968 Mr. Universe contest in Miami, where he gave a posing demonstration that drove the audience wild. As one of the muscle magazines put it, his posing split the concrete. There was no question that Sergio was still way out of my reach. He was really ripped and pound for pound thicker, with more muscle intensity than I had. He had the rare ability among bodybuilders to look fantastic just standing relaxed. His silhouette was the best I’d ever seen: a perfect V-shape tapering from very wide shoulders to a naturally narrow, tubular waist and hips. The “victory pose,” Sergio’s trademark, was a move that very few bodybuilders in competition would even attempt. It involved simply facing the audience with the legs together and the arms extended straight overhead. It exposed the body completely: the huge, sweeping thighs built up from Olympic lifting, the tiny waist, and the near-perfect abdominals, triceps, and serratus. (The serrati are muscles on the sides of the rib cage.)

I was determined to beat this man eventually, but I was still far from having the kind of body I would need. I’d come to America like a hundred-carat diamond that everyone was looking at and saying, “Holy shit.” But the diamond was only rough cut. It was not ready for display, at least not by American standards. Building a totally world-class body typically takes ten years at least, and I’d been training for only six. But I came on strong, and people were saying, “Look at the size of this young kid. What the hell? This guy, to me, has the most potential.” So I’d won my victories in Europe as much on promise and courage as on the fine points of my physique. A huge amount work still remained to be done.

The ideal of bodybuilding is visual perfection, like an ancient Greek statue come to life. You sculpt your body the way an artist chisels stone. Say you need to add bulk and definition to your rear deltoid. You have to choose from an inventory of exercises for that muscle. The weight, the bench, or the machine becomes your chisel, and the sculpting could take a year.

This means you have to be able to see your body honestly and analyze its flaws. The judges in the top competitions scrutinize every detail: muscle size, definition, proportion, and symmetry. They even look at veins, which indicate an absence of fat under the skin.

In the mirror I could see plenty of strong points and plenty of weaknesses. I’d succeeded in building a foundation of power and mass. By combining Olympic lifting, power lifting, and bodybuilding, I’d developed a very thick and wide back, close to perfect. My biceps were extraordinary in size, height, and muscle peak. I had ripped pectoral muscles, and the best side-chest pose of anybody. I had a real bodybuilder’s frame, with wide shoulders and narrow hips, which helped me achieve that ideal V shape that is one element of perfection.

But I also had some shortcomings. Relative to my torso, my limbs were too long. So I was always having to build the arms and legs to make the proportions seem right. Even with massive twenty-nine-inch thighs, my legs still looked on the thin side. My calves fell short compared to my thighs, and my triceps fell short compared to the biceps.

The challenge was to take the curse off all those weak points. It’s human nature to work on the things that we are good at. If you have big biceps, you want to do an endless number of curls because it’s so satisfying to see this major bicep flex. To be successful, however, you must be brutal with yourself and focus on the flaws. That’s when your eye, your honesty, and your ability to listen to others come in. Bodybuilders who are blind to themselves or deaf to others usually fall behind.

Even more challenging is the biological fact that, in every individual, some body parts develop more readily than others. So when you start working out, you might find yourself saying after two years, “Gee, isn’t it interesting that my forearms never got really as muscular as the upper arms,” or “Isn’t it interesting that my calves somehow aren’t growing so much.” That was my particular bugaboo—the calves. I started out training them ten sets three times a week just like the other body parts, but they did not respond the same way. Other muscle groups were way ahead.

Reg Park gave me the wake-up call on that. He had perfect twenty-one-inch calves, so fully developed that each one looked like an upside-down valentine heart under the skin. When I trained with him in South Africa, I saw what he did to achieve that. He trained his calves every day, not just three times a week, and with a mind-blowing amount of weight. I was proud that I’d worked up to calf raises with three hundred pounds, but Reg had a cable system that let him apply one thousand. I said to myself, “This is what I need to do. I have to train my calves totally differently and not give them even a chance of not growing.” When I got to California, I made a point of cutting off all my sweatpants at the knees. I would keep my strongpoints covered—my biceps, my chest, my back, my thighs—but I made sure that my calves were exposed so everyone could see. I was relentless and did fifteen sets, sometimes twenty sets, of calf raises every single day.

I knew all the muscles I needed to focus on systematically. In general, I had better muscles for pulling motions (biceps, lats, and back muscles) than for pressing motions (front deltoids and triceps). It was one of those hereditary things that meant I had to push those muscles much harder and do more sets. I’d built the big back, but now I had to think about creating the ideal definition and separation between the lats and the pecs and the serratus. I had to do exercises for the serratus, so that meant more closed-grip chin-ups. I had to lower the lats a little, which meant more cable raises and one-arm raises. I had to get the rear deltoids, which meant more lateral raises, in which you hold a dumbbell in each hand while standing and lift them straight out to the sides.

I had a whole list of muscles to attack: the rear deltoid and the lower latissimus and the intercostals and the abdominals and the calves, and blah, blah, blah! These all had to be built and chiseled and separated and brought into proper proportion to one another. Each morning, I’d get breakfast with one or two training buddies, usually at a deli called Zucky’s on the corner of Fifth Street and Wilshire Boulevard. They had tuna, they had eggs, they had salmon, all the things I liked. Or we would go to one of those family breakfast places like Denny’s.

Unless I had English class, I would go straight to Gold’s and work out. Afterward, we might hit the beach, where there would be more exercises on the open-air weight-lifting platform, plus swimming and jogging and lying on the sand to perfect our tans. Or I’d go over to Joe Weider’s building and work with the guys cooking up stories for the magazine.

I always split my routine into two training sessions. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, I would focus on, say, chest and back. At night I would come back and work on my thighs and calves, and then practice posing and do other exercises. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, it was shoulders, arms, and forearms. Of course, calves every day, abs every day except Sunday, which was a rest day.

Often for lunch or dinner we’d hit one of the local smorgasbords. Growing up in Europe, I’d never even heard of a smorgasbord. The idea of a restaurant where you could eat all you wanted would have been incomprehensible. The bodybuilders would start with five, six, or seven eggs, after which we’d go to the next station and eat all the tomatoes and vegetables. Then we would have the steak, and then the fish. Muscle magazines in those days were always warning that you had to have your amino acids, and that you had to be careful because the amino acids in certain foods weren’t complete. “Hey,” we said, “let’s not even think about it; let’s just eat all the proteins. We have the egg, the fish, the beef, the turkey, the cheese—let’s just have it all!” You would think the owners of the smorgasbord would have charged us more at least. But they treated us no different from any other customer. It was as if God had created a restaurant for bodybuilders.

During those first months in Los Angeles, everything was going so well that it was hard to believe. There were surprisingly few consequences from my car crash, apart from the gash in my thigh. The crocodile wrestler who owned the GTO scarcely batted an eye about the damage. He worked for a dealership where he had his pick of the used cars, and his reaction was “Don’t worry about it.” In fact, he hired me. One of the dealer’s specialties was exporting used cars, and I earned pocket money that fall by driving cars down to Long Beach and onto a freighter headed for Australia.

A few insurance companies called the gym to talk about damages to the other cars, but the conversations were too hard for me to understand, so I’d hand the phone to a workout partner. He’d explain that I was new to America and had no money, and the companies gave up. The only dramatic effect of the accident was that it made me frantic about getting health insurance. In Europe, of course, everybody was insured: you fell into a certain category if you were a student; if you were a child, you were covered by your parents’ insurance; if you had a job, you had workers’ coverage—even the homeless were covered. It scared me not to be covered here. I kept worrying, “If I get sick, what do I do?” I had no idea that you could go to an emergency room and receive free medical care. And even if I’d known, I wanted no handouts. Though it took me six months, I made sure that I paid back Bill Drake for my doctor bill.

It so happened that Larry Scott, a former Mr. Olympia who was retired from bodybuilding but still worked out every day, was now a regional sales manager for a big insurance company.

“I hear you’re looking for insurance,” he said to me. “Let me help you.”

He came up with a policy that cost $23.60 a month, plus another $5 for disability, which sounded expensive to me because I earned only $65 a week from Weider. But I bought it and must have been one of the few new immigrants in LA with health insurance.

Around Thanksgiving 1969 I got an invitation to a December bodybuilding competition and demonstration in Hawaii. The crocodile wrestler had been planning to go home for the holidays, and he said, “I love Hawaii. Why don’t I come with you and hang out and train with you for a few days, and then I’ll go on to Australia from there?” The plan sounded good to me. Besides the obvious attractions of the beaches and the girls, Hawaii offered the chance to get to know Dr. Richard You, a US Olympic team physician who practiced there, and to visit weight-lifting legends like Tommy Kono, Timothy Leon, and Harold “Oddjob” Sakata (whom I already knew from Munich). So my buddy and I went to Joe Weider and asked if he knew the promoters and what he thought about me going. He was all for it. I could use the experience, he said, and the pressure of an upcoming competition would make me train harder.