Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 6 Lazy Bastards

JOE WEIDER CALLED THE hard-core bodybuilders lazy bastards. From what I could tell, he was mostly right. The typical customers at Gold’s Gym were guys with day jobs: construction workers, cops, professional athletes, business owners, salesmen, and, as time went by, actors. But with a few exceptions, the bodybuilders were lazy. A lot of them were unemployed. They wanted to lie on the beach and have somebody sponsor them. It was always, “Hey, Joe, can you give me an airline ticket to fly to New York to the contest?” “Hey, Joe, can you give me a salary so I can train in the gym?” “Hey, Joe, can I have the food supplements for free?” “Hey, Joe, can you get me a car?” When they didn’t get the handouts they felt entitled to, they were pissed. “Be careful of Joe,” I’d hear them say. “That cheap son of a bitch doesn’t keep his promises.” I saw him completely differently. It’s true Joe had a hard time parting with money. He came from a poor background where he had to fight for every nickel. But I didn’t see any reason why he should just hand out money to any bodybuilder who asked.

Joe was a master at knowing exactly how to appeal to young and vulnerable males. When I first picked up his magazines at age fifteen, I was wondering how I would be strong enough to defend myself. How could I make sure that I’d be successful with the girls? How could I make sure that I would earn a great living? Joe sucked me into a world where I would feel special right away. It was the old Charles Atlas message: Send away for my course, and no one will be kicking sand in your face. You will be a great man in no time, you will be picking up girls, you will be walking around on Venice Beach!

Joe gave all the great bodybuilders nicknames in his magazines, like superheroes. Dave Draper, who trained at Gold’s, was the Blond Bomber. I’d seen him in the 1967 Tony Curtis movie Don’t Make Waves. That fired my imagination even more: here was another bodybuilder who’d gotten into movies! Weider’s magazines photographed Dave with a surfboard walking around on the beach. That looked cool. In the background was a Volkswagen dune buggy, with the exposed wheels, and that looked cool too. He was surrounded by beautiful girls who gazed at him in awe.

Other pictures in the magazine showed scientists and technicians in white lab coats developing nutritional supplements in the Weider Research Clinic. “Weider Research Clinic,” I would say to myself, “this is unbelievable!” And there were pictures of airplanes with “Weider” painted on the side in big letters. I’d imagined an outfit the size of General Motors, with a fleet of planes flying around the globe delivering Weider equipment and food supplements. The writing in the magazine sounded fabulous too when my friends translated it for me. The stories talked about “blasting the muscles” and building “deltoids like cannonballs” and “a chest like a fortress.”

And now here I was, six years later, on Venice Beach! Just like Dave Draper, only now it was me with the dune buggy and the surfboard and the adoring girls. Of course, by this time I was aware enough to see that Weider was creating a whole fantasy world, with a foundation in reality but skyscrapers of hype. Yes, there were surfboards, but the bodybuilders didn’t really surf. Yes, there were pretty girls, but they were models who got paid for the photo session. (Actually, one of the girls was Joe’s wife, Betty, a beautiful model whom he didn’t have to pay.) Yes, there were Weider supplements and, yes, some research took place, but there was no big building in Los Angeles called the Weider Research Clinic. Yes, Weider products were distributed around the world, but there were no Weider planes. Discovering the hype didn’t bother me, though. Enough of it was true.

Not only was I fascinated to be in the middle of this, I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. “I have to pinch myself,” I would think. I told my friends that my worst nightmare would be to feel somebody shaking me and hear my mother’s voice say, “Arnold, you overslept! You have to get up! You’re going to be two hours late for work. Hurry! You have to get to the factory!” And I’d be saying, “Noooo! Why did you wake me up? I was having the most incredible dream. I want to see how it turns out.”

Joe himself wasn’t the easiest guy to like. Starting in the Great Depression, he and his younger brother, Ben, had clawed their way out of the slums of Montreal and built their businesses from scratch. The Weider magazines, equipment, nutritional supplement businesses, and competitions were bodybuilding’s biggest empire, bringing in about $20 million a year, which made Joe and Ben the men to know in what was still a money-starved sport. The only other people who actually made a living out of bodybuilding were a few promoters and gym owners; none of the bodybuilders themselves did, and I was the only one I’d ever heard of getting paid just to train.

Joe and Ben were always pushing to expand, and they didn’t mind invading other people’s turf. In 1946 they created their own association, the International Federation of Body Building (IFBB), to challenge both the American Athletic Union, which controlled Olympic weight lifting and bodybuilding in North America, and the National Amateur Body-Builders’ Association (NABBA), which regulated bodybuilding in the United Kingdom. They started feuds by promoting their own versions of the Mr. America competition, which belonged to the AAU, and Mr. Universe, which belonged to NABBA. Just like in boxing, the duplication of titles caused a lot of confusion but helped bodybuilding to expand.

Joe was also the first to offer a cash prize for winning a bodybuilding championship. When he invented Mr. Olympia in 1965, the prize was $1,000 and an engraved silver plate. In any of the other contests, like Mr. Universe, all you got was a trophy. Joe’s competitions also offered the best deal for contestants. He’d pay for your hotel and plane fare. But he would always hold onto the return ticket until you’d done your stint posing for his photographers after the event. Actually, Joe would have preferred to shoot the bodybuilders before the event, but the bodybuilders usually didn’t feel ready to be photographed beforehand and Franco Columbu and I were the only ones who would agree. We liked it because being photographed forced us to be in good shape and gave us a chance to practice posing.

Mr. Olympia itself was sheer promotional genius. The idea was to choose a champion of champions and Mr. Olympia was by invitation only, and you had to be a present or past Mr. Universe to qualify. So Joe was cashing in on the proliferation of titles he’d created! No wonder the Weiders drove people crazy. Their latest campaign was lobbying the International Olympic Committee to recognize bodybuilding as an international sport.

I liked the fact that Joe Weider was a hustler. He had magazines. He had a federation. He had knowledge. He shook things up and wanted to make bodybuilding really big. He had something to offer that I needed, and he felt I had something to offer that he needed.

Plus, I was not a lazy bastard. The first thing I told him when I got to California was “I don’t want to hang around. I don’t want to take your money for nothing. Give me something to do where I can learn.” He had a retail store on Fifth Street in Santa Monica that sold nutritional supplements and weight-lifting equipment. So I asked if I could work there. “I want to help customers,” I told him. “It helps me to learn business and practice my English, and I like dealing with people.”

Joe loved hearing this. “You see, Arnold,” he said in his Canadian accent, “you want to work, you want to build yourself, you are German, you are a machine, you are unbelievable. You are not like these lazy bastards!”

I loved the way Joe’s mind worked. He had already spun a whole myth about me: that I was this German machine, totally reliable, there’s no malfunction, it always works. And he was going to apply his know-how and power to make this machine come to life and walk around like Frankenstein. I thought this was very funny. I didn’t mind him thinking of me as his creation because I knew that meant that Joe Weider would love me. This fit right in with my goal of becoming the world champion, and the more he thought about me that way, the more generous he was.

Right from the beginning, I felt that he looked at me as the son he never had. I felt that this was a unique opportunity to learn. My own father gave me advice about being disciplined, tough, and brave, but not advice on how to succeed in business. I was always searching for mentors who could pick up where my father left off. Having Joe around was like having a father who appreciated what I was trying to do.

The company was still based back east in Union City, New Jersey, but the Weiders were building a new headquarters in the San Fernando Valley. Joe would come out every few weeks to supervise. He took me along to the construction meetings and let me hang around with him to see how the business worked. When it came to the publishing side of his business, he was always looking for printers who could do a better job and charge less, and he’d include me in those discussions, too. I’d visit him in New York and sit in on meetings there also. After my English improved, he took me on a business trip to Japan, to learn how he conducted negotiations overseas and see how essential distribution is—not just in magazines but in the success of any business.

Joe emphasized the importance of going global rather than doing business in just one country. He knew that was where the future was headed. On every trip, he had multiple goals: in Japan, for example, we also met with the national bodybuilding federation, and Joe advised them on how to improve their contests. Long plane rides with Joe were always stimulating. He’d talk about business, art, antiques, sports. He was a student of world history and Jewish history. He was also heavily into psychology. He must have gone to a shrink.

I was in heaven, since I’d always felt that my future would be in business. No matter what I was involved in, part of my mind was always wondering, “Is this what I’m meant for? What is the mission here?” I knew I was meant for something special, but what was it? Being a businessman, to me, was the ultimate. And now this leader was taking me on business trips, and I was learning just what I needed. Maybe I could end up marketing and selling food supplements, home equipment, and equipment for gyms, owning a gymnasium chain, and running a business empire—like Reg Park but on a global scale. How wild would that be! I knew I looked at business differently than other bodybuilders did. If Weider had offered the Japan trip to one of the other guys, he would have said, “Nah, Japan sounds boring. What gyms do they have over there? I want to work out,” or something stupid like that. So maybe becoming the next generation Weider really was my destiny. Joe clearly was taking great joy in teaching me. He’d say, “You are really into this!”

What I learned from him went way beyond business. He was a collector of fine furniture and art, which I found fascinating. When I stayed at his apartment in New York, I looked at all the art and antiques. He talked about auctions, saying, “I bought this for this amount. Now it is worth this amount.”

That was the first time I understood that old furniture can go up in value. Up until then, I’d just looked at it as old junk, like we had in Austria. So now Joe was saying, “Look at this from the French Empire period. This wood is mahogany. See the swans carved in the armrests? The swans were the emblem of Napoléon’s wife the Empress Joséphine. And see, it has this sphinx made of brass embedded in the back? The French were really into Egyptian motifs.” I started going with him to art auctions in New York at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and other houses.

The Napoléon chair was one of Joe’s prize pieces. He kept it in the guest room. The first time I stayed there, he made a big fuss about it: “It’s very fragile, and very, very expensive. Make sure you don’t sit on it or even touch it, okay?” I wanted to be careful with the chair, but that night when I was taking off my pants to go to bed, my foot got stuck, and I lost my balance and fell right onto it. The chair collapsed under my weight—it looked like it had exploded. I went to find Joe and said, “You have to see this. I just destroyed the chair.”

He rushed into the room, and when he saw the pieces all over the rug he almost fainted. Then he started cursing. “Oh! Bastard! That’s an expensive chair!” But he caught himself because he realized it sounded cheap to be complaining so much. It doesn’t matter what chair it is, when they break, you can put them together again. It’s not like it was gone, because it only really broke where it was glued together; where the joints were. It just fell apart when I landed on top of it.

I felt guilty, of course, but I still couldn’t resist saying, “I can’t believe that I hurt my knee, I hurt my hip, and you never asked, ‘How are you feeling?’ or said, ‘Don’t worry about that, I’m more concerned about you.’ You are supposed to be like my father figure here in America! Here you are only concerned about this chair.”

This made Joe feel really terrible. “Aw, Christ,” he said, “you’re right. Look at this! How cheap they put this together.” And then he called them the bastards, the Napoléon guys who built the chair.

After that visit to New York, I flew to Chicago to see the AAU’s Mr. America contest and spend a week training with Sergio Oliva. We’d be competing that fall, but that didn’t get in the way of his hospitality. He and his wife had me to dinner at their apartment, and I received my first exposure to black Cuban Latino culture. Sergio had a jive way of talking and dressing and a different way of relating to his wife than I’d ever seen, with lots of temper and hollering on both sides. Even so, he was a true gentleman.

I was on a secret reconnaissance mission: I thought that you have to sneak into the enemy camp and experience how he sees the world! What is it that makes him a champion? What does he eat, how does he live, what is there to learn from the way he trains? How does he practice his posing? What is his attitude about competition? None of this information would give me the body to beat him, but it would motivate me and show me what I needed to win. Could I find a weakness I could use psychologically? I was convinced that sports are not just physical but also psychological warfare.

The first thing I discovered was that Sergio worked even harder than me. He had a full-time job at a steel mill, and, after spending all day in the heat of the furnaces, he’d go to the Duncan YMCA and train for hours. He was one of those guys that just didn’t burn up easily. Every day, to start his routine, he would complete ten sets of twenty chin-ups. That wasn’t for training his back. That was just to warm up. Every day. He had a number of unusual techniques that I could pick up. He did his bench press as half reps without ever locking out his elbows. That kept full tension all the time on the pectoral muscle, and he had beautiful, full pecs. There were also things I learned in the way that he practiced his posing.

Now, I also understood that what worked for Sergio wasn’t necessarily going to work for me. We were more like mirror opposites. I had great biceps and back muscles, but his front deltoids, triceps, and pecs were better than mine. To beat him, I would have to work those muscles much, much harder and do more sets. His other great advantages were years of experience and great natural potential—he was truly an animal. But above all it was the fire in Sergio that inspired me. I said to myself that I would have to step it up.

I knew who would help me do that. I had world-class training partners in California, but almost from the minute I set foot there, I lobbied Joe to bring over my friend Franco. I missed many of my Munich buddies, and they must thought it was strange how I’d disappeared to California. But I missed Franco especially because we were like brothers, and he was the perfect training partner for me. Franco was a foreigner like me, and even in Munich, we both had the immigrant mentality and the same kind of hunger. Hard work was the only thing we could count on. I thought America would be great for Franco like it was for me.

Joe was never going to buy the sentimental argument, so I put it in commercial terms. “Bring Franco,” I told him, “and you’re going to have professional bodybuilding locked up. For years! You’re going to have the best tall man in the heavyweight division”—meaning me—“and the best small man in the lightweight division.” I described how pound for pound Franco was the most powerful lifter in the world (it was true; he could deadlift more than four times his weight) and how he’d been reshaping himself for bodybuilding.

Second, I told Joe, Franco was my ideal training partner, and if we could work together, I’d be an even more successful star. And third, I assured him, Franco was a hardworking guy who wouldn’t take advantage of being in California just to loaf on the beach. He’d been a shepherd, a bricklayer, and a taxi driver. “He is no lazy bastard,” I said. “You’ll see.”

Joe dragged his heels. Whenever I brought up Franco, he’d act like he’d never heard the name, and I’d have to make all the arguments again. But finally, in mid-1969, he caved and agreed to invite Franco and pay him the same $65 a week he was paying me. Then right away he started to brag about this fantastic small guy he was bringing from Europe. Except that he was not good with names and still could not quite remember Franco’s. “Guess who we’re bringing over now?” he announced at lunch. “Francisco Franco!”

Artie Zeller, the photographer who’d met me at the airport the year before, happened to be there and corrected him. “That’s the dictator of Spain.”

“No. I mean Columbus is his name.”

“Are you sure?” asked Artie. “Columbus discovered America.”

“No, wait, I mean Franco Nero.”

“He’s an Italian actor. He’s in Westerns.”

“Arnold! Who the hell are we bringing?” Joe finally asked.

“Franco Columbu.”

“Aw, Jesus. Bastard! Italians! Why do Italians have such weird names? They all sound the same.”

I picked up Franco at the airport in my white VW bug. I’d dressed it up with a racing steering wheel by this time, and it looked great. To welcome my friend to America and celebrate his arrival, I thought a marijuana cookie would be best. Frank Zane, the bodybuilder who’d beat me in Miami, had become a good friend and was into baking his own. Every so often he gave me one. “This will be funny,” I thought. “I’m picking up Franco, he’s going to be hungry after his long flight, so I’ll give him half of the cookie.” I wasn’t going to give him the whole cookie because I didn’t know how his body would react.

So when Franco got in the car, I asked, “Are you hungry?”

“Yes, I’m starving.”

“Well, luckily, I have a cookie here. Let’s share it.” The first place I took him was Artie’s apartment. Artie’s wife, Josie, was Swiss, and I thought Franco might feel more comfortable around people who knew German. He spent the first hour after we arrived lying on the rug in their living room laughing.

“Is he always this funny?” Artie asked.

“He must have drunk a beer or something,” I said. “But he is a funny guy.”

“Oh, he’s hilarious.” Artie and Josie were both laughing like hell too. A few days later, I asked Franco, “You know why you were laughing so much?” and told him about the cookie.

“I knew there was something!” he said. “You’ve got to give me more of that because it felt so good!”

It turned out, though, that Franco had developed a severe reaction to a smallpox vaccination he’d received just before leaving Munich. His arm swelled up, he had fever and chills, and he couldn’t eat. This went on for a couple of weeks. I was making him protein drinks every few hours. I ended up bringing a doctor to the apartment, because I was scared Franco was going to die. The doctor promised that Franco would eventually be fine.

I’d done such a great sales job with Joe Weider that he was eager to meet Franco and see how muscular he was. But my friend had shrunk from 170 pounds down to around 150. Joe would come over, and I’d hide Franco in the bedroom and tell Joe, “Oh, Franco, he’s so busy, he went over to Gold’s again to work out.” Or “Yeah, yeah, he really wants to meet you, and he wants to look perfect, so he’s on the beach getting a tan.”

The plan was always for Franco to room with me. My apartment had only one bedroom, however, so I kept the bedroom and he slept on the pull-out couch. The place was so small that there wasn’t even enough wall space to put up posters. But in Munich, I’d lived in a closet in the gym, so this was pure luxury to me. Franco felt that way too. We had a living room and a bedroom, and there were curtains. The beach was only three blocks away. Our bathroom had a sink, a toilet, and a bathtub with a shower, far better than what we’d had in Europe. No matter how small the place was, we felt like we’d really arrived.

I had visited Franco many times at his room in Munich. He always kept the place extremely clean. So I knew he’d be a great roommate, and that’s how it worked out. Our place was immaculate. We vacuumed regularly; the dishes were always done, with nothing piling up; and the bed was always made, military style. We were both into the discipline of getting up in the morning and straightening up before you leave the house. The more you do it, the more automatic it becomes, and the less effort it takes. Our apartment was always way cleaner than anyone else’s I went to, men or women. Especially women. They were like piglets.

Franco was the chef and I was the dishwasher, that was the deal. It didn’t take him long to find all the Italian joints to buy his spaghetti and his potatoes and his meat. As far as supermarkets were concerned, though, he turned up his nose. “Ah, the Americans,” he’d say. “You gotta go in the little store, the Italian store.” He was always coming home with small food packages and jars and saying, “You only get this in an Italian store.”

We were very happy in the apartment—until the landlord kicked us out. He knocked on the door one day and said we had to leave because it was only a one-bedroom. It was considered suspicious in those days in Southern California to have two guys sleeping in a one-bedroom place. I explained how Franco slept on the living room couch, but he just insisted, “It’s really intended for one person.” We wanted a bigger place anyway, so we didn’t care. We found a beautiful two-bedroom apartment nearby and moved there.

The new place had wall space for us to decorate, but we had nothing to put up; I sure didn’t have the money to buy art. Then one day in Tijuana, I saw this cool black-and-white poster of a cowboy with two guns drawn. It cost just $5, so I bought it. When I got home, I put it up on the wall with Scotch tape. It looked beautiful hanging there.

Then Artie came over. As soon as he saw it, he started snorting and acting pissed off. “Ugh,” he said, “what a fool.”

I said, “What’s the matter?”

“Oh, Reagan, I mean, Jesus.”

“That’s a great picture. I found it in Tijuana.”

He said, “Do you know who this is?”

“Well, it says below, ‘Ronald Reagan.’ ”

“He’s the governor of the state of California.”

I said, “Really! That’s amazing. That’s twice as good. I have the governor of the state of California hanging here.”

“Yeah, he used to be in Westerns,” Artie said.

With Franco as my training partner, I could concentrate on my competition goals. I was determined to win the IFBB Mr. Universe title that I’d failed to get in Miami. That loss to Frank Zane still stung so much that I didn’t want to just win the contest; I wanted to win it so decisively that people would forget I’d ever lost.

Then I planned to go over to London and win the NABBA Mr. Universe again. That would give me, at age twenty-two, four Mr. Universe titles on both sides of the Atlantic, more than anyone ever in the sport. It would gain me back the momentum I thought I’d lost, the halo of inevitability that put me in the spotlight and blew people’s minds. And most important, it would broadcast that the only two bodybuilding champions the world should be looking at were Sergio Oliva and me. That was my goal: to make the leap from being one of the six or eight top guys to one of only two. It was my responsibility to pull this off; it was what I’d come to America to do. If I accomplished it and solidified my position in the bodybuilding world, from then on, I would be on a roll. Nobody would stop me.

After that, the next big goal would be to beat Sergio and win the Mr. Olympia title. I wasn’t going to make the mistake I made going into Miami, where I thought I could coast to a victory. I trained as hard as I could.

Holding the Mr. Universe competition in Miami had been an experiment for the Weiders, and for 1969 they moved it back to New York. To pump up the excitement, they’d also scheduled the Mr. America, Mr. Universe, and Mr. Olympia competitions to take place on the same day, back-to-back-to-back in the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the largest performance venue in Brooklyn.

I’d been featured and hyped nonstop all year along with the other top bodybuilders in Joe’s magazines, but Mr. Universe was my first major competition since the previous fall. I was eager to see how my newly Americanized body would go over with the judges and fans. The contest went even better than I’d planned. In one of the strongest fields ever, I ran over all the rest. Thousands of sets on Joe Gold’s machines had helped me define my muscles to the point where neither the big guys nor the small guys were much of a threat. Plus I had a California tan!

Winning was such a high that I thought again about the Mr. Olympia event. What if I’d underestimated the progress I’d made? If I beat Sergio in that, I would be king!

The morning of the contest, he showed up in his trademark flashy clothes: a custom-tailored checked suit and vest, dark tie, black leather shoes, a mod hat, and lots of gold jewelry. We teased each other while we sat watching the Mr. America preliminaries.

“Hey, Monster, you in shape?” I asked.

“Hey, baby, you gonna see somethin’ tonight, I tell you,” Sergio said. “You gonna see it, but you ain’t gonna believe it. Ain’t nobody gonna believe it.”

Finally, we were warming up backstage. Sergio was famous for his lengthy pumping-up routine, during which he always wore a long butcher’s coat so the rival bodybuilders couldn’t see his muscles. When the time came for us to go onstage, he took off the coat and walked ahead of me down the hall. Of course, he knew I’d be checking him out. Very casually, he lifted a shoulder and spread out the biggest lat muscle I’d ever seen. It was the size of a giant manta ray. Then he did the same thing with the other shoulder. His back was so huge it looked like it was blocking all the light in the hall. It was a really effective psych. I knew right then that I was going to lose.

We each posed, first me and then Sergio, and we each had the house screaming and stomping. Then the judges, announcing that they couldn’t decide, called us back onstage to pose simultaneously. Someone shouted, “Pose!” but for a minute, neither of us budged—like we were daring each other to go first. Finally, I smiled and hit my double-biceps pose, one of my best. That brought a roar from the crowd. Sergio answered with his trademark two-arm overhead victory pose. Again the crowd went nuts, chanting “Sergio! Sergio!” I executed a chest pose, which he started to match but then thought better of it, shifting to a “most muscular” shot. More screams for Sergio. I did my best trademark pose—the three-quarters back—but that wasn’t enough to turn it. He was simply still ahead of me.

I just kept smiling and hitting poses. I’d already done what I came to do, and I was much better off than the year before. I’d run over everybody except him. I could say to myself, “You did great, Arnold, and Sergio’s days are numbered.” But for now he was still clearly the champ, and when the judges declared for him, I gave him a big hug onstage. I thought Sergio deserved all of the attention. I was much younger, and I’d be number one in no time, and then I would enjoy all of this attention. In the meantime, he should have it. He was better.

That fall, Joe Weider launched me on phase two of my American dream: getting into movies. When word got around that some producers needed a bodybuilder to star in a film, Joe recommended me.

What happened with Hercules in New York was like one of those Hollywood fantasies. You come off the boat and walk down the street, and somebody says, “You’re the one! You have the exactly the look!” and offers you a movie role. You hear it all the time, but no one knows if it’s true.

As a matter of fact, former Mr. America Dennis Tinerino, whom I’d upset in 1967 to win my first Mr. Universe competition, had already been offered the part. Dennis was a legitimate champ: he had bounced back to win the amateur Mr. Universe title in 1968. But Joe didn’t want him to get the role because Dennis worked mostly with the other bodybuilding federations. So he called the producers and told them that in Vienna I had been a Shakespearean actor, and they should dump Dennis and take me. “I know Tinerino won the Mr. Universe, but Schwarzenegger won it three times,” he said. “You will get the best bodybuilder in the world. Schwarzenegger is your guy. He is extraordinary. His stage presence is outstanding.”

There is no such thing as an Austrian Shakespearean actor. It doesn’t exist. I didn’t know what the hell Joe was talking about, but he told them he was managing me and didn’t allow them to talk to me. He was worried that I couldn’t speak English well enough, so when they said they wanted to meet me, he said, “No. Arnold’s not around yet. He will be coming soon.” All this really cracked me up. Eventually we went to see the producers, and Joe told me not to say much. The next thing I knew, I got the job. Joe knew how to sell.

After the Mr. Olympia competition, Franco and I went to London, where I won the NABBA Mr. Universe competition again, setting the record as the first bodybuilder to win four Mr. Universe crowns. Then I flew back to New York to become the new Hercules.

Hercules in New York was a low-budget spoof on the big sword-and-sandal epics. The idea was that Hercules gets bored living on Mount Olympus and rides a stray lightning bolt to present-day New York, even though his father, Zeus, forbids him to leave. He makes friends with a guy named Pretzie, a nebbishy character who runs a pretzel cart in Central Park. Pretzie tries to help Hercules adjust as he gets mixed up with gangsters, fights a grizzly bear, rides his chariot through Times Square, descends into hell, figures out how to buy lunch from the vending machines at the Automat, and gets involved with the pretty daughter of a mythology professor. Just as Hercules is adapting to life in the big city, Zeus runs out of patience and sends some other gods to fetch him back.

It was not a bad concept, putting Hercules in modern New York City, and the movie was very funny, especially Arnold Stang, the comedian who played Pretzie. He was so little and I was so big. I found the experience daunting, I have to admit. I thought it would take me at least until I was thirty to be in a movie. But here I was at twenty-two, in America, starring as Hercules. How many people got to live this kind of dream? “You should be happy!” I told myself.

At the same time I thought, “But I’m not ready. I haven’t even learned about acting!”

If I’d had acting experience, it would have been a lot better. The producers hired an acting coach and a dialogue coach, but two weeks with them couldn’t make up for my lack of English and lack of experience. I wasn’t up to par. I had no clue what this type of performance should involve. I couldn’t even understand all the sentences in the script.

The guy who played Zeus was a TV soap opera veteran named Ernest Graves. I remember cracking up in the middle of filming a scene because he produced this huge God voice for a speech he was supposed to give, and it was so different from the voice of the guy I’d met in the makeup trailer. He really got into it, and that was funny to me. But, of course, you’re not supposed to laugh on the set. You’re supposed to help the other performers and really buy into what they say. That’s the whole concept of being supportive. When you’re not on camera, and the camera is behind your shoulder, you stay in character, act your part, giving it everything you have in order to draw the best out of the actor who is being filmed. That is so important, but I had no clue. When something struck me as funny, I just laughed.

On the second-to-last day, I finally felt it, what acting is about. We were shooting a sentimental scene where Hercules and Pretzie are saying good-bye. I really got into it, just like they always talk about in acting. The director came over afterward and said, “I got goose bumps when you did that.”

“Yeah, it was strange,” I said. “I really felt that scene.”

“You’re going to be good. I think you’ll have an acting career because as time went on with this project, you really started to get how to do it.”

One of the producers asked if they could bill me as Arnold Strong—nobody could pronounce Schwarzenegger, he said, it was a ludicrous name, and besides putting Arnold Strong and Arnold Stang on the poster would be funny. When they edited the film, they dubbed another actor’s voice over mine, because my accent was too thick for anybody to understand. Maybe the best thing about Hercules in New York was that for many years it wasn’t even shown in the US: the production company went bankrupt, so the film went on the shelf before it could be released.

But even so, starring as Hercules was way beyond any dream for me. And they paid me $1,000 a week. Best of all, I got to send photographs home to my parents and write, “You see? I told you the whole thing was going to work. I came to America, won Mr. Universe, and now I’m in the movies.”

I headed back to California a very happy guy. Joe Weider had promised to stake me for a year, and that time was up. But there was no question he wanted me to stay. As I became more and more successful, he kept thinking up new ways to feature me in the stories and advertisements in his magazines. He asked if I would take a tape recorder and interview the other bodybuilders. I didn’t have to write the stories, just make the tapes, and the writers would turn them into a series of articles giving readers the inside scoop. All I had to do was talk to the others about their training routines, their diet, what vitamins they took, and so on. The guys came over, and Franco cooked them a big Italian meal—paid for by Joe, of course, as were the gallons of wine we opened. After everyone was loosened up, I brought out the tape recorder. Somehow we didn’t get around to the subject of training and nutrition. First I asked, “We want to know all your girlfriends. Have you ever been out with boyfriends? What do you do when you go to bed?”

Joe’s eyes got wider and wider when we played the tape for him the next day. “Dammit! Dammit!” he exploded. “Idiots! Clowns! There’s nothing here I can use!” Franco and I were cracking up, but I promised to do the interviews again.

I started taping the bodybuilders one by one. Most bodybuilders don’t have very interesting insights or routines. But I’d noticed that Joe’s writers could make a story out of anything. So after the first few times, I’d just stop the interview if I got bored, and the tapes I gave Joe kept getting shorter and shorter. He would grumble, but he really wanted those interviews, and I would say innocently, “I can’t help it if these guys don’t have any ideas.” The last couple of interviews were like five minutes and eight minutes, and Joe finally threw up his hands. “Aw hell,” he growled. “Just give me back my machine.”