Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

The Secret

DURING MY HECTIC LASTfew 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.