Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

George could make something out of nothing. Or maybe it wasn’t nothing; maybe it was just nothing to me because I saw it every day and I was part of it, whereas to him it was really something. Once, after a day spent shooting photos at Gold’s, he asked me, “How do you walk around so fast in the gym and never touch anybody?”

To me the answer was obvious: when someone comes by, you move out of the way! Why bump into them? But George saw much more going on. A few weeks later, I heard him turn it into a story at a dinner party with his intellectual friends. “When Charles and I were in the gym, we watched very carefully the way these men moved around. And would you believe that in the four hours we spent there, we never saw any of these enormous bodybuilders bump into one another? Even though it was tight and there was a lot of equipment and not enough room, no one ever bumped. They just went by one another, just like big lions in a cage; they gracefully went by without touching.”

His listeners were mesmerized. “Wow, they never bumped into each other?”

“Absolutely not. Here’s another fascinating thing: Arnold never, ever had an angry look while he was training. He was lifting huge amounts of weight. He’s always smiling. I mean, think about that. What must be inside his head? What must he know about his future, that he is always smiling?”

I thought, “This is brilliant. I would never be able to articulate it this way. All I would say is that I find joy in the gym because every rep and every set is getting me one step closer to my goal.” But the way George expressed it, the scene he created of it, and the psychology he used made me say to myself, “This is perfect marketing.”

Once he realized that I was funny and that I liked meeting new people, George started introducing me around New York City. I met fashion designers, heiresses, and people who made art movies. George loved bringing together worlds. He made friends at one point with a guy who published a magazine for firefighters. “This will be the new thing,” George told everybody, “specialty magazines that cater to firemen, or law enforcement, or plumbers, or the military.” He was way ahead of that trend.

In addition to being a photographer, George had aspirations as a filmmaker too, and he really liked the idea of putting me on the screen. He made short films of me training or going to school or interacting with other people and would show them to acquaintances and say, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to put this guy in a movie?” He started trying to raise money for a documentary on bodybuilding to build on the book’s success.

Charles Gaines, meanwhile, was making friends in Hollywood. He introduced me to Bob Rafelson, the director of Five Easy Pieces, who had bought the movie rights to Stay Hungry . While Charles was working with George on the Pumping Iron book project, he also started collaborating with Rafelson on the screenplay. I met Rafelson when Charles brought him to watch me work out on Venice Beach. Bob’s wife, Toby, came along and took a bunch of pictures of Franco and me training, and she just loved it.

Connecting with Bob Rafelson suddenly swept me up into a whole different orbit. With him came a lot of the “New Hollywood” crowd: actor Jack Nicholson and director Roman Polanski, who were in the process of making Chinatown ; as well as actors Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, who had made Easy Rider with Rafelson’s producer Bert Schneider.

Gaines and Butler were pushing Rafelson to cast me in Stay Hungry. There was a main part for a bodybuilder named Joe Santo. Rafelson was a long way from making up his mind, but I remember sitting hypnotized in my apartment one night in early 1974 listening to him talk about what that would mean for me. “If we did this movie, I want you to know it will be a life changer for you. Remember what happened with Jack when he did Five Easy Pieces ? Remember what happened to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda when they did Easy Rider ? They all became superstars! I have a very good feeling for picking people, so when we do this movie, it will change your life. You won’t be able to go anywhere where people don’t recognize you.”

I was dazzled, of course. One of the hottest directors in Hollywood was talking about making me a star! Meanwhile, Barbara was sitting next to me on the couch staring into space. I could sense the wheels turning. What would this do to our relationship and to me? My career was pulling me away from her. She wanted to settle down, get married, and have me open a health food store. She could see a huge storm coming.

Of course, her instinct was right. My focus was on training, acting, and making sure Rafelson hired me, not on getting married and having a family. But after Bob left, I told Barbara not to worry about what he’d said; it was just the marijuana talking.

I liked getting swept up into a cloud of celebrities. Nicholson’s house was part of a “compound” up on Mulholland Drive next door to Polanski, Warren Beatty, and Marlon Brando. They’d invite me and some of the other bodybuilders up for parties, and sometimes people from that crowd would come to my building and we’d have barbecues on the little patio. It was hilarious: neighbors walking past on the sidewalk couldn’t believe it when they saw who was there. But at the same time, I told myself not to get carried away. I was barely scraping the outside of that world. At that point, I was only a fan of those people.

I was being exposed to a world I didn’t know. It was good to hang out, to watch them, to see how they operated and made decisions, and to hear them talk about movie projects, or building their homes, or building a house on the beach, or girls. I asked about acting and about the secret to becoming a leading man. Nicholson and Beatty, of course, were big proponents of method acting. They talked about how they prepared, how many times they rehearsed a role, and how they were able to live in the moment and improvise. Jack was shooting One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , and he described how challenging it was to play a patient in an asylum. Meanwhile, Polanski, who had directed Nicholson in Chinatown , told of the differences between making a movie in Hollywood and making one in Europe: in America, the opportunity was grander, but the moviemaking was more formulaic and less artistic. They all had such enormous passion for their profession.

I thought that maybe down the road I’d get a chance to be in movies with them, in some kind of supporting role. But mostly I was thinking, “What a great promotion for bodybuilding, that this crowd now is accepting the sport.”

My Hollywood career might never have taken off if not for a chain of events that started with Franco and me organizing a bodybuilding competition in Los Angeles that summer. I was still focused on wanting to see bodybuilding go mainstream. It frustrated me that bodybuilding shows were never advertised to the general public. That seemed totally wrong. I mean, what did we have to hide? People complained that reporters were always negative about bodybuilding and wrote stupid stories. Well, that was true, but who was talking to the press? Had anyone ever sat down and explained what we were doing? So Franco and I decided that if bodybuilding in LA was ever going to break out of its little shell, we had to promote it ourselves. We rented a big auditorium downtown and arranged the rights to host the Mr. International competition for 1974.

There were little signs that the time was right to do this. Lots of actors were starting to work out at Gold’s. Gary Busey came regularly. Isaac Hayes, who’d won an Oscar for writing the Shaft theme song, would pull up in his Rolls every day and train. Up till then, the only actors working out in public were ones who reinforced the gay stereotype about bodybuilding. Actors like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson were muscular and had terrific bodies onscreen. They were working out, but in secret. Whenever somebody commented on their muscles, they’d say, “I was born this way.” But that was starting to change, and weight training was becoming more acceptable.