Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

Then he’d bring me to read for Bob Rafelson. I got to see the parade of actors, men and women, passing through Bob’s office auditioning for the other parts. In case I was wondering, that reminded me how big a deal this movie was. Rafelson made a point of showing me the ropes and teaching me lessons that went beyond just acting. He was always explaining why he did things. “I picked this guy because he looked like a country club boy,” and “We’re shooting in Alabama because in California we’d never get lush green landscape and oyster bars and the backdrop we need to make the story authentic.”

When he picked Sally Field to play Mary Tate, he wanted to make that a big teaching point. “You see?” he said. “I’ve been auditioning all these girls, and the one who is actually the best is the Flying Nun!”

“What is the flying nun?” I asked.

He had to back up and explain he meant Sally Field, and that everybody knew her as the flying nun because she’d played the part of Sister Bertrille for years on a TV sitcom. After we got that straight, he had a bigger point to make. “Everybody thinks they know what a girl has to do to get the part,” he said. “The perception is that you get the job by banging the director. And there were girls with big tits and great hair and great bodies who came in and offered that to me. But in the end the Flying Nun got the job. She doesn’t have big tits, she doesn’t have a curvaceous body, she didn’t offer to fuck me, but she has what I needed most in this part, which is talent. She was a serious actor, and when she came in and performed, I was blown away.”

Because this was my first big movie and I wasn’t an actor by profession, Bob also felt it would be good for me to hang out and see movies actually being made. So he called a few sets to arrange for me to come by to watch for an hour. It was good to experience how silent it gets on the set when they say, “We’re rolling.” It was good to learn that “action” doesn’t necessarily mean action—the actors still might be adjusting and asking, “What’s my first line?”

This was Bob’s way of teaching me that, yes, there will be thirteen takes, and, yes, this is normal, but just remember only one will be seen. So don’t worry when I say for the thirteenth time, “Let’s do it again.” No one will know. And don’t worry if you cough in the middle of a scene, he told me. “I’d cut around it, I’d cover it from this angle and that angle.”

The more I hung out on the set, the more comfortable I felt.

After he cast Sally Field, Bob became especially fanatic about the need for me to lose weight. She’s so petite he worried that if I didn’t slim down, I’d make her look like a shrimp. “When we get to Birmingham, if I put you on a scale the day before shooting and you’re not two hundred ten, you are not in the picture,” he threatened. There was no Eric Morris class for a star bodybuilder to get rid of muscle, so I was on my own. First I had to redo myself mentally—let go of the 250-pound image of Mr. Olympia that was in my head. I started visualizing myself instead as lean and athletic. And all of a sudden what I saw in the mirror no longer fit. Seeing that helped kill my appetite for all the protein shakes and all the extra steak and chicken I was used to. I pictured myself as a runner rather than a lifter, and changed around my whole training regimen to emphasize running, bicycling, and swimming rather than weights.

All through the winter, the pounds came off, and I was pleased. But at the same time, my life was getting too intense. I was working on my mail-order business and on my acting classes, going to college, training for three hours a day, and doing construction. It was a lot to juggle. I often felt overwhelmed and started asking myself, “How do I keep it all together? How do I not think about the next thing while I’m still doing this thing? How can I unplug?”

Transcendental meditation was popular with people on the beach in Venice. There was one guy down there I liked: a skinny guy who was into yoga; kind of the opposite of me. We would always chat, and eventually I found out that he was a Transcendental Meditation instructor. He invited me to one of his classes at this center near UCLA. There was a little bit of hokum involved: you had to bring a piece of fruit and a handkerchief and perform these little rituals. But I paid no attention to that. Hearing them talk about the need to disconnect and refresh the mind was like a revelation. “Arnold, you’re an idiot,” I told myself. “You spend all this time on your body, but you never think about your mind, how to make it sharper and relieve the stress. When you have muscle cramps, you have to do more stretching, take a Jacuzzi, put on the ice packs, take more minerals. So why aren’t you thinking that the mind also can have a problem? It’s overstressed, or it’s tired, it’s bored, it’s fatigued, it’s about to blow up—let’s learn tools for that.”

They gave me a mantra and taught me to use a twenty-minute meditation session to get to a place where you don’t think. They taught how to disconnect the mind, so that you don’t hear the clock ticking in the background or people talking. If you can do this for even a few seconds, it already has a positive effect. The more you can prolong that period, the better it is.

In the middle of all this, Barbara was going through changes too. She and Franco’s wife, Anita, signed up for EST (Erhard Seminars Training), a popular self-help seminar. They asked if we wanted to come, but Franco and I felt we didn’t need it. We knew where we were going. We knew what we wanted. We had control over our lives, which is what EST claimed to teach.

As a matter of fact, the gimmick in the opening session was that no one could leave the room to go to the bathroom. The idea was if you cannot even control your own piss, how are you ever going to get control over yourself or have control over anybody else around you?

I was amazed that people would pay for that! Still, if Barbara and Anita wanted to try it, I didn’t mind.

Barbara and Anita were all sunny and positive when they came home after the first weekend they went. Franco and I were thinking that maybe we should go to EST too. But the second weekend, something happened that sent Barbara and Anita both off the deep end. They came back all angry and negative, thinking everything was wrong with their lives and ready to blame everybody around them for it. Barbara was furious with her father. She was the third of three daughters, and she thought he treated her like the son he never had. I gave her hell for that. I really liked her father and wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand. To me there was no indication that he treated her like a boy. Then she accused me of being on a power trip and not paying enough attention to her.

We usually got along very well and had lived together for more than three years. But she was a normal person who wanted normal things, and there was nothing normal about me. My drive was not normal. My vision of where I wanted to go in life was not normal. The whole idea of a conventional existence was like Kryptonite to me. When Barbara saw me moving away from bodybuilding and into acting, I think she realized we had no future. Right after I left for Alabama to start shooting Stay Hungry , she moved out.

I felt really sad about the whole thing. Barbara was part of my life. I’d developed feelings I’d never had. The comfort of being with someone and sharing our lives, so I wasn’t just putting up my own pictures on the wall but sharing the wall space and choosing the furniture and rugs together. Feeling included in her family was comforting and wonderful. We’d been a unit, and all of sudden it was ripped apart. I struggled to understand. I thought at first that maybe Bob Rafelson had told her, “I need Arnold to get more sensitive. I need to see him cry. If you want to help our movie, move out and fuck him up bad.” Otherwise it seemed crazy that she split.