Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

Finally, George convinced me to compete again. I looked at what I wanted to accomplish. Besides being the bodybuilding champion I was by now convinced that bodybuilding itself was ready for a big push. George and Charles had started the ball rolling with their articles and book. The seminars I taught were full. Working with reporters, I’d made the media a support system for whatever I wanted to sell. I felt it was my responsibility, as the bodybuilder with personality and the large following, to carry that on. I shouldn’t think only about my own career but also about the big picture: the need for fitness in the world and how weight training could make you a better tennis or football or soccer player. And we could make bodybuilding fun.

A Pumping Iron film could have a huge impact. Documentaries such as Marjoe, about an evangelist named Marjoe Gortner, and The Endless Summer, about two young surfers traveling the world in search of the perfect wave, were very hip at that point. The films would move from city to city, using money from the last showing to finance the next screening.

I told George that to get my body back into shape for competition was like turning the Titanic . Mechanically, it was an easy decision; I knew all the training steps I would have to take. But it was much harder to buy into psychologically. I’d deprogrammed myself from being onstage in competition and from needing that glory. Now starring in movies was the motivating thing. That shift had involved months of adjustment. So to go back now was a real challenge. How would I convince myself again that that body was the most important thing?

Still, I thought I would be able to win. I’d have to increase from 210 pounds back to competition weight, but I’d done something like this before, after my knee surgery in 1972. My left thigh atrophied from twenty-eight inches down to twenty-two or twenty-three, yet I’d built it back up bigger than ever in time for Mr. Olympia that year. My theory was that muscle cells, like fat cells, have a memory, so they can grow back quickly to where they were. There was some uncharted territory, of course. I would want to perform even better than I did at Madison Square Garden, so should I come all the way back to 240 pounds, or should I come in leaner? Whatever the answer, I thought it was doable.

The idea of constantly having Butler’s cameras on me while I trained was tempting. You always want to look better when the camera’s on you, so it’s a great motivator. I thought that maybe the camera crew would eventually feel like just part of the woodwork, and I’d no longer be self-conscious around it— and that would be great for my acting career.

For at least a week, I’d sit in the hotel weighing the pros and cons, and then I’d go shoot another scene of Stay Hungry . Then I’d go back and think about it some more, and hang out and talk to other people. Charles Gaines had decided to move on to other writing projects and not work on the documentary with George. He thought my returning to competition would be a mistake. “You are on your acting mission now,” he told me. “You need to show the community that you’re serious about it. After this movie, they’ll want to see you continue with acting classes with talented actors and directors. But if now all of a sudden you’re competing again, it’ll look like you have one foot in and one foot out so that you can go back to bodybuilding in case acting doesn’t work. Is that the impression you want to give?”

All my life, my goals had been simple and linear, like building up a muscle with hundreds of thousands of reps. But this situation wasn’t simple at all. Yes, I had committed 100 percent to becoming a lean and athletic-looking actor—how could I undo that and refocus myself on winning Mr. Olympia again? I knew the way my mind worked, and that to accomplish anything, I had to buy in completely. The goal had to be something that made total sense and that I could look forward to every day, not just something I was doing for money or some other arbitrary reason, because then it wouldn’t work.

In the end I realized I had to think about the problem a different way. It could not be solved from a purely selfish point of view. I felt that even though I was on the trajectory to launch an acting career, I owed too much to bodybuilding to reject it. So I had to do Pumping Iron and compete for Mr. Olympia again—not for myself, but to help promote bodybuilding. I would pursue my acting career at the same time, and if my actions were confusing to people like Charles, I’d just have to explain.

A month after I got back from Alabama, my friends threw a twenty-eighth birthday party for me at Jack Nicholson’s house. The organizer was Helena Kallianiotes, who looked after his property and who had a small part in Stay Hungry. She was a dancer and understood the hard training and dedication involved in bodybuilding. In Birmingham, she’d become a good friend, helping me rehearse and showing me around the oyster bars. Later, when I wrote Arnold’s Bodyshaping for Women , Helen was the first person I consulted to get more into a woman’s mind about training.

The party was a great success. Many people from Hollywood came, as well as my friends from Venice Beach—this amazing mix of actors, bodybuilders, weight lifters, karate guys, and writers, plus visitors from New York. There were about two hundred altogether. For me, this was heaven because I could introduce myself to so many new people.

I got to know Nicholson, Beatty, and the rest of the Mulholland Drive crowd a little better now that I was back. They were so hot in those days, with movies like Chinatown, The Parallax View , and Shampoo . They were on the covers of magazines, they went to the trendiest nightclubs. They were always together, and in winter, the whole clique would fly to Gstaad, Switzerland, to ski. I was not inside enough to be partying with them all the time, but I did get exposed to how stars at that level lived and operated, what they were into, and how they moved around, and it inspired me to be there myself in a few years.

Jack Nicholson was very casual and low-key. You would always see him with his Hawaiian shirt, shorts or long pants, sunglasses, and disheveled hair. He owned the most expensive Mercedes, a maroon 600 Pullman, with all-leather interior and extraordinary woodwork. The person who actually used this car was not Jack but Helena. Jack himself drove a Volkswagen Beetle, and that was his shtick: “I’m so rich that I’m going to sell myself like an ordinary person. I’m not into money at all.” He would drive his little Beetle to the studio lot on the way to a media interview or a discussion about a film. The guard at the gate would say, “Oh, Mr. Nicholson, of course. Your parking spot is right over there,” and Jack would putt-putt in as if the car could barely get there. It was genuine. He was more comfortable in the VW than in the Mercedes. I would have loved the Mercedes.

A photographer friend from New York visited and took me to Warren Beatty’s house on the beach. Warren wanted the photographer to see the plans for the new house he was building on Mulholland Drive. Beatty was famous for never making up his mind and debating every decision for thousands of hours. He was accomplishing a lot: he’d recently starred in The Parallax View directed by Alan Pakula, and was cowriting and starring in Shampoo , and was directing scenes for the Russian Revolution movie that eventually became Reds . But hearing him talk, you wondered how he got anything done at all. I thought this was not the way I would operate if I were at that level. But I was also learning that born actors are always a little artsy and strange. You can identify the type. When you hang out with businessmen, they act like businessmen. Politicians act like politicians. These guys were entertainers, and they acted like entertainers. They were Hollywood. It was a different thing.