Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

Luckily, the buzz for Pumping Iron kept building. George Butler had raised the money he needed to finish it, and now he was hustling nonstop to promote it. Probably his smartest move was hiring Bobby Zarem, the king of New York publicists. Bobby was a balding guy of about forty who grew up in Georgia and went into the PR business straight out of Yale. He liked to come across as a crazy professor, with his tie missing, his shirt out, and his hair sticking out in tufts on the sides. He always talked like he was completely confused and the world was coming to an end. He’d moan, “I don’t know what I’m doing, I’ve never seen it this bad, I have to go to my shrink, this guy’s not returning my phone calls, and I think the whole project is coming down.” Hearing him talk that way about Pumping Iron scared me until I realized it was shtick. Inevitably, somebody would say to him, “No, no, Bobby, everything’s okay. You’re going to pull this off,” and he loved that.

Bobby had set up his own firm only a year or two before, and I think he took on Pumping Iron partly to prove what he could do. Certainly George Butler wasn’t paying him very much. But in the eleven months from the Whitney show until Pumping Iron ’s release, Zarem worked behind the scenes, building the buzz. He’d arrange for a screening room, invite twenty or so serious hitters from the worlds of art, literature, and finance, and play scenes from the work in progress. He always made sure that one or two members of the media were at these events, even though they were off the record. Often I’d go with him—that’s how I met TV journalist Charlie Rose, for example, whose then wife, Mary, became a financial supporter of the film. Bobby would always introduce the screening with a short talk about bodybuilding as a fascinating link between sports and art or as a leading indicator of the trend to fitness—just enough hype to make the guests feel they were in the vanguard. Afterward, there would be a thousand questions.

I was in awe watching Bobby work the media. He taught me that ordinary press releases were a waste of time, especially if you were trying to get the attention of TV reporters. “They don’t read!” he said. Instead, he knew dozens of journalists and their editors personally. He would customize a story for a particular reporter, call, and say, “I’m sending this over. Please call me back as soon as you get it. If you don’t call back, I’m going to assume you don’t want the story, and then you won’t have much.” Bobby was famous for his long, old-fashioned handwritten proposals. He let me read a four-page letter to the editor of Time explaining why the magazine should do a major story on bodybuilding. Editors and news directors all over New York were willing to meet with him and talk seriously. And if newspapers or TV stations were competing on a story, he would brew up a different angle for each, so they weren’t just following one another. He would study the story, work on it, and talk to people at night—he hung out at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side mixing spot for literati, journalists, and celebrities.

Bobby’s job was promoting Pumping Iron, but I took a page from his book to get recognized for my work in Stay Hungry . Even though the movie had missed at the box office, I’d been nominated for a Golden Globe award for best debut by a male actor. ( Hercules in New York had been such a wipeout that Stay Hungry counted as a debut film!) There were four other nominees—including Harvey Spencer Stephens, the five-year-old who played Damien in the horror film The Omen , and author Truman Capote for his part in the comedy whodunnit Murder by Death. Of course this brought out the competitor in me. How could I make sure I stood out? The strategy I hit on was to take out ads in the show business trade papers Variety and the Hollywood Reporter thanking the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, whose members select the Golden Globe winners, for nominating me.

I also invited association members to a dinner and an advance screening of Pumping Iron. Bobby Zarem didn’t really like this idea because my nomination was for Stay Hungry, not Pumping Iron, and he thought that Pumping Iron was too cutting edge for the Hollywood foreign press. But I felt it could only help. For one thing, critics like to see your latest work, even if it’s not actually what’s being judged, because they like to feel they’re voting for someone who is on a roll. Also, in Pumping Iron I was able to be myself much more, so why not give them both: Stay Hungry with my acting and Pumping Iron with my outrageousness? Besides, I figured that the foreign press automatically would be sympathetic toward an immigrant struggling with a sport in America. And even if none of these reasons held up, I was very proud of the work I’d put into Stay Hungry and wanted to do everything possible to call attention to it. A lot of the writers came to the screening, and when it ended, people gave me a big hug and said things like “You were terrific!” and “This is wonderful!” so I knew it had worked.

A week before the January 1977 premiere, Pumping Iron was in the gossip columns because of a lunch that Bobby masterminded at Elaine’s. Delfina Rattazzi was the hostess, I was the guest of honor, and celebrities such as Andy Warhol, George Plimpton, Paulette Goddard, Diana Vreeland, and the editor of Newsweek showed up. But the woman who stole the show was Jackie Onassis. She was known for keeping a low profile and never giving interviews, and I was flattered that she came in spite of the fact that she knew the press would be writing about it. I think she did it partly as a favor—Delfina was now her editorial assistant at Viking Press—and partly out of curiosity, because she enjoyed being involved with art, trends, and new things.

She stayed for the entire lunch, and I got to talk with her for fifteen minutes. JFK had been synonymous with America to me as a kid growing up, so meeting Jackie was like a dream. What impressed me most was her sophistication and grace. She’d obviously come prepared, because she didn’t ask anything clumsy or vague, like “What is this movie about?” Instead, she made me feel that Pumping Iron was important and that she appreciated what we were trying to do. She asked all kinds of specific questions: How do you train? How do you judge a competition? What’s the difference between Mr. Olympia and Mr. America? Would this be something beneficial for my teenage son? At what age can you start with a workout routine? I was predisposed to liking her before we met, and that conversation made me a big fan.

Of course people of her caliber have the social skills to make it seem like they are very much aware of you and that they know a lot about what you are doing. It was very hard to say whether she was truly interested. My guess was that she probably was a naturally curious person. Or maybe she really did think that John F. Kennedy Jr. might like to train. Or maybe she was just doing a favor for Delfina. But she certainly gave Pumping Iron a big publicity boost, and the fact that she brought her son to the New York premiere a week later convinced me that she was genuine.

For the premiere, Bobby Zarem and George Butler pulled out all the stops. They invited five hundred people to the Plaza Theater on East Fifty-eighth Street. There were photographers, TV cameras, police barricades, limos pulling up, searchlights crisscrossing the sky—the works. The temperature was near zero, but a dozen teenage fans were waiting for me and started chanting, “Arnold! Arnold!” when I showed up. I got there early with my mom, who’d flown over from Austria for the event, because I wanted to circulate and kiss all the pretty girls and welcome people as they arrived. For the first time in my life, I wore a tux. I had to get it specially tailored because even though I’d slimmed down to 225 pounds, nobody had a rental that would fit a fifty-seven-inch chest and thirty-two-inch waist.