Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

The first thing that Maria and her friend Bonnie Reiss did was plaster Kennedy ’80 posters and bumper stickers all over my Jeep. I had a brown Cherokee Chief that I was really proud of. It was massive compared to ordinary cars—the first-ever sport-utility vehicle—and I’d gone all the way up to Oregon to take delivery so that I could get $1,000 off the price. I’d had my Jeep outfitted with a loudspeaker and siren for showing off or scaring other drivers out of my way. But now when we drove around town, I’d sink a little lower in the seat, hoping that no one would see me. It was weird pulling up at the gym every day: like most of the people there, I was known as a Republican, and now here I was with the Teddy stickers.

Personally, I was hoping that Ronald Reagan would be elected president, but no one was asking my opinion; it was Maria they wanted to see. Hollywood, of course, is a big liberal town, and her family connections went deep. Her grandfather Joe Kennedy had been heavily involved in movies, running no fewer than three studios in the 1920s, and the Kennedys were famous for involving entertainers in political campaigns. So everyone in the family was very much aware of Hollywood, and they turned to actors, directors, and executives for help in fund-raising. Maria’s uncle Peter Lawford was a big star, and buddies with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. She’d heard about those guys in the “Rat Pack” growing up, had seen them at her parents’ house, and had been to their places in Palm Springs, California. No sooner did she arrive in 1980 than she got to know their wives.

The Kennedy campaign center would call the studios and talent agencies and line up appointments for Maria with big shots and celebrities. “Maria would like to visit you and talk about an event we have coming up,” they’d say, and almost invariably the reaction would be “Omigod, a Kennedy is coming!” and doors would open. Usually Maria would go with other campaign staff, but sometimes I’d tag along or even drive her. Teddy’s candidacy was so controversial that winning endorsements wasn’t easy. Often I’d listen to people like producer Norman Lear explaining to Maria why they didn’t support Teddy and were either backing the independent candidate, Illinois congressman John Anderson, or sticking with Carter.

Maria wasn’t even twenty-five, but already she was a force to reckon with. That had been clear to me early on. In 1978, about six months after we first met, I posed for a photo essay in Playgirl magazine. Ara Gallant, my trendy New York photographer friend, had the assignment, and I came up with the idea that we should do a beer hall scene. It would be a traditional beer hall, but instead of hefty German women serving the beer steins and pretzels and sausages around me, it would be young sexy girls with bare tits. It was one of my crazy ideas and Ara loved it. But when I described this to Maria and said, “We’re just now working on the layout,” she told me instantly that the whole thing was a mistake.

“I thought you wanted to go into movies,” she said. “So if you pose with those girls with their tits hanging out, is that going make producers say, ‘Hey, wow! I want this guy’? I doubt it. What’s your goal in doing this?”

I had to admit I had no answer to that. I’d just been in a silly mood and said to Ara, “Let’s do something funny.” I wasn’t trying to get anything out of it.

“Well, since there’s no goal and it’s not going to lead anywhere, kill it. You don’t need it. You had your fun, now move on.” She was relentless and so convincing that I ended up talking Playgirl into killing the story and paying $7,000 to reimburse the magazine for the shoot.

She was wise about public perception because that was the world in which she’d grown up. Maria was the first girlfriend I ever had who didn’t treat my ambitions as an annoyance, some kind of madness that interfered with her vision of the future: namely, marriage, kids, and a cozy little house somewhere—and the stereotypical all-American life. Maria’s world wasn’t small like that. It was gigantic, because of what her grandfather did, what her father did, what her mother did, what her uncles did. I’d finally met a girl whose world was as big as mine. I’d reached some of my goals but a lot of my world was still a dream. And when I’d talk about even bigger dreams, she never said, “Come on, this can’t be done.”

She’d seen it happen in her family. She came from a world where her great-grandfather was an immigrant and her grandfather made a vast fortune in Hollywood and the liquor business, real estate, and other investments. It was a world in which seeing a relative run for president or senator was not out of the ordinary. She’d heard her uncle John F. Kennedy pledge in 1961 that by the end of the decade the United States would land a man on the moon. Her mother had created the Special Olympics. Her dad was the founding director of the Peace Corps and had created the Job Corps, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), and Legal Services for the poor, all under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. And Sargent Shriver had been Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s ambassador to France. So if I said, “I want to make a million per picture,” it didn’t automatically strike Maria as absurd. It just made her curious. “How are you going to do that?” she’d ask. “I admire how driven you are. I don’t understand how anyone can have this discipline.” What’s more, by watching me, she got to see something she’d never actually witnessed firsthand: how you make one dollar into two, and how you build businesses and become a millionaire.

The way she was raised gave her huge advantages such as an exceptional education and her parents’ extensive knowledge and wisdom. She got to meet the influential people and hear their conversations. She got to live in Paris when her father was ambassador, and was able to travel the world. She grew up playing tennis, skiing, and competing in horse shows.

But there were drawbacks too. Eunice and Sarge were so forceful that the kids never got to develop their own opinions about things. The two of them made a point of letting the kids know that they were smart. “This is a very good idea, Anthony,” I’d hear Eunice tell her youngest son, who was only starting high school. “The way I would approach it is thus and so, but it’s a very good point you have. I didn’t think about that.” But the household was a strict hierarchy in which the parents, usually Eunice, made the choices. She was a very dominating personality, but Sarge didn’t mind.

When you grow up that way, it’s hard to make your own decisions, and eventually you feel like you can’t function without your parents’ input. Eunice and Sarge decided which colleges to consider, for example. Yes, there was some participation on the kids’ part, but overall, the parents ran the show. Then again, many times not even they ran the show, the Kennedy family did. The degree of conformity among the Kennedys was extreme. Not a single one of the thirty cousins was a Republican, for example. If you gather thirty members of any extended family, it’s almost impossible that all of them are the same. That’s why I always used to tease Maria, “Your family’s like a bunch of clones. If you ask your brother to name his favorite color, he doesn’t know. He’ll say, ‘We like blue.’ ”

She would laugh and say, “That’s not really true! Look how diverse they are.”

I’d say, “They are all environmentalists, they are all athletic, they all are Democrats, they all endorsed the same candidates, and they all do like blue.”

The other big disadvantage involved public perception. No matter what you did as a Kennedy or a Shriver, no one gave you credit for your accomplishment. Instead, people would say, “Well, if I were a Kennedy, I could do that too.” For all these reasons, Maria had to fight harder than most people to carve out her own identity.