Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

Sarge and Eunice welcomed me. The first time that Maria brought me to their town house in Washington, Sarge came downstairs holding a book. “I’m just reading about these great accomplishments of yours,” he said. He’d found a mention of me in a book about American immigrants who had arrived with nothing and made a success. That was a nice surprise because I wasn’t expecting to be in books yet. Bodybuilding was such an odd thing. I thought they’d be writing about immigrants like former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, not me. It was so gracious and generous of Maria’s dad to notice that passage and show it to me.

Eunice put me right to work. She was thrilled to hear that I’d been involved with Special Olympics research at the University of Wisconsin. Before I knew it, I was helping her push the idea of adding power lifting to the Special Olympics and conducting workshops on weight training for the mentally handicapped wherever I traveled.

If the Shrivers hadn’t been so gracious, the first dinner I had at their house could have been difficult. Maria’s four brothers, Anthony, Bobby, Timothy, and Mark, ranged in age from twenty-three to twelve, and right away one of the younger ones piped up, “Daddy, Arnold loves Nixon!” Sarge was a great friend of Hubert Humphrey’s; in fact, when Humphrey ran against Nixon in 1968, he’d wanted Sarge as his running mate, but the Kennedy family torpedoed the idea.

So I felt really awkward sitting there at the table. But Sarge, always the diplomat, said evenly, “Well, everyone thinks differently about these things.” Later on we discussed it, and I explained why I admired Nixon. It was my reaction against having grown up in Europe, where government was totally in charge of everything, and 70 percent of people worked for the government, and the highest aspiration was to get a government job. That was one of the reasons why I left for the United States. Sargent happened to be a scholar of German, because he was of German descent. He had spent student summers in Germany in the mid-1930s wearing lederhosen, exploring the German and Austrian countryside, pedaling from village to village on his bicycle. During his first summer there, 1934, Adolf Hitler’s recent rise to power as German chancellor didn’t make much of an impression on Sarge. But in his second summer, 1936, he learned to recognize the brown-shirted “storm troopers” of the Nazi paramilitary, the Sturmabteilung (SA), and the black-uniformed members of Hitler’s elite guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS). He read about political prisoners being sent to concentration camps. Sarge actually heard Hitler speak.

He came home convinced that America should try to keep its distance from the growing crisis in Europe—so much so that in 1940 at Yale University he cofounded the antiwar America First Committee with classmates Gerald Ford, the future thirty-eighth president, and future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, among others. Nevertheless, Sarge enlisted in the navy before Pearl Harbor and served throughout the war. We spoke German together many times. He wasn’t fluent, exactly, but he could sing in German.

Family meals in the Shriver household were about as far from my upbringing as you could get. Sarge would ask me at the dinner table, “What would your parents have done if you’d talked to them the way my kids are talking to me here?”

“My dad would have smacked me right away.”

“Did you hear that, guys? Arnold, repeat that. Repeat that. His father would have smacked him. That’s what I should do with you kids.”

The boys would say, “Oh, Daddy,” and then throw a piece of bread at him.

They had that kind of humor at the table, and I was amazed. The first time I was there for dinner, the meal ended with one of the boys farting, another one burping, and another one leaning so far back in his chair that it toppled to the floor. Then he just lay there groaning, “Oh, man, I am fucking full.”

Eunice snapped, “Don’t ever say that again in this house, do you hear me?”

“Sorry, Mom, but I am so full. Your cooking is unbelievable.” Of course that was a wisecrack too. Eunice did not even know how to soft-boil an egg.

“Be happy that you were fed,” she said.

Maria’s parents certainly had a much more casual approach to childrearing than Meinhard and I had experienced. We were always told to shut up, whereas the Shriver kids were encouraged to join in the conversation. If, let’s say, the subject came up of Independence Day and what a great celebration it was, Sargent would ask, “Bobby, what does the Fourth of July mean to you?” They would talk about policy issues and social ills and things that the president had said. Everyone was expected to come up with something and take part.

Although Maria and I lived on opposite coasts, our lives became intertwined. She came to my graduation up in Wisconsin—after a decade of course work, I was awarded a degree in business, with a major in international fitness marketing. She was just starting her TV career, producing local news shows in Philadelphia and Baltimore. I’d visit her there, and once or twice I went on a show with her buddy Oprah Winfrey, who was also just starting out and had a talk show in Baltimore. Maria always picked interesting friends, but Oprah really stood out. She was talented and aggressive, and you could tell she believed in herself. For one of her shows, she came to the gym and worked out with me to demonstrate how important it is to stay fit. Another time we talked about the importance of teaching kids to read and getting them interested in books.

I was proud of Maria. For the first time I saw how determined she was to make her own niche. There were no other journalists in the family. When she went for her job interview, they asked, “Are you willing to work fourteen hours a day, or do you expect to be pampered as a Shriver?” She said she was willing to work hard, and she did.

We traveled together to Hawaii, LA, Europe. Our ski trip to Austria in 1978 was her first Christmas away from her family. I would also accompany Maria to family get-togethers, of which there were many. An aspect of being a Kennedy cousin, I quickly learned, was that you were never completely free. Maria was expected to go to Hyannis Port in the summer, accompany the family on winter vacation, and be home at Thanksgiving and Christmas. If someone had a birthday or a wedding, she had better be there. Since there were so many cousins, the number of command performances was high.

When Maria could get away from work, she visited me in California. She warmed up really well to some of my friends, especially Franco, and also to some of the actors and directors I knew. Others she didn’t like: guys she felt were hangers-on or were trying to use me. She and my mom got to know each other too, during my mom’s annual Eastertime visits.

The more serious we became, the more Maria talked about moving to California. So for us, Teddy’s 1980 presidential campaign was well timed. I was ready to buy a house, and our first major decision as a couple was to look for it together and to call it our place. In late summer we found a 1920s Spanish-style house in a nice section of Santa Monica off San Vincente Avenue. We called it our house, but it wasn’t really. It was mine. It had a curved stairway to the left as you entered, lots of nice vintage tile, a big living room with a beamed ceiling, and beautiful fireplaces in the living room, the TV room, and the master bedroom upstairs. There was a long lap pool and a guesthouse for my mom to stay in when she visited.

The fact that it was our house was just between Maria and me, because she didn’t want her parents to know we were living together—especially Sarge, who was very conservative. She told them she lived a few blocks away, on Montana Avenue, and we actually rented and furnished an apartment so that when Sarge and Eunice visited, Maria could invite them over for lunch there. I’m pretty sure that Eunice knew what was going on, but the separate apartment was important for the family image.