Arnold Schwarzenegger: Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

This story crystallized a new vision for me. I could become another Reg Park. All my dreams suddenly came together and made sense. I’d found the way to get to America: bodybuilding! And I’d found a way to get into movies. They would be the thing that everyone in the world would know me for. Movies would bring money—I was sure that Reg Park was a millionaire—and the best-looking girls, which was a very important aspect.

In weeks that followed, I refined this vision until it was very specific. I was going to go for the Mr. Universe title; I was going to break records in power lifting; I was going to Hollywood; I was going to be like Reg Park. The vision became so clear in my mind that I felt like it had to happen. There was no alternative; it was this or nothing. My mother noticed right away that something was different. I was coming home with a big smile. I told her that I was training, and she could see I found joy in becoming stronger.

But as the months went by, she started to get concerned about my obsession. By spring, I’d hung up muscleman pictures all over the wall over my bed. There were boxers, professional wrestlers, weight lifters, and power lifters. Most of all, there were bodybuilders posing, especially Reg Park and Steve Reeves. I was proud of my wall. This was in the era before copying machines, and so I’d collected the images I wanted from magazines and then taken them to a shop to be photographed and reproduced as eight-by-tens. I’d bought soft felt-like matting, had it cut professionally, and glued the eight-by-tens on the mats and placed them on my wall. It looked really good, the way I had it all laid out. But it really worried my mom.

Finally one day she decided to seek professional advice and flagged down the doctor when he drove up the road on his usual rounds. “I want you to see this,” she said and brought him upstairs to my room.

I was in the living room doing my homework but I could still hear most of the conversation. “Doctor,” my mother was saying, “all the other boys, Arnold’s friends, when I go to their homes, they have girls hanging on their walls. Posters, magazines, colored pictures of girls. And look at him. Naked men.”

“Frau Schwarzenegger,” said the doctor, “there is nothing wrong. Boys always need inspiration. They will look to their father, and many times this is not enough because he’s the father, so they will look also to other men. This is actually good; nothing for you to worry about.” He left, and my mother wiped tears from her eyes and pretended that nothing had happened. After that she would say to her friends, “My son has pictures of strongmen and athletes, and he gets so fired up when he looks at them, he trains every day now. Arnold, tell them how much weight you are lifting.” Of course I’d started to have success with girls, but I couldn’t share that with my mother.

That spring she discovered how much things had changed. I’d just met a girl who was two years older than me who was an outdoorsy type. “I like camping, too!” I said. “There’s a really nice area on our neighbor’s farm, right below our house. Why don’t you bring your tent?” She came the next afternoon, and we had fun putting up this beautiful little tent. Some of the little kids from the neighborhood helped us pound in the stakes. It was just the right size for two people, and it had a zipper flap. After the kids went away, the girl and I went inside and started making out. She had her top off when suddenly I heard the sound of the zipper and turned just in time to see my mother’s head stick into the tent. She made a big scene, called the girl a tramp and a whore, and stormed back up the hill to our house. The poor girl was mortified; I helped her pull down the tent, and she ran off.

Back at the house, my mother and I had a fight. “What is this?!” I yelled. “One minute you’re telling the doctor that I have those pictures, and now you’re worried about me having a girl. I don’t get it. That’s what guys do.”

“No, no, no. Not around my house.”

She was having to adjust to this whole new son. But I was really mad. I just wanted to live my life! That Saturday, I went into town and made up with the girl—her parents were away.

Apprenticeship was a big part of the training at the vocational school where I started in autumn 1962. Mornings we had class, and afternoons we would fan out across Graz to our jobs. This was lots better than sitting in a classroom all day. My parents knew I was good at math and enjoyed juggling figures in my head, and they had arranged for me to be in a business and commerce program rather than plumbing or carpentry or some other trade.

My apprenticeship was at Mayer-Stechbarth, a small building supply store in the Neubaustrasse with four employees. It was owned by Herr Dr. Matscher, a retired lawyer who always wore a suit to work. He ran the store with his wife, Christine. In the beginning, I was assigned mostly physical labor, from stacking wood to shoveling the sidewalk. I actually liked doing deliveries: carrying heavy sheets of composite board up customers’ stairs was another form of strength training. Before long, I was asked to help take inventory, and that got me interested in how the store was run. I was taught how to write up orders and used what I’d learned in bookkeeping class to help with accounts.

The most important skill I acquired was selling. A cardinal rule was never to let a customer walk out the door without a purchase. If you did, it just showed what a poor salesman you were. Even if it was just one little bolt, you had to make a sale. That meant working every possible angle. If I couldn’t sell the linoleum tiles, I’d push the floor cleaner.

I became buddies with the second apprentice, Franz Janz, based on our mutual fascination with America. We talked about it endlessly and even tried translating Schwarzenegger into English—we came up with “black corner,” although “black plowman” would be closer. I brought Franz to the gym and tried to interest him in training, but it didn’t take. He was more into playing guitar; in fact, he was a member of the Mods, Graz’s first rock band.

But Franz understood how obsessed I was with training. One day he spotted a set of barbells somebody was getting rid of. He dragged them home on a sled and persuaded his father to sand off the rust and paint them. Then they brought them to my house. I converted an unheated area near the stairs into my home gym. From then on, I was able to step up my routine and train at home any day I didn’t work out at the stadium.

At Mayer-Stechbarth, I was known as the apprentice who wanted to go to America. The Matschers were very patient with us. They taught us how to get along with customers and one another, and how to set goals for ourselves. Frau Matscher was determined to correct what she saw as gaps in our education. For instance, she thought we hadn’t been exposed to enough elevated conversation and wanted to make us more worldly. She’d sit us down for long stretches and discuss art, religion, current affairs. To reward our efforts, she’d treat us to bread and marmalade.

Around the same time that Frau Matscher began feeding me culture, I got my first taste of athletic success. A beer hall might seem like a strange place to start a career in sports, but that’s where mine began. It was March 1963 in Graz, and I was fifteen and a half, making my first public appearance in the uniform of the Athletic Union team: black training shoes, brown socks, and a dark unitard with narrow straps, decorated on the front with the club insignia. We were facing off against weight lifters from a rival club, and the match was part of the entertainment for a crowd of three hundred to four hundred people—all sitting at long tables, smoking and clinking their steins.