Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

WHEN YOU SET THEdate and say, “Okay, April 26 next year will be our wedding,” you have no idea whether you’ll be shooting a movie then or not. As 1986 rolled around, I tried to get the production of Predator put off for a few weeks, but Joel Silver, the producer, was worried that we’d run into the rainy season if we waited. That’s how I found myself deep in the Mexican jungle near the ruined Mayan city of Palenque less than forty-eight hours before I was due at the altar. I had to charter a jet for the first time in my life to make sure I got to the rehearsal dinner in Hyannis Port on time.

The day I was scheduled to leave, pro wrestler Jesse Ventura shadowed me on the set. We were shooting an action sequence in the jungle, and he’d be hiding in the bushes, not involved in the scene. While I was supposed to be screaming to the other guys, “Get down! Get down!” we’d hear Jesse chanting in that deep voice, “I do, I do, I do.” We were all laughing like hell and blowing take after take. The director kept asking, “Why are you not concentrating?”

Maria was not happy that I missed the final preparations. She wanted my mind to be on the wedding, but my mind was on the movie when I arrived. Predator had big problems, and—rightly or wrongly—in the mind of the public, the star is responsible for a movie’s success. There was talk of having to stop production, and when that happens to a movie, there is always the chance that it might never restart. It was a risky moment in my career. I refocused, of course, so that my mind was on the wedding, but not 100 percent. Meanwhile, some of our guests were wondering why the groom had showed up with a military crew cut. I made the best of it. Even if the situation wasn’t ideal, doing it this way was adventurous and fun.

I’d closed my ears to my friends’ horror stories about married life. “Ha! Now you get to argue about who should change the diapers.” Or “What kind of food makes a woman stop giving blow jobs? Wedding cake!” Or “Oh boy, wait until she hits menopause.” I paid no attention to any of that. “Just let me stumble into it,” I told them. “I don’t want to be forewarned.”

You can overthink anything. There are always negatives. The more you know, the less you tend to do something. If I had known everything about real estate, movies, and bodybuilding, I wouldn’t have gone into them. I felt the same about marriage; I might not have done it if I’d known everything I’d have to go through. The hell with that! I knew Maria was the best woman for me, and that’s all that counted.

I’m always comparing life to a climb, not just because there’s struggle but also because I find at least as much joy in the climbing as in reaching the top. I pictured marriage as a whole mountain range of fantastic challenges, ridgeline after ridgeline: planning the wedding, going to the wedding, deciding where we’d live, when we’d have kids, how many kids we’d have, what preschools and schools we’d choose for them, how we would get them to school, and on and on and on. I’d conquered the first mountain already, planning the wedding, by realizing that it was a process I couldn’t stop or change. It didn’t matter what I thought the tablecloths would look like or what we’d eat or how many guests there should be. You simply accept that you have no control. Everything was in good hands, and I knew I didn’t have to be concerned.