During those first months in Los Angeles, everything was going so well that it was hard to believe. There were surprisingly few consequences from my car crash, apart from the gash in my thigh. The crocodile wrestler who owned the GTO scarcely batted an eye about the damage. He worked for a dealership where he had his pick of the used cars, and his reaction was “Don’t worry about it.” In fact, he hired me. One of the dealer’s specialties was exporting used cars, and I earned pocket money that fall by driving cars down to Long Beach and onto a freighter headed for Australia.
A few insurance companies called the gym to talk about damages to the other cars, but the conversations were too hard for me to understand, so I’d hand the phone to a workout partner. He’d explain that I was new to America and had no money, and the companies gave up. The only dramatic effect of the accident was that it made me frantic about getting health insurance. In Europe, of course, everybody was insured: you fell into a certain category if you were a student; if you were a child, you were covered by your parents’ insurance; if you had a job, you had workers’ coverage—even the homeless were covered. It scared me not to be covered here. I kept worrying, “If I get sick, what do I do?” I had no idea that you could go to an emergency room and receive free medical care. And even if I’d known, I wanted no handouts. Though it took me six months, I made sure that I paid back Bill Drake for my doctor bill.
It so happened that Larry Scott, a former Mr. Olympia who was retired from bodybuilding but still worked out every day, was now a regional sales manager for a big insurance company.
“I hear you’re looking for insurance,” he said to me. “Let me help you.”
He came up with a policy that cost $23.60 a month, plus another $5 for disability, which sounded expensive to me because I earned only $65 a week from Weider. But I bought it and must have been one of the few new immigrants in LA with health insurance.
Around Thanksgiving 1969 I got an invitation to a December bodybuilding competition and demonstration in Hawaii. The crocodile wrestler had been planning to go home for the holidays, and he said, “I love Hawaii. Why don’t I come with you and hang out and train with you for a few days, and then I’ll go on to Australia from there?” The plan sounded good to me. Besides the obvious attractions of the beaches and the girls, Hawaii offered the chance to get to know Dr. Richard You, a US Olympic team physician who practiced there, and to visit weight-lifting legends like Tommy Kono, Timothy Leon, and Harold “Oddjob” Sakata (whom I already knew from Munich). So my buddy and I went to Joe Weider and asked if he knew the promoters and what he thought about me going. He was all for it. I could use the experience, he said, and the pressure of an upcoming competition would make me train harder.
CHAPTER 6
Lazy Bastards
JOE WEIDER CALLED THE hard-core bodybuilders lazy bastards. From what I could tell, he was mostly right. The typical customers at Gold’s Gym were guys with day jobs: construction workers, cops, professional athletes, business owners, salesmen, and, as time went by, actors. But with a few exceptions, the bodybuilders were lazy. A lot of them were unemployed. They wanted to lie on the beach and have somebody sponsor them. It was always, “Hey, Joe, can you give me an airline ticket to fly to New York to the contest?” “Hey, Joe, can you give me a salary so I can train in the gym?” “Hey, Joe, can I have the food supplements for free?” “Hey, Joe, can you get me a car?” When they didn’t get the handouts they felt entitled to, they were pissed. “Be careful of Joe,” I’d hear them say. “That cheap son of a bitch doesn’t keep his promises.” I saw him completely differently. It’s true Joe had a hard time parting with money. He came from a poor background where he had to fight for every nickel. But I didn’t see any reason why he should just hand out money to any bodybuilder who asked.
Joe was a master at knowing exactly how to appeal to young and vulnerable males. When I first picked up his magazines at age fifteen, I was wondering how I would be strong enough to defend myself. How could I make sure that I’d be successful with the girls? How could I make sure that I would earn a great living? Joe sucked me into a world where I would feel special right away. It was the old Charles Atlas message: Send away for my course, and no one will be kicking sand in your face. You will be a great man in no time, you will be picking up girls, you will be walking around on Venice Beach!
Joe gave all the great bodybuilders nicknames in his magazines, like superheroes. Dave Draper, who trained at Gold’s, was the Blond Bomber. I’d seen him in the 1967 Tony Curtis movie Don’t Make Waves. That fired my imagination even more: here was another bodybuilder who’d gotten into movies! Weider’s magazines photographed Dave with a surfboard walking around on the beach. That looked cool. In the background was a Volkswagen dune buggy, with the exposed wheels, and that looked cool too. He was surrounded by beautiful girls who gazed at him in awe.
Other pictures in the magazine showed scientists and technicians in white lab coats developing nutritional supplements in the Weider Research Clinic. “Weider Research Clinic,” I would say to myself, “this is unbelievable!” And there were pictures of airplanes with “Weider” painted on the side in big letters. I’d imagined an outfit the size of General Motors, with a fleet of planes flying around the globe delivering Weider equipment and food supplements. The writing in the magazine sounded fabulous too when my friends translated it for me. The stories talked about “blasting the muscles” and building “deltoids like cannonballs” and “a chest like a fortress.”
And now here I was, six years later, on Venice Beach! Just like Dave Draper, only now it was me with the dune buggy and the surfboard and the adoring girls. Of course, by this time I was aware enough to see that Weider was creating a whole fantasy world, with a foundation in reality but skyscrapers of hype. Yes, there were surfboards, but the bodybuilders didn’t really surf. Yes, there were pretty girls, but they were models who got paid for the photo session. (Actually, one of the girls was Joe’s wife, Betty, a beautiful model whom he didn’t have to pay.) Yes, there were Weider supplements and, yes, some research took place, but there was no big building in Los Angeles called the Weider Research Clinic. Yes, Weider products were distributed around the world, but there were no Weider planes. Discovering the hype didn’t bother me, though. Enough of it was true.
Not only was I fascinated to be in the middle of this, I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. “I have to pinch myself,” I would think. I told my friends that my worst nightmare would be to feel somebody shaking me and hear my mother’s voice say, “Arnold, you overslept! You have to get up! You’re going to be two hours late for work. Hurry! You have to get to the factory!” And I’d be saying, “Noooo! Why did you wake me up? I was having the most incredible dream. I want to see how it turns out.”
Joe himself wasn’t the easiest guy to like. Starting in the Great Depression, he and his younger brother, Ben, had clawed their way out of the slums of Montreal and built their businesses from scratch. The Weider magazines, equipment, nutritional supplement businesses, and competitions were bodybuilding’s biggest empire, bringing in about $20 million a year, which made Joe and Ben the men to know in what was still a money-starved sport. The only other people who actually made a living out of bodybuilding were a few promoters and gym owners; none of the bodybuilders themselves did, and I was the only one I’d ever heard of getting paid just to train.
Joe and Ben were always pushing to expand, and they didn’t mind invading other people’s turf. In 1946 they created their own association, the International Federation of Body Building (IFBB), to challenge both the American Athletic Union, which controlled Olympic weight lifting and bodybuilding in North America, and the National Amateur Body-Builders’ Association (NABBA), which regulated bodybuilding in the United Kingdom. They started feuds by promoting their own versions of the Mr. America competition, which belonged to the AAU, and Mr. Universe, which belonged to NABBA. Just like in boxing, the duplication of titles caused a lot of confusion but helped bodybuild
ing to expand.
Joe was also the first to offer a cash prize for winning a bodybuilding championship. When he invented Mr. Olympia in 1965, the prize was $1,000 and an engraved silver plate. In any of the other contests, like Mr. Universe, all you got was a trophy. Joe’s competitions also offered the best deal for contestants. He’d pay for your hotel and plane fare. But he would always hold onto the return ticket until you’d done your stint posing for his photographers after the event. Actually, Joe would have preferred to shoot the bodybuilders before the event, but the bodybuilders usually didn’t feel ready to be photographed beforehand and Franco Columbu and I were the only ones who would agree. We liked it because being photographed forced us to be in good shape and gave us a chance to practice posing.
Mr. Olympia itself was sheer promotional genius. The idea was to choose a champion of champions and Mr. Olympia was by invitation only, and you had to be a present or past Mr. Universe to qualify. So Joe was cashing in on the proliferation of titles he’d created! No wonder the Weiders drove people crazy. Their latest campaign was lobbying the International Olympic Committee to recognize bodybuilding as an international sport.
I liked the fact that Joe Weider was a hustler. He had magazines. He had a federation. He had knowledge. He shook things up and wanted to make bodybuilding really big. He had something to offer that I needed, and he felt I had something to offer that he needed.
Plus, I was not a lazy bastard. The first thing I told him when I got to California was “I don’t want to hang around. I don’t want to take your money for nothing. Give me something to do where I can learn.” He had a retail store on Fifth Street in Santa Monica that sold nutritional supplements and weight-lifting equipment. So I asked if I could work there. “I want to help customers,” I told him. “It helps me to learn business and practice my English, and I like dealing with people.”
Joe loved hearing this. “You see, Arnold,” he said in his Canadian accent, “you want to work, you want to build yourself, you are German, you are a machine, you are unbelievable. You are not like these lazy bastards!”
I loved the way Joe’s mind worked. He had already spun a whole myth about me: that I was this German machine, totally reliable, there’s no malfunction, it always works. And he was going to apply his know-how and power to make this machine come to life and walk around like Frankenstein. I thought this was very funny. I didn’t mind him thinking of me as his creation because I knew that meant that Joe Weider would love me. This fit right in with my goal of becoming the world champion, and the more he thought about me that way, the more generous he was.
Right from the beginning, I felt that he looked at me as the son he never had. I felt that this was a unique opportunity to learn. My own father gave me advice about being disciplined, tough, and brave, but not advice on how to succeed in business. I was always searching for mentors who could pick up where my father left off. Having Joe around was like having a father who appreciated what I was trying to do.
The company was still based back east in Union City, New Jersey, but the Weiders were building a new headquarters in the San Fernando Valley. Joe would come out every few weeks to supervise. He took me along to the construction meetings and let me hang around with him to see how the business worked. When it came to the publishing side of his business, he was always looking for printers who could do a better job and charge less, and he’d include me in those discussions, too. I’d visit him in New York and sit in on meetings there also. After my English improved, he took me on a business trip to Japan, to learn how he conducted negotiations overseas and see how essential distribution is—not just in magazines but in the success of any business.
Joe emphasized the importance of going global rather than doing business in just one country. He knew that was where the future was headed. On every trip, he had multiple goals: in Japan, for example, we also met with the national bodybuilding federation, and Joe advised them on how to improve their contests. Long plane rides with Joe were always stimulating. He’d talk about business, art, antiques, sports. He was a student of world history and Jewish history. He was also heavily into psychology. He must have gone to a shrink.
I was in heaven, since I’d always felt that my future would be in business. No matter what I was involved in, part of my mind was always wondering, “Is this what I’m meant for? What is the mission here?” I knew I was meant for something special, but what was it? Being a businessman, to me, was the ultimate. And now this leader was taking me on business trips, and I was learning just what I needed. Maybe I could end up marketing and selling food supplements, home equipment, and equipment for gyms, owning a gymnasium chain, and running a business empire—like Reg Park but on a global scale. How wild would that be! I knew I looked at business differently than other bodybuilders did. If Weider had offered the Japan trip to one of the other guys, he would have said, “Nah, Japan sounds boring. What gyms do they have over there? I want to work out,” or something stupid like that. So maybe becoming the next generation Weider really was my destiny. Joe clearly was taking great joy in teaching me. He’d say, “You are really into this!”
What I learned from him went way beyond business. He was a collector of fine furniture and art, which I found fascinating. When I stayed at his apartment in New York, I looked at all the art and antiques. He talked about auctions, saying, “I bought this for this amount. Now it is worth this amount.”
That was the first time I understood that old furniture can go up in value. Up until then, I’d just looked at it as old junk, like we had in Austria. So now Joe was saying, “Look at this from the French Empire period. This wood is mahogany. See the swans carved in the armrests? The swans were the emblem of Napoléon’s wife the Empress Joséphine. And see, it has this sphinx made of brass embedded in the back? The French were really into Egyptian motifs.” I started going with him to art auctions in New York at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and other houses.
The Napoléon chair was one of Joe’s prize pieces. He kept it in the guest room. The first time I stayed there, he made a big fuss about it: “It’s very fragile, and very, very expensive. Make sure you don’t sit on it or even touch it, okay?” I wanted to be careful with the chair, but that night when I was taking off my pants to go to bed, my foot got stuck, and I lost my balance and fell right onto it. The chair collapsed under my weight—it looked like it had exploded. I went to find Joe and said, “You have to see this. I just destroyed the chair.”
He rushed into the room, and when he saw the pieces all over the rug he almost fainted. Then he started cursing. “Oh! Bastard! That’s an expensive chair!” But he caught himself because he realized it sounded cheap to be complaining so much. It doesn’t matter what chair it is, when they break, you can put them together again. It’s not like it was gone, because it only really broke where it was glued together; where the joints were. It just fell apart when I landed on top of it.
I felt guilty, of course, but I still couldn’t resist saying, “I can’t believe that I hurt my knee, I hurt my hip, and you never asked, ‘How are you feeling?’ or said, ‘Don’t worry about that, I’m more concerned about you.’ You are supposed to be like my father figure here in America! Here you are only concerned about this chair.”
This made Joe feel really terrible. “Aw, Christ,” he said, “you’re right. Look at this! How cheap they put this together.” And then he called them the bastards, the Napoléon guys who built the chair.
After that visit to New York, I flew to Chicago to see the AAU’s Mr. America contest and spend a week training with Sergio Oliva. We’d be competing that fall, but that didn’t get in the way of his hospitality. He and his wife had me to dinner at their apartment, and I received my first exposure to black Cuban Latino culture. Sergio had a jive way of talking and dressing and a different way of relating to his wife than I’d ever seen, with lots of temper and hollering on both sides. Even so, he was a true gentleman.
I was on a secret reconnaissance mission: I thought tha
t you have to sneak into the enemy camp and experience how he sees the world! What is it that makes him a champion? What does he eat, how does he live, what is there to learn from the way he trains? How does he practice his posing? What is his attitude about competition? None of this information would give me the body to beat him, but it would motivate me and show me what I needed to win. Could I find a weakness I could use psychologically? I was convinced that sports are not just physical but also psychological warfare.
The first thing I discovered was that Sergio worked even harder than me. He had a full-time job at a steel mill, and, after spending all day in the heat of the furnaces, he’d go to the Duncan YMCA and train for hours. He was one of those guys that just didn’t burn up easily. Every day, to start his routine, he would complete ten sets of twenty chin-ups. That wasn’t for training his back. That was just to warm up. Every day. He had a number of unusual techniques that I could pick up. He did his bench press as half reps without ever locking out his elbows. That kept full tension all the time on the pectoral muscle, and he had beautiful, full pecs. There were also things I learned in the way that he practiced his posing.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 11