Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

  But even so, starring as Hercules was way beyond any dream for me. And they paid me $1,000 a week. Best of all, I got to send photographs home to my parents and write, “You see? I told you the whole thing was going to work. I came to America, won Mr. Universe, and now I’m in the movies.”

  —

  I headed back to California a very happy guy. Joe Weider had promised to stake me for a year, and that time was up. But there was no question he wanted me to stay. As I became more and more successful, he kept thinking up new ways to feature me in the stories and advertisements in his magazines. He asked if I would take a tape recorder and interview the other bodybuilders. I didn’t have to write the stories, just make the tapes, and the writers would turn them into a series of articles giving readers the inside scoop. All I had to do was talk to the others about their training routines, their diet, what vitamins they took, and so on. The guys came over, and Franco cooked them a big Italian meal—paid for by Joe, of course, as were the gallons of wine we opened. After everyone was loosened up, I brought out the tape recorder. Somehow we didn’t get around to the subject of training and nutrition. First I asked, “We want to know all your girlfriends. Have you ever been out with boyfriends? What do you do when you go to bed?”

  Joe’s eyes got wider and wider when we played the tape for him the next day. “Dammit! Dammit!” he exploded. “Idiots! Clowns! There’s nothing here I can use!” Franco and I were cracking up, but I promised to do the interviews again.

  I started taping the bodybuilders one by one. Most bodybuilders don’t have very interesting insights or routines. But I’d noticed that Joe’s writers could make a story out of anything. So after the first few times, I’d just stop the interview if I got bored, and the tapes I gave Joe kept getting shorter and shorter. He would grumble, but he really wanted those interviews, and I would say innocently, “I can’t help it if these guys don’t have any ideas.” The last couple of interviews were like five minutes and eight minutes, and Joe finally threw up his hands. “Aw hell,” he growled. “Just give me back my machine.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Experts in Marble and Stone

  THE MONEY JOE PAID me never went very far. I was always looking for ways to earn more. As my English got better, and I could explain how to train, I would give seminars at Gold’s and other gyms. Each netted $500.

  I also launched a mail-order business out of my apartment. It grew out of the fan mail I was getting. People wanted to know how I trained my arms, my chest. And they asked how they could get fit themselves. I couldn’t answer all these letters, so in the beginning, I got the writers at the magazine to help me with standard letters that I could send out. That gave me the idea of selling a series of booklets.

  In America, unlike Europe, there weren’t a million obstacles to starting a business. All I had to do was go down to city hall and pay $3.75 for a permit, and then rent a post office box to receive the orders. Next came the California Board of Equalization and the IRS. They’d ask, “How much do you think you’ll make?”

  “I hope a thousand dollars a month.” So you’d pay $320 for the first estimated payment. There was no interrogation. They were kind, sweet, accommodating. When Franco and I started a bricklaying business, it was the same thing. We walked out shaking our heads, and Franco said, “This is why they call this the land of opportunity.” We were so happy.

  Basically, my booklets were the articles I’d been writing for Joe, which the writers and photographers helped me flesh out by adding more details and photos. We made a booklet for arms, one for chest, one for back, one for calves and thighs, how to get a more symmetrical body, how to gain weight, how to pose, and so on—ten different courses. You could order the whole set for $15 or $20 or pick and choose for $1 or $2 each. People asked for photos of me also, so I had an album printed up of my favorite shots. Joe Weider was big in mail order, of course, but he didn’t really see his bodybuilders as competition. I talked him into giving me free advertising space in his magazines. “You can always start paying me for using me in your ads,” I said, “but I’d like it if you just give me an opportunity.” I figured Joe would go for this because he always hated to part with cash. And he agreed, and he was very supportive: he said I could start with a full-page ad that we would make into a double page if the thing really took off.

  Many bodybuilders failed at mail order because they’d accept the money but not get it together to mail the product. You had to fill your orders within a certain time by law. If the post office received complaints, it would take away your post office box, and your business would be gone. You might even go to jail. But I was superefficient. I took the doors off my bedroom closet to make an alcove and had a friend build shelves and a little fold-down desk. Each booklet had its own numbered niche, and there were bins for incoming mail, checks, envelopes, and outgoing orders.

  My booklets were a success. Soon I added an Arnold Schwarzenegger weight-lifting belt and other products, enough for a double-page ad. That brought in even more business. It built to the point where I could afford to hire a secretary to come in a few days a week and handle most of the mail.

  I always showed Joe any ad I wrote before putting it in the magazine because he was a merchandising genius. He would pick apart my language almost word by word. “Why didn’t you write ‘fill within days’?” he’d ask. “Put that in the ad! People want to know you’re dependable. And you should say ‘This booklet is a limited edition.’ People love limited editions.”

  I loved being an American entrepreneur. With mail order I was doing what Charles Atlas had done!

  Soon I started another business, this time with Franco. His idea was that we should work in construction, because he’d done that in Italy and Germany, and it seemed like people would want to hire two strong guys. But when we went to the union hall, we found out it could take months to join.

  I said to Franco, “Why don’t we just start our own company?” Franco knew bricklaying, and I knew business. So that’s what we did. We put an ad in the newspaper that said “European bricklayers. Experts in marble and stone.” We got our first job right away, building a wall for a guy in Venice whose house once belonged to the silent-film star Rudolph Valentino.

  Franco and I had noticed that Americans loved foreign names: Swedish massage, Italian design, Chinese herbs, German ingenuity. We decided that we should highlight being European. The fact that Franco was Italian was especially good. Look at the Vatican! You can’t beat Italian architecture. I’d also noticed that Americans like to bargain a little bit and feel like they’re getting a deal—unlike Germans, who are more willing to accept the quoted price. So Franco and I had a whole routine. I’d bring a tape measure and take measurements and come up with the estimate—which was always in meters and centimeters, adding to the European mystique. Then I’d show it to Franco, and we would start arguing in German in front of the client.

  The guy would ask, “What’s going on?”

  “Well, I don’t have to tell you about Italians,” I’d say, rolling my eyes. “I don’t get it why he thinks this patio will cost eight thousand dollars. He wants to order x number of bricks, which is way more than we’re going to need. I mean, between you and me, I think we can build it for seven thousand. We’ll have all these extra bricks, and we can return them and get the thousand dollars back.”

  The guy would start to trust me right away. “That’s really nice that you’re trying to give me the best price.”

  “Well, we want to be competitive. I’m sure you got other estimates, right?”

  “Oh, yes, yes.”

  “You see, Franco?” I’d say. Then we would argue some more in German, and the guy would be happy with the $7,000 deal.

  We loved bricklaying and felt very productive. We also had a lot of fun. One time a woman had a competing bid for $5,000 to get her chimney replaced. That included $1,000 to demolish the old one. “A thousand dollars?” said Franco. “Let me look at this.” He climbed up on the slope of the
roof, braced his back against the shingles, and did a leg press that pushed over the whole chimney. It almost landed on the woman standing below. But instead of getting mad, she was grateful. “Oh, thank you so much for helping us! This was very dangerous. It could have fallen on somebody’s head.” She not only gave us the job but let us keep the old bricks, which I then sold to another customer as “vintage bricks.”

  Another customer wanted to replace a wall around his house. We had the idea that demolishing the old wall would be strenuous enough to serve as our workout that day. We rented the biggest sledgehammers we could find. I told Franco that we should make it a contest. “You start at that end and I’ll start at this end,” I proposed, “and let’s see who gets to the middle first.” We were hammering like maniacs, and I would have won except that a chunk flew off the wall and broke the customer’s antique stained-glass window. There went our profit.

  Franco and I hadn’t even been in business a year when a big earthquake hit the San Fernando Valley on February 9, 1971. Patios heaved up. Walls cracked. Chimneys fell down. You could not have asked for a better opportunity. Franco and I ran our advertisement in the Los Angeles Times right away, and we were busy around the clock. For extra hands, we recruited bodybuilders off the beach—at one point, we had fifteen of them mixing cement and carrying bricks. It was a very funny sight, but we couldn’t depend on the bodybuilders. They couldn’t handle working every day. Just like Joe said, some of those guys were lazy bastards.

  With the money we made, Franco and I were able to buy better cars and pay for more college classes. We were also able to afford our first investment. In those days, the airlines were planning to introduce supersonic planes, and there was a proposal to build a supersonic airport in Palmdale, right over the mountains fifty or sixty miles northeast of Los Angeles.

  I wanted to be rich very quickly. When I heard that, I said to myself, “This could be a great investment.” Sure enough, a month or two later, we got a copy of the local paper, the Antelope Valley Press, and right there on the front page was a magnificent rendering of the proposed airport: monstrous, very futuristic, exactly what I envisioned America was all about. To think big! In Graz, they used to worry about whether the airport should have three or four planes land a day. I said to myself, “This is major.”

  I figured that when you build an airport on that scale, you’ve got to have warehouses around it, and shopping malls, restaurants, housing developments, government buildings—growth, growth, growth. So I said to Franco, “Let’s find out if there’s anything for sale.” It didn’t take long before the Antelope Valley Press had another front-page story about how companies were buying up huge plots and subdividing and selling the land.

  A gentleman from a development company took us out to see a piece of property. At that time, Antelope Valley was undeveloped, just desert. It took us two hours to get there on the bus, and the whole way, the guy talked about the plans. He explained how they were going to build a freeway into Palmdale, and that the airport would be intercontinental. Ultimately, it might even be used for space planes. We were impressed. When we got there, he showed us where the power and water would go, which confirmed my sense that the opportunity was real. I bought ten acres for $1,000 apiece and Franco bought five, right next to where the runway was going to be and near where a complex of high-rises might be built. We didn’t have $15,000 in cash, so we agreed to $5,000 down and $13,000 in principal and interest payments over the next several years.

  Of course, none of this took into account the issue of sonic booms and how they would affect people living under the flight paths. It became a huge fight, not just in the United States but around the world. Eventually governments concluded that airliners should go supersonic only over the oceans—and Franco and I ended up stuck with acres of desert. The developer kept insisting that all this was just a temporary setback. “Don’t sell it,” he said. “Your grandchildren are going to benefit.”

  —

  I wasn’t lying to Joe Weider when I said that Franco and I would both be champions. The speed with which Franco transformed himself into a world-class bodybuilder was truly amazing. As training partners, we had a big advantage. When we started working out together in Munich, there was no way for us to know much about what American bodybuilders were doing, so we had to learn on our own from scratch. We discovered dozens of training principles and techniques that we would write down. We were constantly on the lookout for new exercises and variations: it could be something as significant as the thousand-pound calf presses I learned from Reg Park, or as subtle as doing a curl with the wrist turned a certain way. Once each week we would choose an unfamiliar exercise and each do sets and reps until we couldn’t do any more. Then we’d analyze the next day which muscles and sections of muscles were sore, and note it down. Working this way, we spent an entire year making a systematic survey of our bodies and building an inventory of hundreds of exercises and techniques. (Eventually this provided the basis for the Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding, which I published in 1985.)

  A key discovery we made was that you can’t just copy someone else’s routine, because everyone’s body is different. Everyone has different proportions of torso and limb and different hereditary advantages and disadvantages. You can take an idea from another athlete, but you have to understand that your body may respond very differently from his or hers.

  Experimenting like this helped us find ways to fix particular weaknesses. For instance, Franco had bowlegs, and we figured out how to fill out his inner thighs by having him do squats in a wider stance. Then we figured out techniques to build up his inner calves. He would never fool the judges into thinking his legs were perfectly straight. But they would be impressed by how he’d toned down the problem.

  For the showdown with Sergio Oliva, I was determined to take my posing to a new level. Franco and I practiced our routines for weeks. To win, you have to be able to hit every pose for minutes at a time. Most bodybuilders will be able to do a vacuum pose, for example, which involves sucking in your stomach to call attention to the development of your chest. But often they can’t hold the pose, either because they’ve pumped up too much backstage or because they’re out of breath from previous poses. Or they have to let the pose go because they cramp up or start shaking.

  So one of us would hold a pose for minutes while the other called out what needed to be done. I would be in a bicep pose, and Franco would say, “I see your arm shaking. Stop shaking.” So I’d stop it from shaking. Then he’d say, “Okay, smile,” and “Give me a little bit of twist in the waist,” and then, “Okay, now go into a three-quarter-back pose. Ah, you took an extra step. No good. Start again.”

  You practice every pose and every transition because that extra step is the very thing that could make you lose in front of the judges. They’ll think, “That’s unprofessional. You’re not ready for the big time. You are a fucking idiot; get off the stage. You can’t even stand still in the pose. You haven’t even practiced the simplest things.”

  At the Mr. Olympia level, what is most important is not necessarily what goes on in the middle of a pose. The judges assume you know how to do that. What becomes crucial is what you do between one pose and the next. How do the hands move? How does the face look? What is the posture? It’s like in ballet. It’s all about the straightness of the back, the head up, not down. Never, ever take an extra step. As you move from pose to pose, you have to visualize yourself as a tiger, slow and smooth. Everything smooth. And precise, without ever looking as if you are straining, because that too shows weakness. You have to be in total command of your face. Maybe you are struggling and completely winded, but you must breathe through your nose while keeping your mouth relaxed. Panting would be the worst. Then when you come back for the next shot, you need to look confident and exactly the way you’re supposed to look.

  My preparation for going up against Sergio didn’t stop at the gym. I bought a movie projector. I assembled a whole collection of his performa
nces in competition, and I watched those films at home again and again. Sergio really did have a stunning physique, but I realized that he had been using the same posing routine for several years. This was knowledge I could use to plan for the final one-on-one pose-off at Mr. Olympia. I memorized his moves in the order in which he hit them, and I got ready for each one with three poses of my own. I rehearsed this and visualized it over and over: “When he hits this, I will do this, and this, and this!” My goal was to overwhelm every move Sergio made.

  Late that summer, the phone rang one day in Gold’s Gym, and the manager called out from the desk, “Arnold, there’s a guy on the phone by the name of Jim Lorimer.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He wants to talk to you about the Mr. World competition.”

  “Tell him to call back. I’m in the middle of working out.”

  That call turned out to be one of those magical things that happened to me that I never could have planned. Jim still laughs about it today. When I called him, he explained that he was the organizer of the world weight-lifting championships, which were being hosted that year by the United States in Columbus, Ohio, and that after the championships, there would be a bodybuilding competition for the title of Mr. World. He wanted me to enter.

  I’d never heard of Jim Lorimer and called around to see if anybody knew him. It didn’t take long to learn he was for real. Jim was a former FBI agent, about twenty years older than me, and an important force in American sports. He’d been chairman of the United States Olympic Committee. He’d been a pioneer in building up the women’s teams to compete against the Soviet bloc. He made his living as an executive at Nationwide Insurance, the largest employer in Columbus, and was a suburban mayor and a very well-connected politician. He’d been running the US weight-lifting championships and the Mr. America contest in Columbus on behalf of the AAU for years, and my friends said that those events were always very well organized. That was a big reason that Columbus had been chosen to host the 1970 world championship, and Jim had been asked to step up and run it.