He pointed out the window and explained, “See that tree over there? Well, if you want, we can all sit in the shade and have our class there.”
We went out and sat on the grass under the tree in front of the college building. I was so impressed. Compared to the way school worked in Europe, so formal and structured, this was unbelievable! I thought, “I’m going to take a college course sitting under the tree outside, as if I was on vacation! After this semester, I’m signing up for another class!” I called Artie and told him he should come by the next week and take a picture of us sitting outside.
In fact, the next semester I signed up for two classes. A lot of foreign students feel intimidated by the idea of jumping into college, but the community college dealt with me in such a low-key way and the teachers were so cool that it was a lot of fun.
Once Mr. Dodge got to know me a little bit and I told him about my goals, he introduced me to a counselor. The guy said, “Mr. Dodge suggested I should give you some other classes besides English. What do you like?”
“Business.”
“Well, I have a good beginning business course where the language is not that difficult—a lot of foreigners take that class—and you have a good teacher who understands foreign students.”
He put together a little program for me. “Here are eight classes you should take besides English. They’re all business courses. If I were you, I would also take some math. You need to hear the language of math so that when someone says ‘division,’ you know what that means. Or ‘decimal,’ or ‘fraction.’ These are the terms you hear, and you may not understand them.”
And I said, “You’re absolutely right, I don’t.” So I added a math class where we did some decimals and easy algebra, and I started relearning the language of math.
The counselor also showed me how to fit classes into my life. “We understand you are an athlete, and some semesters maybe it doesn’t work out. Since the fall is when you have your big competitions, then maybe you only take one class in the summer. You could go one night a week, from seven to ten, after your training. I’m sure you can handle that.” I thought the way he worked with me was terrific. It felt great to add getting an education to my goals. There was no pressure, since nobody was saying to me, “You better go to college. You better get a degree.”
I also had a math tutor at Gold’s Gym: Frank Zane, who had been an algebra teacher in Florida before coming to California to train. I don’t know why, but as a matter of fact, several of the bodybuilders had been teachers. Frank helped with my assignments and translations, explaining and taking the time when I didn’t understand. In California, he had gotten deeply into Eastern philosophy and meditation and relaxing the mind. But that didn’t rub off on me until later.
If I’d thought there would be a serious challenge to my dominance, I’d have stayed 100 percent focused on bodybuilding. But there was nobody on the radar. So I diverted some of my energy to other ambitions. I always wrote down my goals, like I’d learned to do in the weight-lifting club back in Graz. It wasn’t sufficient just to tell myself something like “My New Year’s resolution is to lose twenty pounds and learn better English and read a little bit more.” No. That was only a start. Now I had to make it very specific so that all those fine intentions were not just floating around. I would take out index cards and write that I was going to:
• get twelve more units in college;
• earn enough money to save $5,000;
• work out five hours a day;
• gain seven pounds of solid muscle weight; and
• find an apartment building to buy and move into.
It might seem like I was handcuffing myself by setting such specific goals, but it was actually just the opposite: I found it liberating. Knowing exactly where I wanted to end up freed me totally to improvise how to get there. Take that twelve more college credits I needed, for example. It didn’t matter which college they would come from; I would figure that out. I’d look at which courses were available and what the credits cost and whether they fit my schedule and the rules of my visa. I didn’t need to worry about the exact details now, because I already knew I was going to get those dozen credits.
Immigration status was one of the obstacles I had to work around putting myself through college. I had a work visa, not a student visa, so I could only go part-time. I could never take more than two classes at once in any one school, so I had to jump all over. In addition to Santa Monica College, I went to West Los Angeles College and took extension courses at the University of California at Los Angeles. I realized this would be a problem if I wanted to earn a degree, because I’d have to link all those credits to make them all count. But a degree wasn’t my objective; I only needed to study as much as I could in my available time and learn how Americans did business.
So at Santa Monica College, those English classes became English classes, math classes, history classes, and business administration. At UCLA, I took courses from the business school in accounting, marketing, economics, and management. I’d studied accounting in Austria, of course, but here it was a whole new thing. Computers were just happening: they were using big IBM machines with punch cards and magnetic tape drives. I liked learning about that, which I thought of as the American way of doing things. College appealed to my sense of discipline. I enjoyed studying. There was something really nice about having to read books in order to write reports and participate in class. I also liked working with the other students, inviting them over to my apartment to have some coffee and do our homework together. The teachers often encouraged that, so that if one person didn’t know something, the others could explain it to him. It made the classroom discussions much more effective.
One course required us to read the business news every day and be prepared to talk about the headlines and stories in class. That became the first thing I did every morning: open the newspaper to the business page. The instructor would say, “Here’s an interesting article about how the Japanese bought an American steel mill and dismantled it and set it up back in Japan. Now they’re producing steel more cheaply than we can and selling it to us at a profit. Let’s talk about that.” I never could predict what was going to make a big impression on me. A guest lecturer at UCLA told us that in sales, the larger the salesman, the more he tended to sell. I found this fascinating, since I’m a big guy. I thought, “Well, I’m two hundred fifty pounds, so when I go out to sell something, my business ought to be huge.”
I also found a steady girlfriend, which was a settling influence in my life. Not that meeting women was hard. Bodybuilding had its groupies just like rock ’n’ roll. They were always there, at the parties, at the exhibitions, sometimes even backstage at contests offering to help guys oil up. They’d come to the gym and the beach to watch us work out. You could tell right away who was available. You could go down to Venice Beach and collect ten phone numbers. Barbara Outland was different because she liked me as a human being—she didn’t even know what bodybuilding was. We met at Zucky’s Deli in 1969. She was a college kid a year younger than me, waitressing for her summer job. We started hanging out together and having long conversations. Pretty soon my buddies at the gym started teasing, “Arnold is in love.” When she went back to school, I thought about her, and we even wrote letters—a first for me.
I liked having a girlfriend; someone you saw more often. I could enjoy Barbara’s life, her teaching career, her school, her goals. I could share my ambition and my training and my ups and downs.
She was much more of a girl-next-door type than a femme fatale: blonde, tan, and wholesome. She was studying to be an English teacher and obviously wasn’t just looking for a fun time. Her girlfriends who were dating guys in law school and med school thought I was strange, but Barbara didn’t care. She admired me for writing down goals on index cards. Barbara’s parents were wonderful to me. At Christmas, each family member had a gift for me—and later, when I brought Franco with me, gifts for him too. Barbara and I went to Hawaii,
London, and New York together.
When Barbara graduated in 1971 and came to LA to start work, Franco was getting ready to move out. He was settling down too; he was studying to be a chiropractor and he’d gotten engaged to a girl named Anita, who was a full-fledged chiropractor already. When Barbara suggested moving in with me, it seemed totally natural, since she was already spending a lot of time at my place.
She was totally on board with my habit of saving every penny. We had barbecues in the backyard and spent days on the beach instead of going someplace fancy. I wasn’t the best candidate for a relationship because I was so wrapped up in my career, but I liked having a partner. It was great to have someone there to go home to.
The fact that Barbara was an English teacher was great. She helped me a lot with the language, and she helped when I wrote papers for school. She was also very helpful with the mail-order business and writing letters, but I hired a secretary early on. Even so, we learned that when you have a relationship in a foreign language, you have to be extra careful not to miscommunicate. We’d get into ridiculous fights. One time we went to see the movie Death Wish, and she said afterward, “I like Charles Bronson because he’s very rugged, very masculine.”
I said, “I don’t think Charles Bronson is that masculine. I mean, he’s a skinny guy! I would call him more athletic than masculine.”
“No,” she said. “You think I’m saying he’s muscular, but that’s not what I mean. I’m saying he’s masculine. Masculine is something else.”
“Masculine, muscular, same fucking thing, I think that he’s athletic.”
“But to me he’s very masculine.”
I said, “No, that’s the wrong . . .” and kept arguing. I went straight to the dictionary the minute we got home. Sure enough, she was right. Being masculine meant something totally different from being muscular—it meant that Bronson was manly and rugged, which he was. I said to myself, “How stupid. Oh God, you’ve got to learn this language! It is so stupid that you argue over something like that.”
—
After I won Mr. Olympia, Weider started sending me on sales trips all over the world. I’d climb on a plane and make shopping mall appearances wherever he had distribution or was trying to expand. Selling was one of my favorite things. I’d stand in the middle of a shopping mall with a translator lady—for instance, the Stockmann shopping center in Finland—surrounded by a few hundred people from local gyms, because they’d have advertised my visit in advance. I’d be selling, selling, selling. “Vitamin E gives you fantastic extra energy for training hours every day to get a body like mine! And of course I don’t want even talk about the sexual power it gives you . . .” People would be buying, and I was always a huge hit. Joe sent me because he knew that the hosts would then say, “We sold a lot of stuff. Let’s make a deal.”
I’d be wearing a tank top and hitting poses every so often while I made my pitch. “Let me talk about the protein. You could eat as many steaks as you want, or as much fish as you want, but the body can only take seventy grams at a time. That’s the rule: a gram for every kilo of body weight. Muscle-building shakes are the way to fill the hole in your diet. So you can have five times the seventy grams if you want! You can’t eat enough steak to make up for protein powder, because it’s so concentrated.” I would mix the shake in a chrome shaker, like the kind used to make martinis in bars, drink it, and say to someone in the crowd, “You try it.” It was like selling vacuum cleaners. I’d get so excited that I’d rush ahead of the translator.
Then I’d move on to selling vitamin D, vitamin A, and special oil. By the time I finished, the sales manager would see all the interest. He would order Weider food supplements for the coming year. Plus barbell sets and dumbbells made by Weider. And Weider would be in heaven. Then a month later, I’d travel to another mall in another country.
I always went by myself. Joe would never pay for anyone else because he felt it was a waste of money. Traveling alone was perfectly fine, though, because no matter where I went, there was always someone to pick me up and treat me as if we were brothers because of bodybuilding. It was fun to go around the world and train in different gyms.
Weider wanted me to get to the point where I could sit down with the mall management to make the deal myself, and meet with publishers to line up more foreign-language editions of his magazines, and eventually take over the business. But that was not my goal. The same with the offer I received in the early seventies to manage a leading gymnasium chain for $200,000 a year. It was a lot of money, but I turned it down because it would not take me where I wanted to go. Managing a chain is a ten- to twelve-hour-a-day job, and that would not make me a bodybuilding champion or get me into movies. Nothing was going to distract me from my goal. No offer, no relationship, nothing.
But getting on a plane and selling was right up my alley. I always saw myself as a citizen of the world. I wanted to travel as much as I could because I figured if the local press was covering me there now as a bodybuilder, eventually I would be back as a movie star.
So I was on the road several times a year. In 1971 alone, I flew to Japan, Belgium, Austria, Canada, Britain, and France. Often I would add paid exhibitions to my itinerary to make extra cash. I was also giving free exhibitions and seminars in prisons around California. That started when I went to visit a friend from Gold’s who was doing time in the federal prison on Terminal Island near LA. He was serving two years for auto theft and wanted to continue his training. I watched him and his friends work out in the prison yard. He had made a name for himself as the strongest prisoner in California by setting the state prison record in the squat with six hundred pounds. What impressed me was that he and the other serious lifters were all model prisoners, because that was how they won training privileges and permission to bring in protein from outside to help them become these strong animals. Otherwise the prison authorities would say, “You’re just training to beat up on guys,” and take away the weights. The more popular bodybuilding grew in prisons, I thought, the more guys would get the message to behave.
Being weight lifters also helped them after they got out. If they came to Gold’s or other bodybuilding gyms, it was easy to make friends. Whereas most prisoners were dropped off at the bus station with $200 and ended up wandering around with no job and no connection to anybody, people at Gold’s would notice if you could bench press three hundred pounds. Somebody would say, “Hey, do you want to train with me?” and you’d have made a human connection. On the bulletin board at Gold’s there were always cards offering work for mechanics, laborers, personal trainers, accountants, and so on, and we would help the ex-prisoners find jobs as well.
So in the early 1970s, I went to men’s and women’s prisons all over the state to popularize weight training: from San Quentin, to Folsom, to Atascadero, where they kept the criminally insane. It never would have happened if the guards had thought it was a bad idea, but they supported it, and one warden would recommend me to the next.
—
In the fall of 1972, my parents came to Essen, Germany, to watch me in the Mr. Olympia contest, which was being staged in Germany for the first time. They’d never seen me compete at the international level, and I was glad they were there, although it was far from my best performance. They’d seen me in only one competition—Mr. Austria, back in 1963—and they’d come to that because Fredi Gerstl invited them. He’d helped line up sponsors and trophies.
It was a great experience to see them in Essen. They were very proud. They saw me crowned Mr. Olympia for the third time, breaking the record for the most bodybuilding titles. And they realized, “This is what he used to talk about—his dream that we didn’t buy into.” My mother said, “I cannot believe you are up there on the stage. You’re not even shy! Where did you get that from?” People were congratulating them on my success, saying things like, “You sure put some discipline into that boy!” and giving them the credit they deserved. I handed my mother the trophy plate to take home. She was very ha
ppy. It was an important moment—especially for my father, who’d always said about my weight training, “Why don’t you do something useful? Go chop wood.”
At the same time, my parents seemed to feel out of place. They didn’t know what to make of this scene of giant musclemen, one of them their son, parading in little briefs before thousands of cheering fans. When we went for dinner that evening and during breakfast the next morning before they left, it was hard for us to relate. My head was still in the competition, while they wanted to talk about matters much closer to home. They were still struggling with the devastation of Meinhard’s death, and now their grandson was without a dad. And it was difficult for them that I was so far away. There wasn’t much I could say to them, and I felt depressed after they left.
My parents didn’t realize that I wasn’t in the best shape for the Mr. Olympia contest. I’d been spending too much time on school and not enough time in the gym. My businesses and the sales trips and exhibitions had taken bites out of training. On top of it, Franco and I had been getting lazy, skipping workouts or reducing our sets by half. To get the most out of my workouts, I always needed specific goals to get the adrenaline pumping. I learned that staying on top of the hill is harder than climbing it.
But I had no such motivations leading up to Essen because defending the championship had been so easy up to now. I’d coasted to my second title as Mr. Olympia, in Paris in 1971. The only possible challenger had been Sergio—nobody else was in my league—and he’d been barred from the contest because of a dispute between federations. But in Essen, it seemed like all the top bodybuilders turned up at their very best except for me. Sergio was back, even more impressive than I remembered. And a new sensation from France, Serge Nubret, was also in top form, huge and really defined.
It was the hardest competition I’d ever been through, and if we’d been before American judges, I might well have lost. But German judges were always more impressed by sheer muscular mass, and fortunately I had what they were looking for. Winning narrowly did not make me feel good, however. I wanted my dominance to be clear.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 15