After any competition, I always sought out the judges to ask for their input. “I appreciate that I won, but please tell me what were my weak points and what were my strong points,” I’d say. “You’re not going to hurt my feelings. I will still do a posing exhibition for you if you produce a show or anything like that.” One judge at Essen, a German doctor who’d followed my career ever since I was nineteen, told me bluntly, “You were soft. I thought you were massive and still the best up there, but you were softer than I would like to see you.”
From Germany, I went to do exhibitions in Scandinavia, and from there to South Africa to do seminars for Reg Park. Seeing him again was great; we’d gotten past the hard feelings from my having beaten him in London. However, the trip didn’t turn out too well. I was scheduled for an exhibition near Durban, but when I arrived, I discovered that nobody had given any thought to supplying a posing platform. But I was in construction, right? So I said what the hell and built one myself.
Midway through my routine, the whole thing collapsed with a scary crash. I landed flat on my back with my leg pinned under me and a badly wrecked left knee—the cartilage was torn and the kneecap was pulled way out of place under the skin. The South African doctors patched me up enough to finish the tour with bandages. Except for this mishap, it was a wonderful trip. I went on safari and gave exhibitions and seminars, and coming back I stuffed thousands of dollars of earnings into my cowboy boots so nobody would steal it while I slept on the plane.
On my way home through London, I called Dianne Bennett to say hello.
“Your mother has been trying to find you,” she said. “Call her. Your father is ill.” I called my mother and then went home quickly to Austria to stay with them. My father had suffered a stroke.
He was in the hospital when I got there, and he recognized me, but it was terrible. He couldn’t talk anymore. He was biting his tongue. I kept him company, and he seemed aware, but he was off in upsetting ways. He was smoking, and he’d become confused and try to put out the cigarette on his hand. It was painful and upsetting to see a man who had been so smart and so strong—an ice-curling champion—lose his coordination and his ability to think.
I stayed in Austria for quite a while, and he seemed stable when I left. Around Thanksgiving, back in Los Angeles, I had surgery on my knee. I’d just gotten out of the hospital on crutches, with my entire leg in a cast, when a call came from my mother. “Your father has died,” she told me.
It was heartbreaking, but I didn’t cry or freak out. Barbara, who was with me, got upset that I didn’t seem to react at all. Instead, I focused on practical matters. I called my surgeon, who told me not to fly with the heavy cast—so once again I couldn’t attend a family funeral. At least I knew that my mother had an enormous support system to organize the service and attend to all the details. The gendarmerie would close ranks to bury one of its own, and the band that my dad had led for many years would play, just as he had played at many funerals. The local priests, whom my mother was close to, would handle the invitations. Her friends would comfort her, and our relatives would come. Nevertheless I wasn’t there, my parents’ only surviving child, and that was the bottom line. I know she really missed me.
I was in shock and paralyzed. Yet frankly, I was also glad that the knee injury kept me from going, because I still wanted to separate myself from that whole side of my life. My way of dealing with the situation was deny and try to move on.
I didn’t want my mother to be alone. In less than two years, both my father and brother had died, and I felt like our family was rapidly coming apart, and I could scarcely imagine the grief she must have felt. So now I had to take on responsibility for her. I was still only twenty-five, but it was time to step up and make her life wonderful. Now it was time for me to pay her back for the endless hours and days of nurturing and everything she’d done for us as babies and growing up.
I couldn’t give my mom what she most wished for: a son close to home who would become a cop like Dad, marry a woman named Gretel, have a couple of kids, and live in a house two blocks from hers. That was the way in most Austrian families. She and my father had been okay with my move to Munich, which was 250 miles away and reachable by train. But I now realized that when I’d left for America without warning in 1968, I had shocked and hurt them. I wasn’t going back, of course, but I wanted to make up for that too.
I started sending her money every month and calling her all the time. I tried to convince her to move to the United States. She didn’t want to. Then I tried to have her fly over to visit. She didn’t want to do that either. Finally, in 1973, about six months after my father died, she did come, and stayed with Barbara and me for a few weeks. She returned the next year too, and every year after that. I also found more and more of a connection with Patrick, my nephew. When he was little, and I went to Europe, I made sure to visit him and Erika and her husband, a military man who was a devoted stepfather. Then when Patrick got to be about ten, he became fascinated with the idea of his uncle living in America. He started collecting my movie posters. Erika would ask me for memorabilia; I sent him a dagger from Conan and T-shirts from The Terminator and other movies, and wrote letters for him to show off at school. In high school he would periodically ask me to mail him twenty or thirty autographed photos, which he used for who knows what entrepreneurial purpose. I helped send him to an international school in Portugal and, with Erika’s permission, promised that if he kept up his grades, he could come to Los Angeles for college. He became my pride and joy.
—
Even though the supersonic airport no longer looked superpromising, and Franco and I were still making payments on fifteen acres of desert, I continued to believe that real estate was the place to invest. Many of our jobs entailed fixing up old houses, and it was eye opening. The owners would pay us $10,000 to fix up a house they’d bought for $200,000. Then they’d turn around and sell it for $300,000. Clearly there was real money to be made.
So I put aside as much money as I could and started looking around for investment possibilities. Two of the bodybuilders who had escaped from Czechoslovakia and come to California just before me had taken their savings and bought a little house to live in. That was fine, but they still had to pay the mortgage. I wanted an investment that would earn money, so that I could cover the mortgage through rents instead of having to pay it myself. Most people would buy a house if they could afford it; it was very unusual then to buy a rental property.
I liked the idea of owning an apartment building. I could picture starting with a small building, taking the best unit for myself to live in, and paying all the expenses by renting out the rest. That would let me learn the business, and as the investment paid off, I could expand from there.
Over the next two or three years, I did research. Every day I would look at the real estate section in the newspaper, studying the prices and reading the stories and ads. I got to where I knew every square block of Santa Monica. I knew how much the property values increased north of Olympic Boulevard versus north of Wilshire versus north of Sunset. I understood about schools and restaurants and proximity to the beach.
This wonderful real estate lady named Olga Asat took me under her wing. She might have been Egyptian; she’d emigrated from somewhere in the Middle East. Olga was older, short and heavyset, with frizzy hair, and she always wore a black outfit because she thought it made her appear leaner. You might look at someone like that and think, “Why am I dealing with her?” But I was drawn to the human being, the heart, the motherly love: she saw me as a fellow foreigner and really wanted to see me do well. She was such a pistol.
We ended up working together for years. Eventually, with Olga’s help, I knew every building in town. I knew every transaction: who was selling, at what price, how much the property had appreciated since it last changed hands, what the financial sheet looked like, the cost of yearly upkeep, the interest rate on the financing. I met landlords and bankers. Olga was a miracle worker. She would try s
o hard, going from building to building to building until we found the right opportunity.
The math of real estate really spoke to me. I could tour a building, and as I walked through it, I would ask about the square footage, the vacancy factor, what it would cost per square foot to operate, and quickly calculate in my mind how many times the gross I could afford to offer and still be able to make the payments. The selling agent would look at me in a weird way as if to say, “How did he figure that out?”
It was just a talent I had. I’d get out a pencil and say, “I cannot go any higher than ten times gross because I think the average maintenance expense on a building like this is 5 percent. You have to leave that 5 percent available. And the interest rate is now 6.1 percent, so the loan will cost such and such annually.” I would write it all down for the agent.
Then he or she would argue, “Well, you’re right, but don’t forget that the value of the property is going to rise. So maybe you have to put in a little bit of your own money along the way. At the end of the day, the value goes up.”
“I understand,” I’d say, “but I never pay more than ten times gross. If the value goes up in the future, that’s my profit.”
Interesting bargains began to appear after the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and the start of the recession. Olga would call and say, “This seller is in trouble financially,” or “They really extended themselves, I think you should make a quick offer.” In early 1974 she found a six-unit apartment house on Nineteenth Street just north of Wilshire—the more desirable side of Wilshire. The owners were trading up to a bigger building and wanted to sell fast. Even better, their deal on the bigger building was so good that they were willing to come down on price.
The building cost me $215,000. It took every dollar I’d saved—$27,000—plus another $10,000 borrowed from Joe Weider to make the down payment. The place wasn’t much to look at: a sturdy early-1950s two-story structure of wood and brick. But I was happy with it from the minute Barbara and I moved in. It was in a nice neighborhood, and the apartments were roomy and well maintained. Mine was 2,400 square feet, extra large, and had a balcony in the front, a two-car garage underneath, and a little patio out back. It had other benefits too: I rented the other apartments to entertainment people. Actors I met in the gym were always looking for places to stay, so eventually there were four actors living there. It was a way to build connections in the business I wanted to get into. Best of all, I’d moved out of an apartment where I had to pay $1,300 a month in rent and into a property that paid for itself from Day One, just as I’d planned.
Seeing me pull off a $215,000 deal left my old friend Artie Zeller in shock. For days afterward, he kept asking how I had the balls to do it. He could not understand because he never wanted any risk in his life.
“How can you stand the pressure? You have the responsibility of renting out the other five units. You have to collect the rent. What if something goes wrong?” Problems were all he could see. It could be terrible. Tenants would make noise. What if somebody came home drunk? What if somebody slipped, and I got sued? “You know what America is like with the lawsuits!” and blah, blah, blah.
I caught myself listening. “Artie, you almost scared me just now.” I laughed. “Don’t tell me any more of this information. I like to always wander in like a puppy. I walk into a problem and then figure out what the problem really is. Don’t tell me ahead of time.” Often it’s easier to make a decision when you don’t know as much, because then you can’t overthink. If you know too much, it can freeze you. The whole deal looks like a minefield.
I’d noticed the same thing at school. Our economics professor was a two-times PhD, but he pulled up in a Volkswagen Beetle. I’d had better cars for years by that time. I said to myself, “Knowing it all is not really the answer, because this guy is not making the money to have a bigger car. He should be driving a Mercedes.”
CHAPTER 9
The Greatest Muscle Show Ever
AS MR. OLYMPIA, I WAS the three-time winner of a world championship that 99 percent of Americans had never heard of. Not only was bodybuilding obscure as a sport, but if you asked the average American about bodybuilders, all you’d hear was the negative stuff: “Those guys are so muscle-bound and uncoordinated, they can’t even tie their shoes.”
“It will all turn to fat and they’ll die young.”
“They all have inferiority complexes.”
“They’re all imbeciles.”
“They’re all narcissists.”
“They’re all homosexuals.”
Every aspect of its image was bad. One writer said that the sport was about as easy to promote as midget wrestling.
It’s true that bodybuilders look in the mirror as they train. Mirrors are tools, just like they are for ballet dancers. You need to be your own trainer. When you do dumbbell curls, for example, you need to see if one arm trails the other.
The sport was so far down, it was nowhere. To me bodybuilding had always seemed so American that I was still surprised when people couldn’t guess what I did. “Are you a wrestler?” they’d ask. “Look at your body! No, no, I know, you’re a football player, right?” They’d pick everything but bodybuilding.
In fact, the audiences were much larger in third world countries. A crowd of twenty-five thousand turned out to see Bill Pearl at an exhibition in India, while ten thousand showed up in South Africa. Bodybuilding was one of the most popular spectator sports in the Middle East. A great milestone in Joe Weider’s career came in 1970, when the international community agreed to certify bodybuilding as an official sport. From that point on, bodybuilding programs qualified for state support in dozens of nations where athletics are subsidized.
But I’d been in the United States for four years, and basically nothing had changed. Each big city still had one or two gyms where the bodybuilders would train. The biggest competitions never aimed for more than four thousand or five thousand fans.
This bugged me because I wanted to see bodybuilding thrive, and I wanted to see the athletes and not just the promoters make money. I also felt that if millions of people were going to come to my movies someday, it was very important that they know where the muscles came from and what it meant to be Mr. Universe or Mr. Olympia or Mr. World. So there was a lot of educating to do. The more popular the sport became, the better my chances of becoming a leading man. It was easy for, say, New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath to get into commercials and films. In the major sports—football, baseball, basketball, and tennis—the stars would just cross over and make a lot of money. I knew that would never happen to me. I had to do more. I wanted to promote the sport, both so that more people would take part and to benefit my career.
Joe Weider was pretty set in his ways, though. He didn’t want to try broadening his audience beyond the bodybuilding fans and fifteen-year-old kids—no matter how much I teased. “These are comic books!” I’d say about his magazines. “ ‘How Arnold Terrorized His Thighs’? ‘This Is Joe’s Biceps Speaking’? What kind of silly headlines are those?”
“It sells the magazine,” Joe would say. His approach was to keep the products consistent and take every opportunity to expand their distribution around the world. Probably that was smart, because the business kept growing. But I realized that if I wanted to promote bodybuilding to a new audience, I’d have to find my own way.
I was passing through New York on the way to Europe in the fall of 1972 when I met the two people who would set me on the path: George Butler and Charles Gaines. Butler was a photographer and Gaines was a writer, and they were working as freelancers for Life magazine. They were on their way to cover the Mr. Universe contest that Joe Weider was staging in Iraq. They’d been told that they should talk to me to get background on bodybuilding.
I couldn’t believe my good luck. These were the first journalists I’d ever really talked to from outside the bodybuilding world. They had access to maybe a million readers who’d never heard of the sport. They were about my age, and we hit
it off really well. Gaines already knew quite a bit about bodybuilding, it turned out: he’d just published a novel called Stay Hungry, which centered on a bodybuilding gym in Alabama. It was a bestseller. That summer, he and Butler had teamed up on a story for Sports Illustrated about a contest called Mr. East Coast in Holyoke, Massachusetts. And they were already talking about continuing with the subject after the Life story and doing a book. They knew they were onto a fascinating subject that was unfamiliar to most Americans.
I wasn’t going to be in Baghdad, but I promised that if they wanted to check out the bodybuilding scene in California, I’d make the arrangements and show them around. Two months later, they were sitting in my living room in Santa Monica getting acquainted with Joe Weider. I’d just introduced them, and it was somewhat confrontational at first. The visitors came on like cocky young guys who knew it all, even though Charles had been involved in bodybuilding for only three or four years, and George for less than that. They kept asking Joe why he wasn’t pushing the sport in this or that direction, why he wasn’t signing up corporate sponsors, and on and on. Why didn’t he get ABC’s Wide World of Sports to cover his events? Why didn’t he hire publicists? I could see that Joe thought they knew absolutely nothing, they were journalists, they saw everything from the outside. They had no understanding of the characters and personalities in the sport or what a challenge it was to try to bring in the big companies. You couldn’t just snap your fingers and say, “Here’s bodybuilding!” and have it be equal to tennis or baseball or golf.
But the discussion ended up being productive. Weider invited them out to his headquarters in the San Fernando Valley the next day, and they hung out with him and observed his operation. It was the start of bodybuilding going mainstream. I think at first it was a struggle for Joe. He was trying to figure out how to deal with a whole new kind of attention and not feel like someone was trying to take away his business, outdo him, or steal his athletes. I think there was a certain fear there. But he came to appreciate their way of looking at bodybuilding from the outside. Pretty soon he was including photos taken by Butler and stories by Gaines in his magazines.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 16