I was right in the middle. I could see both sides, and I welcomed this development because I knew the sport needed fresh blood. I wondered if by working with Butler and Gaines, I could step into the mainstream too—get enough distance to reimagine bodybuilding and find ways to raise its public profile.
Over the coming months, the book they’d envisioned began to take shape. Doing research for Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding, George and Charles became familiar faces at Gold’s. They were fun to hang out with and added a completely different dimension to the usual cast of characters. Charles Gaines was a good-looking, self-confident guy from a rich family in Birmingham, Alabama, where his dad was a businessman and his friends were part of the country club. He’d had a wild adolescence, dropped out of college for a while, and hitchhiked around the country. He always said that discovering bodybuilding helped settle him down. Eventually Charles became a teacher and outdoorsman. By the time we met, he lived in New England with his wife, a painter.
He’d figured out that there was a whole world of fascinating sports subcultures that weren’t getting covered broadly: not only bodybuilding but also ice climbing and ice skiing. He was athletic, so he would try these sports himself and then write about them. Charles could convey what it felt like to improve as a weight lifter; to be able to bench thirty pounds more than he could a month earlier.
George Butler seemed even more exotic. He was British and had been raised in Jamaica, Kenya, Somalia, and Wales. His father was very British, very strict. George told stories about what a tough disciplinarian he was. He also described how, as a little boy, he’d spent half his time in the Caribbean with his mother while his father was off someplace. Then at a young age, he was sent away to boarding school. Later on, he went to Groton and the University of North Carolina and Hollins College, and he came out of it all with a million connections in New York society.
Maybe because of his background, George could strike you as cold and kind of prissy. He complained about little things. He always had over his shoulder an L.L. Bean bag containing his camera and a journal in which he wrote down things twenty-four hours a day. It seemed artificial to me, as if he had copied Ernest Hemingway or some famous explorer.
But George was exactly what bodybuilding needed to forge its new image. He was able to photograph it in a way that would make people say, “Wow, this is wild, look!” He didn’t do straight-on muscle poses, which didn’t excite the general public; instead, he’d photograph a bodybuilder as a little figure against the background of a huge American flag. Or he’d photograph the astonished faces of Mount Holyoke girls watching the bodybuilders compete. The Weider brothers did not think of things like that.
George could make something out of nothing. Or maybe it wasn’t nothing; maybe it was just nothing to me because I saw it every day and I was part of it, whereas to him it was really something. Once, after a day spent shooting photos at Gold’s, he asked me, “How do you walk around so fast in the gym and never touch anybody?”
To me the answer was obvious: when someone comes by, you move out of the way! Why bump into them? But George saw much more going on. A few weeks later, I heard him turn it into a story at a dinner party with his intellectual friends. “When Charles and I were in the gym, we watched very carefully the way these men moved around. And would you believe that in the four hours we spent there, we never saw any of these enormous bodybuilders bump into one another? Even though it was tight and there was a lot of equipment and not enough room, no one ever bumped. They just went by one another, just like big lions in a cage; they gracefully went by without touching.”
His listeners were mesmerized. “Wow, they never bumped into each other?”
“Absolutely not. Here’s another fascinating thing: Arnold never, ever had an angry look while he was training. He was lifting huge amounts of weight. He’s always smiling. I mean, think about that. What must be inside his head? What must he know about his future, that he is always smiling?”
I thought, “This is brilliant. I would never be able to articulate it this way. All I would say is that I find joy in the gym because every rep and every set is getting me one step closer to my goal.” But the way George expressed it, the scene he created of it, and the psychology he used made me say to myself, “This is perfect marketing.”
Once he realized that I was funny and that I liked meeting new people, George started introducing me around New York City. I met fashion designers, heiresses, and people who made art movies. George loved bringing together worlds. He made friends at one point with a guy who published a magazine for firefighters. “This will be the new thing,” George told everybody, “specialty magazines that cater to firemen, or law enforcement, or plumbers, or the military.” He was way ahead of that trend.
In addition to being a photographer, George had aspirations as a filmmaker too, and he really liked the idea of putting me on the screen. He made short films of me training or going to school or interacting with other people and would show them to acquaintances and say, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to put this guy in a movie?” He started trying to raise money for a documentary on bodybuilding to build on the book’s success.
Charles Gaines, meanwhile, was making friends in Hollywood. He introduced me to Bob Rafelson, the director of Five Easy Pieces, who had bought the movie rights to Stay Hungry. While Charles was working with George on the Pumping Iron book project, he also started collaborating with Rafelson on the screenplay. I met Rafelson when Charles brought him to watch me work out on Venice Beach. Bob’s wife, Toby, came along and took a bunch of pictures of Franco and me training, and she just loved it.
Connecting with Bob Rafelson suddenly swept me up into a whole different orbit. With him came a lot of the “New Hollywood” crowd: actor Jack Nicholson and director Roman Polanski, who were in the process of making Chinatown; as well as actors Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, who had made Easy Rider with Rafelson’s producer Bert Schneider.
Gaines and Butler were pushing Rafelson to cast me in Stay Hungry. There was a main part for a bodybuilder named Joe Santo. Rafelson was a long way from making up his mind, but I remember sitting hypnotized in my apartment one night in early 1974 listening to him talk about what that would mean for me. “If we did this movie, I want you to know it will be a life changer for you. Remember what happened with Jack when he did Five Easy Pieces? Remember what happened to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda when they did Easy Rider? They all became superstars! I have a very good feeling for picking people, so when we do this movie, it will change your life. You won’t be able to go anywhere where people don’t recognize you.”
I was dazzled, of course. One of the hottest directors in Hollywood was talking about making me a star! Meanwhile, Barbara was sitting next to me on the couch staring into space. I could sense the wheels turning. What would this do to our relationship and to me? My career was pulling me away from her. She wanted to settle down, get married, and have me open a health food store. She could see a huge storm coming.
Of course, her instinct was right. My focus was on training, acting, and making sure Rafelson hired me, not on getting married and having a family. But after Bob left, I told Barbara not to worry about what he’d said; it was just the marijuana talking.
I liked getting swept up into a cloud of celebrities. Nicholson’s house was part of a “compound” up on Mulholland Drive next door to Polanski, Warren Beatty, and Marlon Brando. They’d invite me and some of the other bodybuilders up for parties, and sometimes people from that crowd would come to my building and we’d have barbecues on the little patio. It was hilarious: neighbors walking past on the sidewalk couldn’t believe it when they saw who was there. But at the same time, I told myself not to get carried away. I was barely scraping the outside of that world. At that point, I was only a fan of those people.
I was being exposed to a world I didn’t know. It was good to hang out, to watch them, to see how they operated and made decisions, and to hear them talk about mov
ie projects, or building their homes, or building a house on the beach, or girls. I asked about acting and about the secret to becoming a leading man. Nicholson and Beatty, of course, were big proponents of method acting. They talked about how they prepared, how many times they rehearsed a role, and how they were able to live in the moment and improvise. Jack was shooting One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and he described how challenging it was to play a patient in an asylum. Meanwhile, Polanski, who had directed Nicholson in Chinatown, told of the differences between making a movie in Hollywood and making one in Europe: in America, the opportunity was grander, but the moviemaking was more formulaic and less artistic. They all had such enormous passion for their profession.
I thought that maybe down the road I’d get a chance to be in movies with them, in some kind of supporting role. But mostly I was thinking, “What a great promotion for bodybuilding, that this crowd now is accepting the sport.”
—
My Hollywood career might never have taken off if not for a chain of events that started with Franco and me organizing a bodybuilding competition in Los Angeles that summer. I was still focused on wanting to see bodybuilding go mainstream. It frustrated me that bodybuilding shows were never advertised to the general public. That seemed totally wrong. I mean, what did we have to hide? People complained that reporters were always negative about bodybuilding and wrote stupid stories. Well, that was true, but who was talking to the press? Had anyone ever sat down and explained what we were doing? So Franco and I decided that if bodybuilding in LA was ever going to break out of its little shell, we had to promote it ourselves. We rented a big auditorium downtown and arranged the rights to host the Mr. International competition for 1974.
There were little signs that the time was right to do this. Lots of actors were starting to work out at Gold’s. Gary Busey came regularly. Isaac Hayes, who’d won an Oscar for writing the Shaft theme song, would pull up in his Rolls every day and train. Up till then, the only actors working out in public were ones who reinforced the gay stereotype about bodybuilding. Actors like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson were muscular and had terrific bodies onscreen. They were working out, but in secret. Whenever somebody commented on their muscles, they’d say, “I was born this way.” But that was starting to change, and weight training was becoming more acceptable.
Another positive sign was that more women were turning up at Gold’s—not to ogle the guys but to ask about joining. At first, they weren’t allowed. From a practical standpoint, it would have been hard for Joe Gold to let them in, because there was only one set of toilets and showers. But the real truth was that the guys were not yet ready for it. Bodybuilding was too much of a man’s world. The last thing you wanted was to worry about what you said in the gym. There was a lot of cursing and a lot of man talk. I told Joe that he should include women. I’d seen the benefits in Munich: having women in the gym made us train harder, even if you had to watch your language a little.
Sometimes the women who asked to join were sisters of bodybuilders or girlfriends. Sometimes they were girls who were already working out at the beach. If a woman needed to train for a physical test—to join the police or the fire department, say—Joe would always give special permission. He would tell her, “Come in at seven in the morning when there are fewer guys here, and you can work out. Be my guest; you don’t have to pay anything.”
Joe never made a decision without the bodybuilders’ consent. Should there be a radio playing? Should he carpet the floor? Or would that ruin the dungeon effect? This was a hard-core gym that catered to the hard-core guys. We had endless discussions about letting women join. Finally we agreed to open the membership, but only to the hard-core women who signed a statement that said in effect: “We understand there’s crude language, we understand there are weights dropping on feet and there are injuries, we understand there is only one set of bathrooms, and we will use the bathrooms on the beach.” I wanted bodybuilding to open up completely to women, including women’s championships. At least this was a start, and you could see the interest was there.
We felt bodybuilding contests were never big enough—it was always the same five hundred or one thousand spectators—and it felt very disorganized. Sometimes there was no music or the emcee was bad or the lighting was shitty. No one came to meet us at the airport. Everything was wrong. There were exceptions, like the Mr. World event in Columbus and the Mr. Universe event in London, but most competitions were amateurish. We made a list of everything we wanted to see fixed and started calling people for advice.
Franco and I scheduled our show for August 17. The hall we rented was a grand, old 2,300-seat theater in downtown LA called the Embassy Auditorium. The next thing we did was hire a publicist, Shelley Selover, who had an office right in Venice. When Franco and I went to see her, I doubt that she’d ever given bodybuilding a thought. But after asking a lot of questions and listening for a while, she agreed to take us on. “I can do something with this,” she said. That was an important vote of confidence.
Shelley hooked us up right away with a veteran Sports Illustrated writer named Dick Johnston, who flew over from his home in Hawaii to check out our sport. Shelley coached us carefully before we met. “He wants to make the case to his editors that bodybuilders are athletes, serious athletes, and do a big story,” she said. “You think you can help him with that?” So I went into the interview with all kinds of examples about how if this athlete hadn’t picked bodybuilding, he’d have been a baseball star, and that guy would have been a boxer. They would be athletes anyway, but it happened that bodybuilding was their passion and was where they thought they had the most potential. Dick Johnston liked the idea and arranged to come back to cover our event.
Franco and I really hustled to put together the show. We knew we could never make ends meet with ticket sales alone. We had to pay the airfares for the bodybuilders coming in from around the world, we had to pay the judges, we had to pay for the hall and for advertising and promotion. So we looked for sponsors. Isaac Hayes suggested that we talk to his friend the great boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, who had a foundation. “He’ll be into this,” he told me. “His foundation is really for the underdog, you know? He gives money to inner city kids and minorities. So you just have to explain that as an Austrian in California and a bodybuilder, you’re a minority!” Franco and I thought that was pretty funny, that we should be minorities. Franco was thrilled at the idea of meeting one of the greatest fighters of all time. I was excited too—I remembered seeing Robinson in newsreels as a kid. By 1974, he’d been retired for almost ten years.
When we arrived at his foundation, there were many people in the waiting room. I thought about everybody who must be hitting him up, and how great he was, as an ex-champ, to be spending his time on his foundation.
Finally, it was our turn. Sugar Ray brought us into his office and was incredibly warm. We were in such awe that we didn’t even hear what he said the first few seconds. He took his time and listened to our pitch asking for money to purchase trophies for our event. By the end, he was laughing. It was just so weird, two foreigners trying to run an international championship in bodybuilding in LA. He gave us $2,800 for the trophies—which was a lot in those days. We went out and bought really nice ones with little plaques that said, “Donated by the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation.”
We discovered that people really weren’t negative about bodybuilding. They were open to it, but nobody was talking to them. This was open-minded America, ready to learn something new. Our approach was to educate the people. I had the personality. I knew Gaines’s stories had gotten a good reception. You know how real estate people say “Location, location, location”? Our motto was “Presentation, presentation, presentation.”
As Mr. International drew near, we put up posters headlined THE GREATEST MUSCLE SHOW EVER in YMCAs and gathering places all over town. The poster featured pictures of me (five times Mr. Universe, four times Mr. Olympia), Franco (Mr. Universe, Mr. World), Frank Zane
(Mr. America, Mr. Universe), Lou Ferrigno (Mr. America, Mr. Universe), Serge Nubret (Europe’s greatest bodybuilding star), and Ken Waller (Mr. America, Mr. World).
To my amazement, Shelley not only lined up newspaper interviews but also succeeded at getting me invited onto nationwide talk shows, including The Merv Griffin Show, The Tonight Show, and The Mike Douglas Show. That was when we realized we were right: there was actually an interest here; it wasn’t like we were just imagining it.
Of course, given bodybuilders’ stereotypical image, nobody was going to put me on the air without a preinterview well in advance. I had to go to the studio in the afternoon, hours before the show, so they could check out whether this muscleman could open his mouth and make sense. So I’d chat with the preinterviewer, who after awhile would say, “This is great! Now, can you say all this stuff when you’re under pressure and in front of an audience?”
I would tell him, “Well you know, the interesting thing is, I don’t see the audience. I’m so into it that I don’t see them. So don’t worry; I can block it out.”
“Great, great.”
The first show I did was Merv Griffin. The comedian Shecky Greene was the guest host that day. I sat down, and we exchanged a few lines, and then Shecky went quiet for a beat just looking at me. Then he burst out, “I can’t believe it! You can talk!” That got a big laugh.
When somebody sets the bar that low, you cannot go wrong. Shecky kept complimenting me. He was very funny, and he made me funny as a result. This wasn’t just a boost for me, it was a boost for bodybuilding in America: the viewers were getting to see a bodybuilder who looked normal when he was dressed, who could talk, who had an interesting background and a story to tell. All of sudden the sport had a face and a personality, which made people think, “I didn’t realize these guys are funny! This isn’t weird, it’s great!” I was happy too, because I got to promote Mr. International.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 17