Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

  Doing my homework at the Santa Monica City College library. Schwarzenegger Archive

  On my way to rehab after major knee surgery in 1972, as my girlfriend Barbara Outland and Joe Weider supervise. The bodybuilding championships were just a few months away and I knew I had to bounce back fast. Art Zeller

  I tried to convince my mother to move to America after my father and brother died. Schwarzenegger Archive

  Believe it or not, chess, the brainiest game, has always been part of the scene at Muscle Beach. Here Franco and I square off. Art Zeller

  I’m squatting 500 pounds in preparation for the 1971 Mr. Olympia competition as Franco and Ken Waller stand by to help in case I lose balance or get stuck. Art Zeller

  Going onstage at Madison Square Garden’s Felt Forum to defend my Mr. Olympia crown in 1974. Those are Franco and Frank Zane behind me, and Lou Ferrigno, the wunderkind, in front keeping a close eye. Art Zeller

  Hundreds of fans followed me to my hotel after my Mr. Olympia victory at Madison Square Garden. Albert Busek

  I was getting to know lots of people in Hollywood. Here, drinks on my patio with directors Roman Polanski and Bob Rafelson and friends. Art Zeller

  An advertising photo shoot for a Joe Weider product—the spring-loaded exercise bar I’m holding—gets filmed for the Pumping Iron documentary. George Butler / Contact Press Images © 1975

  Pumping Iron creators Charles Gaines and George Butler relax with me in South Africa in 1975. George Butler / Contact Press Images © 1975

  I work with a New York City ballet teacher to perfect my posing. George Butler / Contact Press Images © 1977

  On Muscle Beach, Franco and I lived the life we’d dreamed about as adolescents. George Butler / Contact Press Images © 1973

  Fooling around in the pool with Nastassja Kinski and others at the home of Frances Schoenberger of the Hollywood Foreign Press. Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images

  I went to visit Andy Warhol at The Factory, his famous studio in Midtown Manhattan. Fred W. McDarrah / Getty Images

  I posed for a standing-room-only crowd at the Whitney Museum in New York. That’s Candice Bergen at the foot of the podium, taking photos for the Today show. Schwarzenegger Archive

  With my idol Muhammad Ali in New Orleans 1978, after he beat Leon Spinks for his third world heavyweight title. Schwarzenegger Archive

  Meeting Senator Teddy Kennedy the night before the 7th Annual RFK Pro Celebrity Tennis Tournament. (Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s widow, is on Teddy’s right.) A few minutes later, Tom Brokaw introduced me to Maria. Ron Galella / Getty Images

  After my turn on the courts, I sat with Maria and her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, at the RFK Pro Celebrity Tennis Tournament. Ron Galella / Getty Images

  Maria, Franco, and I added to the local color on a Venice, California, sidewalk. Albert Busek

  I was so lovestruck that I let Maria and her friend Bonnie Reiss commandeer my Jeep during the 1980 Teddy for President campaign. Schwarzenegger Archive

  Joe Gold ran the best gym in America for bodybuilders. Albert Busek

  Peter Brenner

  When production of Conan the Barbarian got delayed, I trained all-out and shocked the bodybuilding world by coming out of retirement to win a record sixth Mr. Olympia title at the Sydney Opera House. Neal Nordlinger

  CHAPTER 10

  Stay Hungry

  BOB RAFELSON WAS STAYING at director-producer Francis Ford Coppola’s apartment in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel facing Central Park, and the day before the Mr. Olympia contest, he brought me up to see it. I didn’t know an apartment could be like that. It was as big as a house. It made quite an impression. I’d stayed only at Holiday Inns and Ramadas. And to have such a place and not even be there! Coppola was using it just for friends to stay in. The apartment had beautiful paintings and furniture, plus full hotel services day and night. I was amazed by his library of videotapes: an entire wall of movies categorized by genre—musical, action, drama, comedy, history, prehistoric, animated, and so on.

  The next night at the book party, Rafelson’s friends were all hanging out and watching me. Bob had brought them because he wanted to know what they thought. Did they like my personality? Would I be good for his movie?

  Gaines and Butler had been pushing all along for him to cast me in the lead bodybuilder role in Stay Hungry. I’d been pushing too. “Where else are you going to find a body like this?” I asked him. “Looking for a professional actor is bullshit! I can do all that stuff! I’m sure I can act if you direct me right.” The plot of the movie sounded like fun the way that Charles described it to me. He’d set the story in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, where he grew up. The hero, Craig Blake, is a young southern aristocrat who has inherited a lot of money and needs to find himself. He’s stuck in the country club set, and he’s working as the front man for crooked developers who are secretly trying to take over a block of downtown. One of the businesses they need to buy out is a bodybuilding gym.

  The minute Craig walks into the gym, his world starts to change. There’s a pretty receptionist he likes, a country girl named Mary Tate Farnsworth. And he becomes fascinated by the bodybuilding scene. The lead bodybuilder, Joe Santo, is a Native American training for the Mr. Universe contest. He’s a playful, funny guy who sometimes works out in a Batman costume. Meeting him and the other bodybuilders inspires the hero, and he starts to buy into Joe Santo’s philosophy: “You can’t grow without burning. I don’t like to be too comfortable. I like to stay hungry.” Once Craig gets involved with the people at the gym, he realizes that he can’t sell them out, and the plot takes off from there.

  Rafelson had already hired his friend Jeff Bridges as Craig—which was very exciting because Bridges was a hot new talent who had starred in The Last Picture Show and Clint Eastwood’s new movie Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Charles thought I would be perfect as Joe Santo, and changed the character from an American Indian to an Austrian.

  Maybe it was seeing me in the television skit with Art Carney and Lucille Ball that finally caused Rafelson to make up his mind. He called me after Happy Anniversary and Goodbye aired in late October and told me the part was mine. “You’re the only one who has the body and the personality,” he said. “But before you start to celebrate, we’ve got to get together tomorrow and talk.”

  When we sat down at Zucky’s in Santa Monica the next day for lunch, Bob was all business. I’d never seen him in movie-director mode. He took charge of the conversation, and he had a lot to say. “I want you to play this lead role in the film, but I’m not going to give it to you,” he began. “You have to earn it. Right now I feel you are not capable of being in front of the camera and selling all the different beats that I need.” I didn’t know what a beat was, but as he continued, I began to catch on.

  “Most people think of a bodybuilder as a guy who will walk into a room and crash into everything and break it. When he talks, it’ll be rough talk.

  “But I bought the book partly because this guy, besides being powerful, is sensitive. You’ll see him lifting hundreds of pounds of weight, but in the next scene, he might pick up a glass and say, ‘Do you know what this is? This is Baccarat crystal. Look how gorgeous it is, how delicate it is.’ That’s just one example. He loves music. He plays the fiddle. He can get off on the quality of a guitar. He has a sensitivity and intuition that are almost like a woman’s. That’s what makes the character; he’s able to shift gears. That’s very hard to pull off.” I made a mental note: I would have to take a few fiddle lessons.

  “For instance,” Bob was saying, “you’ve told me that bodybuilding is an art. But I want you to be able to sit with the leading lady, and when she says, ‘Wow, look at your calves!’ and say, ‘Well, the calf is a very important body part. To win the competition, you cannot just have a blob of muscle there. It needs to be a heart shape; an inverted heart shape. See? And the measurements of the calf and the upper arm and the neck all have to be the same. It goes back to the Greeks. When you see Greek
sculptures, they are beautifully proportioned—not just big biceps but also big shoulders and calves.’ ”

  Bob said he wanted me to be able to explain all that not as a bodybuilder would explain it, but with feeling, more like an artist or art historian. “And you have to do it on camera. I’ve heard you talk like this sometimes, but can you pull it off when I say, ‘Action’? Can you pull it off when I do the close-up, and the cross-angle shot, and the master shot, and the top shot? Can you stay in character for that, and then snap into the same character the next day when the script calls for you to do a wild training session where you and the other guys bounce around with huge weights? That’s what makes this part unique.”

  He wasn’t finished with his list of requirements.

  “Also, if you’re Joe Santo, you have to deal with the southern country club scene, where they have big parties and where all these silly people are drunk all the time. Everything you have you’ve earned through hard work. Now here’s this new acquaintance, Craig Blake, who inherited a lot of money, walking around in a nice suit, and he wants to be your friend. How do you feel about that?

  “I think you can learn to do all this. But I want you to take acting classes before we shoot.”

  Bob must have been expecting me to put up a fight because he seemed surprised when I agreed. I was excited. Not only was somebody finally explaining to me what movie acting was actually about, but also he was making it a challenge. I wasn’t being hired just because he’d watched me win Mr. Olympia and I got along with his movie-star friends. I had to earn it, which was what I liked to do.

  Bob had another condition, and this one was harder: he wanted me to cut down to 210 pounds from 240. “The camera makes the body look bigger,” he explained, “and I don’t want you to overwhelm the other actors with your size. You can weigh two-ten and still sell the idea of being Mr. Universe.”

  This was a big request. I knew that the only way I could get down to 210 was to let go of my vision of myself as the world’s most muscular guy. I couldn’t have it both ways. So I was forced to make the decision I’d been leaning toward anyway: to retire from competition. I’d been bodybuilding for twelve years already, and the philosophy of the movie spoke to me. I liked the idea of staying hungry in life and never staying in one place. When I was ten, I wanted to be good enough at something to be recognized in the world. Now I wanted to be good enough at something else to be recognized again, and even bigger than before.

  The teacher Rafelson sent me to, Eric Morris, had been Jack Nicholson’s acting coach. He had an LA studio, and I still remember the address and phone number by heart because I sent so many people to him in the following years. As you walked into the studio, there was a sign next to the entrance that read DON’T ACT. I wondered about that the first time I saw it. But the production company was paying for three months of private lessons and classes, and I was ready to give it a chance.

  Morris turned out to be a skinny guy in his late thirties, with shaggy blond hair and penetrating eyes. His full motto was “Don’t act. Only be real.” He was always talking with great enthusiasm about the discoveries he’d made and what was missing from other theories of acting. I didn’t know any other theories of acting. But I did know that the world he opened up to me was mind blowing.

  It was the first time I’d heard anybody articulate ideas about the emotions: intimidation, inferiority, superiority, embarrassment, encouragement, comfort, discomfort. A whole new world of language appeared.

  It was like going into the plumbing business and suddenly hearing about parts and tools that you need, and you say to yourself, “I don’t even know how to spell the things we are talking about here.” It was like a whole new sea of words that you’re hearing over and over until you finally ask, “What does that mean?”

  It was broadening my horizons to things that I’d ignored. In competition, I’d always walled off emotions. You have to keep your feelings under control or you can be knocked offtrack. Women always talked about emotions, but I considered it silly talk. It did not fit into my plan. Not that I usually admitted this to them, because it did not make them happy—instead I’d half listen and just say, “Yeah, I understand.” Acting was just the opposite. You had to let things affect you and keep your defenses down because that was how you became a better actor.

  If you had to enact an emotion in a scene, Morris would get you to go back and connect to some sense memory. Let’s say that you associated the smell of coffee brewing with a time when you were six years old and your mother was making coffee, probably not for you but maybe for your dad. You visualized being in the kitchen, the way it looked with your father and mother there, and that got you into a certain emotional state. It was the smell of coffee that took you there. Or the smell of a rose: maybe the first time you got flowers for some girlfriend. You could see her in front of you, how she smiled, how she kissed, and that got you into a certain mood also. Or if you heard sixties rock ’n’ roll, that took you back to a time when somebody was playing the radio in the gym while you lifted. Morris was trying to help me identify the triggers for specific emotions I might need in Stay Hungry. He’d say, “When you were competing and winning, were you exhilarated, over-the-top excited? Maybe we can use that in a scene.”

  I had to explain that actually I was not especially exhilarated when I won, because to me, winning was a given. It was part of the job. I had an obligation to win. So I did not feel “Yeah! I won!” Instead I’d say to myself, “Okay, did that. Let’s move on to the next competition.”

  I said that I always found surprises much more exhilarating. If I passed all my classes at UCLA, I would walk out ecstatic because even though I expected to pass, it was still a pleasant surprise. Or going to a Christmas party and getting an unexpected gift. I explained that to him. Then Morris would simply say, “Okay, let’s go back to those moments.”

  He probed and probed. When did I feel in love? When did I feel excluded? How did I feel when I left home? How did I feel when my parents told me it was time to start paying them Kostgeld—food money—if I wanted to keep living in their house? Americans don’t usually do that, so how did it feel? He would latch onto different things until he found the emotion.

  I hated it at first. I told him, “I have not dealt with any of this stuff that you are talking about until now. It’s not the way I live.” He didn’t believe a word of it. “You sell yourself as being the kind of guy who doesn’t experience emotion, but don’t delude yourself. Not paying attention to it or dismissing it doesn’t mean that it is not part of you. You actually have the emotion because I see it in your eyes when you say certain things. You can’t fool a fooler.”

  He was teaching me to access all the emotions that were stored in my mind. “Everyone has them,” he said. “The trick in acting is to summon them up in the quickest way. Why do you think certain actors can cry when they want? Not just mechanical crying, but real crying, where your whole face contracts and your lip quivers. It means that the actor can recall something very, very upsetting very quickly. And it’s very important for the director to capture that in the first two takes, because the actor can’t do it again and again without it becoming mechanical. You can’t mess with the mind that often,” he said. “But I’m not worried about that with Bob Rafelson because he is definitely the right director. He’s very much aware of all this.”

  There is a scene in Five Easy Pieces where Jack Nicholson cries. Eric told me how Rafelson stopped filming and talked to Nicholson for two hours until he saw him getting choked up. They were talking about something in his life, too quietly for the other people on the set to hear. Then Bob announced, “Great, Jack, stay with that,” the other actors moved in, they shot the scene, and he cried. “Bob got him into that,” Eric said. “Sometimes it’s difficult, sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it doesn’t happen and then you have to try another day.

  “What I’m trying to do is give you the tools,” he continued. “Maybe you didn’t cry when your brother died, y
ou didn’t cry when your dad died. But is it upsetting to you that here you are, they died, and now you and your mother are left alone?” He was trying every angle. But we hit a wall there. I couldn’t figure it out. Nothing worked. We decided that crying on cue had to wait.

  Besides the private lessons, I also took his group classes three nights a week from seven to eleven. It was twenty people, and you all worked on scenes or did exercises, and some of it was fun. He would pick a topic like, say, anger and frustration. “I want everyone to talk about it. What makes you frustrated?” For the first hour, we’d all tell stories of when we were angry and frustrated. Next he’d say, “Good. Let’s save that emotion. Now somebody give me some lines, make up some lines that show that frustration.” We would ad-lib frustration. The next class might revolve around reading from a script cold, or auditioning, and on and on.

  Those nights were a lot less fun when Morris would take stuff I’d told him in private lessons and trot it out in front of the whole acting class. It was his way of going for the raw nerve. He didn’t hesitate to push me or embarrass me. I might be reading lines we’d rehearsed from the Stay Hungry script, and he’d interrupt me and say, “What the fuck was that? Really, that’s all you have in you? This afternoon when you and I did it, I felt goose bumps. Now I feel no goose bumps. Now I feel like you’re trying to do a show or you’re trying to do the Arnold shtick here. This is not Arnold shtick. This is something totally different. Do it over.”