The private lessons all focused in one way or another on the script. Morris told me, “We’re going to go through it line by line and analyze even the scenes that have nothing to do with you, because you’ll see, in fact, that they do. We’ve got to figure out why you are in the South; what it means when you meet the country club people who are throwing around their inherited money and having their cocktails at night. We’ve got to understand the weather, and the bodybuilding gym, and the crooks who are ripping off everyone.” So we worked through the script page by page, line by line. We would talk about each scene, and I’d start learning the dialogue, and then we’d analyze it again. I’d do the dialogue for him and then again in the class at night in front of the twenty people—he’d assign one of the girls to read the lines of Mary Tate.
Then he’d bring me to read for Bob Rafelson. I got to see the parade of actors, men and women, passing through Bob’s office auditioning for the other parts. In case I was wondering, that reminded me how big a deal this movie was. Rafelson made a point of showing me the ropes and teaching me lessons that went beyond just acting. He was always explaining why he did things. “I picked this guy because he looked like a country club boy,” and “We’re shooting in Alabama because in California we’d never get lush green landscape and oyster bars and the backdrop we need to make the story authentic.”
When he picked Sally Field to play Mary Tate, he wanted to make that a big teaching point. “You see?” he said. “I’ve been auditioning all these girls, and the one who is actually the best is the Flying Nun!”
“What is the flying nun?” I asked.
He had to back up and explain he meant Sally Field, and that everybody knew her as the flying nun because she’d played the part of Sister Bertrille for years on a TV sitcom. After we got that straight, he had a bigger point to make. “Everybody thinks they know what a girl has to do to get the part,” he said. “The perception is that you get the job by banging the director. And there were girls with big tits and great hair and great bodies who came in and offered that to me. But in the end the Flying Nun got the job. She doesn’t have big tits, she doesn’t have a curvaceous body, she didn’t offer to fuck me, but she has what I needed most in this part, which is talent. She was a serious actor, and when she came in and performed, I was blown away.”
Because this was my first big movie and I wasn’t an actor by profession, Bob also felt it would be good for me to hang out and see movies actually being made. So he called a few sets to arrange for me to come by to watch for an hour. It was good to experience how silent it gets on the set when they say, “We’re rolling.” It was good to learn that “action” doesn’t necessarily mean action—the actors still might be adjusting and asking, “What’s my first line?”
This was Bob’s way of teaching me that, yes, there will be thirteen takes, and, yes, this is normal, but just remember only one will be seen. So don’t worry when I say for the thirteenth time, “Let’s do it again.” No one will know. And don’t worry if you cough in the middle of a scene, he told me. “I’d cut around it, I’d cover it from this angle and that angle.”
The more I hung out on the set, the more comfortable I felt.
After he cast Sally Field, Bob became especially fanatic about the need for me to lose weight. She’s so petite he worried that if I didn’t slim down, I’d make her look like a shrimp. “When we get to Birmingham, if I put you on a scale the day before shooting and you’re not two hundred ten, you are not in the picture,” he threatened. There was no Eric Morris class for a star bodybuilder to get rid of muscle, so I was on my own. First I had to redo myself mentally—let go of the 250-pound image of Mr. Olympia that was in my head. I started visualizing myself instead as lean and athletic. And all of a sudden what I saw in the mirror no longer fit. Seeing that helped kill my appetite for all the protein shakes and all the extra steak and chicken I was used to. I pictured myself as a runner rather than a lifter, and changed around my whole training regimen to emphasize running, bicycling, and swimming rather than weights.
All through the winter, the pounds came off, and I was pleased. But at the same time, my life was getting too intense. I was working on my mail-order business and on my acting classes, going to college, training for three hours a day, and doing construction. It was a lot to juggle. I often felt overwhelmed and started asking myself, “How do I keep it all together? How do I not think about the next thing while I’m still doing this thing? How can I unplug?”
Transcendental meditation was popular with people on the beach in Venice. There was one guy down there I liked: a skinny guy who was into yoga; kind of the opposite of me. We would always chat, and eventually I found out that he was a Transcendental Meditation instructor. He invited me to one of his classes at this center near UCLA. There was a little bit of hokum involved: you had to bring a piece of fruit and a handkerchief and perform these little rituals. But I paid no attention to that. Hearing them talk about the need to disconnect and refresh the mind was like a revelation. “Arnold, you’re an idiot,” I told myself. “You spend all this time on your body, but you never think about your mind, how to make it sharper and relieve the stress. When you have muscle cramps, you have to do more stretching, take a Jacuzzi, put on the ice packs, take more minerals. So why aren’t you thinking that the mind also can have a problem? It’s overstressed, or it’s tired, it’s bored, it’s fatigued, it’s about to blow up—let’s learn tools for that.”
They gave me a mantra and taught me to use a twenty-minute meditation session to get to a place where you don’t think. They taught how to disconnect the mind, so that you don’t hear the clock ticking in the background or people talking. If you can do this for even a few seconds, it already has a positive effect. The more you can prolong that period, the better it is.
In the middle of all this, Barbara was going through changes too. She and Franco’s wife, Anita, signed up for EST (Erhard Seminars Training), a popular self-help seminar. They asked if we wanted to come, but Franco and I felt we didn’t need it. We knew where we were going. We knew what we wanted. We had control over our lives, which is what EST claimed to teach.
As a matter of fact, the gimmick in the opening session was that no one could leave the room to go to the bathroom. The idea was if you cannot even control your own piss, how are you ever going to get control over yourself or have control over anybody else around you?
I was amazed that people would pay for that! Still, if Barbara and Anita wanted to try it, I didn’t mind.
Barbara and Anita were all sunny and positive when they came home after the first weekend they went. Franco and I were thinking that maybe we should go to EST too. But the second weekend, something happened that sent Barbara and Anita both off the deep end. They came back all angry and negative, thinking everything was wrong with their lives and ready to blame everybody around them for it. Barbara was furious with her father. She was the third of three daughters, and she thought he treated her like the son he never had. I gave her hell for that. I really liked her father and wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand. To me there was no indication that he treated her like a boy. Then she accused me of being on a power trip and not paying enough attention to her.
We usually got along very well and had lived together for more than three years. But she was a normal person who wanted normal things, and there was nothing normal about me. My drive was not normal. My vision of where I wanted to go in life was not normal. The whole idea of a conventional existence was like Kryptonite to me. When Barbara saw me moving away from bodybuilding and into acting, I think she realized we had no future. Right after I left for Alabama to start shooting Stay Hungry, she moved out.
I felt really sad about the whole thing. Barbara was part of my life. I’d developed feelings I’d never had. The comfort of being with someone and sharing our lives, so I wasn’t just putting up my own pictures on the wall but sharing the wall space and choosing the furniture and rugs together. Feeling included in her family
was comforting and wonderful. We’d been a unit, and all of sudden it was ripped apart. I struggled to understand. I thought at first that maybe Bob Rafelson had told her, “I need Arnold to get more sensitive. I need to see him cry. If you want to help our movie, move out and fuck him up bad.” Otherwise it seemed crazy that she split.
I knew I was losing something valuable. My emotions told me we should stay together, while rationally I could see her point. It wouldn’t work in the long run. Barbara wanted to settle down, and I needed to be free to change and grow. The years with Barbara taught me a great lesson: how having a good relationship can enrich your life.
—
Birmingham turned out to be a small industrial city about the size of Graz, and the shooting of Stay Hungry was the biggest excitement in town. We got there in April 1975, and within a few weeks, you could already feel the sticky summer heat. I loved it there. We shot for three months and got to know the city very well, all the bars and oyster bars and restaurants. The hotel the cast stayed at was great. The people were extraordinarily friendly, and, of course, Charles Gaines was a native son, so we were invited to a lot of parties. Having just broken up with Barbara, I was glad to spend some time away from home.
As soon as I started rehearsing with Sally Field, I saw what Rafelson had been talking about. She was in total command of her craft, and within seconds she could cry or get angry or whatever was required. She was fun to be around too, always bubbly and full of energy. I was grateful to her and to Jeff Bridges for helping me learn. Jeff was very low-key, a little bit of a hippie, into playing his guitar, a comfortable person to hang out with, and very, very patient. I worked hard holding up my end of the deal. I invited other cast members to critique my acting, and I made Jeff promise to tell me what he really thought.
At first it was hard not to take criticisms personally. But Rafelson had warned me that changing careers would be tough. In this world, I wasn’t number one in the universe; I was just another aspiring actor. He was right. I had to surrender my pride and tell myself, “Okay, you’re starting again. You’re nothing here. You’re just a beginner. You’re just a little punk around these other actors.”
Yet I liked the fact that a movie is the effort of dozens of people. You need the people around you for you to look good, whereas bodybuilding is much more me oriented. You have your training partner, of course, but in competition you always want to throw a little shit on the other diamonds to make sure you’re the only one who sparkles. I was ready to get away from that.
In bodybuilding, you try to suppress your emotions and march forward with determination. In acting, it’s the opposite. You look for the sense memories that would serve as emotional keys. To do that, you have to strip away the calluses. It takes a lot of work. I’d remember the flowers I picked for my mother for Mother’s Day, which would remind me of being at home, being part of the family. Or I’d tap into my anger at Joe Weider for reneging on a promise to pay for something. Or I’d think back to when my father didn’t believe in me and said, “Why don’t you do something useful? Go chop some wood.” To live your life as an actor, you can’t be afraid of someone stirring up your emotions. You have to take the risk. Sometimes you’ll be confused, sometimes you’ll cry, but that will make you a better actor.
I could tell that Bob Rafelson was happy with the way things were going because after the first two or three weeks, he stopped checking my weight. I was already back up to 215 by the time we shot the Mr. Universe pose-off. That sequence comes near the film’s end: the bodybuilders in the Mr. Universe contest suspect Joe Santo of having stolen the prize money, and they all spill out onto the Birmingham streets. Once the real bad guy is caught, the bodybuilders notice that they’ve attracted a crowd and spontaneously start a posing exhibition. The crowd gets so into it that soon everybody’s posing in this big, happy climax. Shooting the scene was just like that: the extras and the onlookers in Birmingham got mixed up, and everybody was laughing and doing muscle poses, and Rafelson was on his megaphone shouting, “Please do not touch the bodybuilders.”
George Butler came to Alabama in the middle of all this to turn all my new plans upside down. He’d always talked about turning Pumping Iron into a documentary, but he wasn’t able to raise the money while they were finishing the book. Now things had changed. With all the publicity around Mr. Olympia, the book had become a surprise bestseller. And because I was making a movie with Bob Rafelson, the money was easier to raise. Also, George’s wife, Victoria, was a smart investor, and as long as I was in the film, she was willing to put in money.
“So we can do it!” he announced when we sat down to talk. His idea was to make the documentary hinge on me competing in the next Mr. Olympia contest, which was scheduled for November in Pretoria, South Africa. I had to remind him that I’d shifted my goal to acting and completely changed my training routine. “I’m retired,” I said. “Look, I’ve taken off all this muscle.” The conversation grew pretty heated.
“Well, there is no Pumping Iron if you’re not in it,” George insisted. “The other guys can’t carry the movie with their personalities. You’re really the only one in bodybuilding who brings life to the sport. I need you to be in it. Otherwise I can’t raise the money.” Then he claimed that working on the project would be good for my acting career.
“I don’t need it for my career,” I said. “You can’t get any better than this movie with Bob Rafelson. As soon as I go back, I want to continue with my acting—that’s where the opportunity is.”
George tried playing another card: “We’re prepared to pay you fifty thousand dollars to do this.” This was a number he’d thrown around already the previous year. Back then it sounded good because I was just buying the apartment building in Santa Monica and taking on a lot of debt. And I still liked the idea of that kind of money coming in. At this moment, however, it rubbed me the wrong way. “I don’t really want to go back into competition,” I said.
I didn’t owe George anything, but there was a lot to sort out. He was the best promoter I’d ever met, and I knew he would throw himself into this project. A Pumping Iron film by him would be an opportunity, maybe a great opportunity, to present bodybuilding as a sport to people who normally would never pay any attention. I felt that I couldn’t turn my back on bodybuilding. So much of my life was wrapped up in it and so many friends.
There were business dimensions to think about too. Backstage in Columbus, Ohio, years before, I’d told promoter Jim Lorimer that I wanted to partner with him someday to produce bodybuilding events. After my last Mr. Olympia tournament, I’d called him. “Remember how I said when I retired from competition I’d get in touch?” I asked. We agreed to go into business together, and we were putting together a bid with other investors he knew to make Columbus the home of future bodybuilding competitions. If anyone had the business skill and the connections to bring bodybuilding into the heartland and the American sports mainstream, it was Jim. Of course I still had the Arnold mail-order business, which was now bringing in $4,000 a year and growing.
And I was still attached to Joe Weider. Joe and I had battled—for example, at times he’d gotten mad when I signed up for a competition that he didn’t sponsor. But there was always that father-and-son bond. Joe adjusted to my movie career by covering the filming of Stay Hungry in his magazines. All the fans knew I was retiring, and the way he framed it was “Arnold is going into this other arena, and he is going to carry bodybuilding with him no matter what movie he does, so let’s follow him and support him.” When he realized I was serious about acting, Joe gave up gracefully on the dream of having me take over his business. But he would have freaked if he’d thought he would totally lose me, because I was the goose that laid the golden egg.
Finally, George convinced me to compete again. I looked at what I wanted to accomplish. Besides being the bodybuilding champion I was by now convinced that bodybuilding itself was ready for a big push. George and Charles had started the ball rolling with their articles and
book. The seminars I taught were full. Working with reporters, I’d made the media a support system for whatever I wanted to sell. I felt it was my responsibility, as the bodybuilder with personality and the large following, to carry that on. I shouldn’t think only about my own career but also about the big picture: the need for fitness in the world and how weight training could make you a better tennis or football or soccer player. And we could make bodybuilding fun.
A Pumping Iron film could have a huge impact. Documentaries such as Marjoe, about an evangelist named Marjoe Gortner, and The Endless Summer, about two young surfers traveling the world in search of the perfect wave, were very hip at that point. The films would move from city to city, using money from the last showing to finance the next screening.
I told George that to get my body back into shape for competition was like turning the Titanic. Mechanically, it was an easy decision; I knew all the training steps I would have to take. But it was much harder to buy into psychologically. I’d deprogrammed myself from being onstage in competition and from needing that glory. Now starring in movies was the motivating thing. That shift had involved months of adjustment. So to go back now was a real challenge. How would I convince myself again that that body was the most important thing?
Still, I thought I would be able to win. I’d have to increase from 210 pounds back to competition weight, but I’d done something like this before, after my knee surgery in 1972. My left thigh atrophied from twenty-eight inches down to twenty-two or twenty-three, yet I’d built it back up bigger than ever in time for Mr. Olympia that year. My theory was that muscle cells, like fat cells, have a memory, so they can grow back quickly to where they were. There was some uncharted territory, of course. I would want to perform even better than I did at Madison Square Garden, so should I come all the way back to 240 pounds, or should I come in leaner? Whatever the answer, I thought it was doable.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 20