The idea of constantly having Butler’s cameras on me while I trained was tempting. You always want to look better when the camera’s on you, so it’s a great motivator. I thought that maybe the camera crew would eventually feel like just part of the woodwork, and I’d no longer be self-conscious around it— and that would be great for my acting career.
For at least a week, I’d sit in the hotel weighing the pros and cons, and then I’d go shoot another scene of Stay Hungry. Then I’d go back and think about it some more, and hang out and talk to other people. Charles Gaines had decided to move on to other writing projects and not work on the documentary with George. He thought my returning to competition would be a mistake. “You are on your acting mission now,” he told me. “You need to show the community that you’re serious about it. After this movie, they’ll want to see you continue with acting classes with talented actors and directors. But if now all of a sudden you’re competing again, it’ll look like you have one foot in and one foot out so that you can go back to bodybuilding in case acting doesn’t work. Is that the impression you want to give?”
All my life, my goals had been simple and linear, like building up a muscle with hundreds of thousands of reps. But this situation wasn’t simple at all. Yes, I had committed 100 percent to becoming a lean and athletic-looking actor—how could I undo that and refocus myself on winning Mr. Olympia again? I knew the way my mind worked, and that to accomplish anything, I had to buy in completely. The goal had to be something that made total sense and that I could look forward to every day, not just something I was doing for money or some other arbitrary reason, because then it wouldn’t work.
In the end I realized I had to think about the problem a different way. It could not be solved from a purely selfish point of view. I felt that even though I was on the trajectory to launch an acting career, I owed too much to bodybuilding to reject it. So I had to do Pumping Iron and compete for Mr. Olympia again—not for myself, but to help promote bodybuilding. I would pursue my acting career at the same time, and if my actions were confusing to people like Charles, I’d just have to explain.
—
A month after I got back from Alabama, my friends threw a twenty-eighth birthday party for me at Jack Nicholson’s house. The organizer was Helena Kallianiotes, who looked after his property and who had a small part in Stay Hungry. She was a dancer and understood the hard training and dedication involved in bodybuilding. In Birmingham, she’d become a good friend, helping me rehearse and showing me around the oyster bars. Later, when I wrote Arnold’s Bodyshaping for Women, Helen was the first person I consulted to get more into a woman’s mind about training.
The party was a great success. Many people from Hollywood came, as well as my friends from Venice Beach—this amazing mix of actors, bodybuilders, weight lifters, karate guys, and writers, plus visitors from New York. There were about two hundred altogether. For me, this was heaven because I could introduce myself to so many new people.
I got to know Nicholson, Beatty, and the rest of the Mulholland Drive crowd a little better now that I was back. They were so hot in those days, with movies like Chinatown, The Parallax View, and Shampoo. They were on the covers of magazines, they went to the trendiest nightclubs. They were always together, and in winter, the whole clique would fly to Gstaad, Switzerland, to ski. I was not inside enough to be partying with them all the time, but I did get exposed to how stars at that level lived and operated, what they were into, and how they moved around, and it inspired me to be there myself in a few years.
Jack Nicholson was very casual and low-key. You would always see him with his Hawaiian shirt, shorts or long pants, sunglasses, and disheveled hair. He owned the most expensive Mercedes, a maroon 600 Pullman, with all-leather interior and extraordinary woodwork. The person who actually used this car was not Jack but Helena. Jack himself drove a Volkswagen Beetle, and that was his shtick: “I’m so rich that I’m going to sell myself like an ordinary person. I’m not into money at all.” He would drive his little Beetle to the studio lot on the way to a media interview or a discussion about a film. The guard at the gate would say, “Oh, Mr. Nicholson, of course. Your parking spot is right over there,” and Jack would putt-putt in as if the car could barely get there. It was genuine. He was more comfortable in the VW than in the Mercedes. I would have loved the Mercedes.
A photographer friend from New York visited and took me to Warren Beatty’s house on the beach. Warren wanted the photographer to see the plans for the new house he was building on Mulholland Drive. Beatty was famous for never making up his mind and debating every decision for thousands of hours. He was accomplishing a lot: he’d recently starred in The Parallax View directed by Alan Pakula, and was cowriting and starring in Shampoo, and was directing scenes for the Russian Revolution movie that eventually became Reds. But hearing him talk, you wondered how he got anything done at all. I thought this was not the way I would operate if I were at that level. But I was also learning that born actors are always a little artsy and strange. You can identify the type. When you hang out with businessmen, they act like businessmen. Politicians act like politicians. These guys were entertainers, and they acted like entertainers. They were Hollywood. It was a different thing.
The one who did not fit this picture was Clint Eastwood. The Mulholland Drive bunch liked to go for dinner at Dan Tana’s restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard. They would sit together, and Clint would be there eating at his own table on the other side of the room. I went up to him and introduced myself, and he invited me to sit for a minute and chat. He was a bodybuilding fan and worked out regularly himself. He wore a herringbone tweed jacket, very similar to the one he’d worn in his 1971 movie Dirty Harry. Later I learned it wasn’t just similar, it was the same jacket. Clint was a very frugal guy. After we became friends, he told me that he always kept the clothes from his movies and wore them for years and never bought anything new. (Nowadays, of course, he likes to deck himself out in beautiful clothes. Maybe he still gets them for free.) It made a lot of stars uncomfortable to see a celebrity eating alone. But, in fact, Clint was totally at ease and un-self-conscious.
Costarring in a soon-to-be-released Bob Rafelson movie didn’t get me very far when I tried to find an agent. One guy who approached me was Jack Gilardi, who represented O. J. Simpson, the top running back in the National Football League. O.J. was at the peak of his athletic career, and Gilardi was getting him parts on the side in movies like the disaster flick The Towering Inferno. The studios liked to have O.J. in there just for the name, so football fans would go to see the movie. That’s how you manufactured an audience. But it was never the starring role, and nobody who mattered in Hollywood paid attention.
Jack wanted to do the same thing for me. He figured if I was in a movie, then all the bodybuilding fans would buy tickets. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I have a good Western script and a meeting with the producers, and there’s something in here for you.” It was maybe the sixth or seventh most important role.
This was not at all what I had in mind. Whoever represented me had to buy into the big vision. I didn’t want an agent who would say, “I’m sure you must have something in your movie for Arnold, maybe a minor supporting part with a few lines where he can be listed in the cast.” I wanted an agent who would pound the table on my behalf. “This guy has leading-man potential. I want to groom him for that. So if you can offer us one of the top three parts, we’re interested. If not, let’s just move on.”
I couldn’t find anyone at the big agencies who saw it this way. William Morris and International Creative Management were the dominant agencies in town, and that was where I wanted to be because they always got first look at the big movie projects, they handled all the big directors, and they dealt with the top people at the studios. An agent from each place was willing to meet with me because I’d just shot a picture with Bob Rafelson.
They both said the same thing: there were too many obstacles. “Look, you have an accent that
scares people,” said the guy from ICM. “You have a body that’s too big for movies. You have a name that wouldn’t even fit on a movie poster. Everything about you is too strange.” He wasn’t being mean about it, and he offered to help in other ways. “Why don’t you stay in the gym business, and we can develop a chain of franchises? Or we can help you in lining up seminars and speaking engagements. Or with a book or something like that about your story.”
I understand it better today that there’s so much talent all over the world that these big agencies don’t really have the time or the desire to groom someone and nurture him to the top. They’re not in the business of doing that. It has to happen or not happen. But at the time, I felt stung. I knew I had a strange body. I knew my name was hard to spell—but so was Gina Lollobrigida’s! Why should I give up my goal because a couple of Hollywood agents turned me down?
The accent was an issue I could do something about. That summer I added accent removal lessons to my schedule, along with acting classes, college courses, running my businesses, and training for Mr. Olympia. My teacher was Robert Easton, a world-famous dialect coach whose nickname was the Henry Higgins of Hollywood. He was a gigantic guy, six foot three or four, with a big beard, a tremendous voice, and the most precise enunciation. The first time we met, he showed off by speaking English first with a High German accent and then a Low German accent. Next, he shifted into an Austrian accent and then a Swiss accent. He could do English accents, southern accents, and accents from Brooklyn and Boston. Robert had been a character actor mainly in Westerns. His diction was so perfect, I was scared to open my mouth. His house, where I went to practice with him, contained thousands of books about language, and he loved each one. He would say, “Arnold, the book over there on the fourth shelf from the bottom, third book in, pull it out, will you? It’s about the Irish,” and off he would go.
Easton had me practice saying “A fine wine grows on the vine” tens of thousands of times. It was very difficult with the f, the w, and the v together, because the German language doesn’t have a w sound, only the v. When we drink wine, we spell it wein and pronounce it “vine.” So now I had to say “wuh, wuh, wuh, wine. Why. What. When.” Then there was v, as in “We’re going to vuh, vuh, Vegas.” Also, German doesn’t have the same s and z as English: “the sink is made of zinc.” Bob explained it was the harshness of my accent that made people feel threatened, so rather than get rid of it completely, I only had to soften it and be smoother.
Meanwhile, George Butler had launched into filming Pumping Iron like a wild man. He made a big impression on the bodybuilders by darkening the skylights at Gold’s because it was too bright for the movie cameras. He and his crew shot scenes at Venice Beach. They followed Franco to Sardinia on a visit to his childhood village way up in the mountains and shot footage of his humble roots. They came with me to Terminal Island, where I did a posing exhibition and gave weight-training lessons for the prisoners. He lined up a New York City ballet instructor and filmed her coaching Franco and me on our posing in the New York studio of Joanne Woodward, the Academy Award–winning actress and wife of Paul Newman.
Every movie has to have an element of conflict, and George decided that Pumping Iron would focus on the rivalry between Lou Ferrigno and me in the 1975 Mr. Olympia competition, and the suspense of whether or not Lou would knock me off as champion. He was fascinated by Lou’s relationship with his father, and the fact that we were both sons of policemen. The contrasts between us were perfect. George went to shoot Lou working out in his small, dark gym in Brooklyn, the exact opposite of Gold’s. Lou’s personality was dark and brooding, while mine was sunny and beachy. Normally, Lou came to California to train and get a tan before major competitions, but George persuaded him to stay in Brooklyn to heighten the contrast even more. That was fine with me because it would make him even more isolated and easier to beat.
My job, of course, was to play myself. I felt that the way to stand out was not just to talk about bodybuilding, because that would be one-dimensional, but to project a personality. My model was Muhammad Ali. What separated him from other heavyweights wasn’t only his boxing genius—the rope-a-dope, the float like a butterfly, sting like a bee—but that he went his own way, becoming a Muslim, changing his name, sacrificing his championship title by refusing military service. Ali was always willing to say and do memorable and outrageous things. But outrageousness means nothing unless you have the substance to back it up—you can’t get away with it if you’re a loser. It was being a champion combined with outrageousness that made Ali’s whole thing work. My situation was a little different because bodybuilding was a much less popular sport. But the rules for attracting attention were exactly the same.
Coming up with outrageous things to say was easy because I was always thinking them to keep myself entertained. Besides, George was egging me on. During one interview, I made bodybuilding sound sexy by comparing the pump, when you inflate your muscles with oxygenated blood, to an orgasm. I claimed I’d skipped my father’s funeral because it would have interfered with my training. I philosophized that only a few men are born to lead, while the rest of humanity is born to follow, and went from that into discussing history’s great conquerors and dictators. George had the good sense to cut such stuff from the movie, especially my remark that I admired Hitler’s speaking ability, though not what he did with it. I still didn’t know the difference between outlandish and offensive.
It was stressful having the cameras on me all the time: not just when I was working out but also when I was at home, visiting friends, attending business school or acting class, evaluating real estate, reading scripts. Again, I was grateful for Transcendental Meditation, especially because the TM centers wouldn’t allow cameras inside.
Putting the psych on Lou and his father was part of the drama for the movie. I started setting them up that autumn by pretending to be scared.
“I hope that you screw up your training,” I told Lou’s father. “Otherwise he’s going to be very dangerous for me at the Olympia.”
“Oh, we’re not going to screw anything up.”
Lou himself was easy to rattle, like Sergio Oliva, Dennis Tinerino, or any of the bodybuilders who were so inward that they’d didn’t pay that much attention to the world. You could say casually to Lou, “How have you been doing with your abs?”
And he’d say, “Fine. Why? Actually, I feel pretty ripped.”
“Well, it’s . . . No, never mind, don’t worry about it, they look great.” As you said it, he’d start looking at his abs, and then afterward, Lou would pose in the mirror as the insecurity took hold.
You can see in Pumping Iron how I kept teasing him and his dad right up to the moment of the competition. Like when I tell Lou, “I already called my mother and I told her that I won, even though the competition is tomorrow.” Or, on the morning of the event, when he and his parents invite me to breakfast at the hotel, and I say, “I can’t believe this. You ignore me all week, and now you want to have breakfast on the morning of the competition? You are trying to psych me out!” I pretend I’m so scared that my scrambled egg is shaking on my fork. All this was mainly show, so that audiences would walk away from Pumping Iron saying, “Can you believe that guy? He literally talked his opponent into losing.” But it also had its effect on Lou, who came in third as I won the Mr. Olympia title for a record sixth time straight.
CHAPTER 11
Pumping Iron
PUMPING IRON WAS ONLY half finished, and George was out of cash. Rather than give up on the project, he hit on the idea of staging a posing exhibition in a New York City art museum to try to attract wealthy patrons. We weren’t sure whether this idea was stupid or really brilliant. The Whitney Museum of American Art, which was known for unconventional stuff, leaped at the opportunity.
The event was advertised as Articulate Muscle: The Male Body in Art, and the museum stayed open to host it on a Friday night in February 1976. The idea was to present live posing by Frank Zane, Ed Corney, a
nd me next to slides of Greek statues and great works by Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rodin. A panel of professors and artists would add commentary along the way and afterward. This was the first time anyone had a serious public discussion about the meaning of bodybuilding.
George was hoping for a few hundred people, but despite a snowstorm that night, more than 2,500 showed up and the line stretched around the block. The museum’s fourth-floor gallery overflowed with people standing and sitting on every inch of floor space. In the middle was a raised, revolving platform on which we were to take turns posing.
Probably two-thirds of the crowd had never even seen a bodybuilder before. They were from the media and the New York art scene: critics, collectors, patrons, and avant-garde artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe. People magazine, The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Daily News all had reporters there, and actress Candice Bergen was shooting photographs for the Today show. She was a great photographer and of course very beautiful. All of sudden, bodybuilding was hip. We’d made it out of the sports world and the carnival world and into international pop culture.
Frank, Ed, and I were proud to be posing at a real museum. We’d planned our exhibition to be artistic, leaving out hard-core bodybuilding poses like the “most muscular.” We wanted each pose to look like a sculpture, especially because we were on a rotating platform. When my turn came, Charles Gaines narrated as I hit the standard shots and showed off some of my trademark poses, like the three-quarters back shot. Gaines said, “Arnold owns this pose. And in it you see all the muscles in the back; you see the calf; you see all the thigh muscles.” I wrapped up my ten minutes with a perfect simulation of The Thinker by Rodin and got a lot of applause.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 21