Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

  We put on our clothes after we finished posing and went back out and joined the discussion with the art experts. Their talks were fascinating, in a way. For one thing, they showed that you can make a debate out of anything. One professor said this gathering marked “the entry of the highly developed, beautiful masculine form into the sphere of official culture.” The next guy thought that because of Vietnam, America was looking for a new definition of virility, which was us. But then he tied bodybuilding to Aryan racism in 1920s Europe and the rise of the Nazis and warned that we symbolized the possible growth of fascism in the United States. Another professor compared our poses to the worst Victorian-era kitsch. He got booed.

  The whole thing was mainly a publicity stunt, of course. But I thought that talking about the body as sculpture made sense. My Joe Santo character in Stay Hungry described it that way. Art fascinated me, and if the comparison to sculpture attracted outsiders and helped them understand, then great! Anything was better than the stereotype of bodybuilders as stupid, gay, narcissistic, muscle-bound freaks.

  Unfortunately, much less was happening in Hollywood than in New York. Stay Hungry was my first experience in how movie marketing can go wrong. Upon the film’s April release, it received good reviews but fizzled at the box office, playing for ten or twelve weeks before disappearing. The problem was that the publicists and marketing people at United Artists could not figure out how to promote it. Rafelson let me sit in on a meeting before the release, and they were talking about putting posters in gyms. Then when the film came out, they had Sally Field and me on The Mike Douglas Show showing the fifty-year-old host how to exercise. Each time we did something like that, I felt like we were moving in the wrong direction. Stay Hungry should have been sold as a Bob Rafelson picture—“from the director of Five Easy Pieces!”—and they should have let the exercise dimension be a surprise. Then moviegoers would have walked away saying, “That’s Rafelson. He always introduces us to some weird world.”

  Although my instincts told me that the marketing was embarrassing, I didn’t have the sophistication or confidence to say it. I assumed that the studio would have its act together much more. Of course, later on, I realized that studios work by formulas. If you’re even a little outside the box, they don’t know what to do with you.

  Rafelson wasn’t happy either, but the problem with directors when they get a big reputation is that they can be their own worst enemy. They just want to do everything themselves, cut the trailers, do the advertising. You can’t tell them anything. Then the big battles begin, and the fine print in the contract usually dictates who wins. In this case, it was the studio. Bob butted heads with the marketing people but never got anywhere. They thought he was not a team player.

  One good thing did come of it, though. I finally found an agent on the strength of having costarred in Stay Hungry: Larry Kubik, whose small talent agency Film Artists Management also represented Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone. His phone was ringing for me, but with the wrong kinds of offers. He was searching for leading roles where I might fit, and in the meantime, we were turning down lots of junk. Somebody asked me to play a bouncer. They wanted me to play a Nazi officer, a wrestler, a football player, a prisoner. I never took jobs like that because I would say to myself, “This isn’t going to convince anybody that you’re here to be a star.”

  I was very glad I could afford to say no. With the income from my businesses, I didn’t need money from acting. I never wanted to be in a financially vulnerable position, where I had to take a part I didn’t like. I saw this happen all the time to the actors and musicians who worked out at the gym. An actor would complain, “I’ve been playing this part as a killer for three days, and I’m so glad it’s over.”

  “If you hated it, why did you do it?” I’d ask.

  “They gave me two thousand dollars. I have to pay for my apartment.”

  You could argue that, no matter what the part, being in front of a camera was always good practice. But I felt that I was born to be a leading man. I had to be on the posters, I had to be the one carrying the movie. Of course I realized that this sounded crazy to everybody but me. But I believed that the only way you become a leading man is by treating yourself like a leading man and working your ass off. If you don’t believe in yourself, then how will anyone else believe in you?

  Even before Stay Hungry, I had a reputation at the gym for turning down film work. Someone would call and say, “Can we have a few strong guys come over for an interview?” Some of us would go, and the stunt coordinator or director’s assistant would say, “What we want you to do is pull yourself up onto this roof, sprint across, have this fistfight, and then jump off the roof into a stunt pad . . .” I would say to myself, “That’s not really what builds a leading man’s career” and tell them I wasn’t interested.

  “But we love you. The director loves you. You are the biggest guy, you have the right face, you’re the right age. We’ll give you seventeen hundred dollars a day.”

  “I’d love the seventeen hundred a day, but I don’t really need the money,” I’d say. “Give it to one of my friends here; they need it much more.”

  Larry agreed that I should be picky, but it drove his business partner, Craig Rumar, crazy to see us turn jobs away. I always got worried when Larry was on vacation. Craig would get on the phone with me and say, “I don’t know if I can get you anything. No one is doing movies now. Everything has gone foreign. It’s really tough out there. Why not do commercials?”

  Larry’s biggest triumph that year was that after an endless number of tries, he got me an appointment to see Dino De Laurentiis. Dino was a legend in the movie business for producing classics like Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954) and campy hits like Barbarella (1968), as well as lots of flops. He’d gotten rich and then gone broke making movies in Italy and then started over in Hollywood. Lately, he’d been on an incredible roll with Serpico, Death Wish, Mandingo, and Three Days of the Condor. He liked to adapt comic books to the screen and was looking for somebody to play Flash Gordon.

  When Larry and I showed up at Dino’s office, it was just like a setup from The Godfather. Dino sat behind his desk at one end of the room, and at the other end of the room, behind us, was a connection of De Laurentiis’s from Italy, a producer named Dino Conte.

  De Laurentiis was like an emperor. He had this huge, ornate antique desk: long and wide and maybe even a little taller than a standard desk. “Wow, look at this desk,” I thought. Dino himself was a little guy, very short, and I had this urge to say something complimentary but also funny. What popped out of my mouth was “Why does a little guy like you need such a big desk?”

  He looked at me and said, “You havva an accent. I cannot use-a you. You can-a not be Flasha Gordon. Flasha Gordon is American. Ah.”

  I thought he must be joking. “What do you mean I have an accent?” I said. “What about you?” The whole thing was going south. De Laurentiis announced, “The meeting is over,” and Larry and I heard Dino Conte stand up behind us and say, “This way, please.”

  Larry exploded as soon as we got to the parking lot.

  “One minute and forty seconds!” he screamed. “This was the shortest meeting I’ve ever had with any producer, because you decided to fuck it up! Do you know how long I worked on this fucking meeting? Do you know how many months it took to get into this fucking office? And you say to the guy that he’s little instead of saying maybe the opposite? That he is tall; that he’s much, much taller than you thought he was? He’s a monster! He’s as big as Wilt Chamberlain! And maybe forget about the desk and just sit down and talk to him about your acting career?”

  I realized he had a point. My mouth got in the way. Again.

  “What can I tell you?” I said to Larry. “You’re right. That was a real forehead move. I’m sorry.” Forehead was a term I’d picked up from my bodybuilder friend Bill Drake, who used it all the time. “Look at that Archie Bunker over there,” he’d say. “What a forehead!” Meaning, What
a lowbrow idiot.

  It was more than a year after shooting Stay Hungry before I landed another lead role: this one in an episode of a popular TV series called The Streets of San Francisco, starring Karl Malden and Michael Douglas as police detectives. In the episode “Dead Lift,” they have to track down my character, a bodybuilder who loses it and unintentionally breaks the neck of a girl who mocks his body. The investigation leads them deep into a fictional San Francisco bodybuilding and arm wrestling scene, which meant that I was able to get bit parts for Franco and a lot of my other friends. Having the whole Gold’s Gym gang on the set was very funny. As it happened, the 1976 Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia competitions were only a few weeks away, so the guys were more focused on preparing than on performing for the cameras. They drove the director crazy by wandering off to go train.

  I knew that The Streets of San Francisco was a good credential that would help get Hollywood to take me more seriously. It was also a way to build up recognition among the television audience. The scene where I kill the girl was intimidating, though. Hurting a woman, yelling, ripping down paintings, and throwing around furniture was not me at all. Reading the script, I thought, “Jesus Christ, how did I ever get into this?” Considering how many hundreds of people I went on to wipe out in the movies, that’s funny in retrospect. In the end I just did the scene, not thinking too much about it, and the director was pleased.

  My deeper worry was about getting typecast. I thought that playing a villain or an ass kicker onscreen was the worst thing for me. When Robert De Niro kills in Taxi Driver, he’s the little guy, and people are 100 percent behind him, so it’s good for his career. But for a man of my size and with my looks and accent, bad-guy roles seemed like a dead end. I asked Bob Rafelson about this, and he agreed. His suggestion was that I do the unexpected and play against type. I grew fascinated with the idea of doing a remake of the “The Killers,” an Ernest Hemingway story in which an ex-boxer named the Swede is hunted down by a couple of Mafia hit men. I imagined myself playing the victim, the Swede. But the idea never went anywhere.

  Luckily, the buzz for Pumping Iron kept building. George Butler had raised the money he needed to finish it, and now he was hustling nonstop to promote it. Probably his smartest move was hiring Bobby Zarem, the king of New York publicists. Bobby was a balding guy of about forty who grew up in Georgia and went into the PR business straight out of Yale. He liked to come across as a crazy professor, with his tie missing, his shirt out, and his hair sticking out in tufts on the sides. He always talked like he was completely confused and the world was coming to an end. He’d moan, “I don’t know what I’m doing, I’ve never seen it this bad, I have to go to my shrink, this guy’s not returning my phone calls, and I think the whole project is coming down.” Hearing him talk that way about Pumping Iron scared me until I realized it was shtick. Inevitably, somebody would say to him, “No, no, Bobby, everything’s okay. You’re going to pull this off,” and he loved that.

  Bobby had set up his own firm only a year or two before, and I think he took on Pumping Iron partly to prove what he could do. Certainly George Butler wasn’t paying him very much. But in the eleven months from the Whitney show until Pumping Iron’s release, Zarem worked behind the scenes, building the buzz. He’d arrange for a screening room, invite twenty or so serious hitters from the worlds of art, literature, and finance, and play scenes from the work in progress. He always made sure that one or two members of the media were at these events, even though they were off the record. Often I’d go with him—that’s how I met TV journalist Charlie Rose, for example, whose then wife, Mary, became a financial supporter of the film. Bobby would always introduce the screening with a short talk about bodybuilding as a fascinating link between sports and art or as a leading indicator of the trend to fitness—just enough hype to make the guests feel they were in the vanguard. Afterward, there would be a thousand questions.

  I was in awe watching Bobby work the media. He taught me that ordinary press releases were a waste of time, especially if you were trying to get the attention of TV reporters. “They don’t read!” he said. Instead, he knew dozens of journalists and their editors personally. He would customize a story for a particular reporter, call, and say, “I’m sending this over. Please call me back as soon as you get it. If you don’t call back, I’m going to assume you don’t want the story, and then you won’t have much.” Bobby was famous for his long, old-fashioned handwritten proposals. He let me read a four-page letter to the editor of Time explaining why the magazine should do a major story on bodybuilding. Editors and news directors all over New York were willing to meet with him and talk seriously. And if newspapers or TV stations were competing on a story, he would brew up a different angle for each, so they weren’t just following one another. He would study the story, work on it, and talk to people at night—he hung out at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side mixing spot for literati, journalists, and celebrities.

  Bobby’s job was promoting Pumping Iron, but I took a page from his book to get recognized for my work in Stay Hungry. Even though the movie had missed at the box office, I’d been nominated for a Golden Globe award for best debut by a male actor. (Hercules in New York had been such a wipeout that Stay Hungry counted as a debut film!) There were four other nominees—including Harvey Spencer Stephens, the five-year-old who played Damien in the horror film The Omen, and author Truman Capote for his part in the comedy whodunnit Murder by Death. Of course this brought out the competitor in me. How could I make sure I stood out? The strategy I hit on was to take out ads in the show business trade papers Variety and the Hollywood Reporter thanking the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, whose members select the Golden Globe winners, for nominating me.

  I also invited association members to a dinner and an advance screening of Pumping Iron. Bobby Zarem didn’t really like this idea because my nomination was for Stay Hungry, not Pumping Iron, and he thought that Pumping Iron was too cutting edge for the Hollywood foreign press. But I felt it could only help. For one thing, critics like to see your latest work, even if it’s not actually what’s being judged, because they like to feel they’re voting for someone who is on a roll. Also, in Pumping Iron I was able to be myself much more, so why not give them both: Stay Hungry with my acting and Pumping Iron with my outrageousness? Besides, I figured that the foreign press automatically would be sympathetic toward an immigrant struggling with a sport in America. And even if none of these reasons held up, I was very proud of the work I’d put into Stay Hungry and wanted to do everything possible to call attention to it. A lot of the writers came to the screening, and when it ended, people gave me a big hug and said things like “You were terrific!” and “This is wonderful!” so I knew it had worked.

  A week before the January 1977 premiere, Pumping Iron was in the gossip columns because of a lunch that Bobby masterminded at Elaine’s. Delfina Rattazzi was the hostess, I was the guest of honor, and celebrities such as Andy Warhol, George Plimpton, Paulette Goddard, Diana Vreeland, and the editor of Newsweek showed up. But the woman who stole the show was Jackie Onassis. She was known for keeping a low profile and never giving interviews, and I was flattered that she came in spite of the fact that she knew the press would be writing about it. I think she did it partly as a favor—Delfina was now her editorial assistant at Viking Press—and partly out of curiosity, because she enjoyed being involved with art, trends, and new things.

  She stayed for the entire lunch, and I got to talk with her for fifteen minutes. JFK had been synonymous with America to me as a kid growing up, so meeting Jackie was like a dream. What impressed me most was her sophistication and grace. She’d obviously come prepared, because she didn’t ask anything clumsy or vague, like “What is this movie about?” Instead, she made me feel that Pumping Iron was important and that she appreciated what we were trying to do. She asked all kinds of specific questions: How do you train? How do you judge a competition? What’s the difference between Mr. Olympia and Mr. America? Would this be s
omething beneficial for my teenage son? At what age can you start with a workout routine? I was predisposed to liking her before we met, and that conversation made me a big fan.

  Of course people of her caliber have the social skills to make it seem like they are very much aware of you and that they know a lot about what you are doing. It was very hard to say whether she was truly interested. My guess was that she probably was a naturally curious person. Or maybe she really did think that John F. Kennedy Jr. might like to train. Or maybe she was just doing a favor for Delfina. But she certainly gave Pumping Iron a big publicity boost, and the fact that she brought her son to the New York premiere a week later convinced me that she was genuine.

  For the premiere, Bobby Zarem and George Butler pulled out all the stops. They invited five hundred people to the Plaza Theater on East Fifty-eighth Street. There were photographers, TV cameras, police barricades, limos pulling up, searchlights crisscrossing the sky—the works. The temperature was near zero, but a dozen teenage fans were waiting for me and started chanting, “Arnold! Arnold!” when I showed up. I got there early with my mom, who’d flown over from Austria for the event, because I wanted to circulate and kiss all the pretty girls and welcome people as they arrived. For the first time in my life, I wore a tux. I had to get it specially tailored because even though I’d slimmed down to 225 pounds, nobody had a rental that would fit a fifty-seven-inch chest and thirty-two-inch waist.

  The crowd was a fantastic medley of writers, socialites, hipsters, entertainers, executives, critics, artists, fashion models, and bodybuilding fans—including Andy Warhol; Diana Vreeland; actresses Carroll Baker, Sylvia Miles, and Shelley Winters; actor Tony Perkins and his wife, fashion photographer Berry Berenson; writer Tom Wolfe; the model Apollonia van Ravenstein; porn star Harry Reems; and half the cast of Saturday Night Live. James Taylor came with his wife, Carly Simon, who was pregnant. She flexed a biceps for the cameras and told a reporter that her hit song “You’re So Vain” wasn’t about a bodybuilder.