So he made them all play soccer that day. It was one of those little gestures that you never forget. Joe, Robert F. Kennedy’s firstborn son, had a reputation as a rough guy who would have fits of anger and shout. But that day, I saw how classy he was and how understanding. He wanted to know what I was doing, what my training was about, and the world I came from, Austria. It helped that he was closest to me in age—five years younger—he related to me more than some of the others did. When a person shows me that kind of consideration, I will do anything for him for the rest of my life.
Toward sunset, Maria and I took her grandmother for a walk. Rose quizzed Maria about grammar, as if to make sure her college education was up to par: “Is it so-and-so and me, or so-and-so and I?” Then she switched into German to talk to me, explaining that she’d gone to convent school in Holland as a girl. Rose conversed fluently about Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart, and told us how she loved the opera and the symphony, and how she had played piano her whole life. It was very interesting to be that close to the Kennedy matriarch I’d read and heard so much about—to be that close to history.
Later that night, I had to leave. Maria took me to the airport, and we were talking by the ticket counter when I remembered I had no money. Maria had to write a check for my airfare. Having to ask a twenty-one-year-old girl to lend me money sent my temperature up about a hundred degrees from embarrassment. The reason I always wanted to earn was that I never wanted to ask for a handout or loan. The first thing I did when I came back to Los Angeles was tell Ronda, “Write out a check right away, and we have to send it to Maria because she loaned me sixty dollars. I have to get that money back as quick as possible.” I sent it along with a thank-you note.
Maria and I weren’t in touch again until close to Halloween. By then I was on a promotional tour for my new book, Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, a combination memoir and introduction to weight training that I did with a writer-photographer named Douglas Kent Hall after retiring from competition. The publisher, Dan Green at Simon & Schuster, was fascinated by bodybuilding and masterminded the project. When I went to meet with him about the marketing plan for the book, he was enthusiastic. “This is going to do really well,” he said. “It’ll be as big a bestseller as Pumping Iron.”
“Not if we stay with this publicity plan,” I said. The proposal he was showing me involved visiting only a half dozen of the biggest cities.
“People won’t buy this book unless we tell them it exists,” I pointed out. “Otherwise, how do they know? If you want to see it to go through the roof, then don’t just send me to six cities. We’re going to go to thirty cities, and we’re going to do it in thirty days.”
“Thirty cities in thirty days! That’s crazy!”
“Be happy,” I said. “We’re going to cities where normally celebrities don’t ever go, and we can get more time on the morning shows that way.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” he said. I reminded him that Pumping Iron had succeeded because we’d promoted it more broadly than usual and sold it in unconventional places, like sporting goods stores.
Promotion tours for sports books often skipped Washington, DC. But I had promoted Pumping Iron there, so it made sense to go back and get the same journalists involved. And since Maria lived in DC, it seemed natural to get in touch. I called ahead of time, and she enthusiastically offered to show me around the city. I didn’t arrive until late, eight or nine in the evening on Halloween. Maria picked me up dressed in a gypsy costume and took me out and showed me the bars and restaurants where she had worked while she was in college—she’d just graduated from Georgetown University. She really looked the part, with her colorful dress, bracelets, big earrings, and her mass of beautiful black hair. We had a wonderful time until one in the morning or so, when she went home. The next morning, I had my interviews with the press and then traveled on.
I sent flowers for her birthday a week later, November 6, which I’d never done before for a girl. I had a crush on Maria, and I’d discovered recently that you could order flowers by phone—it was a new way of showing appreciation, like learning the American custom of writing thank-you notes. In any case, Maria was pleased.
As soon as I came back from Europe, I continued the book tour. It took me to Detroit to do a shopping mall appearance. I called Maria and said, “Hey, if you want to come join me, I have some wonderful friends there, and we can go out.” My friends, the Zurkowskis, were part owners of Health & Tennis Corporation, the country’s biggest fitness chain, with more than a hundred gyms all over America. Maria agreed to come, and we all got together. To me this was a clear indication that she was interested in starting a relationship. She’d been seeing a guy from college, but that candle seemed to be sputtering out, and I thought she was ready to move on.
For my part, I didn’t know what I had in mind when I called her. I had such a good time with her on Halloween that I wanted to see her again. And she was on the East Coast, and I thought of Detroit as being in the neighborhood. I wasn’t at the point of wanting a serious relationship, especially not an East Coast–West Coast thing. She was talking about going to TV production training in Philadelphia, and I thought, “No way. Philadelphia and Los Angeles would be tough.”
But it developed into exactly that: an East Coast–West Coast relationship. There was no talk about whether we were now officially going out or whether we were seeing anyone else. It was more like, “Let’s see each other when we can.” But I liked it that she was so ambitious and wanted to become a force in TV news. I told her my ambitions too. “One day I’m going to make a million dollars for a movie,” I said, because that was what the highest-paid actors, like Charles Bronson, Warren Beatty, and Marlon Brando, were making. I had to be one of them. I told her my goal was to be a leading man and to be as successful in movies as I was in bodybuilding.
The Hollywood community was very much aware of me after Stay Hungry, Pumping Iron, and The Streets of San Francisco. But nobody knew what to do with me. Studio executives are always overwhelmed with projects, and none of them was going to sit down and say, “Jeez, what about this guy? He has the body and the looks. He has a personality. He can act. But he doesn’t fit into any ordinary role, so what can we do?”
I needed to connect with an independent producer. Fortunately, one came looking for me: Ed Pressman, who’d made Badlands with writer-director Terrence Malick and was working on Paradise Alley with Stallone. He was a short, professorial-looking guy from New York, elegant and very well dressed, whose father had founded a toy company, and who had a philosophy degree from Stanford University. Ed’s pet project was to bring to the screen a 1930s pulp fiction barbarian warrior named Conan. He and his partner spent a couple of years negotiating for the movie rights and had just locked them up when they saw a rough cut of Pumping Iron. Right away they decided I would be perfect for Conan.
Ed didn’t even have a script. He gave me a pile of comic books to look at while I made up my mind. I’d never heard of Conan, but it turned out that there was this whole cult of young guys who were really into it. There had been a big Conan revival since the sixties, with fantasy paperbacks, and Marvel Comics picked up the character too. To me this meant there would be plenty of ready-made fans if Conan came to the screen.
What Ed envisioned was not just one movie but a whole Conan franchise, like Tarzan or James Bond, with a new installment every couple of years. I don’t remember exactly how he put it, because Ed was extremely low-key, but he was very persuasive. To get studio backing, he explained, he needed to lock me up. I couldn’t accept other he-man roles—like another Hercules, say—and I’d have to commit to being available to make sequels. Just looking at the covers of the paperbacks, I knew I wanted the part. They were these fantastic illustrations by the artist Frank Frazetta showing Conan raising his battle-axes in triumph as he stands on a pile of slain enemies, a beautiful princess at his feet, and Conan charging on a warhorse through an army of terrified foes. In the fall of 1977 we agreed on a
deal for me to star in Conan the Warrior and four sequels. The money was all laid out: $250,000 for the first film, $1 million for the next, $2 million for the next, and so on, plus 5 percent of the profits. All five movies would be worth $10 million over ten years. I thought, “This is fantastic! I’m way beyond my goal.”
Word of the deal traveled fast in Hollywood. The trade press picked it up, so when I walked down Rodeo Drive, shopkeepers would come out of their stores and invite me in. Even though there were still a lot of ifs, signing that contract made me confident that I would be among the million-dollar players in the movie business. So when I told Maria that was my vision, I knew that it could become real.
I didn’t realize it would take several more years, but I was in no rush. Having tied up the rights and tied up the actor, now Ed had to find a director and money to make the first film. John Milius wanted the project because he loved the mixture of macho and mythology in the Conan books. But he was busy shooting a coming-of-age surfer movie with Gary Busey, Big Wednesday. So Ed was still looking for a director. He had better luck with financing. Paramount Pictures agreed to put up $2.5 million for initial development as long as Ed attached a name screenwriter to the project.
That was how I met Oliver Stone. He was known at that point as a rising star and had finished the screenplay for Midnight Express, based on the true story of a young American in Turkey who gets busted for trying to smuggle hashish out of the country and is sentenced to life in a brutal Turkish prison. That script would win Oliver his first Oscar. Conan attracted him because it was epic and mythical and had franchise potential—and because Paramount was willing to pay.
Often when I was in town over the next year, Oliver and I would meet. He was a crazy guy, very smart and very entertaining. He thought of himself as a great writer, and I got a kick out of the fact that he was so confident, like me. We hung out together and had mutual respect, even though politically he was left and I was right. He’d enlisted in the army and fought in Vietnam, and now was very antiestablishment, always railing against the government, against Hollywood, and against the war.
Oliver made me read a lot of comic books and fantasy novels out loud, wanting to get a sense of how I handled dialogue and what did and didn’t sound good in my voice. He’d sit on the couch and close his eyes while I read passages like “Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.”
Ed had encouraged Oliver to think big—he was budgeting up to $15 million for the film, almost double the cost of an average movie—and Oliver did. He transformed the story into what Milius later described as “a feverish dream on acid.” He changed the setting from the remote past to the future after the downfall of civilization. He imagined a four-hour-long saga in which the forces of darkness are threatening the earth, and Conan must raise an army to restore the kingdom of a princess in an epic battle against ten thousand mutants. Oliver dreamed up the most extraordinary images, like the Tree of Woe, a huge, predatory plant that seizes Conan’s comrades as they hack at it and imprisons them in a world below—the tree’s hell. His script also called for a multiheaded dog, a harpy, small bat-like creatures, and much more.
By the time the script began circulating the following summer, though, it still wasn’t clear whether the project would go anywhere. Oliver’s vision would cost a fortune to shoot: not $15 million but $70 million. Even though 1977’s Star Wars was setting records at the box office and the studios were looking for epics, that was too much, and Paramount got cold feet. Ed had been developing Conan for four years, and now he and his partner were in debt.
I’d decided to take a zen approach. I had my contract, and I knew that major productions can take a long time to develop. I was not in any hurry, I told myself. These delays were meant to be. I just wanted to be sure to use the time wisely so that when the day of shooting came, I would be ready.
Ed lined up projects to give me more experience in front of the camera. I played a supporting part in The Villain, a Western spoof starring Kirk Douglas and Ann-Margret. The name of my character was Handsome Stranger, and the rest of the movie was just as lame. It flopped totally at the box office when it came out in 1979, and the best thing I can say about it is that I improved my horse-riding skills. I also costarred with Loni Anderson in a made-for-TV movie, The Jayne Mansfield Story, in which I played Mansfield’s second husband, the 1950s bodybuilding champ Mickey Hargitay. These were not starring roles, and they didn’t involve much pressure, but they did help prepare me for the real deal: Conan, the big international movie that would get worldwide promotion and had $20 million behind it.
At the same time, I tended to my businesses. I was still running my bodybuilding enterprises and coproducing the championship in Columbus, Ohio, that would eventually become the Arnold Classic. Each year Jim Lorimer and I were able to raise the cash prize, and the event grew in popularity and prestige. Meanwhile, there were real estate opportunities that were too good to pass up. In Southern California, the value of property was rising at almost twice the rate of inflation. You could put down $100,000 to buy something for $1 million, and the next year it would be worth $1.2 million, so you’d made 200 percent on your investment. It was crazy. Al Ehringer and I flipped our building on Main Street and bought a city block for redevelopment in Santa Monica and another in Denver. I traded up my twelve-unit apartment building for a thirty-unit one. By the time Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 and the economy slowed, I’d achieved another piece of the immigrant dream. I’d made my first million.
—
Conan the Barbarian might still be stuck in the comic books today if John Milius hadn’t reentered the picture in 1979. He took Oliver Stone’s script, chopped it in half, and rewrote it to cost much less, but still $17 million. Even better for Ed Pressman, Milius had a path to money. He was under contract to do his next movie for Dino De Laurentiis, who loved fantasy. Late that fall, Dino and Ed worked out a deal in which Dino effectively bought the project from Ed. With Dino’s connections came big-league distribution, as Universal Pictures agreed to handle Conan in the United States.
All of a sudden—bang!—the project really started rolling.
What was good for Conan the Warrior wasn’t automatically good for me, however. De Laurentiis still despised me from our first encounter. Even though I was under contract, he wanted to get rid of me.
“I don’t like the Schwarzenegger,” he told Milius. “He’s a Nazi.”
Luckily John had already decided that I was perfectly cast. “No, Dino,” he said. “There is only one Nazi on this team. And that is me. I am the Nazi!” Milius wasn’t a Nazi, of course. He just wanted to shock Dino, and he loved saying outrageous things. For the rest of the production, he would go to odd antique stores and buy these little lead figurines of Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin and Francisco Franco and put them on Dino’s desk.
Dino’s next move was to send his company lawyer to renegotiate with me. The guy’s name was Sidewater, and my agent Larry nicknamed him Sidewinder. The lawyer announced, “Dino doesn’t want to give you five points, like it says in the contract. He wants to give you no points.”
I said, “Take the points. I’m in no position to negotiate.”
He gaped. “All five?” It astounded him to hear me simply say that, because he’d expected a fight. Each of those little digits can add up to many thousands of dollars when a film hits big.
“All the points,” I repeated, “take it. Take it all.” I was thinking, “You can take it and shove it because that’s not what I’m doing the movie for.” I understood the reality. The situation was lopsided. Dino had the money, and I needed the career, so it made no sense to argue. It was just supply and demand. But, I also thought, the day will come when the tables will turn, and Dino will have to pay.
With John Milius, everything was drama, I learned as we got to be friend
s. He was a cigar-smoking, bearlike, Harley-Davidson-riding guy, with black, curly hair and a beard. History obsessed him, especially war, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of battles and weapons from the time of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all the way up to the present day. John could talk authoritatively about the Vikings, the Mongols, pirates of every period, the samurai, medieval knights, and longbowmen. He knew every size of bullet used in the Second World War and what kind of pistol Hitler wore. He didn’t need to do research, it was already in his head.
John liked to call himself a Zen fascist, and he’d brag that he was so far to the right that he wasn’t even a Republican. Some people in town thought he was sick. But he was such a fantastic writer that even the liberals would call him for help on their scripts, like Warren Beatty with Reds. Nobody was better at writing macho lines. A great example of his work is the soliloquy in Jaws, when Robert Shaw’s character, Captain Quint, recalls the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in World War II after it had delivered the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima. It took five days for rescuers to arrive, too late for most of the crew. Quint’s speech ends: “So, eleven hundred men went into the water. Three hundred sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”
Milius also wrote Robert Duvall’s iconic line in Apocalypse Now, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning . . . It smells like . . . victory.” And of course the line that was already my favorite in Conan, when the barbarian is asked, “What is best in life?” and he says, “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.”
It was fun hanging out with a guy who was so totally committed to the macho fantasy, the Teddy Roosevelt ideal. I liked to step in and out of it. I could be an actor one minute, the next minute a beach bum, the next minute a businessman, the next minute a bodybuilding champion, the next minute a Romeo—whatever it was—but Milius was locked in. It was part of his charm. At his office, there were always guns, swords, and knives lying on his desk. He would show off his Purdeys: British shotguns, custom fitted and specially engraved, each of which took months to make and cost tens of thousands of dollars. He treated himself to a new one after every movie. The shotgun was always part of the deal. If John brought the movie in on time, he’d automatically get a Purdey.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 25