He knew so much about the world, and he loved to share his knowledge with anyone who’d listen. He’d grab a sword and say, “Feel this sword. Feel the weight of it. That was the difference between the British sword and the French sword. The French was always lighter . . .” And off he’d go. Or he’d look at an actress and say, “Yeah, she’s beautiful, but she is not erotic for the age of Conan. I don’t think they had those oversized breasts. And see how wide-set her eyes are, and the shape of her nose and lips? Those are not Egyptian lips.”
Right away Milius had me start watching movies he thought were important for my preparation. He’d put on the 1954 Japanese classic Seven Samurai and say, “You’ve got to see Toshiro Mifune. Notice the way he wipes his mouth, the way he talks, the way he grabs the women? Everything has style, everything’s a little bit larger than life and done with mischief. That’s the way Conan is.” He also made me pay attention to the swordsmanship, because kenjutsu was part of a whole range of combat styles that Milius was weaving into the Conan universe; the script called for an entire museum’s worth of swords, battle-axes, lances, knives, and armor from throughout history.
He started sending experts to train me: masters in martial arts, armorers, stunt people who were horse-riding specialists. For three months I was tutored in broadsword combat two hours a day. Unlike the samurai sword, which is very light and very sharp—designed for lopping off heads and limbs and slicing bodies in half—the broadsword is massive and double edged. It’s meant to deliver big blows that eventually hack through armor and flesh. I had to learn which parts of the body are vulnerable to attack and how to swing the sword, not to mention what happens if you miss. The momentum of an eleven-pound sword can pull a fighter out of position, like a gun with tremendous recoil, so you have to anticipate and channel the momentum in order to come back right away with another chop.
A kenjutsu trainer came next, and then an expert in a style of Brazilian fighting that combined punching and wrestling, with all kinds of throws, elbow blows, and body slams. A stuntman taught me climbing techniques, how to fall and roll, and how to jump fifteen feet onto a mat. Milius was busy with postproduction on Big Wednesday, but he always took time to come by to check my progress and videotape me.
The training was as intense and time consuming as getting ready for a bodybuilding competition, and I took to it completely. I felt like my movie career had suddenly come into sharp focus. The vision had always been there, but hazy: I never knew which direction it would go or how I was going to get the big break. But being chosen for Conan was like winning my first international bodybuilding title. Until then I could see my progress in the mirror, I could see my muscles slowly grow, but I really never knew where I stood. Then, after winning Mr. Universe, I thought, “Jesus, that was international judging, and I was competing against guys I see in the magazines, and I won. I’m going to succeed.”
Some of Hollywood’s biggest players now had a stake in my career. Dino was giving me an opportunity to prove myself in movies, a little like Joe Weider had in bodybuilding. And I now had a connection with Universal Pictures, a major international studio that was doing giant hits like The Deer Hunter and Jaws. Now the studio was making a movie about a lovable extraterrestrial stranded here on Earth: E.T. The guys who ran Universal, Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg, were legendary characters, people who manufactured stars.
My stunt trainer, a Hollywood veteran who was a shrewd observer of the scene, wasted no time pointing this out. “Man, you are so lucky,” he said. “Do you realize that you’re now part of the Hollywood machine? Do you know how much money will be spent on you? Just on you? Twenty million on the movie—twenty million!—and you’re playing the title role. All that machinery is going to work for you. You are going to be huge.”
I thought about the people who had come to Hollywood and were struggling to make ends meet, working as waiters and waitresses while they auditioned for parts. I’d met some of them in acting class and heard them say things like “I was turned down again, I don’t know what to do.” The rejections in Hollywood go on and on, and the psychological beating can be relentless. Then you have to go home embarrassed after having failed. It’s why so many actors and actresses turn to drugs. I’d been able to avoid that kind of despair, and now I was the one getting the shot. They’d picked me. Of course, now I had to show I was worthy, but I didn’t feel at all concerned. I would do whatever it took to get there. I didn’t share my feelings of pride with anybody. My style was to keep moving and not reflect too much. But it felt great.
By far the wildest trainer Milius found for me was a Conan fanatic who actually lived outdoors in the mountains. He was so into the Conan stories that he wanted to experience the Conan life, and he’d become an expert at sleeping in the snow, climbing trees, living off the land. He even called himself Conan. Dirt and freezing cold didn’t seem to bother him: I went skiing with him in Aspen, Colorado, and he skied in shorts. I wondered if he’d resent me for being cast as Conan instead of him, but instead he loved that I’d gotten the job. The news had gone out among the Conan fans that I was training heavily for the part and that I was going to do the horseback riding and the sword fighting myself. So the die-hard fans decided that I was a great choice, especially since my body looked so much like Conan’s in the comics. I felt happy to be accepted, and it was a promising sign for the film, because the core audience who would go back to see the movie again and again and recommend it to all their friends was supposed to be guys like this. As a reward for taking the time to help, we brought “Conan” to Europe when we did the shoot. He got to play an enemy warrior in a fight scene, where he was hacked to pieces—by me.
CHAPTER 13
Maria and Me
ALTHOUGH MARIA AND I were on opposite sides of the fence politically, it was politics that brought us together geographically, when she moved to California to work on Teddy Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign. In American politics, it was almost unheard of for an incumbent president running for reelection to be challenged from within his own party. But Jimmy Carter’s first term had been so disappointing, and America was in such a depressed state, that Teddy decided to run. Of course, when any Kennedy ran for office, it was all hands on deck. If you were a family member, you were supposed to put your life on hold and campaign.
The first thing that Maria and her friend Bonnie Reiss did was plaster Kennedy ’80 posters and bumper stickers all over my Jeep. I had a brown Cherokee Chief that I was really proud of. It was massive compared to ordinary cars—the first-ever sport-utility vehicle—and I’d gone all the way up to Oregon to take delivery so that I could get $1,000 off the price. I’d had my Jeep outfitted with a loudspeaker and siren for showing off or scaring other drivers out of my way. But now when we drove around town, I’d sink a little lower in the seat, hoping that no one would see me. It was weird pulling up at the gym every day: like most of the people there, I was known as a Republican, and now here I was with the Teddy stickers.
Personally, I was hoping that Ronald Reagan would be elected president, but no one was asking my opinion; it was Maria they wanted to see. Hollywood, of course, is a big liberal town, and her family connections went deep. Her grandfather Joe Kennedy had been heavily involved in movies, running no fewer than three studios in the 1920s, and the Kennedys were famous for involving entertainers in political campaigns. So everyone in the family was very much aware of Hollywood, and they turned to actors, directors, and executives for help in fund-raising. Maria’s uncle Peter Lawford was a big star, and buddies with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. She’d heard about those guys in the “Rat Pack” growing up, had seen them at her parents’ house, and had been to their places in Palm Springs, California. No sooner did she arrive in 1980 than she got to know their wives.
The Kennedy campaign center would call the studios and talent agencies and line up appointments for Maria with big shots and celebrities. “Maria would like to visit you and talk about an event we have coming up,” they
’d say, and almost invariably the reaction would be “Omigod, a Kennedy is coming!” and doors would open. Usually Maria would go with other campaign staff, but sometimes I’d tag along or even drive her. Teddy’s candidacy was so controversial that winning endorsements wasn’t easy. Often I’d listen to people like producer Norman Lear explaining to Maria why they didn’t support Teddy and were either backing the independent candidate, Illinois congressman John Anderson, or sticking with Carter.
Maria wasn’t even twenty-five, but already she was a force to reckon with. That had been clear to me early on. In 1978, about six months after we first met, I posed for a photo essay in Playgirl magazine. Ara Gallant, my trendy New York photographer friend, had the assignment, and I came up with the idea that we should do a beer hall scene. It would be a traditional beer hall, but instead of hefty German women serving the beer steins and pretzels and sausages around me, it would be young sexy girls with bare tits. It was one of my crazy ideas and Ara loved it. But when I described this to Maria and said, “We’re just now working on the layout,” she told me instantly that the whole thing was a mistake.
“I thought you wanted to go into movies,” she said. “So if you pose with those girls with their tits hanging out, is that going make producers say, ‘Hey, wow! I want this guy’? I doubt it. What’s your goal in doing this?”
I had to admit I had no answer to that. I’d just been in a silly mood and said to Ara, “Let’s do something funny.” I wasn’t trying to get anything out of it.
“Well, since there’s no goal and it’s not going to lead anywhere, kill it. You don’t need it. You had your fun, now move on.” She was relentless and so convincing that I ended up talking Playgirl into killing the story and paying $7,000 to reimburse the magazine for the shoot.
She was wise about public perception because that was the world in which she’d grown up. Maria was the first girlfriend I ever had who didn’t treat my ambitions as an annoyance, some kind of madness that interfered with her vision of the future: namely, marriage, kids, and a cozy little house somewhere—and the stereotypical all-American life. Maria’s world wasn’t small like that. It was gigantic, because of what her grandfather did, what her father did, what her mother did, what her uncles did. I’d finally met a girl whose world was as big as mine. I’d reached some of my goals but a lot of my world was still a dream. And when I’d talk about even bigger dreams, she never said, “Come on, this can’t be done.”
She’d seen it happen in her family. She came from a world where her great-grandfather was an immigrant and her grandfather made a vast fortune in Hollywood and the liquor business, real estate, and other investments. It was a world in which seeing a relative run for president or senator was not out of the ordinary. She’d heard her uncle John F. Kennedy pledge in 1961 that by the end of the decade the United States would land a man on the moon. Her mother had created the Special Olympics. Her dad was the founding director of the Peace Corps and had created the Job Corps, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), and Legal Services for the poor, all under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. And Sargent Shriver had been Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s ambassador to France. So if I said, “I want to make a million per picture,” it didn’t automatically strike Maria as absurd. It just made her curious. “How are you going to do that?” she’d ask. “I admire how driven you are. I don’t understand how anyone can have this discipline.” What’s more, by watching me, she got to see something she’d never actually witnessed firsthand: how you make one dollar into two, and how you build businesses and become a millionaire.
The way she was raised gave her huge advantages such as an exceptional education and her parents’ extensive knowledge and wisdom. She got to meet the influential people and hear their conversations. She got to live in Paris when her father was ambassador, and was able to travel the world. She grew up playing tennis, skiing, and competing in horse shows.
But there were drawbacks too. Eunice and Sarge were so forceful that the kids never got to develop their own opinions about things. The two of them made a point of letting the kids know that they were smart. “This is a very good idea, Anthony,” I’d hear Eunice tell her youngest son, who was only starting high school. “The way I would approach it is thus and so, but it’s a very good point you have. I didn’t think about that.” But the household was a strict hierarchy in which the parents, usually Eunice, made the choices. She was a very dominating personality, but Sarge didn’t mind.
When you grow up that way, it’s hard to make your own decisions, and eventually you feel like you can’t function without your parents’ input. Eunice and Sarge decided which colleges to consider, for example. Yes, there was some participation on the kids’ part, but overall, the parents ran the show. Then again, many times not even they ran the show, the Kennedy family did. The degree of conformity among the Kennedys was extreme. Not a single one of the thirty cousins was a Republican, for example. If you gather thirty members of any extended family, it’s almost impossible that all of them are the same. That’s why I always used to tease Maria, “Your family’s like a bunch of clones. If you ask your brother to name his favorite color, he doesn’t know. He’ll say, ‘We like blue.’ ”
She would laugh and say, “That’s not really true! Look how diverse they are.”
I’d say, “They are all environmentalists, they are all athletic, they all are Democrats, they all endorsed the same candidates, and they all do like blue.”
The other big disadvantage involved public perception. No matter what you did as a Kennedy or a Shriver, no one gave you credit for your accomplishment. Instead, people would say, “Well, if I were a Kennedy, I could do that too.” For all these reasons, Maria had to fight harder than most people to carve out her own identity.
Sarge and Eunice welcomed me. The first time that Maria brought me to their town house in Washington, Sarge came downstairs holding a book. “I’m just reading about these great accomplishments of yours,” he said. He’d found a mention of me in a book about American immigrants who had arrived with nothing and made a success. That was a nice surprise because I wasn’t expecting to be in books yet. Bodybuilding was such an odd thing. I thought they’d be writing about immigrants like former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, not me. It was so gracious and generous of Maria’s dad to notice that passage and show it to me.
Eunice put me right to work. She was thrilled to hear that I’d been involved with Special Olympics research at the University of Wisconsin. Before I knew it, I was helping her push the idea of adding power lifting to the Special Olympics and conducting workshops on weight training for the mentally handicapped wherever I traveled.
If the Shrivers hadn’t been so gracious, the first dinner I had at their house could have been difficult. Maria’s four brothers, Anthony, Bobby, Timothy, and Mark, ranged in age from twenty-three to twelve, and right away one of the younger ones piped up, “Daddy, Arnold loves Nixon!” Sarge was a great friend of Hubert Humphrey’s; in fact, when Humphrey ran against Nixon in 1968, he’d wanted Sarge as his running mate, but the Kennedy family torpedoed the idea.
So I felt really awkward sitting there at the table. But Sarge, always the diplomat, said evenly, “Well, everyone thinks differently about these things.” Later on we discussed it, and I explained why I admired Nixon. It was my reaction against having grown up in Europe, where government was totally in charge of everything, and 70 percent of people worked for the government, and the highest aspiration was to get a government job. That was one of the reasons why I left for the United States. Sargent happened to be a scholar of German, because he was of German descent. He had spent student summers in Germany in the mid-1930s wearing lederhosen, exploring the German and Austrian countryside, pedaling from village to village on his bicycle. During his first summer there, 1934, Adolf Hitler’s recent rise to power as German chancellor didn’t make much of an impression on Sarge. But in his second summer, 1936, he learned to recognize the brown-shirted “sto
rm troopers” of the Nazi paramilitary, the Sturmabteilung (SA), and the black-uniformed members of Hitler’s elite guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS). He read about political prisoners being sent to concentration camps. Sarge actually heard Hitler speak.
He came home convinced that America should try to keep its distance from the growing crisis in Europe—so much so that in 1940 at Yale University he cofounded the antiwar America First Committee with classmates Gerald Ford, the future thirty-eighth president, and future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, among others. Nevertheless, Sarge enlisted in the navy before Pearl Harbor and served throughout the war. We spoke German together many times. He wasn’t fluent, exactly, but he could sing in German.
Family meals in the Shriver household were about as far from my upbringing as you could get. Sarge would ask me at the dinner table, “What would your parents have done if you’d talked to them the way my kids are talking to me here?”
“My dad would have smacked me right away.”
“Did you hear that, guys? Arnold, repeat that. Repeat that. His father would have smacked him. That’s what I should do with you kids.”
The boys would say, “Oh, Daddy,” and then throw a piece of bread at him.
They had that kind of humor at the table, and I was amazed. The first time I was there for dinner, the meal ended with one of the boys farting, another one burping, and another one leaning so far back in his chair that it toppled to the floor. Then he just lay there groaning, “Oh, man, I am fucking full.”
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 26