“Know, O Prince; that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of . . . Hither came I, Conan, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, to tread jeweled thrones of the earth beneath my feet. But now my eyes are dim. Sit on the ground with me, for you are but the leavings of my age. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure.”
I was draped in robes and furs, so the Mr. Olympia physique didn’t show. But before we went on location in December 1980, I would have to reshape my body again.
—
Heading back to LA from Sydney, I thought about how the tribulations of recent months had united Maria and me. I was so glad I’d tolerated those Teddy Kennedy posters on my Jeep and that I hadn’t make an issue about my own political opinions. Because for the first time, I felt that I really, truly had a partner. Throughout that spring and summer, I’d succeeded in helping her with the ups and downs of the campaign, and I felt that taking her to Europe afterward had been exactly the right impulse. And now I saw how she’d gotten involved and been able to help with my thing, which was as foreign to her world as it could be.
I could imagine the pressure she must be under from the Kennedy friends in Hollywood to move on to a more suitable boyfriend. Older women especially—friends of her mother or of Pat Kennedy Lawford, Peter’s ex-wife—used to say to Maria, “Why are you going out with that bodybuilder? Let me introduce you to this wonderful producer,” or “this young, very attractive businessman,” or “Do I have the man for you! He’s a little older, but he’s a billionaire. Let me set you up with him.”
The outside world looked at our relationship in a simpleminded way, as a juicy success story. “Isn’t it amazing that he wins Mr. Olympia and all these bodybuilding championships, and then he gets this big movie contract, and then he gets a Kennedy as his girlfriend?” According to this way of thinking, Maria becomes part of my trophy collection.
But the reality is that she was not a trophy. It made no difference what the name was. If I hadn’t been her style and she hadn’t been mine, we never would have ended up together. Her personality, her look, her intelligence, her wit, what she brought to the table, and how much she was able to participate without missing a beat were what mattered to me. Maria meshed with everything that I was, what I stood for, and what I was doing. That was a very important reason why I was considering that this woman could be my life partner. I got addicted to her. When I reached Spain, it was hard to be without her.
I understood what Maria wanted to accomplish. She wanted to become the next Barbara Walters. And I wanted to become the biggest movie star, so we were both very driven. I understood the world that she wanted to get into, and she understood the world that I was trying to explore and where I wanted to go, and we could be part of each other’s journey.
I also understood why I appealed to her. Maria was such a forceful personality that she would just run over guys. They would become immediate slaves. So here was me, whom you can’t run over. I was confident, I’d accomplished things, I was somebody. She admired the fact that I was an immigrant who had come over here and built a life. She could see from my personality that I’d figure out her family and feel comfortable around them.
Maria wanted to get away from home as much as I did—and what better way than to fall in love with an ambitious Austrian bodybuilder who wanted an acting career? She liked being away from Washington and the lawyers and politicians and Beltway talk. She wanted to be unique and different.
If there was anything in her family for Maria to compare us to as a couple, it was her grandparents. Joe was a self-made man, and I was a self-made man. He was very aggressive in making money, and so was I. Rose had chosen him when he was penniless and she was the daughter of the mayor of Boston, John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, because she had absolute faith in Joe’s ability to succeed. I was relentless, disciplined, hands-on, and street-smart enough to get there too. That was what made Maria want to be with me.
What I represented physically was also a factor. She liked guys who were athletic and strong. Maria told me that when she was a kid and JFK was president, she would hang out with the Secret Service men in Hyannis. At night, when they were on duty and trying to stay awake, sometimes they’d read muscle magazines—with me on the cover! She was too young to pay much attention, but she did notice that those bodyguards were all working out. It stuck in her mind enough that when the book Pumping Iron came out, she bought it as a gift for her oldest brother, Bobby.
We started decorating our house before I had to leave in December for preproduction on Conan. Maria was into floral curtains and a conservative look, which I liked; it was very East Coast and also a little European. She’d inherited a lot of it from her family. They’d all grown up with floral patterns and certain couches and chairs, some with wooden backs and others that were stuffed. All of their houses, all of their apartments, had a piano in the living room, dozens of framed pictures of family members on all the sideboards and surfaces, and on and on.
My style was more rustic, so when we needed a dining room set, I went to an antique fair in downtown LA and bought a heavy oak table and chairs. Maria took charge of the living room. She ordered big, overstuffed couches and had them upholstered with those floral prints, and then easy chairs to be covered in solids so they complemented the couches. One of Eunice’s friends was a great decorator, and she helped with suggestions.
What Maria and I shared was the idea that our home had to be comfortable. Neither of us wanted a place that was so decorated that you couldn’t put your feet up and kick back. I saw that she had taste, so I let her do her thing, and she saw that I had taste. It was great to have someone who also had strong opinions and yet be able to work together, rather than work in a vacuum where I’d have to do everything myself and always be guessing, Does she like this? Does she like that? Is this house just a reflection of me? She brought a great foundation of knowledge and was a great partner to work with because we both grew.
Maria loved it when I took her to the antique shows and we looked at the old stuff. My taste had developed over the years, partly from watching Joe Weider collect his antiques, but it was still not refined, and I did not buy above a certain level. It always depended on how much money I had and how much I wanted to spend. I’d never had a piece of furniture custom upholstered; I would just buy what was on the floor or look for a deal. But now that I was on a roll with Conan, I felt I could open my wallet a little more and get pieces covered with the materials Maria liked.
All of this developed without arguments. It became clear that we were good mates and could live together, which was something we’d wanted to test. I had a taste for art, once again in part due to Joe Weider’s influence. To develop my own taste, I went to a lot of museums, auctions, and galleries, and Maria and I enjoyed going to see art together. I started collecting. In the beginning, less expensive works were all I could afford, such as lithographs by Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí. But I quickly moved up to paintings and sculptures.
The idea of getting married came up shortly before I was scheduled to leave for Spain. I wanted Maria to be with me there and be part of my career. Especially after we’d gone through so much together during that summer and fall, it was obvious that she was the ideal woman for me.
I invited Maria to come to the set and hang out with me, or at least come visit for a month at a time. She said that she couldn’t because her mother and dad would disapprove. It would bother them knowing that she was with me on location and spending nights together, because we weren’t married.
“Well, then why don’t we get married?” I said.
But that was even worse. She kind of flipped out about how Eunice would react. “No, no, no,” she said, shaking her head, “I could never go to her with that.”
Eunice had gotten married late—so late that it was part of the family lore. There were a lot of other things she’d wanted to do first. After she graduated from Stanford
with a sociology degree during the Second World War, she worked for the State Department helping returned former prisoners of war readjust to civilian life. Then after the war, she worked on juvenile delinquency for the Justice Department as a social worker at a West Virginia federal prison camp for women and at a women’s shelter in Chicago. Sarge, who was movie-star handsome and managed the Chicago Merchandise Mart for Joe Kennedy, fell in love with her in 1946 and courted her for seven years. He had pretty much given up hope when one day she took him into a side chapel after morning Mass and said, “Sarge, I think I’d like to marry you.”
The bottom line was that she didn’t marry until her early thirties and after she’d accomplished a lot. So Maria felt quite comfortable not marrying now when she was twenty-five but rather waiting until thirty at least. There was a lot she wanted to do first.
I was glad to hear that the problem wasn’t with me, it was just that marriage wasn’t in her plans for the time being. Marriage wasn’t necessarily in my plans either at that point, although I wanted to be with her so much that I would have done it. I knew I would miss Maria greatly on the set. On the other hand, this was actually perfect. We could now continue for years without me hearing “Where is this heading? We’ve been going out for four years now, and you still can’t make up your mind . . .” Or “Am I not good enough? Are you looking for someone else?” Instead, the subject just faded away.
I could go on for hours about what draws me to Maria but still never fully explain the magic. Ronald Reagan famously would sit and write ten-page love letters to his wife, Nancy, while she was sitting just across the room. I used to think, “Why wouldn’t he just tell her?” But then I realized that writing something is different from saying it—and that love stories are built around people’s idiosyncrasies.
CHAPTER 14
What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Stronger
CONAN THE BARBARIAN IS set in primitive Europe during the fictional Hyborian Age, after the sinking of Atlantis but thousands of years before the dawn of recorded history. I arrived in Madrid in early December to witness it taking shape in modern-day Spain. John Milius had been telling people we were out to make “good pagan entertainment, first and foremost a romance, an adventure, a movie where something big happens”—and also full of action and gore. “It’ll be barbaric,” he promised. “I’m not holding myself back.”
To bring his vision to the screen, he’d recruited the A team: masters like Terry Leonard, the stunt director who’d just worked on Raiders of the Lost Ark; Ron Cobb, the production designer responsible for Alien; and Colin Arthur, formerly of Madame Tussauds, to supervise the making of human dummies and body parts. By the time I got there, Conan was already its own little industry. The movie’s headquarters was in a swanky hotel in central Madrid where most of the actors and senior crew would stay, but the real action took place in locations all across Spain. Two hundred workers were busy building sets in a large warehouse twenty-five miles outside of the city. Outdoor sequences were scheduled for the mountains near Segovia, as well as the spectacular dunes and salt marshes of Almería, a province on the Mediterranean coast. A Moroccan bazaar in the provincial capital was to be dressed as a Hyborian city, and we were also due to film at an ancient fortress nearby and at other historical sites.
The $20 million production budget was lavish: the equivalent of $100 million today. Milius used the money to put together an amazing roster of people and special effects. He brought in artisans, trainers, and stunt experts from Italy, England, and the States, as well as the dozens of Spaniards the film employed. The script called for an animal population of horses, camels, goats, vultures, snakes, dogs, a hawk, and a leopard. More than 1,500 extras were hired. The score was to be performed by a ninety-piece orchestra and a twenty-four-member choir, singing in a mock Latin language.
Milius was fanatical that every bit of clothing and gear be true to the fantasy. Anything made of leather or cloth had to be aged by having cars drag it through the dirt until it looked dirty and worn. Saddles had to be hidden under blankets and furs because John said in those prehistoric times, there would have been no saddle makers stitching leather. The weapons came in for an endless amount of attention. The two broadswords for Conan himself were custom forged to Ron Cobb’s drawings and inscribed with a pretend language. Four copies were made of each sword at $10,000 each. Naturally John insisted that these swords and all the other weapons had to be weathered looking, not gleaming. They were meant to kill, not shine, he said. Killing was the bottom line.
I busied myself during December studying lines, helping block out action scenes, and getting to know the other people on the Conan team.
Milius had unorthodox ideas about choosing a cast: he picked athletes instead of actors for other big parts. As my sidekick, the archer Subotai, he hired Gerry Lopez, a champion surfer from Hawaii who had starred as himself in Milius’s previous movie, Big Wednesday. And as Conan’s love, the thief and warrior Valeria, he chose Sandahl Bergman, a professional dancer recommended by director-choreographer Bob Fosse. John believed that the rigors of weight training, dancing, or being out seven hours a day surfing waves that could kill you built strength of character, and he was sure that this would show through on the screen. “Look at the faces of people who went through horrible times; people from Yugoslavia or Russia,” he would say. “Look at the lines, the character in their faces. You can’t fake that. These people have principles that they will stand and die for. They are tough because of the resistance they’ve fought through.”
Even a fanatic like John realized that our lack of experience in front of the camera might be a problem. To inspire us and help offset the risk, he cast some veterans too. James Earl Jones was just finishing a run on Broadway as the star of Athol Fugard’s A Lesson from Aloes, and he signed on to play Thulsa Doom, the evil sorcerer and king who slaughters Conan’s parents and sells the young hero into slavery. Max von Sydow, the star of many Ingmar Bergman films, joined as a king who wants to reclaim his daughter who has run off to join Thulsa Doom’s snake cult.
One of Milius’s concerns was finding guys bigger than me to play Conan’s enemies, so it didn’t look like Conan was just going to run over everybody. He was very particular about that: they had to be taller and more muscular than me. On the bodybuilding circuit, I’d met a Dane named Sven-Ole Thorsen, who was six foot five and weighed over three hundred pounds. Sven also had a black belt in karate. I contacted him on Milius’s behalf and put him in charge of looking for other big guys. At the beginning of December they all came to Madrid, a half dozen big, really threatening-looking Danes: power lifters, hammer throwers, shot-putters, martial-arts experts. Among them I felt like the little guy, and I’d never felt that before. We worked together, training with the battle-axes and swords and the horseback riding. I had a big head start, of course, but by the time we started shooting in January, the Danes were getting pretty good, and they made a major contribution to the battle scenes.
I was thrilled to see all of this unfold around me. Just as my stunt teacher predicted back in LA, the movie machinery was working on my behalf. I was Conan, and millions of dollars were being spent to make me shine. The movie had other important characters, of course, but in the end it was all geared to making me look like a real warrior. The sets were built for that purpose too. For the first time, I felt like the star.
It was different from being a bodybuilding champion. Millions of people were going to watch this movie, whereas in bodybuilding the biggest live audience was five thousand and the biggest TV audience was one million to two million. This was big. Movie magazines were going to write about Conan, the Calendar section in the LA Times was going to write about it, and magazines and newspapers around the world were going to review it and analyze it—and debate about it, no doubt, because what Milius envisioned was so violent.
Maria came to visit for a few days at the end of December after spending Christmas with her parents. This gave me a chance to introduce her to the crew a
nd the cast, so she wouldn’t think I’d dropped off the face of the earth. She got a laugh out of how I’d already assembled a whole posse of friends from the muscle world: not just the Danes but also Franco, because I’d arranged a small part for him.
I was glad that Maria wasn’t still there when we started filming a week later. In the first scene we were scheduled to shoot, an unarmed Conan, newly released from slavery, is being chased by wolves across a rocky plain. He escapes by scrambling up an outcropping, where he will stumble upon the mouth of a tomb containing a sword. In preparation for this sequence, I’d been working every morning with the wolves, just to conquer my fear. The wolves were actually four German shepherds, but without telling me, Milius had ordered the stunt coordinator to rent animals that had some wolf in them. He thought that would heighten the realism. “We’ll time it all out,” he promised me. “You’ll already be running when we release the dogs, and they won’t have enough time to cross the field and get you before you’re up the rocks.”
On the morning we shot the scene, they sewed raw meat into the bearskin on my back to attract the dogs. The cameras rolled, and I sprinted across the field. But the trainer let the dogs loose too soon, and I didn’t have enough of a head start. The wolf pack caught me before I could get all the way up the rocks. They bit at my pants and dragged me down off the rock, and I fell ten feet onto my back. I tried to stand and rip off the bearskin but fell over into a thornbush. The trainer called out a command, and the dogs froze and stood near me, drooling.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 28