When we promoted Pumping Iron at the Cannes Film Festival in 1977, George Butler had the idea of dressing cabaret girls from the Crazy Horse in Paris in frilly dresses and bonnets to pose with me on the beach. Keystone / Getty Images
I jumped at the chance to work with Kirk Douglas and Ann-Margret in the Western spoof The Villain. The name of my character was “Handsome Stranger.” © The Villain Company. All rights reserved.
On the set of Conan the Barbarian in Spain we created a vivid and violent prehistoric world. Above, the fighting pit in which young Conan slaughters his way out of slavery. Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing, LLC
I broiled in the hot sun while I was crucified on the Tree of Woe. Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing, LLC
Director John Milius, who loved stogies as much as me, was fanatical that the fantasy be accurate in every detail. Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing, LLC
In 1983, before heading to Mexico to shoot Conan the Destroyer, I celebrated becoming a U.S. citizen. Michael Montfort / interTOPICS
Why eat all alone in your personal trailer when you can hang out with the crew and cast? Above, it’s chowtime on location in Mexico for Conan the Destroyer. Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing, LLC
Wilt Chamberlain, who played the treacherous Bombaata, and André the Giant, who played the evil beast god Dagoth, give me the unusual sensation of being the little guy. Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing, LLC
As the Terminator, I worked on selling the idea that I was a machine that can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with, doesn’t feel pity, remorse, or fear, and will not stop, ever, until its target is dead. Courtesy of MGM Media Licensing
The scene in the makeup trailer is sometimes even weirder than what shows up onscreen. Schwarzenegger Archive
Preparations for the Terminator’s do-it-yourself forearm and eyeball repairs. Schwarzenegger Archive
I visited the Vatican with Maria and her parents in 1983 for a private audience with Pope John Paul II. To him, besides religion, life was about taking care of both your mind and your body. So we talked about his workouts. Schwarzenegger Archive
After the sacrifices she’d made to raise my brother and me, I wanted my mother to have a rich life. Here I’ve brought her to meet President Reagan at a state dinner at the White House in 1986. Official White House photo
Milton Berle became my comedy mentor. He’d encourage me by saying, “You being funny with your accent is twice as big a deal as me being funny. They expect me to be funny!” Schwarzenegger Archive
The great Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal himself helped me force a retraction when a London tabloid called me a neo-Nazi in 1988. Art Waldinger/ Tru-Dimension Co.
I helped Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush in his successful bid for the presidency in 1988. Here we prepare speeches between campaign stops aboard Air Force Two. Official White House photo
Economist Milton Friedman, whom I got to know in his retirement, had a profound influence on my political philosophy. George T. Kruse
It took just five years after the premiere of Conan the Barbarian for me to earn the ultimate Hollywood validation, a star on the Walk of Fame. Michael Montfort / interTOPICS
My political mentor, Fredi Gerstl, is a Jew who joined the resistance in World War II and ended up president of the Austrian parliament. Schwarzenegger Archive
Less than forty-eight hours before Maria and I were due to be married in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, I was covered with mud in a Mexican jungle shooting Predator. © 1987 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.
Danny DeVito is a master of comedy, loves stogies, and cooks pasta on the set—no wonder he made such a great twin. Schwarzenegger Archive
Paul Verhoeven directs Sharon Stone and me for the scene in Total Recall in which my character loses his illusions about his marriage. StudioCanal
Director Ivan Reitman took a chance on me as a comic hero. Here we clown around with cotton candy on the set of Kindergarten Cop. Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing, LLC
Tobogganing at Camp David, President George H. W. Bush and I are about to crash into the First Lady. His inscription on the photo reads in part, “Turn, damn it, turn!!” Official White House photo
President Nixon put me on the spot to speak at a holiday exhibit opening at his presidential library— afterward, with him and comedian Bob Hope, I was feeling relieved. Ron P. Jaffe / The Nixon Foundation
Sly Stallone, Bruce Willis, and I had great fun opening Planet Hollywood restaurants around the world. This opening was in London. Dave Benett / Getty Images
My character and his stolen Harley were a perfect combination of cyborg and machine in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. StudioCanal
In the makeup trailer on the set of Terminator 2, I’m boning up on real life—our daughter Katherine was turning one and another baby was on the way. StudioCanal
Sometimes it’s hard to explain to your toddler what you do at the office. Katherine was freaked out by the Terminator mannequin at the studio of special effects wizard Stan Winston. Schwarzenegger Archive
Clint Eastwood, one of my heroes, described a shot to me when I visited the set of In the Line of Fire in 1993. © 1993 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Maria and I turned the making of True Lies in 1993 into a family adventure. Patrick was a newborn, Christina was two, and Katherine almost four. © 1994 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved.
Jim Cameron shows how he wants my character Harry Tasker to fight his way out of a terrorist camp, on location in the Florida Keys. © 1994 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved.
Jamie Lee Curtis was Helen, my onscreen wife. © 1994 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved.
I’ve been retired from bodybuilding since 1980 but I’ll always stay involved. Here I’m celebrating the winners of the 1994 Arnold Classic, Kevin Levrone and Laura Creavalle. Schwarzenegger Archive
Maria puts a brave face on a scary situation. Open-heart surgery in 1997 to replace a defective valve failed on the first try; the next day the doctors had to open me up again. Schwarzenegger Archive
Muhammad Ali and I had been friends for over twenty years when we teamed up in 2000 to raise funds for the Inner City Games Foundation and the Muhammad Ali Center. Herb Ritts/trunkarchive.com
Christina, six, climbed up for a friendly Daddy-daughter chat while I was crucified for End of Days, a turn-of-the-millennium thriller. Courtesy of Universal Licensing, LLC
Christopher, one, and Patrick, four, also visited the set. Courtesy of Universal Licensing, LLC
I loved working with Danny Hernandez, on my left, the ex-Marine who masterminded the Hollenbeck Youth Center in East LA. It provides kids in a poor, gang-infested neighborhood with a place to go and gives problem kids a second chance. Schwarzenegger Archive
I get goose bumps when Nelson Mandela talks about inclusion, tolerance, and forgiveness. In 2001 we met at Robben Island, where he spent twenty-seven years in prison, to light the Flame of Hope for the Special Olympics African Hope Games. Christian Jauschowetz
My first political campaign was crusading in 2002 to pass a ballot initiative to set up after-school programs at every elementary and middle school in California. Frazer Harrison / Getty Images
At the request of New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, I toured Ground Zero three days after 9/11 to thank the first responders and help boost morale. FDNY Photo Unit
Former President Bill Clinton loved visiting movie sets. On his way to a speech in 2003, he stopped by the set of Terminator 3. Robert Zuckerman
In 2010, during my last year as governor, the state partnered with environmentalists and preservationists to set aside the land around the iconic Hollywood sign. California State Archives / Reter Grigsby
As soon as I left the statehouse, I went back to work on the movie set. Above, I’m on location with Sly and Bruce in Bulgaria, where we filmed Expendables 2. Frank Masi / Millennium Films
I’m duking
it out on top of a truck in The Last Stand. Courtesy of Lionsgate
CHAPTER 17
Marriage and Movies
WHEN YOU SET THE date and say, “Okay, April 26 next year will be our wedding,” you have no idea whether you’ll be shooting a movie then or not. As 1986 rolled around, I tried to get the production of Predator put off for a few weeks, but Joel Silver, the producer, was worried that we’d run into the rainy season if we waited. That’s how I found myself deep in the Mexican jungle near the ruined Mayan city of Palenque less than forty-eight hours before I was due at the altar. I had to charter a jet for the first time in my life to make sure I got to the rehearsal dinner in Hyannis Port on time.
The day I was scheduled to leave, pro wrestler Jesse Ventura shadowed me on the set. We were shooting an action sequence in the jungle, and he’d be hiding in the bushes, not involved in the scene. While I was supposed to be screaming to the other guys, “Get down! Get down!” we’d hear Jesse chanting in that deep voice, “I do, I do, I do.” We were all laughing like hell and blowing take after take. The director kept asking, “Why are you not concentrating?”
Maria was not happy that I missed the final preparations. She wanted my mind to be on the wedding, but my mind was on the movie when I arrived. Predator had big problems, and—rightly or wrongly—in the mind of the public, the star is responsible for a movie’s success. There was talk of having to stop production, and when that happens to a movie, there is always the chance that it might never restart. It was a risky moment in my career. I refocused, of course, so that my mind was on the wedding, but not 100 percent. Meanwhile, some of our guests were wondering why the groom had showed up with a military crew cut. I made the best of it. Even if the situation wasn’t ideal, doing it this way was adventurous and fun.
I’d closed my ears to my friends’ horror stories about married life. “Ha! Now you get to argue about who should change the diapers.” Or “What kind of food makes a woman stop giving blow jobs? Wedding cake!” Or “Oh boy, wait until she hits menopause.” I paid no attention to any of that. “Just let me stumble into it,” I told them. “I don’t want to be forewarned.”
You can overthink anything. There are always negatives. The more you know, the less you tend to do something. If I had known everything about real estate, movies, and bodybuilding, I wouldn’t have gone into them. I felt the same about marriage; I might not have done it if I’d known everything I’d have to go through. The hell with that! I knew Maria was the best woman for me, and that’s all that counted.
I’m always comparing life to a climb, not just because there’s struggle but also because I find at least as much joy in the climbing as in reaching the top. I pictured marriage as a whole mountain range of fantastic challenges, ridgeline after ridgeline: planning the wedding, going to the wedding, deciding where we’d live, when we’d have kids, how many kids we’d have, what preschools and schools we’d choose for them, how we would get them to school, and on and on and on. I’d conquered the first mountain already, planning the wedding, by realizing that it was a process I couldn’t stop or change. It didn’t matter what I thought the tablecloths would look like or what we’d eat or how many guests there should be. You simply accept that you have no control. Everything was in good hands, and I knew I didn’t have to be concerned.
Maria and I had both been cautious about getting married and had waited a long time: she was thirty, and I was thirty-seven. We now were like rockets in our careers. Just after we got engaged, she’d been named coanchor of the CBS Morning News, and soon she would be switching to a similarly high-paying, high-profile job at NBC. These assignments were in New York, but I’d made it clear that I would never stand in her way. If our marriage had to be bicoastal, we would work it out, I said, so we should not even debate that now.
I always felt that you should wait to marry until you are set financially and the toughest struggles of your career are behind you. I’d heard too many athletes, entertainers, and businesspeople say, “The main problem is that my wife wants me to be home, and I need to spend more time at my job.” I hated that idea. It’s not fair to put your wife in a position where she has to ask, “What about me?” because you are working fourteen or eighteen hours a day to build your career. I always wanted to be financially secure before getting married, because most marriages break up over financial issues.
Most women go into a marriage with certain expectations of attention; usually based on the marriage their parents had, but not always. In Hollywood, the gold standard for husbandly devotion was Marvin Davis, the billionaire oilman who owned 20th Century Fox, Pebble Beach Resorts, and the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was married to Barbara, the mother of his five children, for fifty-three years. All the women were melting over Marvin Davis. We’d be at a dinner party at their house, and Barbara would boast, “Marvin’s never, ever been gone a single night without me. Every time he goes on a business trip, he comes home that same day. He’s never gone overnight. And when he is, he takes me with him.” And the wives would say to their husbands, “Why can’t you be like that?” Or if your wife was within range, you’d receive jabs or kicks under the table. Of course, not long after Marvin died in 2004, Vanity Fair magazine published a story revealing that he’d been broke and Barbara was left trying to continue their philanthropic causes and cope with a bunch of debts. Then a lot of Hollywood wives were really pissed at his example.
I’d promised myself that we would never have to use Maria’s money—neither the money she earned nor any from her family. I wasn’t marrying her because she came from wealth. At that point, I was making $3 million for Predator, and if it did well at the box office, I’d earn $5 million for the next project and $10 million for the next, because we’d been able to nearly double my “ask” with every film. I didn’t know whether or not I’d end up richer than her grandfather Joseph P. Kennedy, but I felt very strongly that we would never have to rely on Shriver or Kennedy money. What was Maria’s was hers. I never asked how much she had. I never asked how much her parents were worth. I hoped that it was as much as they dreamed of having, but I had no interest in it.
I also knew that Maria wouldn’t want a two-bedroom rental apartment lifestyle. I had to provide her with a lifestyle similar to the way she’d grown up.
My new wife and I were extremely proud of what we’d already achieved. She picked a house for me to buy for us after we got engaged, much more lavish and luxurious than the one we’d started in. The new place was a five-bedroom, four-bath, 12,000-square-foot Spanish-style mansion on two acres of a ridge in Pacific Palisades. Wherever you looked, there were beautiful sycamore trees, and we had views of the entire LA Basin. Our street, Evans Road, led up the canyon to Will Rogers State Historic Park, with its fabulous horse and hiking trails and polo grounds. The park was so close that Maria and I would ride our horses up there; it was like a big playground we could use day and night.
In the months before the wedding, I was busy promoting Commando and shooting Raw Deal—the action movie I’d promised to make for Dino De Laurentiis—and getting ready to start Predator. Maria was even busier in New York. But we carved out time for renovating and decorating. We expanded the swimming pool, put in a Jacuzzi, built the fireplace we wanted, and fixed the tiles, the lighting, and the trees. Under the house, where the land sloped down to the tennis court, we excavated and finished a level, which then served as a tennis house, entertainment area, and extra space for guests.
Maria had chosen curtains and fabrics, but when I came back in late May after shooting Predator, they hadn’t yet been installed. She wasn’t due home from New York for another three weeks. I wanted to make sure that the renovation was finished exactly as she’d envisioned it so that Maria and I could move in and have the perfect house to live in as husband and wife. So I leaned on the decorator to finish the job, and there was a frenzy of painting and furnishing and hanging art. I’d been working with the contractors long distance while I was on the Predator set and flying home on week
ends to check on the renovation. I also had a Porsche 928 waiting for her at the house.
On the living room wall, the best spot was reserved for my wedding gift to Maria: a silk screen portrait of her I’d commissioned from Andy Warhol. I liked the famous prints he’d made of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Jackie Onassis in the sixties. He’d done these by shooting Polaroid portraits and then picking one to enlarge as the basis for a silk screen. I called him and said, “Andy, you have to do me a favor. I have this crazy idea. You know how you always do the paintings of stars? Well, when Maria marries me, she will be a star! You’ll be painting a star! You’ll be painting Maria!” This made Andy laugh. “So I would like to send her down to your studio, and she will sit for you, and you will photograph her and then paint her.” The image he created of Maria was a dramatic forty-two-inch square painting that captured her wild beauty and intensity. He ended up doing seven copies in different colors: one for my office, one for Maria’s parents, one for himself, and four for this wall, where they were clustered in a giant eight-foot square. Lithographs and paintings by Pablo Picasso, Miró, Chagall, and other artists we’d collected hung elsewhere in the room. But among all of those beautiful images, Maria’s was the gem.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 35