Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

  —

  I played a big role in decorating our house, but the wedding itself was out of my hands. The Kennedys have a whole system worked out for weddings in Hyannis Port. They hire the right planners, they handle the limos and buses, they make sure the guest list isn’t so big that people are spilling out the back of the church. For the reception, they know just where in the family compound to put up the heated tents for the cocktails, dinner, and dancing. They manage public and media access so that well-wishers can glimpse the comings and goings and reporters can get the photos and video clips they need without disrupting the event. Not a single detail of food, or entertainment, or accommodations gets missed. And people have a really great time.

  Franco was my best man, and I’d invited a few dozen family and friends, and people who had helped me the most in my life: like Fredi Gerstl, Albert Busek, Jim Lorimer, Bill Drake, and Sven Thorsen, the Danish strongman I’d become buddies with during Conan. Maria’s list numbered almost one hundred just in relatives. Then there were her longtime friends like Oprah Winfrey and Bonnie Reiss, and close colleagues from work like her coanchor Forrest Sawyer. There were also friends we knew as a couple, and beyond that an entire galaxy of amazing people who knew Rose Kennedy, Eunice, or Sarge: Tom Brokaw, Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Art Buchwald, Andy Williams, Arthur Ashe, Quincy Jones, Annie Leibovitz, Abigail “Dear Abby” Van Buren, 50 people or more connected to the Special Olympics—and on and on. In all, we had 450 guests, and I probably knew only a third of them.

  Seeing so many new faces didn’t detract from the wedding; it made the event even more colorful for me. It was an opportunity to meet a lot of people, full of fun, full of life, full of toasts. Everyone was upbeat. Maria’s family and relatives were extremely gracious. My friends kept coming up and saying, “This is amazing, Arnold.” They had a really good time.

  My mother already knew Eunice and Sarge—she’d met them during her annual spring visits. Sarge was always joking with her. He loved Germany and Austria, spoke German to her, and knew just how to make her feel good. He would sing beer-hall songs to her and invite her to waltz. They’d spin through the living room. He always pointed out what a great job she’d done raising me. He would talk about details of Austria, different towns he’d traveled through on his bicycle, and about The Sound of Music, the history of Austria, when the Russians left and Austria became independent, and what a great job of rebuilding the Austrians had done, how he loved the wines, how he loved the opera. My mom would say afterward, “Such a nice man. So educated. How little I know about America compared to how much he knows about Austria!” Sarge was a charmer. He was a professional.

  At the wedding, she met Teddy and Jackie too. They were incredibly gracious. Teddy offered his arm and walked her out of the church after the ceremony. He was very good at important little gestures like that; taking care of the family this way was his specialty. Jackie made a fuss over my mom when we went to her house the afternoon before the wedding. Her daughter, Caroline, as maid of honor, was hosting a lunch there for the bridesmaids, groomsmen, and close family—thirty people in all. Not just my mom, but everyone meeting Jackie for the first time walked away impressed, just as I had been when we’d first been introduced at Elaine’s. She talked to everybody, really sat down and engaged in conversation. Having watched her through the years, I could see why she’d been such a popular First Lady. She had an amazing ability to ask questions that would make you wonder, “How did she know that?” She always made my friends feel welcome when I brought them to Hyannis. My mother fell in love with her too.

  My mom gave the rehearsal dinner that night at the Hyannisport Club, a golf club overlooking the Shrivers’ house. We billed the evening as an Austrian clambake, and mixing the American and Austrian cultures was the theme. We put out red-and-white-checked tablecloths from an Austrian beer hall, and I showed up wearing a traditional Tyrolean outfit and hat. The menu was a combination of Austrian and American food, with a main course of Wiener schnitzel and lobsters, and a dessert of Sacher torte and strawberry shortcake.

  There were great toasts that evening. The toasts on Maria’s side were about her and how great she is and how I’d benefit from being her husband. From my side it was the opposite: what a great guy and perfect human being I am, and how she’d benefit from that. Together we’d make a perfect couple. The Kennedys really know how to celebrate these moments. They all jump in and have a great time. That was very entertaining for the outsiders. And for my friends, it was the first time being exposed to that world. They’d never seen that many toasts and such a lively audience. I took the occasion to give Eunice and Sarge their copy of Warhol’s portrait of Maria. “I’m not really taking her away, because I am giving this to you so you will always have her,” I told them. And then I promised all the guests, “I love her, and I will always take care of her. Nobody should worry.” Sargent put in his two cents: he had this rap about being the luckiest man in the world. “You’re the luckiest guy in the world to marry Maria, but I’m the luckiest son of a bitch alive to be with Eunice. We’re both lucky!”

  The wedding was held at St. Francis Xavier, a white clapboard church in the middle of Hyannis, a couple of miles away. It was a Saturday morning, and literally thousands of well-wishers were waiting outside as we arrived. I rolled down the window of the limo and waved to the crowds behind the barricades. There were dozens of reporters and cameras and video crews on hand too.

  I loved watching Maria coming up the aisle. She looked so regal with her beautiful lace dress and long train and ten bridesmaids, but at the same time, she was radiating happiness and warmth. Everyone settled down for the formality of the nuptial Mass, during which the exchange of vows takes place about one third of the way through. When the moment came, Maria and I stood before the priest. We were about to say “I do,” when all of a sudden the back door of the church went bang!

  Everyone turned around to see what was going on. The priest was staring past us and we looked over our shoulders too. There, silhouetted against the daylight in the entrance of the church, I saw a skinny guy with spiky hair and a tall black woman wearing a dyed-green mink hat: Andy Warhol and Grace Jones.

  They were like gunslingers coming in through the swinging doors of a saloon in a Western movie, or at least that’s how it seemed to me because I was seeing it larger than life. I thought, “This fucking guy, I can’t believe it. Stealing the show at my wedding.” It was wonderful in a way. Andy was outrageous. Grace Jones could not do anything low-key. Maria and I were delighted that they made it, and when the priest in his sermon counseled us as a couple to have at least ten good laughs a day, we were already on our way.

  There aren’t many guys who would describe their wedding reception as enriching and educational, but that’s how ours was for me. As my new father-in-law took me around to introduce me, I was again in awe of how many different worlds Sarge and Eunice had touched. “This guy ran my Peace Corps operation in Zimbabwe, which then was called Rhodesia . . .” “You’ll love this guy; he’s the one who took charge when there were riots in Oakland, and we put in VISTA and Head Start.”

  I was in my element because I was always eager to meet as many people as possible from different fields and backgrounds. Sarge accounted for the lion’s share of the guests from politics and journalism and the business and nonprofit worlds. It was a collection of people he had worked with in the Peace Corps and the Kennedy administration, in politics over the years, in Moscow on his trade mission there, in Paris during his ambassadorship, and on and on. Another guy he wanted me to meet was from Chicago: “Unbelievable, Arnold, an extraordinary human being. He single-handedly managed the entire legal aid program I started, and now people who have no money can get legal advice and representation.” This went on all day long. “Arnold, come over here! Let me introduce you to this friend from Hamburg. Ha ha, you’ll love talking to him—he cut this deal with the Russians . . .”

  When it came time to dance, Maria ditched her pump
s and switched to white sneakers to protect a toe she’d broken the previous week. Then as Peter Duchin and his orchestra struck up a waltz, she wound the train of her dress five or six times around her wrist, and we showed off the steps we’d been practicing, to much applause. My friend Jim Lorimer from Columbus had arranged for us to take ballroom dancing lessons. Those helped us a lot.

  The cake was a copy of the legendary one at Eunice and Sarge’s wedding: a carrot cake with white icing and eight tiers, standing more than four feet tall and weighing 625 pounds. Its appearance started another round of toasts.

  I made one remark at the reception that seemed like a minor thing at the time but would dog me for years. It involved Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary general of the United Nations, who was running for president of Austria. We’d invited him and other leaders, including President Reagan, the president of Ireland—even the Pope. We didn’t think they’d come, but it would be great to get back letters from them for the wedding album. I’d endorsed Waldheim as a leader of the conservative People’s Party with which I’d been associated since my weight-lifting days in Graz.

  A few weeks before the wedding, the World Jewish Congress accused Waldheim of concealing his past as a Nazi officer in Greece and Yugoslavia while Jews there were being sent to the death camps and partisans were being shot. This was hard for me to take in. Like most Austrians, I saw him as one of the greats—as secretary general, he’d been not just a national leader but also a world leader. How could he have any kind of Nazi secrets? He’d have been investigated long before this. Many Austrians thought it was an election-year smear tactic by the rival Social Democrats—a stupid move that embarrassed Austria in the eyes of the world. I said to myself, “I will continue supporting him.”

  Although Waldheim did not attend our wedding, the People’s Party sent two representatives to the reception who unveiled an attention-grabbing present: a life-size papier-mâché caricature of Maria and me wearing Austrian folk outfits. In a toast I gave thanking people for all the letters and gifts, I wove that in. “I want to thank also the representatives from the Austrian People’s Party for coming here, for giving us this gift, and I know that this is also with the blessing of Kurt Waldheim. I want to thank him also for it, and it’s too bad he’s going through all these attacks right now, but that’s what political campaigns are all about.”

  Someone gave this to USA Today, which mentioned it in a story about the wedding, drawing me into an international controversy that dragged on for years. When it was finally proven that Waldheim had lied about his military record, he came to symbolize Austria’s refusal to face its Nazi past. I was still struggling to understand the horrors of Naziism myself, and if I’d known the truth about Waldheim, I would not have mentioned his name.

  That regret was still to come, however. Maria and I jumped in the limo and headed for the airport feeling like this was the best wedding we’d ever been to. It was a very special day. Everyone was happy. Everything was a straight ten.

  —

  Maria had told her fans on the CBS Morning News that she was taking off only a few days. I didn’t have much time to honeymoon either. We went to Antigua for three days, and then she came with me to Mexico to spend a couple of days on the Predator set. When we arrived, I had everything prepared: the flowers were ready in the room, and I took Maria to a romantic dinner with mariachi music. When we came back to the room, I opened a bottle of great California wine, which I figured would lead to some good action. Everything was perfect the whole evening—until she went to take a shower. Then I heard loud screams coming from the bathroom, like in a horror movie.

  I should have known. Joel Kramer and his stunt crew had decided play a joke on us newlyweds. Actually, it was payback, because some of the stunt guys and I had put spiders in Joel’s shirt and snakes in his bag. The set was like a summer camp in that way. So when Maria opened the shower curtain, there were frogs hanging off it. You’d think she’d understand the mentality, because her cousins in Hyannis were playing practical jokes all the time. But she has a quirk: although she’s physically daring—Maria wouldn’t think twice about jumping off a thirty-foot cliff into the ocean—if she sees an ant, or a spider, or there’s a bee in the bedroom, she freaks. You’d think that a bomb had gone off. Same thing with her brothers. So the frogs really triggered some drama. There was no way Joel could have known this, but even so his joke was highly successful. Fucking Joel screwed up my entire night.

  Then Maria headed home, and it was time for me to get back to work as Major Dutch Schaefer, the hero of Predator. It’s a sci-fi action movie, of course, in which I’m leading my team in the jungles of Guatemala as guys are getting picked off and skinned alive by an enemy we don’t understand. (It turns out to be an alien, equipped with high-tech weapons and invisibility gear, that has come to earth to hunt humans for sport.) Producers Joel Silver, Larry Gordon, John Davis, and I took a big risk in picking John McTiernan to direct. He had done only one movie, a low-budget horror film called Nomads about some people who drive around in a van and create mayhem. What set it apart was the tension McTiernan maintained in a film that cost less than $1 million to make. We felt that if he could create that kind of atmosphere with so little money, he must be very talented. Predator would need suspense from the moment the characters arrive in the jungle—we wanted the viewer to feel scared even without the predator around, just from the mists, the camera movements, the way things came toward you. So we gambled that McTiernan could handle a production more than ten times as expensive.

  Like any action movie, Predator was more of an ordeal than a pleasure to make. There were all the hardships you’d expect in a jungle: leeches, sucking mud, poisonous snakes, and stifling humidity and heat. The terrain McTiernan picked to shoot on was so rough that there was hardly an inch of level ground. The biggest headache, though, turned out to be the predator itself. Most of the time it keeps itself invisible, but when it appears onscreen it is supposed to look alien and fearsome enough to terrify and wipe out big, macho guys. The predator we had wasn’t up to the job. It had been designed by a special-effects company that the movie studio chose to save money: Stan Winston, who created the Terminator, would’ve cost them $1.5 million, and this other shop charged half that. But the creature came across as ridiculous, not menacing; it looked like a guy in a lizard suit with the head of a duck.

  We started to worry as soon as we started test shooting, and after a few scenes, the worry crystallized. The creature didn’t work, it was hokey, it didn’t look believable. Also, Jean-Claude Van Damme, who was playing the predator, was a relentless complainer. We kept trying to work around the problem. Nobody realized that the creature footage couldn’t be fixed until we were all back from Mexico and the film was in the editing room. Finally the producers decided to hire Stan Winston to do a redesign and arranged to send us back down to Palenque to reshoot the climactic confrontation. That’s a night sequence where the predator is revealed fully and goes mano a mano with Dutch in the swamp.

  By now it was November, and the jungle was freezing cold at night. Stan’s predator was much bigger and creepier than the one it replaced: a green extraterrestrial, eight and a half feet tall, with beady sunken eyes and insect-like mandibles for a mouth. In the dark it uses thermal vision technology to find its prey, and Dutch, who by this time in the movie has lost all his clothes, covers himself with mud to hide. To shoot that, I had to put cold, wet mud on my body. But instead of actual mud, the makeup artist used pottery clay—the same clay they use to make the bottle-holders that keep your wine chilled at the table in restaurants. He warned me, “This will make the body cool down a few degrees. You may be shivering.” I was shivering nonstop. They had to use heat lamps to warm me, but that made the clay dry out, so they didn’t use them much. I drank jägertee, or hunter’s tea, a schnapps mixture you drink while ice curling. It helped a little, but then you got so drunk it was hard to do the scene. You try to control your shivering while the camera is on, hold onto
something really hard to stop the shaking, because as soon as you let go, it starts again. I remembered putting mud all over myself as a kid on the Thalersee and thought, “How did I ever enjoy that?”

  Kevin Peter Hall, the seven-foot-two-inch actor who had taken over in the predator suit, was facing his own challenges. He had to look agile, but the costume was heavy and off balance, and with the mask on, he couldn’t see. He was supposed to rehearse without the mask and then remember where everything was. That worked most of the time. But in one fight, Kevin was supposed to slap me around but avoid my head; all of a sudden there was a “whap!” and there was this hand right in my face, claws and all.

  The hassle paid off at the box office the following summer. Predator had the second-biggest opening weekend of any 1987 film (after Beverly Hills Cop II) and ended up grossing $100 million. McTiernan turned out to have been a great choice, and you could see from Die Hard the next year that his success with Predator was no fluke. In fact, if a director of his caliber had done the sequel to Predator, the movie could have become a major franchise on a par with Terminator or Die Hard.

  I had a parting of the ways with the studio executives about that. What happened with Predator happens to a lot of successful movies with first-time directors. The director goes on making hits, and his fee goes up: after Die Hard, McTiernan’s was $2 million. And, of course, costs had risen in the years since Predator, but the studio executives wanted to do a sequel that would cost no more than the first movie. That ruled out McTiernan. Instead, they hired another relatively inexperienced and inexpensive director; in this case, the guy who’d made A Nightmare on Elm Street 5. Joel Silver wanted me to do Predator 2, but I told him that the movie would take a major dive. Not only was the director wrong, but the script was wrong too. The story was set in Los Angeles, and I told him, “Nobody wants to see predators running around downtown LA. We already have predators. Gang warfare is killing people all the time. You don’t need extraterrestrials to make the town dangerous.” I felt that unless they paid to bring in a good director and a good script, hiring me wasn’t going to do anything. He wouldn’t budge, so I walked away. Predator 2 and all the other Predators that followed flopped, and Joel and I never worked together again.