So Maria and Ruth became good friends, and Ruth brought Milton to our engagement party. The first thing he did was walk up to some guy I didn’t know and shake his hand. He said, “It’s so nice to be here today at this engagement party. Maria is marrying Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Arnold, this is great, thank you so much for inviting me.”
I totally fell for it. I said, “I am over here!” What a stupid trick, but people were laughing, and that broke the ice, and then he did a whole routine. “Ruthie, my wife,” he said. “Look at her lips. The last time I saw lips like that, it had a hook through it.”
Ruthie, who was sitting next to Maria, said to her, “Oh God, that joke. I’ve heard it a thousand times.”
Berle sat down with us afterward, and we had a great time. Finally, he said, “Let’s get together.”
“Absolutely!” I said.
We met at Caffé Roma in Beverly Hills, and it became our place. We always had lunch there, and I’d hang out with him and his friends like Sid Caesar and Rodney Dangerfield, and Milt Rosen, who wrote a lot of the jokes. Or I would go to his house, where we’d smoke stogies while I asked him a thousand questions about comedy.
Berle was the president of the Friars Club of Beverly Hills, which he founded in 1947 with other comedians like Jimmy Durante and George Jessel. It was on a side street between Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards, in a white building that resembled a bunker from the outside but inside was a private restaurant and nightclub. I would go every month or two for a lunch or a dinner or some event. The Friars had good boxing matches and was famous for celebrity roasts. But Milton was almost eighty, and it was very clear that the club was outdated.
He and his buddies had such a strong lock on it that new comedians weren’t joining. Guys like Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Danny DeVito, and Robin Williams would visit, and you would see them getting frustrated and thinking, “Who are these old farts? I can make jokes that will blow everyone away.”
But I was not a comedian, so I was not putting myself on that level. What’s more, I grew up in a culture where you respect the elders. To me, someone as accomplished as Berle ought to be honored and complimented and pumped up because maybe he didn’t have much going on anymore. It must have been weird to be Milton Berle, and, after becoming a legend as “Mr. Television” and then being a big star in Las Vegas and on Broadway, all of a sudden your only identity is the Friars Club. No matter where he was, Milton tried to steal the show because he still had that craving for attention, which was why he’d become a comedian.
I discovered that all these comedy legends could have a normal conversation, but not often. They would talk about everyday stuff if we were hanging out at Caffé Roma, but then Robin Williams would come by, or Rodney Dangerfield in his Bermuda shorts, and that would stir things up. If you went with that same bunch to an event where there was any kind of audience, the madness never stopped: joke upon joke and attack upon attack, with everyone going after everybody else. But the funniest thing was that a lot of the comedians brought their wives, who were normal-looking hausfraus. They would roll their eyes at the jokes. You could almost hear them say, “Here we go again. Oh God.” In fact, sometimes you did hear one of them say, “Aw, come on, how many more times are you going to use that one?” That was the worst. The old comedians just hated it.
The Friars Club guys didn’t see me as a comedian. They liked me as a person and liked my movies, and they felt that I had some talent for jokes with certain safe material that was not too complicated. They also knew I respected them and admired their talent. That was fine. You have to figure out your potential. So let’s say on a scale of 1 to 10, with Milton Berle a 10, my potential is a 5. In comedy his potential was much greater than mine, obviously, but maybe not in something else. It’s hard to imagine Milton Berle as an action hero.
But the trick is how do you reach 100 percent of your potential? It was the right time in my career to expand into comedy and throw everything off a little bit. But I also knew comedy was a tricky thing to get involved with. Particularly for me as a European, because I didn’t have an American sense of humor, and my timing and delivery of lines tended to be a little cockeyed. So meeting these guys and being included in their world gave me a chance to understand it better. I discovered that I really like being around people who are funny and who write comedy and who are always looking to say things in a unique way—though I had to get used to Milton wisecracking that I had bigger tits than my girlfriend.
He became my comedy mentor. He used to 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!” He taught me a lot about how to deliver jokes, how to play down the humor and not stress the punch line too much. I would ask how to pick jokes to lighten up a serious situation and tie them in so the humor seems organic. I learned how if you’re doing standup, nothing has to tie together at all. First, you make a few jokes about whatever’s in the news, like Jay Leno does. Then you pick some people in the audience and work them over, and you make sure to throw in some jokes on yourself to take the curse off the fact that you’re making fun of other people.
Often Milton would coach me on timing. “You get a lot of awards when you’re a star, and lots of them are irrelevant,” he said. “But you still have to give an acceptance speech. So here’s what you do. You say, ‘I’ve gotten many awards, but this one . . . for me . . .’ —and you have to get emotional here and make like you’re choking up—‘this one . . . for me . . . is the most . . . recent!’ See? You show the emotion so you get the audience going the other way.”
Berle wrote his own jokes—The Milton Berle Show was the biggest and longest-running program on TV in the early days—but he was also famous for stealing from everybody else. Jack Benny once got accused of stealing a joke from Berle, and he said, “When you take a joke away from Milton Berle, it’s not stealing, it’s repossessing.”
His biggest frustration with me was the way I always went over the top. He was helping me get ready once for a roast that he couldn’t attend. On that occasion, I was the person to be roasted, and Milton was giving me jokes to use when my turn came to respond to the other speakers. “Don’t burn, just singe,” he said, reminding me of this old rule about roasts. I didn’t pay much attention. One of the jokes he gave me was about comedian Henny (“Take my wife—please!”) Youngman: “Henny has a weight problem. But it’s not really a weight problem, it’s just water retention. He is retaining Lake Mead.”
On the night of the roast, during my turn to speak, I gestured toward Henny and said, “Look at this fat pig. But he’s not really fat. He has a water retention problem . . .”
Milton’s friends from the Friars Club knew he’d been coaching me, and the next day they called him up yelling, “How could you tell Arnold to call Henny a fat pig!” Milton said I should call the club members who were offended and apologize. “I thought by going beyond what was written on the card, it would be funnier,” I told them. “But I know it was against the rules, and I’m sorry.”
When I see a great performer, I always start to dream. Wouldn’t it be cool to be a rock ’n’ roll star like Bruce Springsteen? Wouldn’t it be cool to give a speech to the applause of one hundred thousand people like Ronald Reagan? Wouldn’t it be cool to do a hilarious half-hour standup routine like Eddie Murphy? Maybe it’s the Leo in me, the perpetual performer who always wants to be the center of attention.
So with Milton Berle, I was saying to myself, “Maybe I will never get to his level, but if I can learn just a little bit of what he knows . . .” How many times in life do you have to give a toast? How many times do you have to give a speech for some worthy cause like physical fitness? Or appear at a press conference at some movie festival?
With action movies, the problem is compounded. Fifty percent of the critics will automatically say, “I hate action movies. I like love stories. I like movies you can take the family to see. This guy just kills people, and kids watch it, and t
hen they go out on the street and kill people.” Starting with something disarming and funny is a good way to stand out. You become more likable, and people receive your information much better.
Whenever I watched a comedy, whether it was Animal House or Ghostbusters or Blazing Saddles, I always thought, “I could have done that!” But nobody was going to hire me for that kind of part, and it made no sense to dig in my heels and insist, “My next movie has to be a comedy.” I hadn’t gone all the way with action movies. If I was going to branch into comedies anytime soon, I would need someone to be my cheerleader.
—
That problem resolved itself at a ski lodge in Snowmass Village, Colorado, outside of Aspen, in late 1986. Maria and I found ourselves hanging out by the fireplace one evening with Ivan Reitman and Robin Williams and their wives. Robin and I were having a good time trading funny stories about skiing and who in Aspen was sleeping with whom. Ivan was the master. He had produced Animal House and produced and directed Ghostbusters and Legal Eagles, and I wanted to work with him really badly, so I was using all the joke-telling skills I’d learned from Milton Berle. It worked. By the end of the evening, Ivan was looking at me thoughtfully.
“You know,” he said, “there’s a certain innocence about you that I’ve never seen come through on the screen, and a certain sense of humor. I think Hollywood wants to keep you pigeonholed as the action hero, but it could be quite attractive to see you play a strong guy with that innocence.”
After we came back from Aspen, I called Ivan and suggested that we develop something together. He agreed. He asked some writers to come up with five ideas for me and gave me all five: two-page memos that each sketched a character and a story. We eliminated four very quickly, but the fifth—about mismatched twins who are the product of a scientific experiment to breed the ideal human—seemed great. Julius Benedict, the Arnold character, who gets all the good genes, is virtually perfect but naïve. He goes in search of his brother, Vincent, a smalltime crook, with comical results. We agreed that the title, The Experiment, didn’t work, given my Germanic background, so the project was renamed Twins. From that point, everyone fell in love with the concept.
I cooked up the idea of casting Danny DeVito as Vincent, because I’d run into Danny’s agent and thought it would be very funny to have the twins look so different physically. Everyone liked that idea. They talked to Danny. He loved the idea, although right away he had reservations. “Okay, it’s a great sight gag, Arnold and me as twins,” he said. “Now how do we sustain that?” Danny liked to have things nailed down. And that is how the project began.
Ivan, Danny, and I made an interesting team. Ivan’s mother was a survivor of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, and his dad had been a resistance fighter; they emigrated from Czechoslovakia after the war. Like many children of Holocaust survivors, Ivan has incredible drive, and he’s combined this with his wonderful talent for directing and producing comedy. Danny turned out to be hilarious to work with, and in spite of his huge successes on TV and in movies, he’s the opposite of a crazy Hollywood personality. He drives normal cars and has a great family and lives a normal life. And he’s extremely well organized financially.
Being realistic and levelheaded about business enabled the three of us to add a little chapter to Hollywood business history. We knew that selling Twins in the usual way would be difficult. In theory, the studios would love the idea: you just had to picture me and Danny DeVito next to each other on a movie poster. But in reality, what we were proposing was an offbeat picture by three expensive guys. If each of us got paid his going rate, the budget would be so top-heavy that we thought no studio would touch it. And yet none of us wanted to take a pay cut because working for less can hurt your negotiating power in future deals.
So when we pitched Tom Pollock, the head of Universal, we proposed to make Twins for no salary at all. Zero. “I can guarantee it will be a hit, because of Ivan and Danny here,” I told him. “But I understand that you see me as an action guy. I’ve never done comedy, and I’m an unknown quantity. Why should you have to take the risk? So don’t pay us anything until we prove we’re worthy.” What we wanted in exchange was a piece of the movie: a percentage of the box-office receipts, video sales and rentals, airline showings, and so on. Hollywood calls this the back end.
Tom was so convinced that the movie was going to be a hit that he said, “I’d rather give you the cash.” But by this time, Ivan, Danny, and I had really gotten attached to our idea. “We don’t want cash,” we said. “None of us is short of cash. Let’s all share the risk here.”
The deal we ended up with guaranteed the three of us 37.5 percent of all the income for the movie. And that 37.5 percent was real, not subject to all the watering-down and bullshit tricks that movie accounting is famous for. We divvied up the 37.5 percent among ourselves proportionally based on what each of us had earned on his previous movie. Because I’d been paid a lot for The Running Man, I ended up with the biggest slice, almost 20 percent. It made the math simple: if Twins was a decent-sized success and made, say, $50 million, it would put almost $10 million in my pocket.
Tom Pollock knew full well how rich these terms could turn out to be. But he didn’t want us to go to another studio and get offered more. Besides, if we made money, Universal would make plenty of money too. He had a great sense of humor about it. We were in his office, and after we agreed, he stood up and theatrically turned his pants pockets inside out. “Okay,” he said. “Now I’m going to bend over. Go ahead. You can steal everything from me and fuck me!” It became one of those legendary lines from a studio executive. We all laughed. Then he said, “I think it’s a good deal. Let’s do it.”
I’d never realized that moviemaking could be so much fun when you’re not covered in freezing jungle mud or getting beaten around by mechanical snakes. We shot Twins in Los Angeles, New Mexico, and Oregon in the early months of 1988. I got to do things on camera that I’d never done before. I got to waltz. I got to sing. I got to play a thirty-five-year-old virgin getting seduced by a beautiful girl (played by Kelly Preston, John Travolta’s wife, who was a joy to work with). I got in touch with what Ivan called the innocent side of me.
Danny DeVito was the Milton Berle of comic acting. He never tried to throw in funny lines, never depended on a joke to create humor—that doesn’t work on camera. Instead, he depended on the circumstances to create the humor. He was so smart in the way that he used his voice and eyes, and the way he threw his body around. He knew exactly what worked for him, what people love about him, what would sell. He knew exactly how far he could take the dialogue, and for all of us, there was a constant back-and-forth with the writers as we fine-tuned scenes and lines. And as a partner on the set, Danny was great! He smoked stogies. He made pasta for us once and sometimes twice a week. He made the good espresso, and he was always ready with the Sambuca and the good after-dinner or after-lunch drinks.
The chemistry between us worked really well right from the start. As shady Vincent, he was always trying to play me like putty. He’d conned a lot of people, and now he was going to con me. And I, as Julius, was an easy mark but at the same time smart enough to figure out the situation and do something about it. I just had to play my character exactly the way it was written: naïve, strong, smart, educated, sensitive, able to speak a dozen languages.
Compared to being an action hero, it was a lot easier to be a comic star. The rehearsals were all about changing the rhythm of my persona. I had to get rid of the stern looks, the hard lines, the commanding, machinelike talk. No more of that Terminator slow monotone. I had to throw out everything I’d learned in action films to telegraph leadership and command. Instead, I had to soften everything. I had to say the words more gently, roll them together, and combine them with gentler looks and smoother turns of the head. There’s a scene early in the movie where a bad guy on a motorcycle zooms up from behind Julius and tries to snatch his suitcase. But Julius doesn’t let go, and the guy wipes out. I had to do tha
t scene without any show of anger or effort—to Julius, it’s just common sense to hold on to his suitcase, and he’s born with such tremendous strength that it’s no effort at all. I’m not trying to make the guy crash. As a matter of fact, I’m worried that he’s hurt and try to help him!
The comedy was there. We knew we had a winner. The idea of opposite twins worked perfectly, and there was always laughter on the set. Every evening when we watched the dailies, cast and crew who had seen us do four, five, or six takes of a scene would still laugh when they saw it on the screen. At first we shot in LA, and then we moved to the desert near Santa Fe, New Mexico.
No matter where we went, people would visit because word spread that it was a happy set. Clint Eastwood dropped by on the day we shot the scene where I sing. Julius is on an airliner listening to rock ’n’ roll on headphones for the first time in his life. He starts singing along to a 1950s hit by the Coasters, “Yakety Yak,” without realizing that all the other passengers can hear. It was my movie singing debut, and let’s just say that I’m no Frank Sinatra. Afterward, Clint said, tongue in cheek, “I didn’t realize you had such talent.” The only time I sing in real life is at the end of a party when I want the guests to leave.
—
One of the running jokes on the set was, “Never ask Arnold about politics.” Not that I’d get upset, but if you asked me, I’d fill your ear with sales talk about Vice President George H. W. Bush. It was presidential primary season, and he was battling Senator Bob Dole of Kansas and evangelist Pat Robertson for the Republican nomination to succeed Ronald Reagan. The other cast members of Twins were all Democrats, and the joke was that if I started talking, they’d get upset with me, which would threaten the sunny mood.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 39