Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

  I visited three hospitals to talk to the surgeons. I believe you should get three opinions when facing a big medical decision. The doctor I chose was Vaughn Starnes at the USC University Hospital. He was a trim guy with rimless glasses who was totally matter-of-fact about the problem and the risks. He also could understand where I was coming from.

  “I love your action movies, and I want to see you keep making them,” he said. “So I don’t want you running around with an artificial valve.” The better course was to put in a replacement valve made of living tissue, he explained. With a mechanical valve, I would have to take blood thinners and limit my activity for the rest of my life. But with an organic valve, “You can continue doing stunts, you can continue doing sports, you can go skiing, you can go motorcycle riding, horseback riding—whatever you want to do.”

  That was the upside. The downside was risk. The particular procedure he recommended worked only six times out of ten. “I want you to understand that in sixty percent to seventy percent of cases the surgery works, but in thirty percent to forty percent of the cases, the replacement valve fails,” he said. “Then we have to go back in and try again.”

  Big risk, big reward. That made sense to me. “It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll take the risk.”

  We scheduled the surgery for immediately after I finished Batman and Robin, so that I could come back without missing a beat. After the operation in April, I wanted to promote Batman and Robin that summer and then shoot my next picture, whatever it might be, in late 1997.

  I didn’t tell anybody about my heart surgery. No one knew. Not my mother, my nephew, my kids or anybody. Because I didn’t want to talk about it. To ease my anxiety, I pretended that it wasn’t really heart surgery; it would be more like getting a wisdom tooth removed. I would go in, get it done, and then go home.

  I didn’t even want to tell my wife. Maria was in the middle of a difficult fourth pregnancy, and I did not want her to be upset. She had a tendency to blow things up into high drama, even things that were not life and death, whereas I would play everything down. For instance, I would never tell her, “Three months from now, I’m going to Norway for a speech,” because from that point on, she’d fret that I would be gone that week and she would be by herself. She’d be relentless: “What flight are you going to take? Why leave on Saturday rather than Sunday? Do you really have to go for that long? What are those two extra meetings?” By the time I got on the plane, I couldn’t enjoy it because I’d talked too much about it. So I always told Ronda and Lynn, “Never share my calendar with anybody,” and I would tell Maria only a few days in advance. I’m a person who does not like to talk about things over and over. I make decisions very quickly, I don’t ask many people for opinions, and I don’t want to think too many times about the same thing. I want to move on. That’s why Maria always said I was just like her mother.

  Maria is the opposite. She’s a genius with medicine, and her method is to flesh everything out by talking to a lot of people. She’s an outward processor, while I keep things bottled up. I was afraid that if she did that, word would get around before I had surgery. I also was concerned that she would second-guess me so that every night there would be a discussion. I needed to be in denial. I’d made my decision in the doctor’s office, and I never wanted to deal with it again. If she were to bring it up all the time, then my denial trick wouldn’t work. It would disrupt my way of coping with life and death. So I felt it was better never to let Maria know until just before the trip, or in this case, just before I went to the hospital.

  As the surgery approached, I let Dr. Starnes in on my plan. “I will tell my family that I’m going to go to Mexico,” I said. “I’ll say I need a little vacation for a week. And then we do the heart surgery. You said I will be out of the hospital after five days. So after five days, I’ll go to a hotel. I will lie in the sun and get tanned, I will look healthy, and then I’ll go home, and no one will even know I had heart surgery. How about that?”

  The doctor seemed a little surprised. He looked at me and then said in his straightforward manner, “Won’t work. You’ll have pain, you’ll need help, you’ll never be able to fake it. I strongly recommend that you tell your wife. She’s pregnant. She should be included. I would tell her now.”

  That night I said casually to Maria, “Interestingly enough, do you remember I said one time that someday down the line I will need to have the valve replaced? The doctor has a slot available for me in two weeks, and I said to myself that’s actually a good idea because if I do it right now, I’m in between movies, and I don’t have to go to Europe for the Batman promotion for another six or seven weeks. So I can squeeze it in. This is a good time to do it, so I just want you to know.”

  Maria said, “Wait! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute, are you telling me you need heart surgery?”

  It was as if I’d never talked about it before. From that point on, she did talk about it continuously, but she also helped me keep it secret. My mother was staying with us for her annual spring visit, and we didn’t even tell her.

  The night before I was due at the hospital, I shot pool until one in the morning with Franco and a bunch of friends. We drank schnapps and had a great time, and I didn’t tell any of them where I was going the next day. Then at four in the morning, Maria got up and drove me to the hospital. We used the family van, not the fancy Mercedes. At Maria’s suggestion, I’d arranged to be admitted under a different name. The parking attendant was expecting us, and we got whisked into the garage. By five I was being prepped and hooked up to the machines, and by seven o’clock the surgery was in full swing. I loved that. Go in at five, start the surgery at seven, and by noon it’s over. Bang, bang, bang. At six o’clock that evening, I woke up ready to shoot some more pool.

  Well, that was the idea. They agreed to dress me in my Hawaiian shirt after the surgery so that when I woke up, I’d feel like I wasn’t actually in the hospital. That was the whole theme. Sure enough, it worked. I woke up, saw Maria sitting there, felt fine, and went back to sleep. When I woke up again the next morning, Maria was still there, and I glanced over and saw a Lifecycle stationary bike that had been ordered for me to use later in the week. Within two hours, I was out of bed and on the bike. The doctor came in and was stunned. He said, “Please, you’ve got to take this Lifecycle out of here.”

  “There is no resistance on it,” I said. “It’s just for me, for my head, that I am sitting on the Lifecycle right after surgery.”

  He examined me and was pleased with my progress. But that evening, I started coughing. Fluid was building up in my lungs. The doctor came back at nine o’clock and ordered a bunch of tests. A little later, after Maria went home to see the kids, I tried to sleep. But the coughing got worse, and soon I was having trouble getting air. At three in the morning, the doctor came back in. He sat down on the bed and held my hand. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “but this didn’t work. We have to take you back into surgery. I’m putting together the best team. We are not going to lose you.”

  “Lose me?” I said.

  “We are not going to lose you. Just hang in there tonight; maybe we’ll give you some medication so you sleep. Where’s Maria?”

  “She’s home.”

  “Well, I have to call her.”

  “Look, she will freak out. Don’t even tell her.”

  “No, she has to be here.”

  There’s a moment going into surgery that I really hate. It’s the moment when the anesthesia starts to take hold, when you know you’re going out, when you’re losing consciousness and don’t know if you’ll ever wake up. The oxygen mask felt like it was suffocating me—I was gasping for air, short of breath.

  This was a much bigger version of the claustrophobia I fought when I was having face and body masks made to play the Terminator or Mr. Freeze in Batman and Robin. For me, Stan Winston’s special-effects studio was torture. To make the masks, they need a mold, and to make the mold, they place these huge, heavy casts on your he
ad. A lot of actors hate it, so Stan and his helpers have a whole routine.

  When you first arrive, the music is on, everyone is happy and welcoming, “Yay, it’s good to have you here!” Then they sit you down and say, “This is going to be a little challenging. Are you claustrophobic?”

  “Nah,” I’d always answer, trying to play ballsy.

  So they start wrapping you with strips of fabric dipped in cement. Soon your eyes are covered, and you can’t see anything. Then your ears are closed, and you can no longer hear. One by one, all your senses are shut off. Now your mouth is sealed, so you can no longer talk. Finally, they cover your nose, except for two little straws poking out of your nostrils to let you breathe.

  You have to wait maybe a half hour for the cast to set. The mind starts to play tricks. What if you can’t get enough air? What if a little bit of cement gets in one of the straws and blocks off a nostril? Because they’ve had so many actors freak out, they try to keep things light with the music and casual conversation. After you can’t hear anymore, you still feel them moving around you as they’re applying the wrap. They tell you ahead of time that if you feel you are really flipping out, “I’m right here. Just signal with your hand or tap me on the arm.”

  After awhile the real fear sets in. You feel the cast getting hard, which means it’s no longer possible to just rip it off your head. Now it will have to be cut. You noticed the tools when you sat down—the little electric circular saw they use to cut off casts—but you didn’t ask enough questions when you had the chance.

  So now you’re thinking, “Wait a minute. How do they know how deep to cut? What if that saw slices into my face?”

  The first time I went through this, I worried so much about the saw that I started hyperventilating. I couldn’t get enough air through my straws, and I started feeling really freaked. I tried to calm down. “Stop thinking about that, stop visualizing that saw,” I ordered myself. “Push it out of your mind . . . Yeah, okay, I’ve got it out of my mind now. Okay, now let’s think about something else. Maybe I should think about the ocean. Maybe I should think about a great forest, something pleasant; maybe birds chirping and leaves rustling in the wind and in the distance people working and the sound of a . . . chainsaw!” And I’d be anxious again. Of course, by this time, the attendants had disappeared. Maybe not out of the room, but I didn’t know where they were. Maybe they’d told me, “Okay, just ten more minutes,” but I couldn’t hear. I was locked in. There was no one around. And so I was just kind of hoping for the best.

  Surgery reminded me of that.

  Maria was so frightened to get a call from Dr. Starnes at four o’clock in the morning that she telephoned her friend Roberta and asked her to come with her to the hospital. Roberta Hollander, a CBS news producer, had been like a sister to Maria when she first got in front of the camera—a strong leader and tough broad who really knew how to deal with people. A few hours later, she and Maria sat in Dr. Starnes’s office as I went back under the knife. He had a huge monitor in his office that let him see and hear what was going on in the operating room because there were parts of the procedure, like taking the patient off the heart-lung machine, that he didn’t perform. He’d go back to his office, see other patients and hold his meetings, keeping track in case he was needed. Maria told me later that she looked away many times. She couldn’t watch when they cut open my chest, used surgical pliers to undo the wires holding together my rib cage from the first operation, and exposed the heart. But Roberta pulled her chair right up to the screen. “Did you see that?” she said. “They just cut the aorta, and they’re stitching in the new valve!”

  So I got a second or third lease on life, depending on how you count it. I woke up from the surgery and discovered Roberta there with Maria, giving moral support. Again I felt good. The painful coughing was gone. I could breathe. “Amazing!” I said. “This is great! When did the doctor say I could go home?”

  We’d found an Austrian guy in the hospital kitchen who knew how to fix Wiener schnitzel, and the first two days I had that. It tasted delicious. But on the third day, when the attendant came in with the food, I said, “Can you please take that away? I cannot stand the smell.” It smelled like rotting garbage.

  From that point on, I could only stomach ice cream and fruit. Everything smelled bad. I lost my sense of taste. I hated everything they put in front of me and began to feel really low.

  The doctor had warned that open-heart surgery often leaves people depressed. But after what we’d just been through, Maria was very concerned. “This isn’t like you,” she said. When a couple of days passed, and I didn’t bounce back emotionally, she thought that the doctors were being too blasé. “You’ve got to do something,” she told them. “We can’t have him like that. When I come back tomorrow, you’d better have him cheery.”

  The residents had the idea of sneaking me a cigar, because they knew I love stogies. They thought that would really do it. There was an area on the roof where they could shoot baskets to unwind, and they brought me up there to smoke. Little did they realize that I had no sense of taste and that I hated everything. I put the cigar in my mouth and almost threw up. “No, thank you, I just can’t,” I said. I ended up sitting in the wheelchair watching them play basketball, like a character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I was just staring. I didn’t even know what I saw, just bodies jumping around. There was nothing in it for me, that was for sure. Eventually they wheeled me back down to the room. I did feel a little bit better, I guess, to be outdoors a bit.

  Eventually I came around, especially after I got home. I played with the kids and little by little started working out in the gym. Not bench presses, of course, but riding the Lifecycle a little and afterward walking up the hill to Will Rogers Park with Conan and Strudel, our black Lab that Franco gave me on one of my birthdays. A little later I could go back to weights, but heavy training was out of the question from now on because it would put pressure on the valve. No forcing, no struggling, the doctor said. Not ever again.

  I never realized how badly the news of my surgery was going to hurt me in Hollywood. We announced it because word had started to circulate anyway, and it would have seemed suspicious not to tell the public. Immediately I got phone calls from executives at the studios I’d been working with. “Don’t worry about the script,” they said. “We are going to hold it for you. Just take care of yourself and feel better. And as soon as you’re ready, let us know.”

  I should have known it was not that simple. The more you promote yourself as the ultimate action hero, and the more you advertise how fit you are and how you do the riding, jumping, and fighting yourself, people form a larger-than-life perception of you. They see you as an actual action figure, not just some guy in a costume on the screen. And the heart symbolizes it all. It’s the center of the body, the physicality. It’s the foundation of courage and will. The heart is emotion too—it’s love and passion and compassion. Heart, heart, heart, heart, it’s the center of everything.

  Now all of a sudden people hear that you’ve had surgery. This thing that has driven you for decades is being operated on. And they talk: “What happened? Did he have a heart attack? Oh, a valve change; I don’t know what that is, really. But Jesus Christ, open-heart surgery. They had to stop his heart and open it up and change parts in there. And having to do two surgeries must mean there’s something really wrong. Sounds like terrible news. Poor guy. I mean, fuck, it’s over!”

  People reacted totally differently to David Letterman’s coronary bypass surgery ten years later. Within two weeks, he was back on the show, and life went on. But no one expected him to lift up the set or run through flames or swing from the ceiling. Commonly after heart surgery, you can go back to your normal everyday life. But my everyday life was anything but normal. My stunts were not normal, and my movies were not normal, so I was seen differently. It was more like when a theoretical physicist has brain surgery. Everyone goes off the deep end and says, “Well, they said one-third o
f his brain was affected, and this is a disaster.”

  Access Hollywood and other celebrity-gossip shows went to town on the situation. So-called medical experts who had never even met me and didn’t know of my hereditary condition or the specifics of my treatment were interviewed on TV. They’d say things like, “Under normal circumstances, when you have a surgery like that, it means you’ll have an artificial valve, and you’ll be taking blood thinners, and you would have to avoid strenuous activity that might cause injury, like a movie stunt, which might cause severe internal bleeding, and you could die immediately.” We could clarify that I hadn’t received a mechanical valve and didn’t need blood thinners, of course, but the damage was done. The studios were making decisions based on inaccurate information. People thought, “We won’t be seeing Arnold in any action movies anymore.”

  —

  In spite of all this, I did experience the wonderful physical rebound that often results from a heart repair. I felt as vigorous as Hercules, ready to leap back into work. In July, I was already traveling around the world promoting Batman and Robin. And, as usual, I had projects at various stages of development, with roles that interested me. With Wings as Eagles was a film in which I would have played a German army officer in the closing months of World War II who ignores orders to kill Allied POWs and saves them instead. Minority Report was envisioned as a sequel to Total Recall, with a script by the same writer. I would have played the detective role that eventually went to Tom Cruise. In Noble Father I would have played a widowed cop trying to raise three daughters and fight crime. There was a proposed movie version of S.W.A.T., a 1970s TV action series; a movie called Crossbow, based on the legend of William Tell; and Pathfinder, about a Viking orphan raised by Native Americans at the time of the first European explorations of North America.

  I didn’t even notice at first that the studios were holding back. But when I started submitting stories and scripts I wanted to do, people were slow responding. I became aware that the studios seemed reluctant to commit really big money. Fox was backing away from the idea of Terminator 3. Warner put the brakes on I Am Legend, a postapocalyptic vampire script that I was supposed to shoot that fall with Ridley Scott directing. He wanted a budget of $100 million, while Warner wanted to spend only $80 million. That was the reason the studio gave for pulling back, anyway—the real reason was my heart surgery.