In the midst of all this, I was also trying to keep Planet Hollywood from going up in smoke. Was it a fad, or was it a real business? The startup had become, to put it mildly, a crazy adventure. In the past eighteen months, I’d taken part in restaurant openings in Moscow, Sydney, Helsinki, Paris, and more than a dozen other cities all over the world. Often these openings were more like national events. Ten thousand people turned out in Moscow, and forty thousand in London. Our opening in San Antonio, Texas, turned into a citywide celebration where more than one hundred thousand people were partying in the streets. It was a huge sensation. There was no press that didn’t cover it. Planet Hollywood was like the Beatles: a genius idea with sophisticated promotion and the best marketing.
An impressive number of stars signed up as owners and participants as the company grew: Whoopi Goldberg, Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas, Cindy Crawford, George Clooney, Will Smith, Jackie Chan, and on and on. We had a lineup of athletes that was just as fantastic, including Shaquille O’Neal, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, Sugar Ray Leonard, Monica Seles, and Andre Agassi. The athletes were associated with the Official All Star Cafe, Planet Hollywood’s chain for sports celebrities. When Planet Hollywood went public in 1996, it had the busiest first day of trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange ever, and the total value of the company stood at $2.8 billion.
It was clear that Planet Hollywood was a great venue for a party. When we held the premiere celebration for Eraser at the Official All Star Cafe in Times Square, traffic was gridlocked for blocks. Inside, for $15, you could get a burger and a beer and watch George Clooney, Vanessa Williams, me, and the rest of the cast and our guests hanging out on the main floor below. There were interesting nostalgia displays, like part of Charlie Sheen’s collection of baseball memorabilia and a preserved slice of wedding cake from Joe DiMaggio’s wedding to Marilyn Monroe. There were counters where you could buy specially designed clothing and souvenirs.
The Planet Hollywood trips, openings, and events were all fun. Sometimes I would bring Maria and the kids, and we’d make the trip a minivacation. Sly, Bruce, and I got together and hung out. It was always interesting to meet the local celebrities, too, who were an essential part of the business. Every city has celebrities, whether it’s a football star or an opera singer or whatever. When we opened in Munich or Toronto or Cape Town or Cancún, we always involved both the international stars and the locals, and that’s what made the celebration. Local celebrities would join in because they could mingle with the international stars, and often they would have financial participation in that particular restaurant. After the grand opening, the international celebrities would draw back, and the locals would support the restaurant as a regular hangout, throw parties there, have screenings there—almost every Planet Hollywood was built with a screening room.
Going public gave the company capital to expand. But we saw very quickly the drawbacks of being publicly owned, too. Compared to regular restaurant chains such as Ponderosa or Applebee’s, Planet Hollywood had high expenses, and if you weren’t on the inside, or out there promoting the business, it was hard to see why certain big-ticket items made sense.
For instance, corporate jets: Planet Hollywood spent lots of money flying celebrities around. Actually, this was the best way to cement the loyalty of the stars; even more effective than the stock options they also received. Big-time celebrities don’t like flying commercial, and yet very few have their own planes. For this reason, the Warner Bros. studio operated its own little air force for twenty or thirty years, keeping a set of planes to fly Clint Eastwood and other major actors and directors around. Warner also had houses in Acapulco, Mexico, and Aspen and apartments in New York. These were like candies for celebrities. If you were part of the Warner family, you could use all of that for free. And those actors and directors stayed with the studio, signing contract after contract, because they knew if they went to, say, Universal, there would be no more corporate jet. We had that same magic working for us, and yet shareholders would say, “Wait a minute, why are you wasting all this money on celebrities? I don’t want to pay for that.”
They complained about the design expenses also. The restaurants all sold merchandise, from cool-looking bomber jackets to caps to key chains, and these were being refreshed and updated constantly. Fans would try to see how many Planet Hollywood T-shirts from different cities they could collect. Sometimes a customer would show up at an opening with thirty T-shirts for me to sign because he or she had been to thirty cities all over the world. It was a good, good spin. But stockholders would still want to know, “Why are you designing jackets and merchandise all the time? Why don’t you keep the same ones?”
The biggest pressure from the public markets was to expand. Wall Street was in the heat of the internet boom, and investors demanded fast growth. The founders, Robert Earl and Keith Barish, were each now worth about $500 million on paper because they still owned 60 percent of the stock. They promised to increase both total sales and the number of locations by 30 percent to 40 percent a year. This meant building restaurants in lots of second- and third-tier US cities like Indianapolis, Saint Louis, and Columbus, as well as in dozens more cities abroad. In April 1997, the month I had my heart operation, the company made a deal with Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal to open almost three dozen Planet Hollywoods across the Middle East and Europe, starting with Brussels, Athens, Cairo, Lisbon, Istanbul, and Budapest. And it made a deal with a tycoon in Singapore, Ong Beng Seng, to build almost two dozen restaurants in Asia.
I kept telling Robert and Keith that this was a mistake. They were losing their grip on the central concept. If you went to the Planet Hollywood in Beverly Hills, you really might see Arnold. If you went to the one in Paris, you really might see beloved French film star Gerard Depardieu. If you went to the All Star Cafe in Tokyo, you really might see Ichiro Suzuki, the great baseball player. And in Orlando, you really might see Shaq during the years that he played there. But if you went to the Planet Hollywood in Indianapolis, would you see Bruce Willis having lunch? It started to feel like bullshit. We couldn’t deliver on that promise. By October, I was worried enough to ask Robert and Keith to come to my office and talk. We sat around the big conference table, just the three of us and Paul Wachter, and I made my pitch to them about fixing the strategy. We now had restaurants all over the world in great locations, I told them, and those held enormous potential that was still untapped. I had a whole presentation prepared on how to do that. For instance, we had a big opportunity to work with the studios on movie premieres. “Hollywood is turning out fifty movies a year,” I said. “Every one of those movies is going to open up across the United States and the world. So where do they hold the party?”
I wanted to bring studio executives into the business, fly them to the premieres, offer them perks, and treat them like kings so they would sit in their marketing meetings and say, “We’re going to open this movie with Planet Hollywood in Moscow, Madrid, London, Paris, and Helsinki—ten cities. In each city, we’ll have a screening at the restaurant, and then a huge screening at a local theater, and Planet Hollywood will host a big after-party. And here’s the good thing, guys: Planet Hollywood will fly the celebrities over and pay for the party. We’ll take care of the hotel rooms and all the other stuff involved in the premiere itself. By splitting the costs, we’ll save, and we’ll still get a ton of attention.”
Pulling off those kinds of deals meant that we would need a point person to schmooze with the studio. My first choice would have been Jack Valenti, the longtime head of the Motion Picture Association of America and Hollywood’s top lobbyist in Washington. Jack was a good friend and had been one of my closest advisors when I was chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. I thought we should go to him and say, “Jack, you’re seventy-five. You have done a terrific job for the movie business, but what are they paying you? A million dollars a year? Here’s two million a year. Relax. And here’s a pension, and here are benefits f
or your grandchildren.” All of a sudden we’d have Jack Valenti schmoozing all the studios and making the deals.
Another vital matter that I raised: our hamburgers and pizzas were good, but I wanted to serve more interesting food. And I saw huge potential in the merchandise. Rather than cut back our spending on design, I believed that we should do more. I was fascinated by the way fashion designer Tom Ford had gone into Gucci and transformed it from an old-fuddy-duddy company into a source for hip jackets and hip shoes. Before Ford’s arrival, I never bought from Gucci; all of a sudden, I was in their store.
“You’ve got to get a guy like that to design for Planet Hollywood,” I told Robert and Keith. “You need actual Planet Hollywood fashion shows that you can take to Japan, Europe, and the Middle East, so that people will want to have the latest Planet Hollywood stuff. Rather than always selling the same old bomber jacket, the bomber jacket should change all the time, with different kinds of buckles and with different kinds of chains hanging off it. If you make the merchandise snappy and hip and the newest of the new, you’ll sell tons of it.”
Throughout my pitch, Robert and Keith kept saying, “Yes, yes, great idea.” At the end, they promised to get back to me on the points I’d raised. But Paul had been the only person taking notes. “I don’t think they got it,” he said after they left. I’d hoped this would be a game-changing meeting, because promotion and merchandising were realms I truly understood. But I had the sense that Robert and Keith were overwhelmed. The pressure from the market was getting to them. While Robert was supposedly focused on operations and Keith on the strategic vision, mostly they talked about investor deals. And Planet Hollywood had reached a scale where it was no longer possible for two entrepreneurs to do it all. The company needed structure, and it needed people who were expert in managing a global operation. I’m a loyal person, and I stayed committed to the business for several more years. But its popularity declined steadily, and the stock fell and fell until eventually the company went bankrupt. Financially I did fine, thanks to the protections we had negotiated into my deal, although I made nowhere near the $120 million or so my stock had once been worth on paper. I was better off than the many shareholders who lost money, however, and better off than many of the other actors and athletes.
Even so, I’d love to do it again, only have it managed better. Whoopi, Bruce, Sly, and all the other big-name participants would tell you that Planet Hollywood was fun. With the huge parties, openings, and premieres, we met people all over the world and had the time of our lives.
CHAPTER 22
Family Guy
MARIA HAD A TERRIBLE time with morning sickness while she was pregnant with Christopher in 1997. It got so severe that she had to check into our local hospital because she couldn’t keep anything down. I was worried even though she had good medical attention, and the kids were upset because Maria was gone. Katherine was only seven years old, Christina was five, and Patrick was three. To help them get through it, I put off commitments and spent a lot of extra hours at home trying to be both mom and dad.
I figured that what would reassure them most was making sure they saw Maria every day and otherwise keeping up the daily routine. Every morning on the way to school for the girls, we’d stop off at the hospital, and again in the afternoon. I explained to them that Mommy would want to have a part of home with her, so each morning before we left, we’d go into our garden and pick the most elegant flower to bring her.
Maria and I had been raised in wildly different ways, which meant we could draw on the best of each style for our parenting routine. Meals, for example, were definitely in the Shriver tradition. Both sets of parents insisted that we all sit down as a family every night, but that’s where the similarity ended. In my parents’ house when I was a kid, no one discussed anything at the dinner table. The rule was, when you eat, you eat. Each of us was very private, and if you had a problem, you worked it out yourself. But in Maria’s family growing up, they all shared what they’d done that day. Everybody told a story. I’m good at communicating, but Maria was so much better at creating fun at dinner, explaining everything to the kids. She brought her family’s atmosphere to our table. It was something that I tried to pick up on for myself, to learn and become the same way. It’s very helpful to have at least one parent with those skills.
When our kids had homework, we each went with our strengths. Maria would help with anything involving language, and I would help with anything involving numbers. She is a very good writer, with an unbelievable vocabulary and grace with words. In fact, motherhood inspired her to author books of insight for young people. Her first, Ten Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Went Out into the Real World, tore down the myth of the superparent who can barrel on unchanged at work while raising kids. “Children Do Change Your Career (Not to Mention Your Entire Life),” one chapter was titled, and its takeaway was “At work, you’re replaceable . . . But as a parent, you’re irreplaceable.” We both strongly believed that.
I’ve always been comfortable with numbers. As a kid, as I learned about math, it all made sense. The decimals made immediate sense. The fractions made immediate sense. I knew all the roman numerals. You could throw problems at me, and I’d solve them. You could show me statistics, and instead of glazing over the way a lot of people do, I’d make out facts and trends that the figures were pointing to and read them like a story.
I taught our kids math drills that my father had used on Meinhard and me. He always made us start them a month before school, and we had to do them every day because he felt that the brain has to be trained and warmed up like the body of an athlete. Not only did my brother and I have to do the math drills but so did anybody who came over to play. Pretty soon a lot of kids avoided our house. I hated all this, of course. But here I was thirty-five years later drilling my own kids. I always gave them the bill in restaurants to figure out the 20 percent tip. They’d add it up and sign my signature. I always checked to make sure they did the math right. It was a whole routine, and they loved it.
When it came to chores, we used the Schwarzenegger tradition. In Europe, you grow up helping to keep the house clean. You take off your shoes when you come in, otherwise all hell breaks loose. You turn off the lights when you leave the room because there is a limited amount of power. You conserve water because somebody has to fetch it from the well. You are much more involved in the basics. I remember my shock when I first got to know Maria, who had grown up with people to pick up after her. She’d come into the house and take off her sweater—it was a cashmere sweater—and if it fell on the floor, that’s where it stayed. To me, even today, I can’t treat a cashmere sweater that way. I’d have to pick it up and hang it on a chair. And even though I can afford it, I would never wear cashmere to go skiing or play sports. It has to be cotton or wool or something cheaper, like a $10 sweatshirt, before I feel comfortable getting it sweaty.
Although Maria eventually became a neat freak like me, I was still the one who brought European discipline to the house—with tolerance added, of course, because I knew I couldn’t go crazy. You have to tone it down, unlike some of my friends in Austria. The way they discipline their kids may work for them there, but it doesn’t work here. Otherwise, when your kids compare notes with their friends at school, they will think that their father is a weirdo. I’d also promised myself, this is the generation where the physical punishment stops. I wasn’t going to carry on that Old World tradition.
Maria and I settled on our own approach, where we pamper the kids a little, but also have rules. From the time they were little, for instance, they had to do their own wash—learn how to use the washing machine, put the detergent in, put the clothes in and choose a medium or large load. Then how to put the clothes in the dryer and fold them and put them away. Also how to time yourself so your siblings have a chance to do their laundry too.
Every day before taking the kids to school, I would inspect to make sure that the lights were off, the beds made, and drawers and closets close
d. There could be stuff lying around and a little bit of mess; I was much more lenient than my dad. Nevertheless, those beds were made. I wasn’t looking for perfection, like in the military. But I didn’t want the kids to think that someone else was going to pick up after them. The epic struggle, though, was teaching the kids to turn off the lights when they left a room or went to sleep. It was me against the entire Maria clan, because the kids inherited keeping the lights on from her. When we first got together, she never went to sleep without the lights on. It made her feel secure. Then when we’d visit Washington or Hyannis Port, and I’d arrive late and they would all be asleep, I would walk into a house with the door unlocked and all the lights on. I could never understand it. It was the wildest thing. The next day the excuse would be, “Oh, we knew you were coming in late and wanted you to feel welcome, so we left the lights on.” But even if I was already there, and I went downstairs in the middle of the night, the lights would be on. Everywhere it was like Times Square. I’d explain to my kids, we have a shortage of energy, and there is only so much water in this state. You can’t stand under the shower for fifteen minutes. Five minutes is the limit. I’ll time it from now on. And be sure to turn off lights because when you’re not in the room, you don’t need them anymore.
To this day, my daughters won’t go to sleep without the hallway light on. I finally had to get used to the fact that they feel more comfortable that way. As for leaving the lights on when they’re not in a room, my father would have solved that with a smack, but we don’t hit our kids. When communication fails, our method is to take away privileges: canceling a playdate or a sleepover, grounding, not letting them use their car. But punishments like that seemed over the top for the light-switch problem. One of the boys was the worst offender, so I finally unscrewed one bulb in his room each time I found the lights left on. I pointed out that there were twelve bulbs in his room, and if he kept it up, soon he’d be in the dark. And that is what happened. Eventually my crusade was effective. Now when we’re home, I only have to turn off the lights after the kids maybe two days a week.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 48