Among the joys that kids bring are the holidays that have been mostly missing from your life since your own childhood. Holidays become much more meaningful when you have a family, because now you see them in two ways. I remembered Christmas vividly from when I was a kid: my mother and father lighting the candles on the tree with the toys underneath, holding hands, singing “Heil’ge Nacht,” and my father playing the trumpet. Now I also saw Christmas through a parent’s eye.
I considered myself a tree-decorating expert. It was in my blood. In Austria, my father and the other men from the village would go out into the forest three days before Christmas and bring back trees. Kids were not supposed to know about it because the tree officially came from Christkindl: a female angel like the Christ child who was the Austrian version of Santa Claus. One time my brother mistakenly blurted out, “I saw Dad leaving with an axe,” and my father went nuts because my mother had not kept us away from the window. But normally it was the most fun thing. They decorated our tree with all kinds of candies, wrappings, and ornaments, so that the branches would droop down, with the presents underneath. The tree was always so tall that the highest ornament touched the ceiling. There were real candles mounted with clips on the outer branches, which meant that you could light the tree only for a few minutes each time.
At six o’clock on Christmas Eve, my father would turn down the radio, and there would be total silence. My mother would say, “Let’s listen, because remember Christkindl always comes around six o’clock.” Soon we would hear a little bell ring: one of the ornaments that decorated the tree. Obviously the neighbor girl had crept up the rear stairs and in the back door of our bedroom, but we never caught on to that until later. For years, Meinhard and I would race to our room, skidding on the throw rug on the hardwood floor and wiping out before we even got to the door, and the next thing, pushing and shoving, we would storm in. There was great, great joy.
Maria and I didn’t do the secret tree because that’s not the American tradition. The tradition here is to set up the tree three or four weeks before Christmas, and I didn’t want to insist on waiting and have the kids constantly ask, “How come we don’t have a tree yet?” Instead, we’d have friends over American style, where each friend hangs an ornament. As the kids got older, they did more and more until they were in charge of putting up the angel, or the star, or Jesus or Mary, or whatever the highest ornament would be, and deciding on the look of the tree.
We made a big deal of the other holidays too. Easter always came during my mom’s annual visit. She’d arrive as early as mid-February and live with us for two or three months, depending on the cold and snow in Austria. Besides wanting to spend time together, part of her motivation was to escape the harshest part of the winter. For Easter she was the perfect grandparent to have on hand, because the big traditions all trace back to that part of Europe: the bunny, the baskets, the eggs, the chocolates. She always colored eggs with the kids; she was an expert, and they’d have their little aprons on. My mother would take over the kitchen and make pastry, covering all the counters with dough rolled so thin that no one could figure out how she did it. Then she’d lay out the apple slices and fold up the dough and bake the most delicious apple strudel in America. On Easter the festivities would go on all day: first big Easter baskets and an exchange of small gifts, then Mass, and then an Easter egg hunt and a feast, followed by visits from relatives and friends.
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Maria made a big effort with my mother, and they really got along. And of course I was in heaven when Eunice or Sarge would come stay with us. So we never had in-law problems. The kids called my mother Omi, and she spoiled them, and they loved her. She’d picked up English over the years and had even taken some classes, so by now she was fluent enough to have conversations with the kids, even though talking to kids in your second language is never easy to do. She and Christina especially sought each other out—Christina whose middle name is Aurelia.
My mother spoiled our dogs as well. Conan and Strudel were not allowed upstairs, but after we went to sleep, my mother would sneak them into her room, and in the morning the dogs would be curled up on the rug by her bed. She was in LA enough that she established her own life and her own circle of friends—other Austrians and European journalists—to shop with, have lunch with, and hang out. I’ll never forget seeing her at an awards banquet once, deep in conversation with the mothers of Sophia Loren and Sylvester Stallone. They were probably all claiming credit for our success.
Mom was seventy-six when she died in 1998. It was my father’s birthday, August 2, and as my mother always did, she walked to the cemetery on a hill outside town to spend time at his grave. She would hold imaginary conversations with him for an hour, telling him everything she’d been doing, asking questions, as if he were right there but on the other side.
The weather that day was humid and stiflingly hot, and the cemetery was a steep climb up. People who saw her said that when she reached the grave, she sat down suddenly as if she felt faint, and then slumped to the ground. The medics tried to revive her, but by the time they got her to the hospital, she was brain-dead from oxygen deprivation. She’d never had her heart repaired, and it had failed.
Maria and I flew to Graz for the funeral. My nephew Patrick and Maria’s brother Timmy and Franco came along. I’d missed the funerals of my father and my brother, but for my mom’s we got there a day in advance and helped organize. We saw her in the casket, wearing a traditional Austrian dirndl dress.
She had been fine and cheerful as always during her annual spring visit, staying all through May, so of course this came as a terrible shock. But later, looking back on her life, I felt that by the time she passed away, I had no regrets. None, because of the relationship that I’d nurtured with her after I came to America, as I learned to think a little bit more about my family rather than just myself. Now that I had kids, I realized how my leaving must have upset her. I’d appreciated her earlier as a devoted mother, but I’d never thought about the pain my leaving caused. That maturing happened too late for me to reconnect with my brother or dad, but with my mother I built a good relationship where she and I really communicated.
I offered many times to buy her a house in Los Angeles, but she didn’t want to leave Austria. In addition to Easter and Mother’s Day, she came for all of our kids’ christenings. She saw every movie I made and came to a lot of the premieres. Starting with Conan the Barbarian, I brought her to the set of every one of my movies. She hung out on the set, hung out in my trailer, watched me film. When I was on location, in Mexico or Italy or Spain, she came and stayed sometimes for a week or two at the hotel. No one else brought their mom to the set, but mine was a natural tourist and this was something she happened to enjoy. It was partly because she got so much attention from everyone. We’d have breakfast together, and then my driver would take her wherever she wanted to explore, so she always came home with photos to show her friends: a marketplace in Mexico, the Vatican while in Rome, museums in Madrid. I brought her to the White House to meet Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and she attended the Great American Workout at the White House with George Bush. He was really, really nice to her, talking up a storm and complimenting her by telling her what a great job she’d done raising me.
I loved doing things for my mother not only because I wanted to make her feel that she’d done a good job as a parent, but also because it was kind of a reward for the hardships of her earlier life. When I look at the photographs of her at twenty-three or twenty-four, when my brother and I were born, she looked haggard and skinny. It was after the war. She was begging for food. She had a husband who got crazy and drunk every so often. She was in this little village. The weather was shitty a lot of times, with rain, snow, and gloom, except in the summer. She never had enough money. It was a struggle all along.
So I felt that in her remaining years, she should have the best time possible. She would be rewarded for carrying us kids at midnight over the mountain to the hospital when we go
t sick, for being there when I needed her. Also, she should be rewarded for the pain that I caused her by leaving. She deserved to be treated like a queen.
We buried my mother at the gravesite where she died, next to my dad, which was very sad but also romantic. She was so connected to him.
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If Easter belonged to my mom, Thanksgiving was a special Sarge and Eunice holiday from long before we got married. Shriver children, spouses, and grandchildren would always converge on their beautiful white Georgian mansion outside Washington. It was like a three-day family festival. Many couples have to negotiate about whether to spend a holiday with the in-laws, but this arrangement just fell into place naturally. I said to Maria, “Let’s stay with this because we have a great time at Thanksgiving with your parents and then we can always have Christmas at home. It doesn’t mean your parents can’t come, but we’ll have Christmas on our turf.” She liked that as well. I was always sensitive that our marriage had taken her far from her family and that she often missed them and wanted to hang out even though she also wanted her independence. So I always told her, “Remember that any of your family you want to invite is automatically a guest of mine too.” Welcoming my in-laws was easy because I liked them a great deal, and they always brought laughter and fun.
Thanksgiving at the Shriver house started out with church—Sarge and Eunice went to Mass every day—followed by breakfast and then lots of sports. In Georgetown, there were great clothes stores and gift shops that offered different merchandise than shops in California, so I’d grab the opportunity to get a start on Christmas shopping. We’d meet again at night, and many times Teddy would come over with his wife for dinner or drinks, or Robert Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist, would come with his son, or his sister Courtney and her little girl, Saoirse (her name is pronounced Seer-sha, which means “freedom” in Gaelic). In Hyannis Port every August, the cousin scene was really wild because the Kennedys and Lawfords, as well as the Shrivers, would come. You’d see thirty cousins swimming, sailing, and waterskiing, and going to the snack bar to get fried shrimps and clams. Morning to night, it was a big sports camp.
I always believed that Eunice and Sarge would have a big influence on our children. They certainly did on me. I worked with them on the Special Olympics, serving as a torchbearer to help the organization expand. The summer when Katherine was twelve and the other kids ranged in age down to four, Maria and I brought them all along on a mission to South Africa.
This was my first visit there in twenty-six years, since I’d won Mr. Olympia in Pretoria during the days of apartheid. It was breathtaking to see how the country had changed. Back then, Mr. Olympia had been the first racially integrated athletic competition there. During my visits to South Africa in those early days, I’d become friends with Piet Koornhof, the minister of sports and culture and a strong progressive voice against apartheid. He opened the way for me to do bodybuilding exhibitions in the townships and said, “Every time you do something for whites, I’d like to see you do something for blacks.” He’d also taken the lead in getting South Africa to bid for the Mr. Olympia competition, and I’d been part of the delegation from the International Federation of Body Building that worked with him. Now apartheid was long gone, and Nelson Mandela was the nation’s distinguished former president.
Since leaving office, Mandela had committed himself to raising the profile of the Special Olympics across the entire continent, where millions of people with intellectual disabilities were stigmatized, ignored, or worse. Sarge and Eunice had planned to come with us, but Eunice, who’d just turned eighty, broke her leg in a car crash a day before we left. So when we got to Cape Town, it was up to us, the younger generation: Maria, me, and her brother Tim, who’d succeeded Sarge as Special Olympics president. Tim brought his wife, Linda, and their five kids as well.
Mandela was a hero to me. I got goose bumps when he talked in his speeches about inclusion, tolerance, and forgiveness—the opposite of what you might expect from a black man in a white racist nation who’d rotted in prison for twenty-seven years. Such virtue doesn’t just happen, especially not in prison, so to me it was like God had put him among us.
We were there to launch a torch run involving athletes from across southern Africa. It was for the dual purpose of raising the profile of the Special Olympics and supporting the cause of law enforcement within South Africa itself. Mandela lit the flame in the grimmest possible setting: his old cell at the Robben Island prison. Standing there, we had a chance to talk before we began, and I asked how he’d achieved insight in such a place. I’m sure he’d been asked this a thousand times, but he said the most remarkable thing. Mandela said it was good that he’d been in prison. It had given him time to think—time to decide that his approach as a violent young man had been wrong, and to be ready to emerge as the person he is. I admired him, but I didn’t know what to make of that. Was it real or just something he’d talked himself into? Could Mandela really believe that twenty-seven years in a cell was necessary? Or was he looking at the bigger picture: what those lost years meant to South Africa, not to him? You’re just one person, and the country is much bigger, and it’s what will live forever. That was a powerful thought. Afterward, I said to Maria, “I don’t know if I can buy it or not, but it was amazing for him to say—that he felt totally content with what he went through and with losing whole decades.”
The kids were with Maria and me throughout the day. Of course Christopher, who was just four, wasn’t taking in as much as his brother and his sisters, who were eight, ten, and twelve. But I knew that seeing all this would have an impact, even if they didn’t understand everything right away. At some point they would write papers at school about meeting Mandela, and lighting the torch, and hearing him compare the prejudice that Special Olympians face with the injustice of apartheid. They’d be able to look back and ask Maria and me about what we’d all seen, and then write about the beauties of Cape Town and the contrast with the townships and the poverty of families who live there. The experience would take time to sink in. Before leaving Africa, we spent a few days on safari, which for everybody was an instant 10. I was just as amazed as the kids were watching what seemed like the entire animal kingdom roaming round before our eyes: lions, monkeys, elephants, giraffes. And then at night to lie in a tent and hear the calls and the cries all around. The ranger was on the lookout for a particular lioness that had a special tag on its ear. It was time to replace a tracking device the lion wore. Finally, he spotted the lioness and said, “I have to tranquilize her.” He took careful aim and shot her with a dart, and suddenly the lioness was roaring, pissed off, and running away. “She’ll make it about two hundred yards,” the ranger said. Sure enough, all of a sudden the lioness was walking, and then she was looking back at us, and, finally, she rolled onto her side.
We drove to him and got out, and the kids had a chance to take pictures and to see how big the paws were; bigger than their faces. Big cats have always fascinated me. When we were filming Total Recall in Mexico, we had all kinds of animals on the set, including a panther kitten and a cougar kitten. I loved playing with them. The trainer would bring them to my RV every Saturday when we had a two-hour break. They were maybe five months old at the beginning, and they were growing fast. By the last month of filming, they were seven months old. One day the cougar was lounging at the back of the RV when I stood up and walked toward the front. With no warning, he leaped all the way across the length of the vehicle and onto the back of my neck: one hundred pounds of cougar knocking me forward into the steering wheel. He could have killed me with a quick bite to the spine, but he just wanted to play.
A full-grown lioness can easily weigh three times as much. But I couldn’t resist resting my chin on top of the lioness’s head to show the kids how big it was; compared to hers, mine looked like a little pin. We laughed and took pictures, and I was really glad that she was totally knocked out.
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I was always thankful for the opportunity to s
pend more time with my family and take them on holidays and adventures. But I also wanted to get my movie career moving again, and that took some real doing. I had to mount a whole campaign to convince people that I could still do the job. Sitting down with Barbara Walters on national TV nine months after my heart surgery was a first step. “You could have died,” she said. “Were you scared?”
“I was very scared,” I told her, especially when the valve repair went wrong and they had to do it again. I thought the best approach was to let people see me and to lay out the facts. She asked about my family, teased me about gray hairs, and gave me the platform I needed to say that I felt totally energetic and raring to go.
The next step was photos: making sure that images of me running on the beach, skiing, and weight lifting made it into newspapers so people would know I was back. Even so, the studios still were slow returning calls. I was amazed to discover that insurance was an issue. Not only were they telling my agent “We don’t know how people feel about him now,” but also, “We just don’t know if we can insure him.” There seemed to be endless questions and uncertainties that they didn’t want to deal with.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 49