During that time, we were having almost daily talks with my friend Dick Riordan, the former mayor of Los Angeles. He and his wife, Nancy, lived just a mile away. Dick was a moderate Republican like me, who had lost the gubernatorial primary the previous year. Most people expected him to run in the recall, and he had a very good chance to win. He had a terrific campaign manager named Mike Murphy, whom he had already called back in. But then word went around that Dick had taken to skipping political meetings and playing golf instead.
I called to find out what was going on. “I’m not likely to run,” I told him, “and if I’m not running, I want to say I’m endorsing you.”
He thanked me and later invited us to join him and Nancy for dinner at their new beach house in Malibu. We spent the whole meal talking about the Riordans running and us not running. That’s when I noticed a little softening in Maria’s stance.
“Arnold almost decided to run, and then he decided not to because we really didn’t like the idea,” she told them.
“These are the decisions you make,” I added. “I feel good that I made the decision not to run.”
Maria turned to me. “Well, I know this must be really hard on you. But in the end you make the decision that you want to make, and you should do whatever you want to do.”
This threw me. Was she now saying, “I freaked out when I heard about you running, but now I feel a little better about it?”
After dinner, Dick casually took me outside to the terrace. He punched me lightly in the stomach and said bluntly, “You should run.”
“What do you mean?”
“To be honest with you, I don’t have that fire in the belly like you have.” Dick was seventy-three years old. He said, “You should run. Why don’t I endorse you?”
While driving home, I said to Maria, “You won’t believe what just happened,” and I told her about the conversation.
“I thought that there was something off about him during dinner!” she said. “Well, what did you tell him?”
“I told him the story about you, that you are totally against—”
“Look,” she interrupted, “I don’t want to be a spoiler here. I don’t want that responsibility. Maybe you should run.”
And then I said, “Maria, we’ve got to make up our mind by next week.”
It went back and forth like that for days. I could now see her dilemma. One side of Maria was ballsy and brave and wanted to be a strong partner, and the other side was telling her, “This is the same roller coaster you’ve ridden before. Chances are he’ll lose, and that’ll make you a loser too. You’ll be a fifty-fifty partner in an embarrassing mess you didn’t cause.” She would tell me to make my own decision, but every time I sounded like I was getting serious about running, she would get upset again.
I was off my stride too. Up to now, making a career decision had always been an incredible high. Like when I went into acting, and I said I wasn’t going to compete as a bodybuilder anymore. The vision became clear, I made the leap, and that was that. But making a career decision as a husband and a father was a whole different deal.
Normally, I would have called my friends to talk this through. But declaring a candidacy was so loaded that I couldn’t go to anybody. I emphasized to Maria, “This is just between us. We will figure it out.”
In the middle of all this, Danny DeVito asked me over to his house. He had three movie projects he wanted to pitch, including Twins II and one that he’d written himself that he wanted to direct. I said, “That’s a great idea, Danny, I’d love to work with you again.”
Then I added, “But, Danny, you know, California is in terrible shape.”
“Well, yes, probably. But what’s that got to do with my movies?”
“Well it could be that if my wife agrees, I may run for governor.”
“What! Are you crazy? Let’s do a movie together!”
“Danny, this is more important. California is more important than your career, my career, everyone’s career. I’ve got to run if my wife lets me.” He said okay, figuring that it wasn’t going to happen anyway.
—
Suddenly it was Wednesday, August 6, the day I was supposed to go on TV. I still didn’t know what I would announce. I was in the bathroom that morning, and I heard Maria call from outside the door, “I’m leaving now. I’m going over to NBC. I wrote up something for you that will help you at The Tonight Show.” And she pushed two pieces of paper under the door.
One was a set of talking points that essentially said, “Yes, Jay, you’re absolutely correct, California is in a disastrous situation, and we need new leadership. There are no two ways about it. That’s why I’m here to announce that I’m going to endorse Dick Riordan to be governor, and I’m going to work with him, but I’m not going to run.” Dick still hadn’t jumped in, but she was figuring he would.
The other piece of paper said essentially, “Yes, Jay, you’re absolutely correct, California is in a disastrous situation, and we need new leadership. This is why I’m announcing today that I am going to run for governor of the state of California. I will make sure that we are going to terminate the problems.” And so on.
By the time I finished reading, Maria was already out the door. “Okay,” I said to myself, “she is leaving this to me. We’ve had this conversation for a week. I am not going to think about it again until I’m on the show. Whatever comes out of my mouth, that is how it will be.” Of course I was leaning toward declaring I would run.
No political advisor would ever tell you to announce a serious candidacy on The Tonight Show, but I’d been a guest dozens of times and felt comfortable there. Jay was a good friend. I knew he’d cover me and ask interesting questions and get the audience involved. You don’t hear the roar of the crowd at a press conference.
Leno had announced countless times that I’d be there to make a very important announcement. Everyone from my close friends to the driver taking me to the studio was asking, “What are you going to say?” In the green room, Leno came in and asked the same question. But everything leaks in the political world, where everybody owes a journalist and every journalist wants a scoop. The only way I could truly make news was to answer no one. I never said anything until we were on camera.
By sunset it was done: I was in the race. The Tonight Show airs at eleven but tapes at five thirty in the afternoon California time. After I made my announcement, I answered questions for a hundred reporters and TV crews gathered outside.
The crazy California recall suddenly had a face! Within days, I was on the cover of Time, wearing a big smile over a one-word headline: “Ahhnold!?”
The next day, my Santa Monica office became Schwarzenegger for Governor central. When you launch a campaign, you’re supposed to already have a thousand ingredients in place: themes, messages, a fund-raising plan, a staff, a website. But because I’d kept everybody in the dark, there was none of that. Even a fund-raising team would have been a giveaway. So all I had was my Prop 49 team. We were organizing on the fly.
This was bound to result in ragged moments. On Friday, I got up at three in the morning for interviews with the Today show, Good Morning America, and CBS This Morning. We started with Matt Lauer from Today. As he pressed me for specifics on how I would bring back the California economy and when I would release my tax returns, I realized I was unprepared. Unable to answer, I finally had to resort to the old Groucho Marx stunt of pretending the connection was bad. “Say again?” I put a hand to my earpiece. “I didn’t hear you.”
Lauer ended the interview by remarking sarcastically, “Apparently we are losing audio with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles.” It was my lamest performance ever.
Maria had kept her distance up to now, adjusting to this new drama in our lives. But seeing me stumble on TV roused the sleeping Kennedy lioness. Later that morning, she joined a meeting of the consultants who were scrambling to put together the campaign.
“What is your plan?” Maria asked quietly. “Where is the staff
? What is the message? What was the point of these TV appearances? What direction is the campaign going in?” Without raising her voice, she was bringing generations of authority and expertise to bear.
Afterward, she decided, “We need more people and soon. And we need someone to come in on top and stabilize this thing.” She called Bob White in Sacramento, who had helped launch the after-school campaign and who had recommended most of the guys I was working with. “You’ve got to come down here,” she told him. “You’ve got to help.” So Bob opened his Rolodex and guided us to a campaign manager, a strategist, a policy director, and a communications chief. He also stayed on himself, informally overseeing it all. Ex-governor Pete Wilson pitched in as well. Not only did he endorse me but he also volunteered to hold a fund-raiser at the Regency Club and joined me in lining up big donors over the phone.
—
One of my very first moves as a candidate was to seek out Teddy Kennedy. There was no chance of getting an endorsement; in fact, Teddy put out a written statement that said, “I like and respect Arnold . . . but I’m a Democrat. And I don’t support the recall effort.” Still, on Eunice’s advice, I went to see him. When she heard that I had to fly to New York for an After-School All-Stars event in Harlem right after I announced—a commitment I’d agreed to months before—she urged me to stop at Hyannis Port and talk to her brother. “You’re not up his alley politically,” Eunice said, “but he has run many campaigns and won all of them except the presidential election, so I would pay close attention to what he says.”
Teddy and I talked for several hours, and he gave me one piece of advice that had a profound effect: “Arnold, never get into specifics.” He told me a little story to explain. “There is no one who knows more about health care than me, right? Well, I once held a four-hour public hearing in which we talked about health care in minute detail. Then I came out of the hearing chamber and went to my office, where the same reporters who’d been at the hearing caught up with me: ‘Senator Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, can we talk to you about health care?’
“ ‘Yes, what do you want to know?’
“ ‘When do we finally get to hear the specifics?’ ” Teddy laughed. “That just shows that you can never provide enough details that they won’t ask for more. It’s because what they really want is for you to trip up and say something newsworthy. Covering a four-hour congressional hearing is one thing, but journalists are trying to break news. That’s what makes them shine.”
Teddy continued, “Right away, from the top, all you say is, ‘I’m here to fix the problem.’ Make that your approach. In California, you need to say, ‘I know we have major problems—we have blackouts, we have unemployment, we have companies leaving the state, we have people who need help—and I will fix it.’ ” Hearing this made a big impression on me. Without Teddy’s advice, I would probably always have felt intimidated when a reporter asked, “When are we hearing the specifics?” It was Matt Lauer demanding specifics that had embarrassed me on Today. But Teddy showed me that instead of responding to that question, I could say confidently, “Let me give you a clear vision for California.”
It was my financial advisor Paul who pointed out that my first campaign challenge was credibility. He, Maria, and Bonnie Reiss were my closest advisors, and Paul had flown back from a family vacation the minute he heard that I’d announced. As the campaign headed into its second week, he reported that he was getting calls about me from friends in business and finance, saying, “C’mon, he’s not serious.” Sure, everybody knew who I was, and at least some people knew of my long track record in public service, but in this recall circus, as the reporters liked to call it, I had to show that running for governor was not just some celebrity vanity project. How could I convince them that I wasn’t just another clown in the clown car?
My campaign team urged me to call George Shultz. He was like the godfather. Secretary of state under Reagan and secretary of the treasury under Nixon, Shultz was now at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and was perhaps America’s most distinguished Republican senior statesman. He was expecting to hear from me, but even so, when I reached him, he growled, “You’ve got two minutes to tell me why I should endorse you.”
I said essentially, “The state shouldn’t spend more money than it has, and it needs a leader to get it into that position. I want to be that leader, and I would appreciate your help.”
That was the right answer.
“I’m in,” he said. I told him I’d like to do a press conference with him.
“Let me call you back,” he said. On our next call, he told me, “I have an idea. Warren Buffett has said positive things about you, and he’s a Democrat. It might be wise for you to call him and have him be in the press conference too. It sends the message that you’re not partisan, you just want to fix the problems. We’ll talk about goals that set you above the political stuff.”
I’d met Buffett, the legendary investor, at a private conference, and we’d hit it off. To my delight, even though he was a Democrat, he’d offered to back me if I decided to run. But, of course, as soon as you actually jump in, people can back away. So I asked Paul, who knew Warren well, to check whether he was still willing to commit. Warren agreed immediately.
With the election barely two months away, the campaign staff was urging me to get out and make public appearances. But while I had passion, vision, and money, I knew that I needed a deeper understanding of the complicated issues the state faced before I could venture out very much as a candidate. Shultz sent a Hoover Institution colleague to give me an intensive five-hour tutorial on California’s debt and deficits. The tutorial was a combination of charts, talk, and readings, and it was so useful and enjoyable that I immediately asked to arrange similar lessons on other big issues. “I want to meet with the best briefers in the world,” I said. “It doesn’t matter what party.” For the next few weeks, I was basically in sponge mode. The staff called it Schwarzenegger University, and the house was like a train station, with experts coming and going constantly. They included Ed Leamer, a liberal economist and head of the Anderson School of Management at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Pete Wilson. Republican politicians who had almost jumped into the race themselves graciously took time to help educate me, including Dick Riordan, Darrell Issa, and Dave Dreier. I was learning about everything from energy, to workers compensation, to college tuition fees. The staff kept trying to cut these sessions short so I could get out and campaign, but I resisted the pressure. I needed the knowledge not just for the campaign but also for running the state—because in part of my mind, I’d already won.
It turns out that the governor of California has more authority to name appointees than any elected official in America except the president of the United States and the mayor of Chicago. The governor can also suspend any state law or regulation by declaring an emergency, and he can also call a special election if he wants to put a proposal directly to the voters—levers of power that might be important.
As Schwarzenegger University wound down, my staff assembled a white binder with the most important content of the briefings. I carried that binder everywhere on the campaign trail. In it were the actions I wanted to take as governor. And at the back, I kept a running list of every promise that I made.
Buffett and Shultz weren’t the types to just to sit back when they endorsed somebody. With our joint press conference approaching, they jumped at the idea of calling a bipartisan summit of business and economic leaders to explore ways to get the economy back on track. We named this the California Economic Recovery Council.
They agreed to cochair this meeting, which would be a two-hour closed-door session preceding the press conference, and they came up with a list of almost two dozen names. Paul and I invited these people to the summit ourselves, phoning them one by one from my kitchen. They included heavy hitters such as Michael Boskin, former economic advisor to the first President Bush; Arthur Rock, a cofounder of Intel Corp. and a pioneering Silicon Valley
venture capitalist; Bill Jones, a former California secretary of state; and UCLA’s Ed Leamer. Of course, these were not names that would be familiar to the typical Terminator 3 or Twins fan, but their involvement would signal to the political media and policy establishment that my candidacy was for real.
The meeting, on August 20, generated useful ideas, and the press conference that followed was a smash. We’d taken over the ballroom of the Westin Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport, and it was packed with reporters and video crews from all over the world and was buzzing with excitement. I’d just done a Terminator 3 press conference in Cannes in May, and this one was much bigger.
“Perfect!” I thought. Buffett the Democrat and Shultz the Republican flanked me, dramatizing the fact that I was a candidate for all of California. After they made a few opening remarks, I took questions for forty-five minutes and outlined what I’d do if the voters chose me to replace Gray Davis. Restoring California’s economic health was priority one, I emphasized, and taking fast action toward balancing the budget would be key to that plan: “Does that mean we are going to make cuts in state spending? Yes. Does this mean education is on the table? No. Does this mean I am willing to raise taxes? No. Additional taxes are the last burden we need to put on the backs of the citizens and businesses of California.”
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 54