Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

  I’d been nervous about this event, because this was the serious media, not the entertainment media. So I was wondering, “Should I change the tone? Should I sound more governor-ly?” But Mike Murphy, who had just signed on as my campaign manager, said, “Show that you’re having a good time. That you love what you’re doing. Be likeable, be yourself, be humorous, have fun. Don’t worry about saying something wrong, just be ready to make a joke about it right away. People don’t remember what you say, only whether they like you or not.” So it was all right to be me. I went out and had a great time. One of the first questions was about Warren Buffett and Proposition 13. A week before, he’d told the Wall Street Journal that a good way for California to generate more revenue would be to rethink that law, which kept property taxes unrealistically low. “It makes no sense,” he said. So now a reporter asked, “Warren Buffett says that you should change Prop 13 and raise property taxes. What do you say about that?”

  “First of all, I told Warren if he mentions Prop 13 one more time, he has to do five hundred sit-ups.” That got a big laugh, and Warren, who is a good sport, smiled. Then I said unequivocally that I would not raise property taxes.

  There were questions about everything from immigration to how I would get along with the Democrats who controlled the legislature. “I’m trained to deal with Democrats,” I said, pointing out that I was married to one.

  Inevitably, a reporter asked when I would provide specifics about my economic and budget plans. I said, “The public doesn’t care about facts and figures. They’ve heard figures for the past five years. What the people want to know is if you are tough enough to clean house. The thing the citizens of California can count on is, I will take action.” It didn’t make sense, I added, to come up with exact positions on complex questions before I was in a position to know the facts.

  A reporter asked if I would have to come up with specifics before October 7, Election Day. Silently thanking Teddy, I said simply, “No.”

  My advisors were thrilled, and the coverage of my remarks in the following hours and days was overwhelmingly positive. I had to laugh, though, when I saw the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle the next morning:

  Tough Talk by Actor to Tame Deficit;

  But Schwarzenegger Provides Few Details

  Maria, who was just back from a vacation in Hyannis with the kids, told me I’d handled myself well. She was also pleased to find much more order and coherence in the campaign—thanks in large part to the changes she’d set in motion during those first few days. And there was something else as well. I think that for the first time she smelled victory; that it was actually possible for me to win.

  —

  From that day on, the campaign picked up steam. We chose a theme a week: the economy, education, jobs, the environment. We also held a press conference at the Sacramento train station, where the legendary Governor Hiram Johnson had given a historic speech denouncing the rail barons and advocating the ballot initiative process as a way for voters to take back the state. I chose the location to emphasize that I would tackle systemic political problems like gerrymandering, which let elected officials decide the shape of their own districts so that they could keep their lock on them forever.

  Maria put aside her reluctance and really dove in. When she came into campaign headquarters, you could see she was in her element. She joined in meetings on everything from strategy to slogans. She offered insights and suggestions, sometimes to the staff and sometimes to me privately.

  She made one basic suggestion that somehow we’d managed to overlook: she advised us to open a campaign office on street level, so people could actually stop in. “You can’t just stay up here on the third floor,” she said. “People like to be able to walk by and see things are happening. They like to talk and drink coffee and get leaflets that they can go hand out.” We found a large vacant storefront nearby, and the landlord was willing to lend it to us for the campaign. We decorated it with flags, posters, and balloons. Then we held a grand opening party, which was packed. I’d seen movie crowds and bodybuilding crowds and after-school crowds—but there was a different kind of excitement in this scene. This was a real political campaign.

  In September Maria and I flew to Chicago to go on the season premiere of The Oprah Winfrey Show. I was delighted to appear because Republicans had stupidly been alienating women, and it was crucial to get them on board. I especially needed to court women because my movie audiences had always skewed heavily male. I had progressive views on issues that are particularly important to female voters—education reform, health care reform, the environment, raising the minimum wage—and Oprah was the perfect vehicle for making my case.

  Meanwhile, big-time Democrats were campaigning for Gray Davis. Bill Clinton spent a whole day with him in Watts and South Central LA. Senator John Kerry, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton all showed up. The only key Democrat who didn’t appear was Teddy.

  Both President Bush and his father offered to campaign with me, but I declined graciously. I wanted to be the little guy taking on the Gray Davis machine.

  Maria followed the polls like a pro. She tracked very closely, for example, how the ultraconservative Tom McClintock, a California state senator, kept chipping away at my support among Republicans. We had staff members constantly slicing and dicing the data too, of course. But Maria picked up on factors that didn’t show up in the numbers. She startled me at one point by saying, “There’s nobody major attacking you. That’s a good sign.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. How could the absence of attacks mean anything?

  She explained that if people thought I was crazy, or so bogus that my getting elected would hurt the state, the opposition would be much broader and fiercer. “You’re only getting attacked by the far left and far right,” she pointed out. “That means you’re accepted as a viable candidate.”

  What the polls did show by mid-September was that Gray Davis was toast; voters were leaning almost two to one in favor of booting him out.

  But the number one contender to replace him wasn’t me, it was Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante. He was the choice of 32 percent of the voters surveyed. I was at 28 percent, Tom McClintock was at 18 percent, and the remaining 22 percent of voters surveyed were either undecided or splintered among our 132 rivals in the circus.

  Bustamante was a tricky opponent for me—not because he had great charisma but because he appealed to Democrats who didn’t like Gray Davis. He promoted himself as the safest, most experienced alternative, with the not-very-catchy campaign slogan “No on the recall, Yes on Bustamante.” In other words, I’m not here to undermine my fellow Democrat Gray Davis, but in case you kick him out, pick me!

  By now our campaign was in full swing. With my private jet, I could cover a lot of ground in one day. We would travel from airport to airport, and sometimes the rally would be right there, with a thousand people in a hangar. We’d fly in, park the plane, I’d walk to the hangar, pump up the crowd, and then fly to the next city. We also did crazy stunts, like driving around in a campaign bus named “Running Man” and dropping a wrecking ball onto a car to symbolize what I would do to Gray Davis’s vehicle registration fee if I were elected.

  Every day, I learned more about policy and government. My press conferences went better: I learned how to compress my preparation for big speeches from a week to one night, and I was faster on my feet, too. Our TV ads were playing really well. My favorite one started with a slot machine labeled “California Indian Casinos,” where you see the number 120,000,000 come up on the slots—$120 million was the amount the tribes had contributed to political campaigns in the Gray Davis administration. Then I come on camera and say, “All the other major candidates take their money and pander to them. I don’t play that game. Give me your vote, and I guarantee you things will change.” People were shocked that I was taking on the gaming tribes. They thought, “He’s the real Terminator.”

  Rather than try to sway Bustamante’s partisans, we w
anted to attract the millions of independents and undecided voters. The best opportunity to do that was the September 24 debate, just two weeks before the election. For the first and only time, all five of the major candidates to replace Gray Davis were going to mix it up on stage: me, Cruz Bustamante, State Senator Tom McClintock, Peter Camejo of the Green Party, and the TV pundit Arianna Huffington.

  The prep for the debate was funny. We cast people from our staff to play my opponents. All the candidates were given the questions in advance, but the debate itself would be open, with participants allowed to speak up when they wished. We worked on policy, every possible attack or rebuttal:

  “How can you be for the environment if you fly a private plane?”

  “You make thirty million dollars for a movie. How can you be in touch with the poor?”

  “Your movies are violent. How can you say you support law enforcement?”

  I also had to be ready to attack. I knew I couldn’t beat McClintock at policy—he was a wonk—and I couldn’t outjabber Arianna. Humor was my chance to eliminate them. So we made up one-liners and commissioned jokes from John Max, who writes for Leno, and rehearsed so they’d be at my fingertips. I had a line ready if Arianna challenged me on taxes. If she got overly dramatic, I could say, “I know you’re Greek” or “Switch to decaf.”

  We rented a studio and practiced, sitting in a V formation facing where the audience would be. It was reps, reps, reps for three days. I reminded myself: don’t get caught up on detail. Be likable, be humorous. Let the others hang themselves. Lure them into saying stupid things.

  The event attracted a huge amount of media. When I arrived, the entire parking lot was full. It looked like a Lakers game. There was a sea of media vans and trailers, and satellite dishes from Japanese, French, and British TV, as well as from all the US networks. It was scary and wild to have so much attention focused on one event.

  We were not allowed to bring notes as we took our places onstage. Sixty seconds before we started, I did a mental spot check. “Health care: what would you change?” I quizzed myself. But all of a sudden I could remember absolutely nothing about health care! “Okay,” I thought, “let’s go with the pension issue.” But my mind was a blank. Totally frozen. Once or twice in movies I’d experienced a brain lock like this, but it was very rare. And in movies, you can always ask for your lines. Luckily, I still had my sense of humor. “This will be interesting,” I thought.

  —

  The debate started with each candidate addressing the question of whether the recall should be held in the first place. We all agreed that it should, except for Bustamante, who called it “a terrible idea,” which emphasized his awkward position of opposing the recall while promoting his own “just in case” campaign.

  Very quickly the exchanges became “feisty” and “spirited,” as reporters described it later. Bustamante wasted no time attacking my lack of experience, prefacing just about every remark he made to me with “I know you may not know this, but . . .” Being condescending backfired because it made people dislike him and gave me a chance to show people that I did know the issues. That made an impression, and so did my humor. When things got especially intense, with everyone shouting over everyone else, I’d say something outrageous that would make the audience laugh.

  Arianna and I got into it a couple of times. At one point, she was blaming the state’s budget crisis on tax loopholes and the immorality of Republicans and corporations. I said, “What are you talking about, Arianna? You are using tax loopholes so big that I could drive my Hummer through.” The next day’s polls put me on top. My numbers jumped from 28 to 38, while Bustamante’s fell from 32 to 26.

  But even though Bustamante and I had been the main contenders, the media coverage afterward focused on the sparring between Arianna and me. At one point during the debate, as the candidates discussed the state budget, she complained that I was interrupting her and accused me of being sexist. “This is the way you treat women,” she said. “We know that. But not now.”

  I responded jokingly, “I just realized that I have a perfect part for you in Terminator 4.” I meant that she could play the part of the ferocious female Terminator. But she took it as an insult and told a reporter the next day that women were outraged by my remark. “I thought it really hurt him with women, which was already his vulnerability,” she said.

  She was drawing attention to the allegations of bad behavior on my part, which had surfaced at various times over the years. The following week, with just five days left before the election, such accusations were the focus of an exposé in the Los Angeles Times: “Women Say Schwarzenegger Groped, Humiliated Them.” My staff went nuts: apparently there is some unwritten rule in politics that you don’t run exposés on candidates in the final week of a campaign. But I hadn’t jumped into this race without expecting to face some heat. As I’d told Jay Leno on TV the night I announced, “They’re going to say that I have no experience and that I’m a womanizer and that I’m a terrible guy, and all these kinds of things are going to come my way . . . but I want to clean up Sacramento.” I wasn’t campaigning as a social conservative with a values agenda. As soon as I declared, the LA Times had assigned a team of reporters to produce a series of investigative pieces on me. Several articles had run already, including a story on my father’s Nazi past and one on my use of steroids as a bodybuilder. My rule of thumb about damaging accusations was that if the accusation was false, fight vigorously to have it withdrawn; if the accusation was true, acknowledge it and, when appropriate, apologize. So as the earlier stories appeared, I’d acknowledged my early steroid use, just as I had in the past, and I’d worked with the Simon Wiesenthal Center to track down newly available documents about my father’s war record.

  None of the groping accusations was true. Even so, I had sometimes acted inappropriately and did have reason to apologize for my past behavior. In my first speech the next day, I told a crowd in San Diego, “A lot of those stories are not true. But at the same time, I always say wherever there is smoke, there is fire. And so, yes, I have behaved badly sometimes. Yes, it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets, and I have done things that were not right, which I thought then was playful, but now I recognize that I have offended people. And those people that I have offended, I want to say to them, I am deeply sorry about that, and I apologize.”

  Now, as in the past, many people came to my defense, and my most important ally was Maria. Speaking to a Republican women’s organization that day, she said she deplored gutter politics and gutter journalism. “You can listen to all the negativity, and you can listen to people who have never met Arnold, or who met him for five seconds thirty years ago. Or you can listen to me,” she said, and she praised me for having the guts to apologize.

  As our polling had suggested all along, California voters were far more concerned about other issues, like the economy. My speech in San Diego was to kick off a final bus tour to rallies across the state. Three thousand people showed up that morning, and we had six thousand people at the next event in the Inland Empire area east of LA, and then eight thousand people in Fresno Saturday morning. When we finally pulled into Sacramento on Sunday, almost twenty thousand people were massed in front of the capitol to cheer, celebrate, and enjoy the hoopla. I stood on the steps and gave a five-minute speech. Then the band played—a hip band, one that the kids could relate to—and I took out a broom, and that was the photo op: Schwarzenegger is here to clean house. You could feel the momentum. This was it! We were ready to clinch the deal.

  The night of the election, I was getting dressed to go to the party. I didn’t know the outcome yet because it was too early, but I felt my chance of winning was really high. As I walked into the bedroom to put on my shoes, I heard an announcer on CNN say, “We can call the election now. The new governor will be Arnold Schwarzenegger.” I had tears streaming down my face. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been counting on it, but actually hearing the news on CNN—the official acknowledgment from an int
ernational cable network—was overwhelming. I never thought I’d walk by a TV set and hear “Schwarzenegger is the new governor of California.”

  I sat there a little while. Katherine walked in and said, “Daddy, what do you think of this dress?” I wiped away the tears. I didn’t want her to see. Maria, who had been dressing in a separate bathroom, joined me upon hearing the news, and she too was overjoyed: not only did she like the idea of becoming California’s First Lady, but here was a political victory that could help her forget past family defeats.

  The people had voted to recall Gray Davis by a margin of 55 percent to 45 percent, and a large plurality had chosen me over Cruz Bustamante and the other contenders. The breakdown of the vote was 49 percent for me, 31 percent for Cruz, 13 percent for McClintock, 3 percent for Camejo, and 4 percent spread among the rest of the pack.

  One of the sweet moments of victory came a week later, when President George W. Bush stopped off to see me on his way to a diplomatic mission in Asia. We met at the Mission Inn, a historic hotel in Riverside, California, where ten presidents have stayed. Karl Rove was there with the president when I was shown into the suite, and after we all exchanged greetings, Rove said, “I’m going to leave so the two of you can talk alone.”

  President Bush, who knew that his political architect had told me not to run, tried to mend fences. “Don’t be mad at Rove for what he said to you in Washington. Karl is Karl. He’s a good guy. We have to work together.”

  I said I’d never let personality conflicts get in the way of what we needed to achieve for America and California. “It will be a pleasure to work with him in the future,” I added. “I know he’s doing a good job.”