PART THREE: The Star

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Arnold the Barbarian 141

CHAPTER NINETEEN: Paying the Price 148

CHAPTER TWENTY: The Terminator 156

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Chasing Sly 162

CHAPTER TWENT\-T\vo: Red Sonja 167

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: The Good Life 172

CHAPTER TWENT^'-FOUR: Raw Deals 184

CR\PTER TWENTY-nvE: "You Are What You Do" 197

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: The Sins of the Father 206

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Number One 216

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Last Action Hero 225

ca\PTER TWENTY-NINE: Private Lives 233

CHAPTER THIRTY: Ttm^ Z-Z^J 241

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Avenues of Relaxation 250

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Patton's Retreat 257

PART FOUR: The Politician

CHAPTER THIRT\-THREE: Birth of a Candidate 265

CR\PTER thirt\'-four: Total Recall 273

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: Lights, Camera, Action 283

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEX: A Fork in the Road 293

CHAPTER THIRT\'-SEVEN: "We're Not Gonna Take It" 300

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: The California Comeback Express 310

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: The Golden Dream by the Sea 319

CHAPTER forty: Cigar Nights 333

CHAPTER forty-one: Girhe Men 346

CHAPTER fort^-TWO: Not the Last Chapter 352

Notes 363

Bibliography 403

Bodybuilding Tides 407

FUms 409

Index 411

Acknowledgments

I would like first like to thank Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. When I finished my research, Schwarzenegger allowed me several interviews. He answered every question that I asked him. He neither sought nor received any special consideration. He is in no way responsible for my interpretations, and this is in no way an authorized book. Maria Shriver also gave me an interview, and I would like to thank her, too.

A biographer is dependent on the perceptions of many people. If this book is any good, it is because a great number of people have been honest with me. I have been writing books for several decades, and I have a pretty good sense of when people are dissembling or holding back. I had the feeling that most people I interviewed were talking from the depths of their human experience.

I was fortunate in interviewing almost all of Schwarzenegger's close friends and associates. I talked to them and others in Graz, Thai, Schladming, Munich, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego, New York, Columbus, and Boca Raton. Each one of the friends I should rightly acknowledge in at least a paragraph, but let me just list their names, including them among acquaintances, professional associates, and others who talked to me or helped in other ways: Alfred Gerstl, Heidi Gerstl, Dr. Karl Gerstl, Franco Columbu, Albert Busek, Reg Park, Jon Jon Park, Dianne Bennett, Joe Weider, Betty Weider, Barbara Outland Baker, Charlotte Parker, Joel Parker, Charles Gaines, George Butler, Lou Pitt, Sven-Ole Thorsen, Frank Zane, James Lorimer, Jean Lorimer, Neal Nordlinger, Paul Wachter, Jake Bloom, James Cameron, Representative David Dreier, Mike Murphy, Landon Parvin, Herta Kling-Schmidbauer, Franz Hermann, Sepp Heinzle, Karl and Elif Kling, Mark Arax, Douglas Kent Hall,

Frank Zane, Kurt Marnul, Joan Goodman, Franz Baumgartner vulgo Grophof-bauer, Peter Urdl, Johann Strebel, Dr. Jur. Heinz Anderwald, David Ander-wald, Anthony Shriver, Bobby Shriver, Tim Shriver, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Dan Samson, Gars- Ginsberg, John Connolly, Mickey Kaus, Burton Hersh, Rick Wayne, Bill Pearl, Kurt Shusterich, Dan Moldea, Gene Mozee, Dick Tyler, Bill Dobbins, Mike Uretz, Wendy Leigh, Lou Ferrigno. Bobby Zarem, Lawrence Kubik, Theo Hayes, the late Dr. Herbert Kramer, Patricia Seaton Lawford Stewart, Franz Wisner, Jill Stewart, Eric Morris, Craig Rumar, Dino De Laurentiis, David Pecker, John Milius, Jerr\' Lopez, Bill Grant, Sandahl Bergman, Raffaella De Laurentiis, Rabbi Marvin Hier, Sandy Gleysteen, Barry Golson, Larry Grobel, Ronald Shusett, Paul Verhoeven, Danny Hernandez, Rob Stuzman, Margita Thompson, Sheryl Main, Charles Fleming, Mike DiGiovanni, Anita Busch, Sid Ganis, Duncan Clark, Danny Simon, Dr. Hans-Moritz Pott, Ann Louise Bardach, George Gorton, Kiki Gorton, Governor Gray Davis, Arthur Laffer, Yvonne Abraham, John Carroll, Senator Tom McClintock, Arthur Grace, Bill Bradley, Gary Cohn, Joe Sappell, David D. Kirkpatrick, Charlie LeDuff, Senator John Burton, Robert Leamer, Mars^ Francis Leamer, Daniela Leamer, Antonio Mantilla, Assemblyman Keith Richman, Assemblywoman Sarah Reyes, Donna Lucas, Pat Clarey, John Jackson, Leticia King, Armand Tammy, Joe Mathews, the late Bruce Murphy, Dan Lurie, Win Paris, Marv' Ann Dolan, Charly Kahr, Larry^ Thomas, Ben Weider, Bruce Kluger, Melvin Sokolsky, Wayne DeMilia, Representative Dan Lund-grum, Dennis McDougal, Lucy Penny, Suzanne Irwin, Donna Reeder, Elizabeth Mehren, George Linder, Kristina Rebelo Anderson, Hil Anderson, Mike Feldman, Jack Romero, Carla Hall, Bob Delmonteque, Daniel Weintraub, Terrv^ Todd, Jan Todd, Mayor Hermann Kroll, Peter Nicholas, Margaret Talev, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Gigi Goyette, and Debra Breslow Grace.

There were a number of sources who asked to remain anonymous. I am of the school that believes that if you are unwilling to affix your name to your opinions, then you had best be quiet. There are exceptions, and I think a few anonymous quotes in a book of this length is acceptable. I assure you that if these people had given their names, there may have been consequences to their personal or professional lives.

I would like to express my gratitude to Kim Beckwith, a graduate student at the Lniversity of Texas, who under the direction of Terrs- and Jan Todd researched the unique collection of bodybuilding magazines and other research materials at the Todd-McLean Physical Culture Collection at the universiry-. I also must thank Don Spencer, who transcribes my tapes with great sensitivity. And once again I could not have done the research on this book without Zoot Software. I would like to give a tip of the hat to its inventor, Tom Davis. I have

dealt with many executive assistants in my life, but I have never dealt with anyone better than Kris Lanner Liang in Governor Schwarzenegger's office.

I am deeply blessed in the friends I have. Several of them read all or part of this manuscript. The biographer Nigel Hamilton read the pages with the detailed concern of an editor and was immensely helpful. The author Burton Hersh made his astute suggestions. Barbara Gasser, an Austrian journalist from Graz, not only had many insightful comments but traveled with me to Austria and served as my interpreter and guide. If the pages that take place in Austria are vivid, she has much to do with that. California syndicated columnist Jill Stewart read the political chapters and offered her strong insights. My brother, Professor Edward Leamer, read the campaign and political chapters and had his valuable criticisms to offer.

I made several friends out of this project. One of them was Schwarzenegger's longtime publicist, Charlotte Parker. She was a wonderful guide to the intricacies of public relations, and I learned a great deal, and not only about Schwarzenegger. I traveled to Columbus, Ohio, to interview James Lorimer, and not only did I discover a great American city, but a great American.

I owe special gratitude to my friends at Congressional Quarterly —Robert Merry, Mike Mills, and Jeff Stein—who provided me with credentials for the 2004 Republican National Convention so I could be on the floor the evening that Governor Schwarzenegger gave his talk. That week in the evenings Rita Cosby, Tomaczek Bednarek, and Janet Donovan were marvelous companions to all the Republican festivities.

When my mother, Helen Leamer, was a student at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, she helped earn her way by copy-editing manuscripts for the University of Chicago Press. At the age of eighty-seven, she was the first person to copy-edit this manuscript.

In the computer age, good copy-editing is a dying craft, but I was blessed with one of the best in Steve Lamont. I have never met him, and for all I know he may be eighty-seven years old or a precocious eighteen-year-old, but whatever his age, he watched over my words with immense concern. I am also fortunate in that George Butler has allowed me to use so many of his marvelous photos, available at Contact Press.

When I began this project, I felt unwanted by New York publishers. No one thought that Schwarzenegger was worthy of a full-scale biography, no one but Diane Reverand, the executive editor of St. Martin's Press. She understood that this man was a phenomenon, and her contributions to this project are immense. Her assistant, Regina Scarpa, handled the details with consummate skill and cheery resolve. St. Martin's president and publisher Sally Richardson backed this project to the hilt. John Murphy, the publicity chief.

X Acknowledgments

grasped its potential the moment he was handed the manuscript, and he and his associate Gregg Sulhvan developed a sterling publicity campaign. The marketing campaign directed by Matthew Baldacci and his associate Carrie Hamilton-Jones may well be the reason you heard of this book. I also must note my appreciation to Joy Harris, my agent.

I also would like to thank Lufthansa Airlines. The German carrier is the only airline with a direct flight from the United States to Graz, and it was a pleasurable journey. In Graz, I stayed in the Grand Hotel Wiesler, where manager Hubert Aumeier not only showed me gracious hospitality but one evening provided accommodations in the grand suite where Schwarzenegger stays. As a biographer I have traveled extensively researching my subjects, but this is the first time that I slept in one of their beds, and a good night's sleep it was indeed.

I often say that I should dedicate every one of my books to Vesna Obradovic Leamer, my wife, but never has she contributed more than she did to Fantastic. I could never have done this book if Vesna had not taken care of everything else in our lives. She was endlessly supportive, and if these pages have any merit, she deserves much of the credit.

PART ONE

The Vision

CHAPTER ONE

The American Dream

As California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stood at the podium of the Republican National Convention in August 2004, scanning the vast assemblage, everything was fantastic. Arnold's favorite word 'W2i?, fantastic. Of course, his wife, Maria Shriver, was "fantastic," but so was working with his predecessor and archrival, former Governor Gray Davis, during the transition. Now that Arnold was in office, every Californian would have a "fantastic job." When a judge ruled that he had violated campaign laws and would have to repay $4.5 million out of his own pocket, that was "fantastic," too.

Arnold was washed in waves of applause that began directly in front of him in the Ohio delegation. They knew him as the greatest bodybuilding champion in historN', who had come to Columbus each spring since his retirement to put on a bodybuilding and sports competition. Behind the Midwesterners stood his own California delegation, many wearing T-shirts reading i'm with ARNOLD. Beyond them were other delegations that considered him the most exciting new political figure in their party. And back up in the upper reaches of Madison Square Garden were many to whom he was primarily a movie star celebrated almost everywhere.

Arnold looked out beatifically on the huge hall. This was his first public test as a national political figure and the most important speech of his life. He had been given a key slot, Tuesday evening at ten o'clock, the first speaker on prime-time network television. He had been governor of California for nine and a half months, elected in a controversial recall election. As far as he was concerned, he had done a fantastic job. He was wildly popular and had made Californians feel good about their state once again. It was all about competition, and standing there was like moving up from the California title to the

national championship or the Olympics. He was shining. Everyone was looking at him. Everyone was wondering, could he hack it.^ Could he make it on this great stage.^

Arnold's enormous head on the great television screens in the Garden looked like a giant icon. His head was so large that it was a visual signature that could be seen from afar. His hair, already turning gray a quarter-century ago, was dyed the most peculiar shade of brown. The six-foot, two-inch-tall politician had orange-brown skin, a color that was also a shade unknown to nature. He had a tucked face that was the work of either a master plastic surgeon or a generous God who had decided to bestow eternal youth on one mortal. However bizarre these elements might have seemed individually, they came together in an immensely powerful image.

Fifty-seven-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger was a man of the most extraordinary public discipline. The look of youthful exuberance and energy was, in part, an act of pure will. He had a slow, purposeful walk. He almost never hurried. He held his stomach in tight to promote the lean look of youth. His discipline set him apart—surely from most men his own age, many of whom were already counting the days to retirement.

Arnold's first starring role in Hollywood had been in 1982 as Conan the Barbarian. In his action/adventure films, Arnold had slain his enemies by the hundreds. To his audiences who had seen him as the world's greatest action star, he seemed immortal, impervious to pain, attack, flame, bullet, or natural disaster. His most famous character, the Terminator, was a robot, but Arnold projected himself onto the world like a Terminator with a heart, a suprahu-man, constantly reinventing himself, regrowing his aging parts so he seemed eternally young.

Arnold waved to Maria and their four children, all impeccably dressed for their father's great moment. They were seated next to former President George Herbert Walker Bush, a man Arnold admired as much as any living figure in American politics, and the governor waved to him, too.

Maria was here this evening to honor her husband, but she was a Kennedy/Shriver, member of a family with two great faiths, the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party, and she would not give up either. The Republicans were no more comfortable with her then she with them, and not once this evening was her image shown on the in-house television screens. Maria had shoved a microphone in Senator John McCain's face after his defeat in the Super Tuesday primaries four years earlier and asked him, "How do you feel?" Many among the delegates remembered that the Arizona politician had snarled at her to get out of the way, and she was escorted out, actions that were applauded by some of the Republican faithful.

The American Dream 5

Arnold knew there were those out there among the 2,509 delegates, the thousands of others in attendance, and the 30 million watching on television who expected him to falter, to expose himself as a celebrity playing in a league where he did not belong and in a game he barely understood. Arnold took that as just another challenge. He became the greatest bodybuilder of the modern era by the most meticulous preparation, including working out more each day than any of his opponents. He became the biggest movie star in the world by the same kind of concern over every last detail of his films, from the script to the marketing to the publicity. He entered politics the same way, scoping it out over a number of years, planning his attack, and when opportunity opened up, going for it.

To prepare for this evening, Arnold probably devoted more hours than any of the other politicians who spoke at the convention. For weeks he had spent hours with his speechwriter and staff, tinkering with phrases, debating concepts. Longtime Reagan speechwriter Landon Parvin had been brought in to write the speech, but Maria was dissatisfied with the original draft, and the speech went through many revisions. Parvin wanted to begin the address with a joke about Maria's uncle. Senator Edward Kennedy. "People ask me if I still lift weights," Arnold was to say. "Absolutely. Just the other day, I lifted two hundred and eighty-five pounds. I lifted Ted Kennedy out of his chair." The joke would have brought the house down, but Maria would not allow her uncle to be mocked.

The week before the convention, in Sacramento and Los Angeles, Arnold practiced the speech again and again, working over the nuances of his delivery. Monday night he arrived at the convention in downtown Manhattan at midnight with his entourage and walked into the eerily empty Garden. In the belly of the arena, where a stray journalist could not possibly find him, he worked with the technician handling the TelePrompTer and ran through the address once again. Then he walked into the arena itself and up to the podium and stood there. He saw in his mind's eye what it would be like as the crowd exploded with cheers.

As he stood there, warmed by the ovation, it was just as he imagined it would be. He was bathed in adulation. There were even hundreds of blue signs emblazoned with the name Arnold. Wherever he looked out upon the immense gathering, he saw his name. As his eyes fell for an instant on the glass TelePrompTer, he was startled. The blue background from the hundreds of signs showed through the screen, and he could not see the words. He knew his speech, but he had not memorized it. He did not panic or turn in a frantic gesture to an aide. He was in the moment. He would find a way.

6 Fantastic

"Thank you, thank you," he said. He had a consummate awareness of his image, and he turned slowly so that everyone would see his profile, capturing him in their minds. "Thank you . . . What a greeting!"

"This is like winning an Oscar!" Arnold said as the applause died down. "As if I would know!" Arnold believed that "modest" was the appellation that the mediocre gave themselves to hide their mediocrity. This moment of self-deprecation was totally calculated. As he saw it, if he could get a laugh from making fun of himself, he would achieve instant commonality with the audience, winning a kind of capital he could use later on in his speech.

"My fellow Americans, this is an amazing moment for me," he said, turning serious. "To think that a once scrawny boy from Austria could grow up to become governor of California and stand in Madison Square Garden to speak on behalf of the President of the United States—that is an immigrant's dream. It is the American dream."

There in three sentences was the essence of his life, the essentials of his message, and the foundation of his political faith. He conveyed these sentiments with an elevated sense of joy and optimism that affected almost everyone around him, and he had those emotions at a time in modern politics when almost no one else did. That, too, he was conveying to this audience.

Three days before, up to half a million Americans had marched in opposition to the war in Iraq outside this arena, many of them believing that the best and only way to be heard was to shout in the streets. The President, who had authorized this war, was accused by his foes of being a slacker who had used his father's influence to avoid risking his life in Vietnam. His Democratic opponent was charged by political enemies with exaggerating his heroic record in that tragic conflict. It was a dispiriting time in which Democrats and Republicans tore mercilessly at each other, and many Americans seemed ready to believe the worst of the motives of those who sought to lead them.

"I was born in Europe, and I've traveled all over the world," Arnold said. "I can tell you that there is no place, no country, more compassionate, more generous, more accepting, and more welcoming than the United States of America." Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, these public professions of patriotism had become a standard ritual of politics, but few of these assertions had the authenticity of Arnold's.

Arnold was a true witness to the greatness of America and what freedom could mean, and he held this convention the way no one else had yet. The delegates put down their blue Arnold placards, and Arnold could see the teleprompter, and he was fully in the moment. He had played many roles, but the character he played best was his own creation: the giant, mythic Arnold Schwarzenegger who stood onstage that evening. He focused relentlessly on

The American Dream 7

whatever he was doing. He was giving the speech of his hfe, imbuing it with every ounce of his controlled emotional power.

He told the audience what it had been like growing up in Austria, when he had seen Soviet tanks in the streets and experienced firsthand the repression of liberty in a socialist country. Arnold was a loving son of Austria and had kept dual citizenship. This exaggerated picture pleased his audience in America as much as it displeased those in his birthplace.

When Arnold was working on the speech, some of Bush's people recommended that he not say that when he came to United States in 1968, he had heard Richard Nixon campaigning for President and found him "a breath of fresh air." Since his disgraced resignation in 1974, President Nixon's name was one that Republicans rarely invoked. Arnold did not care. He said to himself, "The hell with that. I'm not embarrassed by anything that has had an effect on me, and therefore I will not stay away from that." That was the truth of his life, and he was going to speak it, and so he did. There were many in the audience who still revered Nixon. They left the hall that evening remembering the one man who spoke the former President's name when no one else would. One of those was Nixon's daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower, who said that she was "moved to tears by Arnold's immigrant story and by the fact that thirty years later my father's legacy—and the impact he had on our party—still resonates."

In twenty-three minutes, Arnold had to do many things—among them, prove his fidelity to President George W. Bush. Time and again he invoked the President's name and proved to any who doubted it that he was a stalwart supporter. Arnold also sought to bring the disparate elements of the party together. He was a Republican governor in a state largely controlled by Democrats, and he was here "trying to find the middle ground." He had to do that "without rubbing it in their faces, putting it in their eyes, and at the same time helping the President." In California, he had won the support of right-wing members of his party who would have deplored almost any other Republican candidate who held liberal views on social issues—pro-choice, pro-environmental movement, pro-gay rights. "We can respectfully disagree and still be patriotic and still be American and still be good Republicans," he told the delegates. He sought to reach beyond his own party to independents and Democrats and to move them with the passion of his ideas.

Arnold has an impish quality that no amount of power, no seriousness of position or theme, can change. In July, when he was fighting to pass a budget through California's Democrat-controlled legislature, he called members of the opposition party "girlie men." Some accused Arnold of resorting to "blatant homophobia," but he meant the phrase as a gibe at what he considered weak-willed politicians who would not come to meaningful compromise.

He wanted to use the phrase again at the convention, but when Bush's handlers vetted the speech, they sought to veto its inclusion. They were incapable of appreciating the irony that they were embodying the very definition of "girlie men." Arnold held tough and let it be known that even if the phrase was not in the formal speech, he might just decide to say it extemporaneously.

"To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: 'Don't be economic girlie men!'" he said, receiving the biggest ovation of the entire speech. He knew it would be a great applause line, but he also wanted to signal that he "was not apologetic about it at all."

Arnold insisted that there be humor even in the most serious of moments, not because he was a frivolous man but because he saw that humor was one of the engines of the human spirit. Nothing—not a toast, not a speech, not even a funeral or a memorial ser\'ice—should be untouched by it. But the purpose of this speech was a serious one: to invoke his own life as a witness to the greatness of his adopted country, to reach for the deepest truths of his own life to inspire his nation and to advance himself as a major national political figure.

"My fellow Americans," Arnold said at the end of his speech, "I want you to know that I believe with all my heart that America remains 'the great idea' that inspires the world. It's a privilege to be born here. It's an honor to become a citizen here. It's a gift to raise your family here, to vote here, and to live here."

The cheers and applause rose to an ovation, but Arnold did not linger. He walked offstage as purposefully and as deliberately as he had entered onto it. He knew that he had done precisely what he wanted to do. He could never say so publicly, but he believed that there was a vacuum of leadership in his adopted country. There had been a vacuum in California, and he believed that he had more than filled it. As he looked on the horizon, he saw no one with the strength, confidence, energy, and belief to lead America in the twenty-first century. All that held him back from actively aspiring to the highest office in the land was the constitutional prohibition of foreign-born citizens becoming President.

He believed he had been chosen for a special role in the world. He wanted more than anything to leave that stage with people thinking that maybe he was the one. Though he was an immigrant and was not born here, maybe he was the visionary. Maybe the American people would change the Constitution so that he could lead them.

PART TWO

The Bodybuilder

CHAPTER TWO

A Man from Thai

On summer weekends, families from Graz often journeyed over the wooded hill from the Austrian city to a diminutive lake in the village of Thai. There they swam in the Thalersee, rented wooden rowboats, or ate ample meals of pork loin and fried potatoes in the restaurant by the side of the lake. In the summer of 1963, as the visitors took their half-hour constitutional around the lake or sat in the outdoor cafe with their coffee and strudel, near the boathouse a group of young men in swim trunks lifted weights and exercised, performing a theater of physicality. They hung from the tree branches and did vigorous series of chin-ups. They held one another's feet for repetitions of sit-ups. The young men were "bodybuilders," practicing an obscure sport for which there was not even a word in German.

Eyes inevitably focused on one of the youths. He was an inch or two over six feet tall. He had short-cropped brown hair; thick, lengthy eyebrows; deep, expressive eyes; a separation between his front teeth; and sensuous lips that often seemed poised between a laugh and a sneer. If the sixteen-year-old looked much like any other teenager from the village, he had other qualities that made him an imposing presence beyond his age and station. He was developing the most muscular body of them all and had an awesome exuberance. His enthusiasm was a benediction that he spread on all within hearing—his fellow bodybuilders, the weekend strollers, everyone from the giggling young women to the serious walkers with their carved walking sticks and lederhosen.

The young man's name was Arnold Schwarzenegger. His father, Gustav, was the police chief in Thai, a modest position overseeing two deputies.

Arnold's mother, Aurelia, was a housewife. He lived with his mother and father and his elder brother, Meinhard, in the upstairs of a home owned by a local nobleman. The centuries-old house was in disrepair and had no indoor plumbing, a lack it shared with most residences in Thai.

"Where I started was a little farm community outside the Austrian town of Graz," Arnold reflected. "Now, that may make you think of sunny hillsides with buttercups dancing in the breeze, and happy children with rosy cheeks, eating strudel. But that's not what I think of. First of all, strudel was a luxury. It was right after World War II, and the country was absolutely devastated and destroyed. We had no flushing toilet in the house. No refrigerator. No television. What we did have was food rations—and British tanks around to give us kids an occasional lift to the elementary school."

In the four-room Hans Gross Volksschule, the children wore patches on their hand-me-down clothes and passed their books down from class to class. "Arnold learned how to get along with the little money he had," recalled Peter Urdl, one of his classmates, now mayor of Thai. "But nobody at the time had all that much money. In the beginning, his mother had her hands full just to keep him fed."

Arnold was thrice a provincial. He was a citizen of an Austria that before defeat in World War I had been the center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, overseeing the destinies of 67 million Europeans. In the late 1930s, many Austrians had hoped to restore their nation's greatness in an alliance with Nazi Germany, but the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler led them into a disaster unprecedented in their history. The Austria that Arnold was born into on July 30, 1947, was a despairing, defeated country occupied by the Americans, British, and Russians. The crews on the tanks that rolled through the countryside spoke English, for the region was part of the British zone of occupation.

Arnold was also a provincial in that he was born in Styria. The southeastern region of Austria had been the watchtower against the invasion of the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. When the Muslims retreated, Styria lost its historic importance. As early as the end of the eighteenth century, Graz was already becoming a backwater, a place where, one writer noted, "most of the people .. . [lost] the desire to pick up their walking staff and continue wandering." Even so, Graz remains the second-largest city in Austria, with a population of 250,000.

The Alps helped wall off the region in geographic and cultural isolation. Other Austrians caricatured the Styrians as "the wild people beyond the Sem-mering." Other German speakers sometimes find the Styrian dialect unintelligible and vulgar, like a hillbilly accent. 'I'he critical listener does not hear

i

the words themselves, but the accent marks its speaker as uneducated and backward.

Arnold was also from a village hidden beyond a large hill that isolated Thai from Graz itself. Even now the community remains largely unchanged from the years when Arnold lived there, revealing a soothing commonness of form and purpose. For the most part, the homes are set well apart from one another across the slope of the hill, the orange-tinged tile roofs making the houses look like a series of stepping-stones across a landscape of pasture, farm, and forest. There is nothing of the bold reds of a Vermont barn. It is all subtle shades, pastels blending in with the verdant greens of the grass and forestland.

Thai was a bucolic, pastoral setting for a boy's life, everything within reach and comprehensible, the lake half a mile from Arnold's home, the school in the same building that housed his father's police station, his friends' homes visible from most places in Thai. From Arnold's upstairs bedroom window, he looked out on what could have been a stage setting for a Wagnerian opera, a few cows grazing in the pasture, wooded landscape mysterious in the morning haze, and to one side of the tableau the spire of a ruined castle where Arnold played hide-and-seek as a boy.

If the small Catholic church in the upper reaches of the village is Thai's symbol of faith, then the Cafe-Restaurant Thalersee is its symbol of sociability. When the outsiders had gone back to Graz, the restaurant became a gathering place for the locals. Even on an August Sunday afternoon with the tables full of weekenders, Austrian custom reserved one table in the establishment, the Stammtisch, for the owner's chosen guests. It might be a regular group of men, local officials, or relatives, but one sat at that table only by special invitation.

Almost no one came into the Cafe-Restaurant Thalersee for a hurried meal. At some of the tables, the words were witty, the conversation animated, but even if it was not, the pleasure was simply in being there. Arnold's mother worked in the kitchen sometimes, but there were not the social distinctions of an urban, more stratified society. Almost everv'one in the village was welcome at the restaurant, from the one family of nobility who had an estate to the village drunk. It had been that way long before Arnold was born, and it would be that way decades after he no longer lived there.

There is a strong centrifugal pull to Thai. People do not want to leave to venture forth in the unknown world beyond. Generation after generation, they stay there. When a home is for sale, it is much preferred to sell to a relative or close friend of someone in the village itself. It is a homogeneous place;

the villagers look as if they are from one large family. They are hospitable to those they think might be one of them, but uncomfortable and nervous with those they deem outsiders. They are deeply conservative, finding comfort in a present that is full of the past.

Gustav was a large man who dominated his family in a way that he could not dominate the world beyond. Arnold's obsession with physical size and strength surely comes in part from his father, whose sheer mass suggested that heft and muscle translated into power and potency in the world and control over those on whom he passed his gaze. Arnold fondly remembers how, as a little boy, he dressed up in Gustav's police uniform. "I was a little kid standing on a chair, and the jacket was hanging down, like a raincoat, all the way to my toes," Arnold recalled. "I had this hat on which covered me all the way to my nose. I always played dress-up with his uniform."

When Gustav walked upstairs into the Schwarzenegger home, wearing his police outfit, he insisted on discipline and order in the most minute details of family life. He sought perfection in his sons, and perfection was a goal that was forever receding. He pushed his sons to develop an interest in classical music and took them to museums on Sundays. This was all an endless chore to Arnold. He preferred to go to movies, especially the features his father told him not to see. Arnold snuck in to see films that children were not permitted to attend by walking in backward when theatergoers were leaving.

It was bad enough having to go with his parents to a concert or a museum, but even worse was that afterward his father made him write a ten-page report on what he had just seen. "He would correct it all over the place," recalled Arnold. " 'This sentence makes no sense.' 'Write this word fifty times.' 'You made a mistake.'"

If his sons did not polish his shoes and burnish his brass belt until they gleamed, Gustav ordered them to do the job over again and punished them for their inadequacy. Arnold had to be home at a certain time, his pace homeward quickened by the prospect of a cuff to the ear if he was even a minute late. Gustav took immense satisfaction in meting out what he considered just punishment. Other parents were strict, too, but most Thai youths did not have the curfew that Gustav imposed on his sons, nor the myriad duties and obligations.

It was not just at home that Arnold feared the sting of reprimand. He recalled vividly the Parents Day when one father walked into the schoolroom, slapped his son without even a word, and walked out again. In school, some of

the teachers taught with sticks in their hands, ever ready to use them on an unruly pupil. The students' worst fear was of a female math teacher who delighted in coming up from behind and whacking them on the head. Arnold was a feisty, irrepressible boy, and he received more than his share of raps on his large head.

"My hair was pulled," Arnold recalled of his home life. "I was hit with belts. So was the kid next door. It was just the way it was. Many of the children I've seen were broken by their parents, which was the German-Austrian mentality. Break the will. They didn't want to create an individual."

"I have seen one kid almost get his ear ripped off right in front of me because he was fighting with someone else," Arnold said. "I think it was a very much more brutal time." Although Arnold is surely correct that the corporal punishment he received "would now be called abuse," his solace is that everv'one was getting walloped, too, and that his was just a typical German-Austrian childhood.

There is no way to calibrate whether Gustav's beatings were worse than those handed out by other fathers, but what is probably true is that young Arnold suffered more than many of his peers. He might have seemed at times an oafish lad, but he was preternaturally sensitive to everything around him. The best evidence of that is not in his contemporaries, who saw nothing of it, but in the man he became, a man with extraordinary insight into the motivation and character of other people. That is one of the qualities that has helped him advance in the world, and it is a quality that began in his difficult childhood years.

"I rebelled against my father," Arnold said. "When he said white, I said black. When he wanted my hair short, I wanted it long." It was not just his father that the youth was rebelling against, but the subjugation of the spirit and physical brutality that masks private pain.

It was the boy who felt the pain and it is the man who found the understanding many years later. "I think being a disciplinarian, being a military guy, made my father more intense in some ways, more into the discipline thing," said Arnold. "But with the punishments, the next day he would shower you with gifts. He was a very generous guy. He was always handing out money, a schilling here and a schilling there, or going into town and buying something or doing wonderful things for our mother on Mother's Day or for Christmas. But he still had that side of being a soldier in the Second World War, with all the wounds, with the shrapnel still in his legs and body. He was in tremendous pain a lot of times. He drank because of that. There was all of that, which, of course, as a kid, I wasn't much aware of, only later on. And so I

know that the key thing always is that you know that your father was a good human being."

There was one matter that was not discussed in the Schwarzenegger house, and that was Gustav's membership in the Nazi Party. MilHons of Austrians in the thirties believed that Hitler M'ould bring order and discipline to the world, but only a minority of them joined the Nazi Party, as Gustav did in 1938, four months after the annexation of Austria. As a police officer, he surely found it advantageous to carry a party card. Moreover, he was precisely the kind of conservative, insular, proud Austrian to whom Hitler appealed.

One indication that Gustav's beliefs in Nazism went deeper is that in May 1939 he volunteered for the Sturmabteilungen (storm troopers), and served as a master sergeant in a military police unit on both the eastern and western fronts. The Feldgendarmerie were nicknamed the "Chained Dogs," a vivid rendering of their reputation in subduing occupied peoples. Gustav left the military in 1943 after being wounded. After the war, there were tens of thousands of former soldiers like Gustav who may have witnessed war crimes or participated in atrocities. The Allies had neither the time nor the political will to investigate each one of these hollow-eyed veterans. Almost all of them returned to civilian society, where they almost never talked about what they had seen and done. In 1947 Gustav was cleared sufficiently to return to police work.

In civilian clothes, Gustav was a nondescript middle-aged man with a receding hairline and an unprepossessing manner, but in uniform he was transformed. His other uniform of choice was that of the Graz Gendarmerie Musik, the police brass band in which he played the trumpet, sometimes leading the uniformed group though the streets of the provincial capital.

In Thai a celebratory dinner at the Cafe-Restaurant Thalersee, a wedding feast or holiday dinner, was a lengthy, convivial affair in which Welschriesling and schnapps flowed as freely as the conversation. It was hardly a matter for social ostracism to imbibe until flush-faced, but Gustav's drinking was of a different sort. He was an angry drunk, and there were rumors in the village that when he wended his way home in the evening hours, he beat his wife. Despite these tales, Arnold has no memories of his father hitting his mother.

One of Arnold's schoolmates recalled the time he discovered Gustav passed out. The boy removed the police chief's pistol and fired it into the air, which did not wake Gustav. The villagers of Thai might gossip mercilessly among themselves but not to outsiders, and they protected a man who was a danger to himself, to his family, and to the community as a whole since he was

police chief. He was eventually transferred from the village, though he never had the epaulets of authority cut off, his name disgraced.

Arnold's elder brother, Meinhard, was enthroned in his father's mind as his favorite son. Meinhard was a year older than Arnold and not only larger through their childhood but robustly healthy, whereas Arnold was often sick. He was handsome in a way that Arnold was not, with a winsome charm that he could turn on and off on cue. Gustav's championing of his elder son was the worst of gifts to Meinhard, endowing him with an arrogant lassitude and the belief that he could pluck whatever he wanted from life without even a down payment in effort. He was the school bully, tormenting those weaker and smaller. His merciless teasing began at home, where Arnold had to learn to stand up to not only his father's pedagogical cuffing but his brother's cruel words. Outside the house, Meinhard faced a world that would not tolerate his abuse as his younger brother did, and he graduated from surly intimidation of his peers to full-fledged delinquency and tenure in a reformatory.

The emotional neglect Arnold received from his father, the brutal hazing from his brother, and the secret shame of Gustav's drunken binges could have emotionally crippled many youths. Instead, Arnold developed an ability to turn his head from what was negative and hurtful and always to look beyond. To compensate for what he lacked as a child, Arnold also developed an insatiable hunger for the love, applause, and affirmation he could never receive from his father.

His childhood friends do not remember Arnold as anything but a normal boy, full of humor and pranks. "He was a rascal, surely, but that's very normal," recalled classmate Franz Hormann. "He played a few great pranks. He was part of every prank." Like his friends, Arnold was a mediocre student who gauged his success more by avoiding his teachers' censure than by academic achievement.

For all Thai's exquisite beauty, there was nothing that led away from the village, no legendary figure of accomplishment who had once lived there, no teacher who filled the spirit with a vision of a grander life, no inspiring neighbor who had reached beyond the narrow confines. On the far side of the village stood a castle owned by a family of German nobility who visited occasionally, but they were a species far beyond the aspirations of the people of Thai.

Arnold's emotional salvation lay largely in his relationship with his mother. "Arnold was a mama's boy," said Sepp Heinzle, another classmate. Aurelia had been a childless widow with a serious, gentle demeanor, slightly protruding teeth, and a stolid frame when she met Gustav after the war. Twenty-three-year-old Aurelia married her forty-two-year-old suitor in October 1945.

The bachelor Gustav already had four decades to become a narrow martinet, and Aurelia assumed the most traditional of wifely roles, obedient to her older husband's wishes, deferential to his suggestions.

If ever once Aurelia complained about her lot or sat befuddled at her condition, there is no one who recalls it. Almost everyone who knew Arnold's mother says that she was "simple." They do not mean that she was simple-minded but rather a woman of a few compelling concerns—her husband and her children—who built her life around them. She was not an educated woman, but she had a natural dignity. When she worked in the kitchen at the Cafe-Restaurant Thalersee to earn some extra schillings, she was "Frau Schwarzenegger," as she always would be.

Arnold could have gone the route of his father and brother, an oppressive bullying presence, but it was his mother who taught him empathy and tenderness. When one family of outsiders moved to the village, their daughter, Herta Kling-Schmidbauer, felt ostracized by many of her new classmates. Arnold befriended her, staying close to the woman for decades to come. Arnold tried to be a dutiful son but wanted only to get away from his mother and father and what he considered the claustrophobic world of Thai. It was not until his father's death in 1972 that he truly began to value his mother. He talks about her now with an emotional intensity that he brings to only a few things in his life.

"With my father's death, it dawned on me that my mother had struggled her whole life," Arnold said. "She was a child through the Second World War. When she married my father and had my brother and me, there was no food around. She had to run for twenty miles around just to get a little piece of butter or some food that she could feed us, because otherwise we would die. And then to sell off their litde belongings just to get enough food. I mean, it was horrible, it was unbelievable the hardship that my parents went through. And when I was sick, she carried me over the mountain to Graz to the doctor at midnight in a rucksack on her back. So what was life really for her.'' It was a continuous struggle."

Aurelia was not a child during the war, but in her son's recollections she was. There is no mountain between Thai and Graz, only a wooded hill, but in Arnold's mind, it is a mountain. His mother may not have gone twenty miles foraging for food, but to her son it seemed an epic journey. And if she had not found provisions, her family would not have starved but only gone hungry. But that is how Arnold remembers a childhood full of unspoken fears, and at base this is not sentimental recollection but emotional truth. His mother's lot had been a hard one. She had loved her husband and her sons, and she had lived for them and not for herself.

Arnold's real school in Thai was not the banal classroom, but the village and the people in it, and he learned long and well. He has the same instinctive conservatism as most of the villagers—not a political statement, but an emotional commitment to the stability of life and a belief that in times of need one looks first and last to one's family and neighbors. He has the endlessly convivial habits of the villagers, spending hours with his friends and acquaintances, kibitzing in a manner tedious to most Americans. What sets him apart from others who leave their birthplaces in search of larger lives is that wherever he journeys, he remains a man from Thai.

CHAPTER THREE

The Hedgehog

By the time Arnold headed off to Knaben Hauptschule Frobel in Graz after the eighth grade, his hfe had already been set out for him, the parameters marked on one side by his father, who wanted his second son to become a police officer, and on the other by his mother, who thought he had best become a carpenter. The high school he attended had the advantage of being geographically nearest to home, but it was one of the worst high schools in Graz. Some of the other parents in Thai sent their sons and daughters to better public schools in the city, but Arnold's interest in academics was so minimal that it was hardly a matter of consequence whether he went to Frobel or not. He also worked in an apprentice program as a carpenter, taking a crucial step in following his mother's aspirations.

Graz is a walker's city with a labyrinth of streets, and the famous Schlo^ds-berg, the ruins of a great fortress, looks down upon the ancient roads from a hill above the old city. Arnold did not have the time, the money, or the inclination to stroll the byways. He was usually on one purposeful journey or another. On one occasion, fourteen-year-old Arnold saw a bodybuilding magazine in a store window that featured Reg Park starring in a Hercules movie on its cover. The producers had made the film to exploit the success of another bodybuilder, the American Steve Reeves, who had become a worldwide star in a series of similar toga-and-sandals sagas.

"I scraped up the pfennigs that I had left and bought that magazine," Arnold recalled. "It turned out that Hercules was an English guy who'd won the Mr. Universe title in bodybuilding and parlayed that into a movie career—then took the money and built a gym empire. Bingo! I had my role model! If he could do it, I could do it! I'd win Mr. Universe. I'd become a

movie star. I'd get rich. One, two, three—bing, bang, boom! I found my passion. I got my goal."

Arnold had already been working out in a gym and at the lake in Thai. Surely, if he had not glanced into the store window, he would have come across something else that would have sparked his obsession. He was not a man to learn from books or abstract ideas but from identifying with what he considered admirable individuals. It simplified his life journey and focused his energy and mind. "Reg became my idol," Arnold said in 1976. "In time, I would base my whole bodybuilding future on Reg. Everything that I dreamed of was embodied in Reg Park. I couldn't have had a better hero to inspire me."

Modern bodybuilding began with the Prussian Eugene Sandow, who had developed himself into the idealized proportions of classical Greek sculpture. The celebrated showman Florenz Ziegfeld featured the muscular German in "the Sandow Trocadero Vaudevilles" in which he flexed his muscles and performed feats of strength in the nude except for a leaf-like appendage over his genitals. At the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, he stood daubed with white powder in front of black velvet, a living statue. Sandow was a unique phenomenon, winning not only fame but social and cultural acceptance in Europe and America.

There had been others who carried on the same tradition, including an impresario of bodybuilding, Bernarr Macfadden, who held a famous show at Madison Square Garden in 1903 and started Physical Culture, the first American magazine devoted to muscular development. Although bodybuilding in the early 1960s had hundreds of thousands of adherents, it was still perceived by many as a theatrical adjunct to serious sport. One of its champions, Frank Zane, has gone so far as to call it "performance art." Some consider bodybuilding not a sport at all to be included in the Olympic Games. The athletes are judged not by how many pounds they lift, how far they heave a javelin, or how fast they run, but by a committee of judges evaluating how they look, how well defined their muscles are, how flawless their forms are. It is natural that the highest reward for a bodybuilder is to end up like Reeves or Park, starring in films in which their bodies do most of the performing.

Most bodybuilders begin, as Arnold did, as teenagers, and usually from much the same mind-set. Growing up in Austria, Arnold never saw the famous comic book ads for Charles Atlas, "the world's most perfectly developed man," and his technique of "Dynamic-Tension." The ads, based supposedly on Atlas's own life, featured a cartoon in which "a 97-pound weakling," lying with his girlfriend on the beach, has sand kicked in his face by larger, tougher youths. Thanks to "Dynamic-Tension," the weakling

builds up his body, successfully confronts his tormenters, and gets the pretty girl. Few boys who have seen that ad ever forget it, for it plays brilliantly to the self-doubt in the struggle for manhood.

There is another theme common among many of the greatest bodybuilders: a deeply troubled relationship with their fathers. On some level, their fathers do not accept their sons' manhood, and the sons seek in bodybuilding to assert their masculinity in such a profound, pictorial way that their fathers can no longer deny them. This, like the layer of muscle on a self-perceived weakling's form, is a struggle that is rarely fully successful. "Maybe I was competitive with my brother or tr\ing to prove something to my father," Arnold said. "But it doesn't really matter. Something was there that made me hungn.'."

Arnold is a connoisseur of his own stor\\ yet as much as he enjoys lovingly reciting the details of his rise, he is far from introspective. Even as a teenager he chose never to look back at what was unpleasant, whether specific episodes in his past or the psychological realities of his own life. From his early years, he had a mern.; exuberant temperament that drew people to him. That spirit seemed a gift from a distant place where Arnold had never been. The logical Freudian conclusion would be that Arnold has repressed the darkness of his childhood and overlaid it with a giddily positive spirit, but he bridles at those who would make facile psychological judgments about his character. "I wouldn't overthink it," he said. That is his mantra about even.--thing that is unpleasant and unchangeable. He is not a child of the American culture of blame. He accepts his childhood and moves on.

"Some people are by nature depressed or optimists and some are funny by nature and some aren't," he said, as close to analyzing himself as he ever gets. "I think my body produced the right combination of chemicals. I found joy in my life. My chemistry- was right. There are people I know who are on medications to tr\" to get some of this. I just by nature happen to have this gift from God."

Arnold's observation about body chemistn." is supported by contemporary psychology'. Intense physical exercise is considered a major antidote to depression, as effective as or more effective than drugs. .-Xnd yet to credit body chemistry is just as inadequate an answer as the psychological. There is equally a spiritual dimension. In her book Exuberance: The Passion for Life, Kay Redfield Jamison writes about those rare individuals who ha\ e such a passionate love of life that they transform it for all of us. It is this sheer joyous assault on life that many great men have had, from Theodore Roosevelt to Winston Churchill. This exuberance makes "the exploration of the universe more likely: it fuels anticipation; overlooks or minimizes risks and hardships: intensifies the joy

once the exploration is done; and sharply increases the desire to recapture the joy, which in turn encourages further forays into the unknown."

Arnold delighted in himself, and out of that delight came many gifts.

Bodybuilding was the vehicle that carried Arnold away from Thai. He was a natural athlete who could have made his mark in any number of sports. He has said that he liked bodybuilding because it was not like soccer, which required him to share his acclaim with others. With bodybuilding, the glories were his alone. There was another reason that was probably even more important. Arnold was a profoundly controlling person, who needed sovereignty over all aspects of his life. He had no teammates in bodybuilding. He alone determined how he worked on his triceps or built up his deltoids, or whatever muscle he sought to expand or define.

Arnold maneuvered to meet Kurt Marnul, the reigning Mr. Austria and the closest thing in Graz to the bodybuilding elite. Marnul was a flamboyant, charismatic figure who tooled around Graz in a sports car with a voluptuous blonde by his side. Marnul was proof positive that with a great body came great sexual opportunities. Marnul invited his young acolyte to train at the Graz Athletic Union in the bowels of Graz's Liebenauer Stadium. The rudimentary structure had concrete floors, no heating, and equipment copied from pictures in the American muscle magazines. Although Arnold celebrated the solitary; competitive nature of a bodybuilder, he did not like to be alone and was a natural participant in the boisterous camaraderie of the sport. Bodybuilders usually have a workout partner, and Arnold enjoyed the banter and manly fraterniry.

When Arnold looked back on those days, he realized that joining the Athletic Union was the first decision he had ever made on his own. Arnold admitted later that he was "literally addicted." The union was closed on weekends, so Arnold rode his bicycle into Graz, broke a window in the building, and worked out by himself in the darkened gym.

Marnul says that he introduced Arnold to synthetic male sex hormones known as anabolic steroids, which are used to grow skeletal muscle. Steroids were developed in the 1930s and served an important medical function to treat hypogonadism, when the testes do not produce enough testosterone for normal growth. Russian and other Eastern European weight lifters began using steroids in the early 1950s, achieving records impossible without the drugs.

For bodybuilders, steroids were a miracle drug, enabling them to bulk up in ways that no amount of physical effort could duplicate. In the early 1960s,

anabolic steroids were not illegal, but they were not something that reputable doctors prescribed for healthy adults. Steroids were already the drug of choice for serious bodybuilders, giving them the competitive edge that could be achieved no other way. Although there are anecdotes about Arnold's mindlessly gobbling down steroids like potato chips, that was hardly his standard approach to anything involving his chosen sport. As unseemly as it may appear for the thirty-two-year-old Marnui to have introduced fifteen-year-old Arnold to steroids, it was nonetheless a rite of passage, a sacrament in his newfound religion.

Arnold's mother was upset at his obsession, thinking that she was losing her son and that he might be hurting himself. "When I discovered what he was doing, I was concerned that it might be harmful to him," she reflected. "As a baby, Arnold was always sick with one of the child illnesses."

Arnold's father tried to throttle his obsession by limiting his trips to the gym, but Arnold built a mini-gym in the unheated basement of his house. Waiting for the bus to Graz in the morning, he struck poses and trained while his peers watched. In the hours he served his apprenticeship as a carpenter, he happily picked up heavy loads of lumber. During lunch hour, he turned the timber into his makeshift heavy weights. "We used to joke around, 'We don't need a forklift, we have Arnold,'" said his friend Franz Baumgartner vulgo Gro(3hofbauer. If Arnold's friends asked him to join them in an after-school soccer game, he usually refused, lecturing them that fast running would hurt his muscle development. At night, he rode his bicycle back into Graz to work out until the late hours.

"You'll see! I'll be like this," he vowed to his friends, pointing to a picture of Reg Park. "I'll become Mr. Universe and go to America."

"Yeah, sure you will," his friends laughed, letting Arnold indulge in his reverie.

Arnold did not have that much time for his old friends any longer. He had a new circle of bodybuilder friends, several of whom became crucial figures in his life. In the popular nineteenth-century Horatio Alger stories, the hero inevitably rises out of poverty after being befriended by a wealthy older man. The tales have been mocked for their refusal to deal with harsh socioeconomic realties of life in the Gilded Age, but they may have been more realistic about how people advance than the critics suggest. Arnold's rise is in some ways a series of linked Horatio Alger stories, in which he uses what he has learned from one mentor to move to the doorstep of another mentor, and then move on again. He takes on part of their being as his own, and moves on when he has learned everything there is to learn.

Arnold's closest friend among the bodybuilders was Karl Gerstl, a twenty-

year-old medical student in Graz. It was an unlikely friendship: a shy, studious doctor-to-be and a young high-school student on a career track to become a carpenter. Dr. Gerstl insists that there was difficulty with neither the gap in age nor the level of education. "Arnold has always been a personality," Dr. Gerstl reflected. "Among the friends, Arnold was the leader. I was five years older, but he was the leader. The difference in age made no difference."

Karl was so impressed by his younger friend that he invited him home. Arnold met Karl's parents and hit it off immediately with Alfred Gerstl, a complex, sophisticated man of a type Arnold had never met before. Arnold stayed overnight so often that he became subject to the same strict house rules as Karl. In Austrian society, this was an unusual occurrence, doubly so since the Gerstls were Jewish. Arnold's feelings for his mentor were such that in 2004 he signed a photo to him, "From your second son." Yet in Arnold's 1977 autobiography, he does not even mention Gerstl's name. As Arnold admits, it has taken many years for him to mature enough and to gain enough wisdom to appreciate what Gerstl gave him.

Alfred was a cosmopolitan mixture of cultures and faiths. In the late nineteenth century, Alfred's grandfather Dr. Ignaz Gerstl had sailed to New York City to study medicine. He had a remarkable voice that led to careers as a bass-baritone at the Metropolitan Opera and a celebrated cantor. He traveled the world, giving performances, and died in Graz during World War I. Alfred's father fell in love with a Catholic woman, who converted to Judaism before they married in the Graz synagogue. As a Jew, he could not obtain a position with the Austrian Federal Railway. To advance himself, Alfred Senior converted to Catholicism, and his wife reverted to her former faith.

At the beginning of World War II, Alfred was enough of a Catholic to avoid being sent to a concentration camp and worked as a toolmaker in a chain factory. When he was drafted into the army, he went underground, serving as a courier for anti-Nazi partisans.

There had been two thousand Jews in Graz when Alfred left. When he returned there were fewer than a hundred. Alfred says he rejected joining the leftist Social Democratic Party because he was told he had fought Hitler for religious, not political, reasons. It was his first indication that the endemic anti-Semitism of his homeland had not died but had merely been muted. He joined the Conservative Party. He was in several respects an outsider. "To the Catholics I was a Jew," he said. "To the Jews I was a Catholic."

Gerstl is a profoundly conciliatory human being, the fact that he returned to Graz being only the most obvious indication. Gerstl believes in developing all aspects of a person, his mind beyond all else, and his body, too. He worked with his son and his friends who pursued bodybuilding and karate. Although

Gerstl was a small businessman with a tobacco shop, his deepest interest was politics. He saw it not as a way to social and economic advancement, but as a vehicle to transform his nation. In his living room convened an eclectic group of former partisans, politicians, activists, and intellectuals to discuss the questions of the day, represented by everything from an anarchist to conservatives such as himself

Neither Karl nor Arnold said a word during these discussions. If they would have preferred to be working out instead of listening, they hardly dared say so. "When Arnold talked with Alfred, he was quiet because he saw an elevated personality, but he was like a sponge quiet," said Dr. Gerstl. "Arnold was not shy. Arnold never was shy. He never knew any fear, but I was the one who was more introverted. He was always outgoing."

Arnold saw in that living room a family model so unlike the authoritarian rule of the Schwarzenegger home. There was openness, nowhere more startling than when Gerstl broke into song in a voice inherited from his cantor grandfather. Gerstl insisted that after his son and his best friend worked out, they listen to serious music recordings, including two of the great voices of the time, the half-Jewish Austrian tenor Richard Tauber and the Romanian Jewish tenor Josef Schmidt. If that did not make Arnold an immediate lover of classical music, it gave him an understanding of a cultural world far beyond his own.

In his many hours in the Gerstl home, Arnold dreamed only of his next workout, but he had been exposed to an exalted vision of politics and of life. "We paid very little attention, but as time goes on it has an impact," Arnold said. "The mind is like a tape recorder. He [Gerstl] would be talking about classical composers, Beethoven and Mozart. And he would talk about tolerance and about the Second World War. He was educating us in a way. He could reach me much better than my father."

Arnold would go on to meet many of the most celebrated people in the world, but he rarely sat with a more extraordinary' group of people than those to whom he listened those long evenings in the Gerstls' apartment. They were men who did not see themselves as the passive recipients of history, but individuals who believed that they had the possibility of putting their strong marks on the world. Although Gerstl had a distinguished political career, becoming a senator and twice president of the Bundesrat, the Austrian Senate, no period of his life does he remember with more excitement and insight.

One of the other regulars at the Gerstls' was Helmet Knaur, a big, boisterous, redheaded anarchist whom the Nazis had imprisoned in the notorious Strafkolonie 999 labor camp in North Africa. Knaur, who came from a wealthy Austrian family, was rescued by the British and brought back to Austria,

where he fought against the Nazis. He was a bodybuilder fluent in English who translated some of the American bodybuilding magazines for Arnold.

Knaur never fully recovered from the trauma of war, yet to Arnold and the other young men, the former prisoner was a formidable human being. Knaur raged against those crv-pto-Nazis who remained at the levers of power in the new Austria. He combined body and mind with action, and he had a major effect on Arnold. "Arnold was influenced by the fact that I was in the resistance and my brother was in a concentration camp," said Gerstl, "but he was mainly influenced by Helmut Knaur, who was a great anti-National Socialist and inspired these young people."

It is a measure of how much Arnold was affected by the man that his whole idea of faith changed. One day Knaur handed him Pfajfenspiegel, an anticlerical book filled with the myriad misdeeds of priests. Arnold was not much of a reader, but the treatise affected him. Knaur had his own deep insights into the human psyche. When they were discussing the book, he asked his young protege if he prayed to God for a good body.

Of course, Arnold said. Knaur made the telling point that if he wanted a champion's body, he would have to build it himself. It was as if Arnold had been cheating, asking someone else to lift a part of his weights. Arnold returned home to tell his parents he was no longer going to Mass on Sunday. His mother was distraught at losing her son to bodybuilding, and now he was apparently replacing the Catholic religion with a newfound faith.

"Knaur had a big impact on me," said Arnold. "He was a large, fat guy. I thought he was cool, because he was so big. AH of the bodybuilders admired him, because he was the most sophisticated. He was a free spirit and very liberal. He would bring Playboy magazines to the lake. He would find ways to educate you and to talk about knowing various languages. He introduced us to women, to girls at the lake. He wanted to make sure we got together with girls."

The guests in the Gerstl living room shared a common belief in a new democratic Austria that would bury the swastika so deeply that it could never be resurrected. The evils of Nazism reach further than anti-Semitism, but that was one of the fascist core beliefs, and it had found fertile soil in SrvTia for hundreds of years. At the behest of the leaders of Graz, in 1496, Emperor Maximilian I expelled the Jews, declaring that "the Jews had too often shown serious disrespect of the sacraments, and had tortured, martyred, and killed Christian children and taken their blood and used it for their obstinate, malignant nature." The Jews had been allowed to return, but always as sojourners.

Though the Holocaust had left only a few witnesses to the horrors of the gas chambers who returned to the streets of Graz, undercurrents of anti-Semitism still existed. The Jews were no longer accused of taking the blood of Christian babies, but there were many who believed that Jews controlled the banks and the newspapers, the secret presence that manipulated the lives of the good people of Styria.

To Gerstl and his friends, there could not be a truly democratic Austria if society was infused with this conspiratorial delusion. At the Teachers Academy in Graz, Director Franz Gobhard was educating the next generation of teachers about Nazism. Since the subject was not discussed in most of the students' homes, Dr. Gobhard's words were a revelation. The lectures had such an impact that they offended the neo-Nazis and ultrarightists, who considered these truthful accounts as treasonous slander and marched on the town center, attacking the professor. The group of men whom Arnold befriended quickly organized a counterdemonstration and marched to the Her-rengasse themselves and chased the neofascists away.

One of those running alongside Arnold was Kurt Marnul, who remembers his young companion as both "outraged—so filled with rage against the Nazi regime"—and also "a very reserved boy" whose "only interest was in shaping his body in hopes of one day becoming Mr. Universe."

To Arnold, bodybuilding was the world. In Sir Isaiah Berlin's famous essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox," the historian of ideas argues "there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory." Arnold was a hedgehog who pulled most of his meaning, purpose, faith, ambition, and ideas out of bodybuilding. For almost anyone else, it would have been like divining water from the desert sand, but Arnold filled his glass up. When he said years later that everything he knew from life he had learned from bodybuilding, he was not far from wrong.

Arnold listened to Marnul's lectures on nutrition with intense interest and heeded his precepts, treating his body like a machine that had to be fueled properly. He treated sex the same way, as a bodily function that he needed and wanted regularly. There was a rudely hedonistic quality to the bodybuilders. As young as he was, Arnold was invited to their parties and provided with suitable companions for the evening. On the Thalersee, he picked up young women, had sex with them, and dropped them back at the lake, never to see them again. "I saw the other bodybuilders using them in this way, and I thought it was all right," Arnold said. "We talked about the pitfalls of romantic situations, serious ones, how it could take away from your training."

By the time Arnold appeared at his first bodybuilding competition at the leading Graz hotel, Steirer Hof, the teenager was transformed. He did not win first place that evening but was the most promising younger bodybuilder in Graz. He took home a trophy, and his mother, who had been worried about her son's bizarre obsession, finally saw value in his efforts.

Aurelia was worried not about Arnold's body but about his soul. It was a small village, and his mother knew more than she wanted to about her son's sexual pattern. That was a mother's legitimate concern, but his father's attitude was bizarre and unsettling. "Jesus Christ, you should see some of the women my son's coming up with," Gustav told his friends, as if bragging about his own virility.

Since he was a little boy, Arnold had been a natural leader, and that was even truer now. Everyone wanted to be around him, in part because wherever he went he had an impish, cheerful manner that made things come alive. He was fearless and daring. One evening he and his classmate Peter Urdl drove their mopeds into Graz to see a movie. Returning through a driving snow, Urdl swerved to avoid hitting a car, and both youths were thrown off the little scooters. Arnold jumped back on his moped, but Urdl decided he would walk back to Thai.

As genial as he was, Arnold had a humor that he wielded like a knife that cut only others. If you were inside the sacred circle of friends, you were probably protected from the worst of it, but if you were not, he could be merciless in his jibes and pranks.

On one occasion he went into the Kastner & Ohler store in Graz to buy a new jacket for his Trachtenanzug, his traditional Austrian wool suit. He purposely asked the salesman for a size too small. The clerk was complimenting Arnold on how fine he looked when the seam split in the back. "No, that one doesn't fit me," he said, and the story entered into the growing myth of Arnold.

CHAPTER FOUR

Helping Hands

As soon as eighteen-year-old Arnold arrived to begin his year of obligatory military sersdce on October 1, 1965, he set himself apart from the other inductees. While he and his fellow trainees were trying on their army uniforms, Arnold decided to pull the same trick on the Austrian army that he had pulled on the clerk in Graz a few months before. He purposefully crunched his shoulders so that the jacket would tear, in so doing calling attention to his distinctive body. It did just that, creating a murmur and laughter among the other fledgling soldiers about this giant who had landed unassumingly in their midst. That evening in the barracks, one of the other recruits, Johann Strebel, had the misfortune of sleeping in the bunk bed beneath Arnold. His two-hundred-pound body pressed the springs so far down that the mattress was practically in Strebel's nose.

Arnold had all the attributes for success in the militarv'. He was in superb condition, able to go effortlessly through calisthenics and other physical training that had others panting and doubled up in pain. The discipline was a costume he enjoyed wearing. And yet back in the barracks when the day was over, Arnold was a rollicking, joking raconteur, highly popular among the men. He held no higher rank than the other inductees, but they looked up to him. One evening when there was a fight brewing, he marched at the head of his company to the anointed field. His mere presence calmed down the opponents and ended the prospects of a brawl that could have had serious disciplinary consequences.

In the continuing pattern of Arnold's life, an older man came forward to help ease Arnold's way along his chosen path. In this instance, it was an officer fascinated by bodybuilding and awed by Arnold's extraordinary physique. He set up a small gym where he could work out with Arnold.

Arnold fit his massive frame into the ordered, discipHned hfe of the mih-tary. He seemed the least likely soldier to go AWOL in the midst of basic training, but in late October Arnold pulled himself over the fence and set off to compete in the junior division of the Mr. Europe championship in Stuttgart, Germany. He had so little money that he had to settle for a third-class train that rolled slowly through Germany for a day, stopping at local stations. Arnold had never left Austria before, and the trip was an adventure in itself. He was perfectly aware of the consequences of deserting his company, if only for a few days, but nothing would prevent him from testing himself against the best young European bodybuilders of his generation.

At Stuttgart, the fans at the Wulle Rooms considered the event as authentic as any other sporting event, but to most others it remained a bizarre spectacle—these muscular young men standing in swim briefs, shorn of body hair and covered with a thin coat of oil, flexing their overwrought muscles. It was where Arnold belonged, loving the brilliant flash of attention, appreciating the adulation that he felt was rightly his.

Not only did Arnold win the championship as Junior Mr. Europe that day, but he met two of the crucial people in his life. The first, Albert Busek, was only three years Arnold's senior, but he was far older in the ways of the world. Busek had come from Munich along with his boss, Rolf Putziger, a businessman who owned a leading health club and a bodybuilding magazine. Busek was a wiry, literate man. Although not a bodybuilder himself, he had a deep appreciation and understanding of the sport. He realized immediately that in Arnold he had seen someone astonishing. "I was interested in Arnold as a great athlete to bring him to Munich," Busek recalled. "I talked to Arnold about it." Busek also talked to Putziger, who agreed that Arnold would be a valuable addition to his gym.

When Arnold walked onstage to receive his trophy, he was joined there by Franco Columbu, who that same day had won the European power-lifting championship. Columbu was a five-foot, four-inch-tall, 170-pound Sardinian. Although Franco had arrived in Germany only three years before, he was less an outsider to this world than was Arnold. Franco lived in Munich, where he was working as a bricklayer. He knew all the bodybuilders and power lifters, and it was unthinkable that this kid had shown up and won.

"Who are you.''" Franco asked, standing there, holding his trophy. "Where you come from.^"

"Oh, Fm not from here," Arnold said. "Fm from Austria."

"Oh, Fm from this tiny village in Sardinia," Franco said.

"Yeah, well, Fm from a tinier village outside Graz," Arnold snorted. "Only two hundred people!" For the first of many times he had one-upped

Franco—by cutting Thai to a tenth of its size. Columbu had an ebulHent sparkle to his dark Italian eyes, an aggressiveness tempered by his incongruously sweet demeanor, and a bouncing, optimistic stride.

If there is love at first sight, there is surely friendship at first sight, and that is what it was between these two men that evening. They had the same rough-hewn, masculine bodies that perfectly mirrored their spirits. Although twenty-four-year-old Franco was six years older than Arnold, they were peers in every other way. Franco had the same resolute spirit as Arnold, a man of the most compelling optimism who had already achieved far more than most men of his background. His father was a shepherd, who sold his three hundred sheep when he went off to war and put the proceeds in the bank. When he took out his savings at the end of World War II, inflation had rendered him only enough liras to buy three sheep. Instead, he purchased an old horse and made his living as an itinerant peddler, selling beans and potatoes from town to town in baskets made by his wife. Franco was an only son who became a champion boxer as a teenager. Like Arnold, he did not like a sport in which he was dependent on others—in this case, managers and trainers. He left for Germany, because there he could find a job.

That evening Arnold went out to a big beer hall with a small group including Albert and Franco. "It clicked like the chemistry," said Columbu, who was training in the unfinished Munich gym that Albert was managing, "Arnold kept telling me what he's going to do, the kid is going to get out. I identified with that. If I stayed in Sardinia, I might have a million sheep and be a millionaire with sheep, but I didn't want that. Arnold [was] the same. He said, 'I want to come to Munich and train with you.' "

Arnold did not even have enough money for a return ticket, and he had to borrow funds from his newfound friends to get back to Austria. As Arnold took the long, tedious train ride, he carried back with him a trophy and a future in Munich. Until that point, everyone in his life had considered his goal of becoming a great bodybuilder an aberrant and dangerous fantasy. Even his mentor Gerstl had a limited vision of Arnold's prospects. "Freddy would say, 'Arnold, just remember I always have a job ready for you. You can be the swim master at the biggest swimming pool in Graz,'" recalled Arnold "'You will have the security of the pension and the health care.'"

Clutching the trophy in his hands, Arnold had the physical manifestation of his future. In his conversations with Busek, he knew that when his military service was over, he would pursue his destiny in the capital of Bavaria. In the next months, he kept in touch with Albert by letter.

Arnold climbed back over the fence at the army base as if he imagined he could walk into the barracks with his absence unnoticed. He was observed as he dropped over the wall and escorted to the brig, where he spent a week in a cold cell with only a blanket for company.

As tedious as those days were, Arnold's life was proving to be a ladder in which the rungs led only upward. By the time he left confinement, he was the most celebrated soldier on the base. Instead of condemning him for his dereliction of duty, his superior officers praised him as an exalted figure who had exhibited the kind of daring conduct that could be used on the field of combat as well. "I had become a hero, even though I had defied their rules to get what I wanted," Arnold reflected later. "That one time, they made an exception."

This was another remarkable aspect of Arnold's life. He could do things and say things that would have merited the most onerous consequences for anyone else. He could turn the malignant into the benign, and the malicious into the kindest sentiment. Arnold trained as a tank driver and enjoyed being part of a five-soldier team on the Korean War-era vehicles. He was so strong that he was the only man who could single-handedly put chains on a tank. He got the best of his assignment as a tank driver, too. In the afternoons when his comrades were cleaning the tanks and performing other tedious duties, Arnold was deputized to work out. He kept at it four or five hours a day, using some equipment that he had brought from home.

For the first time in his life, Arnold had all the food he wanted. Shoveling gigantic portions of meat into his mouth, he put on twenty-five pounds of muscle. And every day, every repetition, every spoonful of food, every ingestion of steroids moved him away from the Austria of his birth.

"From my earliest recollection, I've always had a tremendous hunger and desire," Arnold reflected. "It was just there. I feel it was a combination of my upbringing, my heredity, competition with my brother, and the frustration of growing up in a little country. I despised growing up in a little country. That's the reason I left Austria. I did not want anything about my life to be little."

By the time Arnold headed off to Germany after his year in the service, he was a monstrous 225 pounds. In the Europe of the mid-sixties, few men had such mammoth muscular bodies, and people often viewed him as either a formidable figure or a freak of nature.

Arriving in Munich on August 1, 1966, Arnold was confronted by a great city beyond anything he had ever known. He was a small-town boy almost overwhelmed by the polyglot realities of the Bavarian metropolis, the anonymous crowds, and the ceaseless bustle.

Arnold's new employer, the genial Putziger, squired his newest employee around the city in his Mercedes and invited him to stay in his fine house. Putziger was a homely man with a nose that dominated his small face, and tiny eyes squinting behind large glasses. It took Arnold several days to realize that Putziger was attempting to seduce him, a mark of Arnold's naivete and the gym owner's subtlety. "Putziger had agreed immediately to bring Arnold to Munich, but his thinking was young guy, good-looking, easy win for him," said Busek. Putziger was always on the prowl for young men at his club, using guile, money, and other blandishments.

When Putziger asked him to sleep in his bedroom, Arnold could no longer pretend that he did not understand what was happening. It was a common scene in that world, a poor bodybuilder—which was the common lot— propositioned by a rich gay gentleman. In this instance, Putziger sweetened his suggestion with enticing prospects. Other bodybuilders had shared that bed before Arnold, and with the businessman's assistance, they now were no longer merely the marginal denizens of Munich but had their own gyms. Putziger painted an even more grandiose picture for Arnold, saying that through that bedroom door lay the portal to greatness as a bodybuilder and perhaps even a movie career. It was an alluring package, all in exchange for sexual compliance.

Arnold's immediate problem was not a movie career but a job, and he desperately needed to maintain some semblance of a relationship with Putziger. It would have been understandable if he gave the matter consideration for a moment at least. After all, he was a man of limitless ambition willing to run great risks to achieve his goals'. By everything he said then and later, he was outraged by Putziger's offer. He left the house prepared to pay the price for his refusal, even if he lost his job at the newly opened gym. He went to Albert and asked his help. "Arnold was mad as hell," said Busek. "I fixed the problem. Putziger wanted to throw him out."

Arnold moved into a windowless cubbyhole in the gym that previously had been used to store vitamins. There was hardly enough room for his small cot. "Why you got such a little bed.'"' Columbu asked, looking at Arnold's legs hanging a foot over the end of the cot. "It must come from Sardinia," Arnold explained. For the two new friends, it was one raucous put-down after another, so many jokes that when they were working out it was a vaudeville show in the gym.

The two men had an almost magical rapport and a congeniality and impish exuberance that spilled over to almost anyone who came near them. They were both poor men and foreigners in a country not always known to be welcoming to impecunious outsiders, but they didn't care.

After several weeks Arnold had enough money to rent a tiny bedroom in a modest apartment. It was about as low a circumstance as one could have without living on the street, but the gym was the theater of Arnold's life. Arnold had an energizing impact on those around him, and he created an excitement in the gym that had not been there before. "We called him the 'muscle locomotion,'" said Busek, "because within two weeks everybody had a much higher level of energy working out. He was immediately the center. He had this outstanding talent, and everybody who had eyes knew that this was one outstanding body. Then there was his drive and personality. First you see the body, and you are impressed, and then you see him working out and acting, and you are totally impressed. It was his attitude, his will to arrive at his goals, that impressed you."

Bodybuilders are frequently criticized as being no more true athletes than professional wrestlers, poseurs who display the illusion of strength rather than its steely reality. In Arnold's instance, this was simply not true. In 1966 he won the heavyweight division of the International Powerlifting Championships, just one example of his authentic strength and athleticism.

Arnold, like most great athletes, did not have the patience to train amateurs, to squander his efforts on the Munich businessmen and wannabes who envisioned themselves developing muscles like their hero. His real life consisted of the hours before his work at the gym, when he trained seriously with other true bodybuilders.

Among the goodies that Putziger had dangled before Arnold's eyes when he first arrived in Munich was a trip to the Mr. Universe bodybuilding contest in late September 1966 in London, where he expected Arnold to sit in an orchestra seat and observe the stage on which one day he might compete. Arnold told his would-be patron that he intended to go not as a spectator but as a competitor. When he walked out of Putziger's house that day, he had walked out of his one sure way to get to England. "If it hadn't been for Albert, I wouldn't have been able to compete in the Mr. Universe contest," Arnold recalled. "I was working in the gym with Putziger, who did everything to stop me. Putziger wanted to throw the application away. Albert caught it some way, and I filled it out, and he sent it to London."

Years later Arnold's proudest boast was that he "did not have to kiss ass," though early in his life he had often stooped to ingratiate himself. He had only a few weeks before the Mr. Universe competition in London, and he knew almost no one in Munich. He stood one evening in the street outside the home of Reinhard Smolana waiting for the champion bodybuilder to re-

turn home. The previous year Smolana had won Mr. Universe in his weight division, and Arnold wanted to tell the man of his exalted dream to go compete himself.

Invited inside, Arnold was a compelling witness for his own story. That evening after Arnold left, Smolana made up his mind. Not for the first or the last time, a generous colleague took up the cause of this outsider blessed with energy, playfulness, a refreshing guilelessness about his ambitions, and willful determination. Calling his friends, Smolana began to collect the necessary money to send the youth from Graz to England—and show the Brits and the Americans a thing or two.

CHAPTER FIVE

Paying the Price

As Arnold's cab pulled up at London's Royal Hotel, where the 1966 Mr. Universe contestants were staying, he recalls there being "at least fifty huge guys standing outside the glass doors," apparently waiting for him. Many of the leading bodybuilders in the world "crowded close, grabbing and feeling my arms and talking in at least ten different languages." Perhaps a crowd should have been there welcoming him with wild enthusiasm, but no one else has anything like that recollection. "No one knew him, and no one knew he was coming," said Dianne Bennett (she and her husband, Wag, were the leading couple of British bodybuilding).

What anyone outside bodybuilding would consider a whopping untruth was in part the natural rhetoric. The whole idiom of discourse in bodybuilding was and is exaggeration, expanding everything—from the size of one's biceps to the magnitude of the applause. It was a genial conspiracy that afflicted almost everyone in what was at that time a tiny, marginalized world. It was an effective way of moving people. Arnold inflated his truths to such a size that anyone could see them. His hyperbole began with bodybuilding, but it expanded to cover this whole life and the world beyond.

Even as he began his bodybuilding career, Arnold was already carrying this further than it had gone before. The contest itself became a landmark in Arnold's budding career because it challenged the young bodybuilder to pull out precocious psychological as well as muscular tactics—before he even went onstage.

Arnold met his main opponents for the first time at the prejudging, the first and most important part of a bodybuilding competition. It is there that the judges grade the contestants on various parts of their bodies. It is a long, tedious

process. Except for the opponents, their entourages, officials, and the press, there generally are few spectators; but for the competitors, this is the crucial part of the process.

Backstage was a place of tense anticipation for the competitors. Their bodies were being oiled so that their physical form took on an otherworldly, defined quality it did not have in the gym. Then they began pumping up, working to expand their muscles to create the maximum presentation to the judges. "It is a visible process and a riveting one," writes Charles Gaines. "Watching a muscle after working it, he [the bodybuilder] can see the freshly oxygenated blood flooding the tissue, spreading and flushing the skin, creating the condition known as a pump—the sacramental engorgement of muscle that is an outward and visible sign of growth."

As Arnold pumped himself up, he watched the other contestants. For all his hyperbole, when it came to the realities of bodybuilding, Arnold was as fair and accurate in evaluating himself and the others as any of the judges. The competition from across the Atlantic was formidable. Arnold had a vision of America as a land of skyscrapers, giant people, and endless vistas. When he saw the greatest of the American bodybuilders that day, it was a physical manifestation of that image. Arnold felt they looked like "special creations of science," a peculiarly American science that created these superhuman creatures.

Arnold carefully observed the most formidable of his challengers, Chet Yorton. The American's body not only was oiled but had a brown sheen, a preternaturally dark color that could not have been obtained merely by tanning. Each muscle group seemed to stand apart, with veins standing out like marble in beefsteak. As for Arhold, he had what was an almost plump veneer in comparison. Arnold's hair reminded Rick Wayne, a professional contestant, of "Prussian militarism when the cut of the day was Beatle, and his skin was white enough to light up the dark." If the trophy were awarded to the most courteous of the competitors, Arnold would have won hands down. His lack of English made him seem deferential and self-effacing, characteristics that Arnold did not consider virtues and that he was rarely accused of possessing in later years.

The judges found it an extremely difficult call to choose between Arnold and Yorton. One of the judges, the legendary American bodybuilder John C. Grimek, decided not to vote in the obviously close competition. Grimek knew Yorton and believed that he might have been considered biased. In the modern bodybuilding world of which Arnold became the prime creator, such a gesture would be considered a betrayal of friendship.

"Considerable time was spent calling out both of these men for body comparisons and checking various body parts," Grimek wrote later. "A few of the

judges got up and stood behind the area where I sat in order to get a better look. I heard two judges discussing the merits of each man, and more than anything else, husky Yorton came through to victory on the merits of his fine calves!"

The judges did not announce the winners of the prejudging. The finals took place at the Victoria Palace Theatre before nearly three thousand spectators the next evening. As the bodybuilders prepped themselves for the minutes of posing, young, untried Arnold should have been the most nervous. As much as he anticipated going onstage, the nineteen-year-old saw this as a moment to learn from other bodybuilders. Although few of them spoke German, he had a friend from Munich there to translate for him.

Arnold had impeccable instincts to seek out whoever could help him. He approached Rick Wayne, who though only five feet eight inches tall, packed two hundred muscular pounds on his frame. Wayne was from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Before going to London, Arnold had never seen a black with an Afro hairdo, and he had rarely met anyone so articulate about his chosen sport. Wayne was a talented journalist as well as a bodybuilder, with a philosophical view of the sport deeper than many of his peers'. Arnold asked Wayne questions about the nature of bodybuilding in a humble, supplicating manner, a novice seeking wisdom from one of the elite.

Arnold wanted to know about the leading American bodybuilders. Although the interpreter relayed the Austrian's curiosity about such celebrated bodybuilders as Dave Draper, Larry Scott, and Bill Pearl, it was clear that Arnold was preparing for the inevitable challenge. When the conversation turned to a comparison between Steve Reeves and Reg Park playing Hercules, Arnold's championing of his South African mentor came across as a championing of himself. Arnold considered Reeves too pretty, too refined, too handsome, and too perfect to play the elemental Hercules. Reg, by contrast, had rawness to him, an edge, and a fundamental force—essential components of what Arnold considered a true Hercules.

To Wayne's surprise, Arnold predicted that he, Arnold, would win the Mr. Universe competition. Even in translation it did not sound to Wayne to be hollow posturing, but rather a confident assertion. Before going onstage, Arnold asked a final question: "Do you think a man can get whatever he wants.''"

The question stunned Wayne, who had seen enough of the world to have a quick and certain answer. "A man's got to know his limitations," he replied.

As soon as the answer was translated, Arnold shot back, "You're wrong."

"What do you mean, I'm wrong.?" Wayne said, growing mildly irritated at this arrogance.

"A man can get anything he wants," Arnold declared definitively, "provided he's willing to pay the price for it." Then he turned on his heels and

went to prepare to take his place onstage, leaving a speechless Rick Wayne behind.

As Arnold waited to go onstage, he saw for the first time the extent that bodybuilding was an amalgam of sport and show business. Dianne Bennett had put together a group of young women from her gym called the Glamour Girls, who lifted weights to Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman." An acrobat performed and several comedians regaled the crowd while Miss Britain herself took a bow. Interspersed in the variety show came the bodybuilding championship.

When Arnold walked out onto that stage, he was a bigger presence than he had been only a few weeks before. He was not only bigger physically but larger in the manner in which he exhibited himself. He had never posed before such an audience, and he was carried out onto the stage on a great wave of applause. The adulation sent a warm rush through his body. He had only three minutes in the spotlight, but it was enough time to make a lifelong impression, to realize that "it made the entire four years of training worthwhile." Before the cheering spectators, he was not what he seemed back in the hotel, a German hayseed wearing silly, ill-fitting corduroys, looking like a boy playing in a world far beyond his comprehension.

Arnold's posing techniques were rudimentary, culled largely from American bodybuilding magazines. He was more than comfortable wearing nothing but black briefs on the great stage. As he breathed in and flexed his pecs, he also seemed to breathe in the applause and the acclaim, puffing himself up with it as no other bodybuilder did.

Arnold made such a formidable impression and the applause was so extended that he was called back for an encore. He did not win that evening but came in second to Yorton, by any measure an astounding achievement.

Arnold returned to Munich a newfound celebrity. He embraced the goal of going back to London the following year, determined to win the amateur Mr. Universe title. Already in January 1966 he had been on the cover of the German muscle magazine that Busek edited; now he was on the move—upward. When he walked down the broad avenues of Munich, it was with a confident stride worthy of a young millionaire. When he worked out, he was the man whom people watched over their shoulders.

As good as he had a right to feel about his young life, Arnold still found himself criticized by his father. "Why do you write so big.''" his father asked, referring to one of Arnold's letters to his parents. "You don't want to write more.-*"

"No, it was just my handwriting like that," Arnold replied.

"Yes, but now you're grown up," Gustav said, as if doubting that fact. "You're not anymore in grammar school."

Arnold was a revered figure in the Munich sports world, but in his father's eyes he was a son who could not even write a decent letter.

One major reward of bodybuilding was that Arnold could see dramatic results in his physique. He could see his lower-body muscle groups growing each day. Until then he had been building his upper body, the most visible signature of his physique, but now it was his legs that he had to develop as the worthy foundations on which stood his massive frame. Never for one moment, however, did he lose sight of his real goal—competitive victory.

Arnold sought in almost every aspect and every moment of his life to challenge someone and to best him. He trained with a partner with whom he could have a mini-Olympics every day. His expectations were not only high but relentless—even ruthless. If his prospective partner showed up late to the gym even once, he was gone.

No one Arnold ever partnered with in Munich (or anywhere else) was as perfect a psychological and physical match as Columbu. They were an inevitable duo—Lone Ranger and Tonto, Batman and Robin—in which Columbu's diminutive size advertised that he was always the second lead.

Arnold had convinced Columbu that he should begin serious bodybuilding training. What held the Sardinian back in his competition with Arnold was the aesthetics of height; it was almost impossible to beat a man nine or ten inches taller. As they developed their bodies, Columbu was probably Arnold's superior, pound for pound. As it was, Columbu did not have Arnold's brilliant psychological acumen, the bag of tricks that he was willing to play on all his competitors, even his closest friend.

In the g\'m, there was constant gamesmanship between the two men, endless banter that masked the seriousness of their endeavor. "Look in the mirror," Arnold scolded as a tired Columbu stopped doing squats lifting 400 or 500 pounds. "See those guys watching.? They're from Italy, and they see you quitting in the middle of a set. What will they think?"

The men may not have been from Italy and they may not have been watching, but that was enough to push Columbu to do ten reps. "You're a lazy bum!!" Arnold yelled when he finished, pushing his partner to do at least half a dozen more.

On other occasions when Arnold left for a few minutes, Columbu added ten-pound plates to the bar that Arnold was lifting. Arnold would return,

struggle to do his reps, not realizing that he was lifting twenty pounds more than he had before—but doing it nevertheless.

That minor deception exemplified what Arnold considered a basic reality of life itself: a person could do far more than he thought he could. Pain was the proof that what he was doing was right and that he was pushing beyond the parameters of the possible. He walked through a crucible of pain, and no one who would not walk through with him was his equal.

"When Arnold did squats, sometimes he would faint," Busek said. "He didn't know his limit. He knew his limit when he fainted. But without fainting, he didn't know the limits."

What saved Arnold's compulsively excessive workouts from being exercises in masochism is that even in the most agonizing of moments, he exuded joy. He projected that quality in whatever he was doing, and that more than anything drew people to him.

Even in his first months in Munich, his full psychological makeup was in place, his philosophical mind-set and his life's agenda. He was like a young general with a war plan so tailored to his strengths that he would deviate from it not one iota, no matter the momentary vicissitudes of battle. Few, if any, had a full sense of the magnitude of Arnold's vision. As gregarious as he was, as willfully extroverted, he was alone with his ambition. He had consciously distanced himself from his parents. Women were interchangeable. As important as Busek and Columbu had become, there was a subtle distance, places in the heart and soul to which they did not gain admission.

Unlike many bodybuilders, Arnold not only fit comfortably into his enlarged physical self but had a manner that made him seem even bigger. What to some sounded like boasting was to him merely an honest recitation of the truth, as he saw it: magnified, dramatic, dynamic. And yet for a man of such ego, he could be extraordinarily perceptive and empathetic toward others, in pursuit of what he could take in value from them. "He learns from other people," said Busek. "He has the ability to pick up the good things like an elephant who with his trunk pokes into anything that's important and sucks it in."

Arnold's focus on whatever lay before him was extraordinary, from an exercise in the gym to a casual conversation with a stranger. His focal point was locked in, because even the most trivial of moments led to a higher focus, and that higher focus led to something far beyond it. Thus, when a companion ran a few yards to catch a tram, Arnold walked ahead at his same steady pace, prepared to wait for the next streetcar. He was trying to gain weight, and it wasn't good to jolt his body—his passport to the future.

CHAPTER SIX

The Trickster

A man sauntered into the Munich gym one day with a belly the size of a beer keg resting precariously on pencil-size legs and told Arnold, "I want to be a champion." Arnold looked the man up and down and told him he definitely had the makings of one of the immortals and that he would train him to enter the Mr. Germany competition taking place in only a few weeks.

Arnold told the man that to impress the judges, he should yell. The louder he yelled, the more impressed the judges would be. When he leaned forward in a pose, he should shout, "Ahhhhhhhh!" in deep guttural tones, and when he stood up tall to do a double bicep pose, he should emit a high-pitched "Ehhhhhhhhh!" And with each pose he should step closer and closer to the front of the stage until he stood within a few feet of the judges, screaming at the top of his lungs. "During the training Arnold would hit him on the leg and say, 'Louder, louder,'" recalled Columbu. "We told him to stick the stomach out."

The man was an apt pupil, and on the evening of the Mr. Germany contest, he proudly walked onstage with the other contestants and posed in a manner that had never before been seen in a bodybuilding context—and has never been seen since.

Arnold's reputation as a prankster grew alongside his fame and physique. He greased barbells so it was impossible to lift them. He told a bodybuilder that to look like a champion, he must eat ever increasing mixtures of ground-up nutshells and salt; the young man did so with devastating consequences. In his unremitting pranks, Arnold resembled the classic archetype of the trickster, a mythological character found in Greek legends, African tribal

tales, American Indian myths, and American folklore. He is Hermes stealing Apollo's cattle. He is Brer Rabbit with his Tar-Baby.

The tricked did not see things the same way the trickster did. What to Arnold was the often-pathetic gullibility of his victims was to them the trust that their esteemed trainer would give them worthy advice. Arnold had no intention of allowing others to presume on his friendship and affection. Just as his aggressiveness with women was more about power than sex, so was this endless gamesmanship another way of asserting his sovereignty over his world. He was making fools of those who had the audacity to think that they could follow too closely on the trail that he had laboriously blazed. Yet for all that, Arnold possessed the knack of behaving in ways that in anyone else would seem mean-spirited, petty, and even dangerous, and he used his magnetic charm to transform his actions into amiable anecdotes that embellished, rather than spoiled, his legend.

Arnold enjoyed the spectacle of uncertainty over what he would do next. In a bodybuilding exhibition in Germany, Arnold flashed what appeared to be a Nazi salute in the midst of his posing. It was hardly a public admission of his devotion to the Fiihrer, but the act was greeted with little applause and much unease. Afterward, backstage, Arnold told Rick Wayne: "These people are nothing without an Austrian to lead them." Wayne found Arnold's contemptuous comment funny, and the whole matter was forgotten. It was, however, typical of the almost reckless bravado that exemplified Arnold. He pushed and probed beyond what was permissible, and then dismissed his actions with defiance and moved on.

Soon after Arnold returned from London, Putziger told him that he had decided to get out of the gym business and concentrate on his magazine and supplements. He asked if Arnold wanted to buy him out. Arnold had no money and was in no position to walk into a Munich bank for a loan, so instead he found people willing to help and was able to take over partial ownership of the gym. It was an impressive accomplishment, especially since he had done it while refusing to become Putziger's lover.

In Europe many people thought of bodybuilders the way many Americans considered motorcycle groups: self-conscious outlaws spoiling for a fight. Arnold considered it an amiable diversion to have a few liters of beer and then face off with belligerent punks, who thought they would test their mettle against Arnold and his buddies. When he and his friends made their way through the beer-sodden during the famous Munich revel Oktoberfest, he was a walking provocation.

Arnold was sauntering through one of the giant Oktoberfest tents when a drunken American ran into him. There was as much give as tackling a house.

Arnold kept on walking, an action that the American took as a provocation. Lunging at Arnold from behind, he grabbed him by the neck. Arnold pushed him off, turned, and faced the little man who stood before him, fists at the ready. Arnold smiled almost imperceptibly, slowly took off his shirt, and then flexed his muscles. The American put his fists down and invited Arnold and the others to dinner.

Arnold had the Germanic love of the woods and went off with his bodybuilding friends to work out on weekends. To him, it was communing with the primitive, wild soul of man that had long been domesticated. They brought girls with them to cook the massive meals and to have sex with.

Even in the streets of Munich, when he wanted attractive women, Arnold did not squander his time on civilized patter. He simply said, "Do you want to have sex.^" When a woman asked to see him with his shirt off, Arnold said that he would be delighted if she would do the same, a request that was at times granted. Arnold had to assert his superiority, to women as well as men. He made most of his boastful requests for sex in the presence of his male friends, simultaneously demonstrating his power over the women while duly impressing his friends.

Although Arnold was able to build up the gym business, he had already set his sights far beyond success just in Munich. He ingratiated himself with the most powerful individuals within his vision. He was daringly assertive with people who would have intimidated most teenagers from his modest background. After he finished second in the Mr. Universe contest in England, he met Wag and Dianne Bennett, prominent gym owners devoted to bodybuilding. The Bennetts became figures like Gerstl and Busek, studiously devoted to Arnold's advance, sharing vicariously in his success. Wag had been one of two judges who had voted Arnold first and had been the first man in Britain to bench-press 500 pounds, both qualities that immediately impressed the young bodybuilder.

The Bennetts were a genial couple totally lacking in British reserve. They invited Arnold to stay with them and their six children in their home above their gym, a converted church in East London serving as a temple of newfound faith. Since there wasn't an extra bedroom upstairs in the living quarters, he slept on the bed settee in the front room. "His corduroy trousers were a poor fit, because he was growing so fast that he resembled Li'l Abner," Dianne Bennett recalled. "He couldn't get shirts to fit him, so I had to make them in fluorescent lime and yellow Crimplene."

"He came from a stern background, and he loved the informality that you could lie on the floor and eat your food and the kids would climb all over you," said Dianne Bennett. Wag Bennett taught Arnold that he must add a

new element to bodybuilding, posing to music with lights dramatically silhouetting him. At first Arnold wondered what this had to do with sport, but once he realized that this show-business aspect would help him win, he added a whole new component to his performance, posing to the theme music from the film Exodus.

To the Bennetts Arnold poured out his hopes, including his aspirations of one day meeting his hero, the South African bodybuilder Reg Park, who in 1958 and 1965 had won the professional Mr. Universe title to which Arnold aspired.

As soon as Arnold returned to Germany, he began writing letters to Park, something he had held off from doing for years. "Before that, when I was just a young bodybuilder, a nobody, I hadn't been sure he would bother to answer," Arnold explained his reasoning in his autobiography. He had had no intention of writing Park as a mere fan and risking rejection. Instead, he had waited for the time when he could at last write as a colleague. That moment, he reckoned, had now come.

Soon afterward, Park received a call from Bennett. "There's a kid from Austria, who is a sensation, and you're his hero and he idolizes you," Bennett said. "If I put on a show in London, will you come over and guest-star the show with him.-*" Bennett had already lined up a series of shows in Scandinavia for the Yorkshire-born Reg, and it was an easy matter to send an acceptance.

Arnold had influenced Park and Bennett to create a show in which one of the greatest, most celebrated bodybuilders in the world would share the stage with a teenage novice. Arnold had employed a shrewd ploy to advance himself, but he had done so largely in order to learn from a master. Arnold was no book reader. People were his reading matter. Getting to know Reg was like checking a book out of the library that he had long wanted to have.

"I consider myself a sponge," Arnold said. "I'm extremely good at absorbing information. I was always hungry to hang out with people who were smart and to learn from them. With my background, I had to do a lot of learning. It was like the world was one big classroom. That's not just a metaphor, but it's a real thing."

It was a measure of Arnold's good fortune that it was Reg's portrait he happened to see in that shop window in Graz, for in the whole histor\- of bodybuilding, other than the immortal Sandow, he could not have found a better model than the South African. The two men had the same kind of body, and as they saw it, a moral force emanated from their bodies. They were raw, rough-hewn, tough men in both body and spirit.

"Steve Reeves was the typical hero, but I picked Reg," said Arnold. "I admired what I read about him. He was not only an incredible bodybuilder, he

was the strongest bodybuilder in the world. He bench-pressed over five hundred pounds. And he had a family. None of the other bodybuilders had families that I ever read about. They were on the beach and running around with surfboards. It was written that Reg had a great wife and he was lecturing at the university in South Africa."

When Reg arrived at the gym in London, Arnold said that he had "this foolish self-conscious smile on my face. I just kept looking at him and smiling—almost like when a girl has a crush on a boy and she doesn't know what to say; she just has this smile on her face. I was absolutely speechless. I was afraid to talk. I ran around like an excited little kid, looking at his muscles, trving to talk to him."

Arnold was not a man who exposed his emotional vulnerabilities, and there perhaps has been no other time in his life when he has so openly admitted his weakness. He had found in Park a father figure who was like a little boy's model of his father when Dad was the most powerful and perfect of men. As great a bodybuilder as Arnold became, and as proudly committed as he was to his chosen sport, it was equally a means to achieve a powerful sense of traditional manhood.

While Arnold was dumbstruck with awe at meeting Reg, his hero was a man of reserve that strangers often thought was shyness or aloofness. The best that Reg managed was a wave in Arnold's direction before he returned to his workout.

Arnold and Reg had hours to overcome their mutual apprehension during their tour together. A magical transference took place whenever Arnold stood next to those more powerful, more celebrated, than himself. After a week touring England with his idol, Arnold had achieved a prominence he had not had before, not simply as the world saw him but as he saw the world. Afterward a reporter asked Park what he thought of young Arnold. "Well, this kid could be the greatest of all times. He's young. He's got potential, he's got charisma, and the crowd liked him."

Arnold sought to push himself ever closer to the man who stood at the peak to which he was ascending. "I understand you bring out the current Mr. Universe to South Africa," Arnold said.

"Yeah, we do a barnstorm where we do every city hall, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, Durban. It's good for my business."

"If I win, would you bring me out.^" Arnold asked.

"Sure," Park said. "With pleasure."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mr. Universe

Arnold was obsessed with power, with the pure physical manifestation of power in his body and with the powerful men who dominated the world. He had begun calling himself "Arnold," in the third person, but this was not so much a royal manner as one of the many ways he motivated himself By objectifying himself, he could train "Arnold" even harder. He developed new exercises and motivational techniques, utilized special equipment, chose different venues for training and various training partners—whatever it took to keep "Arnold" on a relentlessly focused course. He trained five or six hours a day, a full-time job in itself, and then had all his other obligations at the gym, as well as the good times in the evening, almost as much an imperative as training and work. He was a philosopher of competition who saw that these hours of training were the great competition, and training began when most people thought it was over.

It is possible that there have been other bodybuilders who worked as hard as Arnold, but no one worked harder. He wasted no time, and he considered driving within the speed limit a waste. One of Arnold's friends was a maniacal driver who thought nothing of steering his car up on the sidewalk and then back down again before careening down the street. Arnold followed his lead, picking up enough speeding tickets that his license was in jeopardy.

Arnold returned to London in the fall of 1967, where he believed only Dennis Tinerino. the new American heir apparent, stood between him and the crown. Arnold was going to seek whatever edge he could in this competition.

For the first time, he began a level of gamesmanship, of sheer trickery, of subterfuge, that had never before been seen in bodybuilding. He did not try to hide his actions but proudly admitted them afterward.

One of the judges in the competition was Arnold's mentor Wag Bennett. "He was helping me, giving me instructions, psyching me up," Arnold said. Bennett not only stayed a judge but actively conspired with Arnold about how he could win.

Busek had press credentials for his bodybuilding magazine. "I sent him out as a spy to locate Tinerino and see how he looked," Arnold proudly disclosed later. Bennett's and Busek's actions were not only patently unfair, but they were unnecessary. That was true of most of Arnold's endless trickery in the years to come, a seeming waste of his energy and will that diminished the genuine quality of his victories. In terms of psychological self-pumping, the scheming was vital. Arnold needed to feel and portray himself as standing on a plane far above his opponents, a master manipulator able to pull the strings of fate and to needle his opponents into fatal errors.

When it was time for the crucial prejudging, Arnold was asleep in his hotel room. Bennett called Arnold and woke him up. Clutching his swim briefs, Arnold ran down to the lobby and joined his competitors a minute before the deadline.

The reason the prejudging at a bodybuilding competition takes place in a largely empty auditorium is that it is bereft of drama and excitement. Arnold, with his gift for self-dramatization, pumped himself up emotionally by turning the event into an epic psychological drama. While the two top contestants waited backstage, Arnold said that Tinerino asked Arnold how he felt. "Fantastic!" Arnold recalled saying. "It's the kind of day when you know you're going to win." Tinerino remembered it a little differently. "I was going through my routine, and I looked in the mirror and here was this larger-than-life bodybuilder saying, 'I vant you to get out of the vay. There's not enough room for the two of us. I vant to pose here. The best man shall win, and you're looking at him.'"

Arnold liked to believe that his little verbal ripostes were like pinpricks in a balloon, but it is more likely that these gestures pumped Arnold up far more than they deflated Tinerino. As Arnold walked onstage, instead of standing in the lineup, he walked forward and began shaking hands with the judges.

After being admonished to join the other contestants, Arnold made a point of standing next to Tinerino onstage, observing his every move. After Tinerino posed, Arnold did a kind of counterprogramming, highlighting every aspect of his body that bested the American's, a lean, confident winner's

presentation. When it came time for the final pose, Arnold continued surreptitiously observing Tinerino, topping him with his own poses, checkmating his opponent's evers^ turn.

The next evening in the same theater in which Arnold had finished second the year before, he was awarded the amateur Mr. Universe title. "I was twenty years old, and I was already the greatest and the best," Arnold claimed in his autobiography, but that was not strictly true. There had been a higher competition, and sharing the podium that evening was the American Bill Pearl, winner of the professiona/ Mr. Universe title.

Arnold was focused so completely on what he was doing that his was the only reality, but as he stood next to Pearl, he could not rightfully consider himself "the greatest and the best." To deserve that title, he would have to defeat such men as Bill Pearl.

"I would think Arnold was in awe of me," said Pearl, recalling his prowess. "At that particular time, there was only one hot dog at the top. I happened to be the hot dog at that time." Yet even the professional Mr. Universe, looking at the twenty-year-old amateur, knew his own days were numbered. "Well," he confessed candidly, "I knew that Arnold was probably going to take my place in the industry."

Arnold was not yet the champion of champions, but he was already leader of the bodybuilders. After the finals he suggested that the thirty or so competitors jump in their cars and taxis and head down to Trafalgar Square to show the skeptical British just what bodybuilders were all about. In the center of London some of the bodybuilders ripped off their shirts and began posing. Franco decided to perform his favorite trick. He picked up one end of a Fiat, and one of the other bodybuilders picked up the other, a feat impressive to everyone (except presumably the vehicle's owner). "Come on, you guys are getting out of hand," Arnold scolded. "We gotta go before the bobbies come. Let's go eat."

There was a relentlessly methodical quality to Arnold's training, and his work in the gym was only part of it. Soon after he won the Mr. Universe title, he cabled Reg Park, telling him about his victorv' and expressing the hope that the bodybuilder would keep his promise to invite him to South Africa. Park was as good as his word; he cabled back the financial arrangements, and Arnold flew off to Africa in December 1967.

As a guest of the Parks, Arnold spent Christmas in Johannesburg, an experience that had a deep emotional impact on him. The young bodybuilder was hungry not only for fame and money but for a father figure and family. Body-

builders often do not reach their peak development until their thirties, and forty-year-old Park had a formidable physique that had not dramatically diminished, even though he no longer competed. As the two men walked down the beach, they looked more like two brothers than a father and a son.

As much as Arnold had appreciated his time with the Gerstls, in the Parks he found a model of what he wanted his own life and family to be. "We would sit down to dinner in a very civilized way," Park said, "and we would discuss the day. He wasn't accustomed to that. His relationship with his father was not of that caliber. He favored the eldest son. He was always putting Arnold down, saying, 'Why are you doing this and why are you doing that.^' And so at our house, he had freedom."

Marion Park was a beautiful woman, who at the age of nineteen had been in an automobile accident serious enough to end her promising career as a ballerina. Soon after, she met Reg, who had arrived from England on his bodybuilding tour of South Africa, and fell in love. They married and had two children. "Marion was an incredible woman, very feminine and mothering, and made me food and fruit salads and drove me around," said Arnold. "I just totally loved her. I said to Reg, 'She's the perfect woman.'"

"Arnold fell in love with my wife," said Reg. "He really did. She was what he wanted. She was a housemaker. She's a mummy." Marion happened to be Jewish, and though that had nothing do with Arnold's deep affection for her, it is further evidence that he is far from anti-Semitic. "I considered theirs the most perfect marriage," Arnold said later. "There was still the sort of relationship where the female does not compete with the man. He is boss, and that's the way it is." In later years Arnold would learn to keep his anti-feminist attitudes to himself or to temper them, but he continued to look with dismay at the American woman who, as he saw it, "feels inferior if she has to prepare her husband's dinner."

Reg lived in an exquisite house and ran five health clubs. Arnold was impressed with the whole symmetry of the man's life and the generous way that the Parks treated him during the six weeks he stayed with the family. "Arnold could hardly speak a word of English," recalled the Parks' son, Jon Jon. "He was very Teutonic in his whole appearance and dress. He wore sandals and socks. He'd part his hair on the side, kind of a Brylcreem look."

Arnold's English was still rudimentary, but the Parks took the time to understand him. Of all the gifts he might have given Reg that Christmas, the best was his dreams. He had never really opened up to anyone before about his ambitions, but he showed the Parks a sheet of paper on which had written his goals.

"I want to win the Mr. Universe many times like Reg," he said proudly. "I

want to go into films like Reg. I want to be a billionaire. And then I want to go into politics."

Arnold knew that almost everything he wanted lay in America, and he began planning to get there. He understood that what others called luck was often nothing but good timing, and to be too early was as foolish as to be too late. With his victory in the amateur Mr. Universe contest, his value had increased to such a point that he could legitimately start making plans to go to the United States.

Arnold would have ended up in the United States eventually, but the way, time, and place it happened was due to his own calculation and careful preparation, as well as the press of events. Arnold had a friend in Munich who had gotten him involved in a business deal that not only was turning sour but involved illegalities. He had not known about the dealings, but he might have been indicted. "I almost made myself thrown out," Arnold said. "I got in trouble with the police. Little troubles. I created a situation that forced me to leave. Somebody told me—'Split. Now you have to go to America.'"

As an amateur, Arnold had no money to bankroll himself in America, and he needed some kind of sponsorship. There were two major competing bodybuilding groups in the United States. The older organization was centered in York, Pennsylvania, where Bob Hoffman ran the York Barbell Company. York sold most of the barbells in America, and his publications were devoted more to weight lifting than bodybuilding.

Hoffman's nemesis, Joe Weider, was a full-fledged proponent of bodybuilding. He took what the York man had begun and copied it, expanded it, opened it up, marketed it, and professionalized it. He started his own International Federation of Bodybuilders (IFBB), run by his brother, Ben Weider. Joe's magazines, including Muscle BuilderlPower and Mr. America, had pizzazz and energy, while the Hoffman publications Strength & Health and Muscular Development projected a staid, gentlemanly understatement.

Arnold was already on the cover o{ Muscular Development in July 1967. Even before he arrived in the United States, he had a series of articles with his byline in the York magazine that Busek believes were lifted from his German bodybuilding publication. Arnold may have appeared like a muscle-bound naif, but he was sophisticated about bodybuilding, the only thing about which he cared deeply. "I was talking to three camps, York, Weider, and Dan Lurie [president of the World Body Building Guild]. There were three organizations, but most didn't have ties to business. Weider was the one known for picking up the guys, and grooming them in his magazines, and building this whole fantasy around you."

Arnold pursued his York contacts and tried to dangle that possibility in front of Weider. "He told Joe, 'Hoffman wants me to go to York,' and Joe went crazy," said Columbu. Weider was perfectly tuned into the small world of bodybuilding and had a sense of Arnold's potential. Weider was creating an empire that would one day reputedly make him close to a billionaire. It was a fortune built on developing bodybuilding stars with images exciting enough that readers would buy the nutrition supplements, pamphlets, books, barbells, and other equipment that he sold in the magazines.

Arnold was not a phenomenon who could be forgotten for long. Eventually Joe invited Arnold to the 1968 IFBB Mr. Olympia contest in New York City. This was the premier competition in bodybuilding. In exchange for plane fare and expenses, Arnold agreed to compete with the greatest bodybuilders in the world.

To prepare his readers for the arrival of the great new champion, Weider put Arnold on the cover of the July 1968 Muscle Builder/Power, looking superhuman, his upper chest bulging out like giant parabolic metal plates. The following month Rick Wayne wrote the first profile of Arnold. In that same issue, Ben Weider wrote a preview of the September contest in which Arnold's arrival is written about before it happens: "He's wearing dark glasses and an immense overcoat to cloak his enormous body. But the disguise does little good as his flaming blond hair gives him away. He's halfway up the steps when someone screamed: 'That's Arnold Schwarzenegger!' "

Beyond the hair color, there was at least one other major problem with the scenario. Although Arnold said that "his all-consuming dream, ambition, and goal [was] to beat Sergio [Oliva]," he realized that the Cuban American had a better physique and z\rnold had no intention of getting beaten.

Arnold flew to London in September 1968, where he won the National Amateur Bodybuilders Association (NABBA) professional Mr. Universe title that he had so long coveted. All that was left for his next triumph was to take an American championship. Arnold told Weider's European representative, Ludwig Shusterich, at the last minute that he would compete in the IFBB Mr. Universe competition in Miami that was to take place immediately after the IFBB Mr. Olympia competition. There he would face lesser competition than he would have in New York. Shusterich's teenage son Kurt recalled driving to the London airport with his father and Arnold, who was clutching a gym bag as his only luggage. "Arnold was definitely excited," recalled Kurt Shusterich. "His goal and mission was to storm America in his chosen sport and field and to be a success and to be as big as he could be in the sport."

CHAPTER EIGHT

Joe Welder's Greatest Creation

When Arnold walked off the plane in Miami in late September, he was the physically biggest bodybuilder anyone had ever seen, and he had every reason to believe that the 1968 IFBB Mr. Universe title would be his. At twenty-one, Arnold appeared to have an arrogant certitude that matched his swaggering walk. Rick Wayne felt that Arnold "seemed damned sure of himself, full of Aryan contempt. You could tell by his stage manner, his pigeon-toed strut, the way he carried his enormous chest, that privately he held himself above the other Mr. Universe contestants."

At 250 pounds, Arnold was heavier than he should have been for the competition, but he believed that bigger was better. By that criterion, most of his opponents on the stage for the prejudging hardly belonged up there with him. One of them, Frank Zane, was three inches shorter and sixty-five pounds lighter—by Arnold's reasoning, a little man on a stage where big men triumphed. Zane had an elegantly perfected body, nothing overwrought or exaggerated. His was a classic form, a template. As for Zane, he was hardly in awe of the pudgy Austrian. A friend who had been in London had told him: "Don't worry about Arnold. He's not even in shape. He's big and smooth and looks like a white marshmallow." While Arnold looked pasty white, Zane had a Florida tan as perfect as if he had been turned on a rotisserie.

In the finals, Arnold finished second to Zane and saw that the world was not what he thought it was. Later that same evening, he stood on the side of the stage, watching instead of exhibiting his physique, as the emcee announced in a posing exhibition, "The one and only unchallenged king of bodybuilding—Sergio Oliva." In New York City the Cuban American had

just won the top title in bodybuilding, Mr. Olympia, for the second year in a row, this latest time with no one daring to compete against him.

Oliva had a form that seemed to deny everv' law of human physiology. It did not appear possible that a man could have a dancer's waist and litheness as well as enormous twenty-inch slabs for thighs and huge arms that appeared to have been fused from some other giant creature. There should have been a sheer incongruity' to his body, but it all came together in an absolute harmony that made Oliva a bodybuilder for the ages.

Arnold went back to his hotel that evening and cried himself to sleep. In Miami Beach he was alone, without the protective entourage of German-speaking friends. Everything about the city was foreign to him, exotic, impossible to understand. He had brought no clothes with him, because he had no intention of staying there. He told Wayne, "The idea was to just wipe everyone out and return home as king of the bodybuilders." Despite the cloud hanging over him in Munich, he still had shares in a thriving gym in the Bavarian capital. He hungered for constant companionship, and he had a world of comrades there. In Miami he knew nobody and could not even talk to people.

Arnold had had a dream of coming to America, but it was a poor man's dream, a dream of a man who had nothing to lose. Arnold had a good life in Munich, and a part of him was simply not ready or willing to give it up and walk away. Yet as he lay in that hotel bed crying, he was confronted by a new dilemma. He could not envision returning to Munich a loser. Whatever the cost, he would have to stay in America for a while. At first, he thought his defeat had been terribly unfair, but he had slowly begun to realize that size was not everything and that if he wanted to be the greatest bodybuilder in the world, he had much to learn.

When Arnold talked to Weider the next day, he was not the arrogant know-it-all he might have been had he won. He was a supplicant. Weider had seen Arnold looking at the winner's trophy with yearning eyes—and only Weider could make that happen. If Arnold had won in Miami, Weider would have celebrated his victory in the pages of his magazines but would not have had the story- line he needed. "Even if he had won the title, he still had to come to us," said Weider. "Because he had no other real place to go to be idolized, promoted, and so forth."

Altruism was not Welder's primary motive. He said that the circulation of his magazines was declining, as was the sport itself in terms of popularity. If he could make Arnold Schwarzenegger the greatest bodybuilder of his time, not only would Weider have his greatest achievement as a kingmaker, but his magazines and business empire would benetit immeasurably.

Weider was in the business of taking bodybuilders and turning them into gigantic images onto which he could graft his products. "I sensed that this man would be a great idol for our sport," Weider said. "This is what brings a sport together and makes it accessible. I thought that he would be that man, because he was taller than most people, he was big, and he was very charming, and people liked him. Even his competitors liked him."

It remained only to convince Arnold—who, humbled by his defeat in Miami, was all ears. "I said, 'If you want to really know how the guys train to be champions, why don't I send you to California, and I'll get you a ticket to go there.'"" Weider recalled saying. "'You can become a member [of the gym] there, and I'll set it up for you. And I'll see that you have an apartment and you'll have a car and you'll have some food. I'll interview you, and I'll promote you to the whole world.'"

Weider had never before financed a bodybuilder the way he was offering to back Arnold. He was promising not only to dramatically elevate Arnold's physical being but to create a mythic image for Arnold every bit as huge as his frame. Arnold beamed, and his very chest seemed to expand at the prospect. "Oh, boy," he confessed, "that's my dream, to go to California and train and be on the beach with all the girls and all the champions. And I'll see how the champions train."

Several days later Arnold arrived in Los Angeles, clutching his second-place trophy, to be met by Dick Tyler, a Weider editor, and Art Zeller, a leading bodybuilding photographer. Arnold told his hosts that he intended to return to Munich after he had learned the newest bodybuilding techniques. "I hope it will be a year," he said. "I want to get as much training, sun, and supplements into me as I can." This was Weider's thinking at the time, too. Arnold would stay long enough to improve himself, then go back to Germany and open an office and do business there as Joe's European representative.

Los Angeles was a meat market, a struggle for survival. Arnold saw bodybuilders living in their cars, hustling their bodies, selling steroids, doing whatever they had to do to get by. Fortunately or unfortunately, Arnold was able to share an apartment in Studio City with an Australian bodybuilder named Paul Graham.

On December 9 and 10, 1968, two automobiles were stolen in Los Angeles, only to reappear in the Antipodes. In January 1969 the Justice Department filed a complaint asserting that Paul Graham had "transported two

stolen Mustangs, a 1965 Ford Mustang and a 1966 Ford Mustang, in foreign commerce from Los Angeles, California, to Sydney, Australia."

Arnold danced a sinuous waltz to stay away from various illegal activities that bodybuilders used to make money. Arnold was close enough to Graham that in 1969 they were staying together in a hotel in Hawaii for a bodybuilding exhibition. "He said that he had some legal problems, and one day he left the hotel," said Arnold. "The next thing I knew, I was getting a phone call to visit him in some institution down in Long Beach. He and I never talked about it. I was very far removed and never saw him take any cars. It was a sensitive thing."

Arnold's association with Graham did not end as a result. "He always has been a fantastic friend and a great human being," said Arnold. Graham left the United States and returned to Australia, where he became the top executive in the bodybuilding federation controlled by the Weiders. Arnold invited the Australian to his wedding and was best man at Graham's. Several of Arnold's old friends believe that as a foreigner himself, he was fortunate not to have been drawn into Graham's legal problems. "I spoke to Arnold and he said no, he had nothing to do with it," said Weider. "I don't think Arnold is that kind of a guy." However, he was the kind of guy who would not abandon his friend, even though that led to unfair rumors that Graham had taken the rap for both of them.

Arnold now moved into an apartment supplied by Weider and started living on his weekly stipend. "I knew Arnold was a penny-pincher from way back," said Weider. "He pinches every penny. Gets milk out of everything. So I told the guys at my office to give him what he really needed to get by on. I knew he wouldn't take advantage of that, and that's what he did."

Twice a day Arnold worked out, in the morning down the street at Vince's Gym, in the evening at the home of Don Peters, a wealthy bodybuilder and fan. Within a few months Arnold moved to an apartment in Venice near Muscle Beach and began going daily to the nearby Gold's Gym.

"Arnold, anything you want, it's yours," Arnold recalled the feisty Joe Gold, a former Merchant Marine, telling his new patron the first day he entered the gym. Gold waited a moment until Arnold had fully breathed in the compliment. "You're just a stupid farmer from Austria, and you got a balloon belly!" Gold yelled. "It will take us a year to work on that." Arnold had just arrived, and Gold had already given him a nickname—"Balloon Belly."

As a young man. Gold had hung out at Muscle Beach when the term beach bum was a high compliment. He took his interest in bodybuilding and built Gold's Gym in Santa Monica, the legendary temple of the sport. The original

Gold's Gym has little to do with the modern franchised emporiums of health that bear the name across America. Gold's was smaller than contemporary gyms, about 5,000 square feet, taking up no more space than a typical store, and it was a rudimentary place. Most of the equipment Gold had built himself out of scrap metal.

"If you got up on the second-floor balcony and looked down, you'd think you were looking at hell, at Dante's Inferno," recalled bodybuilding journalist Dick Tyler. "The steam literally coming off the floor from the sweat and yelling and clanking plates. All of these guys training and the screaming. 'One more set!' 'One more set, you faggot!'"

In the middle of it, as often as not, stood Arnold. Although he could hardly communicate when he arrived, within a year he was fluent in his own peculiar brand of English. All around the room were mirrors, and Arnold and the others continually glanced at their reflected images and those of the others. Arnold was training around men who would be his opponents. Within the camaraderie, there was an element of one-upmanship as they psyched one another out.

Arnold drew people to him like no other leading bodybuilder. He was younger than most of his colleagues, but some of the older bodybuilders called him "mother." He was a font of advice, cautions, taunts, admonitions, and athletic axioms. There was in bodybuilding a peculiar rhythm, a slow, methodical pace broken by brief, intense bursts of activity, a rhythm that took over his entire life. He was soon nicknamed "the Austrian Oak," and the Austrian Oak did things fast, but he was not a man to rush or be rushed.