When the host, Harry Belafonte, announced that Arnold had won as the outstanding male newcomer, no one applauded louder than Stallone—indeed "Rocky" came up to Arnold's table and told him that he had a great part for him in a script Stallone had just written called Hell's Kitchen.

For Arnold it was a glorious achievement, but his moment of recognition was short-lived, forgotten in the triumphant procession to the podium of major stars winning major awards. At the end of the evening, the most important prize for Best Picture was given to Rocky. Leaping from his seat at the table, Stallone ripped the centerpiece apart, threw the flowers high in

the air, and kissed ever\- female within reach before going up to receive his trophy.

That's what it meant to be a Holh^vood star. For all his gleaming muscles and the adulation he enjoyed at the g>-m, Arnold was barely in the same room with Stallone.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Maria Factor

In August 1977 Bobby Zarem called Arnold and invited him to play at the Robert F. Kennedy pro-am celebrity tennis tournament only a few days before the event. Another celebrity, James Caan, had been unable to make it, and Zarem had suggested that Arnold take his place. The annual charity event, held just before the U.S. Open and hosted by Ethel Kennedy, had become one of the megacelebrity gatherings of the time. That Arnold did not play tennis and was going to have to play the game in front of thousands of New Yorkers did not dissuade him.

Arnold had just acquired his first Hollywood agents, Lawrence Kubik and Craig Rumar, and he figured that this was a matter for their expertise. "He asked, had I ever heard of the tournament," said Kubik. "I said that I had, and I took him up to the Malibu Tennis Club to teach him some tennis. The balls were flying everywhere. When we finished, he asked, 'What am I going to do.^'"

By the time Arnold arrived in New York a few days later, he had learned the rudiments of the sport. The spectators in the Forest Hills Stadium watched an array of games, everything from comedian Buddy Hackett doing his pratfalls after a bad shot to Senator Edward Kennedy and Vice President Walter Mondale taking on two television journalists, Tom Brokaw and David Hartman. But The New York Times described "the highlight of the day" as the massive doubles duo of Arnold and retired football player Roosevelt Grier against a couple of sprightly kids. Arnold and Grier were big hams like Hackett. After losing their first game to the two determined boys, they ripped off their shirts and proceeded to defeat their youthful opponents.

Arnold had plenty of time to talk to others at the event. He had never been

taken much by the romance of the Kennedys, but they were the first family of American politics and had an undeniable energy that appealed to him. There were three generations running around the grounds, including a large array of Shrivers, almost all of them excellent tennis players. Arnold had already met Bobby Shriver, a gadfly who was working as a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and that day he met others, including Bobby's younger sister, twenty-one-year-old Maria.

Maria was intrigued enough by thirty-year-old Arnold to invite him to Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, the summer home of the Kennedy clan. Arnold did not fly northward full of social ambition, out to make his way in the world by latching on to a Kennedy. That was simply not the way he looked at women. For the most part, Arnold did not date women to advance himself. It was one of the oldest gambits of Hollywood publicists to set up young stars with faux romances that got their names in the gossip columns. If that had been Arnold's pleasure, he could have dated a stream of publicity-seeking starlets mixed in with socially prominent single women, but he did not do that, either.

Arnold did not like women who were emotionally troublesome, and the famous and rich and the highborn all immediately qualified. He was living now with Sue Moray, a warm, feisty, pretty young woman who was a hairdresser. He had set out the parameters of the relationship. When he was in town, he was loyal to her. When he was away, he did what he wanted, and so could she.

Arnold considered the actress Candice Bergen his womanly ideal. She was as beautiful as any model, but if you thought that meant she was stupid, she immediately disabused you of that notion with her intimidating intellect. Arnold said that he was looking for a woman "that's brighter than I ... an aggressive woman who can talk and is not always in the background." That may have been what Arnold was looking for, or more likely what he liked to think he was looking for, a drop-dead gorgeous woman who royally trumped him in intelligence. He never sought such women out but preferred someone like Moray as long as he could sweeten his evenings out of town with an endless array of others.

Arnold proudly called himself a "butt man" and could lovingly talk about that part of a woman's anatomy the way a wine lover discusses vintages. Maria was a lush beauty with Reubenesque thighs. She was five feet, seven inches tall and weighed as much as 150 pounds. "When Arnold first met Maria, she was entirely different," recalled Kubik. "She was a young girl, her body was different, she was certainly enamored with Arnold, and I thought he likes big girls."

Maria's parents were one of the most extraordinary political couples in

America. Her father, Sargent Shriver, came from an old Maryland family that had lost its wealth. He had graduated from Yale, flown a navy plane in World War II, gone to work for Joseph P. Kennedy, and married his daughter Eunice. He was the first director of the Peace Corps, led the War on Poverty, ran for Vice President on the ticket with Senator George McGovern in 1972, and ran for the Democratic presidential nomination four years later. Maria adored her father, and the lover or husband who inherited that love would find it intense, passionate, and almost overwhelming.

Among the many gifts her father gave Maria was her initial fascination with journalism. In 1972 she had traveled in the back of the plane with the journalists covering the McGovern-Shriver campaign for the presidency. It was hardly the most desired assignment of the campaign, but doom brings out the best in journalists, and they had many weeks to practice gallows humor. There were no other sixteen-year-olds among the scribes, and Maria enjoyed being "part of this pack of intense and highly competitive professionals." She had found her metier. To her it was politics without the pain.

Maria's love for her mother was just as intense, but far more complicated. Some people thought that Eunice Kennedy Shriver was a saint, but they had not worked for her. She was a woman to whom any mountaintop was only a momentary plateau. She founded the Special Olympics and worked to develop it into a worldwide institution that helped change the way the develop-mentally disabled are viewed. She was not a name-on-the-letterhead kind of person, but an in-the-muck, in-your-face perfectionist. That was also true of the way she brought up her children, especially her only daughter. She wanted to make sure that Maria, the second of her five children, knew that the world was as wide-open and free for her as it was for her brothers.

"Growing up, people would come up and say to my mother, 'Oh, your daughter is so pretty,'" Maria recalled. "My mother would always say, 'Stop it. Stop it.' Then she would turn to me and say, 'Don't you pay any attention to that. It's your mind, your mind!' I was always saying to myself, 'Oh, she's so weird.' She was always pushing me to do boys' activities, you know, to speak up when the boys were there. My father would say, 'I'm going to the baseball game.' She'd go, 'Maria is going.' And she'd push me right along like I came to believe I was a boy or one of the boys. She never emphasized anything feminine with me."

Maria, like her brothers, was brought up with a constant diet of stories of the greatness of her family, reinforced by pictures of the various Kennedys all over the Shriver house in Maryland. Although she was close to her three younger brothers, Timothy, Mark, and Anthony, she was closest to her elder brother, Bobby. She was inculcated with the idea that she had blessed and sa-

cred blood in her veins, that family mattered more than anything, and that her family mattered more than any other. And yet it was not a lazy entitlement that her mother handed to her. She wanted her children tested and challenged. It was fine to go to live in Paris, where Sarge Shriver served as ambassador in the last years of the Johnson administration, but she pushed Maria out to test herself, to live on a kibbutz in Israel and in a village in Africa, experiences suitable perhaps for young adults, but not so obviously for young teenagers.

When she was a little girl, her parents had in her estimation "traveled and worked an excessive amount," leaving Maria and Bobby in the care of nannies and aides. That hurt her, especially when she contrasted it to how often her parents were with her when she was older, and what a constant presence they were in the lives of her younger siblings. "I can remember staying overnight at Maria's house when we were growing up," said Theo Hayes, one of her closest friends. "And I could hear Mrs. Shriver up on the third floor, sitting in the hallway in between the two doors of the boys' bedrooms at ten o'clock at night, and she's reading stories to Maria's younger brothers, putting them to bed. Maria never had that."

Maria had been old enough to have known and felt the deaths of her uncles Jack and Bobby and seen how the tragedies emotionally ravaged her family. That was a price that she did not intend to pay, yet she was intellectually and emotionally drawn to politics, not simply by the drama of it but by how politics could change things and how people used politics for purposes good and bad.

Maria was hungry to test herself in the world, but as neither a Kennedy nor a Shriver. She was not about to get involved in politics, but she wanted to come to it as a professional observer reporting on the great public events of her time. "I always had a desire to go against the flow, so I wanted to pick something different," she said. "Yet I wanted to use what I had been brought up to believe in and work in—in a different field."

She wanted to be a television journalist and to be able to state that she had made it on her own. "I think I was obsessive about that," she said. It was an inheritor's greatest burden, to be able to believe that your accomplishments are not based largely on the fact that your name and wealth has positioned you far in front of those you consider your competitors. She ended up signing on as an intern at KYW-TV in Philadelphia for twelve thousand dollars a year.

For all Eunice's concern that Maria not be defined by her sex, she found it unacceptable for her daughter to be so chunky. It never quite occurred to her

that one reason Maria was so heavy is that when the Shrivers returned from Paris, Eunice brought a French chef with her who filled the dinner table with heavy, rich foods that the teenage Maria found irresistible. Eunice was constantly lecturing her daughter to lose weight.

This obsession with weight had been common among the Kennedy women for at least three generations. In turn-of-the-century Boston, where girth marked one as having peasant origins, Maria's great-grandmother Josephine Fitzgerald was proud of her wineglass figure. Maria's grandmother Rose took pills and obsessively dieted to stay thin, boasting that she wore the same gown to her son's inauguration that twenty-three years before she had worn to be presented to the king and queen in Great Britain. Eunice was rail-thin. Maria was a robust, healthy young woman, and this fixation with weight was a malady that the women in the family passed on like recipes or child-rearing advice.

Maria's brother Anthony was there that weekend in Hyannis Port, and he watched the mating dance. He had the sense that several of Maria's cousins were intrigued by Arnold, too. "Maria didn't necessarily have the physique she has now," Anthony said. "And he saw in her qualities. It wasn't about getting the Kennedy thing going. Caroline was there, and all those other people were there, so he got it on with Maria, and he figured it out that she was the star."

Nothing Maria had done in her life was as daring as dating Arnold. Many young heirs are under the illusion that if you marry a person equally wealthy, you are not marrying that person for his or her money. Yet, up until that point, she had generally dated men of her own class or social background, including Larry Lucchino, an ambitious young attorney who would end up as CEO of the Boston Red Sox. She had been trained to have a subtle social caution. There were people out there who wanted to use her and her family, people who wanted to get to her family through her, and part of her job was not to let that happen.

Arnold was precisely the kind of man that a well-brought-up Kennedy woman was taught to avoid. He was not even a movie or television star, but a freak celebrity. He had already had his moment of notoriety, and odds were that he would soon turn to flab and obscurity. He was, by all accounts, a man of dangerous sexuality who flaunted his promiscuous lifestyle. He may have played tennis with Sarge and spoken German with Grandmother Rose, an action more impressive on the Kennedy matriarch's part than Arnold's, but that he was partially housebroken did not mean that he should be invited regularly into one's home.

Arnold had supped at Elaine's, but he had not fully learned the social graces that came naturally to the Kennedys and their associates. Everything was a little off, from his hair to his shoes. Maria's girlfriends were struck by how bad Arnold smelled. He gave off what they called a peculiarly European odor, which they felt came from unfamiliarity with deodorants. That probably was not true, but rather a projection of how threatening they found Arnold and how wrong for their friend. He did give off an odor of danger, and they were appalled that their beloved friend should be seeing such a man. Theo Hayes was so upset at this untoward intrusion that a few weeks later she refused to allow Maria to bring Arnold to her wedding.

"Everybody had problems with Arnold," Maria said. "I don't know one person who thought he was a good idea. People around him would say, 'What the hell is that.^' They had never met anybody like him. And everybody around me said the same. So I was on a pretty lonely island there."

Maria's friends were for the most part good Catholic girls, and none of them had ever seen anything like Arnold. He was someone you ran from, the very model of the kind of man the nuns told you to avoid. "Sex was the great compelling force of the relationship," said another friend. There was a gloriously lustful center to their love. A measure of that was that two and a half decades later, Maria is still talking about her sexuality in a way that was unthinkable for a Kennedy woman. "I wish I'd known how creative, crucial, and consistent sex would have to be," Maria wrote. "And I certainly never knew I'd wind up talking about it so much."

It was almost unheard-of for a Kennedy woman to have such an openly randy relationship. Maria came from a family in which most of the men sought their sexual entertainment outside marriage, and many of their wives came to consider sex one of the onerous obligations of marriage. Maria's aunt Pat crossed herself before having sex with her husband, Peter Lawford. Maria's own mother, Eunice, was so ignorant about birth control that she thought that men with a sexual gleam in their eye strapped on condoms before leaving the house. Even if these women found pleasure in having sex with their husbands, marriage was too important a matter to be left to such fickle, transient matters as sexual attraction.

Arnold and Maria talked to each other about myriad subjects, either in person or on the phone, but unquestionably the sexual component was key. Arnold flew to Washington to attend the Special Olympics and other social events, and Maria made her trips to California, too. Distance allowed their affair to continue. Arnold simply was not ready for a relationship that was intense and monogamous.

The couple had gone out only once or twice when they headed out with Joe and Betty VVeider for a weekend of antiquing in the Pennsylvania countryside, to be followed by a bodybuilding show. The foursome arrived so late at the Philadelphia airport that they missed the plane to the exhibition. Arnold wanted to rent a private plane so that he could make his scheduled appearance. The only one available was an ancient craft that Betty thought might have flown in World War I, with an ancient pilot who might have flown it. Anyone with a modicum of caution would have walked away—anyone but Arnold. "I was in shock and I think Maria was in shock, and at first Joe said, 'I'm not going,'" said Betty Weider. "Arnold figured if the man had flown for sixty years, he could fly." They had not reckoned on Arnold's persistence, and off they flew into the Pennsylvania sky. The old man buzzed the urban skyline before heading out over the countryside. Betty kept asking the pilot questions about how he flew the plane. She wanted to be ready in case he died of a heart attack before they landed and she had to take over the controls.

Arnold was not good at saying no, and he was no good at endings. His love affair with Moray ended in tortured convulsions. Arnold was full of gentle duplicities that he used to cushion unpleasantness. He kept telling Moray that Maria was terribly young and that his relationship with her was platonic. Moray became obsessed with Maria, full of paranoia and jealousy. Tired of Arnold's fibbing, she walked out of the house, only to return. "I found him there, cr^^ing," she said. "I've never seen a man cry so hard. He was just like a baby, crying and crying."

Arnold liked routine, be it in bodybuilding or romance, and he did not want Moray to leave. Maria was matchless as a weekend or vacation partner, but theirs was not the casual, comfortable relationship Arnold had with Moray. It was not until a year after Arnold met Maria that Sue finally left, and she says their sexual relationship continued for a while even after that.

Arnold was a man of limitless ambition, but he was not obsessed with his career in the same way Maria was. He could let go and think of other things, while she put no limit on the hours she would work or the commitments she would make. She was a woman of exhausting intensity, obsessed by succeeding in broadcasting. She had moved to a producer's slot in Baltimore at WJZ. When she said she worked night and day, she was not indulging in hyperbole. She never found time even to unpack the boxes she had shipped from Philadelphia. Despite the endless work, Maria was passionately in love with Arnold. He was a man of special occasions and splendid good times. With her compulsive work schedule, it was the perfect romance.

Arnold brought Franco Columbu with him to the Shriver home for

Thanksgiving their first year together. "Come in the kitchen, Franco," Maria said to Arnold's closest friend. Columbu hardly knew Maria, and he was appreciative of her immediate warmth. "This is a carrot cake," she told him. "It smells funny," Franco replied. "It's a burnt cake."

"Smell it," Maria commanded. As Columbu leaned over the cake, Maria shoved his face into it. He had hardly stood up to begin to wipe the frosting off his face when another Shriver entered the kitchen and threw a cake in Maria's face. Columbu had known Arnold's previous girlfriends, but nobody like Maria and no family like the Shrivers.

Arnold did not know quite what to make of this unpredictable young woman. "She always says that the first time she met me she really liked me, and it was like love at first sight," he said. "I'm slower about these things, I don't jump. As time went on, the more I talked to her and the more I saw her, I started to love her."

He brought to romance all the skills of a diplomat, giving her the illusion that she was the only woman in his life. He was proud of her, and he appeared proud that she was a Kennedy and that she was in love with him. He detailed her physical attributes to his bodybuilding buddies while they worked out. She was energetic and fun to be with, but she was a wearing, emotionally demanding person. Anybody's bet was that the affair would not last. Maria had one qualiry she shared with Arnold that was crucial to the longevity of their affair. She was growing and learning and changing, and so was he.

"People have always written that Arnold went and got himself a Kennedy," reflected Maria. "No. He and I fell in love. He wasn't finished growing and he saw in me someone who could grow with him and could help. I was saying, 'You can do more. We can go together.' He had found someone unlike his mother who believed he could go further. And nobody felt that he could go further but the two of us. And everybody laughed at his dreams. People were mad at me, because I was supposedly taking him further away. That's where Arnold wanted to go. You can't take a guy like Arnold somewhere where he doesn't want to go."

The Shrivers might be Democrats when it came time to vote, but they were snobs when it came to their only daughter, and they could hardly envision that this hulk might be their future son-in-law. Nevertheless, Eunice involved anyone within shouting radius in the Special Olympics, and Arnold immediately and enthusiastically took part. It meant little to fly into Washington to attend a $500-a-ticket benefit with Maria that coincided with the premiere o{ Superman in December 1978. It meant a little more to be there that same weekend for a sports clinic for the Special Olympics. And it meant

a lot more to become the weight-lifting adviser to the organization and to work, to make it an important sport. Arnold was a wonderfully sensitive coach, never patronizing, his enthusiasm perfectly fitted to his task.

Arnold loomed large not only as a figure in the bodybuilding world but as a guru in the whole fitness revolution. His 1978 book, Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, was a bestseller. Written with Douglas Kent Hall, it was half autobiography and half a program on how to get in shape. Many celebrities publish ghostwritten books for which they have made minimal contributions and which they sometimes have not even read. That was not the case with this book. Arnold was worthwhile and solid, a further indication that Arnold saw himself as a product that could be merchandised in many different ways as long as full value was delivered.

Arnold promoted the semi-autobiography as avidly as he would a movie. It was a mark of his persistence, perseverance, and marketing vision that he did so. When Simon & Schuster put together a five-city tour for the first-time author, he told them that it was not enough, it was hardly a beginning.

"I said, 'No, I want to go to at least thirty cities,'" Arnold recalled with pleasure. "And they looked at me like I was totally out of my mind. They had never even been in touch with anyone in those cities, so they had no contacts and had to hire some outside consultants. I wanted to go out and do something unique and different and not just do the traditional way of marketing. They got out my book into sporting-goods stores, which never happened before, and I went to thirty cities and we made our book a bestseller, which has never happened before with any bodybuilding book. So that was like a huge victory."

This was the first of a series of bodybuilding books and videos bearing Arnold's name that were released during the next two decades. They were a lucrative sideline, and Arnold perceived them as part of his legacy and as a mark of his serious commitment to bodybuilding. The books delivered fully upon their promise. "He wanted everything to be perfect and went over every line with me," recalled co-author Bill Dobbins. "He would generally add a lot of very personal stuff about his own training in Austria and elsewhere."

When Arnold was in Washington on the book tour, he had a chance to see Maria for Halloween. She was a pleasant diversion, but the relationship was neither compelling nor deep. "She picked me up in the hotel lobby," he recalled. "She was dressed up all goofy as some kind of gypsy, wearing a lot of weird earrings and stuff, and I thought, 'God, this girl is just too much.' I loved that. She was also so witty, so 'on' that night. I went to Europe then and thought about her a lot. I had a feeling it was reciprocal."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

"Part of the Entertaining Show"

Maria was a pleasant enough diversion, but his Golden Globe for Stay Hungry was leading him nowhere and Arnold was consumed with making it in Hollywood. Arnold returned to study under Eric Morris in a weekly class with other students. Like everyone else in the room, he said that he was looking for the right role. The idea of playing the Swede in Ernest Hemingway's short stors' "The Killers" attracted him. It would have been film noir, a dark little tale of a man who has double-crossed people he should not have. The Swede knows he is going to be murdered. He does not think there is anything he can do to stop it. "If there's one thing I should do, it's the unexpected," Arnold argued. "Whether it's 'The Killers' or something else, I probably should play the victim."

That was the thinking of a man who wanted to be a serious actor. That was what Morris's acting class was all about. For a year or so Arnold went every' week when he was in town and went through what everybody else was going through. The students took their places in chairs that formed a horseshoe around a small stage, where they took turns performing. Morris sat on the side, watching the students and making comments. The teacher was an adept reader of faces, and one evening he saw that Arnold was distracted and full of contained rage.

"Get up there, Arnold," Morris commanded. Arnold slowly rose and stood before the twenty or so students.

"Okay, it's obvious you're upset. What's the matter.'*"

"I'm pissed off! It's bullshit! They don't like my name, they don't like my accent, they don't like my body, but fuck them! I'm going to be a superstar!"

"Okay, I'm with you. What's going on.''"

"I see agents. They say, 'Your accent is too heavy. You're too big. What can you play.'" "

"Arnold, you're charismatic. Everybody in this room is pinned and nailed, glued to you. I mean, that is something you can't teach somebody. If you've got it, you've got it. If you ain't got it, you ain't got it. So, I mean, you've got it. You've just got to be patient."

That was just about the last time Arnold went to the class. He did not talk much anymore about becoming a serious actor. He talked about being a star, the greatest star in the world. And he talked about it in a way that was either mindlessly boastful or perfectly confident. "I love to entertain," Arnold said. "I want to entertain more people than any actor ever has. But I will stay away from serious shows. I want to be part of the entertaining show, make people laugh and have a good time."

Arnold turned away from whatever was negative, and acting as such had become an onerous, unpleasant business. "I don't care if I ever become an actor, I'm going to become a star, and everyone is going to know the name Schwarzenegger," he told Betty Weider, who sensed the driven nature of the man. "I know how to become a star. Maybe I don't have the talent to become an actor, but I'll become a star."

Arnold did not want to plumb whatever darkness he had in his own soul and lay out that darkness before the world. He understood himself, not some fantasy of what he might have been, not some ideal that other people wanted him to be, but what he was. "You have to think positive and program yourself to be a winner," he said. "I am simply not programmed to think bad thoughts. Successful people have the ability to take a risk and make a tough decision, no matter what everyone around them says."

To become a movie star, Arnold had to overcome the most merciless stereotypes. "The first movies that were offered to me were Nazi movies, play a Nazi officer and all that stuff," remembered Arnold. "So, I think people always look whether he's from Germany or from Austria, and say, 'Oh, he's a Nazi.' I remember when I walked into World Gym and the people called, 'Oh, the Boy from Brazil,' all those kind of things. If you have a German accent, that's what you get."

Arnold's first agent, Craig Rumar, does not remember how he and Lawrence Kubik got their new client, but there was no great competition to represent him. Hollywood is a place where people spend their days trying to find ways to say no, and in Arnold's case it was just too easy. He had a foreign accent.

That was bad enough, but it was also a German accent, and in what was largely a Jewish industry, that was a further reason to turn him away. He was also a conservative Republican. "It's not like you can go to Nat and Al's deli in Beverly Hills in the morning for breakfast and sit in the Republican section," said Rumar. "You can't do it. That was a huge element for Arnold to overcome. You do not know the vile hatred that they had for him."

Rumar had a number of famous clients, but he had never had anyone who impressed him in so many ways. "He oozed charm and confidence," said Rumar. "But it wasn't Hollywood phony. He was sort of like a young messiah who could come in and do anything he wanted to. For whatever reason, he chose acting. He could have gone into business and been one of the great tycoons in the world."

Acting was Arnold's first choice as a profession, but it was perhaps not the choice for which he was best suited. Other than Pumping Iron, Arnold did not radiate stardom in his early film work. In a secondary role in The Villain, starring Kirk Douglas and Ann-Margret, Arnold was so boring and leaden that he seemed an anti-star "more of a weight on the movie than even he might be able to lift," as The New York Times sniffed. He was adequate as Jayne Mansfield's lover Mickey Hargitay in the 1980 TV movie The Jayne Mansfield Story but displayed nothing of the charisma and excitement needed to succeed even on the small screen.

Arnold's first chance at a role custom fit to him was to play Conan the Cimmerian, in a film based on the fantasy adventure stories by the late Robert E. Howard. In the Great Depression, these stories led teenage boys away from the uncertainty' of their daily existence into a brutal, mythic world where might was right and revenge the noblest of motives. Howard set out an irresistibly compelling vision of a barbarian world: "Between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities . . . there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars. . . . Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand ... to tread the jeweled thorns of the Earth under his sandaled feet."

The role of such a hero seemed tailor-made for Arnold Schwarzenegger, world-conquering bodybuilder with his own mythic dreams. The producer Edward Pressman purchased the film rights to Conan and signed Arnold to do a whole series. Pressman subsequently sold the project to Dino De Lauren-tiis, the Italian producer. The diminutive De Laurerttiis was not a highbrow artiste but a shrewd entrepreneur who was as happy to roll the dice with Conan the Barbarian or Barbarella as such legendary films of his as La Strada or

Nights ofCabiria. De Laurentiis gave Arnold a higher education in the machinations of Hollywood, where few plots are as complicated or as full of potential betrayal and disappointment as in the making of the film.

When Arnold and Kubik went in to see De Laurentiis in his Hollywood office, the producer sat behind a desk so large that practically only his head was visible. The producer got up and walked out from behind the desk. "Why does a man so small need such a big desk.'"' Arnold asked him. The meeting ended shortly thereafter. Out in the hall, Arnold's agent berated him. "You destroyed your career!" he railed.

"No, I made it," Arnold replied.

Kubik recalled saying ironically, "Well, you handled that well."

No other young actor would have been so bold or foolish as to make such a comment, but Arnold did not care that he had spoken so rudely. The agents had already negotiated a tiered deal that Rumar said totaled $5 million for five films. De Laurentiis did not have to make the films, but if he did, Arnold earned increasing amounts that could earn him a fortune.

Arnold not only had limited acting skills, but he was sometimes hard to understand. "His accent was much thicker than it is today," said Kubik. "He worked very hard over the years to lessen his accent." His voice would be dubbed in other languages and perhaps even in English, and thus in his first major film the accent was not a concern. It was all about business, in any case, and it was business that saved Arnold.

De Laurentiis recalled that he flew to London to meet the director Ridley Scott to sign him up for the film. "Dino, I'd love to do it," Scott said, "but I need an actor. I cannot do it with Arnold Schwarzenegger."

"If I have to choose between you and Arnold, I choose Arnold," said De Laurentiis.

That Arnold was legally tied to the project was a technicality that the producer's lawyers could probably have voided. Arnold brought something else that most Hollywood film studios had not yet fully grasped: the significance of the worldwide market. Arnold was famous in much of the world as a bodybuilder, and De Laurentiis envisioned Conan the Barbarian as a movie that would make its profit by being successful in scores of countries. De Laurentiis was going through one of his periodic downtimes, and he needed to sell those foreign rights if he was going to get the film into production.

Kubik had ample opportunity to observe Arnold before he made his first important film. "I saw the terrific discipline and confidence that he had," said the agent. "There were no limits on his ambition. He exerts a tremendous amount of control. He had a vision, and he knew he could turn it into reality. In his mind, whatever he's doing is like a film getting made."

Making a film involves a great deal of waiting around, and the least of it is on the set. In Arnold's case, from the time he first heard about the project, he waited almost half a decade for shooting to begin. He was in his early thirties, already an unlikely age to become a major star. He could hardly afford to sit around, but there was one delay after another.

The talented young screenwriter Oliver Stone wrote the first screenplay of Conan the Barbarian. It was a wild fantastical adventure that would have been prohibitively expensive to shoot. When Pressman sold the project to De Lau-rentiis, the Italian producer brought in another prominent young screenwriter, John Milius. to write a script that could be shot economically. If Milius did that, he would be given the opportunity to direct the film.

Milius was a rudely spoken, vulgar, literate, obsessive, burly, bearded, proud, gun-toting anachronism. He had cowritten what was probably the greatest screenplay of the epoch. Apocalypse Now, a dark, operatic saga of Vietnam. In writing the Conan script, Milius poured all his fierce anger and artistic energy not only into a grand vision but into exquisite details and evocative descriptions. Although he shared the screenplay credit with Stone, it is unquestionably Milius's story, a compelling, evocative piece of work grounded in his darkly romantic view of history. The script follows the life of Conan from the childhood day his father is run through with a sword and disemboweled by dogs in front of his son, his mother is decapitated as the boy stands next to her holding her hand, and young Conan is pressed into slavery'.

At the beginning of his screenplay', Milius places an epigram from Nietzsche: "That which does not destroy us, makes us stronger." It was perfect not only for Conan but for Arnold. There is a persistent theme in Arnold's life and the lives of many of those with whom he has been artistically associated: out of weakness grows strength. Out of the forthright admission of one's frailties and the determined commitment to go on comes a laminated strength powerful enough to overcome those who have not made such a struggle.

Howard, the author of the Conan stories, was a weak little boy pummeled by the town bully. He turned to bodybuilding so that he could defend himself. .-Vnd he turned to his Conan stories to create a mythic man who would ride through a blood-tinged barbaric world, meting out vengeful justice with a fierce and certain sword. It was a world uniquely appealing to teenage boys, who fancied themselves living in their own barbaric, adult-controlled universe and dreamed of their own revenge. Milius himself had been so weak and sickly that he was turned down by the military service he so admired, and had become a troubadour of lost traditional manhood.

There is an atavistic, self-consciously primitive quality expressed in much of Milius's work, as if only by stripping away the shoddy veneer of civilization can the manly life be reborn. Milius and Howard share a dramatic world in which men head out into danger, seeking certain truths. If these are truths that only teenage boys understand, the fault lies not in the youths but in their spiritually anesthetized elders.

Arnold's own life resonated with many of these same themes, though he largely disguised what Milius proudly proclaimed. Arnold was a man from Styria, a land whose glories were in the past, in years of brave struggle holding back the hated Ottomans from their assault on the West. Even today the armory museum in Graz is the largest in the world, with rooms full of body armor, spikes, muskets, and guns, relics of a time when a man proved his mettle against fire and sword. Arnold hungered for heroism, and he loved tales of great men and their deeds. He was the man to play Conan, and his physical form was only part of the reason.

When Milius went to Arnold's office to discuss the script, he noticed a photograph that convinced him that Arnold could convey the essence of Conan. "It was a picture of him on his back, grotesquely lifting this bent curling bar with these giant fucking dumbbells on it, and he had this thing around his waist so that he wouldn't burst or something from the strain," Milius said. "It was just horrible, the strain on his muscles, and all the veins were stressed, everything. And he has this expression on his face of Zen bliss, combined with the look of the lion. I said to Arnold, 'Whenever you kill someone, that's the way you should be. That's who you are. This is more than pleasure. This is you doing what you do, this is what you can't help but do. And Conan must always be thus, instead of ever yelling in rage or anything like that, Conan must always be cool.'"

Arnold, who had arguably created the greatest physique in the history' of bodybuilding, devoted most of his effort to creating the physical presence of Conan. From the moment he heard about the Conan role, he began to develop the on-screen presence. "One of the first things I did was to look up the character and see what he did well," said Arnold. "That turned out to be swordfighting, climbing, and horseback riding. So I felt that, on my own, before they even selected a director, I should go out and train for those things. I also started to do athletic things like running and climbing." In months of preparation, he developed his own aggressive style of swordplay, his own manner of running and fighting, and his own set of expressions.

In preparing to play Conan, Arnold had gained the same control over his

physical gestures and movements that he sought over all the externals of his life. His public presence and every' gesture and nuance of it had become as calculated for effect as the rhetoric in a speech. It was a change observed by George Butler, who for several years had photographed his countenance. "In the early days, when I photographed Arnold, before he had acted in movies, his facial expressions were natural," he said. "I began to notice that he was thinking about his expressions. I doubt he will ever have that natural expressiveness again that we captured in the film [PumpingIron].'"

Milius was inordinately proud of his image as a wild man, and he told Arnold that if he wanted to understand Conan, he should hang out with the Hell's Angels, the outlaw biker gang. Arnold, like Milius, liked to drive his Harley in the winding hills, and he had run into his fair share of Angels. "I always find that they are basically wonderful characters and great human beings," Arnold said. "The only thing is, they prefer a freer life than the law allows today."

That was Arnold speaking, not Conan, and it was hardly an objective view of an often violent, drug-riddled subculture. Arnold may have been prepping himself to play a movie role, but in doing so he reinforced his own political beliefs. His natural sympathies were with those living on the wild fringes of American life. He fancied that these self-conscious outlaws were the torch-bearers of a kind of liberty that those in corporate/bureaucratic America had long forgotten or considered mere indulgence. He was a skeet-shooting hunting control. He had, by his count, about fifteen guns in his house, including not only shotguns and pistols but an Uzi.

Arnold was preparing for his role not only by taking fencing and riding lessons but by working to keep his name in the forefront of the public consciousness. Arnold was still featured in the Welder publications, but there was no longer the buzz there had been when Pumping Iron came out. The most certain way to get major publiciry^ was to win another bodybuilding title, but he had been out of competition for five years. Although Arnold was still in good shape, he was hardly in the form to walk back into the highest reaches of the sport. He decided that it would help promote his movie if he competed and won the 1980 Mr. Olympia.

For the past four years, Arnold and Lorimer had put on the Mr. Olympia contest in Columbus. It had been a raging success, and the Welders had taken it back, saying that they wanted to stage the premier contest in bodybuilding around the world. They arranged for the 1980 event to take place in Sydney, Australia.

Arnold had other reasons to win that great prize an unprecedented seventh time. The year before, Arnold had been working as a commentator for CBS

on its live coverage of the 1979 Mr. Olympia finals in Columbus. When Frank Zane won the title for the third time, Arnold asked him how it felt. "Great, Arnold," Zane said. "Almost as good as the time I beat you in '68."

Nobody humiliated Arnold on national television. He called Zane afterward, raging at him for his audacious insult. "Yeah, Arnold, you've got a good sense of humor if the joke's not on you," Zane said. "You do this all the time to other people. Somebody does it to you, it's not so funny." Arnold said nothing more, but he envisioned the sweetest revenge of all, ripping the trophy out of Zanc's hands in Australia.

Another top bodybuilder, Mike Mentzer, represented far more of a threat to Arnold than Zane. The Washington, D.C., area resident had won the 1978 Mr. Universe title with a perfect score and finished second to Zane in the 1979 Mr. Olympia. He had ample reason to believe that he was primed to wear the crown this year. Mentzer might never win as many championships as Arnold, but he represented another kind of challenge. Arnold fancied himself not only the greatest champion of all time but the great philosopher of bodybuilding. He was the proudest product of the Weider system, who supposedly represented what could happen if you used Weider equipment, took Weider vitamins and supplements, and followed the rigorous Weider workout routines.

Mentzer was a direct confrontation of evervthing Arnold represented. He was the most intellectual of any of the bodybuilders, a onetime premed student who would as likely as not quote Jung, Freud, or Ayn Rand when he talked about training. His Heavy Duty training system was an extrapolation and elaboration of the ideas of Arthur Jones, the developer of the Nautilus fitness equipment. Mentzer said that the way to build one's body was to work out intensely and properly, but not to overexercise. Bodybuilders who worked out five or six hours a day were not giving their muscles time to recover and were hurting themselves.

Weider had condemned the Nautilus machines in the pages of his magazines, but the equipment had taken over much of the space in health clubs across America. If Mentzer won Mr. Olympia, his victory would be equally for a system that risked rendering suspect almost everything Weider did—from a workout philosophy so brilliantly exemplified in Arnold's efforts and the equipment he sold to the magazines. Weider was too powerful a figure to be seriously diminished by the mere victors' of one man, but Mentzer did represent a new kind of threat to Arnold. Arnold did not read books and rarely peppered his remarks with historical or philosophical allusions. He was part of an aural tradition of learning. If he was insightful and wise about bodybuilding, there was a limit to his knowledge. Mentzer sounded far more erudite and

scientific than Arnold. With victory, Mentzer would have the public platform that he sought.

Three months before the Sydney competition, Arnold gave an interview in Muscle Mag International \n which he said that Mentzer did not have a "world-class physique" and would never win the Mr. Olympia title. It was an inappropriate thing to say, especially since Arnold was then scheduled to be one of the judges.

Several months before the October competition, Arnold began training seriously. Arnold worked out with other bodybuilders and it took shrewd deception to hide what he was doing. When Arnold prepared for a major competition, he focused on his major opponents, figuring out their strengths and weaknesses. It was crucial to any bodybuilder's training, and around the world elite bodybuilders were planning and strategizing with no idea that Arnold would be posing on that stage beside them.

"Arnold, I had this injurv', and what would you do if you were me.'"' Frank Zane asked Arnold one day.

"I would go to Australia and defend your title."

"Are you going to compete.''"

"No, I'm just getting in shape for the Conan movie. I'm going to go to Australia to do commentary^ for CBS."

Arnold told a different tale to George Butler, whom he telephoned in September and invited to fly to Australia to photograph him. "Actually, I just start my training now," he told his friend. "But don't worry-. I still fuck everyone else up. I am working on Mike Mentzer."

A month later Butler flew to L.A. to catch z\rnold's last week of training before flying off with him and Maria to Australia. "I win," Arnold boasted as he worked out. "Don't worry. I don't need to control the judges. I control the bodybuilders. Already Mike Mentzer has left the gym this morning. I said: 'Mike, what is wrong.^' He said, 'Arnold, stop smiling!' I said, 'Why.?' He said, 'You're driving me crazy with that smile.'

"So this afternoon he misses training to see a shrink," Arnold continued as he stood surveying the other bodybuilders working out. "And he pays him to analyze me! He should remember that another Austrian was King of the Shrinks. I could advise him for free." Then Arnold returned to the next set of what he called his "savage training program."

When Arnold arrived in Sydney and entered the contest, it was a jolting shock to his competitors. That by itself was a giant step toward victory. As always, Arnold had Columbu at his side, watching over every moment. Body-

building competitors did not generally insult one another verbally, but Arnold could not resist turning a group meeting into an assault on his most dangerous challenger. In the midst of a discussion of a different matter, Arnold said, "Mike Mentzer, we all know Zane beat you last year because you have a big stomach."

Mentzer was still fuming because he believed the rules had been changed so Arnold could enter at the last minute, and now he had to listen to his insults. Mentzer rushed Arnold. Franco wanted to "let them fight a little bit, because I love to see fights." His thinking was that if Arnold was trouncing Mentzer, he would let them fight; if Arnold was losing, the former boxing champion would get in a few licks himself. But he did not have a chance, for others separated the two heavyweights before the battle began.

Arnold was always posing, putting forth his most positive features on view while hiding his weaker aspects. He created a wondrously compelling image of himself as a man who through rigorous training had taken his body to a place not only of unprecedented beauty but of unprecedented health. He did not talk about the steroids he introduced into his system, and he did not talk about the other things he did to create that illusion.

Before heading to Australia, Arnold injected cortisone to dull the pain from a shoulder injury. The medication worked but increased his fluid retention. That is always a problem before a competition and the reason many bodybuilders use diuretics. Arnold tried to sweat it out, wearing a heavy suit while he did his posing routine fifty times or more.

He was not the only one trying to get rid of fluids so his body would appear perfectly muscled, without a hint of fat. Mentzer had fixed up his own sauna in the kitchen of his hotel suite, where he sat popping potassium pills in front of the open oven, wearing a jogging suit and a rubber suit on top of that, the water pouring off of him. Shortly after one of the other bodybuilders, Samir Bannout, took the diuretic Lactix, his heart started beating irregularly. A quick dose of potassium pills settled him down, and he too continued preparing for the competition.

These elite bodybuilders did whatever necessary so that when they walked onto the stage that evening at the Sydney Opera House, they would present the fantasy of physical perfection. As the contestants posed on the stage, Columbu sat in the front row among the thousands of excited spectators looking up at the final competition.

Columbu realized that the opera lighting on the left side of the stage was far better and that Arnold was standing on the right side. He shouted in German to Arnold to move to the other side of the stage. Perhaps the words were lost in the tumult of applause and screams, but more likely Arnold was not lis-

tening. "Arnold has a tendency, when you have a friend so long, so good best friends, that a lot of times, he doesn't pay attention to me," said Columbu. "I've seen that a million times with him, so I'm used to it. And he's not paying attention."

Columbu knew that Arnold had no right to move to another position. But Columbu bolted out of his seat, hurried backstage, grabbed a towel, and ran onstage. He came up behind Arnold, who was facing the audience, grabbed him by the shoulder, and said in a loud voice, "Here is the towel! You're sweating!" Then in German he whispered to his friend: "You cannot be there. You have to move to the area of number four and number five and number six. There's no light here. You understand.^" Arnold took the towel from Franco, wiped his neck, and then raised his friend's arm into the sky and shouted: "Mr. Olympia! Franco Columbu!"

Although Columbu had won the coveted title the year after Arnold retired, that was hardly a reason for him to be up there now. The Australian crowd cheered and applauded as if they were being given a special treat, seeing one of the other immortals of bodybuilding in person. As the applause died down, Columbu walked offstage with the towel in his hand. Arnold moved to the other side of the stage and pushed himself between two of his competitors.

This unprecedented interruption focused the audience even more on Arnold and visibly upset the other contestants, causing several of them to seem to shrink. Before they had gone onstage, they had engorged their muscles in order to display themselves to full advantage. But with all the distractions, some of them were no longer able to hold their pump. In the end, Mentzer came in an unthinkable fifth and Arnold won the title. It was the trickster Arnold who won, the trickster who had kept secret his intention to compete, and with Columbu's help had played another game. He won, but this time the cost he paid was exorbitant.

When the 1980 Mr. Olympia was announced, the great auditorium resonated not only with clapping but with boos as powerful and interminable as the applause Arnold had received in other victories. It was a measure of Arnold that he did not hear the derision or, if he heard, does not remember. "You know the applause was very clearly overwhelming for me," he said. "There were maybe some boos there, but I mean, I cannot even remember those as far as that goes." That was Arnold. At midnight in a bed of nettles, he could find a single rose.

The boos eventually died down that evening, but they did not die down within the bodybuilding community. Mentzer said that the event had been fixed, a libelous accusation if untrue, while judges such as Arnold's friend Albert Busek are adamant that the victory was fair. Although Butler does not

call the results rigged, he says that Arnold's status was such that "as long as he was in respectable shape he would win."

Like Sergio Oliva and Lou Ferrigno before him, the defeat was so devastating to Mentzer that it effectively ended his professional career. He continued to write and speak out about bodybuilding, but he was no longer heir to Arnold's throne, and he was increasingly disturbed and troubled.

Zane was so angry that he boycotted not only the next year's contest promoted by Arnold and Lorimer but another event that he had promised Arnold he would attend. For breaking that pledge, Arnold sued him. Eventually Arnold dropped the lawsuit and the two men made up over breakfast.

It still rankled Zane that Arnold had coaxed him into competing and lied to him about not competing himself. Zane told Arnold as much, but Arnold is not a man to say, "Fm sorry."

"If Jimmy Carter goes to Ronald Reagan and says to him, 'Reagan, this is how I plan to win the presidency,' and he tells him exactly how he's going to do it, Reagan would be a fool not to take advantage of that and use it to win," Arnold said. "Just like I did in the Olympia. Competition is not about friendship, it's about strategy."

PART THREE

The Star

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Arnold the Barbarian

During the many months of delay in production on Conan the Barbarian, MiHus sometimes drove over to Venice, where Arnold was studying swordplay techniques under a master. Arnold was learning to fight like a samurai, but that did not change the fact that Milius thought Arnold was "a terrible actor." When Arnold stopped his vigorous training long enough to ask the director what acting approach they would be using, Milius told him: "We're going to use the dog-training technique. We're going to do it again and again and again until it is yours, and then you can do it without thinking. It's the Pavlov technique. It's not a movie where there's a lot of dialogue. This movie is supposed to be more like a ballet, a very simple story of revenge and redemption."

Milius's sense of the dramatic neither began nor ended on the screen. He was so nonplussed by having a novice as the star of this $19 million picture that as costar to play Valeria, Queen of Thieves, he signed Sandahl Bergman, a dancer who had been featured in All That Jazz, Bob Fosse's musical about dancers. As Conan's sidekick Subotai, Milius hired Gerry Lopez, a surfing champion and friend, who had no acting experience at all. Bergman referred to the trio as "the three stooges: a bodybuilder, a dancer, and a surfer." Milius balanced this team of amateurs with two great contemporary actors: James Earl Jones, playing the evil Thulsa Doom, and Max von Sydow as King Osric.

When Arnold arrived in Spain around Thanksgiving in 1980 for filming that did not begin until early January, Maria was with him and they had a glorious few weeks, riding horses in the countryside. Arnold looked like the personification of the mythic hero. He had learned to wield a great sword and ride a bold horse, and he had inculcated much of the spiritual aura of Conan.

In Spain, Milius created a psychological and physical ambience in which the film and the world around it blended seamlessly into each other. The palaces, dungeons, and villages did not seem so much like temporary sets as a different universe. A group of eleven enormous Danes, who looked as if they had been left over from the Vikings, contributed significantly to the atmosphere. One of them, Sven-Ole Thorsen, had met Arnold when he had gone to Copenhagen to promote Pumping Iron. Sven was the king of bodybuilding in Denmark. At nearly six and a half feet tall and 330 pounds, he was not a king to be casually provoked. Arnold had a marvelous time in the Danish capital and returned several times, and Sven visited California.

On one of his trips to Los Angeles, Sven met Milius. The director took one look at him and hired him to play one of the villains, then asked him to invite his friends to play other evil characters and be stuntmen. Milius called them the "Great Danes" and said later that they acted like "naughty puppies." Everyone else called them "the animals," an appellation that they worked diligently to deserve.

At meals the cast sat together dressed in their costumes, as if at a banquet in an ancient mead hall. Milius told the cast and crew to throw away their eating utensils and rip their meat off the bones with their hands. "It should be very tribal," he said. "Whenever we're shooting at night, we must have a bonfire so that people can sit around and tell stories or eat, stick stuff in the bonfire." He told them, "If you want to fight, if you have an argument with somebody, make sure you fight in front of everyone so that we may enjoy the pleasure of mutual combat." He said that the women of Spain were worthy conquests for the cast and crew. They did not pillage the neighborhoods and rape the choicer specimens among the fifteen hundred extras as they would have if they had lived out the film literally, but they still played conquerors indulging themselves and moving on.

"When you're dressed like a barbarian and you're fourteen hours a day wearing a barbarian outfit, I'm sure some part of you becomes a little barbaric," Sven recalled fondly. "This movie was the most fun for Arnold, for John, for all of us. When you're a kid, this is what you imagine a barbarian would be like. The horses, the swords, the women. So, we felt we were kind of conquering Spain, because we had about seventeen locations all over the country. I actually got divorced based on that, because I was gone from home for six months."

The very first day of shooting set the tenor for the entire five months. Arnold was to be attacked by four wolves as he climbed up a rock wall. He was a moment late in finding his foothold on the Styrofoam rock, and the wolf-like dogs were released a moment too early. The dogs went overenthusi-

astically at the meat-scented cloth on Arnold's buttocks. Arnold fell down and suffered a large enough wound to require stitches.

"The wolf almost got my ass!" he exclaimed in amazement. That accident would ha\ e caused many directors to call in a stuntman for further dangerous shots rather than risk injuring the star of the film. The idea never occurred to Milius. The next day Arnold was out there being run down by tw^ent^^ horses. "I fall!" Arnold recalled. "But I get up again. You cannot imagine the joy of not feeling afraid. I don't care if Fm wounded physically. I am inspired by not being afraid of fearful things."

That was one of the essential philosophical lessons that Milius sought to impart in the film, and in Arnold he had found the perfect person to convey it. It did not matter that Arnold was not a real actor; he communicated that truth, because he felt it so deeply. Arnold had brought an entire gym with him, and he worked out before filming and sometimes afterward. He convinced one crew member, a hollow-chested cineast whose heaviest exercise w^as lifting film books, that he'd better get in shape. That was almost a command, and the young man obeyed, gaining almost twenty pounds by the time the film finished production.

Bergman was the only actress on the set regularly. "Sandahl, take off your shirt, show us your breasts," Arnold shouted. Bergman took it as just a raunchy joke and often threw herself in his lap, just one of the boys.

The cast and crew traveled from the cities to the mountains to the coast. There was snow and rain and cold and heat and bugs, and almost nobody complained. Milius seemed to be turning the film set into as close an approximation of a battlefield as he could devise. Bergman had her finger half cut off in a swordfighting scene, and her long wig caught on fire in another scene.

Arnold rolled down a mountainside and lay crumbled among the rocks. "Look. Real blood! I'm cut up," he exclaimed, more in surprise than apprehension. "Don't touch it," Milius said. "It looks great."

Looking down at his wounded star, Milius decided that more than bandages, Arnold needed the balm of his philosophy. "Pain is momentar\; film is eternal," Milius said. Arnold remembered Milius's pithy epigram, and for years repeated it whenever there was difficulty on a set.

When one actor said that he could not put up with the cold any longer, Arnold said nothing but retreated to his trailer. When the disgruntled actor passed by with Milius on their way to the set, Arnold was sitting outside the trailer. He was naked from the waist up, with windblown snow on his head, and was reading a magazine. "What are you doing.^" Milius asked. "I'm learn-

ing not to shiver," Arnold replied. The two men walked on, and the actor complained no more.

It was fun at the beginning, but as the months went by, tempers flared and there was an irritable sensibility on the set at times—all except for Arnold. "At the end he was in as good a mood as at the beginning," said Lopez.

"You know, I love making movies," Arnold told Thorsen at a time when other cast members were having their doubts. "It's like being in the military. They wake you up in the morning. They feed you. And all day long they tell you what to do. Then you go home, and you feel good, because you've worked hard and you can focus on yourself. I love that."

When Maria arrived for her long visits, everything changed. She was intimidating to some of the other cast members, this elegant, well-spoken woman who seemed uncomfortable with the often vulgar repartee of the movie set. "You can talk about opposites attract," recalled Bergman. "Like sort of a gym rat and sort of an aristocratic background. And at that point in time, he was totally physically obsessed and Maria wasn't at all. She was more zaftig."

Arnold enjoyed having Maria with him, but he was different when she was in Spain, more cautious in what he said, more reserved. He was one person on the movie set, one person with Sven and Franco and the rest of his gang, one person hanging out in Santa Monica, and somebody else around Maria.

That became one of the persistent themes of their life together. Maria had a foul enough mouth to merit membership in the Teamsters, and having grown up with four brothers, she was not easily shocked by male vulgarity. Yet many people were intimidated, almost frightened around her, and at times she became the convenient receptacle for complaints that rightfully should have been directed against him.

Maria happened to be in Spain the day Milius shot the love scene between Arnold and Bergman. One of the many reasons Conan the Barbarian is the archetypal Arnold film is that there is so little sex, and most of that is unpleasant. Early in the film the slave Conan is used as a stud, made to mate a comely maiden in front of an interested crowd. The atmosphere on the set was such that the largely naked woman was terrified, as if she felt she were about to be ravished in front of the entire crew. Later in the film Conan accepts the entreaties of a beautiful woman who in his embrace turns into a wolf witch. In another scene he turns down the blandishments of whores. There is also a scene in which a gay priest attempts to seduce him. He takes the man out in the desert, smites him with one blow, and steals his robe.

The scene with Bergman is different, as tender a love scene as Arnold would ever film. The five-foot, ten-inch-tall Bergman was the perfect physical match for Arnold. She was not only beautiful, statuesque, and athletic but still had something of the small-town Kansas girl in her. In Spain she had gotten involved with Terry Leonard, the second unit director/stunt coordinator. "I remember Arnold and I chatting about the scene," Bergman recalled. "It was so strange, because he and I were friendly, but the love scenes are so awkward when you don't have that emotionality about it. So I remember him saying, 'Isn't this weird that Maria's here visiting at this particular time.^ And your new guy now is the stunt coordinator, probably going to beat the living daylights out of me.'"

Arnold was not comfortable playing emotional scenes, and it was just as well that he had so little dialogue. He was playing a comic-book hero, and he recited part of the dialogue as if reading words on a balloon over his head. And yet the sheer physicality of the man was so extraordinary and the energy and enthusiasm he brought so enormous that he truly became Conan.

The Conan that Arnold helped create is a giant by all measures, not just his size and strength but his spirit and will. There had been other movies starring bodybuilders, but they had largely starred their bodies, showing them half draped, focusing on their muscles. In Conan the Barbarian, it is the story of Conan's journey that drives the movie.

There had rarely been a Hollywood film intended for a youthful audience with so much bloody mayhem as Conan the Barbarian. In that way, too, it is the archetypal Schwarzenegger film. Toward the end of the movie, Conan is crucified on a gnarled, barren tree that could have been painted by Goya. Conan has been nailed there for endless hours and is close to death. A vulture lands on his shoulder and starts to pick away at his wounds. Conan reaches out and bites the vulture, killing it. No matter how close to death, no matter how impossible the circumstance, Conan destroys those who seek to hurt him.

At the end of the film, having destroyed all his enemies except for the evil Thulsa Doom, Conan stands confronting his ultimate nemesis, ready to kill him. "I am the wellspring from which you flow," Thulsa Doom says. "What would you be without me.^" For Arnold as well as for Conan, it is the struggle that is the essence, for with victory comes emptiness. Conan thinks for a long moment and then with a single stroke of his great sword lops off Thulsa Doom's head, just as his enemy had decapitated his mother.

On the way back to the States, Arnold, Milius, and Lopez stopped in Maui for a few days. Milius and Lopez went up into the hills and shot a wild hog and brought it back to prepare a luau in Arnold's honor. Before the feast, they insisted that he go out beyond the breakwater to surf with them. Lopez was a

great surfer and Milius a good one, and they doubted that Arnold would even think of joining them. But he paddled out on a board. When they were far out at the beginning of the great waves, Arnold let his board go and said that he would bodysurf. And so he did, and when they reached the beach, the three friends had their great repast.

"Everyone in Hollywood is an assassin," said Rumar. "They don't want you to succeed for whatever reason. Working with Dino made Arnold legitimate. He beat the system, and everybody in Hollywood hates somebody who beats the system."

Arnold had enough confidence in how Conan the Barbarian would do that he decided to drop his agents and to move up to somebody more prestigious. It was not a particularly admirable part of the business of stardom, but what set Arnold apart was not that he did it but that he did it before most actors would have dared walk away from the agents who got them their first deal. "Our contract had come to an end, and he was pressured by his then attorney to make a move and he did," said Kubik. "There was no hard feeling."

Arnold invited his new agent, Lou Pitt of ICM, a Hollywood powerhouse, to his office to discuss his future. They did not discuss art or craft. They discussed business. Arnold led Pitt into the back room that looked like a full-fledged store full of mail-order Arnold merchandise, from T-shirts to pamphlets to books, piles of goods all neatly laid out. "I know how to merchandise, and I can merchandise myself," Arnold said. "I know how to do that. Give me the opportunity, and I'll do that." Pitt was a major agent with big clients, but he had never had anyone talk to him quite that way about his career.

"He's always been the master of his own destiny," said Pitt. "When he walks into a room, no matter what anybody wants to talk about or what anybody's agenda is, his thought process was, 'That may be your agenda, but it's not my agenda. So, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to share with you what I want to share with vou.'"

It was only right that Conan should narrate his own tale, but Arnold's accent bothered De Laurentiis so much that he insisted on someone else telling the story. "My father always disliked that film," said Raffaella De Laurentiis, one of the film's producers. "He never understood it. Never, never, never got it." Although Milius agreed to another narrator, he fought Dino De Laurentiis's

intention to dub the dialogue as best he could and got the producer to agree to wait until the first screening in Las Vegas to see how the audience reacted.

The studio had booked one of the three theaters in a multiplex in March 1982. By the time De Laurentiis, his daughter, and the studio brass arrived, the theater was full and there was a line around the block, and in the line were a gang of bikers, who did not like waiting in lines. They said that if there were not more screenings, they would tear up the theater, and by the way they looked, no one doubted them. So a second theater was added, and then a third, and the reels were carried back and forth. In every theater the reaction was the same. The audience cheered the first time they saw Arnold onscreen, pushing the wheel of pain, and from then on they loved the film. By the time the evening was over, even De Laurentiis realized that they had a hit on their hands and that Arnold was a star.

"I became swept up in this incredible machinery," Arnold said, machinery that he learned to ride and guide as have few others. He was just a fledgling star who should have been happy just to be along for the ride, but already he sought to sit behind the wheel and drive the machine precisely where he wanted it to go. He nagged the marketing people in a way that even his agent would not have done. "We should have gone to Cannes," he told them, though he had not an iota of experience in marketing a film. "We should go to the places where the press is from all over the world, and Cannes is the place. Why aren't they organizing anything.^ We should be way ahead of the game before we even come out with the movie and have the Conan cover on all the muscle magazines all over the world."

To those who did not want to hear his message, Arnold was a relentless pest. He pushed and he pushed and he pushed. At a time when many stars would not have thought of leaving the United States to promote a film, he insisted that he be sent to countries around the world. He headed out with enthusiasm, energy, and joy and he talked to anyone and everyone who would stop long enough to hear his tale of the making oi Conan the Barbarian.

"There's not one actor in the U.S. who is as good as Arnold in promoting a movie," reflected De Laurentiis. "That's true both because of his ability at promoting and his willingness to go out there. There's nobody like that who would go out internationally and really push the movie. He really knew how to sell the movie so people would really want to go out and see it."

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Paying the Price

In October 1983 Arnold was down in Samalayuca, Mexico, filming the sequel to Cotian the Barbarian. He was staying at the Plaza Juarez Hotel, hanging out at a table around the pool with members of the cast and crew on a Sunday evening. Arnold was glad to be doing another Conan film, though it did not seem right that Milius was not directing. He was busy with other projects, and Milius and De Laurentiis simply did not get along. So instead, the producer brought in Richard Fleischer, a director who could work, in many different styles and for many different masters.

The critics had thrown caldrons of abuse on Arnold's performance in Conan the Barbarian. Time noted "the flatness of Schwarzenegger's performance, the dullness of his odyssey." Newsweek called Arnold's Conan "a dull clod with a sharp sword, a human collage of pectorals and latissimi who's got less srv'le and wit than Lassie." That is only a small sampling of the savagery. The reviews would have devastated many actors, but to Arnold they did not merit even a shrug. He remained focused on his goal, which was to be the biggest star in the world, and Conan the Barbarian was a great start. It was one of the hits of the summer of 1982, displaced from its top spot only by E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, one of the biggest films of all time. Almost half of the $69 million the film took in came from outside the United States, evidence that Arnold was on his way to becoming a global star.

Arnold might not have cared about reviews, but he did care immensely about the image he projected to the world. He had learned much from Weider, and he put forth a precise image that he allowed nothing or no one to disturb.

As Arnold was sitting, having dinner with his associates, Alicia F"igueroa, a

society reporter from the Diario de Juarez, came up to the table and asked to take his picture. He wanted his image out there his way, and a photo of the group was decidedly not his way. He told the woman no pictures. She stepped back and took photos of the others at the table. Arnold did not say anything, but when one of the men took off his bathing suit to swim naked, Arnold told the reporter in what Figueroa called "a forceful voice" to give him her camera. He took the camera, pulled out the film, and returned it empty. The Juarez Press Association was so upset that it tried to have Arnold thrown out of the country, but nothing was done and the matter was largely forgotten.

In almost every respect, Arnold was finding the second Conan film a very different experience. De Laurentiis had been astounded that Conan the Barbarian was such a hit. The sequel took what seemed to be a shrewd tact, cutting down on the violence so Conan the Destroyer would receive a PG rating, purging the script of Milius's pretentious philosophical underpinnings, stripping Arnold down literally to his crowd-pleasing bare-chested, bodybuilder essence, and adding a touch of humor to the main character.

Conan's task is to lead Princess Jehnna (Olivia d'Abo), a movie virgin with deep cleavage exposing her budding breasts, to find the sacred Heart of Ahri-man, a gem with magical powers that looked like a gigantic phallus. He is helped by Bombaata (Wilt Chamberlain), who intends to betray him once the jewel is found. On the journey they meet Akiro (Mako) and Zula (Grace Jones). The other actors were congenial, but there was nothing of the camaraderie of Spain, or the sense of an epic adventure whose journey is almost as important as the final film.

Sven Thorsen had once again been hired to play one of the villains, but he was there largely because Arnold liked to have his friend around. Arnold slept little, no more than five hours a night plus two or three tiny power naps during the day that revitalized him. The naps were not fitful attempts at rest, but seemingly deep sleep. "He's gone," said Sven. "Like you cannot wake him up."

Arnold loved his life not simply abstractly or in the great moments, but in its details, and he was hungry for as much of it as he could have. At thirty-six, his hair was already turning gray. He was beginning to feel pain in his body at an earlier age than those who have not so dramatically challenged their bodies. "After years of pounding my knees and shoulders with heavy weights, I'm paying the price," Arnold said. "These days it hurts like hell to do a respectable squat or press behind the neck. Bench presses are murder!"

Arnold had daily intimations of his own mortality. By sleeping so little, he had essentially an extra day a week. "We were living in this big hacienda dur-

ing much of the filming," Sven said. "Our gym was put up in a church. There was only candleHght. So, four o'clock in the morning, we leave our fucking hacienda and hit our gym and work out with candlelight."

Maria decided to visit during shooting in the middle of the jungle. When Arnold drove to the airport to pick her up, Sven collected dozens of frogs and put them in Arnold's bathtub. A few hours later Sven heard Maria's scream through the walls as she entered a bedroom full of frogs.

"Sven, how could you do that.^" Arnold asked. He could do it because Arnold liked this boyish pranksters' world in which you never knew who would get you next. He was not so much mad as figuring out a way to get even.

When Arnold was still in Mexico on the set oiConan the Destroyer, he was already thinking about promoting the film. For two years he had been represented by the Hollywood public relations firm Rogers & Cowan, and he was not happy with the job that his publicist, Paul Bloch, was doing. Without any warning, Arnold received a phone call from someone else at the prestigious agency saying that she was representing the film. He blew up.

Arnold did not waste a moment on social niceties. "What's the matter with you people.''" he yelled at Charlotte Parker. The young woman was a relative newcomer at the firm, and she loved the kind of films Arnold was making. Most of the other account executives there liked to work with big-budget, classy films that might win Academy Awards, not sword-and-sorcers' knock-offs, and no one was interested in working on Arnold's film. That was the reason Parker was given Conan the Destroyer tl"^ her first film. She had called to talk about publicity.

"Hey, I'm new," Parker said. "Stop yelling at me. What do you want.'* Stop yelling so I can find out what you want."

"Don't you know anything.''" Arnold sputtered. "Can't you do anything.'*"

"Just tell me what you want," Parker implored.

"I want European covers."

"Fine, no problem."

There probably was not another star in Hollywood fuming and fretting because his face was not on the cover of European movie magazines. It was a mark of how aware Arnold was of his own marketing that he grasped the significance of something that other stars would have dismissed as irrelevant or unworthy of their time. Parker had helped create the international division of Rogers & Cowan, and she had her own special awareness of the world market.

In the next two decades, the foreign movie money would steadily increase, eventually overtaking the domestic box office. Few people in Hollywood grasped that trend earlier than Arnold. On most of his films, the international receipts far outpaced the American ticket sales. "Being from Austria, I knew

that America wasn't the world," said Arnold. "Coming from an athletic background where the world is your stage, I felt that ought to be with everything. I saw it in bodybuilding firsthand that the people's interest was the same all around the world. It was just a matter of publicizing and promoting it the right way. It was the same with any product."

Arnold worked these markets assiduously before most stars were willing to have their passports stamped. The result was that as big an American star as he became, he was in some ways bigger outside the country, becoming a world cultural figure of the same type though not quite the magnitude of Muhammad Ali.

Arnold and Parker did not meet until the first screening of the film in Los Angeles. Afterward, Arnold announced in his abrupt way that he wanted to have dinner with his publicist. Parker made a U-turn on Santa Monica Boulevard and followed him to the Palm, where they spent the evening discussing Arnold's future.

Arnold was at a point in his career where people were still comfortable telling him the truth. He was not the intimidating public persona that he would soon become; equally important, in those years Arnold signaled to those around him that he wanted to be spoken to frankly. And he heard the truth even if it was lightly sweetened to his taste. Parker had not liked the film at all, so when Arnold asked her what she thought, she praised his performance as well as those of Chamberlain and Jones. Arnold surely understood that what was not said was as important as what was said.

Parker was young, impressionable, ambitious, and focused, and she had found in Arnold's career the perfect vehicle for her aspirations. She had wanted to be a poet or a short-story writer and had almost gone to the well-regarded writers program at the University of Iowa. She decided against it and poured all her creativity and energy into Arnold's career. She had not fallen in love with Arnold, but with the idea of Arnold, with the immense iconic image of him. Serendipitously for Parker, Arnold was equally in love with that image.

Parker had seen what was within Arnold, and she grasped not only what Arnold was but what he could be. It was something not even the film critic Gary Arnold or the filmmakers Butler and Gaines had perceived. That was the Arnold she began talking about to reporters.

"I sat, and I had dinner with the reporters and I told them the story of Arnold and enrolled them in my Arnold point of view," Parker said. "And by the time they got to Arnold, they already loved him!"

Parker also talked with the tabloids, aware how much, in the increasingly celebrity-led world of media, they could help create the image she wanted for Arnold. "I think I was in the forefront of trying to deal with them," Parker reflected. "You know, if they had something, I would try to explain to them that it wasn't right or whatever." She did not just put them right, though, she rewarded them. As she added, smiling: "And then later, we'd give them a nice story."

When Conan the Destroyer ^2.'?, first in theaters in June 1984, it was next to impossible to avoid seeing Arnold out there somewhere promoting his film. Parker worked with feverish diligence, getting Arnold so much publicity that the loose-leaf media notebook was as thick as a Tom Wolfe novel. Within the agency, it became a model of how a publicity campaign should be run. Arnold was ubiquitous, giving interviews not only to major media—AP, UPI, David Letterman, and The Tonight Show —but to small outlets such as SoHo Arts Weekly, Waikiki Beach Press, Woman's Own magazine, and Starfix magazine that most stars considered beneath them. He did the same in the international market, traveling wherever the film was opening, promoting from morning till the last evening interview.

When the extensive tour was over, Arnold asked Parker, who had been responsible for setting up the media, to become his personal publicist. The two of them began what became one of the crucial professional relationships of Arnold's life. He has transcended reviews, personal attacks, even the success and failure of individual films, and it was Arnold and Parker together who made it happen.

Conan the Destroyer d\di far less business in the United States than the original, but about as well overseas, and much of the film's success had to do with Arnold's relentless promotion. Although some of the critics were kind to him, others were no happier with this version than the first one. If bad reviews stung like scorpions, Arnold would have been in constant pain. "It's neither a man nor a bird, but it could be a moose wearing a sweatband," wrote Vincent Canby in The New York Times. "Actually, it's large-jawed, Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger."

Arnold said that he was not angry at such reviews but enjoyed them "if they are witty." That was not only shrewdly disarming but deeply insightful of the positive impact that even negative reviews could have on his career. It was not simply that Arnold was review-proof but that even the ugliest of

these attacks advanced him as a gigantic icon. He was becoming a metaphor and an organic part of American popular culture. "The U.S. dollar is the Arnold Schwarzenegger of major world currencies right now," wrote Industry Week in September 1984, and the readers of that trade publication did not have to be told that that meant the dollar was extremely strong.

Arnold had a full career as an action-movie hero, but that was only part of his life. He continued to manage a series of books that others wrote in his name, and developed workout videos and other products that he could sell with his name on them. He turned down many opportunities to endorse products, though when he became a top star he pitched a select group of products on Japanese television.

Most of Arnold's business interests were in a wide range of increasingly sophisticated real estate investments. "Schwarzenegger has acquired a reputation in the last two decades as a razor-sharp entrepreneur and as one of the most prosperous real estate developers in Southern California," wrote California Business in 1986. As with everything else in his life, business began and ended with people. In his Santa Monica deals, he partnered with a major real estate developer, Al Ehringer, who may have been drawn to Arnold by his celebrity and capital but soon learned that his cohort was a shrewd, detail-oriented businessman. The two men developed a 39,000-square-foot complex on the then-marginal end of Santa Monica's Main Street, just where it becomes the beginning of the more downscale Venice. The high-tech industrial look was perfectly fitted for the area, anchoring an enlarged and vital area of stores, restaurants, and offices. Arnold set up his own offices in the old gas company building across the street.

The Santa Monica project was enormously profitable, but only part of his real estate holdings in the small seaside town. When he bragged that "90 percent of my investments have been very, very profitable," he was speaking of startling yields. Even when something did not work out that well, like a condominium conversion in San Francisco, he was generally able to get out with a profit that would have pleased many investors.

The Conan films established Arnold as a leading adventure hero. He was in his mid-thirties and had what by any measure was a good life. It was a doubly good life because he knew it and appreciated it every day. As much as he enjoyed the endless perks of newfound wealth and stardom, things did not define him.

Arnold enjoyed his many good times with Maria, but he was not consumed by her. He had his friends, his work, and his bodybuilding, each a crucial part

of his life as his long-term, faraway girlfriend. After helping out on her uncle Ted's failed campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980, Maria decided that she wanted to be an on-air correspondent. She had as many obstacles to a career on television as Arnold had to Hollywood stardom. She went to one of the top agents in the business and was told that if he was going to represent her, she would have to lose twenty-five pounds and do something about her nasal voice.

After she got through crying and calling her parents, who condemned the agent for his merciless untruths, she set out to do precisely what he suggested. She lost the weight and more, and she added to her other anxieties a deepened obsession with weight. Most others saw only her svelte form, so perfect for the body-hugging styles of the time, or admired her looks on television, where the camera added five pounds to her overly thin form, but her friends knew the psychological cost of maintaining that image.

A voice coach worked with her, but the problem was not so much her voice as the fact that she did not have the chipper, ingratiating personality that appealed to television audiences. There was often an unrelieved harshness about her on camera as she stuck the microphone in someone's face. She developed into a stunning public speaker and was more the natural politician than any of her brothers. Yet for reasons more psychological than political, she did not consider doing what she would have done best.

Maria was able to latch onto a position as a Los Angeles correspondent for PM Magazine, a chatty, lightweight show produced by W'estinghouse. "When Maria was in New York, Arnold would play around so much that she knew she had to be there in Los Angeles," said one close friend. In deference to the Shrivers' moral sensitivities, Maria supposedly was living with her brother Bobby—but if you called her number, it rang at both homes.

Arnold immensely enjoyed his time with Maria, but he did not back off from friendships unusual in number and intensity for a celebrity. There were Franco and Sven and the guys down at World Gym, and he was unusual, too, in the way he picked up friends along the route of his life and did not drop them. Milius was in that group, along with several others.

While Conan the Barbarian was still in the theaters, Milius invited Arnold to go down to Edwards Air Force Base, south of Los Angeles. It would not sell that many tickets, but Arnold was ready to do it as long as the air force let him fly in one of its jets. Even when that did not work out, he still agreed to go, bringing Columbu with him.

Arnold gave a speech and then attended the high-school senior prom in the evening, dancing with about twenty-five delighted teenagers. "Of course, he's having a great time, because they're good-looking, and he's flirting with

them and joking and he takes one and dances with her and passes her on and dances with the next one," Mihus recalled with Falstaffian relish. "And he comes back and he says, 'I thought I was going to get to fly on a jet. Instead, I have to go to the senior prom.' We were staying in special officers quarters, and he and Franco short-sheeted my bed. He had to remind me that he thought we were going to get the jet ride. Now, you know, it was great, and those people never forgot that. And he had a really good time. Somebody else might have sat there and said, 'I don't want to do this.' Whatever it was, he was going to do it and do it well."

When Arnold was sworn in with several hundred others as a new citizen on September 16, 1983, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, it was a perfect American mesh of patriotism and self-promotion. He arrived wearing a red tie, white shirt, and blue suit. Duly notified by Rogers & Cowan, the media were out in full force to chronicle Arnold's taking the oath while Maria looked on. "Now I want to embody the whole American ideal," he announced, "have the privilege of calling myself an American and travel the world as an American."

As much as Arnold loved America, he loved his homeland, too, and was still an Austrian. His closest friends in America were mainly Europeans. He went back to Austria often, and he invited his mother to Los Angeles for a lengthy visit everv' year. He still called his old comrades back in Graz and Thai. He went to his dear friend and mentor Alfred GerstI, who had become an important Austrian politician. GerstI arranged it so that Arnold could keep his Austrian citizenship. He would be an American but he would remain European, too, both legally and emotionally.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Terminator

Arnold's proximity to Maria did not change his poHtics one iota. He was not a Kennedy clone, something he made clear in 1984 when he attended the Republican National Convention. The week was not only a celebration of President Ronald Reagan but a paean of patriotism, a flag-waving, boot-stomping celebration. The campaign film shown to the delegates was no tedious recitation of administration accomplishments but rather an irresistible celebration of a largely lost America: small towns, bright white faces, picket fences, church spires. The Republicans had picked up what in the post-Vietnam era had become the underused symbols of patriotism and nationalism and turned them into party possessions. Arnold was there to watch them do it. He had his own secret political ambitions, and those days were a brilliant primer on how to motivate people emotionally.

Reagan had given his own deeply moving speech to close the convention. It was well after midnight when Arnold finally got his chance to meet the seventy-three-year-old President. "I was already tired and I'm thirty-seven," Arnold said. "But he was right there, fast, quick with his answers—full of energy. He appears fifteen years younger than he is. God, when I'm his age, I hope I'm still alive. He's remarkable."

There was no figure in public life whom Arnold admired as much as Reagan. It was not just the President's politics, though Arnold stood fully square with him there, but also his style and charisma. As Arnold saw it, the President was the model not only of how it could be done but of how it should be done. The two men had something else in common. Reagan had a deeply troubled, drunken father who had shamed him and his family, and the President's buoyant optimism was in part his thrusting upward out of darkness.

Just like Reagan during most of his long film career, Arnold was far down on the list of actors considered suitable to star in a good movie. In fact, he was not even on the list at all. The young director James Cameron had already found someone to play the villain in his new science-fiction project, TAe Terminator, and now he needed a hero.

Cameron's script begins in Los Angeles in 2029. Nuclear war has leveled the city, and in the rubble the remnants of humanity are fighting a desperate guerrilla war against the intelligent machines of Cyberdyne Systems. In this world it is possible to go back in time, and Cyberdyne Systems sends back Cyberdyne Systems Model 101, "the Terminator," to 1984 to kill a woman, Sarah Connor, before she gives birth to the son who will grow up to lead humanity in its war against the machines. The humans send back one of their kind, Kyle Reese, to find the Terminator and try to destroy him before he kills the woman who unknowingly holds the future of the human race in her womb.

Cameron did not require a Shakespearean thespian to play the hero Kyle Reese, but the director wanted at least what he considered an actor, and he definitely did not want Arnold. Cameron's problem was that thanks to the success of Conan, Arnold was considered bankable and Orion Pictures had sent Arnold the script. If he signed on for the film, the studio would probably make it a go, but even so, Cameron did not want him.

Cameron understood the prickly egos of actors. All it would take would be a few subtle digs, and he would irritate Arnold enough that he would walk away from the project without anyone knowing Cameron had sabotaged Arnold's involvement. "Looks like I gotta go pick a fight with Conan," Cameron said to his roommate as he headed off for lunch with Arnold.

As the two men sat together, Arnold articulated in great detail his conception of the film. "Mike Medavoy, the studio head, told me that O.J. Simpson had been hired to play the Terminator and I should play Reese, the hero," Arnold recalled. "When I first met with Cameron, for half an hour I told him how the Terminator should act."

Despite his ambitions, Cameron was just another wannabe living in a modest apartment in Sacramento Valley. He could hardly believe that Arnold had actually read his script and was commenting intelligently on the intricacies of the screenplay. Cameron thought, "Well, there goes this 'Blow This Up Over Creative Differences' scenario." Cameron envisioned Reese as a lean, highly verbal character, and sitting there across from Arnold, he just couldn't see him playing the part. He couldn't see him playing the Terminator, either, whom Cameron had written almost as a cipher, an anonymous character who could flow out of the crowd for his moment of mayhem, and then flow back again, lost until his next savage act.

As engrossed as he was he was with Arnold's explication of the character, Cameron found himself inexplicably drawn to the idea of Arnold playing the dark title character. Cameron almost stopped listening to Arnold and sat there staring at the iconic reality of Arnold, the incredible bone structure, the powerful features, the whole demeanor. It was like a curtain opening and there stood the man on the screen. In an instant, the whole concept of the movie radically changed. Arnold was an irresistible force, a relentless pile driver. "You have to be the Terminator, with your voice and body, that's for you," Cameron said with intense conviction.

Arnold was irresistibly drawn to Cyberdyne Systems Model 101, the Terminator. Arnold was not a character actor. He was a star whose own persona was his only capital. Why play a villain and risk tainting yourself with such negativity that the audience might no longer believe in you as an action hero.^ Yet Arnold was, once again, one step ahead of the conventional thinking in the film industrs^ Arnold had a game plan, and playing Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 fit it perfectly. "I chose to play the villain both as a personal move and as a career move," Arnold explained his strange yet intriguing decision. "I figured it would be a good career move after establishing that my fans like to see me in heroic terms. On a personal level, I felt it would be a challenge."

After the lunch, Arnold called Lou Pitt, his new agent. Pitt made a point of counting the number of words of dialogue for Arnold in scripts offered to his client. This did not require higher math, but the Terminator script was an extreme—only seventy-four words. Pitt pointed that out to Arnold, but he was adamant about wanting the part.

Arnold was not an actor as much as he was a performer who played various versions of his idealized self on-screen. His largest limitation was his inability to express painful emotions. Instead of trsing to make a living as an emotionally cramped-up, self-contained actor, he had forged himself into a suprahu-man character who appeared beyond emotion. He joked that his only love scenes were with guns, but surely it was a kind of artistic impotence that his characters are incapable of making love. Love scenes were shot in several of his films but generally not used. They just did not work with Arnold.

Arnold was comfortable as a character without feelings. The Terminator was supposed to be the most anonymous of characters, a cipher appearing in and out of the shadows. Arnold could not possibly play the character that way. Since Arnold's aura was as large as his physical size, he had to create a totally different character. "The thing that I learned from my acting teacher, Eric Morris, was not to act, but to be," said Arnold. "So, I had to work hard over a period of months, learning to to be a machine. In reading the script

I:

over and over, I envisioned the character and what his moves will be. For instance, it was important when the Terminator reloaded his gun that he never looked down. There are certain gestures where you can sell the idea that you're different."

Just as in the first Conan film, Arnold spent much time thinking about and developing the physical presence of the character. Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 is a robot. Instead of affecting a kind of mechanical abruptness, Arnold played the Terminator with smooth efficiency. He never squanders any movement and always moves directly toward his goal by the shortest route, leaving mayhem and gore in his wake. In one scene, the Terminator's eyes move toward their prey like the turret on a tank, the head then follows.

The Terminator does not run. That was one of Arnold's essential insights into projecting a strong image. He almost never runs or hurries on-screen in this or any other film. He applied this principle to his image off-screen as well, always striding purposefully onward, but never rushing, never scurrying in or out of an event.

Making a film means living a compressed life, and the key for Arnold was living it with a director he completely trusts. Arnold thrives on difficulty, and in the months of shooting The Terminator^ his plate was full. It was a demanding physical feat of filmmaking. Through it all, Arnold was ready to lance tension on the set with wry asides.

The film was shot on location in Los Angeles, but the emotional reality was as if they were off in a remote country. Most of The Termifiatorwa.'s, shot at night in the grittier precincts of Los Angeles. Cameron directed the film on the limited budget of $6.5 million, which necessarily tempered his perfectionism. The film was nothing but one relentless action shot after action shot, one difficult physical moment after another.

Arnold, like most of his peers in the action-hero business, suggested that he did many or even most of his own stunts. A studio would never risk a multimillion-dollar production when there were trained stuntmen ready to do the dangerous scenes. Arnold was proud that on The Terminator, he did one major stunt. "I was lying on the hood of this car and they lit me on fire," he recalled. "The car took off backwards and I was supposed to be punching my fist through the windshield. Luckily, they had everv'thing timed and situated just right, and they jumped on me and put the flames out as soon as each shot was over. A hydraulic arm was used for the close-up of the fist breaking through the glass."

Arnold had no sympathy for actors who complained, and he dismissed them with what he considered his crudest epithet—accusing them of being sissies. "I have to just smile at those other girly-men that are around who do

the whimpering and the suffering and the complaining because they have to shoot at night and woric sixteen hours," he said. "They come in and say, 'I cannot take it anymore, I have to call my agent: I've had it!' I say, 'You morons/ What did you Aave? What about being in the war somewhere or being in the SEALs and going through that kind of training with no food or anything?'"

When Arnold attended one of the first prescreenings, he was startled to hear the audience cheering the Terminator. He had not tried to make the character sympathetic. If anything, he had done just the opposite, playing the role without even a suspicion of human feelings or motivation. In a strange way, the denatured violence of his character was almost refreshing, and the audience took pleasure in the havoc. Early on in the film the Terminator walks into a police station and utters what has become one of the most famous lines in cinema history: "I'll be back." The line captured the nightmarish quality of a villain who cannot be killed, but it also resonated with Arnold's own personal characteristics, his relentless, unyielding pursuit of whatever he wanted.

The film is full of outstanding performances, including Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor and Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese, but it is Arnold's movie. In this low-budget, supposedly B movie, he creates a new kind of villain. Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd had written a strong script, and Cameron directed the film with aplomb, but it is Arnold's stunning performance that turns T/ie Terminator into a memorable film.

When Charlotte Parker saw TAe Terminator for the first time, she bolted out of her seat and called Time and told them that she had just seen a classic of the genre that far transcended its B-movie origins. It was, but the film might well have come and gone, remembered largely by science-fiction buffs, had it not been for the determined efforts of Parker. Orion Pictures focused its attention on Amadeus, a big-budget, serious film that looked certain to win several Academy Awards. The studio was so indifferent about The Terminator that it intended to run only a half-page ad in the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times. Ads are placed not only to fill theaters but to impress the industry, and a half-page ad said that Orion didn't think much of the film's prospects.

Parker was so upset that she convinced Arnold that they should go to see Orion cofounder Mike Medavoy. Stars and publicists did not march into a studio to discuss the minutia of publicity with the top executive. Arnold was impressed and amused by Parker's concern, and mostly sat there and watched the publicist overwhelm the powerful executive with her arguments. Arnold did not talk as much as Parker, but his was the voice of authority. He was not

somebody you wanted to see if he wanted something from you and you planned to turn him down. Orion ended up running full-page ads for two weeks straight and supporting the film in a much stronger manner.

When the film came out in the fall of 1984, Arnold received the best reviews of his career, and Time magazine named T/ie Terminator one of the ten best films of the year. It was an influential film affecting a whole generation of darkly hued science fiction, and it was one of Arnold's best performances.

The Terminator d\d decently at the box office, grossing $30 million domestically, but if Arnold was to use the film as the springboard to bigger movies— and bigger-budget sequels—it was imperative that it be seen in Hollywood as a far bigger, more successful film than it was commercially. This was Parker's contribution to the perception of the film in the City of Dreams. "I talked about how big the box office was," Parker recalled, "how Arnold was a big international star. When I got through with it, you thought it was a huge hit."

Not the reality but the public perception of reality had become the higher truth. Hollywood is not only a creator of myth but a consumer of it. Parker had helped give Arnold the opportunity to fashion his own mystique on an even higher plane. From now on, he would be the producer, director, and screenwriter of his own career.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Chasing Sly

In 1984 Arnold attended a fund-raising dinner for the Wiesentha! Center in Los Angeles. Within a few years it would become de rigueur for a star to be identified with a charity, but in the mid-eighties only a few performers were so involved. It was his publicist Parker's idea that Arnold attend the event to raise money for a Museum of Tolerance—and Arnold took up the cause with alacrity.

Part of the attraction was the personality of the director and fund-raiser, Rabbi Marvin Hier. Los Angeles is a city of entrepreneurs, in religion as in everything else, and Hier was an ambitious man. After arriving from Vancouver, British Columbia, where he headed a conservative synagogue, he had begun aggressively turning the Wiesenthal Center into an important, much-publicized institution.

The Hollywood figures who contributed heavily were mainly Jewish studio executives. Although there were few Christians involved, Parker—who knew Rabbi Hier personally—thought it would be valuable for Arnold to join the group. She knew nothing of the comments Arnold had made about Hitler's abilities as a speaker or his penchant for playing Nazi marches. "I would have walked away from Arnold if I thought he was in any way anti-Semitic," she said, and there is no reason to doubt her, especially since she was born in Austria to parents who were Holocaust survivors.

Almost no one in America knew that Arnold's father had been a Nazi, but simply the fact of Arnold's Austrian birth and his Catholic faith were enough to make his presence at the event unusual. It was even more singular that Arnold did not limit his involvement to an occasional charity event. He became friendly with Hier, who was appreciative and astounded when Arnold started

giving fifty thousand dollars every time he starred in a film, making him the single largest Hollywood contributor other than the top studio executives.

Arnold attended many fund-raising dinners. The emotional high point of the events was always survivors coming foru^ard to tell their stories. It would be a wrenching experience for anyone; for Arnold, who could not stand to look at the pain of his past, it was unique—this son of Austria hearing in appalling detail what his countrymen had perpetrated.

Hier was by necessity an astute judge of humans and their venalities, and he sensed that there was some other purpose behind the donations. For the first five years Arnold gave his gifts without requesting to be acknowledged publicly. That was unusual for him, as it would be for most philanthropists. His gesture suggests either a selfless generosity or some other, hidden motive. "How many Austrians do we have that are interested in wanting to come forward.''" asked Hier "So, I knew that there was something that was driving him to be involved with this, but for a number of years I didn't know what it was."

In 1989 Arnold made his involvement public when he took a seat on the dais for a fund-raising dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel in which Yitzhak Shamir, prime minister of Israel, gave the keynote speech. Whatever motivated Arnold, it was unlikely that he was anticipating one day being accused of pro-Nazi views or feared that his antics filming Pumping Iron might come to light. As he viewed matters, it was inconceivable that he could be accused of anti-Semitism. Yes, he had been insensitive, gross, and mindlessly vulgar at times, but the two greatest mentors in his young life had been Jewish—Gerstl and Weider—and his third mentor, Reg Park, had a Jewish wife. His agent was Jewish. His publicist was Jewish. Most of the people he worked with on films were Jewish. If he was anti-Semitic, then he was a pathetic ingrate denying his own life.

The truth was much more personal. Each survivor's story was a reminder of what had not been addressed in his childhood, either in his community or within his own family. Arnold could not deal with the emotions he felt over his father, and if his contributions were in part guilt or penance, they were also markers of a search for greater understanding and knowledge. "He understood very much what the Holocaust was, and he was ashamed that Austrians did not want to confront it in reality," said Hier. "It was never spoken about in Austrian homes; he was very negative about his Austrian educational experience."

Meanwhile, Parker was constantly trying to position Arnold by placing him every way she could alongside the greatest stars and figures in Hollywood.

He was naturally linked with a series of action heroes, including Sylvester Stallone, Clint Eastwood, Chuck Norris, and Charles Bronson. Whenever she sent out press releases, pitched him to television programs, or briefed journalists before their interviews, she mentioned him in the company of the biggest names, usually Stallone and Eastwood. When Arnold went to a premiere or a big Hollywood party, she asked him to stand only with stars more famous than he was and not allow himself to be photographed with a minor star or starlet. One person she advised avoiding was the forthrightly conservative Charlton Heston, who since The Ten Commandments had brought Moseslike authority to his political convictions. While Arnold's political ideas weren't that different from Heston's, and it would have seemed natural for the two conservative stars to stand arm in arm, Parker's protective instinct was to keep Arnold away from the National Rifle Association's (NRA's) Hollywood poster child. If Heston appeared at the same event, Parker insisted, Arnold must never allow himself to be photographed with Heston, or, she warned, he would become marked as a right-wing ideologue.

Parker's protective caution was found at every level. She interviewed every journalist before he or she talked to Arnold. At premieres, she showed up early and walked the rope line, talking to reporters, selecting the ones Arnold would just happen to stop and talk to as he walked into the theater— the actor and his publicist in perfect harmony. "It was all so effortless. I would give him the reporter's first name, and he would look at me, knowing that I would guide him. It was an unspoken thing," Parker recalled, marveling at the way Arnold would pick up his cue and apply his charismatic charm.

As Arnold was relentlessly promoted by Parker and giving his all to each movie, his legendary luck held true. Just as he had ridden the crest of bodybuilding to what would be seen as its golden days, his movie career now coincided with the golden days of the fantasy action films—the very genre that was his forte. In another era, he might not have become a superstar, but the Reagan years seemed tailor-made for his brand of superhero. No longer a time for self-doubting, introspective protagonists, the new epoch called for savage heroes operating outside the pristine parameters of law and civilization. It was a time when black was black and white was white and gray was a coward's color. Against the background of Reagan's battle between America and the Evil Empire of communism, audiences throughout the world flocked to watch mighty heroes slay their enemies by the score, walking through flame and flood, eternally invincible.

Arnold was not alone, of course, in rising to the cinematic challenge of his age. Sylvester Stallone had imprinted his image on a generation of Americans in his Rocky sagas. Stallone was bound to be Arnold's major competitor. In his

way, Stallone had as compelling and inspiring a life story as Arnold. A facial nerve was severed at birth, affecting the left side of his face. He had been kicked out of school after school for his disruptive behavior.

The stars, however, were such different types that they would not have gotten along no matter where they encountered each other—on the school playground, the athletic field, the corporate world, or Hollywood. Stallone was at his best playing the archetypal little guy who overcomes adversity, a role Arnold could not even think of playing. Stallone had the face of a palooka, but he was viewed as a Hollywood Renaissance man who could not only act but write scripts and direct.

"I said to myself, 'Hey, this is the guy that I have to pass if I want to be the top-paying action star,'" Arnold remembered his feeling being at the time. "And so for me, that was the motivation. Because he was the action guy when I came onto the scene, I always had Sly in front of me. I was chasing him. If he is not around, and if I wouldn't have felt about him the way I did, then I would not have been as motivated."

His competitive adrenaline rising, Arnold played the same sort of games on Stallone that he had played on Sergio Oliva and Lou Ferrigno. He understood the emotional vulnerabilities of the man. Nothing was worse for Stallone than to be called cowardly or unmanly. In statements he made publicly, Arnold suggested that he was bolder, more daring in his career choices than Stallone was. After all, Arnold had played the villain in The Terminator, while Stallone could not move beyond his role as Rocky Balboa, constantly wrapping himself in the red, white, and blue. "All that flag waving is a lot of bull—we're all in the entertainment business," Arnold said in a 1985 interview. Stallone was trying to move beyond his Rocky image, and Arnold came close to suggesting that Stallone was copying him. "I see him working out in the gym all the time lately—working out very seriously, because he wants to be in shape for this Inew] picture," he told GQ in 1986.

Arnold's complacency was rudely shattered when one of the films he was sniffing at became Rambo: First Blood Part II, the 1985 epic of a rampaging folk hero whose triumph was matched that same year by Rocky IV. "Stallone's ingenious comic-strip artistrv' has zapped them all," wrote Newsweek, pointedly including Arnold among those who had been zapped. Stallone's "success with two series at once, and with two grunt heroes, is unprecedented in the industry."

Arnold was less than happy about the achievement. He had a predator's proprietary sense of his own turf, and Stallone was stepping into what Arnold considered his territory. Stallone's Rambo was a larger-than-life superhero, a modern-day Conan who returns to Vietnam to wreak his revenge.

What made things worse for Arnold was that he had signed what once had looked like a wonderful deal for a series of Conan films. That now felt like bondage. Arnold had all kinds of exciting projects being offered to him that might have helped him overtake Stallone in the popular mind, but he had obligations to De Laurentiis. He therefore agreed to do a cameo in RedSonja, a film based on a Howard character who was a female Conan. De Laurentiis saw it as a way to create a second lucrative Conan franchise. He brought back not only Arnold but Sandhal Bergman, who played the evil Queen Gedren. And then, as Sonja herself, a magnificent physical specimen with a body that in its sensuous, voluptuous way was the female counterpart of Arnold's: Brigitte Nielsen.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Red Sonja

Almost from the day Arnold arrived on the set oi Red Sonja in Italy, there were persistent rumors that he was having an affair with costar Brigitte Nielsen. Six-foot, one-inch-tall Nielsen was a Danish model, performing in her first film. Twenrs-one years old. she was already a divorcee with a baby at home. Some of those who knew Arnold assumed that it would be extraordi-nar\' if he were not having an affair with her. Even Maria had heard the rumors and tried to learn if they were true.

If Maria could have known more about her boyfriend's travels, she would have been even more worried. Arnold and Nielsen were spotted traveling together from Rome to X'ienna, where they stayed at the Hilton Menna. They went to a part>- together, where they were photographed, and they were seen together on their way to Munich, and from there to a ski resort in Austria.

Arnold reflected later that Nielsen had cast him as her next husband. "She said, 'I want to move to America and be your wife or woman,'" Arnold recalled. "I said, 'I have a girlfriend that Tm very- serious about. I am committed to Maria.' She said, 'I am unbeatable.' I said to her, 'I can guarantee you that I will not change my mind. But there are a lot of guys over there in America.'"

Nielsen was almost an irresistible force, so once he returned to the United States, Arnold sought to deflect her attentions elsewhere. "Here, go to Warren Beatt\; Stallone, or Jack Nicholson, there are many of those guys out there if you want to marry a star," he told her. "You've met my lawyer, Jake Bloom, when he came to visit in Rome and we did the movie. So, he's the guy; he's your contact."

Arnold said that Bloom invited Stallone and Nielsen to dinner and "he was immediately smitten crazy about her." As with most Holh-wood romances,

the story would be told in different ways. Both Stallone and Nielsen tell how she first met Stallone by sending him a nude photo, but even if that story is to be believed, Arnold bequeathed Nielsen to Stallone in the aftermath oi Red Sonja. It proved to be an unfortunate gift. The actor married Nielsen, but they had barely returned from their honeymoon before the tabloids starting writing about Nielsen's alleged lesbian affair with her assistant, and Nielsen denied that, charging that it was her husband, Stallone, who was cheating.

The marriage lasted less than two years. Stallone was a far more emotional person than Arnold. Though it is impossible to gauge the price he paid for his time with Nielsen, it was enormous. Stallone drew on his emotions and his instincts for almost all his creativity. He had written Rocky in three feverish days. No move script emerged from the nightmare with Nielsen. Arnold was not responsible for the failure of Stallone's marriage, but it was a stark lesson in what might have happened had he allowed himself to fall in love with Nielsen.

To Arnold, Nielsen brought bad luck, and bad karma. When Arnold saw the ads for Red Sonja, he believed that De Laurentiis had tricked him. He was portrayed as the primary star. "I felt I should do a favor to Dino De Laurentiis," Arnold said, "to participate and do a cameo, and he ended up using every foot of film that I did."

Arnold had the kind of optimism that could turn a can of Spam into Spanish ham, but even he was confounded with this dreadful film. "We were at a screening, and I was with my agent," recalled Sandahl Bergman. "And after the movie, Maria and I turned to each other and went 'Oh, this is just terrible.' And he was very disappointed because The Terminator\\2,^ come out and sort of really jumped him over the top." The film disappeared into the cavernous earth, taking Nielsen's career with it. For Arnold there was nothing to do but laugh at life's vagaries. He salvaged the matter by turning Red Sonja into a running joke, a film so awful that it became a badge of honor that he had survived it and gone on.

There were lessons to be learned here, too. For Arnold, making a film was all about choosing—the right script, the right producer, the right director, and the right deal. Red Sonja reinforced his determination never to accept an offer, a commission, a project, or an appearance without embracing it 100 percent. He could be impossible when he was in the midst of this process, second-guessing himself and everyone around him. His agent Pitt was in the center of all of this decision making. Arnold had a way of emotionally entwining those who worked for him. Lou was a friend Arnold could call in the middle of the night or ask for advice on matters that had nothing to do with the movies. On matters such as choosing Arnold's next project, they went back

and forth, often with Maria as a third participant, working through each step, until he was sure.

They certainly did not sit around discussing the scripts on Arnold's desk, searching for the one that might win him an Academy Award as Best Actor, or at least give him wider respect as a thespian. Rather, they tried to figure out which movie would have the biggest audience, and how they could tinker with the script so that ever more people would walk into the theater. It was not unlike a populist politician looking at the polls and figuring just what position he could take to achieve the highest popularity.

"We talked about how you expand a career," Pitt said. The answer lay in the market for Arnold's films. "We talked about expanding it by ten percent. He was very clever, and it was very systematic. I remember us talking about this a lot, actually. We've got young males, let's make sure we don't lose the young males. How do we get the young girls.^ How do we get the older females.'' How do we get the older males, you know.'"'

And once Arnold had signed on, all doubt was forgotten, and he was there completely. Arnold always had several projects in front of him. As usual, to help him decide what to do, he asked Parker to read the scripts. That is not something that publicists generally do, and if they do, they are expected to concur with conventional wisdom. Parker was appalled at the film he was ready to do, a shoddy knockoff of the Mel Gibson hit The Road Warrior. "I'm not knocking myself out for you to do such pathetic crap," Parker told him. "This is the one you should do, Commando, the right kind of studio film." Parker got called into her bosses' office and reamed out for second-guessing Arnold's agent, but she was so concerned with Arnold's future that she did not care.

In the end, however, Arnold did decide that for his next film he would play Colonel John Matrix in Commando. John Matrix is a legendary Delta Force commando who has retired to a rural retreat with his eleven-year-old daughter, Jenny. The first part of the film gives Arnold his first opportunity to do what in Arnold's case is called "acting," which is largely the empathic portrayal of a character in a way that appeals to women. Arnold is surprisingly good at playing a brave man whose skills are no longer needed or much appreciated and who has taken up a pastoral life.

When his daughter is kidnapped by men loyal to a Latin American dictator deposed in part by Matrix's task force, the colonel reverts to his former self and journeys to the fictional country of Val Verde to rescue his daughter. The script is peppered with one-line wit appealing to men, but what the film's largest audience of young males is waiting for is Matrix's bloody quest to find his daughter. Matrix weaves and jumps his way around bullets as he single-

handedly kills scores of the enemy. He shoots them, stabs them, and pummels them to death. There is a rude acrobatic ballet to his movements. He knows how to use guns in a realistic enough way to pass muster as a combat veteran.

Arnold kills so many people in Commando that at one point the film becomes an endless slaughter. The more than a hundred deaths were sufficient for Premiere to give the film the dubious honor of being the most violent film of all time. Commando is to violence what pornography is to sex, nothing but numbing anonymity. Much of the film is a circus of violence, a thrilling catharsis to the audience, and it succeeds superbly on its own terms. Moreover, it is a film made to garner a huge audience—with Arnold being paid a huge salary. "It was a pivotal film for him," recalled Pitt. "And it was a breakthrough in terms of money."

At the premiere, various luminaries praised Commando as a milestone in the history of cinema in which Arnold's greatness was immortalized. It was not the truth, but it was pleasant to the ear and nothing more than Hollywood's standard garish hyperbole. When all the major players had their say, Arnold called up Thorsen to say a few words. Sven had just moved to Los Angeles and had never been to a premiere. He thought of it as nothing but a big friendly party for his buddy Arnold. "Yeah, it's a good movie," Thorsen said, relishing the moment. "Congratulations! But let's be honest. Isn't it only a

seven

Afterward, Arnold got his friend alone. "Sven, what the fuck is wrong with you.''" he asked.

"What do you mean.''" Sven said. "I was honest." "Yeah, but, you know, this is the movie business."

To Arnold, movies were above everything else a business, and if you were a star, you had to deliver. Commando proved a big hit when it opened in October 1985, and made a great deal of money for 20th Century-Fox—which augured well for Arnold's next work.

There was a troubling irritant pestering Arnold—and its name was Stallone. As successful as it was. Commando did not come close to the formidable receipts that Ramho had amassed. By 1985 Stallone had become the biggest film star in the world. Parade reported that he earned far more than anyone else—$12 million a film, compared with $3 million for Arnold.

Such a comparison was difficult enough for Arnold to take, but there was

something even worse: he was criticized for starring in a film that was a cynical knockoff of the Stallone film—and the rivalry between the two men rose to new heights.

Arnold could not stand the idea of anyone's imagining that he would stoop to copy Stallone. "I'd be angry at hearing my name mentioned in the same breath as Stallone's," he snorted, though for the past couple of years much of his publicity and positioning campaign had linked him with Stallone. The reality was that Parker's plan had worked brilliantly, and it was not simply positioning any longer. Arnold had become Stallone's powerful new competitor. It was crunch time. "Watch out, Rambo! Matrix—in the mountainous form of Arnold Schwarzenegger—is stealing your thunder," wrote the Dai/y News.

From this point on, it was not a case of being placed alongside Stallone in publicity, but being placed in opposition. Arnold told a reporter that Stallone used "body doubles for some of the close-ups in his movies. I don't." He was essentially accusing Stallone of cowardice and delivering false goods.

Arnold had a superb grasp of Stallone's vulnerabilities, and he probed them mercilessly. "I think Stallone, as far as I know him, is extremely intense all the time, even when he comes to the gym," he said, picking at Stallone's psyche in an interview with GQ's Jean Vallely in July 1986. "He's obsessed, and that carries through in the way he dresses, how hard he tries to belong to a charity organization," he said with contempt. "It's all Rocky."

Arnold charged that Stallone's feelings did not come from the heart. "There's no love there," he asserted. "And people see that. You can fake your way through for a year, but for ten years, that's hard. Eventually it catches up to you. I think that's the difference between him and me."

Arnold loved to stick it to people, to play practical jokes that sometimes seemed gratuitously mean, or to make fun of a person's vulnerabilities, but he almost never did so publicly, or if he did, it was for a purpose. Had he slipped one time and made a demeaning comment about Stallone, it might be seen as a mistake, or a momentary excess, but those who knew Arnold from his bodybuilding past realized that there was a method behind such repeated needling. Arnold kept at it enough that it became clear he was playing with Stallone's head.

If it was to be a reprise of Arnold's bodybuilding ways, he would work toward a final victory that would devastate his opponent. He would look back and tell with disarming humor how he had tricked poor Stallone and led him down a path that carried him from the peak of stardom—a peak where now only Arnold resided.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Good Life

Arnold continued to squirrel away great amounts of money, but he was doing so well now that he lived in a Spanish-st>ie house on a quiet street in Santa Monica with lithographs by Warhol, Wyeth, Dali, and Chagall on the walls, serious books on the shelves, and a swimming pool and a hot tub. He had brought almost nothing from his old apartment, none of the kitschy art from around the world and almost none of the overwrought furniture. He had assumed all the accoutrements of a Hollywood aristocrat, from his designer suits to his Tony Lama cowboy boots. He acted to the manner born, comfortable with an entourage of people who sened him and made his life easy. There was often a hubbub in the home, people tearing in or out on one mission or another, Arnold sitting at the dining-room table with a speech expert, pronouncing English words.

In the mornings, when he did not have to be on the set, he drove to World Gym. Joe Gold had long since sold his g>m, and though it bore his name, it was no longer the same. After a stint in the Merchant Marines, Gold had come back and started another gym, and Arnold had happily made the transition to his friend's new one. World was a fancy, high-tech place, nothing like the old legendary Gold's Gym that had been Arnold's second home. The new gym was a testament to the democratization of bodybuilding into fitness workouts for the millions, a social change to which Arnold had contributed as much as anyone.

There, as almost everv^vhere he went, life coalesced around Arnold. "Most of the people only knew him as the icon," said Neal Nordlinger, a close friend since the late seventies. "So they would treat him with incredible reverence.

And then there were the guys who were, like, he's still just Arnold, like they knew him when he was some stupid farm boy from Austria. And so it was really fun."

People were often startled to see that in person Arnold did not look like a bodybuilding giant. At 220 pounds, he was below his competition weight, and so was not bulked up. In a more important sense, he was bigger than ever. The aura of fame that he had first won as a bodybuilder had grown. People took pleasure in simply seeing him. He was only a movie hero, but the derring-do on the screen had become part of his persona, and wherever he went there were often awe and wonder. Few people have tasted the power of fame the way he did. He made sure that he felt it wherever he went, nodding his head at passersby when they recognized him, dropping a word or two, letting people touch him (but just barely) before he moved on. It was as if he had to make sure that his megacelebrity was still there, like someone constantly touching his wallet to check that it hadn't been stolen.

After working out, Arnold often drove up the Pacific Coast Highway to Patrick's Roadhouse for breakfast. Holl^^wood's idea of a power place to breakfast is the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but this lime green old diner is where Arnold liked to go. His presence helped make it the hip place for the younger stars and studio executives to eat. Most of them had modest breakfasts, not the "Schwarzenegger special" or "Bauernfruhstiick," a gigantic meal of breakfast foods, which was Arnold's favorite. He was the only customer with his own special table, a tradition that Arnold understood and appreciated from his days in Thai.

If Arnold was not working on a film, he would go to his office in Venice after breakfast. Arnold had a team of people watching out for him, starting with his devoted agent and publicist. Many stars keep an office to deal with fan mail and movie business, but Arnold had a real office. He had constant real estate deals and other investments. He watched over his properties in great detail. He spent more money on his apartment buildings than was necessary, replacing carpets every two years, keeping the walls freshly painted, making sure the property values held. He had a mail-order business that he did not regard as a big profit center but as a way to keep kids interested in him, kids who sent in for a T-shirt, an autographed photo, or a gym bag. He and Jim Lorimer had an annual bodybuilding event to produce in Columbus, Ohio.

When he arrived in America, Arnold had been an abysmal dresser. He now understood how clothes projected one's image to the world. He cringed when he saw bodybuilders in cutoff sweatshirts or rolled-up T-shirts, flaunting their muscularity. He dressed to hide his muscles, not emphasize them. He liked a

preppy look and was partial to casual clothes from L. L. Bean. He had tailors in New York and Los Angeles who styled conservative suits that downplayed his shoulders and slimmed his torso. Those were the outfits he wore to business meetings and dinners at the exclusive Regency Club in Westwood, where he hobnobbed with the magnate David Murdock, a man he called one of his "idols."

Arnold had the same interest in the dollar that Weider had recognized when he arrived in the United States. He was inordinately proud that his salary as a star was doubling year after year, yet he wanted to keep that to himself as much as possible, for it would only make people jealous to hear that he was earning $3 million or $6 million a picture, and jealousy did no one any good. He was being offered all kinds of big-money, multi-picture deals, but he always said no because he wanted to have control over each film project.

Even though Arnold appeared comfortable at the highest reaches of society, he had the soul of a poor boy, a quality he considered an attribute, not the shameful psychological baggage of his past. He knew that he understood the value of things the way no one born to wealth could. When a button came off a shirt, he often sewed a new one on himself, and did the same for Maria's dresses. When he went out on his expansive lawn for a game of touch football, he put on an old sweater whereas Maria wore whatever she happened to have on. His favorite car was an old Jeep, and he vowed wrongly that he would never be found driving a car that too flamboyantly advertised his wealth.

He believed, too, that he loved America in a way that no one blessed with being born here could. American liberty was a fresh breeze in his face, not the air that he had always lived in. American opportunity was a precious new gift, not a birthright he took for granted.

Arnold had turned his intense pleasure in life, his laserlike focus, and his endless dreaming about his own future into a philosophy that had not changed since he was a teenager. "I set a goal," he said, "visualized it very clearly, and created the drive, the hunger, for turning it into reality. There's a kind of joy in that kind of ambition, in having a vision in front of you. With that kind of joy, discipline isn't difficult, or negative, or grim. You love doing what you have to do—going to the gym, working hard on the set. Even when pain is part of reaching your goal—and it usually is—you can accept that, too."

Arnold is a man who knows what he knows and what he does not know. He knows how to learn and when to learn. How to learn is by listening to people,

and when to learn is all the time. "A lot of people are very sensitive about what they don't know, but he's never been that way," said Jim Lorimer. "Right from the beginning, if you say something he doesn't understand, he'll say, 'What do you mean?' If he doesn't know it, he'll say, 'What is it?'"

The least introspective of men, unconcerned with the foibles and failures of the past, Arnold took what he needed from his earlier life and moved on. He deeply appreciated what he had been able to achieve in America. That was the wellspring of his patriotism and his conservative politics. He focused so completely on whatever lay before him that he seemed almost slow. He was full of pleasure no matter what he was doing, and yet he remained profoundly ambitious, having a game plan that would take him well into the future. He often talked about politics, about perhaps running for governor of California one day. Those who knew him best realized that he was not merely daydreaming, but vocalizing the blueprint of his future.

"What I am most happy about is that I can zero in on a vision of where I want to be in the future," Arnold said in 1986. "I can see it so clearly in front of me, when I daydream, that it's almost a realit^^. Then I get this easy feeling, and I don't have to be uptight to get there because I already feel like I'm there, that it's just a matter of time."

Arnold saw that celebrity risked walling him off from much of what most people called life. He wanted to experience life at its broadest and deepest reaches, and he could not do that with the self-conscious life of a full-time celebrity'. He did not always have bodyguards around him. He did not live his life in the seclusion of limousines and private planes. He took them when he needed to, but when he wanted, he jumped on his Harley and roared off with his friends into the hills, or he drove over to Gaffe Roma in Beverly Hills with its eclectic mix of European expatriates and locals, to hang out with Sven and Franco and make fun of the people strolling by. He liked to have parties at his house at which he talked on and on into the night, parties that weren't about business or deal making, but only about having a good time among good friends.

As much as Arnold was elated with the small moments of life as well as the large, he occasionally questioned the meaning of everything and anything he was doing. There were times when he felt that all the money he had and all the money he would earn in the future meant nothing. There were times that he felt that all of his obsessions with achieving the ultimate success in bodybuilding meant nothing. There were times when he felt that his dream of becoming the greatest star in the world meant nothing.

"What does it mean?" he asked himself "Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. If you'd look down on the world, you'd say 'What the fuck, these guys are

crazy.' You know when I was standing up on the stage trying to win Mr. Universe.^ I said, 'Isn't this absolutely all funny and silly.'' Here you are trying to be the most muscular man in the world.'"

Arnold's friends knew that they were to be amusing and upbeat and not to burden him with their own petty woes and complaints. He did not like naysayers, and he banished anyone from his presence who reeked of negativity. By a few verbal incantations, he could take an obstacle as high as a wall and turn it into a mere bump in the road as thrilling as a carnival ride. Everything was fantastic, and if it was not, by his mere incantation, it became so. And damn anyone who said otherwise.

Most of Arnold's friends exuded an ultramacho quality, but it was not that alone which brought these men together. Although they rarely exposed it, each man had a sensitivity grounded in painful experience. His Munich friend Albert Busek lost a son to cancer and a wife to a decade-long struggle with multiple sclerosis, yet he remained full of the most compelling optimism about life. Franco had struggled up from the most modest of circumstances in Sardinia, without money, education, or prospects, and he, too, was bullish on life. Sven had a police officer father who thought his son a worthless oaf. Much of his life was a struggle to win an approval that would never come. Arnold and his friends did not sit around endlessly pawing through the dead embers of the past, but the past was in them and it helped to make them lifelong friends.

As big a star as he became, Arnold was there for his friends. When Busek's wife died, the first call he made was to Arnold on location, and his friend was there as long as he wanted to talk. Sven had moved to the United States and was a fixture in Arnold's movies. Franco had advanced much further in the world than he ever would have without Arnold, and now had a new career as a chiropractor.

I'hat said, there was an emotional stinginess to Arnold. He complained privately to his friends about how cheap Maria and her family were, but he was hardly generous when it came to helping some of his friends advance in the world. He cared for his buddies but could have done so much more for them at almost no cost to himself. He could have helped Franco when he tried to have his own movie career. He could have pushed Sven. But he did not, and they knew if they wanted to stay his friends, they should not ask.

There was inevitably a one-sided quality to these friendships that went far beyond the massive difference in wealth. His friends waited for Arnold.

Arnold did not wait for them. As irreverent and rowdy as they could be with him, each of these men was in awe of Arnold.

"Arnold used to say when he went to the gym on a rainy day, the sun was shining around the gym only," said Sven. "He can walk in the rain, he used to say, and it pours, and he's dry. Just like a spotlight of no rain is around him. I get goose bumps when he says that, because I've seen it. I've seen it so many times. He's bulletproof. I don't know what it is. It's something you can't even describe with words. He's chosen. I mean, it's a little tough to use that word. But he's chosen. They don't come around too often."