Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Read online

  Soon life at the gym totally consumed me. Training was all I could think about. One Sunday when I found the stadium locked, I broke in and worked out in the freezing cold. I had to wrap my hands in towels to keep them from sticking to the metal bars. Week by week I would see the gains I was making in how much I could lift, the number of reps my muscles would tolerate, the shape of my body and its overall mass and weight. I became a regular member of the Athletic Union team. I was so proud that I, little Arnold Schwarzenegger, was in a club with Mr. Austria, the great Kurt Marnul.

  I’d tried a lot of other sports, but the way my body responded to weight training made it instantly clear that this was where I had the greatest potential and I could go all out. I couldn’t articulate what drove me. But training seemed something I was born for, and I sensed that it would become my ticket out of Thal. “Kurt Marnul can win Mr. Austria,” I thought, “and he’s already told me that I could too if I train hard, so that’s what I’m going to do.” This thought made the hours of lifting tons of steel and iron actually a joy. Every painful set, every extra rep, was a step toward my goal of winning Mr. Austria and entering the Mr. Europe competition. Then in November I picked up the latest issue of Muscle Builder at the department store in Graz. On the cover was Mr. Universe, Reg Park. He was wearing a loincloth, dressed as Hercules, and I realized with a start that this was the guy who’d starred in the movie I’d loved that summer. Inside were pictures of Reg posing, working out, winning as Mr. Universe for the second year in a row, shaking hands with Joe Weider, and chatting on Muscle Beach with the legendary Steve Reeves, an earlier Mr. Universe who had also starred in Hercules films.

  I could barely wait to track down Mui and find out what the article said. It gave Reg’s whole life story, from growing up poor in Leeds, England, to becoming Mr. Universe, getting invited to America as a champion bodybuilder, getting sent to Rome to star as Hercules, and marrying a beauty from South Africa, where he now lived when he wasn’t training on Muscle Beach.

  This story crystallized a new vision for me. I could become another Reg Park. All my dreams suddenly came together and made sense. I’d found the way to get to America: bodybuilding! And I’d found a way to get into movies. They would be the thing that everyone in the world would know me for. Movies would bring money—I was sure that Reg Park was a millionaire—and the best-looking girls, which was a very important aspect.

  In weeks that followed, I refined this vision until it was very specific. I was going to go for the Mr. Universe title; I was going to break records in power lifting; I was going to Hollywood; I was going to be like Reg Park. The vision became so clear in my mind that I felt like it had to happen. There was no alternative; it was this or nothing. My mother noticed right away that something was different. I was coming home with a big smile. I told her that I was training, and she could see I found joy in becoming stronger.

  But as the months went by, she started to get concerned about my obsession. By spring, I’d hung up muscleman pictures all over the wall over my bed. There were boxers, professional wrestlers, weight lifters, and power lifters. Most of all, there were bodybuilders posing, especially Reg Park and Steve Reeves. I was proud of my wall. This was in the era before copying machines, and so I’d collected the images I wanted from magazines and then taken them to a shop to be photographed and reproduced as eight-by-tens. I’d bought soft felt-like matting, had it cut professionally, and glued the eight-by-tens on the mats and placed them on my wall. It looked really good, the way I had it all laid out. But it really worried my mom.

  Finally one day she decided to seek professional advice and flagged down the doctor when he drove up the road on his usual rounds. “I want you to see this,” she said and brought him upstairs to my room.

  I was in the living room doing my homework but I could still hear most of the conversation. “Doctor,” my mother was saying, “all the other boys, Arnold’s friends, when I go to their homes, they have girls hanging on their walls. Posters, magazines, colored pictures of girls. And look at him. Naked men.”

  “Frau Schwarzenegger,” said the doctor, “there is nothing wrong. Boys always need inspiration. They will look to their father, and many times this is not enough because he’s the father, so they will look also to other men. This is actually good; nothing for you to worry about.” He left, and my mother wiped tears from her eyes and pretended that nothing had happened. After that she would say to her friends, “My son has pictures of strongmen and athletes, and he gets so fired up when he looks at them, he trains every day now. Arnold, tell them how much weight you are lifting.” Of course I’d started to have success with girls, but I couldn’t share that with my mother.

  That spring she discovered how much things had changed. I’d just met a girl who was two years older than me who was an outdoorsy type. “I like camping, too!” I said. “There’s a really nice area on our neighbor’s farm, right below our house. Why don’t you bring your tent?” She came the next afternoon, and we had fun putting up this beautiful little tent. Some of the little kids from the neighborhood helped us pound in the stakes. It was just the right size for two people, and it had a zipper flap. After the kids went away, the girl and I went inside and started making out. She had her top off when suddenly I heard the sound of the zipper and turned just in time to see my mother’s head stick into the tent. She made a big scene, called the girl a tramp and a whore, and stormed back up the hill to our house. The poor girl was mortified; I helped her pull down the tent, and she ran off.

  Back at the house, my mother and I had a fight. “What is this?!” I yelled. “One minute you’re telling the doctor that I have those pictures, and now you’re worried about me having a girl. I don’t get it. That’s what guys do.”

  “No, no, no. Not around my house.”

  She was having to adjust to this whole new son. But I was really mad. I just wanted to live my life! That Saturday, I went into town and made up with the girl—her parents were away.

  —

  Apprenticeship was a big part of the training at the vocational school where I started in autumn 1962. Mornings we had class, and afternoons we would fan out across Graz to our jobs. This was lots better than sitting in a classroom all day. My parents knew I was good at math and enjoyed juggling figures in my head, and they had arranged for me to be in a business and commerce program rather than plumbing or carpentry or some other trade.

  My apprenticeship was at Mayer-Stechbarth, a small building supply store in the Neubaustrasse with four employees. It was owned by Herr Dr. Matscher, a retired lawyer who always wore a suit to work. He ran the store with his wife, Christine. In the beginning, I was assigned mostly physical labor, from stacking wood to shoveling the sidewalk. I actually liked doing deliveries: carrying heavy sheets of composite board up customers’ stairs was another form of strength training. Before long, I was asked to help take inventory, and that got me interested in how the store was run. I was taught how to write up orders and used what I’d learned in bookkeeping class to help with accounts.

  The most important skill I acquired was selling. A cardinal rule was never to let a customer walk out the door without a purchase. If you did, it just showed what a poor salesman you were. Even if it was just one little bolt, you had to make a sale. That meant working every possible angle. If I couldn’t sell the linoleum tiles, I’d push the floor cleaner.

  I became buddies with the second apprentice, Franz Janz, based on our mutual fascination with America. We talked about it endlessly and even tried translating Schwarzenegger into English—we came up with “black corner,” although “black plowman” would be closer. I brought Franz to the gym and tried to interest him in training, but it didn’t take. He was more into playing guitar; in fact, he was a member of the Mods, Graz’s first rock band.

  But Franz understood how obsessed I was with training. One day he spotted a set of barbells somebody was getting rid of. He dragged them home on a sled and persuaded his father to sand off the rust and p
aint them. Then they brought them to my house. I converted an unheated area near the stairs into my home gym. From then on, I was able to step up my routine and train at home any day I didn’t work out at the stadium.

  At Mayer-Stechbarth, I was known as the apprentice who wanted to go to America. The Matschers were very patient with us. They taught us how to get along with customers and one another, and how to set goals for ourselves. Frau Matscher was determined to correct what she saw as gaps in our education. For instance, she thought we hadn’t been exposed to enough elevated conversation and wanted to make us more worldly. She’d sit us down for long stretches and discuss art, religion, current affairs. To reward our efforts, she’d treat us to bread and marmalade.

  —

  Around the same time that Frau Matscher began feeding me culture, I got my first taste of athletic success. A beer hall might seem like a strange place to start a career in sports, but that’s where mine began. It was March 1963 in Graz, and I was fifteen and a half, making my first public appearance in the uniform of the Athletic Union team: black training shoes, brown socks, and a dark unitard with narrow straps, decorated on the front with the club insignia. We were facing off against weight lifters from a rival club, and the match was part of the entertainment for a crowd of three hundred to four hundred people—all sitting at long tables, smoking and clinking their steins.

  This was my first time performing in public, so I was excited and nervous when I walked out onstage. I put chalk on my hands to keep the weights from slipping, and right away did a two-arm press of 150 pounds, my normal weight. The crowd gave a big cheer. The applause had an effect like I’d never imagined. I could barely wait for my next turn in the rotation. This time, to my amazement, I lifted 185 pounds—35 pounds more than I ever had before. Some people perform better in front of an audience, some worse. A guy from the other team who was a better lifter than me found the audience distracting and failed to complete his last lift. He told me afterward that he couldn’t concentrate as well as in the gym. For me, it was the opposite. The audience gave me strength and motivation, and my ego kicked in more. I discovered that I performed much, much better in front of others.

  CHAPTER 3

  Confessions of a Tank Driver

  THE MILITARY BASE NEAR Graz was headquarters of one of the tank divisions of the Austrian army. I learned this because all young men in Austria were required to serve, and I was looking for a way to fit the army into my life goals. I realized that the logical thing for the army to do with somebody my size would be to put me in the infantry and have me carry machine guns and ammunition up mountains. But the infantry was based in Salzburg, and this was not consistent with my plan. I wanted to stay in Graz and continue with my training. My mission was to become the world champion in bodybuilding, not to fight wars. That wasn’t really the mission of the Austrian army either. We had a military because we were allowed to have one. It was an expression of sovereignty. But it was a small military, and no one had any thought of engaging in real combat.

  I was looking forward to joining the military and being away from home for the first time. I had just finished my education, and the sooner I completed my service, the sooner I could get a passport.

  Being a tank driver sounded really good. Several friends who had joined the army were stationed in Graz, and I’d asked a thousand questions about jobs on the base. There were many positions for new recruits, including being in the administrative office or the kitchen, where you never touched a tank. My friends were in the armored infantry, which are troops trained to support tanks by riding on top of them into battle, jumping off, searching for antitank mines, and so on.

  But it was the tanks themselves that fascinated me. I love big things, and the American-built M47 Patton, named after the World War II general, certainly fit that. It was twelve feet wide, weighed fifty tons, and had an 800-horsepower engine. It was so powerful that it could push through a brick wall and you’d hardly realize it if you were inside. It amazed me that someone would actually trust an eighteen-year-old with something this big and expensive. The other big attraction was that to qualify as a tank driver, you first had to be licensed in driving a motorcycle, a car, a truck, and a tractor-trailer. The army would supply the training for all that, which would have cost thousands and thousands of schillings in the civilian world. There were only nine hundred tanks in the whole Austrian army, and I wanted to stand out.

  My father, who still had dreams of me becoming a policeman or military officer, was happy to put in a word with the base commander, a buddy of his from the war. He was a huge sports fan and was pleased to bring me into the fold. Once I’d completed basic training, he’d see to it that I could set up weight-lifting equipment on the base.

  Everything would have worked out perfectly except for one miscalculation. I’d started winning trophies in weight lifting by now. I was the regional junior weight-lifting champ, and just that summer I’d won the Austrian power-lifting championship’s heavyweight division, beating much more experienced men. Even though you could tell at a glance that I was still just an oversize kid, I was starting to compete successfully in bodybuilding too. I won a regional championship and actually placed third in the competition for Mr. Austria—good enough to share the stage with Kurt Marnul, who was still the king. Just before enlisting, I’d signed up for my first international competition, the junior version of Mr. Europe—a crucial next step in my plan. I hadn’t realized that for the whole six weeks of basic training, there was no leaving Graz.

  I didn’t mind basic training. It taught me that something that seems impossible at the start can be achieved. Did we ever believe that we could climb a cliff in full field gear? No. But when we were ordered to do it, we did. And along the way, we even stuffed our pockets with mushrooms, which we turned over to the cook that night to make soup.

  Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted to compete for Junior Mr. Europe. I stole every minute I could to hit my practice poses in the latrine. I begged the drill sergeant to treat this like he would a family emergency and to let me go to Stuttgart, Germany, to compete. No chance. The night before the event, I finally decided fuck it and walked out of the gate.

  A seven-hour train ride later, I was in Stuttgart, hitting my poses in front of a few hundred fans and soaking up the cheers. I won the title 1965 Best Built Junior Athlete of Europe. It was the first time I’d ever been outside Austria and the biggest audience I’d ever had. I felt like King Kong.

  Unfortunately, I was punished when I returned to training camp. I was put into detention and made to sit by myself in a cell for twenty-four hours. Then my superiors got word of my victory, and I was freed. I kept my head down for the rest of basic training, and soon I was able to report to the tank unit my father’s friend commanded. From then on, the army became a fantastic joyride. I set up a weight room in the barracks, where I was allowed to train four hours a day. Some of the officers and men also began training too. For the first time in my life, I could eat meat every day—real protein. I grew so fast that every three months I outgrew my uniform and had to be issued the next larger size.

  Motorcycle training started right away, followed by cars the next month. We learned basic mechanics, because you always had to be able to fix your vehicle if something simple went wrong. Next was how to drive trucks, which turned out to be difficult because the military trucks had manual, unsynchronized transmissions. To shift up or down, you had to go into neutral and double clutch and rev the engine to the proper speed so that it could mesh with the next gear. This led to much gear grinding and big drama, because after only a little practice on the base, they took us out in real traffic. Until shifting became second nature, it was very hard to keep your eye on the road. I’d be distracted by the shift lever, and all of a sudden I’d see cars stopped in front of me and have to brake and downshift and do the thing with the clutch—all with the instructor yelling at me. By the time we came back to the base, I was always soaked with sweat; it was a
great way to lose body fat.

  The next stage, learning tractor-trailers, was hairy too, especially backing up using mirrors and opposite-direction steering. This took me a while to master and some crashing and banging into things. It really felt good when I finally graduated to tanks.

  The M47 is built to be driven with one hand, using a joystick that controls the gears and the motion of the treads. You sit in the left front corner of the hull and have a brake and gas pedal for your feet. The metal seat can be raised and lowered; normally you drive with the hatch propped open and your head sticking out of the tank to see. But when you button up for battle, you drop the seat, close the hatch, and peer through a periscope. At night, there was a primitive form of infrared that let you just make out trees and bushes and other tanks. I could fit in the seat despite my size, but driving with the hatch shut could be very claustrophobic. I felt really proud to be learning this massive machine, something totally different than I had ever dealt with.

  The nearest maneuver ground was a big tract of land along the ridge between Thal and Graz. To reach it, we had to leave the base and drive an hour and a half up a winding, gravel back road—a company of twenty tanks rumbling and clanking past houses and hamlets. Usually we drove at night, when civilian traffic was at a minimum.

  I took pride in my driving ability, which meant being able to maneuver with accuracy and drive smoothly through holes and ditches so that my tank commander and crewmates didn’t get banged around. At the same time, I was somewhat catastrophe-prone.

  When we camped in the field, we had a regular routine. First, we’d work out: I had my weight plates and bars and exercise bench all stowed in compartments on top of the tank, where tools were usually kept. Three, four, or five other guys from the platoon would join me, and we’d exercise for an hour and a half before getting something to eat. Some nights the drivers had to stay with their tanks while the other guys went to the sleeping tent. We’d bed down by digging a shallow hole, putting down a blanket, and parking the tank overhead. The idea was to protect ourselves from wild boars. We were not allowed to kill them, and they roamed freely in the training area because I think they knew that. We also posted sentries who would stand on top of the tanks so the boars couldn’t get at them.