Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Read online

  Dianne concentrated on filling me up with protein and improving my manners. Sometimes she must have thought I’d been raised by wolves. I didn’t know the right way to handle a knife and fork or that you should help clear up after dinner. Dianne picked up where my parents and Fredi Gerstl and Frau Matscher had left off. One of the few times she ever got mad at me was when she saw me shove my way through a crowd of fans after a competition. The thought in my head was “I won. Now I’m going to party.” But Dianne grabbed me and said, “Arnold, you don’t do that. These are people who came to see you. They spent their money, and some of them traveled a long way. You can take a few minutes and give them your autograph.” That scolding changed my life. I’d never thought about the fans, only about my competitors. But from then on, I always made time for the fans.

  Even the kids got in on the Educating Arnold project. There’s probably no better way to learn English than to join a lively, happy London household where nobody understands German and where you sleep on the couch and have six little siblings. They treated me like a giant new puppy and loved teaching me words.

  A photo of me during that trip shows me meeting my boyhood idol Reg Park for the first time. He’s wearing sweats, looking relaxed and tan, and I’m wearing my posing trunks looking starstruck and pale. I was in the presence of Hercules, of the three-time Mr. Universe, of the star whose picture I kept on my wall, of the man on whom I’d modeled my life plan. I could barely stammer out a word. All the English I’d learned flew right out of my head.

  Reg now lived in Johannesburg, where he owned a chain of gyms, but he came back to England on business several times a year. He was friends with the Bennetts and had generously agreed to help show me the ropes. Wag and Dianne felt that the best way for me to have a good shot at the Mr. Universe title was to became better known in the United Kingdom. Bodybuilders did that in those days by getting on the exhibition circuit—promoters all over the British Isles would organize local events, and by agreeing to appear, you could make a little money and spread your name. Reg, as it happened, was on his way to an exhibition in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and offered to bring me along. Making a name for yourself in bodybuilding is a lot like politics. You go from town to town, hoping word will spread. This grassroots approach worked, and the enthusiasm it created would eventually help me to win Mr. Universe.

  One night I found myself standing in the wings and watching Reg pose onstage for a crowd of several hundred cheering exhibition fans. Then he went to the microphone and called me to the stage. He moderated while I showed off my strength: I would perform a two-arm curl of 275 pounds and deadlift 500 pounds five times. I finished by posing and received a standing ovation. I was ready to leave the stage when I heard Reg say, “Arnold, come over here.” When I got to the microphone, he said, “Say something to the people.”

  So I said, “No, no, no.”

  “Why not?”

  I said, “I don’t speak English that well.”

  “Hey!” he says. “That’s very good! Let’s give a little applause. That takes a lot of nerve for a guy who doesn’t speak English to say a sentence like that.” He started clapping, and then they were all applauding.

  All of a sudden I felt, “Gee, this is amazing. They liked what I said!”

  Reg went on: “Say to them, ‘I like Ireland.’ ”

  “I like Ireland.” Applause again. He said, “I remember you telling me earlier that this is the first time you’re in Belfast, and you couldn’t wait to get here. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So tell them! ‘I couldn’t wait . . .’ ”

  “I couldn’t wait . . .”

  “ ‘. . . to get here.’ ”

  “. . . to get here.” Wow, again applause. And every sentence he said for me to repeat, I got applause.

  If he had told me the day before, “I’m going to bring you onstage and ask you to say a few words,” I would have been scared to death. But here I was able to practice public speaking without the pressure. I didn’t have to sweat about the audience accepting me or caring what I said. That fear was not there, because the body was the focus. I was lifting, I was posing. I knew they accepted me. This was just extra.

  After that, I studied Reg at a bunch of shows. The way he spoke was unbelievable. He could entertain people. He was outgoing. He told stories. And he was Hercules! He was Mr. Universe! He knew about wine, he knew about food, he spoke French, he spoke Italian. He was one of those guys who really had his act together. I watched the way he held the mike, and I said to myself, “That’s what you’ve got to do. You can’t just pose on stage like a robot and then walk off so people never get to know your personality. Reg Park talks to them. He’s the only bodybuilder I’ve seen who talks to people. That’s why they love him. That’s why he’s Reg Park.”

  —

  Back in Munich, I concentrated on building up business at the gym. Old man Putziger was almost never around, which was totally fine with Albert and me. He and I made a great team. Albert managed everything—the mail-order nutritional supplements business, the magazine, and the gym—doing the work of several men. My job, besides training, was to recruit new members. Our business goal, of course, was to overtake Smolana’s and become the city’s top gym. Advertising was an obvious first step, but we couldn’t afford much of it, so we had some posters printed up. We’d wait until late at night and then work our way across the city—pasting them up at construction sites, where we figured the workers would be interested in bodybuilding.

  But this strategy wasn’t as successful as we hoped. We were scratching our heads about why until Albert passed one of the construction sites in daylight and noticed a Smolana poster on the wall in the exact spot where one of ours had been. It turned out that Smolana had been sending his guys around town pasting their posters over ours before the glue could dry. So we changed our routine. We’d poster once at midnight and then make a second pass at four in the morning to make sure that when the construction workers showed up for work, our gym would be the poster on top. Everybody got a kick out of the poster war, and slowly our membership started to grow.

  Our pitch was that while Smolana’s had more room, we had more spirit and more fun. We also had the wrestlers going for us. Today professional wrestling is a giant TV sport, but back then wrestlers would travel from city to city and put on bouts. When they came to Munich, they’d perform at the Circus Krone, which had a huge permanent arena as its home base. Whenever there was a wrestling match, the place was packed.

  The wrestlers were always looking for somewhere to work out, and they picked our gym when they heard about me. I trained with guys like Harold Sakata, from Hawaii, who’d played the villain Oddjob in the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger. Like a lot of professional wrestlers, Harold started out as a lifter; he’d won a silver medal for the United States at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. We also had Hungarian wrestlers, French wrestlers—guys from all over the world. I’d open up the gym at times when it was normally closed just to accommodate them, and at night I would go watch their matches. They wanted in the worst way to make me a wrestler too, but of course that was not my agenda.

  Still, I was proud that our gym was becoming a little like the United Nations, because I planned to go global with everything that I wanted to do. American and British bodybuilders passing through town would stop by, and word got around among the American troops stationed nearby that the Universum Sport Studio was a good place to train.

  Having a big range of customers was the perfect sales tool. If someone said to me, “Well, I was over at Smolana’s gym, and they have more machines than you,” I would say, “Well, they have one more room than we have, you’re absolutely right. But think about why it is that everyone wants to come here. When any American bodybuilder comes from overseas, they train here. When the military looks for a gymnasium, they train here. When the professional wrestlers come into town, they train here. We even have women wanting to join!” I built it into a whol
e routine.

  My initial success in London had reassured me that I was on the right track and that my goals were not crazy. Every time I won, I became more certain. After the 1966 Mr. Universe contest, I won several more titles, including Mr. Europe. Even more important for my local reputation, during the March beer festival I won a round of the Löwenbräukeller’s stone-lifting competition, hoisting the old beer hall’s 558-pound stone block higher than every other contestant that day. (The weight was in German pounds, equivalent to 254 kilos, or 558 English pounds.)

  I knew I was already the favorite to win the 1967 Mr. Universe competition. But that didn’t feel like enough—I wanted to dominate totally. If I’d wowed them with my size and strength before, my plan now was to show up unbelievably bigger and stronger and really blow their minds.

  So I poured my energy and attention into a training plan I’d worked out with Wag Bennett. For months I spent most of my earnings on food and vitamins and protein tablets designed to build muscle mass. The drink of choice in this diet was like a nightmarish opposite of beer: pure brewer’s yeast, milk, and raw eggs. It smelled and tasted so vile that Albert sampled it once and threw up. But I was convinced that it worked, and maybe it did.

  I read everything I could find about the training methods of the East Germans and the Soviets. Increasingly, there were rumors that they were using performance-enhancing drugs to get superior results from their weight lifters, shot-putters, and swimmers. As soon as I figured out that steroids were the drugs in question, I went to the doctor to try them myself. There were no rules against using anabolic steroids then, and you could get them by prescription, yet already people seemed to feel two ways about their use. Bodybuilders didn’t talk about steroids as freely as they talked about weight routines and nutritional supplements, and there was an argument about whether the bodybuilding magazines should educate people about the drugs or ignore the trend.

  All I needed to know was that the top international champions were taking steroids, something I confirmed by asking the guys in London. I would not go into a competition with a disadvantage. “Leave no stone unturned” was my rule. And while there wasn’t any evidence of danger—research into steroids’ side effects was only getting under way—even if there had been, I’m not sure I would have cared. Downhill ski champions and Formula One race drivers know they can get killed, but they compete anyway. Because if you don’t get killed, you win. Besides, I was twenty years old, and I thought I would never die.

  To get the drugs, I simply went to see a local general practitioner. “I heard this will help muscle growth,” I said.

  “It’s supposed to, but I wouldn’t oversell it,” he replied. “It’s meant for people in rehab after surgery.”

  “Can you let me try it?” I asked, and he said sure. He prescribed an injection every two weeks and pills to take in between. He told me, “Take these for three months and stop the day the competition is over.”

  Steroids made me hungrier and thirstier and helped me gain weight, though it was mostly water weight, which was not ideal because it interfered with definition. I learned to use the drugs in the final six or eight weeks leading up to a major competition. They could help you win, but the advantage they gave was about the same as having a good suntan.

  Later on, after I retired from bodybuilding, drug use became a major problem in the sport. Guys were taking doses of steroids twenty times the amount of anything we took, and when human growth hormone came on the scene, things really got out of hand. There were instances where bodybuilders died. I’ve worked hard since then with the International Federation of Bodybuilding and other organizations to get drugs banned from the sport.

  The total effect of all these training refinements was that by September 1967, when I got on the plane again for London, I was packing another ten pounds of muscle.

  That second Mr. Universe competition was every bit as good as I imagined. I went up against bodybuilders from South Africa, India, England, Jamaica, Scotland, Trinidad, Mexico, the United States, and dozens of other countries. For the first time, I heard people chanting “Arnold! Arnold!” I’d never experienced anything like that before. As I stood on the pedestal, holding my trophy, just the way I’d envisioned, I actually was able to deliver the right words in English to show some class and share the fun. I said into the microphone, “It is my lifetime ambition realized. I am very happy to be Mr. Universe. I say it again, it sounds so good. I am very happy to be Mr. Universe. My thanks to everyone in England who have helped me. They have been very kind to me. Thank you all.”

  Being Mr. Universe brought me a lifestyle beyond a young man’s wildest dreams. In warm weather, the bodybuilders would pile into our old cars and head for the countryside and do the gladiator thing—grill fresh meat and drink wine and occupy ourselves with girls. At night I was hanging out with an international crowd of bar owners, musicians, bar girls—one of my girlfriends was a stripper and one was a gypsy. But I was wild only when I was wild. When it was time to train, I never missed a session.

  Reg Park had promised that if I won Mr. Universe, he would invite me to South Africa for exhibitions and promotions. So the morning after the competition, I sent him a telegram saying, “I won. When am I coming?” Reg was as good as his word. He sent a plane ticket, and over the holiday season of 1967, I spent three weeks in Johannesburg with him, his wife Mareon, and their kids Jon Jon and Jeunesse. Reg and I traveled all over South Africa, including Pretoria and Cape Town, giving exhibitions.

  Up until then, I had only the dimmest idea of what success in bodybuilding and movies and business really meant. Seeing Reg’s happy family and prosperous life inspired me as much as seeing him play Hercules. Reg had started as a working-class kid in Leeds and was a bodybuilding star in America by the time he fell in love with Mareon in the 1950s. He took her to England and married her, but Leeds depressed her, so they moved back to South Africa, where he started his gymnasium chain. The business had done very well. Their house, which he called Mount Olympus, overlooked the city and had a swimming pool and gardens. The interior was roomy, beautiful, comfortable, and filled with art. As much as I was loving my hard-training, fun-loving, brawling, girl-chasing lifestyle in Munich, living with the Parks reminded me to keep my sights set higher than that.

  Reg would wake me up at five o’clock each morning; by five thirty we’d be at his gym at 42 Kirk Street working out. I never even got up at that hour, but now I learned the advantage of training early, before the day starts, when there are no other responsibilities and nobody else is asking anything of you. Reg also taught me a key lesson about psychological limits. I’d worked my way up to three hundred pounds of weight in calf raises, beyond any other bodybuilder I knew. I thought I must be near the limit of human achievement. So I was amazed to see Reg doing calf raises with one thousand pounds.

  “The limit is in your mind,” he said. “Think about it: three hundred pounds is less than walking. You weigh two hundred fifty, so you are lifting two hundred fifty pounds with each calf every time you take a step. To really train, you have to go beyond that.” And he was right. The limit I thought existed was purely psychological. Now that I’d seen someone doing a thousand pounds, I started making leaps in my training.

  It showed the power of mind over body. In weight lifting, for many years there was a 500-pound barrier in the clean and jerk—kind of like the four-minute barrier in the mile, which wasn’t broken until Roger Bannister did it in 1954. But as soon as the great Russian weight lifter Vasily Alekseyev set a new world record of 501 in 1970, three other guys lifted more than 500 pounds within a year.

  I saw the same thing with my training partner Franco Columbu. One afternoon years later we were taking turns doing squats at Gold’s Gym in California. I did six reps with 500 pounds. Even though Franco was stronger than me in the squat, he did only four reps and put the bar back. “I’m so tired,” he said. Just then I saw a couple of girls from the beach come into the gym and went over to say hello. Then I
came back and told Franco, “They don’t believe you can squat five hundred pounds.” I knew how much he loved showing off, especially when there were girls around. Sure enough, he said, “I’m gonna show them. Watch this.” He picked up the 500 pounds and did ten reps. He made it look easy. This was the same body that had been too tired ten minutes before. His thighs were probably screaming “What the fuck?” So what had changed? The mind. Sports are so physical that it’s easy to overlook the mind’s power, but I’ve seen it demonstrated again and again.

  The immediate challenge for me back in Munich was how to use being Mr. Universe to attract more customers to our gym. Bodybuilding was still so obscure and considered so weird that winning the championship made no splash at all outside the gyms. I’d gotten more celebrity from lifting the heavy stone in the beer hall.

  But Albert came up with an idea. If we had asked the newspapers to write a story about me winning Mr. Universe, they’d have thought we were nuts. Instead he had me walk around the city on a freezing day in my posing briefs. Then he called some of his newspaper friends and said, “You remember Schwarzenegger who won the stone-lifting contest? Well, now he’s Mr. Universe, and he’s at Stachus square in his underwear.” A couple of editors thought that was funny enough to send photographers. I led them all over the city: from the market to the Hauptbahnhof, where I made a point of chatting up little old ladies to show I was friendly and nice and not some kind of monster. This is what politicians do all the time, but it was very unusual for a bodybuilder. In spite of the cold, I was having fun. The next morning a picture ran in one of the papers of me in my briefs and at a construction site, where one of the workers who was all bundled up against the cold was gawking at me in amazement.