From Pumping Iron to Pushing Political Ideas
By Sharon Waxman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 28, 2003; Page A07
Arnold Schwarzenegger first gained public notice
as a champion bodybuilder. By the age of 20, he
had become Mr. Universe, the youngest person
to hold the title in the competition's history.
LOS ANGELES -- When Twentieth Century Fox was releasing the action thriller "Commando" in 1985, the film's rising star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, went to see Fox chairman Barry Diller to demand more billboard advertising for the movie's release. Diller told him: "I don't believe in billboards," and turned him down. But when Schwarzenegger relayed the news to other Fox executives, they laughed and said: "He's b.s.-ing you. On '48 Hours' we had a big billboard on Sunset."
From that experience, Schwarzenegger drew a lesson: It was his own fault -- for not being prepared. "I did not do the proper research," he later chided himself during an interview. "You've got to have your act together. You have to have a total understanding."
The actor's reaction lends insight into the rise of the candidate now competing for the governorship of California. Schwarzenegger's much-noted ambition helped him conquer bodybuilding and the movies, and his willingness to learn helped him garner a fortune through a range of business ventures. Those who know him say that his transition from bodybuilder to politician has brought with it a maturity and a political evolution as well.
Now, as California hurtles toward the Oct. 7 vote on whether to replace Gov. Gray Davis (D), Schwarzenegger's evolution is being examined more closely than ever before. Dubbed a "rock-ribbed conservative Republican" in the 1970s, he opposed gun control, believed in up-by-the-bootstraps economics and thought women belonged in the kitchen, or the bedroom. But over time, Schwarzenegger, 56, evolved into a political moderate: Though he angered some Latino voters here with his support of a referendum a decade ago to ban government services for illegal immigrants, he backs what he calls "sensible" gun control and abortion rights and led a voter initiative last year to provide after-school care for poor families.
Schwarzenegger's political development over the past three decades has been influenced by the entertainment industry; his exposure to career women such as his wife, television journalist Maria Shriver of the Kennedy family; contact with his wife's family; his volunteer work with minority and immigrant children in Los Angeles; and his own parenting of four children.
If not yet a liberal, Schwarzenegger -- the man who persuaded General Motors to sell the military Hummer to civilians -- is at least now having his eight-mile-a-gallon truck retrofitted for hydrogen technology. To some, Schwarzenegger's shift is nothing short of astonishing. But those who know him say they are not surprised.
"He's a person who actually does grow and evolve," said Charlotte Parker, who was Schwarzenegger's publicist for 15 years, during his rise from obscurity to the height of his stardom. "He's had many years surrounded by sophisticated, intelligent, accomplished people. He aspires to learn from them, and he surrounded himself with those people."
Schwarzenegger declined requests for an interview for this article but has left a long record of his thoughts and opinions in interviews over the past 25 years.
"In the past I was inexperienced, insensitive and intolerant. I was not as worldly or sophisticated as I might have been. But I am a lot different these days. I've learnt a lot" he said in 1999 to the British men's magazine, Loaded. But in that same interview, Schwarzenegger showed he hadn't shed his macho persona that many movie fans adore but which can play poorly on the campaign trail:
"Apologies are for wimps," he said. "If you behave like a wimp, you're going to get stiffed, simple as that. If you're a man then you should behave like a man."
Schwarzenegger's political evolution from being "to the right of Genghis Khan," as "Pumping Iron" producer George Butler put it recently, started well after he became a celebrity. But his interest in politics appears to go back almost as far as his interest in bodybuilding.
Schwarzenegger signed up with the Republican Party shortly after arriving in the United States, while watching a Richard Nixon-Hubert Humphrey debate in 1968 with a friend who interpreted it for him because his English was still poor. Nixon was espousing ideas that appealed to Schwarzenegger: A strong military. Less government bureaucracy. Free trade. He told his friend: "I love what this guy is saying. If this guy is a Republican, then I am a Republican."
Years later Schwarzenegger told the story to Nixon, and the former president told him he should try politics himself. "If you ever run for governor, you have my help," Nixon told him, the actor recalled last year to the Weekly Standard.
Schwarzenegger's instinctive affinity for conservative ideas was an outgrowth of his background and his personal philosophy of self-reliance.
He grew up in a small, southern Austrian village, Thal, where poverty was pervasive, food was scarce, and communism was just across the border. The Schwarzenegger home had no refrigerator or flush toilet.
His father, Gustav, was the village's police chief, a harsh disciplinarian and a heavy drinker. Schwarzenegger has said that his father showed little outward love and had no patience for children. "There was a wall. He established that wall," the actor told Rolling Stone in 1985. "I always knew that punishments could come at any time if I screwed up."
Screwing up meant, for example, having spelling or grammar errors in the 10-page essays that Schwarzenegger and his older brother, Meinhard, had to write on Sunday after Saturday outings. Their father sometimes pitted the boys against one another in boxing and skiing races. To Arnold, every loss was a lesson: Winning was all that mattered in his father's eyes. Ultimately, it became Arnold's mantra as well.
Schwarzenegger had a much closer relationship with his mother. His maternal ideal is anchored in the glowing memories of her devotion to the family and cleanliness -- "you could eat off the floors" he once told an interviewer. "I have one of the best mothers anybody could have."
Despite the hardships, Schwarzenegger has frequently extolled the values instilled by the austerity of his childhood. It drove him, he said, to become goal-oriented and self-sufficient. "I would want a bicycle, and he [my father] would say, 'Get it yourself. Work,' " he said.
Work he did. By 15, Schwarzenegger had already determined to be a champion bodybuilder, a goal he reached by the age of 20, becoming the youngest Mr. Universe in the competition's history.
He constantly sought out mentors who would help him. In 1966, Schwarzenegger moved to London where he lived with Wag Bennett and his wife. Bennett, a bodybuilding judge who groomed young talent, routinely asked the young bodybuilders what they wanted to achieve in life. "When I asked Arnold that question, his answer was 'I want to be the greatest bodybuilder in the world, the greatest bodybuilder of all time, and the richest bodybuilder in the world. I want to live in the United States and own an apartment block and be a film star,' " Bennett told Wendy Leigh, a British author who has written an unauthorized biography of Schwarzenegger.
Moving to Southern California in the late 1960s, Schwarzenegger quickly accomplished most of those goals. By 1975 when he retired from bodybuilding, he had won Mr. Universe titles four times, Mr. World once and Mr. Olympia six times (he would win the latter title again in 1980, returning from retirement).
With his bodybuilding success, Schwarzenegger simultaneously turned his attention to business, writing best-selling books on fitness, starting a mail-order business and beginning to amass lucrative real estate holdings in Santa Monica, Denver and Ohio.
The real money, however, was in Hollywood. By the late 1970s, Schwarzenegger had turned to an acting career in earnest, after the surprise success of the documentary "Pumping Iron."
In 1977, Schwarzenegger gave a now-controversial interview to Oui magazine, boasting of a "gang-bang" with a woman bodybuilder, describing the sexual encounter in the lewdest of terms. He now claims that he made up the story to "get headlines. We were promoting bodybuilding," he told a Los Angeles television station earlier this month.
Still, Schwarzenegger's crude comments about women have come back to haunt him on the campaign trail. Some women's groups have criticized him, and at a recent political convention in Los Angeles, protesters held a banner reading "Groper for Governor." Polls show his support among women voters is far less than among men.
"Arnold does not have outdated views on women," said his wife, Shriver, who declined to speak in more detail on the question. "Ask any of the women who've worked for him."
There weren't many jobs in Hollywood for brawny Austrians with thick accents and no evident acting ability. But Schwarzenegger, as he has said many times, created a market for himself. He first won the attention of the entertainment industry as the heroic lead in "Conan the Barbarian" in 1982, and then became a pop culture icon with the 1984 film "The Terminator," playing a robot who comes from the future to exact revenge.
That film was followed by a stream of violent, action blockbusters -- "Commando," "Predator," "Running Man," "Total Recall." Schwarzenegger became emblematic of the star-driven action movies that dominated Hollywood in the 1980s and early into the 1990s.
He had reached the pinnacle, and ever since has been surrounded by a coterie of agents, managers, lawyers, publicists and handlers who have burnished his image and protected him in public and in private. Schwarzenegger lived in the rarified world of a Hollywood star where almost no behavior is unacceptable, no whim too outrageous, no idea less than brilliant. He could dictate the terms of an interview, as he often did, and at times even insisted on controlling the publication dates of stories about him.
He enjoyed celebrity stardom and the adoring coverage that went with it. It wasn't until Premiere magazine profiled him in 2001 that Schwarzenegger took some of his toughest hits from the Hollywood press. The article detailed alleged sexual trysts with women on movie sets and complaints from women about him touching them inappropriately.
It was widely viewed in Hollywood that the article derailed what many analysts believed was Schwarzenegger's tentative plan to run for governor in 2002.
During the 1970s and early '80s, Schwarzenegger had been increasingly active in politics, and his conservative views tracked with his cultural image.
In 1980, he boasted that his political views hadn't changed since he was 18 years old. He was devoutly anti-Communist, believed in the death penalty, low taxes and minimal government.
In 1984, Schwarzenegger attended the Republican national convention in Dallas, giving a speech about how thrilled he was to be able to vote -- a year after becoming a citizen -- for Ronald Reagan. He called Reagan one of his heroes: "He's done the impossible," he said in Rolling Stone. "He's never been beaten in any election. He's really in touch with the people, which is why he wins."
A staunch defender of the violence in his films -- journalists had taken to counting the bodies -- Schwarzenegger supported the National Rifle Association. "Outlawing guns is not the right method of eliminating the problem" of violence, he said in 1988.
But change was in the air, most significantly in Schwarzenegger's marriage in 1986 to Shriver, daughter of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of John F. Kennedy, and Sargent Shriver, who was George McGovern's running mate in 1972. It was the beginning of his sustained exposure to Democrats and liberal activists.
"At home, I'm surrounded by Democrats," he told the St. Petersburg Times in 1987. "Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden are always coming over to the house. And we have a great time because we have so much in common despite our politics."
At the time, Joan Goodman, a seasoned celebrity journalist, interviewed Schwarzenegger over several months for a 1988 Playboy magazine article. In a transcript of his unpublished remarks Goodman provided to The Washington Post, Schwarzenegger compared the prejudice faced by black actors to his experience as an Austrian immigrant trying to get work in Hollywood and compared the Mexican immigrant experience to his own.
"He can't really compare himself to Mexicans coming over the border," Goodman said in an interview for this article. "That's kind of insensitive of him. It's weird, but he doesn't seem to realize that he's saying things that are offensive."
But Schwarzenegger's actions sometimes belied his politically incorrect talk. He began to do charity work with the Special Olympics, which Eunice Shriver had founded.
Schwarzenegger remained a Republican and forged a close friendship with then-Vice President George H. W. Bush. Bush attended the premiere of the actor's movie "Twins" in 1988, while Schwarzenegger threw his star power behind Bush's campaign for president the same year. He traveled around the country making speeches on Bush's behalf.
In 1990, Bush rewarded Schwarzenegger by naming him chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. Schwarzenegger used the post to promote fitness.
His role on the fitness council led to his introduction to the Hollenbeck Youth Center in East Los Angeles, an urban community center. That in turn led to the establishing of the actor's own charity, the Inner-City Games, now held in cities around the country. The presidential appointment "opened his eyes. When he traveled around the country, he realized that some kids in America don't have boots," said Bonnie Reiss, a former entertainment lawyer who is advising Schwarzenegger's campaign. "He saw that some kids don't have parents. He started seeing the way kids in America live."
At the same time, Schwarzenegger found himself diverging from his party as Republicans took control of the House and Newt Gingrich became speaker.
"No one knows what our party really stands for rather than going from one convention to the next talking about what we're against," he complained in 1999 to George magazine. "Guys like [Pat] Buchanan are up there and speaking about, 'We are anti-gay and we're anti-lesbian. We are anti-taxation and anti-federal government.' '' He said he was ashamed to call himself a Republican during the impeachment.
In 1997, after undergoing heart surgery, Schwarzenegger quipped, "We made, actually, history, because it was the first time ever that doctors could prove that a lifelong Republican has a heart." He stopped making major donations to the party and kept a low profile in the past few election campaigns even as he gave hints that he might run for office in California.
Schwarzenegger made his first public political move in 2002 by campaigning for Proposition 49, the ballot proposal for before- and after-school programs sponsored by the state, which the conservative American Spectator magazine derided as "nanny-state liberalism at its best."
"I think this is one place he felt comfortable, because he and his wife likely agreed precisely on this issue," said Sheri Annis, a political consultant who worked with Schwarzenegger on the initiative. "This was an issue that didn't ruffle a lot of feathers in his family life and something he strongly believed in."
The campaign was a political success for Schwarzenegger and a sure sign of his political evolution from his swagger-talking bodybuilding days. Whether it is where he expected to be at this point in his life, he clearly had been contemplating the journey for a long time.
He told the German magazine Stern in 1977: "When one has money, one day it becomes less interesting. And when one is also the best in film, what can be more interesting? Perhaps power. Then one moves into politics and becomes governor or president or something."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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