|
Man behind the muscles { August 11 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://us.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/08/11/timep.arnold.tm/http://us.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/08/11/timep.arnold.tm/
The mind behind the muscles
By Richard Lacayo
Monday, August 11, 2003 Posted: 4:11 PM EDT (2011 GMT)
The man and the political goals beneath the movie-star mystique
Last Thursday, when Arnold Schwarzenegger arrived at the county government building in Norwalk, Calif., you could tell with no trouble that he was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood—and not just if you measure lat spread.
He was trailed by a media contingent of the kind that usually turns out for George W. Bush. With the arched cushions of his pectorals thrusting out like an advance party, Schwarzenegger treated it all as his due.
We're talking after all about a man who once routinely walked out on stages in a bathing suit to the opening theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Making his way through an adoring crowd of office workers, he approached the counter and announced his intention to file his candidacy for Governor. Then he smiled and asked clerk Tanya Ramirez, "You know who I am, right?"
You bet she does—and that's the California election in a nutshell. Thirty-five years after he arrived in the U.S., Schwarzenegger is a name that everybody knows, even if one that not everybody can spell. And in the pinwheeling world of the California recall, that alone may be enough to make him, at 56, the man who replaces Gray Davis as Governor.
But when it comes to knowing a public figure, what we expect from elected officials is something different from what we settle for from movie stars. A guy can spend decades playing killer robots and musclehead commandos without once being asked to provide the timeline on his steroid use, fill in the picture on his sex life or clarify his position on offshore oil drilling. On the Today show last week, Arnold was asked twice whether he would make his tax returns public. He claimed he couldn't hear the question.
So just who is Arnold, and what does he bring to public life other than a cumulonimbus physique and the thickest Mittel-european accent since Henry Kissinger? Gary Coleman, the onetime TV actor who is also running for Governor, may be the very definition of a long-shot candidate. But even he has a website with a platform. That's more than you can say for Schwarzenegger.
Last week he was still mostly saying things like, "I will pump up Sacramento!" Friends describe him as a moderate Republican, fiscally conservative but libertarian on most social issues. They also say he's a true conservative, a man who keeps a bust of Ronald Reagan in his office. What that means exactly is still something of a mystery.
Whatever kind of Republican Schwarzenegger may be, it's probably not the kind to give much comfort to a cultural conservative like Pat Robertson. The actor has said he's pro-choice, though how he feels about things like parental notification and partial-birth abortion is unknown.
He's loud and clear about his support for gay rights, including adoption rights. He once told Cosmopolitan magazine, "I have no sexual standards in my head that say this is good or this is bad. Homosexual—that only means to me that he enjoys sex with a man and I enjoy sex with a woman. It's all legitimate to me."
Charlton Heston probably won't like him either. In The Terminator Schwarzenegger goes into a gun store and picks out a "12-gauge auto loader, a .45 long slide, a phase plasma rifle and an Uzi 9 mm." (Then he kills the guy behind the counter.) But as Schwarzenegger began to think of himself as a potential political candidate, he became sensitive on the gun issue, telling one interviewer, "I'm for gun control. I'm a peace-loving guy."
Then again, Arnold also describes himself as an environmentalist, but no one did more to popularize the gas-guzzling Humvee as a car for ordinary civilians. When a reporter asked him last week to detail his environmental positions, he made do with "I will fight for the environment. Nothing to worry about."
One of the first members of Congress to endorse Schwarzenegger's candidacy was Dana Rohrabacher, a longtime friend who is one of the most conservative members of the California congressional delegation. Is that just further evidence of Arnold's gift for befriending people of all kinds, or does Rohrabacher know something the rest of us don't?
As for how to deal with California's most urgent problem, its $8 billion deficit, Schwarzenegger is not saying much yet, except that, in the end, it's all about leadership. And leadership is one thing we know for sure has fascinated Schwarzenegger for years. His implacable ambition, from the world of bodybuilding to Hollywood, is the most legendary part of his legend.
"Arnold has been interested in power and authority—political power, financial power—forever," says George Butler, a co-director of Pumping Iron, the 1977 documentary that made Arnold a star in the world beyond bodybuilding. "I was born to be a leader," Schwarzenegger once told Britain's Loaded magazine. "I love the fact that millions of people look up to me."
So let's agree that Arnold has his triumph-of-the-will side. So do Madonna, P. Diddy and Norman Mailer. Beyond a consuming ambition and an unshakable faith in his destiny, what is he about? Even longtime friends say he can be a little mysterious. "If you follow Arnold carefully, he always has a new circle of people," says Butler. "He's not keen on having people get too close to him and know too much about him before he moves on to the next group." Or you can look at it the way Lou Pitt does. Schwarzenegger's former agent says, "He reminds me in some ways of Clinton. He's incredibly personable and very connected to people, very much a people person."
One crowd that Arnold has stayed with for a while are old bodybuilding friends, a faithful circle that includes Franco Columbu, the Sancho Panza of Schwarzenegger's early days, who says Arnold is running for Governor to give something back to the country that has been so good to him. "He wants to do a big, beneficial thing, more than a movie—like straightening out this problem in California."
Schwarzenegger also keeps up with Joe Weider, the onetime head of the International Federation of BodyBuilders who brought the 21-year old Austrian to the U.S. in 1968 when Schwarzenegger was already a two-time Mr. Universe, the youngest ever.
Schwarzenegger, his wife Maria Shriver and their four children—Katherine, 13; Christina, 12; Patrick, 9 and Christopher, 5—live in the kind of place that Hollywood-Kennedy royalty would be expected to inhabit. Their home is a five-bedroom, 11-bathroom, Tudor-style pile. It measures 11,000 sq. ft. on six ocean-view acres in Brentwood.
Visitors to their home bring back tales of Arnie's lavish humidors, the enormous ceilings and the Warhol silkscreen of Shriver. It all goes with Arnold's fortune—estimated at several hundred million. That comes largely from movies—he was paid $30 million for Terminator 3—but also from real estate like the Columbus, Ohio, shopping mall he invested in.
The Schwarzenegger-Shrivers, both avid skiers, also keep a home in Sun Valley, Idaho, where the locals include Democratic presidential contender Senator John Kerry. "They named one of the runs there the Schwarzenegger run," says Al Ruddy, a movie producer and family friend. "You've got to have balls just to look down there. I wouldn't go down it for $100,000. But Arnold attacks the mountains."
Another group of friends is drawn from family, like his nephew Patrick Knapp, a lawyer, and Bobby Shriver, his wife's brother, who is a political activist and movie producer. Friends say the Kennedy-Shriver clan has softened the edges of Schwarzenegger's politics from the time he came into their orbit in the late 1970s. "Arnold was quite right wing when I first met him in 1972," says Butler. "Maria has moderated that quite a lot."
In 1999 Schwarzenegger told George magazine of his bitterness about the frenzy over Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton and the waste of time and energy it represented. "That was another thing I will never forgive the Republican party for," he said. "I was ashamed to call myself a Republican during that period." But Arnold may identify with Clinton for any number of reasons. Two years ago, when he first considered a gubernatorial run, Gary South, a strategist for Governor Gray Davis, sent reporters a story from Premiere magazine that accused the star of repeatedly groping female interviewers and detailed various extramarital shenanigans on the sets of his films—claims that Schwarzenegger denies.
The article also raised the issues of Schwarzenegger's steroid use, which he has admitted in several interviews but claims to have ended at an unspecified time in the distant past. Just when that was and whether it was related to the heart-valve-replacement surgery he underwent in 1997 are questions that are sure to dog him during the campaign. So is the rumor that he is on dialysis, a consequence of steroid abuse. "Absolutely not!" says Columbu. "The first time I heard the dialysis rumor was when we were skiing in Sun Valley. I got a call from someone telling me that Arnold was on dialysis, and I said, 'No he's not. He's here skiing with me.'"
Arnold's contradictions—if that's what they are—are an outgrowth of his two formative experiences: an iron-heel upbringing in Austria followed by all the lubrications of sun and fun and wealth that we still call California. He was born in the Austrian village of Thal, near Graz, in 1947, in the struggling years right after World War II. His mother was a homemaker. His father was a policeman and an avid performer of military music, which may help explain why Schwarzenegger sometimes reminds you of a one-man oompah band.
And most significantly perhaps, the elder Schwarzenegger was a Nazi. Wendy Leigh, a British free-lancer who published an unauthorized biography of Schwarzenegger in 1990, discovered that Arnold's father had joined the party on July 4, 1938, just months after the Anschluss, Germany's annexation of Austria. Regardless of whether that was a step Arnold's father took gladly, in America we don't visit the sins of the father onto the children.
All the same, Arnold did not always take care to avoid those associations himself. One of the guests he invited to his 1986 wedding to Shriver was Austrian presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim. At the time Waldheim was revealed to have been a former Nazi Party member. But Schwarzenegger has tried to neutralize that question many times over. In the past decade he raised millions for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and the center's Museum of Tolerance.
After the Leigh biography was published he asked Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center, to confirm whether his father had joined the Nazi Party—which researchers for the center eventually did, adding that he was no war criminal. Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger has had close Jewish friends from the time he left Austria.
Paul Wachter, a financial adviser who heads Schwarzenegger's chief charity, the Inner City Games Foundation, is even chairman of the Austrian Holocaust Reparations Committee, a body formed by a U.S. federal court to administer the Holocaust settlement fund of the Austrian bank.
In any event, as with many kids, home was a place that Arnold was looking to escape. When his father died while Arnold was living in the U.S., he did not return for the funeral. He has said variously that he was too deep into his training or that he was hospitalized. He had long since made his escape from home by way of bodybuilding. At 19 he went AWOL from his Austrian army base to enter a competition that he won.
At 20 he won the first of five Mr. Universe titles, the hypertrophies of the sport. By that time, Schwarzenegger was literally a self-made man, exploring ways to reach hard-to-perfect areas of his body. "I became my own researcher," he once told TIME. "I would do a curl, for example, and turn my wrist in a certain way, and the next day it would feel sore on the outside of the biceps. If I didn't turn my wrist, it wasn't sore. So I wrote it down."
It was just weeks after he arrived in the U.S. in September 1968, during the Nixon-Humphrey presidential campaign, that Arnold began thinking of himself as a Republican. Humphrey's promises about big government programs sounded too much to him like the sluggish socialism back home in Austria.
It wasn't long after his arrival in the U.S. that Arnold also lost at his third attempt at the Mr. Universe contest, held that year in Miami. In his 1977 autobiography, The Education of a Bodybuilder, he claims that he cried himself to sleep that night. But by the next day, he had got himself together. "I'm going to pay [the Americans] back," he decided. "I would use their food and their knowledge and work it against them. I would make it in America too."
During his years as a professional bodybuilder, Arnold made his living partly by organizing bodybuilding shows, publishing workout manuals and endorsing muscle products in the pages of Weider magazines. We have all done embarrassing things, but if Schwarzenegger is elected Governor, he will certainly be the first major American political figure to have once advertised "strong arm bracelets" with the tag line, "Are you man enough to wear them?"
All along, he plotted his film career with the same determination that devised his flesh. He had started in the early '70s with roles in movies like Hercules in New York—sometimes also titled Hercules Goes Bananas—that are good for a laugh if you can find them in video stores. Keep in mind that Ronald Reagan once made a chimp movie called Bedtime for Bonzo.
When he first hit it big in 1982 in Conan the Barbarian, there were those who doubted that he would ever move beyond myth-and-muscle vehicles. But he arrived on the scene in the post-Star Wars years, when once-despised genres like science fiction and action-adventure were raised into big-budget and big-profit status. Acting could be secondary to spectacle, and Arnold was a spectacle all by himself.
Who cared whether he talked with an accent that could make a killer robot sound as if it had stepped down from a Salzburg cuckoo clock? With those early films he proved that he wasn't just another guy in a loincloth. He used to have just his biceps. Now he could flex his box office.
And soon his political muscles. By 1988 he was campaigning aggressively for George Bush, telling crowds that Michael Dukakis would be the real Terminator if he ever made it to Washington. A grateful Bush later made Schwarzenegger the chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, a position that gave Arnold the power to talk to school groups about fitness and conduct push-up drills for Colin Powell on the White House lawn.
The position that Arnold has in mind for himself requires more than muscle. Now that he has a campaign, he has been assembling a team that includes several veterans who helped get former California Governor Pete Wilson elected.
The first thing they need to do is move past messages like the one Arnold delivered last week: "We have to make sure everyone in California has a fantastic job." We know he has a fantastic job in mind for himself. What he might have in store for other Californians is hard to say.
—Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/ Los Angeles and Angela Leuker/Vienna
|
|
