a parent, but also because it was kind of a reward for the hardships of her earlier life. When I look at the photographs of her at twenty-three or twenty-four, when my brother and I were born, she looked haggard and skinny. It was after the war. She was begging for food. She had a husband who got crazy and drunk every so often. She was in this little village. The weather was shitty a lot of times, with rain, snow, and gloom, except in the summer. She never had enough money. It was a struggle all along.
So I felt that in her remaining years, she should have the best time possible. She would be rewarded for carrying us kids at midnight over the mountain to the hospital when we got sick, for being there when I needed her. Also, she should be rewarded for the pain that I caused her by leaving. She deserved to be treated like a queen.
We buried my mother at the gravesite where she died, next to my dad, which was very sad but also romantic. She was so connected to him.
If Easter belonged to my mom, Thanksgiving was a special Sarge and Eunice holiday from long before we got married. Shriver children, spouses, and grandchildren would always converge on their beautiful white Georgian mansion outside Washington. It was like a three-day family festival. Many couples have to negotiate about whether to spend a holiday with the in-laws, but this arrangement just fell into place naturally. I said to Maria, “Let’s stay with this because we have a great time at Thanksgiving with your parents and then we can always have Christmas at home. It doesn’t mean your parents can’t come, but we’ll have Christmas on our turf.” She liked that as well. I was always sensitive that our marriage had taken her far from her family and that she often missed them and wanted to hang out even though she also wanted her independence. So I always told her, “Remember that any of your family you want to invite is automatically a guest of mine too.” Welcoming my in-laws was easy because I liked them a great deal, and they always brought laughter and fun.
Thanksgiving at the Shriver house started out with church—Sarge and Eunice went to Mass every day— followed by breakfast and then lots of sports. In Georgetown, there were great clothes stores and gift shops that offered different merchandise than shops in California, so I’d grab the opportunity to get a start on Christmas shopping. We’d meet again at night, and many times Teddy would come over with his wife for dinner or drinks, or Robert Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist, would come with his son, or his sister Courtney and her little girl, Saoirse (her name is pronounced
I always believed that Eunice and Sarge would have a big influence on our children. They certainly did on me. I worked with them on the Special Olympics, serving as a torchbearer to help the organization expand. The summer when Katherine was twelve and the other kids ranged in age down to four, Maria and I brought them all along on a mission to South Africa.
This was my first visit there in twenty-six years, since I’d won Mr. Olympia in Pretoria during the days of apartheid. It was breathtaking to see how the country had changed. Back then, Mr. Olympia had been the first racially integrated athletic competition there. During my visits to South Africa in those early days, I’d become friends with Piet Koornhof, the minister of sports and culture and a strong progressive voice against apartheid. He opened the way for me to do bodybuilding exhibitions in the townships and said, “Every time you do something for whites, I’d like to see you do something for blacks.” He’d also taken the lead in getting South Africa to bid for the Mr. Olympia competition, and I’d been part of the delegation from the International Federation of Body Building that worked with him. Now apartheid was long gone, and Nelson Mandela was the nation’s distinguished former president.
Since leaving office, Mandela had committed himself to raising the profile of the Special Olympics across the entire continent, where millions of people with intellectual disabilities were stigmatized, ignored, or worse. Sarge and Eunice had planned to come with us, but Eunice, who’d just turned eighty, broke her leg in a car crash a day before we left. So when we got to Cape Town, it was up to us, the younger generation: Maria, me, and her brother Tim, who’d succeeded Sarge as Special Olympics president. Tim brought his wife, Linda, and their five kids as well.
Mandela was a hero to me. I got goose bumps when he talked in his speeches about inclusion, tolerance, and forgiveness—the opposite of what you might expect from a black man in a white racist nation who’d rotted in prison for twenty-seven years. Such virtue doesn’t just happen, especially not in prison, so to me it was like God had put him among us.
We were there to launch a torch run involving athletes from across southern Africa. It was for the dual purpose of raising the profile of the Special Olympics and supporting the cause of law enforcement within South Africa itself. Mandela lit the flame in the grimmest possible setting: his old cell at the Robben Island prison. Standing there, we had a chance to talk before we began, and I asked how he’d achieved insight in such a place. I’m sure he’d been asked this a thousand times, but he said the most remarkable thing. Mandela said it was good that he’d been in prison. It had given him time to think—time to decide that his approach as a violent young man had been wrong, and to be ready to emerge as the person he is. I admired him, but I didn’t know what to make of that. Was it real or just something he’d talked himself into? Could Mandela really believe that twenty-seven years in a cell was necessary? Or was he looking at the bigger picture: what those lost years meant to South Africa, not to him? You’re just one person, and the country is much bigger, and it’s what will live forever. That was a powerful thought. Afterward, I said to Maria, “I don’t know if I can buy it or not, but it was amazing for him to say—that he felt totally content with what he went through and with losing whole decades.”
The kids were with Maria and me throughout the day. Of course Christopher, who was just four, wasn’t taking in as much as his brother and his sisters, who were eight, ten, and twelve. But I knew that seeing all this would have an impact, even if they didn’t understand everything right away. At some point they would write papers at school about meeting Mandela, and lighting the torch, and hearing him compare the prejudice that Special Olympians face with the injustice of apartheid. They’d be able to look back and ask Maria and me about what we’d all seen, and then write about the beauties of Cape Town and the contrast with the townships and the poverty of families who live there. The experience would take time to sink in. Before leaving Africa, we spent a few days on safari, which for everybody was an instant 10. I was just as amazed as the kids were watching what seemed like the entire animal kingdom roaming round before our eyes: lions, monkeys, elephants, giraffes. And then at night to lie in a tent and hear the calls and the cries all around. The ranger was on the lookout for a particular lioness that had a special tag on its ear. It was time to replace a tracking device the lion wore. Finally, he spotted the lioness and said, “I have to tranquilize her.” He took careful aim and shot her with a dart, and suddenly the lioness was roaring, pissed off, and running away. “She’ll make it about two hundred yards,” the ranger said. Sure enough, all of a sudden the lioness was walking, and then she was looking back at us, and, finally, she rolled onto her side.
We drove to him and got out, and the kids had a chance to take pictures and to see how big the paws were; bigger than their faces. Big cats have always fascinated me. When we were filming
A full-grown lioness can easily weigh three times as much. But I couldn’t resist resting my chin on top of the lioness’s head to show the kids how big it was; compared to hers, mine looked like a little pin. We laughed and took pictures, and I was
I was always thankful for the opportunity to spend more time with my family and take them on holidays and adventures. But I also wanted to get my movie career moving again, and that took some real doing. I had to mount a whole campaign to convince people that I could still do the job. Sitting down with Barbara Walters on national TV nine months after my heart surgery was a first step. “You could have died,” she said. “Were you scared?”
“I was very scared,” I told her, especially when the valve repair went wrong and they had to do it again. I thought the best approach was to let people see me and to lay out the facts. She asked about my family, teased me
