Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

family’s privacy, which remains a priority of mine today.

And then, knowing that the story would break the next morning, I had to tell my kids. I told Katherine and Christina over the phone, because they were in Chicago with Maria for Oprah Winfrey’s farewell show. Patrick and Christopher were home with me, so I asked them to sit down and told them face to face. In each conversation I explained that I’d made a mistake. I said, “I am sorry about it. This happened with Mildred fourteen years ago and she got pregnant and now there’s a child by the name of Joseph. It doesn’t change my love for you and I hope it doesn’t change your love for me. But that is what happened. I’m terribly sorry about it. Your mother is very upset and disappointed. I’ll work very hard to bring everyone together again. This is going to be a challenging time, and I hope it won’t be too awful with the response of other kids at school, or the parents when you go to your friends’ houses, or when you turn on TV or pick up the paper.”

I should have added “or go on the internet,” because one of the first things that Katherine and Patrick each did was tweet how they felt. Patrick quoted from the rock song “Where’d You Go”: “some days you feel like shit, some days you want to quit and just be normal for a bit,” and added, “yet I love my family till death do us part.” Katherine wrote, “This is definitely not easy but I appreciate your love and support as I begin to heal and move forward in life. I will always love my family!”

It took weeks for them to begin to trust the fact that our family hadn’t totally blown up. Our kids saw Maria and me communicating almost daily. They saw us go out for lunch or dinner. Patrick and Christopher developed a certain rhythm going back and forth between the house and the condo. All of this helped restore a little bit of stability.

I regretted also the impact on Mildred and Joseph. They weren’t used to living in the public eye, and all of a sudden they found themselves besieged by publicity-hungry lawyers and by reporters from gossip shows and tabloids. I stayed in touch with Mildred and helped arrange a more private place for them to stay. Mildred was never adversarial and handled the situation honestly, and when she left our household she told the media we’d been fair with her.

Although Maria and I remain separated as of this writing, I still try to treat everyone as if we are together. Maria has a right to be bitterly disappointed and never look at me the same way again. The public nature of our separation makes it doubly hard for us to work through it. The divorce is going forward, but I still have the hope that Maria and I can come back together as husband and wife and as a family with our children. You can call this denial, but it’s the way my mind works. I’m still in love with Maria. And I am an optimist. All my life I have focused on the positives. I am optimistic that we will come together again.

During this past year, Maria has sometimes asked, “How can you go forward with your life when I feel like everything has fallen apart? How come you don’t feel lost?” Of course she already knows the answer because she understands me better than anybody else. I have to keep moving forward. And she has kept moving forward too, becoming more and more involved in causes associated with her parents. She has traveled all over the country promoting the fight against Alzheimer’s, and is very active on the Special Olympics board, helping prepare for the 2015 International Special Olympics Games in Los Angeles.

I was glad to have a busy schedule after we separated because otherwise I would have felt lost. I kept working and stayed on the move. By the summer, I’d appeared at a series of post-governorship speaking engagements across the northern United States and Canada. I went to the Xingu River in Brazil with Jim Cameron; to London for Mikhail Gorbachev’s eightieth birthday party; to Washington, DC, for a summit on immigration; and to Cannes to receive the Legion d’Honneur medal and promote new projects. Yet while I was as busy as ever, none of it felt the way it should. What had made my career fun for more than thirty years was sharing it with Maria. We’d done everything together and now my life felt out of kilter. There was no one to come home to.

When the scandal broke in the spring of 2011, I was scheduled to give the keynote speech at an international energy forum in Vienna organized in conjunction with the United Nations Development Program. I worried that the media frenzy would hamper my effectiveness as an environmental champion, and half expected the invitation to be withdrawn. But the organizers in Vienna wanted to proceed. “This is a personal matter,” they said. “We don’t think it will affect the great example you set in environmental policy. The million solar roofs are not going to be dismantled …” In that speech, I promised that I would make it my mission to convince the world that a green global economy is desirable, necessary, and within reach.

When I left Sacramento, I knew I would want to pick up my entertainment career. I had taken no salary during my seven years as governor and it was time to get back to paid work. But the media onslaught of April and May made it temporarily impossible. To my embarrassment and regret, painful consequences of the scandal rippled out beyond my family to many of the people I worked with.

I announced that I was suspending my career to work on personal matters. We postponed The Governator, an animated-cartoon and comic-book series I’d been collaborating on with Stan Lee, the legendary creator of Spiderman. Another project that got derailed was Cry Macho, a movie I’d looked forward to making the entire time I was governor. Al Ruddy, the producer of The Godfather and Million Dollar Baby, had been holding this movie for me for years. But after the scandal broke, the material was just too close to home—the plot revolves around a horse- trainer’s friendship with a streetwise twelve-year-old Latino kid. I called Al and said, “Maybe somebody else can star, I don’t mind, or you can hold it for me a little longer.”

He’d already talked to the investors. “They’ll make any other movie with you. But not this one,” he said.

Just as after my heart surgery, Hollywood initially pulled back. The phone stopped ringing. But by summer my nephew Patrick Knapp, who serves as my entertainment lawyer, reported that studios and producers had begun calling again. “Is Arnold’s career still on hold?” they were asking. “We don’t have to talk to Arnold directly, because we understand if he’s still going through this family crisis, but can we talk to you at least? We have this great film we want to do with him …”

By autumn I was back to shooting action movies—The Expendables 2 in Bulgaria with Sylvester Stallone, The Last Stand in New Mexico with director Jee-Woon Kim, and The Tomb, another film with Stallone, near New Orleans. I’d wondered what being in front of the cameras again would feel like. When I was governor and I would visit a movie set, I would think, “Boy, am I glad that I am not hanging upside down in a harness having to do a fight scene.” My friends would ask, “Don’t you miss this?” And I would say, “Not at all. I’m so glad I’m in a suit and tie and I’m about to have a meeting about education and digital textbooks and then give a speech about keeping crime down.” But the brain always surprises. You start reading scripts and visualizing the scene and how to direct it, how to choreograph the stunt, and then you get into it and then you look forward to doing it. The mind unwinds from the political stuff and shifts to the new challenges.

Sly was shooting The Expendables 2 in Bulgaria, and when I arrived on location in September 2011, it was my first time back as an actor, except for cameos in The Kid and I and The Expendables while I was governor. I was eight years out of practice with shoot-outs and stunts. The other veteran action heroes in the cast—Sly, Bruce Willis, Dolph Lundgren, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Chuck Norris—were really nice to me and kind of protective. Normally an action star keeps to himself on the set, practicing his martial arts and looking studly. But these guys really went out of their way. Someone would come over and say, “The safety of that gun is here … This is how you load the shells.” I felt like I was being welcomed back into the craft of action and acting.

The stunts were hard. The work is very physical and it takes conditioning because you have to do each stunt over and over: slamming into some desk, running around with weapons, dropping to the floor, staying low because you’re being shot at. You realize there’s a difference between being thirty-five and almost sixty-five. I was glad that The Expendables 2 is an ensemble movie, where I was one of eight or ten stars. I was only on the set for four days, and never felt that the pressure to carry the movie was on me.

I went from Bulgaria to the American Southwest to shoot The Last Stand. With that movie, a lot of the pressure did fall on me. In fact, the script had been written for me. I play an LAPD drug cop who is near retirement. After my partner gets crippled in a bungled raid, I decide I can’t handle the job anymore. So I go back to my hometown on the Arizona-Mexico border and become sheriff. Then suddenly a major drug gang is headed my way after escaping the FBI. They’re hardened criminals and ex-military warriors, I’m supposed to stop them from crossing into Mexico, and I have only three inexperienced deputies. We’re the last stand. It’s a great, great role. The sheriff knows if he succeeds, it will mean everything to the town. His reputation is on the line. Is he