during my last year as governor, I took a little time out to visit former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev at his home. We’d become friends over the years and I’d given a speech for him and sat with him at his eightieth birthday party in London a few months before. Gorbachev’s daughter Irina made lunch for us and several friends from the Gorbachev Institute. We ate for at least two and a half hours.
I’ve always idolized Gorbachev because of the courage it took him to dismantle the political system that he grew up under. Yes, the USSR had financial troubles, and yes, Reagan outspent them, and they were backed into a corner. But for Gorbachev to have the guts to embrace change rather than further oppress his people or pick fights with the West has always amazed me. I asked how he did it. How could he change the system after being indoctrinated from childhood to view Communism as the solution to every problem, and after rising to leadership in the party, where you had to show passion for the system all the time? How could he be so open minded? “My whole life I worked to perfect our system,” he told me. “I couldn’t wait to get to the most powerful position, because I thought then I would be able to fix problems that only the leader can fix. But when I got there, I realized we needed revolutionary change. The only way things got done was if you knew somebody or you paid somebody under the table. So what system did we have? It was time to dismantle the whole thing.” Maybe it’ll take fifty years for people to understand his achievement. Scholars will always be debating whether he did it the right way. I’m not going to debate it; I just thought it was great that he did it. I’m amazed by the courage it took to not go for immediate gratification but to look for the best direction for the country in the long run.
To me Gorbachev is a hero, at the same level as Nelson Mandela, who overcame the anger and despair of twenty-seven years in prison. When given the power to shake the world, both of them chose to build rather than destroy.
9.
For people who are successful with their intelligence, the opposite applies. They need to exercise the body every day. Clint Eastwood exercises even when he’s directing and starring in a movie. Dmitri Medvedev worked endless hours when he was president of Russia, but he had a gym at home and worked out two hours each day. If world leaders have time to work out, so do you.
Many years after hearing it from Fredi Gerstl, I heard the same idea of balance from the Pope. I visited the Vatican with Maria and her parents in 1983 for a private audience with John Paul II. Sarge was talking spiritual talk because he was an expert in that. Eunice asked the Holy Father about what kids should do to become better people and he said, “Just pray. Just pray.”
I talked to him about his workouts. Just before we went, I’d read a magazine story that described how athletic the pope was and what good shape he was in. To him, besides religion, life was about taking care of both your mind and your body. So we talked about that. He was known for getting up at five in the morning and reading newspapers in six different languages and doing two hundred push-ups and three hundred sit-ups, all before breakfast and before his workday began. He was a skier too, and he skied even after he became pope.
And he was already in his sixties, twenty-seven years older than me. I said to myself, “If that guy can do it, I’ve got to get up even earlier!”
10.
Don’t rest on your laurels. Too many former athletes spend their lives talking about how great they were twenty years ago. But someone like Ted Turner goes from running his father’s outdoor advertising business to founding CNN, to organizing the Goodwill Games, to raising bison and supplying bison meat, to having forty-seven honorary degrees. That’s what I call staying hungry. Bono starts as a musician, then buys others’ music, then works to combat AIDS and to create jobs. Anthony Quinn was not happy just being a movie star. He wanted to do more. He became a painter whose canvases sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Donald Trump turned his inheritance into a fortune ten times as big, then had a network TV show. Sarge traveled the world till he died, always hungry for new projects.
So many accomplished people just coast. They wish they could still be somebody and not just talk about the past. There is much more to life than being the greatest at one thing. We learn so much when we’re successful, so why not use what you’ve learned, use your connections and do more with them?
My father always told me, “Be useful. Do something.” He was right. If you have a talent or skill that makes you happy, use it to improve your neighborhood. And if you feel a desire to do more, then go all out. You’ll have plenty of time to rest when you’re in the grave. Live a risky life and a spicy life and like Eleanor Roosevelt said, every day do something that scares you.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCES
MEMOIRS ARE ABOUT LOOKING back, but I’ve lived my life by the opposite principle. So when people over the past two decades asked me to write a memoir, I always answered, “At home I have a hundred photo albums starting with my childhood in Austria, and I never look at them. I’d rather do another project or make another movie and learn from looking forward!”
Digging up and piecing together memories proved to be as difficult as I imagined, and yet what made the work unexpectedly enjoyable was the help I got from others. I found myself swapping stories with old friends from the worlds of bodybuilding, business, sports, Hollywood, and politics—a large cast of characters, too many people to name here. I’m grateful to all of them for helping me re-create the past and for making it immediate and friendly.
I want to thank first my coauthor, Peter Petre. Books like this require a collaborative partner with not just writing skill but also endurance, tact, judgment, and a great sense of humor, and Peter has them all.
My friend and close colleague of many decades Paul Wachter was generous in sharing recollections and editorial suggestions and providing practical acumen. Danny DeVito, Ivan Reitman, and Sylvester Stallone added funny Hollywood stories (Sly added Planet Hollywood stories also). Susan Kennedy, from 2005 to 2010 my gubernatorial chief of staff, gave us the benefit of her encyclopedic knowledge of my time in office. Her master’s thesis, an inside analysis of turning around my governorship in late 2005 and 2006, was of great use. Albert Busek in Munich, one of my oldest friends and the first journalist ever to single me out, provided advice and photos. Bonnie Reiss contributed her recollections and notes to the accounts of my governorship and of the environmental and after-school movements. Steve Schmidt, Terry Tamminen, Matt Bettenhausen, and Daniel Zingale also helped reconstruct aspects of my governorship. Fredi and Heidi Gerstl, Franco Columbu, and Jim Lorimer reminded me of shared experiences from our lifelong friendships.
Because my life has been extraordinarily well covered by the media, we had the benefit of almost fifty years of books, magazine and newspaper stories, interviews, videos, photos, illustrations, and cartoons about me documenting my careers in the muscle world, the movie world, the business world, and the world of politics and public service. Three people were key in organizing these troves of material: my executive assistants Lynn Marks and Shelley Klipp and my archivist Barbara Shane. Lynn and Barbara, with help from my former assistant Beth Eckstein, also tackled the massive challenge of transcribing hundreds of hours of recorded conversations between
