Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

was as if God had created a restaurant for bodybuilders.

During those first months in Los Angeles, everything was going so well that it was hard to believe. There were surprisingly few consequences from my car crash, apart from the gash in my thigh. The crocodile wrestler who owned the GTO scarcely batted an eye about the damage. He worked for a dealership where he had his pick of the used cars, and his reaction was “Don’t worry about it.” In fact, he hired me. One of the dealer’s specialties was exporting used cars, and I earned pocket money that fall by driving cars down to Long Beach and onto a freighter headed for Australia.

A few insurance companies called the gym to talk about damages to the other cars, but the conversations were too hard for me to understand, so I’d hand the phone to a workout partner. He’d explain that I was new to America and had no money, and the companies gave up. The only dramatic effect of the accident was that it made me frantic about getting health insurance. In Europe, of course, everybody was insured: you fell into a certain category if you were a student; if you were a child, you were covered by your parents’ insurance; if you had a job, you had workers’ coverage—even the homeless were covered. It scared me not to be covered here. I kept worrying, “If I get sick, what do I do?” I had no idea that you could go to an emergency room and receive free medical care. And even if I’d known, I wanted no handouts. Though it took me six months, I made sure that I paid back Bill Drake for my doctor bill.

It so happened that Larry Scott, a former Mr. Olympia who was retired from bodybuilding but still worked out every day, was now a regional sales manager for a big insurance company.

“I hear you’re looking for insurance,” he said to me. “Let me help you.”

He came up with a policy that cost $23.60 a month, plus another $5 for disability, which sounded expensive to me because I earned only $65 a week from Weider. But I bought it and must have been one of the few new immigrants in LA with health insurance.

Around Thanksgiving 1969 I got an invitation to a December bodybuilding competition and demonstration in Hawaii. The crocodile wrestler had been planning to go home for the holidays, and he said, “I love Hawaii. Why don’t I come with you and hang out and train with you for a few days, and then I’ll go on to Australia from there?” The plan sounded good to me. Besides the obvious attractions of the beaches and the girls, Hawaii offered the chance to get to know Dr. Richard You, a US Olympic team physician who practiced there, and to visit weight-lifting legends like Tommy Kono, Timothy Leon, and Harold “Oddjob” Sakata (whom I already knew from Munich). So my buddy and I went to Joe Weider and asked if he knew the promoters and what he thought about me going. He was all for it. I could use the experience, he said, and the pressure of an upcoming competition would make me train harder.

CHAPTER 6 Lazy Bastards

JOE WEIDER CALLED THE hard-core bodybuilders lazy bastards. From what I could tell, he was mostly right. The typical customers at Gold’s Gym were guys with day jobs: construction workers, cops, professional athletes, business owners, salesmen, and, as time went by, actors. But with a few exceptions, the bodybuilders were lazy. A lot of them were unemployed. They wanted to lie on the beach and have somebody sponsor them. It was always, “Hey, Joe, can you give me an airline ticket to fly to New York to the contest?” “Hey, Joe, can you give me a salary so I can train in the gym?” “Hey, Joe, can I have the food supplements for free?” “Hey, Joe, can you get me a car?” When they didn’t get the handouts they felt entitled to, they were pissed. “Be careful of Joe,” I’d hear them say. “That cheap son of a bitch doesn’t keep his promises.” I saw him completely differently. It’s true Joe had a hard time parting with money. He came from a poor background where he had to fight for every nickel. But I didn’t see any reason why he should just hand out money to any bodybuilder who asked.

Joe was a master at knowing exactly how to appeal to young and vulnerable males. When I first picked up his magazines at age fifteen, I was wondering how I would be strong enough to defend myself. How could I make sure that I’d be successful with the girls? How could I make sure that I would earn a great living? Joe sucked me into a world where I would feel special right away. It was the old Charles Atlas message: Send away for my course, and no one will be kicking sand in your face. You will be a great man in no time, you will be picking up girls, you will be walking around on Venice Beach!

Joe gave all the great bodybuilders nicknames in his magazines, like superheroes. Dave Draper, who trained at Gold’s, was the Blond Bomber. I’d seen him in the 1967 Tony Curtis movie Don’t Make Waves. That fired my imagination even more: here was another bodybuilder who’d gotten into movies! Weider’s magazines photographed Dave with a surfboard walking around on the beach. That looked cool. In the background was a Volkswagen dune buggy, with the exposed wheels, and that looked cool too. He was surrounded by beautiful girls who gazed at him in awe.

Other pictures in the magazine showed scientists and technicians in white lab coats developing nutritional supplements in the Weider Research Clinic. “Weider Research Clinic,” I would say to myself, “this is unbelievable!” And there were pictures of airplanes with “Weider” painted on the side in big letters. I’d imagined an outfit the size of General Motors, with a fleet of planes flying around the globe delivering Weider equipment and food supplements. The writing in the magazine sounded fabulous too when my friends translated it for me. The stories talked about “blasting the muscles” and building “deltoids like cannonballs” and “a chest like a fortress.”

And now here I was, six years later, on Venice Beach! Just like Dave Draper, only now it was me with the dune buggy and the surfboard and the adoring girls. Of course, by this time I was aware enough to see that Weider was creating a whole fantasy world, with a foundation in reality but skyscrapers of hype. Yes, there were surfboards, but the bodybuilders didn’t really surf. Yes, there were pretty girls, but they were models who got paid for the photo session. (Actually, one of the girls was Joe’s wife, Betty, a beautiful model whom he didn’t have to pay.) Yes, there were Weider supplements and, yes, some research took place, but there was no big building in Los Angeles called the Weider Research Clinic. Yes, Weider products were distributed around the world, but there were no Weider planes. Discovering the hype didn’t bother me, though. Enough of it was true.

Not only was I fascinated to be in the middle of this, I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. “I have to pinch myself,” I would think. I told my friends that my worst nightmare would be to feel somebody shaking me and hear my mother’s voice say, “Arnold, you overslept! You have to get up! You’re going to be two hours late for work. Hurry! You have to get to the factory!” And I’d be saying, “Noooo! Why did you wake me up? I was having the most incredible dream. I want to see how it turns out.”

Joe himself wasn’t the easiest guy to like. Starting in the Great Depression, he and his younger brother, Ben, had clawed their way out of the slums of Montreal and built their businesses from scratch. The Weider magazines, equipment, nutritional supplement businesses, and competitions were bodybuilding’s biggest empire, bringing in about $20 million a year, which made Joe and Ben the men to know in what was still a money-starved sport. The only other people who actually made a living out of bodybuilding were a few promoters and gym owners; none of the bodybuilders themselves did, and I was the only one I’d ever heard of getting paid just to train.

Joe and Ben were always pushing to expand, and they didn’t mind invading other people’s turf. In 1946 they created their own association, the International Federation of Body Building (IFBB), to challenge both the American Athletic Union, which controlled Olympic weight lifting and bodybuilding in North America, and the National Amateur Body-Builders’ Association (NABBA), which regulated bodybuilding in the United Kingdom. They started feuds by promoting their own versions of the Mr. America competition, which belonged to the AAU, and Mr. Universe, which belonged to NABBA. Just like in boxing, the duplication of titles caused a lot of confusion but helped bodybuilding to expand.

Joe was also the first to offer a cash prize for winning a bodybuilding championship. When he invented Mr. Olympia in 1965, the prize was $1,000 and an engraved silver plate. In any of the other contests, like Mr. Universe, all you got was a trophy. Joe’s competitions also offered the best deal for contestants. He’d pay for your hotel and plane fare. But he would always hold onto the return ticket until you’d done your stint posing for his photographers after the event. Actually, Joe would have preferred to shoot the bodybuilders before the event, but the bodybuilders usually didn’t feel ready to be photographed beforehand and Franco Columbu and I were the only ones who would agree. We liked it because being photographed forced us to be in good shape and gave us a chance to practice