To get the most out of my workouts, I always needed specific goals to get the adrenaline pumping. I learned that staying on top of the hill is harder than climbing it.
But I had no such motivations leading up to Essen because defending the championship had been so easy up to now. I’d coasted to my second title as Mr. Olympia, in Paris in 1971. The only possible challenger had been Sergio—nobody else was in my league—and he’d been barred from the contest because of a dispute between federations. But in Essen, it seemed like all the top bodybuilders turned up at their very best except for me. Sergio was back, even more impressive than I remembered. And a new sensation from France, Serge Nubret, was also in top form, huge and really defined.
It was the hardest competition I’d ever been through, and if we’d been before American judges, I might well have lost. But German judges were always more impressed by sheer muscular mass, and fortunately I had what they were looking for. Winning narrowly did not make me feel good, however. I wanted my dominance to be clear.
After any competition, I always sought out the judges to ask for their input. “I appreciate that I won, but please tell me what were my weak points and what were my strong points,” I’d say. “You’re not going to hurt my feelings. I will still do a posing exhibition for you if you produce a show or anything like that.” One judge at Essen, a German doctor who’d followed my career ever since I was nineteen, told me bluntly, “You were soft. I thought you were massive and still the best up there, but you were softer than I would like to see you.”
From Germany, I went to do exhibitions in Scandinavia, and from there to South Africa to do seminars for Reg Park. Seeing him again was great; we’d gotten past the hard feelings from my having beaten him in London. However, the trip didn’t turn out too well. I was scheduled for an exhibition near Durban, but when I arrived, I discovered that nobody had given any thought to supplying a posing platform. But I was in construction, right? So I said what the hell and built one myself.
Midway through my routine, the whole thing collapsed with a scary crash. I landed flat on my back with my leg pinned under me and a badly wrecked left knee—the cartilage was torn and the kneecap was pulled way out of place under the skin. The South African doctors patched me up enough to finish the tour with bandages. Except for this mishap, it was a wonderful trip. I went on safari and gave exhibitions and seminars, and coming back I stuffed thousands of dollars of earnings into my cowboy boots so nobody would steal it while I slept on the plane.
On my way home through London, I called Dianne Bennett to say hello.
“Your mother has been trying to find you,” she said. “Call her. Your father is ill.” I called my mother and then went home quickly to Austria to stay with them. My father had suffered a stroke.
He was in the hospital when I got there, and he recognized me, but it was terrible. He couldn’t talk anymore. He was biting his tongue. I kept him company, and he seemed aware, but he was off in upsetting ways. He was smoking, and he’d become confused and try to put out the cigarette on his hand. It was painful and upsetting to see a man who had been so smart and so strong—an ice-curling champion—lose his coordination and his ability to think.
I stayed in Austria for quite a while, and he seemed stable when I left. Around Thanksgiving, back in Los Angeles, I had surgery on my knee. I’d just gotten out of the hospital on crutches, with my entire leg in a cast, when a call came from my mother. “Your father has died,” she told me.
It was heartbreaking, but I didn’t cry or freak out. Barbara, who was with me, got upset that I didn’t seem to react at all. Instead, I focused on practical matters. I called my surgeon, who told me not to fly with the heavy cast—so once again I couldn’t attend a family funeral. At least I knew that my mother had an enormous support system to organize the service and attend to all the details. The gendarmerie would close ranks to bury one of its own, and the band that my dad had led for many years would play, just as he had played at many funerals. The local priests, whom my mother was close to, would handle the invitations. Her friends would comfort her, and our relatives would come. Nevertheless I wasn’t there, my parents’ only surviving child, and that was the bottom line. I know she really missed me.
I was in shock and paralyzed. Yet frankly, I was also glad that the knee injury kept me from going, because I still wanted to separate myself from that whole side of my life. My way of dealing with the situation was deny and try to move on.
I didn’t want my mother to be alone. In less than two years, both my father and brother had died, and I felt like our family was rapidly coming apart, and I could scarcely imagine the grief she must have felt. So now I had to take on responsibility for her. I was still only twenty-five, but it was time to step up and make her life wonderful. Now it was time for me to pay her back for the endless hours and days of nurturing and everything she’d done for us as babies and growing up.
I couldn’t give my mom what she most wished for: a son close to home who would become a cop like Dad, marry a woman named Gretel, have a couple of kids, and live in a house two blocks from hers. That was the way in most Austrian families. She and my father had been okay with my move to Munich, which was 250 miles away and reachable by train. But I now realized that when I’d left for America without warning in 1968, I had shocked and hurt them. I wasn’t going back, of course, but I wanted to make up for that too.
I started sending her money every month and calling her all the time. I tried to convince her to move to the United States. She didn’t want to. Then I tried to have her fly over to visit. She didn’t want to do that either. Finally, in 1973, about six months after my father died, she did come, and stayed with Barbara and me for a few weeks. She returned the next year too, and every year after that. I also found more and more of a connection with Patrick, my nephew. When he was little, and I went to Europe, I made sure to visit him and Erika and her husband, a military man who was a devoted stepfather. Then when Patrick got to be about ten, he became fascinated with the idea of his uncle living in America. He started collecting my movie posters. Erika would ask me for memorabilia; I sent him a dagger from
Even though the supersonic airport no longer looked superpromising, and Franco and I were still making payments on fifteen acres of desert, I continued to believe that real estate was the place to invest. Many of our jobs entailed fixing up old houses, and it was eye opening. The owners would pay us $10,000 to fix up a house they’d bought for $200,000. Then they’d turn around and sell it for $300,000. Clearly there was real money to be made.
So I put aside as much money as I could and started looking around for investment possibilities. Two of the bodybuilders who had escaped from Czechoslovakia and come to California just before me had taken their savings and bought a little house to live in. That was fine, but they still had to pay the mortgage. I wanted an investment that would earn money, so that I could cover the mortgage through rents instead of having to pay it myself. Most people would buy a house if they could afford it; it was very unusual then to buy a rental property.
I liked the idea of owning an apartment building. I could picture starting with a small building, taking the best unit for myself to live in, and paying all the expenses by renting out the rest. That would let me learn the business, and as the investment paid off, I could expand from there.
Over the next two or three years, I did research. Every day I would look at the real estate section in the newspaper, studying the prices and reading the stories and ads. I got to where I knew every square block of Santa Monica. I knew how much the property values increased north of Olympic Boulevard versus north of Wilshire versus north of Sunset. I understood about schools and restaurants and proximity to the beach.
This wonderful real estate lady named Olga Asat took me under her wing. She might have been Egyptian; she’d emigrated from somewhere in the Middle East. Olga was older, short and heavyset, with frizzy hair, and she always wore a black outfit because she thought it made her appear leaner. You might look at someone like that and think, “Why am I dealing with her?” But I was drawn to the human being, the heart, the motherly love: she saw me as a fellow foreigner and really wanted to see me do well. She was such a pistol.
We ended up working together for years. Eventually, with Olga’s help, I knew every building in town. I knew every transaction: who was selling, at what price, how much the property had appreciated since it last changed hands, what the financial sheet looked like, the cost of yearly upkeep, the interest rate on the financing. I met landlords and bankers. Olga was a miracle worker. She would try so hard, going from building to building to building until we found the right opportunity.
