The math of real estate really spoke to me. I could tour a building, and as I walked through it, I would ask about the square footage, the vacancy factor, what it would cost per square foot to operate, and quickly calculate in my mind how many times the gross I could afford to offer and still be able to make the payments. The selling agent would look at me in a weird way as if to say, “How did he figure that out?”
It was just a talent I had. I’d get out a pencil and say, “I cannot go any higher than ten times gross because I think the average maintenance expense on a building like this is 5 percent. You have to leave that 5 percent available. And the interest rate is now 6.1 percent, so the loan will cost such and such annually.” I would write it all down for the agent.
Then he or she would argue, “Well, you’re right, but don’t forget that the value of the property is going to rise. So maybe you have to put in a little bit of your own money along the way. At the end of the day, the value goes up.”
“I understand,” I’d say, “but I never pay more than ten times gross. If the value goes up in the future, that’s
Interesting bargains began to appear after the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and the start of the recession. Olga would call and say, “This seller is in trouble financially,” or “They really extended themselves, I think you should make a quick offer.” In early 1974 she found a six-unit apartment house on Nineteenth Street just north of Wilshire—the more desirable side of Wilshire. The owners were trading up to a bigger building and wanted to sell fast. Even better, their deal on the bigger building was so good that they were willing to come down on price.
The building cost me $215,000. It took every dollar I’d saved—$27,000—plus another $10,000 borrowed from Joe Weider to make the down payment. The place wasn’t much to look at: a sturdy early-1950s two-story structure of wood and brick. But I was happy with it from the minute Barbara and I moved in. It was in a nice neighborhood, and the apartments were roomy and well maintained. Mine was 2,400 square feet, extra large, and had a balcony in the front, a two-car garage underneath, and a little patio out back. It had other benefits too: I rented the other apartments to entertainment people. Actors I met in the gym were always looking for places to stay, so eventually there were four actors living there. It was a way to build connections in the business I wanted to get into. Best of all, I’d moved out of an apartment where I had to pay $1,300 a month in rent and into a property that paid for itself from Day One, just as I’d planned.
Seeing me pull off a $215,000 deal left my old friend Artie Zeller in shock. For days afterward, he kept asking how I had the balls to do it. He could not understand because he never wanted any risk in his life.
“How can you stand the pressure? You have the responsibility of renting out the other five units. You have to collect the rent. What if something goes wrong?” Problems were all he could see. It could be terrible. Tenants would make noise. What if somebody came home drunk? What if somebody slipped, and I got sued? “You know what America is like with the lawsuits!” and blah, blah, blah.
I caught myself listening. “Artie, you almost scared me just now.” I laughed. “Don’t tell me any more of this information. I like to always wander in like a puppy. I walk into a problem and then figure out what the problem really is. Don’t tell me ahead of time.” Often it’s easier to make a decision when you don’t know as much, because then you can’t overthink. If you know too much, it can freeze you. The whole deal looks like a minefield.
I’d noticed the same thing at school. Our economics professor was a two-times PhD, but he pulled up in a Volkswagen Beetle. I’d had better cars for years by that time. I said to myself, “Knowing it all is not really the answer, because this guy is not making the money to have a bigger car. He should be driving a Mercedes.”
CHAPTER 9
The Greatest Muscle Show Ever
AS MR. OLYMPIA, I WAS the three-time winner of a world championship that 99 percent of Americans had never heard of. Not only was bodybuilding obscure as a sport, but if you asked the average American about bodybuilders, all you’d hear was the negative stuff: “Those guys are so muscle-bound and uncoordinated, they can’t even tie their shoes.”
“It will all turn to fat and they’ll die young.”
“They all have inferiority complexes.”
“They’re all imbeciles.”
“They’re all narcissists.”
“They’re all homosexuals.”
Every aspect of its image was bad. One writer said that the sport was about as easy to promote as midget wrestling.
It’s true that bodybuilders look in the mirror as they train. Mirrors are tools, just like they are for ballet dancers. You need to be your own trainer. When you do dumbbell curls, for example, you need to see if one arm trails the other.
The sport was so far down, it was nowhere. To me bodybuilding had always seemed so American that I was still surprised when people couldn’t guess what I did. “Are you a wrestler?” they’d ask. “Look at your body! No, no, I know, you’re a football player, right?” They’d pick everything but bodybuilding.
In fact, the audiences were much larger in third world countries. A crowd of twenty-five thousand turned out to see Bill Pearl at an exhibition in India, while ten thousand showed up in South Africa. Bodybuilding was one of the most popular spectator sports in the Middle East. A great milestone in Joe Weider’s career came in 1970, when the international community agreed to certify bodybuilding as an official sport. From that point on, bodybuilding programs qualified for state support in dozens of nations where athletics are subsidized.
But I’d been in the United States for four years, and basically nothing had changed. Each big city still had one or two gyms where the bodybuilders would train. The biggest competitions never aimed for more than four thousand or five thousand fans.
This bugged me because I wanted to see bodybuilding thrive, and I wanted to see the athletes and not just the promoters make money. I also felt that if millions of people were going to come to my movies someday, it was very important that they know where the muscles came from and what it meant to be Mr. Universe or Mr. Olympia or Mr. World. So there was a lot of educating to do. The more popular the sport became, the better my chances of becoming a leading man. It was easy for, say, New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath to get into commercials and films. In the major sports—football, baseball, basketball, and tennis—the stars would just cross over and make a lot of money. I knew that would never happen to me. I had to do more. I wanted to promote the sport, both so that more people would take part and to benefit my career.
Joe Weider was pretty set in his ways, though. He didn’t want to try broadening his audience beyond the bodybuilding fans and fifteen-year-old kids—no matter how much I teased. “These are comic books!” I’d say about his magazines. “ ‘How Arnold Terrorized His Thighs’? ‘This Is Joe’s Biceps Speaking’? What kind of silly headlines are those?”
“It sells the magazine,” Joe would say. His approach was to keep the products consistent and take every opportunity to expand their distribution around the world. Probably that was smart, because the business kept growing. But I realized that if I wanted to promote bodybuilding to a new audience, I’d have to find my own way.
I was passing through New York on the way to Europe in the fall of 1972 when I met the two people who would set me on the path: George Butler and Charles Gaines. Butler was a photographer and Gaines was a writer, and they were working as freelancers for
I couldn’t believe my good luck. These were the first journalists I’d ever really talked to from outside the bodybuilding world. They had access to maybe a million readers who’d never heard of the sport. They were about my age, and we hit it off really well. Gaines already knew quite a bit about bodybuilding, it turned out: he’d just published a novel called
