Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

just the marijuana talking.

I liked getting swept up into a cloud of celebrities. Nicholson’s house was part of a “compound” up on Mulholland Drive next door to Polanski, Warren Beatty, and Marlon Brando. They’d invite me and some of the other bodybuilders up for parties, and sometimes people from that crowd would come to my building and we’d have barbecues on the little patio. It was hilarious: neighbors walking past on the sidewalk couldn’t believe it when they saw who was there. But at the same time, I told myself not to get carried away. I was barely scraping the outside of that world. At that point, I was only a fan of those people.

I was being exposed to a world I didn’t know. It was good to hang out, to watch them, to see how they operated and made decisions, and to hear them talk about movie projects, or building their homes, or building a house on the beach, or girls. I asked about acting and about the secret to becoming a leading man. Nicholson and Beatty, of course, were big proponents of method acting. They talked about how they prepared, how many times they rehearsed a role, and how they were able to live in the moment and improvise. Jack was shooting One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and he described how challenging it was to play a patient in an asylum. Meanwhile, Polanski, who had directed Nicholson in Chinatown, told of the differences between making a movie in Hollywood and making one in Europe: in America, the opportunity was grander, but the moviemaking was more formulaic and less artistic. They all had such enormous passion for their profession.

I thought that maybe down the road I’d get a chance to be in movies with them, in some kind of supporting role. But mostly I was thinking, “What a great promotion for bodybuilding, that this crowd now is accepting the sport.”

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My Hollywood career might never have taken off if not for a chain of events that started with Franco and me organizing a bodybuilding competition in Los Angeles that summer. I was still focused on wanting to see bodybuilding go mainstream. It frustrated me that bodybuilding shows were never advertised to the general public. That seemed totally wrong. I mean, what did we have to hide? People complained that reporters were always negative about bodybuilding and wrote stupid stories. Well, that was true, but who was talking to the press? Had anyone ever sat down and explained what we were doing? So Franco and I decided that if bodybuilding in LA was ever going to break out of its little shell, we had to promote it ourselves. We rented a big auditorium downtown and arranged the rights to host the Mr. International competition for 1974.

There were little signs that the time was right to do this. Lots of actors were starting to work out at Gold’s. Gary Busey came regularly. Isaac Hayes, who’d won an Oscar for writing the Shaft theme song, would pull up in his Rolls every day and train. Up till then, the only actors working out in public were ones who reinforced the gay stereotype about bodybuilding. Actors like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson were muscular and had terrific bodies onscreen. They were working out, but in secret. Whenever somebody commented on their muscles, they’d say, “I was born this way.” But that was starting to change, and weight training was becoming more acceptable.

Another positive sign was that more women were turning up at Gold’s—not to ogle the guys but to ask about joining. At first, they weren’t allowed. From a practical standpoint, it would have been hard for Joe Gold to let them in, because there was only one set of toilets and showers. But the real truth was that the guys were not yet ready for it. Bodybuilding was too much of a man’s world. The last thing you wanted was to worry about what you said in the gym. There was a lot of cursing and a lot of man talk. I told Joe that he should include women. I’d seen the benefits in Munich: having women in the gym made us train harder, even if you had to watch your language a little.

Sometimes the women who asked to join were sisters of bodybuilders or girlfriends. Sometimes they were girls who were already working out at the beach. If a woman needed to train for a physical test—to join the police or the fire department, say—Joe would always give special permission. He would tell her, “Come in at seven in the morning when there are fewer guys here, and you can work out. Be my guest; you don’t have to pay anything.”

Joe never made a decision without the bodybuilders’ consent. Should there be a radio playing? Should he carpet the floor? Or would that ruin the dungeon effect? This was a hard-core gym that catered to the hard-core guys. We had endless discussions about letting women join. Finally we agreed to open the membership, but only to the hard-core women who signed a statement that said in effect: “We understand there’s crude language, we understand there are weights dropping on feet and there are injuries, we understand there is only one set of bathrooms, and we will use the bathrooms on the beach.” I wanted bodybuilding to open up completely to women, including women’s championships. At least this was a start, and you could see the interest was there.

We felt bodybuilding contests were never big enough—it was always the same five hundred or one thousand spectators—and it felt very disorganized. Sometimes there was no music or the emcee was bad or the lighting was shitty. No one came to meet us at the airport. Everything was wrong. There were exceptions, like the Mr. World event in Columbus and the Mr. Universe event in London, but most competitions were amateurish. We made a list of everything we wanted to see fixed and started calling people for advice.

Franco and I scheduled our show for August 17. The hall we rented was a grand, old 2,300-seat theater in downtown LA called the Embassy Auditorium. The next thing we did was hire a publicist, Shelley Selover, who had an office right in Venice. When Franco and I went to see her, I doubt that she’d ever given bodybuilding a thought. But after asking a lot of questions and listening for a while, she agreed to take us on. “I can do something with this,” she said. That was an important vote of confidence.

Shelley hooked us up right away with a veteran Sports Illustrated writer named Dick Johnston, who flew over from his home in Hawaii to check out our sport. Shelley coached us carefully before we met. “He wants to make the case to his editors that bodybuilders are athletes, serious athletes, and do a big story,” she said. “You think you can help him with that?” So I went into the interview with all kinds of examples about how if this athlete hadn’t picked bodybuilding, he’d have been a baseball star, and that guy would have been a boxer. They would be athletes anyway, but it happened that bodybuilding was their passion and was where they thought they had the most potential. Dick Johnston liked the idea and arranged to come back to cover our event.

Franco and I really hustled to put together the show. We knew we could never make ends meet with ticket sales alone. We had to pay the airfares for the bodybuilders coming in from around the world, we had to pay the judges, we had to pay for the hall and for advertising and promotion. So we looked for sponsors. Isaac Hayes suggested that we talk to his friend the great boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, who had a foundation. “He’ll be into this,” he told me. “His foundation is really for the underdog, you know? He gives money to inner city kids and minorities. So you just have to explain that as an Austrian in California and a bodybuilder, you’re a minority!” Franco and I thought that was pretty funny, that we should be minorities. Franco was thrilled at the idea of meeting one of the greatest fighters of all time. I was excited too—I remembered seeing Robinson in newsreels as a kid. By 1974, he’d been retired for almost ten years.

When we arrived at his foundation, there were many people in the waiting room. I thought about everybody who must be hitting him up, and how great he was, as an ex-champ, to be spending his time on his foundation.

Finally, it was our turn. Sugar Ray brought us into his office and was incredibly warm. We were in such awe that we didn’t even hear what he said the first few seconds. He took his time and listened to our pitch asking for money to purchase trophies for our event. By the end, he was laughing. It was just so weird, two foreigners trying to run an international championship in bodybuilding in LA. He gave us $2,800 for the trophies—which was a lot in those days. We went out and bought really nice ones with little plaques that said, “Donated by the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation.”

We discovered that people really weren’t negative about bodybuilding. They were open to it, but nobody was talking to them. This was open-minded America, ready to learn something new. Our approach was to educate the people. I had the personality. I knew Gaines’s stories had gotten a good reception. You know how real estate people say “Location, location, location”? Our motto was “Presentation, presentation, presentation.”

As Mr. International drew near, we put up posters headlined THE GREATEST MUSCLE SHOW EVER in YMCAs and gathering places all over town. The poster featured pictures of me (five times Mr. Universe, four times Mr. Olympia), Franco (Mr. Universe, Mr. World), Frank Zane (Mr. America, Mr. Universe), Lou Ferrigno (Mr. America, Mr. Universe), Serge Nubret (Europe’s greatest bodybuilding star), and Ken Waller (Mr. America, Mr. World).