Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

massage table, and setting it up. She’s gaping at my muscles and saying, “How did you get like that?”

“Oh, I actually come from Italy. I was a truck driver and then I became a masseur guy, and I’m very happy to be here today to massage you”—she is losing it as I’m saying this—“and after that I have another massage someplace else. I make a little bit of money massaging, and it’s also good for the muscles.”

“Now let’s improvise,” she said. So I made up a line. “Lie down so I can work you over.”

She said, “Great, great! What do you think, guys?”

“That was funny, the way he explained it, and the Italian accent,” the director said.

I said, “No, it’s a German accent, but to you guys, it all sounds the same.” They laughed and told me, “Okay, you’ve got the job.”

Art Carney, Lucy, and I rehearsed that scene every day for a week. Carney had just won an Academy Award for his leading role in the movie Harry and Tonto. He was a very funny actor who turned out to have even more trouble than me memorizing lines. Finally, on Friday they told me, “On Monday when you come back, we’re going to shoot live.” I felt ready and said great.

Monday I waited backstage in the green room with some of the other actors. Then somebody came in and said, “Your scene is ready.” They led me behind the stage to the door I was supposed to go through. “Stand here, and when the green light goes on, ring the doorbell and take it from there, just like we rehearsed.”

So I waited, holding my massage table by the handle. I had on shorts and sneakers and a jacket I was supposed to strip off during the scene to reveal my tank top and my muscles underneath all pumped up and oiled up.

The green light came on, I rang the bell, Lucy opened the door, and I stepped onstage and said my first line, “I am Rico.”

All of a sudden there was laughter and applause.

Which we hadn’t rehearsed. I had no idea that “We’re going to shoot live” in this case meant that we would be videotaping in front of three cameras and a studio audience. I’d never heard the expression before—what did it mean to me, a bodybuilder who had never been involved in TV? Meanwhile, Lucy was in character as Norma, acting hypnotized by my bulging legs and getting a big laugh by saying, “Oh, y-yes … won’t you come in … Oh, you are in,” and hurrying behind me to shut the door.

My next line was supposed to be “Where do we do it, here or in the bedroom?” But I’m standing frozen, holding the massage table and looking into the lights and listening to the applause and laughter of a thousand people filling this studio up to the rafters.

Being a total pro, Lucy saw what was happening and ad-libbed. “Well, don’t just stand there looking at the art! You came to give me a massage—right?” I remembered my line, and from there the scene went great. There was applause throughout.

She was so good that I really thought she was asking me questions that I had to answer; I didn’t feel like I was acting. It was a real lesson, and instead of getting paid, I should have paid them. Lucy followed my career like a mom for many years after that. As tough as she was by reputation, she was a sweetheart to me and would write me a letter of praise whenever a new movie came out. I ran into her many times at celebrity events, and she always gave me a big hug and just went off the deep end. “I take full credit for this man. He’s going to become a big star,” she’d say.

Lucy gave me advice about Hollywood. “Just remember, when they say, ‘No,’ you hear ‘Yes,’ and act accordingly. Someone says to you, ‘We can’t do this movie,’ you hug him and say, ‘Thank you for believing in me.’ ”

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I had to be careful not to let my adventures in television sidetrack me from training. In July, Franco and I shifted to workouts at maximum effort twice a day to get ready for the competitions of the fall. I was defending my Mr. Olympia title for the fourth straight year, but in some ways it was far from routine. For the first time, the contest was going to be at Madison Square Garden, New York City’s top location for rock concerts and sports. True, we were in the 4,500-seat Felt Forum rather than the 21,000-seat arena. But still, Madison Square Garden was where people came to see Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fight for the first time and to watch Wilt Chamberlain and Willis Reed play. It was where they came to listen to Frank Sinatra and to the Rolling Stones. It was the place for championships and major tournaments in college sports.

So bodybuilding was taking a big step up. People had seen me on TV. The book Pumping Iron was about to come out. And thanks to George Butler’s tireless networking, the 1974 Mr. Olympia contest was getting buzz like it never had before. Charles Gaines’s friend Delfina Rattazzi, an heiress to the Fiat fortune and later Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s assistant at the Viking Press, would be hosting a book party at her apartment after the competition. She was inviting dozens of hip and trendy people who would have turned up their noses at bodybuilding before. I didn’t know where it would all lead, but I knew I wanted to be in top form.

Joe Weider’s magazine writers outdid themselves working to whip up excitement for this event, calling it “the Super Bowl of bodybuilding.” The venue was a “modern Roman Colosseum.” The contestants were “gladiators in a mortal vascular combat.” The event itself was “the great muscle war of ’74” and “the battle of the titans.”

This year’s drama revolved around bodybuilding’s new wunderkind, Lou Ferrigno, a six-foot-five, 265-pound giant from Brooklyn. He was only twenty-two and getting better and better each year. He’d won both Mr. America and Mr. Universe in 1973, and now he was training to knock me off as Mr. Olympia. They were hyping Lou as the new Arnold. He had a terrific frame, wide shoulders, incredible abs, out-of-this-world potential, and nothing else on his mind except training and winning. To be precise, Lou was training for six hours a day, six days a week—more than even my body could stand. I loved being the champ. But how much more was there to prove after winning Mr. Olympia four straight years? Plus, my businesses were growing, and maybe I had the start of a movie career. As we trained for New York, I made up my mind that this Mr. Olympia would be my last.

Ferrigno had won the Mr. International contest that Franco and I had organized in Los Angeles. He was massive and symmetrical, and if I’d been a judge, I’d have picked him too, even though he was still undefined—like me when I first came to the America—and his posing needed work. If I’d had his body, I could have shaped it in a month to beat anyone—even me. I liked Lou, a nice, quiet guy from a sweet, hardworking family. He’d been partly deaf from the time he was a kid and had a lot to overcome growing up. Now he made a living as a sheet-metal worker, and his coach was his father, a New York City police lieutenant who drove him really hard. I could see how bodybuilding gave Lou pride. It made him somebody with a body. I loved the idea of a guy beating all the obstacles. I knew how he must have felt about me. He’d been a fan of mine growing up, and so he now saw me the way that I had once seen Sergio Oliva: as the champion he would ultimately have to beat.

But I didn’t think he’d be ready. This wasn’t going to be his year. So I trained carefully and kept things low- key and took it lightly when people would say to me, “Arnold, you’ve gotta be careful. If the judges want to look for a new face …” Or “Maybe Weider thinks you’re too independent. Maybe he wants a new star.”

Lou showed up in New York a few days before the competition, fresh from defending his Mr. Universe title in Verona, Italy. His father boasted at a press preview that if Lou won, he’d hold the title for a decade. “There is nobody on the horizon to challenge him.” But Lou skipped a talk show on the morning of the competition to which he’d been invited along with Franco and me. “He’s shy, he must be really shvitzing,” I guessed. On the air I joked, “He is probably sitting at home watching my body and moving around his television set, posing, to see if he should compete.”

At Madison Square Garden that night, it wasn’t even close. By the final pose-off Lou was looking depressed, like a rookie who’d made a mistake. And he had. He’d tried so hard to add muscle definition that he’d lost too much weight, so his big body actually looked stringy and less muscular than mine. Onstage in front of a capacity crowd, I copied his poses, doing each one better than him. Then came a moment when we were face to face in matching biceps poses, and I gave Lou a little smile that said, “You are beaten.” He knew it, the judges knew it, and so did the crowd.

Franco and I didn’t stick around for very long after the contest; we ducked out with the Weiders and my old friend Albert Busek, who had flown from Munich to cover the event, to go to the Pumping Iron book party at Delfina’s. The moment I walked in the door, I was the rookie. Delfina had a giant three-floor apartment, very decorated, very hip. There were paintings on the ceilings rather than on the walls so you could lie around getting stoned and look up and see the art.

An endless stream of people filled the huge rooms. The party was catered and seemed really well done, although I had never witnessed anything like this before, so I had no way to know. It was extraordinary. I had never