This was Bob’s way of teaching me that, yes, there will be thirteen takes, and, yes, this is normal, but just remember only one will be seen. So don’t worry when I say for the thirteenth time, “Let’s do it again.” No one will know. And don’t worry if you cough in the middle of a scene, he told me. “I’d cut around it, I’d cover it from this angle and that angle.”
The more I hung out on the set, the more comfortable I felt.
After he cast Sally Field, Bob became especially fanatic about the need for me to lose weight. She’s so petite he worried that if I didn’t slim down, I’d make her look like a shrimp. “When we get to Birmingham, if I put you on a scale the day before shooting and you’re not two hundred ten, you are not in the picture,” he threatened. There was no Eric Morris class for a star bodybuilder to get rid of muscle, so I was on my own. First I had to redo myself mentally—let go of the 250-pound image of Mr. Olympia that was in my head. I started visualizing myself instead as lean and athletic. And all of a sudden what I saw in the mirror no longer fit. Seeing that helped kill my appetite for all the protein shakes and all the extra steak and chicken I was used to. I pictured myself as a runner rather than a lifter, and changed around my whole training regimen to emphasize running, bicycling, and swimming rather than weights.
All through the winter, the pounds came off, and I was pleased. But at the same time, my life was getting too intense. I was working on my mail-order business and on my acting classes, going to college, training for three hours a day, and doing construction. It was a lot to juggle. I often felt overwhelmed and started asking myself, “How do I keep it all together? How do I not think about the next thing while I’m still doing this thing? How can I unplug?”
Transcendental meditation was popular with people on the beach in Venice. There was one guy down there I liked: a skinny guy who was into yoga; kind of the opposite of me. We would always chat, and eventually I found out that he was a Transcendental Meditation instructor. He invited me to one of his classes at this center near UCLA. There was a little bit of hokum involved: you had to bring a piece of fruit and a handkerchief and perform these little rituals. But I paid no attention to that. Hearing them talk about the need to disconnect and refresh the mind was like a revelation. “Arnold, you’re an idiot,” I told myself. “You spend all this time on your body, but you never think about your mind, how to make it sharper and relieve the stress. When you have muscle cramps, you have to do more stretching, take a Jacuzzi, put on the ice packs, take more minerals. So why aren’t you thinking that the mind also can have a problem? It’s overstressed, or it’s tired, it’s bored, it’s fatigued, it’s about to blow up—let’s learn tools for that.”
They gave me a mantra and taught me to use a twenty-minute meditation session to get to a place where you don’t think. They taught how to disconnect the mind, so that you don’t hear the clock ticking in the background or people talking. If you can do this for even a few seconds, it already has a positive effect. The more you can prolong that period, the better it is.
In the middle of all this, Barbara was going through changes too. She and Franco’s wife, Anita, signed up for EST (Erhard Seminars Training), a popular self-help seminar. They asked if we wanted to come, but Franco and I felt we didn’t need it. We knew where we were going. We knew what we wanted. We had control over our lives, which is what EST claimed to teach.
As a matter of fact, the gimmick in the opening session was that no one could leave the room to go to the bathroom. The idea was if you cannot even control your own piss, how are you ever going to get control over yourself or have control over anybody else around you?
I was amazed that people would pay for that! Still, if Barbara and Anita wanted to try it, I didn’t mind.
Barbara and Anita were all sunny and positive when they came home after the first weekend they went. Franco and I were thinking that maybe we should go to EST too. But the second weekend, something happened that sent Barbara and Anita both off the deep end. They came back all angry and negative, thinking everything was wrong with their lives and ready to blame everybody around them for it. Barbara was furious with her father. She was the third of three daughters, and she thought he treated her like the son he never had. I gave her hell for that. I really liked her father and wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand. To me there was no indication that he treated her like a boy. Then she accused me of being on a power trip and not paying enough attention to her.
We usually got along very well and had lived together for more than three years. But she was a normal person who wanted normal things, and there was nothing normal about me. My drive was not normal. My vision of where I wanted to go in life was not normal. The whole idea of a conventional existence was like Kryptonite to me. When Barbara saw me moving away from bodybuilding and into acting, I think she realized we had no future. Right after I left for Alabama to start shooting
I felt really sad about the whole thing. Barbara was part of my life. I’d developed feelings I’d never had. The comfort of being with someone and sharing our lives, so I wasn’t just putting up my own pictures on the wall but sharing the wall space and choosing the furniture and rugs together. Feeling included in her family was comforting and wonderful. We’d been a unit, and all of sudden it was ripped apart. I struggled to understand. I thought at first that maybe Bob Rafelson had told her, “I need Arnold to get more sensitive. I need to see him cry. If you want to help our movie, move out and fuck him up bad.” Otherwise it seemed crazy that she split.
I knew I was losing something valuable. My emotions told me we should stay together, while rationally I could see her point. It wouldn’t work in the long run. Barbara wanted to settle down, and I needed to be free to change and grow. The years with Barbara taught me a great lesson: how having a good relationship can enrich your life.
Birmingham turned out to be a small industrial city about the size of Graz, and the shooting of
As soon as I started rehearsing with Sally Field, I saw what Rafelson had been talking about. She was in total command of her craft, and within seconds she could cry or get angry or whatever was required. She was fun to be around too, always bubbly and full of energy. I was grateful to her and to Jeff Bridges for helping me learn. Jeff was very low-key, a little bit of a hippie, into playing his guitar, a comfortable person to hang out with, and very, very patient. I worked hard holding up my end of the deal. I invited other cast members to critique my acting, and I made Jeff promise to tell me what he really thought.
At first it was hard not to take criticisms personally. But Rafelson had warned me that changing careers would be tough. In this world, I wasn’t number one in the universe; I was just another aspiring actor. He was right. I had to surrender my pride and tell myself, “Okay, you’re starting again. You’re nothing here. You’re just a beginner. You’re just a little punk around these other actors.”
Yet I liked the fact that a movie is the effort of dozens of people. You need the people around you for you to look good, whereas bodybuilding is much more
In bodybuilding, you try to suppress your emotions and march forward with determination. In acting, it’s the opposite. You look for the sense memories that would serve as emotional keys. To do that, you have to strip away the calluses. It takes a lot of work. I’d remember the flowers I picked for my mother for Mother’s Day, which would remind me of being at home, being part of the family. Or I’d tap into my anger at Joe Weider for reneging on a promise to pay for something. Or I’d think back to when my father didn’t believe in me and said, “Why don’t you do something useful? Go chop some wood.” To live your life as an actor, you can’t be afraid of someone stirring up your emotions. You have to take the risk. Sometimes you’ll be confused, sometimes you’ll cry, but that will make you a better actor.
I could tell that Bob Rafelson was happy with the way things were going because after the first two or three weeks, he stopped checking my weight. I was already back up to 215 by the time we shot the Mr. Universe pose- off. That sequence comes near the film’s end: the bodybuilders in the Mr. Universe contest suspect Joe Santo of having stolen the prize money, and they all spill out onto the Birmingham streets. Once the real bad guy is caught, the bodybuilders notice that they’ve attracted a crowd and spontaneously start a posing exhibition. The crowd gets so into it that soon everybody’s posing in this big, happy climax. Shooting the scene was just like that: the extras and the onlookers in Birmingham got mixed up, and everybody was laughing and doing muscle poses, and Rafelson
