Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

was on his megaphone shouting, “Please do not touch the bodybuilders.”

George Butler came to Alabama in the middle of all this to turn all my new plans upside down. He’d always talked about turning Pumping Iron into a documentary, but he wasn’t able to raise the money while they were finishing the book. Now things had changed. With all the publicity around Mr. Olympia, the book had become a surprise bestseller. And because I was making a movie with Bob Rafelson, the money was easier to raise. Also, George’s wife, Victoria, was a smart investor, and as long as I was in the film, she was willing to put in money.

“So we can do it!” he announced when we sat down to talk. His idea was to make the documentary hinge on me competing in the next Mr. Olympia contest, which was scheduled for November in Pretoria, South Africa. I had to remind him that I’d shifted my goal to acting and completely changed my training routine. “I’m retired,” I said. “Look, I’ve taken off all this muscle.” The conversation grew pretty heated.

“Well, there is no Pumping Iron if you’re not in it,” George insisted. “The other guys can’t carry the movie with their personalities. You’re really the only one in bodybuilding who brings life to the sport. I need you to be in it. Otherwise I can’t raise the money.” Then he claimed that working on the project would be good for my acting career.

“I don’t need it for my career,” I said. “You can’t get any better than this movie with Bob Rafelson. As soon as I go back, I want to continue with my acting—that’s where the opportunity is.”

George tried playing another card: “We’re prepared to pay you fifty thousand dollars to do this.” This was a number he’d thrown around already the previous year. Back then it sounded good because I was just buying the apartment building in Santa Monica and taking on a lot of debt. And I still liked the idea of that kind of money coming in. At this moment, however, it rubbed me the wrong way. “I don’t really want to go back into competition,” I said.

I didn’t owe George anything, but there was a lot to sort out. He was the best promoter I’d ever met, and I knew he would throw himself into this project. A Pumping Iron film by him would be an opportunity, maybe a great opportunity, to present bodybuilding as a sport to people who normally would never pay any attention. I felt that I couldn’t turn my back on bodybuilding. So much of my life was wrapped up in it and so many friends.

There were business dimensions to think about too. Backstage in Columbus, Ohio, years before, I’d told promoter Jim Lorimer that I wanted to partner with him someday to produce bodybuilding events. After my last Mr. Olympia tournament, I’d called him. “Remember how I said when I retired from competition I’d get in touch?” I asked. We agreed to go into business together, and we were putting together a bid with other investors he knew to make Columbus the home of future bodybuilding competitions. If anyone had the business skill and the connections to bring bodybuilding into the heartland and the American sports mainstream, it was Jim. Of course I still had the Arnold mail-order business, which was now bringing in $4,000 a year and growing.

And I was still attached to Joe Weider. Joe and I had battled—for example, at times he’d gotten mad when I signed up for a competition that he didn’t sponsor. But there was always that father-and-son bond. Joe adjusted to my movie career by covering the filming of Stay Hungry in his magazines. All the fans knew I was retiring, and the way he framed it was “Arnold is going into this other arena, and he is going to carry bodybuilding with him no matter what movie he does, so let’s follow him and support him.” When he realized I was serious about acting, Joe gave up gracefully on the dream of having me take over his business. But he would have freaked if he’d thought he would totally lose me, because I was the goose that laid the golden egg.

Finally, George convinced me to compete again. I looked at what I wanted to accomplish. Besides being the bodybuilding champion I was by now convinced that bodybuilding itself was ready for a big push. George and Charles had started the ball rolling with their articles and book. The seminars I taught were full. Working with reporters, I’d made the media a support system for whatever I wanted to sell. I felt it was my responsibility, as the bodybuilder with personality and the large following, to carry that on. I shouldn’t think only about my own career but also about the big picture: the need for fitness in the world and how weight training could make you a better tennis or football or soccer player. And we could make bodybuilding fun.

A Pumping Iron film could have a huge impact. Documentaries such as Marjoe, about an evangelist named Marjoe Gortner, and The Endless Summer, about two young surfers traveling the world in search of the perfect wave, were very hip at that point. The films would move from city to city, using money from the last showing to finance the next screening.

I told George that to get my body back into shape for competition was like turning the Titanic. Mechanically, it was an easy decision; I knew all the training steps I would have to take. But it was much harder to buy into psychologically. I’d deprogrammed myself from being onstage in competition and from needing that glory. Now starring in movies was the motivating thing. That shift had involved months of adjustment. So to go back now was a real challenge. How would I convince myself again that that body was the most important thing?

Still, I thought I would be able to win. I’d have to increase from 210 pounds back to competition weight, but I’d done something like this before, after my knee surgery in 1972. My left thigh atrophied from twenty-eight inches down to twenty-two or twenty-three, yet I’d built it back up bigger than ever in time for Mr. Olympia that year. My theory was that muscle cells, like fat cells, have a memory, so they can grow back quickly to where they were. There was some uncharted territory, of course. I would want to perform even better than I did at Madison Square Garden, so should I come all the way back to 240 pounds, or should I come in leaner? Whatever the answer, I thought it was doable.

The idea of constantly having Butler’s cameras on me while I trained was tempting. You always want to look better when the camera’s on you, so it’s a great motivator. I thought that maybe the camera crew would eventually feel like just part of the woodwork, and I’d no longer be self-conscious around it— and that would be great for my acting career.

For at least a week, I’d sit in the hotel weighing the pros and cons, and then I’d go shoot another scene of Stay Hungry. Then I’d go back and think about it some more, and hang out and talk to other people. Charles Gaines had decided to move on to other writing projects and not work on the documentary with George. He thought my returning to competition would be a mistake. “You are on your acting mission now,” he told me. “You need to show the community that you’re serious about it. After this movie, they’ll want to see you continue with acting classes with talented actors and directors. But if now all of a sudden you’re competing again, it’ll look like you have one foot in and one foot out so that you can go back to bodybuilding in case acting doesn’t work. Is that the impression you want to give?”

All my life, my goals had been simple and linear, like building up a muscle with hundreds of thousands of reps. But this situation wasn’t simple at all. Yes, I had committed 100 percent to becoming a lean and athletic- looking actor—how could I undo that and refocus myself on winning Mr. Olympia again? I knew the way my mind worked, and that to accomplish anything, I had to buy in completely. The goal had to be something that made total sense and that I could look forward to every day, not just something I was doing for money or some other arbitrary reason, because then it wouldn’t work.

In the end I realized I had to think about the problem a different way. It could not be solved from a purely selfish point of view. I felt that even though I was on the trajectory to launch an acting career, I owed too much to bodybuilding to reject it. So I had to do Pumping Iron and compete for Mr. Olympia again—not for myself, but to help promote bodybuilding. I would pursue my acting career at the same time, and if my actions were confusing to people like Charles, I’d just have to explain.

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A month after I got back from Alabama, my friends threw a twenty-eighth birthday party for me at Jack Nicholson’s house. The organizer was Helena Kallianiotes, who looked after his property and who had a small part in Stay Hungry. She was a dancer and understood the hard training and dedication involved in bodybuilding. In Birmingham, she’d become a good friend, helping me rehearse and showing me around the oyster bars. Later, when I wrote Arnold’s Bodyshaping for Women, Helen was the first person I consulted to get more into a woman’s mind about training.

The party was a great success. Many people from Hollywood came, as well as my friends from Venice Beach—this amazing mix of actors, bodybuilders, weight lifters, karate guys, and writers, plus visitors from New York. There were about two hundred altogether. For me, this was heaven because I could introduce myself to so