Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

many new people.

I got to know Nicholson, Beatty, and the rest of the Mulholland Drive crowd a little better now that I was back. They were so hot in those days, with movies like Chinatown, The Parallax View, and Shampoo. They were on the covers of magazines, they went to the trendiest nightclubs. They were always together, and in winter, the whole clique would fly to Gstaad, Switzerland, to ski. I was not inside enough to be partying with them all the time, but I did get exposed to how stars at that level lived and operated, what they were into, and how they moved around, and it inspired me to be there myself in a few years.

Jack Nicholson was very casual and low-key. You would always see him with his Hawaiian shirt, shorts or long pants, sunglasses, and disheveled hair. He owned the most expensive Mercedes, a maroon 600 Pullman, with all-leather interior and extraordinary woodwork. The person who actually used this car was not Jack but Helena. Jack himself drove a Volkswagen Beetle, and that was his shtick: “I’m so rich that I’m going to sell myself like an ordinary person. I’m not into money at all.” He would drive his little Beetle to the studio lot on the way to a media interview or a discussion about a film. The guard at the gate would say, “Oh, Mr. Nicholson, of course. Your parking spot is right over there,” and Jack would putt-putt in as if the car could barely get there. It was genuine. He was more comfortable in the VW than in the Mercedes. I would have loved the Mercedes.

A photographer friend from New York visited and took me to Warren Beatty’s house on the beach. Warren wanted the photographer to see the plans for the new house he was building on Mulholland Drive. Beatty was famous for never making up his mind and debating every decision for thousands of hours. He was accomplishing a lot: he’d recently starred in The Parallax View directed by Alan Pakula, and was cowriting and starring in Shampoo, and was directing scenes for the Russian Revolution movie that eventually became Reds. But hearing him talk, you wondered how he got anything done at all. I thought this was not the way I would operate if I were at that level. But I was also learning that born actors are always a little artsy and strange. You can identify the type. When you hang out with businessmen, they act like businessmen. Politicians act like politicians. These guys were entertainers, and they acted like entertainers. They were Hollywood. It was a different thing.

The one who did not fit this picture was Clint Eastwood. The Mulholland Drive bunch liked to go for dinner at Dan Tana’s restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard. They would sit together, and Clint would be there eating at his own table on the other side of the room. I went up to him and introduced myself, and he invited me to sit for a minute and chat. He was a bodybuilding fan and worked out regularly himself. He wore a herringbone tweed jacket, very similar to the one he’d worn in his 1971 movie Dirty Harry. Later I learned it wasn’t just similar, it was the same jacket. Clint was a very frugal guy. After we became friends, he told me that he always kept the clothes from his movies and wore them for years and never bought anything new. (Nowadays, of course, he likes to deck himself out in beautiful clothes. Maybe he still gets them for free.) It made a lot of stars uncomfortable to see a celebrity eating alone. But, in fact, Clint was totally at ease and un-self-conscious.

Costarring in a soon-to-be-released Bob Rafelson movie didn’t get me very far when I tried to find an agent. One guy who approached me was Jack Gilardi, who represented O. J. Simpson, the top running back in the National Football League. O.J. was at the peak of his athletic career, and Gilardi was getting him parts on the side in movies like the disaster flick The Towering Inferno. The studios liked to have O.J. in there just for the name, so football fans would go to see the movie. That’s how you manufactured an audience. But it was never the starring role, and nobody who mattered in Hollywood paid attention.

Jack wanted to do the same thing for me. He figured if I was in a movie, then all the bodybuilding fans would buy tickets. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I have a good Western script and a meeting with the producers, and there’s something in here for you.” It was maybe the sixth or seventh most important role.

This was not at all what I had in mind. Whoever represented me had to buy into the big vision. I didn’t want an agent who would say, “I’m sure you must have something in your movie for Arnold, maybe a minor supporting part with a few lines where he can be listed in the cast.” I wanted an agent who would pound the table on my behalf. “This guy has leading-man potential. I want to groom him for that. So if you can offer us one of the top three parts, we’re interested. If not, let’s just move on.”

I couldn’t find anyone at the big agencies who saw it this way. William Morris and International Creative Management were the dominant agencies in town, and that was where I wanted to be because they always got first look at the big movie projects, they handled all the big directors, and they dealt with the top people at the studios. An agent from each place was willing to meet with me because I’d just shot a picture with Bob Rafelson.

They both said the same thing: there were too many obstacles. “Look, you have an accent that scares people,” said the guy from ICM. “You have a body that’s too big for movies. You have a name that wouldn’t even fit on a movie poster. Everything about you is too strange.” He wasn’t being mean about it, and he offered to help in other ways. “Why don’t you stay in the gym business, and we can develop a chain of franchises? Or we can help you in lining up seminars and speaking engagements. Or with a book or something like that about your story.”

I understand it better today that there’s so much talent all over the world that these big agencies don’t really have the time or the desire to groom someone and nurture him to the top. They’re not in the business of doing that. It has to happen or not happen. But at the time, I felt stung. I knew I had a strange body. I knew my name was hard to spell—but so was Gina Lollobrigida’s! Why should I give up my goal because a couple of Hollywood agents turned me down?

The accent was an issue I could do something about. That summer I added accent removal lessons to my schedule, along with acting classes, college courses, running my businesses, and training for Mr. Olympia. My teacher was Robert Easton, a world-famous dialect coach whose nickname was the Henry Higgins of Hollywood. He was a gigantic guy, six foot three or four, with a big beard, a tremendous voice, and the most precise enunciation. The first time we met, he showed off by speaking English first with a High German accent and then a Low German accent. Next, he shifted into an Austrian accent and then a Swiss accent. He could do English accents, southern accents, and accents from Brooklyn and Boston. Robert had been a character actor mainly in Westerns. His diction was so perfect, I was scared to open my mouth. His house, where I went to practice with him, contained thousands of books about language, and he loved each one. He would say, “Arnold, the book over there on the fourth shelf from the bottom, third book in, pull it out, will you? It’s about the Irish,” and off he would go.

Easton had me practice saying “A fine wine grows on the vine” tens of thousands of times. It was very difficult with the f, the w, and the v together, because the German language doesn’t have a w sound, only the v. When we drink wine, we spell it wein and pronounce it “vine.” So now I had to say “wuh, wuh, wuh, wine. Why. What. When.” Then there was v, as in “We’re going to vuh, vuh, Vegas.” Also, German doesn’t have the same s and z as English: “the sink is made of zinc.” Bob explained it was the harshness of my accent that made people feel threatened, so rather than get rid of it completely, I only had to soften it and be smoother.

Meanwhile, George Butler had launched into filming Pumping Iron like a wild man. He made a big impression on the bodybuilders by darkening the skylights at Gold’s because it was too bright for the movie cameras. He and his crew shot scenes at Venice Beach. They followed Franco to Sardinia on a visit to his childhood village way up in the mountains and shot footage of his humble roots. They came with me to Terminal Island, where I did a posing exhibition and gave weight-training lessons for the prisoners. He lined up a New York City ballet instructor and filmed her coaching Franco and me on our posing in the New York studio of Joanne Woodward, the Academy Award–winning actress and wife of Paul Newman.

Every movie has to have an element of conflict, and George decided that Pumping Iron would focus on the rivalry between Lou Ferrigno and me in the 1975 Mr. Olympia competition, and the suspense of whether or not Lou would knock me off as champion. He was fascinated by Lou’s relationship with his father, and the fact that we were both sons of policemen. The contrasts between us were perfect. George went to shoot Lou working out in his small, dark gym in Brooklyn, the exact opposite of Gold’s. Lou’s personality was dark and brooding, while mine was sunny and beachy. Normally, Lou came to California to train and get a tan before major competitions, but George persuaded him to stay in Brooklyn to heighten the contrast even more. That was fine with me because it would make him even more isolated and easier to beat.

My job, of course, was to play myself. I felt that the way to stand out was not just to talk about bodybuilding, because that would be one-dimensional, but to project a personality. My model was Muhammad Ali. What