Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

big, swooping fenders and running boards, exposed chrome exhaust pipes, and big headlights separate from the hood. It was a beautiful pimp car. I knew about the expensive, rare Stutz Bearcat because Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. each owned one. We started driving up a dirt road, with Wyeth explaining that he’d gotten the car from a vodka company in exchange for working on an ad. Meanwhile, I was noticing that we weren’t driving on a road but on a farm track with ruts for the wheels and with weeds growing up on both sides and in the middle—clearly not meant for cars like this. Then even the track ended and yet Wyeth kept driving up a hill, bumping through knee-high grass.

Finally, we arrived at the top, where I noticed an easel and a woman who was sitting on the ground wrapped in a blanket. She wasn’t beautiful, exactly, but sensuous, strong looking, and captivating—there was something unique about her. “Take it off,” Wyeth said. She dropped the blanket and sat with her breasts exposed, beautiful breasts, and I heard him mutter, “Oh, yeah.” Then he said to me, “I’m painting her now,” and he showed me the beginnings of a painting on the easel. “Anyway, I wanted you to meet because she speaks German.”

This was Helga Testorf, who worked at a neighboring farm and who was Wyeth’s obsession. He drew and painted her hundreds of times over many years, in sessions they kept secret from everyone. A decade later the story of the paintings and the obsession ended up on the covers of Time and Newsweek. But in 1977 I just happened to be there, and he let me in.

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Running around promoting Pumping Iron ate up a lot of time, but I enjoyed the work. At the Boston premiere, George Butler introduced me to his longtime friend John Kerry, then a first assistant county district attorney. He was there with Caroline Kennedy, JFK and Jackie’s nineteen-year-old daughter who was an undergraduate at Harvard. She seemed reserved at first, but after the movie we all went to dinner and she warmed up. Caroline told me she wrote for the Harvard Crimson, the university’s daily student newspaper, and asked if I would come speak the next day. Of course I agreed happily. She and other Crimson staff members interviewed me about government and my sport. Someone asked who was my favorite president. I said, “John F. Kennedy!”

All of this was fun, and it was also a good investment in my future. By promoting Pumping Iron and bodybuilding, I was also promoting myself. Every time I was on the radio or TV, people became a little more familiar with my accent, the Arnold way of talking, and a little more comfortable and at ease with me. The effect was the opposite of what the Hollywood agents had warned. I was making my size, accent, and funny name into assets instead of peculiarities that put people off. Before long people were able to recognize me without seeing me, just by name or by the sound of my voice.

The biggest promotion opportunity on the horizon was France’s Cannes Film Festival, in May. In preparation, I decided to do something about my clothes. Up until now, my uniform had pretty much been double-knit pants, a Lacoste shirt, and cowboy boots. One reason for this was lack of money. I couldn’t afford to have a wardrobe custom made, and the only off-the-rack clothes that could be made to fit came from big men’s stores, where the waist had to be taken in by a foot and a half. Another reason was that up to now, clothes were just not part of the plan. Every dollar should be invested to turn into two or three dollars and make me financially secure. With clothes, the money was gone. George told me the best tailor in New York was Morty Sills. So I went to him and asked, “If I had to pick one suit to own, what would it be?”

“Where are you wearing it?” he asked.

“First of all, a month from now, I’m going to the Cannes Film Festival.”

“Well, that’s a beige linen suit. There is no debate about that.”

So Morty made me a light beige linen suit and picked the tie and the shirt so that I would look really snappy.

Without question, the clothes were important when I got to Cannes. Decked out in the suit I was so proud of, with the right shirt, the right tie, the right shoes, I circulated among the thousands of journalists there and drummed up a lot of press for Pumping Iron. But the biggest splash I made there was on the beach, where George had the idea of staging a photo op featuring a dozen girls from Crazy Horse, the Parisian strip club and cabaret. They were outfitted in frilly summer dresses, bonnets, and bouquets—and I was just in my posing trunks. Pictures of that scene appeared in newspapers around the world, and the Pumping Iron screening was packed to overflowing.

So many famous stars were at Cannes—like Mick and Bianca Jagger!—and I was part of it. I kicked around a ball with the great Brazilian soccer star Pele. I went scuba diving with French military frogmen. I met Charles Bronson for the first time. The woman who headed European distribution for his movies hosted an evening for him at the hotel on the beach. She sat next to him at the head table, and I was close enough to hear their conversation. It turned out that Bronson wasn’t an easy guy to talk to. “You’re contributing so much to our success,” she said to him. “We’re so lucky to have you here. Isn’t the weather wonderful? We’re so lucky to have sunshine every day.” He waited a beat or two and then answered, “I hate small talk.” She was so shocked that she turned to her other dinner partner. I was stunned. That’s the way he was, though: rough around the edges. It never seemed to hurt his movies, but I decided I’d stay with a friendlier style.

Now that I was interested in clothes, my agent Larry Kubik was happy to take me shopping after I got back to LA. “You can find those same pants in this other store that’s not on Rodeo Drive for fifty percent less,” he’d say. Or, “Your brown socks won’t go with that shirt. I think you should have blue socks.” He had a good eye, and for both of us, shopping was a welcome diversion from turning down terrible parts. The most recent offers were for me to play a muscleman in Sextette, starring eighty-five-year-old Mae West, and, for $200,000, to be in commercials about automobile tires.

For months it seemed like the only action for me in LA was in real estate. Partly because of inflation and partly because of growth, Santa Monica property values were going through the roof. My apartment building wasn’t even on the market, but around the time that Pumping Iron came out, a buyer offered me almost double what I’d paid for it in 1974. The profit on my $37,000 investment was $150,000—I’d quadrupled my money in three years. I rolled the whole amount into a building twice the size, with twelve apartments rather than six, with the help of my friend Olga, who, as always, had found just the place to buy.

My secretary, Ronda Columb, who had been running the Arnold mail-order business and organizing my crazy schedule for years, was tickled to see me turning into a real estate minimogul. She was a transplanted New Yorker, four times divorced and ten or twelve years older than me. Her first husband had been a bodybuilding champ in the 1950s. I’d met her through Gold’s Gym. Ronda was like an older sister. Her latest boyfriend was a real estate developer named Al Ehringer.

Out of the blue one day she said, “You know, Al loves you.”

“He gets to go home with my secretary; of course he loves me!” I said.

That got a laugh. “No, really, he loves you and wants to be in business with you. Would you think about doing business with him?”

“Well, find out what he has in mind, because there’s a building for sale down on Main Street, and if he wants to get involved …” Al had a reputation as a shrewd real estate brain, very good at sensing which areas to develop. He’d played a major role in reviving the historic district of Pasadena, California, with shops and lofts. I thought Santa Monica might be ripe for the same treatment. Main Street, which ran parallel to the ocean a few blocks in from the beach, was run down and full of drunks and drifters, and there was a lot of property for sale. I was looking to invest $70,000 I’d saved up from Pumping Iron and other work.

Al was already familiar with the building that had caught my eye. “That property and three others are for sale now,” he said. “Pick which one you like, and I’ll go in with you.” So Al and I bought the building and started organizing the turnaround of Main Street.

Our building started to pay for itself almost immediately. It came with three small houses out back, facing onto the next street, and we sold those off for enough money to reimburse our entire down payment. That made it easy to get a big loan and do a total renovation. And because the building was more than fifty years old, it qualified for historic status and a big tax advantage. This was yet another reason to love America: back in Austria, if you tried to get a building declared historic, they’d laugh at you unless it was five hundred years old.

Making money this way doubled my confidence. I adjusted my life plan: I still wanted to own a gymnasium chain eventually, but instead of making money from movies, like Reg Park and Steve Reeves did, I would make it from real estate.

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