Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

school in Holland as a girl. Rose conversed fluently about Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart, and told us how she loved the opera and the symphony, and how she had played piano her whole life. It was very interesting to be that close to the Kennedy matriarch I’d read and heard so much about—to be that close to history.

Later that night, I had to leave. Maria took me to the airport, and we were talking by the ticket counter when I remembered I had no money. Maria had to write a check for my airfare. Having to ask a twenty-one-year-old girl to lend me money sent my temperature up about a hundred degrees from embarrassment. The reason I always wanted to earn was that I never wanted to ask for a handout or loan. The first thing I did when I came back to Los Angeles was tell Ronda, “Write out a check right away, and we have to send it to Maria because she loaned me sixty dollars. I have to get that money back as quick as possible.” I sent it along with a thank-you note.

Maria and I weren’t in touch again until close to Halloween. By then I was on a promotional tour for my new book, Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, a combination memoir and introduction to weight training that I did with a writer-photographer named Douglas Kent Hall after retiring from competition. The publisher, Dan Green at Simon & Schuster, was fascinated by bodybuilding and masterminded the project. When I went to meet with him about the marketing plan for the book, he was enthusiastic. “This is going to do really well,” he said. “It’ll be as big a bestseller as Pumping Iron.”

“Not if we stay with this publicity plan,” I said. The proposal he was showing me involved visiting only a half dozen of the biggest cities.

“People won’t buy this book unless we tell them it exists,” I pointed out. “Otherwise, how do they know? If you want to see it to go through the roof, then don’t just send me to six cities. We’re going to go to thirty cities, and we’re going to do it in thirty days.”

“Thirty cities in thirty days! That’s crazy!”

“Be happy,” I said. “We’re going to cities where normally celebrities don’t ever go, and we can get more time on the morning shows that way.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” he said. I reminded him that Pumping Iron had succeeded because we’d promoted it more broadly than usual and sold it in unconventional places, like sporting goods stores.

Promotion tours for sports books often skipped Washington, DC. But I had promoted Pumping Iron there, so it made sense to go back and get the same journalists involved. And since Maria lived in DC, it seemed natural to get in touch. I called ahead of time, and she enthusiastically offered to show me around the city. I didn’t arrive until late, eight or nine in the evening on Halloween. Maria picked me up dressed in a gypsy costume and took me out and showed me the bars and restaurants where she had worked while she was in college—she’d just graduated from Georgetown University. She really looked the part, with her colorful dress, bracelets, big earrings, and her mass of beautiful black hair. We had a wonderful time until one in the morning or so, when she went home. The next morning, I had my interviews with the press and then traveled on.

I sent flowers for her birthday a week later, November 6, which I’d never done before for a girl. I had a crush on Maria, and I’d discovered recently that you could order flowers by phone—it was a new way of showing appreciation, like learning the American custom of writing thank-you notes. In any case, Maria was pleased.

As soon as I came back from Europe, I continued the book tour. It took me to Detroit to do a shopping mall appearance. I called Maria and said, “Hey, if you want to come join me, I have some wonderful friends there, and we can go out.” My friends, the Zurkowskis, were part owners of Health & Tennis Corporation, the country’s biggest fitness chain, with more than a hundred gyms all over America. Maria agreed to come, and we all got together. To me this was a clear indication that she was interested in starting a relationship. She’d been seeing a guy from college, but that candle seemed to be sputtering out, and I thought she was ready to move on.

For my part, I didn’t know what I had in mind when I called her. I had such a good time with her on Halloween that I wanted to see her again. And she was on the East Coast, and I thought of Detroit as being in the neighborhood. I wasn’t at the point of wanting a serious relationship, especially not an East Coast–West Coast thing. She was talking about going to TV production training in Philadelphia, and I thought, “No way. Philadelphia and Los Angeles would be tough.”

But it developed into exactly that: an East Coast–West Coast relationship. There was no talk about whether we were now officially going out or whether we were seeing anyone else. It was more like, “Let’s see each other when we can.” But I liked it that she was so ambitious and wanted to become a force in TV news. I told her my ambitions too. “One day I’m going to make a million dollars for a movie,” I said, because that was what the highest-paid actors, like Charles Bronson, Warren Beatty, and Marlon Brando, were making. I had to be one of them. I told her my goal was to be a leading man and to be as successful in movies as I was in bodybuilding.

The Hollywood community was very much aware of me after Stay Hungry, Pumping Iron, and The Streets of San Francisco. But nobody knew what to do with me. Studio executives are always overwhelmed with projects, and none of them was going to sit down and say, “Jeez, what about this guy? He has the body and the looks. He has a personality. He can act. But he doesn’t fit into any ordinary role, so what can we do?”

I needed to connect with an independent producer. Fortunately, one came looking for me: Ed Pressman, who’d made Badlands with writer-director Terrence Malick and was working on Paradise Alley with Stallone. He was a short, professorial-looking guy from New York, elegant and very well dressed, whose father had founded a toy company, and who had a philosophy degree from Stanford University. Ed’s pet project was to bring to the screen a 1930s pulp fiction barbarian warrior named Conan. He and his partner spent a couple of years negotiating for the movie rights and had just locked them up when they saw a rough cut of Pumping Iron. Right away they decided I would be perfect for Conan.

Ed didn’t even have a script. He gave me a pile of comic books to look at while I made up my mind. I’d never heard of Conan, but it turned out that there was this whole cult of young guys who were really into it. There had been a big Conan revival since the sixties, with fantasy paperbacks, and Marvel Comics picked up the character too. To me this meant there would be plenty of ready-made fans if Conan came to the screen.

What Ed envisioned was not just one movie but a whole Conan franchise, like Tarzan or James Bond, with a new installment every couple of years. I don’t remember exactly how he put it, because Ed was extremely low-key, but he was very persuasive. To get studio backing, he explained, he needed to lock me up. I couldn’t accept other he-man roles—like another Hercules, say—and I’d have to commit to being available to make sequels. Just looking at the covers of the paperbacks, I knew I wanted the part. They were these fantastic illustrations by the artist Frank Frazetta showing Conan raising his battle-axes in triumph as he stands on a pile of slain enemies, a beautiful princess at his feet, and Conan charging on a warhorse through an army of terrified foes. In the fall of 1977 we agreed on a deal for me to star in Conan the Warrior and four sequels. The money was all laid out: $250,000 for the first film, $1 million for the next, $2 million for the next, and so on, plus 5 percent of the profits. All five movies would be worth $10 million over ten years. I thought, “This is fantastic! I’m way beyond my goal.”

Word of the deal traveled fast in Hollywood. The trade press picked it up, so when I walked down Rodeo Drive, shopkeepers would come out of their stores and invite me in. Even though there were still a lot of ifs, signing that contract made me confident that I would be among the million-dollar players in the movie business. So when I told Maria that was my vision, I knew that it could become real.

I didn’t realize it would take several more years, but I was in no rush. Having tied up the rights and tied up the actor, now Ed had to find a director and money to make the first film. John Milius wanted the project because he loved the mixture of macho and mythology in the Conan books. But he was busy shooting a coming-of-age surfer movie with Gary Busey, Big Wednesday. So Ed was still looking for a director. He had better luck with financing. Paramount Pictures agreed to put up $2.5 million for initial development as long as Ed attached a name screenwriter to the project.

That was how I met Oliver Stone. He was known at that point as a rising star and had finished the screenplay for Midnight Express, based on the true story of a young American in Turkey who gets busted for trying to smuggle hashish out of the country and is sentenced to life in a brutal Turkish prison. That script would win Oliver his first Oscar. Conan attracted him because it was epic and mythical and had franchise potential—and because Paramount was willing to pay.

Often when I was in town over the next year, Oliver and I would meet. He was a crazy guy, very smart and very entertaining. He thought of himself as a great writer, and I got a kick out of the fact that he was so confident,