out, is that going make producers say, ‘Hey, wow! I want this guy’? I doubt it. What’s your goal in doing this?”
I had to admit I had no answer to that. I’d just been in a silly mood and said to Ara, “Let’s do something funny.” I wasn’t trying to get anything out of it.
“Well, since there’s no goal and it’s not going to lead anywhere, kill it. You don’t need it. You had your fun, now move on.” She was relentless and so convincing that I ended up talking
She was wise about public perception because that was the world in which she’d grown up. Maria was the first girlfriend I ever had who didn’t treat my ambitions as an annoyance, some kind of madness that interfered with her vision of the future: namely, marriage, kids, and a cozy little house somewhere—and the stereotypical all- American life. Maria’s world wasn’t small like that. It was gigantic, because of what her grandfather did, what her father did, what her mother did, what her uncles did. I’d finally met a girl whose world was as big as mine. I’d reached some of my goals but a lot of my world was still a dream. And when I’d talk about even bigger dreams, she never said, “Come on, this can’t be done.”
She’d seen it happen in her family. She came from a world where her great-grandfather was an immigrant and her grandfather made a vast fortune in Hollywood and the liquor business, real estate, and other investments. It was a world in which seeing a relative run for president or senator was not out of the ordinary. She’d heard her uncle John F. Kennedy pledge in 1961 that by the end of the decade the United States would land a man on the moon. Her mother had created the Special Olympics. Her dad was the founding director of the Peace Corps and had created the Job Corps, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), and Legal Services for the poor, all under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. And Sargent Shriver had been Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s ambassador to France. So if I said, “I want to make a million per picture,” it didn’t automatically strike Maria as absurd. It just made her curious. “How are you going to do that?” she’d ask. “I admire how driven you are. I don’t understand how anyone can have this discipline.” What’s more, by watching me, she got to see something she’d never actually witnessed firsthand: how you make one dollar into two, and how you build businesses and become a millionaire.
The way she was raised gave her huge advantages such as an exceptional education and her parents’ extensive knowledge and wisdom. She got to meet the influential people and hear their conversations. She got to live in Paris when her father was ambassador, and was able to travel the world. She grew up playing tennis, skiing, and competing in horse shows.
But there were drawbacks too. Eunice and Sarge were so forceful that the kids never got to develop their own opinions about things. The two of them made a point of letting the kids know that they were smart. “This is a very good idea, Anthony,” I’d hear Eunice tell her youngest son, who was only starting high school. “The way I would approach it is thus and so, but it’s a very good point you have. I didn’t think about that.” But the household was a strict hierarchy in which the parents, usually Eunice, made the choices. She was a very dominating personality, but Sarge didn’t mind.
When you grow up that way, it’s hard to make your own decisions, and eventually you feel like you can’t function without your parents’ input. Eunice and Sarge decided which colleges to consider, for example. Yes, there was some participation on the kids’ part, but overall, the parents ran the show. Then again, many times not even
She would laugh and say, “That’s not really true! Look how diverse they are.”
I’d say, “They are all environmentalists, they are all athletic, they all are Democrats, they all endorsed the same candidates, and they all
The other big disadvantage involved public perception. No matter what you did as a Kennedy or a Shriver, no one gave you credit for your accomplishment. Instead, people would say, “Well, if
Sarge and Eunice welcomed me. The first time that Maria brought me to their town house in Washington, Sarge came downstairs holding a book. “I’m just reading about these great accomplishments of yours,” he said. He’d found a mention of me in a book about American immigrants who had arrived with nothing and made a success. That was a nice surprise because I wasn’t expecting to be in books yet. Bodybuilding was such an odd thing. I thought they’d be writing about immigrants like former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, not me. It was so gracious and generous of Maria’s dad to notice that passage and show it to me.
Eunice put me right to work. She was thrilled to hear that I’d been involved with Special Olympics research at the University of Wisconsin. Before I knew it, I was helping her push the idea of adding power lifting to the Special Olympics and conducting workshops on weight training for the mentally handicapped wherever I traveled.
If the Shrivers hadn’t been so gracious, the first dinner I had at their house could have been difficult. Maria’s four brothers, Anthony, Bobby, Timothy, and Mark, ranged in age from twenty-three to twelve, and right away one of the younger ones piped up, “Daddy, Arnold loves Nixon!” Sarge was a great friend of Hubert Humphrey’s; in fact, when Humphrey ran against Nixon in 1968, he’d wanted Sarge as his running mate, but the Kennedy family torpedoed the idea.
So I felt really awkward sitting there at the table. But Sarge, always the diplomat, said evenly, “Well, everyone thinks differently about these things.” Later on we discussed it, and I explained why I admired Nixon. It was my reaction against having grown up in Europe, where government was totally in charge of everything, and 70 percent of people worked for the government, and the highest aspiration was to get a government job. That was one of the reasons why I left for the United States. Sargent happened to be a scholar of German, because he was of German descent. He had spent student summers in Germany in the mid-1930s wearing lederhosen, exploring the German and Austrian countryside, pedaling from village to village on his bicycle. During his first summer there, 1934, Adolf Hitler’s recent rise to power as German chancellor didn’t make much of an impression on Sarge. But in his second summer, 1936, he learned to recognize the brown-shirted “storm troopers” of the Nazi paramilitary, the Sturmabteilung (SA), and the black-uniformed members of Hitler’s elite guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS). He read about political prisoners being sent to concentration camps. Sarge actually heard Hitler speak.
He came home convinced that America should try to keep its distance from the growing crisis in Europe—so much so that in 1940 at Yale University he cofounded the antiwar America First Committee with classmates Gerald Ford, the future thirty-eighth president, and future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, among others. Nevertheless, Sarge enlisted in the navy before Pearl Harbor and served throughout the war. We spoke German together many times. He wasn’t fluent, exactly, but he could sing in German.
Family meals in the Shriver household were about as far from my upbringing as you could get. Sarge would ask me at the dinner table, “What would your parents have done if you’d talked to them the way my kids are talking to me here?”
“My dad would have smacked me right away.”
“Did you hear that, guys? Arnold, repeat that. Repeat that. His father would have smacked him. That’s what I should do with you kids.”
The boys would say, “Oh, Daddy,” and then throw a piece of bread at him.
They had that kind of humor at the table, and I was amazed. The first time I was there for dinner, the meal ended with one of the boys farting, another one burping, and another one leaning so far back in his chair that it toppled to the floor. Then he just lay there groaning, “Oh, man, I am fucking full.”
Eunice snapped, “Don’t ever say that again in this house, do you hear me?”
“Sorry, Mom, but I am so full. Your cooking is unbelievable.” Of course that was a wisecrack too. Eunice did not even know how to soft-boil an egg.
“Be happy that you were fed,” she said.
Maria’s parents certainly had a much more casual approach to childrearing than Meinhard and I had experienced. We were always told to shut up, whereas the Shriver kids were encouraged to join in the conversation. If, let’s say, the subject came up of Independence Day and what a great celebration it was, Sargent would ask, “Bobby, what does the Fourth of July mean to you?” They would talk about policy issues and social ills and things that the president had said. Everyone was expected to come up with something and take part.
