ordinary B movie even though there were signs from the start that it was much more. Critics wrote about it as a major breakthrough, as if to say, “Wow, where did that come from?” People were amazed at what they saw and how it was shot. And it wasn’t just guys who liked it.
But Orion’s advertising campaign was pitched to action fanatics, and featured me shooting and blowing everything up. The TV commercial and the movie-house trailer would make most people say, “Ugh, crazy, violent science fiction. That’s not for me. My fourteen-year-old might like it. Oh, but maybe he shouldn’t go. It’s rated R.” What Orion telegraphed to the industry was “This is a bread-and-butter movie to help pay the bills. Our classy movie is about Mozart.”
Cameron went nuts. He begged the studio to expand the promotion and raise the tone before the movie came out. The ads should have been broader, with more focus on the story and on Sarah Connor, so the message would be: “Even though you may think it’s crazy science fiction, you’ll be quite surprised. This is one of our classy movies.”
They treated him like a child. One of the executives told Jim beforehand that “down-and-dirty action thrillers” like this usually had a two-week life. By the second weekend, attendance drops by half, and by the third week, it’s over. It didn’t matter that
Nevertheless, from an investment point of view,
The fling with Brigitte Nielsen underlined what I already knew: I wanted Maria to be my wife. In December she acknowledged that she was thinking more and more about marriage. Her career was taking off—she was now an on-air correspondent for CBS News—but she would be turning thirty soon and wanted to start a family.
Since Maria had been quiet about our marrying for so long, I didn’t need for her to signal twice. “This is it,” I told myself, “the end of dating, the end of telling people ‘I believe in long escrows,’ and all this bull. Let’s take this seriously and move forward.” Literally the next day, I asked friends in the diamond business to help design a ring. And when I wrote down my list of goals for 1985, at the very top I put, “This is the year I will propose to Maria.”
I liked having the diamond in the middle, bookended by smaller diamonds on the left and right sides. I asked my friends in the jewelry business to come up with ideas along those lines and sketched for them what I envisioned. I wanted the main diamond to be a minimum of five carats and the others to be maybe a carat or two each. We worked on that idea, and then within a few weeks, we had designs. And in another few weeks, I had the ring.
From that day on, I kept it wrapped up and ready in my pocket. Everywhere we went, I was just looking for the right moment to propose. I almost asked Maria at various points in Europe and Hyannis Port that spring, but it didn’t feel quite right. I was actually planning to propose when I took her to Hawaii in April. But the minute we got there, we met three other couples who all said, “We’re here to get engaged,” or “We’re here to get married.”
I thought, “Arnold, don’t propose here, because every schmuck’s coming over here to do the same thing.”
I had to be more creative. I knew my wife would be telling the story to my kids someday, and my kids would be telling their kids, so I had to come up with something unique. There were many options. It could have been on an African safari or on the Eiffel Tower, except that going to Paris would be a dead giveaway. The challenge was to make it truly a surprise.
“Maybe I should take her to Ireland,” I thought, “where she actually traces her ancestry—maybe some castle in Ireland.”
In the end I just proposed spontaneously. We were in Austria in July visiting my mom, and I took Maria out rowing on the Thalersee. This lake was where I’d grown up, where I’d played as a kid, where I’d learned to swim and won trophies for swimming, where I’d started bodybuilding, where I’d had my first date. The lake meant all of those things to me. Maria wanted to see it, since she’d heard me talk about it. It felt right to propose to her there. She started crying and hugging and was totally surprised. So it was exactly the way I envisioned it; the way it ought to play out.
After we got back to shore, of course, all kinds of questions came into her mind: “When do you think we should get married?” “When should we have an engagement party?” “When should we make the announcement?”
And she asked, “Have you talked to my dad?”
“No,” I said.
“It’s a tradition in America that you have to talk to the father and ask him.”
“Maria,” I said “do you think I’m stupid? Ask your father and he will tell your mother and your mother will blabber it to you immediately. What do you think, their loyalty is to me? You are their daughter. Or she will tell Ethel, and she will tell Bobby, and she will tell everybody in the family before you even find out. I had to have my chance to actually propose. So of course I didn’t talk to them, nobody.”
I did call her father that evening. “Normally I know I’m supposed to ask you first,” I said, “but I was not about to ask you anything because I know that you would tell Eunice and Eunice would tell Maria.”
“You’re goddam right. That’s exactly what she would have done,” said Sarge.
“So I’m just asking you now.”
He said, “Arnold, it is a great pleasure to have you as a son-in-law.” He was very, very gracious, Sargent, always.
Then I talked to Eunice and told her, and she acted very excited. But I’m sure that Maria had called her before I ever did.
We spent a lot of time with my mom. We hung out, we took her to Salzburg, and traveled around and had a great time. Then we went home to Hyannis Port. We had a little party to celebrate, with everyone sitting around the dinner table: the Shriver family, Eunice and her sister Pat, Teddy and his then wife, Joan, and many Kennedy cousins as well. They always had those long extended tables and a lot of people for dinner.
I had to tell in minute detail exactly how it came about. That was fun. They were hanging on every word and there were all these sounds: “Oh! Ahh! Fantastic!” And bursts of applause.
“You went on a rowboat! Jesus, where’d you find a damn rowboat?”
Teddy was boisterous and very loud and having a good time. “That’s amazing! Did you hear that, Pat? What would you have done if Peter had asked you to marry him in a rowboat? I know Eunice would have preferred the sailboat. She’d say, ‘A rowboat? That’s no good! I want action!’ ”
“Teddy, let Arnold finish the story.”
Everyone was asking questions.
“Tell me, Arnold, what did Maria do then?”
“What was the expression on her face?”
“What would you have done if she’d said no?”
Before I could answer, someone else said, “What do you mean, said no? Maria couldn’t
It was this very Irish way of relishing the smallest details and turning everything into great fun.
Eventually Maria got a chance to speak. “It was so romantic,” she said. And she held up the ring for everyone to see.
