Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

life to make sure I got to the rehearsal dinner in Hyannis Port on time.

The day I was scheduled to leave, pro wrestler Jesse Ventura shadowed me on the set. We were shooting an action sequence in the jungle, and he’d be hiding in the bushes, not involved in the scene. While I was supposed to be screaming to the other guys, “Get down! Get down!” we’d hear Jesse chanting in that deep voice, “I do, I do, I do.” We were all laughing like hell and blowing take after take. The director kept asking, “Why are you not concentrating?”

Maria was not happy that I missed the final preparations. She wanted my mind to be on the wedding, but my mind was on the movie when I arrived. Predator had big problems, and—rightly or wrongly—in the mind of the public, the star is responsible for a movie’s success. There was talk of having to stop production, and when that happens to a movie, there is always the chance that it might never restart. It was a risky moment in my career. I refocused, of course, so that my mind was on the wedding, but not 100 percent. Meanwhile, some of our guests were wondering why the groom had showed up with a military crew cut. I made the best of it. Even if the situation wasn’t ideal, doing it this way was adventurous and fun.

I’d closed my ears to my friends’ horror stories about married life. “Ha! Now you get to argue about who should change the diapers.” Or “What kind of food makes a woman stop giving blow jobs? Wedding cake!” Or “Oh boy, wait until she hits menopause.” I paid no attention to any of that. “Just let me stumble into it,” I told them. “I don’t want to be forewarned.”

You can overthink anything. There are always negatives. The more you know, the less you tend to do something. If I had known everything about real estate, movies, and bodybuilding, I wouldn’t have gone into them. I felt the same about marriage; I might not have done it if I’d known everything I’d have to go through. The hell with that! I knew Maria was the best woman for me, and that’s all that counted.

I’m always comparing life to a climb, not just because there’s struggle but also because I find at least as much joy in the climbing as in reaching the top. I pictured marriage as a whole mountain range of fantastic challenges, ridgeline after ridgeline: planning the wedding, going to the wedding, deciding where we’d live, when we’d have kids, how many kids we’d have, what preschools and schools we’d choose for them, how we would get them to school, and on and on and on. I’d conquered the first mountain already, planning the wedding, by realizing that it was a process I couldn’t stop or change. It didn’t matter what I thought the tablecloths would look like or what we’d eat or how many guests there should be. You simply accept that you have no control. Everything was in good hands, and I knew I didn’t have to be concerned.

Maria and I had both been cautious about getting married and had waited a long time: she was thirty, and I was thirty-seven. We now were like rockets in our careers. Just after we got engaged, she’d been named coanchor of the CBS Morning News, and soon she would be switching to a similarly high-paying, high-profile job at NBC. These assignments were in New York, but I’d made it clear that I would never stand in her way. If our marriage had to be bicoastal, we would work it out, I said, so we should not even debate that now.

I always felt that you should wait to marry until you are set financially and the toughest struggles of your career are behind you. I’d heard too many athletes, entertainers, and businesspeople say, “The main problem is that my wife wants me to be home, and I need to spend more time at my job.” I hated that idea. It’s not fair to put your wife in a position where she has to ask, “What about me?” because you are working fourteen or eighteen hours a day to build your career. I always wanted to be financially secure before getting married, because most marriages break up over financial issues.

Most women go into a marriage with certain expectations of attention; usually based on the marriage their parents had, but not always. In Hollywood, the gold standard for husbandly devotion was Marvin Davis, the billionaire oilman who owned 20th Century Fox, Pebble Beach Resorts, and the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was married to Barbara, the mother of his five children, for fifty-three years. All the women were melting over Marvin Davis. We’d be at a dinner party at their house, and Barbara would boast, “Marvin’s never, ever been gone a single night without me. Every time he goes on a business trip, he comes home that same day. He’s never gone overnight. And when he is, he takes me with him.” And the wives would say to their husbands, “Why can’t you be like that?” Or if your wife was within range, you’d receive jabs or kicks under the table. Of course, not long after Marvin died in 2004, Vanity Fair magazine published a story revealing that he’d been broke and Barbara was left trying to continue their philanthropic causes and cope with a bunch of debts. Then a lot of Hollywood wives were really pissed at his example.

I’d promised myself that we would never have to use Maria’s money—neither the money she earned nor any from her family. I wasn’t marrying her because she came from wealth. At that point, I was making $3 million for Predator, and if it did well at the box office, I’d earn $5 million for the next project and $10 million for the next, because we’d been able to nearly double my “ask” with every film. I didn’t know whether or not I’d end up richer than her grandfather Joseph P. Kennedy, but I felt very strongly that we would never have to rely on Shriver or Kennedy money. What was Maria’s was hers. I never asked how much she had. I never asked how much her parents were worth. I hoped that it was as much as they dreamed of having, but I had no interest in it.

I also knew that Maria wouldn’t want a two-bedroom rental apartment lifestyle. I had to provide her with a lifestyle similar to the way she’d grown up.

My new wife and I were extremely proud of what we’d already achieved. She picked a house for me to buy for us after we got engaged, much more lavish and luxurious than the one we’d started in. The new place was a five- bedroom, four-bath, 12,000-square-foot Spanish-style mansion on two acres of a ridge in Pacific Palisades. Wherever you looked, there were beautiful sycamore trees, and we had views of the entire LA Basin. Our street, Evans Road, led up the canyon to Will Rogers State Historic Park, with its fabulous horse and hiking trails and polo grounds. The park was so close that Maria and I would ride our horses up there; it was like a big playground we could use day and night.

In the months before the wedding, I was busy promoting Commando and shooting Raw Deal—the action movie I’d promised to make for Dino De Laurentiis—and getting ready to start Predator. Maria was even busier in New York. But we carved out time for renovating and decorating. We expanded the swimming pool, put in a Jacuzzi, built the fireplace we wanted, and fixed the tiles, the lighting, and the trees. Under the house, where the land sloped down to the tennis court, we excavated and finished a level, which then served as a tennis house, entertainment area, and extra space for guests.

Maria had chosen curtains and fabrics, but when I came back in late May after shooting Predator, they hadn’t yet been installed. She wasn’t due home from New York for another three weeks. I wanted to make sure that the renovation was finished exactly as she’d envisioned it so that Maria and I could move in and have the perfect house to live in as husband and wife. So I leaned on the decorator to finish the job, and there was a frenzy of painting and furnishing and hanging art. I’d been working with the contractors long distance while I was on the Predator set and flying home on weekends to check on the renovation. I also had a Porsche 928 waiting for her at the house.

On the living room wall, the best spot was reserved for my wedding gift to Maria: a silk screen portrait of her I’d commissioned from Andy Warhol. I liked the famous prints he’d made of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Jackie Onassis in the sixties. He’d done these by shooting Polaroid portraits and then picking one to enlarge as the basis for a silk screen. I called him and said, “Andy, you have to do me a favor. I have this crazy idea. You know how you always do the paintings of stars? Well, when Maria marries me, she will be a star! You’ll be painting a star! You’ll be painting Maria!” This made Andy laugh. “So I would like to send her down to your studio, and she will sit for you, and you will photograph her and then paint her.” The image he created of Maria was a dramatic forty-two- inch square painting that captured her wild beauty and intensity. He ended up doing seven copies in different colors: one for my office, one for Maria’s parents, one for himself, and four for this wall, where they were clustered in a giant eight-foot square. Lithographs and paintings by Pablo Picasso, Miro, Chagall, and other artists we’d collected hung elsewhere in the room. But among all of those beautiful images, Maria’s was the gem.

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I played a big role in decorating our house, but the wedding itself was out of my hands. The Kennedys have a whole system worked out for weddings in Hyannis Port. They hire the right planners, they handle the limos and buses, they make sure the guest list isn’t so big that people are spilling out the back of the church. For the reception, they know just where in the family compound to put up the heated tents for the cocktails, dinner, and dancing. They manage public and media access so that well-wishers can glimpse the comings and goings and