Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

takeoff on me. I’d always been the perfect target for jokes; there was so much material to work with. Being Austrian, marrying Maria, being Republican, the accent. With all this going for you, you need a sense of humor so you can join the fun.

In 1985, the year after The Terminator became a hit, I was at a dinner in Denver on the eve of the Carousel Ball, a famous charity extravaganza organized by Marvin and Barbara Davis. Marvin, who was then the owner of Fox Studios, where I was making Commando, was known for his sense of humor. He and Barbara were seated with a bunch of comedians who were due to perform at the gala, including Lucille Ball and her husband, Gary Morton. I was at the next table with the Davises’ son, John, and the younger crowd. There was a lot of laughing at Marvin’s and Barbara’s table, and the jokes were starting to fly thick and fast. I heard Marvin call out, “Hey, Arnold, come over here. Why don’t you tell us a joke?” That was typical Marvin, I later learned. But I was speechless. I didn’t have a joke prepared. I didn’t even know what kind of jokes to make at such an event.

All I could say was, “Give me a little bit of warm-up time here. Maybe tomorrow I tell you,” or something like that.

But Lucille Ball jumped right in. “He’s very funny. You don’t have to worry about him,” she said. “I worked with him.” So she covered for me, and then Gary Morton interrupted with a joke, and then Milton Berle went off on a routine about what would Gary Morton be without Lucille Ball. I was saved, but it was a perfect example of how important it is to be prepared for such moments.

I’d met Milton Berle at the West Coast engagement party for Maria and me in 1985. Berle’s wife, Ruth, and Maria knew each other from the Share Girls, a charity group that Maria joined when she moved to LA; it included Johnny Carson’s wife, Dean Martin’s wife, Sammy Davis Jr.’s wife, and so on, and we called it the rich broads’ foundation. There was a great history between the Berles and the Kennedys because Milton had been a big fan of JFK. They’d hung out together, and Milton had given JFK a humidor that eventually sold at the Kennedy auction for $520,000 to Marvin Shanken, the publisher-editor of Cigar Aficionado magazine. Milton gave me one just like it, one of only three he ever gave away.

So Maria and Ruth became good friends, and Ruth brought Milton to our engagement party. The first thing he did was walk up to some guy I didn’t know and shake his hand. He said, “It’s so nice to be here today at this engagement party. Maria is marrying Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Arnold, this is great, thank you so much for inviting me.”

I totally fell for it. I said, “I am over here!” What a stupid trick, but people were laughing, and that broke the ice, and then he did a whole routine. “Ruthie, my wife,” he said. “Look at her lips. The last time I saw lips like that, it had a hook through it.”

Ruthie, who was sitting next to Maria, said to her, “Oh God, that joke. I’ve heard it a thousand times.”

Berle sat down with us afterward, and we had a great time. Finally, he said, “Let’s get together.”

“Absolutely!” I said.

We met at Caffe Roma in Beverly Hills, and it became our place. We always had lunch there, and I’d hang out with him and his friends like Sid Caesar and Rodney Dangerfield, and Milt Rosen, who wrote a lot of the jokes. Or I would go to his house, where we’d smoke stogies while I asked him a thousand questions about comedy.

Berle was the president of the Friars Club of Beverly Hills, which he founded in 1947 with other comedians like Jimmy Durante and George Jessel. It was on a side street between Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards, in a white building that resembled a bunker from the outside but inside was a private restaurant and nightclub. I would go every month or two for a lunch or a dinner or some event. The Friars had good boxing matches and was famous for celebrity roasts. But Milton was almost eighty, and it was very clear that the club was outdated.

He and his buddies had such a strong lock on it that new comedians weren’t joining. Guys like Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Danny DeVito, and Robin Williams would visit, and you would see them getting frustrated and thinking, “Who are these old farts? I can make jokes that will blow everyone away.”

But I was not a comedian, so I was not putting myself on that level. What’s more, I grew up in a culture where you respect the elders. To me, someone as accomplished as Berle ought to be honored and complimented and pumped up because maybe he didn’t have much going on anymore. It must have been weird to be Milton Berle, and, after becoming a legend as “Mr. Television” and then being a big star in Las Vegas and on Broadway, all of a sudden your only identity is the Friars Club. No matter where he was, Milton tried to steal the show because he still had that craving for attention, which was why he’d become a comedian.

I discovered that all these comedy legends could have a normal conversation, but not often. They would talk about everyday stuff if we were hanging out at Caffe Roma, but then Robin Williams would come by, or Rodney Dangerfield in his Bermuda shorts, and that would stir things up. If you went with that same bunch to an event where there was any kind of audience, the madness never stopped: joke upon joke and attack upon attack, with everyone going after everybody else. But the funniest thing was that a lot of the comedians brought their wives, who were normal-looking hausfraus. They would roll their eyes at the jokes. You could almost hear them say, “Here we go again. Oh God.” In fact, sometimes you did hear one of them say, “Aw, come on, how many more times are you going to use that one?” That was the worst. The old comedians just hated it.

The Friars Club guys didn’t see me as a comedian. They liked me as a person and liked my movies, and they felt that I had some talent for jokes with certain safe material that was not too complicated. They also knew I respected them and admired their talent. That was fine. You have to figure out your potential. So let’s say on a scale of 1 to 10, with Milton Berle a 10, my potential is a 5. In comedy his potential was much greater than mine, obviously, but maybe not in something else. It’s hard to imagine Milton Berle as an action hero.

But the trick is how do you reach 100 percent of your potential? It was the right time in my career to expand into comedy and throw everything off a little bit. But I also knew comedy was a tricky thing to get involved with. Particularly for me as a European, because I didn’t have an American sense of humor, and my timing and delivery of lines tended to be a little cockeyed. So meeting these guys and being included in their world gave me a chance to understand it better. I discovered that I really like being around people who are funny and who write comedy and who are always looking to say things in a unique way—though I had to get used to Milton wisecracking that I had bigger tits than my girlfriend.

He became my comedy mentor. He used to encourage me by saying, “You being funny with your accent is twice as big a deal as me being funny. They expect me to be funny!” He taught me a lot about how to deliver jokes, how to play down the humor and not stress the punch line too much. I would ask how to pick jokes to lighten up a serious situation and tie them in so the humor seems organic. I learned how if you’re doing standup, nothing has to tie together at all. First, you make a few jokes about whatever’s in the news, like Jay Leno does. Then you pick some people in the audience and work them over, and you make sure to throw in some jokes on yourself to take the curse off the fact that you’re making fun of other people.

Often Milton would coach me on timing. “You get a lot of awards when you’re a star, and lots of them are irrelevant,” he said. “But you still have to give an acceptance speech. So here’s what you do. You say, ‘I’ve gotten many awards, but this one … for me …’ —and you have to get emotional here and make like you’re choking up—‘this one … for me … is the most … recent!’ See? You show the emotion so you get the audience going the other way.”

Berle wrote his own jokes—The Milton Berle Show was the biggest and longest- running program on TV in the early days—but he was also famous for stealing from everybody else. Jack Benny once got accused of stealing a joke from Berle, and he said, “When you take a joke away from Milton Berle, it’s not stealing, it’s repossessing.”

His biggest frustration with me was the way I always went over the top. He was helping me get ready once for a roast that he couldn’t attend. On that occasion, I was the person to be roasted, and Milton was giving me jokes to use when my turn came to respond to the other speakers. “Don’t burn, just singe,” he said, reminding me of this old rule about roasts. I didn’t pay much attention. One of the jokes he gave me was about comedian Henny (“Take my wife—please!”) Youngman: “Henny has a weight problem. But it’s not really a weight problem, it’s just water retention. He is retaining Lake Mead.”

On the night of the roast, during my turn to speak, I gestured toward Henny and said, “Look at this fat pig. But he’s not really fat. He has a water retention problem …”

Milton’s friends from the Friars Club knew he’d been coaching me, and the next day they called him up yelling, “How could you tell Arnold to call Henny a fat pig!” Milton said I should call the club members who were offended and apologize. “I thought by going beyond what was written on the card, it would be funnier,” I told them. “But I