Working with these kids taught me a lot about myself. Until then I thought I was the poster boy for the American dream. I came to the United States virtually broke, worked hard, kept focused on my goal, and made it. This really was the land of opportunity, I thought. If a kid like me could do it, anybody could. Well, that wasn’t so.
Traveling to schools, I saw that it wasn’t enough to grow up with the United States as your address. In the inner cities, kids didn’t even dare to dream. The message they got was “Don’t bother. You’ll never make it. You’re a loser.”
I thought about what I had that those kids didn’t. I grew up poor too. But I had a fire inside of me to succeed and two parents who pushed me and taught me discipline. I had a strong public school education. I had after-school sports with coaches and training partners who were role models. I had mentors who told me, “You can do it, Arnold,” and then made me believe it. They were around me twenty-four hours a day, supporting me and making me grow.
But how many inner-city kids had those tools? How many learned the discipline and determination? How many got the encouragement that would let them even glimpse their self-worth?
Instead, they were told they were trapped. They could see that most of the adults around them were trapped. The schools were short of resources, the teachers were worn out and not always the best, and mentors were scarce. There were families in poverty and gangs all around.
I wanted them to feel their own drive, ambition, and hope, and get up to the same starting line. So it was never hard to work for these kids or to think of the right thing to say. “We love you,” I would tell them. “We care for you. You are great. You can make it. We believe in you, but the most important thing is that you believe in yourself. All these opportunities are out there waiting for you as long as you make the right decisions and have a dream. You can be anything you want to be. A teacher, a police officer, a doctor, you can do that. Or a basketball star or an actor. Or even the president. Anything is possible, but you have to do your end of the work. And we as grownups have to do ours.”
CHAPTER 21
Heart Trouble
MAKING MONEY WAS NEVER my only goal. But I always kept an eye on my earning power as a gauge of success, and money opened the door to interesting investments.
Like many Hollywood stars, I also made money doing commercials in Asia and Europe. Making commercials in the United States would have undermined the Arnold image and the Arnold brand, but commercials by American celebrities had cachet abroad, especially in the Far East. The makers of products such as instant noodles, canned coffee, beer, and Vffuy, a Japanese vitamin drink, were willing to pay me as much as $5 million per ad. And the commercial was usually shot in one day. The deal always included a “secrecy clause” holding the advertiser responsible for not letting the commercial reach the West. That possibility no longer exists—shoot a commercial today, and it’s all over YouTube—but in the mid-1990s the internet was just an odd new idea.
As my business interests expanded, I knew that we’d eventually get into territory where I no longer had time to tend them all and where Ronda would be overwhelmed. She’d been taking business classes, true, but at heart she was an artist. That’s exactly what happened in 1996. She came to me and said, “This is so much money now, it’s beyond me. I don’t feel comfortable anymore.” I loved Ronda and was determined never to make her feel like she was being replaced. I promised that she could keep the work she was comfortable with and that, meanwhile, I’d get help with the bigger projects, where more and more money was at stake.
I always felt that the most important thing was not how much you make, but how much you invest, how much you keep. I never wanted to join the long list of famous entertainers and athletes who wiped out financially. It’s a staggering list, including Willie Nelson, Billy Joel, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Bjorn Borg, Dorothy Hamill, Michael Vick, and Mike Tyson. All those people had business managers; I remember Burt Reynolds and his manager showing up in Palm Springs each driving a Rolls-Royce. Then the money was gone. No matter what you do in life, you have to have a business mind and educate yourself about money. You can’t just delegate it to a manager and tell him, “Half has to stay locked in investments so that we can pay the taxes, and I’ll keep the other half.” My goal was to get rich and stay rich. I never wanted to have the phone call where the manager says, “Something went wrong with the investment. We can’t pay our taxes.” I wanted to know the details.
My interests were so diverse that I could have ended up with a whole grab-bag of specialist advisors. Instead, I worked closely with an extremely smart investment banker named Paul Wachter, whom I’d known for years. Paul was a longtime friend of my brother-in-law Bobby Shriver’s—they became pals after law school in the 1970s while clerking for judges in Los Angeles—and we’d gotten quite close. You wouldn’t think I had much in common with a Jewish lawyer and banker from Manhattan’s Upper East Side who’d never been near a weight room or a movie set in his life. It seemed strange to other people how well Paul and I got along. But he had a strong Austrian heritage: his father was a Holocaust survivor from Vienna, and his mother was from a German-speaking part of Romania. German had been Paul’s primary language at home growing up. And his father, unlike many post–World War II immigrants, had maintained strong connections with the Old World. In fact, his business was importing and exporting ham and other meat products between the United States and places like Poland and Bavaria. Paul had spent his summers in Europe as a kid and later worked as a ski instructor in the Austrian Alps.
Compared to most Americans, he thought a lot like me. We both had alpine scenery in our blood: the snowy landscapes, the pine forests, the big fireplaces and chalets. For example, when I told Paul that I dreamed of building a large chalet overlooking LA for my family, he understood. We were both extremely competitive, and I would challenge him at tennis and skiing. From his father, whom I really liked also, Paul understood the immigrant mentality of coming to America and starting a business and making good.
So here was someone I trusted who was funny and athletic—a guy I could hang and schmooze with; ski, play tennis, and go golfing with; travel with; and shop with. Those things are important to me. I never like business relationships that are purely work. Maria and I are very different in that way. She grew up in a world where a sharp line was drawn between friends and the help. With me, there is almost no line. I find it valuable to work with people I can also be friends with, go river rafting with, go to Austria with and hike in the mountains. And I’m like a little kid who loves to show off and share things that I have experienced. If I go to the top of the Eiffel Tower for lunch and have an extraordinary meal, and someone comes with the cart with five thousand stogies in it, and I like the way they present the cigar and light it, I want all my buddies to experience that. So the next time I’m promoting a movie overseas, I’ll figure out how to arrange for some of them to come along. I want them to see the Sydney Opera House. I want them to see Rome. I want them to experience World Cup soccer games.
When I was doing the Planet Hollywood deal, Paul was my unofficial rabbi. He’d encouraged me to bring in my own lawyer when everybody else was using the company’s man. He’d also insisted that we take the time to do the deal right. We spent almost two years negotiating my ownership stake, and while the other stars focused mainly on including freebies and perks in their contracts, the arrangement I ended up with was more lucrative and had more safeguards built in in case the business went south. Over time Paul and the investment bank he worked for, Wertheim Schroder & Co., helped me on other deals. His official specialty at Wertheim was gaming and
