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The World According to Arnold
Hollywood Superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger Knows What He Wants--and
Usually Gets It
by David Shaw
The call comes at 4:33 p.m. on a Monday.
"Arnold's cigar dinner is tonight, at his restaurant. I know it's
last minute, but if you can come, I can get you a seat at his table."
The caller is James Stankard, Arnold Schwarzenegger's
major-domo. Schwarzenegger has been busy with various ventures,
including filming Eraser, which figures to be his big summer
hit, and this is the first time since I'd put in a bid to see him
several weeks earlier that he has some time.
Almost four hours later, I find myself standing in the middle of a
milling crowd as Schwarzenegger walks into Schatzi on Main, the
restaurant he owns in Santa Monica, California, two blocks from the
Pacific Ocean.
He's wearing a gray T-shirt, khaki slacks, a brown leather jacket
and that big, familiar, gap-toothed smile. Because he was a world
champion bodybuilder--five times "Mr. Universe" and seven times
"Mr. Olympia"--long before he was an international box office star,
I'd expected his physical presence to fill the room, much as Muhammed
Ali once did and Wilt Chamberlain still does. But Schwarzenegger has
none of that awesome physical presence. Nor, for that matter, does
he--on first sighting--have that magnetic, galvanizing star appeal
that automatically stops conversation and turns all eyes toward
him. He makes no grand entrance. There is neither hush nor buzz. He's
just there. Just Arnold. Just one of maybe 200 guys standing around
with a cigar in his hand.
He's 6-foot-2, 212 pounds--about 36 pounds below his competitive
bodybuilding weight--but apart from his bulging biceps and thick neck,
he almost looks small, or at least not uncommonly large. Maybe that's
because one subconsciously expects him to look as dominating in person
as he does on-screen, where he seems even bigger and more menacing
than he really is.
As Schwarzenegger makes his way across the room, we meet and shake
hands--he's not a bone-cruncher--and when we reach his table, he
introduces me to several of our seatmates and says, warmly, "You sit
here, next to me."
Schwarzenegger's nephew, Patrick Kennedy, newly out of law school, is
on the other side of me. Across from him is Stan Winston, a four-time
Academy Award winner for makeup and special effects (Alien,
Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park). Others at our table
include Schwarzenegger's agent, Lou Pitt; actor Luke Perry, formerly
of television's "Beverly Hills 90210"; and Keith Barish, one of the
founding partners (as is Schwarzenegger) of Planet Hollywood, which is
about to go public with a $170 million stock offering.
Savvy financial people can tell, Schwarzenegger says, when a celebrity
is just lending his name to a venture and when he's "really involved."
Schwarzenegger is really involved--in the worldwide Planet Hollywood
empire, in the development of a shopping, restaurant and entertainment
complex in Denver and in a variety of other enterprises. He's not
"just" a movie star, albeit one of the most famous, recognizable
people in the world, a self-made cinematic sensation who commands up
to $20 million up front--and a significant percentage of the gross box
office receipts--on each action movie he makes; he's also a very
successful businessman, real estate mogul, restaurateur--and a man who
has Republicans salivating at the mere prospect that one day he just
might deign to run for high public office. Not bad for a guy who came
to this country in 1968 with little more than $20, a gym bag full of
sweat clothes and a dream.
Schwarzenegger was born on July 30, 1947, in the tiny Austrian hill
town of Thal-by-Graz (pop. 800), where his father was a village cop
and the family house had neither telephone nor television. But unlike
many who come from humble beginnings and strike it rich in Hollywood,
Schwarzenegger has neither forgotten nor forsaken his roots, and
seated directly across from him at Schatzi tonight are two of his
oldest friends from his bodybuilding days, Franco Columbu and Rolf
Moeller. Schwarzenegger even paid tribute to Columbu with an inside
joke in Last Action Hero, giving him an on-screen credit--"A
Franco Columbu Film"--on the movie-within-a-movie in that big-budget
epic.
As the waitresses begin service, I ask Schwarzenegger how often he
manages to come to the first-Monday-of-the-month cigar nights here.
"I try to go to every one," he says, his gutteral Austrian
accent determinedly intact, even after three years of what he calls
"accent-removal lessons."
"I think I only missed two last year. Because it's on a Monday, even
if we're filming somewhere else, I can usually come home for the
weekend and stay Monday before I go back."
As the evening wears on, Schwarzenegger is friendly, intelligent,
charming, funny and attentive, all without seeming to be either
obsequious or disingenuous. He chats unself-consciously with his
friends, makes one leisurely walking tour of the room to shmooze with
various guests and periodically turns to me with a question or a
comment--or an answer to one of my questions, one of the first of
which is, "Are there always this many women here? It looks like 25 to
30 percent of the total crowd is female."
"It's increasing all the time," he says. "Usually, when they come the
first time, it's just out of curiosity or to be with their men. They
don't even take a cigar. Or they take it and don't light it. But two
or three months later, you see them smoking--and always with the
biggest cigars."
When did Schwarzenegger start smoking cigars?
"I smoked little Virginians when I went to Munich as a bodybuilder,"
he says, "but I didn't smoke a real cigar until 1977, when I met
Maria."
Maria is Maria Shriver, his wife, the NBC News personality and
daughter of Sargent Shriver, the former Peace Corps director, and
Eunice, a sister of Kennedy brothers John, Robert and Ted. Arnold and
Maria met at the Kennedys' pro-celebrity tennis tournament and later,
after dinner at the Shriver house, near the Kennedy compound in
Hyannisport, Massachusetts, Sargent Shriver lit a cigar and offered
one to Schwarzenegger.
"This is a big advantage in life," Schwarzenegger says with a
laugh. "Your wife can't complain about your cigars. You can always
say, 'Look, honey, your father wouldn't have introduced me to
something that's bad.'"
Does Maria complain often about his cigars?
"Every once in a while it comes up. We recently bought a house in Sun
Valley and Maria said, 'You're certainly not going to smoke cigars up
here, are you--not in all this wonderful, fresh, clean air?' I said
that when we entertained, I'd certainly offer cigars after dinner. No
way I'm not going to do that. But if I'm alone, I'll go outside and
smoke in the Jacuzzi. Same thing at home. If we have guests, I'm going
to pass cigars. But if I'm alone, I'll smoke in the Jacuzzi or while
I'm playing pool. I won't smoke upstairs, near the kids'
bedroom. Besides, I don't want to stink up my clothes or the bedroom."
With that, Schwarzenegger relights the Punch he's been nursing all
evening--using what looks like a three-inch blow torch emitting a
laser-like blue flame. He then launches into a hilarious replay of the
game of charades he played with his two-year-old son earlier in the
day. "I was mimicking him, doing what he sometimes does--jumping up
and down and crying and saying 'I hate you, I hate you' and we were
all laughing, and he finally figured out what I was doing, and then he
started laughing, too."
The story occasions much hilarity at our table. But Schwarzenegger is
mostly serious this evening. Politics is much on his mind. His Kennedy
connection notwithstanding, he is a very public Republican--he was
chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports
under President Bush--and tonight, early in the presidential primary
season, six weeks before Bob Dole will wrap up the Republican
nomination, he wants to talk about the candidates.
"What do you think of Steve Forbes?" he asks me.
"Not much. And you?"
"He's a robot. He says the same thing over and over." He grins. "I've
played robots; he is a robot. But I don't know enough about his views
yet, except for the flat tax. I'd like to hear more about what he
thinks on other issues before I decide who to vote for."
The Republicans have a good chance to capture the White House this
year, Schwarzenegger says, but they're "going about it the wrong
way. I don't like all this flag-waving and rhetoric. I wish they'd
talk about the issues--especially the family. That's the most
important problem we have--the breakdown of the family--and no one is
doing anything about it."
It's getting close to midnight now, and the guests are beginning to
drift away. I decide to head for home, too. Schwarzenegger says good
night and tells me he looks forward to our next meeting.
T en nights later, Stankard calls from his car to ask me to meet
Schwarzenegger at 10 o'clock the next morning at the Grand Havana
Room, a private cigar club in Beverly Hills. Schwarzenegger, who was
an hour late at Schatzi, is 30 minutes late today. As he did at
Schatzi, he apologizes immediately.
"I took my daughter to school this morning--Christina, the
four-year-old. She didn't want me to leave right away. She wanted me
to watch how she played with the other kids."
Schwarzenegger has two other children--six-year-old Katherine and
two-year-old Patrick--and he seems to think a lot about his paternal
pleasures and obligations. "You have to know when they need you and
when to back away," he says.
He's again wearing a gray T-shirt and khakis--and a Planet Hollywood
bomber jacket--decidedly casual attire in this room filled with
polished wood, upholstered sofas and leather easy
chairs. Schwarzenegger is a member--one of many with a personalized
humidor on the premises--and as we walk through the club to take a
table on the outdoor terrace, he says he sometimes comes for a smoke
after lunch. How many cigars does he usually smoke a day?
"One or two most days. I usually start after lunch unless"--he holds
up a half-smoked, unlit Hoyo de Monterrey--"unless I have a good one
left over from the night before, like today."
Last night's cigar, relit 10 hours later? I wonder why a
multigazillionaire like him wouldn't light a new cigar. But all I say
is "Yuck."
He grins impishly. "To me, it tastes great. I know your magazine is
called Cigar Aficionado, but...." He shrugs, as if to say, he's no
expert; he just likes cigars.
As I look at his half-smoked cigar, I can't help remembering that when
Playboy interviewed him nine years ago, he pulled out a cigar
at the beginning of the interview and told the writer, "Your time will
be measured in stogies. When I finish one, the interview ends." I hope
he doesn't think I'll be satisfied with just a half a cigar's worth of
his time this morning. But as long as we're on the subject of cigars,
I ask what he usually smokes.
"Cohiba, Punch Punch. Punch Punch is actually my favorite size. It's a
good size for an after-dinner smoke or during the day. I used to love
Davidoff, and there are still sometimes good ones around. Sometimes
you get good Romeo y Julietas. And Hoyo de Monterrey is a great
cigar. Milton Berle came over to my house one time--I think it was
when I had my 40th birthday--and he brought over a box [of Hoyo de
Monterrey Double Coronas] and gave me one. It was a spectacular
smoke."
Has he ever had any trouble smoking cigars on a movie set?
Both Danny DeVito and Carl Weathers objected the first time he lit up
around them, he says. Weathers "started coughing loud, pretending like
he's dying" on the set of Predator. "He said, 'Get away with
your stinking stuff. I can't breathe.'" But Schwarzenegger explained
to Weathers that he found a cigar "soothing," especially amid the
chaos and uncertainty of the first day of shooting. Schwarzenegger
says he took his cigar outside, away from Weathers. Six hours later,
Weathers asked if he could have a cigar--"just to chew on. I hate to
smoke." Schwarzenegger gave him an Ashton. A little later, Weathers
asked Schwarzenegger to clip off the wet end and "let me just light it
for a minute." He smoked half the cigar, asked for another the next
day and "by the time the movie was half done, he had his manager and
his agent flying in boxes and boxes of Ashtons and Pléiades,"
Schwarzenegger says. "He was smoking up a storm. I had to say to him,
'Carl, you're not supposed to smoke from seven in the morning to seven
at night.'"
Schwarzenegger says DeVito converted from antagonist to aficionado
just as quickly, and it's clear from talking to movie people around
town that there are many such Schwarzenegger converts. In fact,
Schwarzenegger once found himself giving out so many free cigars on
the set that he handed out an exploding cigar to discourage
freeloaders. Not that Schwarzenegger is ungenerous. Far from it. But
neither does he like to be taken advantage of. The exploding cigar was
a symbol of more than his penchant for practical jokes and his
fondness for the big bang, on- and off-screen: He likes to see people
doing things for themselves, rather than relying on others, whether
it's providing cigars or supporting a family. That, he says, is why he
became a Republican when he arrived in the United States.
It was shortly before the 1968 presidential election, and he
immediately became interested in the campaign--Richard Nixon
vs. Hubert Humphrey. Having just came from "a country where the
government interfered with everything and owned monopolies of
industries," Schwarzenegger says he was put off by Humphrey's comments
on the obligations of the federal government--and attracted by Nixon's
support for free enterprise-- "free trade...deregulation...get the
government off our backs."
As at the cigar dinner, he's eager to talk about his interest in
politics and his commitment to America. "If you go to a country and
the country adopts you," he says, "you have a responsibility to learn
the language as fast as you can, make all the effort you can to become
part of the country, learn what the social behavior is, what the
political system is. Everyone should have enough information to make
wise choices when it comes to an election so you can vote on a
candidate's complete philosophy, rather than just [on whether] he's
pro-choice or not, for gay rights or not, for foreign trade or not."
How do the Kennedys feel about his Republicanism?
"I'm very fortunate to have parent in-laws that are so bright. That's
the advantage of being liberal." Being open-minded--especially to new
or contrary ideas--is "the definition of being liberal," he says, and
"you can really see how open-minded they are." Exposure to the
Kennedys has even led him to moderate some of his "extreme"
conservative views, Schwarzenegger says. He's now willing to
acknowledge that "government has a responsibility...to provide things
for the underdog."
But the only "underdogs" he cites as worthy of government assistance
are people in wheelchairs--no mention of the government's obligation
to help those who are poor, homeless, jobless and/or the victims of
discrimination--and he's quick to say that he's still "a very strong
Republican."
Would he ever run for political office?
"I've been asked several times to run for office--the Senate,
Congress, for governor. But I am so happy with where I am right now,
the things that I'm doing, that I would not even think about that."
Would he consider changing his mind down the road?
"Yes--if there's a need for it. If I really think that I can provide
something. If I've done everything in my profession." He looks
away. "That's a lot of 'ifs.'"
At that moment, the chef from the Grand Havana Room appears at our
table with two heaping plates of kaiserscharren, a dish that resembles
a cross between chopped-up French toast and the Jewish breakfast
specialty matzo brie, topped with raspberries. Schwarzenegger explains
that it's an old Austrian dish, created by some nineteenth century
emperor or other ("King Ludwig, I think") who wanted his subjects to
be able to eat the same thing he did, at least once a day (a noble
and--dare one say it--decidedly democratic idea).
His continuing appetite for Austrian breakfast fare notwithstanding,
Schwarzenegger says he "felt deep down inside of me that I was an
American" from age eight or 10 on. School studies, newsreels, American
pop culture--all gave him a sense of "the size of [America] and the
possibilities." As he grew older, he found himself wondering, "What am
I doing in this village here, with the farmers?" He wanted to live in
the United States. He was 15 when he began the activity that would
make that possible.
His father wanted him to excel at soccer, and the training camp for
his youth soccer team was next door to a weightlifting room. He
wandered in one day and did a few simple weight-training exercises to
strengthen his legs. "When I saw those animals climbing around the
chin-up bar and doing 20 chin-ups and then going over to the squat
rack and squatting 200 kilos [440 pounds], and then another guy
snatching up 315 [pounds] in one movement, it outweighed by far
everything that I'd seen on the soccer field."
Schwarzenegger began lifting weights and doing bodybuilding exercises
so obsessively that his parents limited his trips to the gym to three
times a week. Solution: He converted an unheated room in the house to
a small gym and continued to work out, hour after hour after hour,
following a strict routine.
"I lived by the training program, the eating program, the competition
program," he says. "I was always the master in writing out the
programs. I knew that as soon as I put it down, the last thing I ever
wanted to do is disappoint myself. I knew that I had to look in the
mirror every day and I could not look in the mirror and say, 'You know
something: You're a fucking loser; you cannot even do the kind of sets
and exercises and eat the kind of food that you wrote down.' I didn't
want to face that."
Schwarzenegger's hard work and singlemindedness paid off. He competed
all over the world and became the best--and best-known--bodybuilder
since Charles Atlas. He was dubbed "The Austrian Oak" (his company is
now called Oak Productions), and after winning his second Mr. Universe
contest, in London, he came to the United States to compete. He came
first to Miami Beach, but when he decided to stay, Joe Weider, the
bodybuilding impresario, urged him to live in Southern California, in
Venice--Muscle Beach--the mecca of bodybuilding. He made the move and
says he instantly felt "this was where I'd always been meant to be. I
felt-- 'Ahhh, now I'm at home.' "
Schwarzenegger has always had self-confidence. In his 1977
autobiography, Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, he
wrote: "I knew I was a winner. I knew I was destined for great
things." Having settled in Los Angeles, he wasn't content to be "just"
a world champion bodybuilder; he immediately set out to be a world
champion capitalist as well. While Weider paid him $60 a week (in
addition to providing him an apartment and car) to write articles for
his bodybuilding magazine, Schwarzenegger started a bricklaying and
masonry business with his weightlifting friend Columbu, who'd been his
training partner in Germany and who doubled as a bricklayer. Columbu
had moved to the United States nine months after Schwarzenegger, and
they employed several of their fellow gym rats in the business as
well. They also began to offer mail-order courses in bodybuilding,
astonished by how easy it was to start a business in this country,
compared with all the bureaucratic red tape and regulation they would
have encountered trying to start a similar enterprise in Austria.
"I said to Franco as we walked out of City Hall [with a business
license], 'Can you believe this? They didn't ask anything. We didn't
put up any money. We didn't have to have any banking proofs or any
[college] degrees, any of these complications.' "
Schwarzenegger was a natural businessman and promoter--he designed the
brochures for the mail-order business--and with the profits from his
early endeavors, he invested in a six-unit apartment house and an
office building. He also went to school at night--to three different
schools--studying marketing, economics, political science, history and
art. Cumulatively--and quickly--these early business and academic
activities marked the true beginning of Schwarzenegger's love affair
with America.
"I could see firsthand," he says, "that if you were willing to work
hard, you could really make it. This is the place with the greatest
opportunities of anywhere in the world."
His boundless ambition and restless energy left him perpetually
hungry for new challenges. As a bodybuilder, he had long been a
performer--he could often lift 60 more pounds in front of an audience
than he could when he was alone in the gym. With Hollywood right down
the freeway, his next move was almost predestined.
"I was always fascinated with entertainment, with acting, with
performing," Schwarzenegger says. "I think in my blood there's
something that makes me want to be a performer. That's the way I was
in bodybuilding; the more you showed your personality to the people,
the more you expressed [yourself], the more you could entertain the
people," the better the audience liked it--"you could tell from the
applause. The next natural step for me was to go into acting."
His first movie was Hercules in New York, which was released
in the United States only on television (although it did play in
theaters in South America). In it, Schwarzenegger's voice was dubbed,
and he was billed as "Arnold Strong," his accent at that time being
impenetrable and his name having been deemed unpronounceable.
"But deep down inside," he says, "I felt that it was wrong" to change
names.
Eight years later, in 1977, when his movie career really began--with
the critically acclaimed documentary Pumping Iron, based on the
surprise best-seller of the same name--he used his own name and his
own voice. The success of Pumping Iron--and, the same year, of
Stay Hungry, in which he was billed third, behind Jeff Bridges
and Sally Field--persuaded him to give up bodybuilding and concentrate
on acting full-time.
Conan the Barbarian, in 1982, was his first true starring
role. Critics savaged it--and Schwarzenegger. He was, Newsweek
said, "a dull clod with a sharp sword, a human collage of pectorals
and latissimi who's got less style and wit than Lassie." The reviews
for the sequel, Conan the Destroyer, and for Red Sonja
weren't much better.
Ever a believer in self-improvement--especially when the need for it
was so obvious--Schwarzenegger took acting, dialogue and
accent-removal lessons. He can still recall the problems he had trying
to pronounce the "th" sound properly. He practiced saying
"three-thousand-three-hundred-thirty-three-and-one-third" so many
times that he was "mentally exhausted," he says. But just as he had
refused to permanently change his name, so he refused to stick with
the accent-removal lessons until all traces of his Austrian heritage
were gone. At one point, he said--much as his on-screen character
might say-- "OK, that's enough" (or was it, "I'll not be back"?).
Movie people told him that he was making a mistake, that all the big
stars--John Wayne, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland--changed
their names, and that foreigners had to get rid of their accents to be
accepted.
"There was a natural pressure to conform, to do things the way they
had been done before," Schwarzenegger says. "But I always felt the
only way you make an impact is by doing things that have never been
done before. 'OK,' I said, 'if everyone has always changed their name,
maybe I should be the first who doesn't change his name. If everyone
has a perfect American accent to get to the top, maybe I should be the
first who doesn't.' I wanted to make sure that if I go on an elevator,
before people ever saw me coming around the corner, they would say
already, 'That sounds like Arnold.'
"I felt that my uniqueness would work to my advantage."
We've been talking for almost two hours and the late-morning Southern
California midwinter sun is warm on our shoulders. Schwarzenegger
sloughs off his jacket, casually stretches his muscular arms and
relights the same day-old cigar, for perhaps the fourth time. His
manner is so disarming that I've been wondering how best to broach the
subject of the dismal quality of many of his movies--especially the
early action movies--and the hostile critical reaction that many of
those films received.
I needn't have been concerned. He has no delusions that he's Robert De
Niro or Dustin Hoffman.
"I knew what I was doing," he says. "I knew these movies were not
going to be nominated for Academy Awards. I was trying to get into the
movie business. I was doing things that I thought I could handle."
He flashes a self-deprecating grin.
"Now, if I want to punish someone, I make them watch Red Sonja
10 times."
He pauses.
"As I got better, the reviews got better."
Indeed they did. Time magazine named The Terminator, a
futuristic orgy of blood and mayhem, one of the 10 best movies of
1984. The Terminator also established Schwarzenegger as a
genuine
worldwide superstar.
Although his movies continue to receive mixed reviews, the critics
have become increasingly supportive of his performances. He was
"attractively vulnerable" in Total Recall (the Los Angeles
Times); "appealing, relaxed and genial" in Kindergarten Cop
(The New York Times); "impressive, hilarious, almost touching"
in Terminator 2 (Newsweek). It helped, of course, that
his massive box-office success gave him increasing clout over script,
cast and directing choices--and that as a result, he began to work
with very good directors, James Cameron and Ivan Reitman among
them. Schwarzenegger was broadening his horizons--and gathering new
admirers. When he made Red Heat in 1987, co-star Jim Belushi
pronounced himself "totally surprised" that Schwarzenegger kept up
with him when Belushi improvised his lines. Schwarzenegger even
improvised a few lines himself.
No one would mistake Schwarzenegger for Jim Carrey--or Cary Grant--but
within a certain range, he has developed a surprising, if broad, comic
touch that relies largely on making fun of (or playing against) his
Predator/Terminator avenging hulk persona. Many people
still laugh at Schwarzenegger's often-wooden mannerisms and the absurd
plots and over-the-top mayhem in his action movies, but as The New
York Times observed in its review of Kindergarten Cop in
1990, "no one laughs at Arnold Schwarzenegger better than Arnold
Schwarzenegger himself." Even in his most brutal action films, it's
his sense of humor that distinguishes him from Sylvester Stallone,
Chuck Norris and other denizens of the death and destruction genre. On
several movies, Schwarzenegger has asked that extra comic lines be
written for him.
He now tries to alternate big-budget action movies with smaller
comedies like Twins, Junior and Jingle All the
Way (which he should be filming by the time you read this and
which is expected to be in theaters for Christmas). On some comedies,
Schwarzenegger willingly defers his customarily colossal up-front
payday and takes a giant chunk of the eventual profits instead. That
way, a smaller film is not overburdened financially before it begins
shooting--and if he guesses right and works hard, he still gets
rich(er).
Schwarzenegger says he'd ultimately like to direct--and to act--in
a war movie, a Western and a dramatic movie. He'd like to do a love
story, too, if he could find the right vehicle. (This from a man who
once responded to the observation that his movie characters rarely
have a love interest by saying, "I have a love interest in every one
of my films--a gun.")
But he knows that his options are limited somewhat by his image. He
brings a certain baggage--he calls it "luggage"--to the screen. He's a
very male male, on and off the
screen. Big. Physical. Tactile. Primitive.
"You should do what you're best at," he says. "People really enjoy me
if I save the day, overcome the ultimate in obstacles and danger. At
the same time, they also enjoy the humor, the comedies. They see
there's a funny side to me. But one should not make the mistake of
thinking you can do whatever you want to do, just for the sake of the
challenge."
There are certain roles in which he knows he wouldn't be credible.
"That's the problem we had on Junior [in which he plays a
man--a bespectacled scientist--who gives birth to a child]. I have too
macho an image for people to believe I'm having a baby." Personal
implausibility and biological impossibility were not the only hurdles
Junior had to overcome. Even comedies like Twins and
Kindergarten Cop had a few beatings and shootings to keep the
Schwarzenegger bloodlust fans happy; Junior had no violence at
all. Although Schwarzenegger deserves credit for taking on such a
risky, out-of-character role, the movie did poorly at the box office,
grossing only $37 million in this country (compared with $112 million
for Twins and $91 million for Kindergarten Cop). It was
a rare mistake for Schwarzenegger.
"He manages his career as well as anybody," says Kenneth Turan, the
film critic for the Los Angeles Times. "He doesn't stretch
himself into unlikely areas. But by alternating comedies with action
movies, people don't get bored with him. He's very canny"--canny
enough to realize that he has become such a huge box-office star
abroad primarily because action (i.e., violence) is understandable
everywhere. Love, comedy and drama are often dependent on the nuances
of language and on differing cultural interpretations. But as Turan
says, "Everyone gets Arnold. If he hits somebody, they fall down. If
he shoots them, they die."
Brian Grazer, who produced Kindergarten Cop, says that when
Schwarzenegger reads a script, "he knows which words can and can't
come out of his mouth--what sounds natural and what doesn't. He has a
built-in truth meter. He knows his strengths and weaknesses."
Some see Schwarzenegger's discipline as cold commercial calculation, a
window on his nonexistent soul. Indeed, "soullessness" is a word--a
criticism--that comes up often in magazine and newspaper stories about
Schwarzenegger. He is, without question, a control freak--shrewd,
manipulative and relentless--and he concedes that one of the most
difficult lessons he had to learn when he left bodybuilding for the
movie business was that he couldn't be in control of everything, that
moviemaking is a collaborative process. Without a script--and a
scriptwriter--without a director, camermen, lighting technicians, and
makeup, special effects and other experts (not to mention the studio
money men), there is no movie, no matter how big or how talented the
star. There's a sense that at some level, Schwarzenegger resents his
dependence on others, and it would be easy to dismiss his off-screen
charm as pure acting, camouflaging a heart of steel. But he's not that
good an actor, and while it's not always easy to separate role playing
from reality, there does seem to be a genuine warmth and decency to
the man. To Grazer, this is an enormously important--and enormously
appealing--part of Schwarzenegger's success: "He's not a fraud. He's
not pretending to be an artist. He doesn't travel with a bullshit
entourage."
Schwarzenegger is not universally beloved. No one as big and rich and
successful and aggressive as he is could possibly be without
enemies. After the runaway success of Terminator 2 in
particular, Schwarzenegger says he was "sitting on top of the
mountain," ripe for attack by those envious or resentful of his
triumphs. His next movie, Last Action Hero, suffered from
assorted rumors--among them the (false) story that the movie had been
roundly criticized in a test screening in the Los Angeles suburb of
Pasadena. But four writers worked on the screenplay for Last Action
Hero, and rumors that the movie was in trouble began circulating
in Hollywood very early. Critics generally (and understandably) panned
it--some quite ferociously. Having cost $100 million to make, Last
Action Hero took in only $50 million at the box office in America
after it was released in 1993 (although as Schwarzenegger points out,
its success abroad still made it "the twelfth-biggest grossing movie
of the year worldwide.")
By and large, Schwarzenegger seems to be respected and well-liked in
the various circles in which he moves. Not surprisingly, he is
especially popular with those for whom he has made a fortune. Since
the 1980s, his films have grossed more than $1.5 billion worldwide.
Terminator 2 took in more than $500 million, True Lies more
than $400 million. Twins, Total Recall and
Kindergarten Cop also topped $200 million apiece in global
box-office gross.
Schwarzenegger is--in Grazer's words--"the dream star for a producer
and a studio." Unlike many stars--who consider themselves artistes
and, hence, are above such philistine concerns as marketing and
promotion--Schwarzenegger "is willing to do all the promotion, all the
press, all the smiling you could want," as Grazer puts it.
Schwarzenegger is not only willing; he's eager. Before he even asks
about a script for a movie, he wants to know what the poster will look
like--what's the concept for the movie, the central image, the
marketing plan. When the movie comes out, he'll sit in a hotel room
all day long while reporters from around the country are shuttled back
and forth, one after another, each asking the same basic questions,
all pretending to be interviewing him in their hometowns: "Hi,
Arnold. Welcome back to Seattle [or Houston or Cleveland]. Thanks for
this exclusive interview."
Newsweek once wrote, "Self-promotion comes as naturally to
Schwarzenegger as flexing his triceps," and with his ego, his natural
charisma, his hands-on style and his immense store of nervous energy
("I hate to be doing nothing"), it's obvious why he loves marketing
and promotion. To him, it's just another performance--one with a
clear and immediate payoff: "You have to let the world know what you
have out there. It doesn't make any sense to just work on the product
but not on getting it out there.
"I'm involved every step of the way when it comes to marketing,
internationally and nationally," he says. On Eraser, he's been
trying to arrange a special screening in the Olympic Village in
Atlanta next month. "Fifteen thousand journalists from around the
world in one place," he says, his face alight with the joy of so
irresistible a marketing opportunity.
A week goes by before I get another call from Stankard. Schwarzenegger
wants to know if I'd like to come to the Warner Brothers set in two
hours. Stankard's calls seem more like summonses than
invitations. Schwarzenegger, Mr. Control, clearly likes setting the
terms of any engagement or transaction. But he is giving me a lot of
time. I agree to go to Warner's, where
he's filming Eraser, in which he plays an elite federal marshal
assigned to the witness protection program; as is usually the case in
a Schwarzenegger action movie, the fate of the world hangs implausibly
in the balance. I show up in a hellacious rainstorm and race to his
trailer, where I find him eating lunch with Arnold Kopelson, the
producer of Eraser.
"It's goulash and dumplings," Schwarzenegger says to me. "Sit
down. Have some."
Kopelson asks Schwarzenegger's chef what holds the dumplings
together.
"Whole eggs," the chef replies.
This leads to a Kopelson diatribe on eggs, cholesterol and heart
disease. Schwarzenegger cuts it short: "That's bullshit." He tells us
about a friend whose cholesterol shot up 40 points after he gave up
eggs. "Cholesterol is mostly a matter of heredity," he says, certain
that on this--as on so many other issues--he has The Answer.
Kopelson starts to leave, but first he echoes producer Grazer's
praise of Schwarzenegger's enthusiasm for promotion. He also praises
his generosity--specifically thanking him for an Elie Bleu humidor
that Schwarzenegger recently gave him. "The green inlay matches the
carpet in my office perfectly," he says. That sets the actor off on
one of his favorite gripes--most people's lack of creativity,
specifically (in this instance) the boring similarity of most other
humidors. "They're all the same--shiny wooden boxes," he says. "I
found some antique jewelry boxes and sent them to a humidor maker to
have them cedar-lined and transformed into humidors."
On his way out the door, Kopelson asks Schwarzenegger if he plans to
market them. Or give them away as gifts.
"No," he says. "I just want to show them they're behind the times in
creativity. A shiny wooden box isn't always the best. We just bought a
home in Sun Valley, and it wouldn't fit with the rustic decor there."
After Kopelson leaves, Schwarzenegger pulls out a humidor--a shiny
wooden box--and offers me a cigar. He has humidors all over--in his
houses, his office, his trailer--and this one is filled with what he
says are Cohibas, bearing a special red, "Arnold S" band. "They're a
gift from Rick Dees [a local disc jockey] to thank me for a favor," he
says.
Schwarzenegger lights his Cohiba with a larger version of the blow
torch he used at Schatzi; the thin bolt of flame looks hot enough to
incinerate the entire trailer. As we smoke and sip espresso, he talks
about parenting. He didn't have an early call today--he's awaiting the
call for his next scene right now--so he wanted to take four-year-old
Christina to school again this morning. But she demanded that her
mother accompany them. She cried and pretended to throw
up. Schwarzenegger wanted time alone with her, though, and he insisted
that they leave Maria behind. Christina not only got over her upset,
he says--the proud parent is talking now--but once they got to school,
she wrote down her numbers from one to 15 and then sounded them all
out, "and then I said, out of nowhere, 'OK, sound them out in German,'
and she did that, too. The teacher said 'Wow!' She was very pleased."
Because of his own strict upbringing, Schwarzenegger is much more the
disciplinarian with the children than Maria is. "Her upbringing was
more lenient, more positive," he says. "In an Austrian home, the
emphasis is on what you did wrong, what you did bad, rather than what
you did well. There's a lot of things that I had to learn--to be
positive, to reinforce the positive, to give kids the confidence."
A few days earlier, the Los Angeles Times had published a
Valentine's Day story on several prominent couples, Schwarzenegger and
Shriver among them. The story said that on the day the two met,
Schwarzenegger told Maria's mother, "Your daughter has a great body."
I thought that seemed a bit brazen, even for Schwarzenegger.
"Did you really say that?" I ask.
"No. I said, 'she has a nice ass.'"
As it turned out, she has more than that. But even though
Schwarzenegger says he knew on their first date alone that she was the
woman for him, it took nine years before he was ready to get
married. He carried the engagement ring around for six months,
changing his mind several times about the right moment and the right
setting to propose marriage, before he finally popped the question in
a rowboat on a lake, near where he grew up in Austria.
"I never saw myself as a guy that could settle down," he says. "I was
always very derogatory about the station wagons that people used in
the '60s and '70s, with the dog and the cat and the kids
screaming--and now I'm driving around with the dogs, the puppies, the
kids screaming in the back, the wife in the front seat, trying to calm
everyone down."
Schwarzenegger wants to talk more about family, not just his own, but
family in general, the family in trouble. I interrupt to ask how, as
the father of three young children, he justifies making such
gratuitously violent movies. In 1988, the National Coalition on
Television Violence named him the most violent actor of the year after
he averaged a mind-numbing 146 acts of violence an hour in Running
Man. I tell him that I'm opposed to censorship but that I banned
the TV show "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" from our house when I
realized that my six-year-old son, Lucas, was much more likely to hit
and kick and act aggressively after seeing it. But Schwarzenegger
insists that his movies don't have a bad effect on children. His
two-year-old son sees no violent movies--"not even mine"--but he
"kicks everything that he sees. Things like smacking the girls in the
face--he realizes he can cause damage. He picks up a frying pan and he
sees everyone running from him. That's when he's in his glory," he
says. "Kids have a certain amount of aggression stored away. You go
through stages. Then you grow out of it."
He talks about his own experience as a young man, then says,
"Violence is a social problem in this country, created by the very
politicians that now complain that movie violence is causing it. It is
them, by not having run the country well, that have gotten the kids
into that. The inner-city problem is not a creation from the
movies. The violence that is going on there--the shootings in the
schools and all of that--is not created by our movies."
No. But study after study has shown that children exposed to
violent images on television and in the movies do behave more
aggressively, even violently. Schwarzenegger doesn't want to hear
about it. He'd rather talk about what he's doing to address the
problems of inner-city violence--and inner-city alienation,
frustration and failure.
Schwarzenegger is the chairman of the Inner-city Games Foundation,
which sponsors more than 40 sports and recreation activities in 17
cities nationwide. In Los Angeles alone, more than 100,000 inner-city
children and teenagers participated in the games last year.
Danny Hernandez, who has long worked with youths in the Latino
neighborhoods of East Los Angeles, founded the Inner-city Games in
1991 and--attracted by Schwarzenegger's star appeal and his work on
the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports--asked him to
help. Schwarzenegger has provided free office space to the foundation
and--more importantly--he delivers the foundation's central message
directly to the kids.
"I wanted the kids to see that if you work hard, you can go far, and
I knew Arnold would tell them that and show them that," Hernandez
says. "He's been totally hands-on. He comes to the centers so often
that the kids call him 'Arnold.' He helps raise money all over the
country, and he brings a lot of his celebrity friends in to help,
too."
From the world of sports have come, among others, Muhammad Ali; former
Olympic champions Bruce Jenner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Edwin Moses and
Bob Beamon; and boxers Evander Holyfield and Oscar de la Hoya. From
Hollywood: Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, Edward James Olmos, Jay
Leno, Arsenio Hall.
Although the focus of the program is on competitive sports, the
foundation also sponsors academic competition and arts programs and
awards scholarships to promising inner-city youngsters. Schwarzenegger
is clearly proud of the work the foundation is doing. He sees it as an
opportunity to act on his conviction that family and a sense of
belonging are crucially important to keeping kids off drugs, out of
gangs and out of prison. (Schwarzenegger has been criticized for using
steroids himself as a bodybuilder, but he says he always used them
"under a doctor's supervision," never suffered any side effects and
never allowed drugs to take over his life, as so many in the inner
cities and Hollywood alike have done.)
"The reason kids join gangs, to large extent, is because they want to
be part of a family," Schwarzenegger says. "They have no family at
home. One parent is missing or there are terrible conditions at
home. They want to feel needed, loved, to have a sense of
responsibility. With the Inner-city Games, what we provide is an
alternative. They belong to a family at the gymnasium."
After he turns on the VCR in his trailer and shows me a short
promotional tape on the Inner-city Games, Schwarzenegger complains
about recent budget cuts in big-city recreation programs across the
country.
"For every dollar they pull back today," he says, "we're going to
spend $10 later on."
I tell him that sounds like an argument I'd expect from a liberal
Democrat, not a conservative Republican. After all, it's the
Republicans who have slashed social spending, the Republicans--the
Reagan and Bush administrations--whose social and economic policies
have greatly exacerbated the pressures on poor and middle-income
families alike.
Schwarzenegger will concede only that the problems of the inner cities
require bipartisan solutions. "You can't keep going back to those old
rules--'this is the conservative way, this is the liberal way,'" he
says. "I think it takes both sides working together to solve the
problem." He ticks off his priorities: "Promote heavily the whole idea
of family, rebuild education, create jobs, make people feel proud of
the work they're doing.
"It's all an outgrowth of the decay of the family," he says
again. "Many children and teenagers in America's inner cities have no
parental role models, so the only people they emulate are those they
meet on the streets."
He talks about his visits to all 50 states on behalf of the
President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports and about how
discouraging it was to try to talk about physical fitness to "kids who
hadn't had breakfast, weren't even washed." He seems truly moved,
genuinely upset. "How do these children ever make it when they don't
even have the first initial shot at it? So that generation is wasting
away. So they will bring their kids up this way."
He's interrupted by a knock on the door. Stankard is here with a man
who sells Cuban cigars to many movers and shakers in Hollywood. He
asks Schwarzenegger what kind of cigars he likes.
"Whatever I can get for free," he says, laughing.
Mr. Habana pulls out a leather cigar holder and gives him a choice
of three brands of double coronas. Schwarzenegger takes the Hoyo de
Monterrey. Then Mr. Habana opens two large canvas bags and starts
pulling out box after box of Cuban cigars--Cohiba, Punch, Partagas,
Romeo y Julieta, Montecristo, Saint Luis Rey, Hoyo de Monterrey, Quai
d'Orsay. Schwarzenegger asks how he knows they aren't fake.
"My guys guarantee it. If you smoke two or three and don't like it,
I give you all your money back."
Schwarzenegger says he remembers the time he bought 10 boxes of
Davidoff Havanas--Dom Perignons--in London, right after seeing men
loading hundreds of boxes into a Saudi prince's Rolls-Royce. "I
figured somebody knew there was going to be a shortage," he says.
Mr. Habana tells him the Dom Perignons now sell for $3,000 to
$4,000 a box--"if you can find them." (Editor's note: The going rate
is closer to $2,500 per box of 25.)
Schwarzenegger buys two boxes of cigars--Punch and Hoyo de Monterrey--
for considerably less money ($700) "for a friend's birthday," then
says goodbye to the salesman and invites me to visit his "exercise
trailer."
Schwarzenegger remains very committed to bodybuilding. In a few days,
he'll fly to Columbus, Ohio, to oversee the Arnold Fitness Expo '96, a
three-day international bodybuilding competition and martial
arts/physical fitness exhibition. On a more personal level, he
generally works out at least an hour a day, no matter where he
is--either at home or in a gym or, when he's filming, in this 40-foot
trailer that "follows me everywhere." He likes the discipline and the
feeling of being fit, and he finds exercise an antidote for the brief
black moods he says he sometimes falls prey to. "Maria will see me
grumpy and say, 'Why don't you go have a workout.'" Given the kinds of
roles he usually plays on-screen, he also thinks it's vital that his
physical appearance remain credible, that he looks capable of
performing the feats of physical derring-do that the scripts so often
call for.
The trailer is strictly utilitarian, nothing fancy--two Life Cycles,
more than a dozen weight machines, several of his movie and
bodybuilding posters on the wall. When we walk out, we bump into Jeff
Dawn, his makeup man on several films. Schwarzenegger introduces us
and praises Dawn lavishly. Then, as we're walking away, he says over
his shoulder, "By the way, the other guy made me up today."
Pause. Grin. "He was better than you."
People have told me that Schwarzenegger enjoys teasing and bantering
and playing practical jokes on the set--he once dumped a pitcher of
ice water on a screenwriter's crotch--and this is my first, albeit
mild exposure to it. People have also told me that Schwarzenegger is
very detail-conscious, and I'm about to see that, too.
We walk onto the Eraser set. Schwarzenegger looks at a small
monitor showing film of a dummy in a parachute being approached by an
airplane. The dummy is a stand-in for Schwarzenegger; the plane is
supposed to hit him in midair. Or try to. Schwarzenegger watches the
brief sequence once and immediately notices that the dummy appears to
be higher above the ground later in the sequence than it is
earlier. That's wrong. As he falls, he should get lower. A technician
explains that the sequence looks as it does because "the scenes were
shot with two different lenses." Schwarzenegger is not
mollified. "That's fine," he says, "but the audience will notice the
inconsistency, and you can't hand out a brochure to everyone in the
theater, explaining that you used a different lens. You have to make
it look realistic, like I'm getting lower."
We leave, and not long after, Schwarzenegger is called for his next
scene, to be filmed inside an airplane. Schwarzenegger's co-star,
James Caan, knows that for the airplane-chases-man-in-parachute scene,
Schwarzenegger has spent a great deal of time recently being filmed
while hanging from the ceiling of the sound stage, suspended in an
intricate leather harness that's left his chest black and blue from
the pressure.
"So, Arnold," Caan says, a malicious grin splitting his face, "you
been doing some more hanging today?"
Before Schwarzenegger can reply, another actor pipes up: "Arnold's
already well-hung."
Titters abound.
The assistant director calls for quiet--"and action!" This scene is
largely Caan's; in it, Schwarzenegger is supposed to get up from his
seat on the plane, walk slowly toward Caan, pick up a bottle of water
and answer a question during a conversation between Caan and another
actor. But the camera is rolling and Schwarzenegger hasn't moved.
Caan looks at him, the same grin in place. "Action means you, you
fucking putz--you come and get the bottle of water." Everyone bursts
into laughter. Director Chuck Russell yells, "Cut!" Then they run
through the scene again. And again. And again. Nine times in all. It's
never quite perfect. After the ninth take, Russell says, "Excellent. I
really like that. Really good performances.
"Let's do it again."
I decide it's time for me to go home.
Almost two weeks later, Stankard calls to say that Schwarzenegger is
flying to Las Vegas the next morning. "Why don't you come along."
I know that Schwarzenegger has his own jet--a $12.5 million Gulfstream
III. This could be fun.
"His plane?" I ask.
"Yes. We're wheels-up at 11:15."
I show up at Van Nuys Airport shorty before 11. Schwarzenegger and
Stankard drive up 15 minutes later. Schwarzenegger, clad in yet
another gray T-shirt--plus Levis and a blue blazer, the standard
Hollywood dress-up outfit--bounds aboard and we're airborne by 11:25.
Schwarzenegger is flying to Las Vegas to appear with other 20th
Century Fox movie stars, directors, producers and studio executives at
the National Association of Theater Owners' ShoWest '96. The purpose
of the trip is to get the theater owners, exhibitors and
concessionaires from more than 70 countries excited about Fox's
upcoming releases--in Schwarzenegger's case, Jingle All the
Way, in which he plays a businessman too preoccupied with his work
to pay attention to his family until--well, let's just say the movie
provides Schwarzenegger with an excellent opportunity to advance his
views on the importance of family (which is one of the reasons he's
doing it). "We'll only be in Vegas for about an hour," Schwarzenegger
says as we reach cruising speed. "I have to be back on the
[Eraser] set this afternoon. Then I'll fly to Vegas again
tomorrow for Warner Brothers to promote Eraser."
I ask about reports that he'll play the villainous Mr. Freeze in
Warner Brothers' Batman and Robin, scheduled to begin filming
in August. He says he'd love to do it, but he doesn't think that will
work out; there's a conflict between it and With Wings As
Eagles, written by Randall Wallace (who wrote Braveheart),
which he's also scheduled to start filming in August, much of it in
Europe, right after he finishes Jingle All the Way. (Two weeks
later, Schwarzenegger decided that Mr. Freeze is too juicy a role to
pass up; he took it and pushed With Wings As Eagles back to
October.)
We chat some more, nibble on fresh fruit and cookies, and the next
thing I know, we're on the ground, getting into a waiting limousine
for the short drive to Bally's Las Vegas, where Schwarzenegger is
hustled into a small room filled with Fox executives--and with so many
movie stars that if a bomb went off, they might have to cancel next
year's Oscars: Tom Hanks. Meg Ryan. Warren Beatty. Sigourney
Weaver. Winona Ryder. Sandra Bullock. Morgan Freeman. Keanu
Reeves. Jeff Goldblum.
Schwarzenegger chats up Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp., Fox's
parent company. He gives Bullock a hug and a kiss. He tries to
persuade Ryan that she should play the still uncast role of his wife
in Jingle All the Way. When she balks, he calls out the names
of several Fox executives who have already left for the program that's
about to begin. "Where are they?" he asks with mock chagrin. "I'm
trying to make a deal here. I can't get any respect."
Beatty comes up, puffs out his chest and stands face-to-face with
Schwarzenegger, pretending to compare physiques.
There is no comparison, of course.
After some more small talk and picture-taking, the stars and the rest
of the executives are herded into a waiting area, then called one by
one to a raised platform in front of an overflow audience of about
4,000. The movie exhibitors have been watching advance clips of Fox's
big summer film Independence Day--and listening to "We're the
greatest studio" pitches from the Fox brass. Now they get to
meet--albeit, en masse and at a distance--not only George Lucas, the
creator of Star Wars, and James Cameron who directed
Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2 and True Lies, but All
These Stars.
There's a burst of applause as each one is introduced. Most just nod
and shuffle to their seats. Only Schwarzenegger stops, smiles broadly
and waves with both hands. When all the stars are seated, a Fox
executive says a few final words, and the band breaks into martial
music, in keeping with the Independence Day theme. Fireworks
explode. "My first indoor fireworks show," Stankard says as we move
quickly toward the exit, our "VIP All Access" badges warding off the
very tight security.
Somehow, Schwarzenegger manages to be the first star to leave the
platform. He's met by a security guard who's already barking into his
cell phone: "I need Arnold's limo. Right now."
Schwarzenegger turns to him in mid-stride. "The pressure's on. My
record for getting from a stage to a limo is a minute and 20
seconds. Think you can beat it?"
We all pick up the pace.
As we emerge from the hotel, the limo is waiting, doors
open. Schwarzenegger slides into the back seat, looks at his watch and
says, "A minute and 16 seconds." He nods approvingly and we're off.
"That Sandra Bullock," he says. "What a personality. I always wanted
to meet her."
Stankard laughs. "Only Arnold," he says. "He never met her before, but
did you see that kiss he gave her?"
Schwarzenegger readily acknowledges the pleasure he takes in
flirtation and "a little patting on the ass" with attractive
women. "It's like I always told you: He who hesitates...masturbates."
Airborne again a few minutes later, I ask Schwarzenegger if it's true
that with the mega-grosses of Forrest Gump and Apollo
13, Hanks has supplanted him, at least temporarily, as the biggest
box-office star in the world.
"Without any doubt. He's a huge star. He's extremely talented. And
he's a nice man who deserves everything he got."
As we gobble down chicken sandwiches on pita bread, Schwarzenegger
talks about how much he enjoys watching his wife on NBC's "Today"
show--and how much he admires the career sacrifices she's made to
spend time with their children--"just the opposite of my character [in
Jingle All the Way]."
The plane touches down shortly before 2:30. As soon as he's on the
ground, Schwarzenegger pulls out a Romeo y Julieta and extols its
"easy pull." Then we walk over to his pride and joy--"The Hummer," a
three-ton, eight-foot-wide military car-truck-tank-missile launcher
that's been modified for civilian use. Officially a High Mobility
Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicle ("HumVee" to the grunts who drove it),
the Hummer emerged from the Persian Gulf War with a reputation as the
toughest desert fighter since Lawrence of Arabia, in the words of
Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.
The Hummer resolved a long-standing frustration for Schwarzenegger. He
had been looking for a distinctive, rugged, four-wheel-drive vehicle,
but he says he "hated the direction the market was going--all those
cars that looked more like family cars, station wagons--rounder,
almost streamlined, more luxurious; all the colors were very pleasant,
pleasing to the eye." He wanted something ballsy. After seeing the
military HumVee, he decided it was "so ugly, it was beautiful." He
flew several times to the South Bend, Indiana, headquarters of AM
General, the HumVee manufacturer, to try to persuade company officials
that there would be a civilian market for the car and that they should
seek Pentagon approval to sell to that market. They resisted at first,
he says, but he was able to lease one, modify it at his own expense
and show them how appealing it could be to non-military users.
When the Hummer finally went into civilian production, Schwarzenegger
was invited back to Indiana to accept the first one off the line. Now
there are now more than 3,000 Hummers on the road, at prices ranging
up to $80,000 apiece. He has four of them.
The one waiting for him today at Van Nuys Airport is jungle green and
outfitted with various personalized features that he points out to me
as excitedly as a teenager with his first car. He takes special note
of the two bench seats installed for his three children. One "kid
seat" is in the back, between two adult seats; the other is outside,
behind the rear window, facing backwards, on a modified flatbed. "They
love it," he says.
Then he climbs into the Hummer, unlit cigar in hand, and heads off to
Warner Brothers. It's been a little more than three hours since we
took off for Vegas. We've been gone from L.A. for the equivalent of a
long lunch hour.
As Schwarzenegger says just before we land, "That's my idea of
aperfect business trip."
David Shaw, the Pulitzer Prize-winning media critic for the Los
Angeles Times, is the author of The Pleasure Police: How
Bluenose Busybodies and Lily-Livered Alarmists Are Taking All the Fun
Out of Life, published this month by Doubleday.
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