We still had our differences. She and my father were Catholic. Every Sunday until I was fifteen, I went to church with them. Then my friends started asking why I did it. They said it was stupid. I had never given it much thought one way or the other. It was a rule at home: we went to church. Helmut Knaur, sort of an intellectual among the bodybuilders, gave me a book called Pfaffenspiegel, which was about priests, their lives, how horrible they were, and how they’d altered the history of the religion.
Reading that turned me completely around. Karl and Helmut and I discussed it in the gym. Helmut insisted that if I achieved something in life, I shouldn’t thank God for it, I should thank myself. It was the same if something bad happened. I shouldn’t ask God for help, I should help myself. He asked me if I’d ever prayed for my body. I confessed I had. He said if I wanted a great body, I had to build it. Nobody else could. Least of all God.
These were wild ideas for someone as young as I was. But they made perfect sense and I announced to my family that I would no longer go to church, that I didn’t believe in it and didn’t have time to waste on it. This added to the conflict at home.
Eventually there was a split between my parents about me. My mother obviously knew what was going on with me and the girls my friends lined up. She never came out and said anything directly, but she let me know she was concerned. Things were different between me and my father. He assumed that when I was eighteen, I would just go into the Army and they would straighten me out. He accepted some of the things my mother condemned. He felt it was perfectly all right to make out with all the girls I could. In fact, he was proud I was dating the fast girls. He bragged about them to his friends. “Jesus Christ, you should see some of the women my son’s coming up with.” He was showing off, of course. But still, our whole relationship had changed because I’d established myself by winning a few trophies and now had some girls. He was particularly excited about the girls. And he liked the idea that I didn’t get involved. “That’s right, Arnold,” he’d say, as though he’d had endless experience, “never be fooled by them.” That continued to be an avenue of communication between us for a couple of years. In fact, the few nights I took girls home when I was on leave from the Army, my father was always very pleasant and would bring out a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses.
My mother still wanted to protect me. We had to hide things from her. She was too religious; she imagined the awful state of my soul. And she felt sorry for the girls. To her it was all somehow connected with bodybuilding, and her antagonism for the sport grew. It bothered her that this had not merely been a phase of my growing up.
“You’re lazy, Arnold!” she would shout. “Look at you. All you want to do is train with weights. That’s all you think about. Look at your shoes,” she would say, grasping at anything. “They’re filthy. I’ve cleaned your father’s because he’s my husband. But I won’t do yours. You can take care of yourself.”
That aspect of it was getting to my father as well. The girls were all right. He liked that. And the trophies. He had a few of his own from ice curling, which we did together. But every so often he would take me aside and say, “Well, Arnold, what do you want to do?”
I would tell him again, “Dad, I’m going to be a professional bodybuilder. I’m going to make it my life.”
“I can see you’re serious,” he would say, his eyes growing thoughtful. “But how do you plan to apply it? What do you want out of life?” A silence would grow between us. He would sigh, go back to his newspaper, and that would be the end of it until he felt compelled to question me again.
For a long time I would just shrug my shoulders and refuse to speak about it. Then one day when I was seventeen and had the plan more firmly in my own mind, I surprised him with a full reply. “I have two possibilities right now. One is that I can go into the Army, become an officer, and have some freedom to go on training.” He nodded his head gravely. He felt I’d finally hit upon something. It would have made him proud for me to devote my life to the Austrian Army. “The other alternative is to go to Germany and then to America.”
“America?” Now I was talking nonsense again.
I had already weighed out the good points of being an officer. The Austrian Army would give me schooling, food and clothing; then, as an athlete, I would be allowed unbelievable freedom. There was an elite military academy in Vienna that specialized in sports. They would equip a weight room for me; they would see that I had the best of everything.
My father and I talked more than once about that as my final goal. He looked at it as a career in the Army. I saw it as the means to an end—winning Mr. Universe. My father was concerned that I might be unable to earn a living from bodybuilding, that I would waste myself and my potential.
1964
A career in the Army was my last choice. My real aspiration was to somehow get to America. I’d always had a claustrophobic feeling about Austria. “I’ve got to get out of here,” I kept thinking. “It’s not big enough, it’s stifling.” It wouldn’t allow me to expand. There seemed never to be enough space. Even people’s ideas were small. There was too much contentment, too much acceptance of things as they’d always been. It was beautiful; it was a great place to be old in.
Reg Park still dominated my life. I had changed my routine a few times. I kept the old exercises, the standard ones I knew Reg used. But I modified them to my own needs and I added new ones. Instead of doing just a barbell curl, I did a dumbbell curl too. I thought continually of making my biceps higher, giving my back thickness and width, increasing the size of my thighs. Working on the areas I wanted to emphasize.
I was always honest about my weak points. This helped me grow. I think it’s the key to success in everything: be honest; know where you’re weak; admit it. There is nobody in bodybuilding without some areas that need work. I had inherited from my parents an excellent bone structure and an almost perfect metabolism. For that reason it was basically easy for me to build muscles. However, there were some muscles that seemed stubborn. They refused to grow as rapidly as the others. I wrote them on note cards and stuck the cards around my mirror where I couldn’t avoid seeing them. Triceps were the first I noted down. I had done the same amount of biceps and triceps exercises; my biceps grew instantly, but my triceps lagged behind. There was no reason for it. I had put as much effort into my triceps but they refused to respond. The same with my legs. Although I was doing a lot of squats, my legs didn’t grow as rapidly as my chest. And my shoulders didn’t improve as much as my back. After two years I could see that certain parts hadn’t changed very much at all. I wrote them down and adjusted my workouts. I increased some exercises. I experimented. I watched my muscles for the results. Slowly I adjusted and evened out my body.
It was a long, almost unending process. At eighteen, I still didn’t have my body equalized. There were weak points to work on. I was limited to what I knew and what was available locally to learn. I was held back severely by the Austrian mentality in bodybuilding, which was just to concentrate on big arms and a big chest, as though photographs would always be taken only from the waist up. Nobody I knew really considered the serrati or the intercostals, the muscles that give the body a look of finish, of quality. And that kind of provincial thinking was to hamper me for a long time to come.
I went into the Army in 1965. One year of service was obligatory in Austria. After that, I could make my decision about a future. For me the Army was a good experience. I liked the regimentation, the firm, rigid structure. The whole idea of uniforms and medals appealed to me. Discipline was not a new thing to me—you can’t do bodybuilding successfully without it. Then too, I’d grown up in a disciplined atmosphere. My father always acted like a general, checking to see that I ate the proper way, that I did my studies.
His influence helped get me assigned as a driver in a tank unit. Actually I wasn’t well-suited to be a tank driver; I was too tall and I was only eighteen (twenty-one was the minimum age), but it was something I badly wanted t
o do. The necessary strings were pulled and not only was I allowed to drive a tank, I was also stationed in a camp near Graz. That enabled me to continue training, which remained the most important part of my life.
Shortly after I was inducted, I received an invitation to the junior division of the Mr. Europe contest in Stuttgart, Germany. I was in the middle of basic training and our orders were to remain on the base for six weeks. Unless someone in your immediate family died, you were absolutely forbidden to leave. I spent a couple of sleepless nights wondering what I should do. Finally I knew there was no alternative: I was going to sneak out and go.
The junior Mr. Europe contest meant so much to me that I didn’t care what consequences I’d have to suffer. I crawled over the wall, taking only the clothes I was wearing. I had barely enough money to buy a third-class train ticket. It crept out of Austria into Germany, stopping at every station, and arrived a day later in Stuttgart.
This was my first contest. I was nervous and exhausted from the train trip and I had no idea what was going on. I tried to learn something by watching the short men’s class, but they seemed as amateurish and confused as I was. I had to borrow someone else’s posing trunks, someone else’s body oil. I had rehearsed a posing routine in my mind on the train. It was a composite of all Reg Park’s poses I’d memorized from the muscle magazines. But the instant I stepped out before the judges my mind went blank. Somehow I made it through the initial posing. Then they called me back for a pose-off. Again, my mind was blank and I wasn’t sure how I’d done. Finally, the announcement came that I’d won—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Europe Junior.
When I look at the photographs that were taken then, I recall how I felt. The surprise wore off fast. I drew myself up. I felt like King Kong. I loved the sudden attention. I strutted and flexed. I knew for certain that I was on the way to becoming the world’s greatest bodybuilder. I felt I was already one of the best in the world. Obviously, I wasn’t even in the top 5,000; but in my mind I was the best. I had just won Mr. Europe Junior.
Winning my first competition, Mr. Europe Junior, 1965
At first the Army was not impressed. I borrowed money to travel back to the base and they caught me as I was climbing over the wall. I sat in jail for seven days with only a blanket on a cold stone bench and almost no food. But I had my trophy and I didn’t care if they locked me up for a whole year; it had been worth it.
I showed my trophy to everybody. And by the time I got out of jail, word had spread through the camp that I had won Mr. Europe Junior. The top majors decided it lent some prestige to the Army and gave me two days’ leave. I became a hero because of what I’d gone through to win. When we were out in the field the drill instructors mentioned it. “You have to fight for your fatherland,” they said. “You have to have courage. Look at what Schwarzenegger did just to win this title.” I became a hero, even though I had defied their rules to get what I wanted. That one time, they made an exception.
In basic training, my bodybuilding gave me a tremendous boost; it put me way ahead of everyone else in physical prowess. And that, added to the notoriety I’d gained from winning Mr. Europe Junior, gave me a special status in the eyes of the officers. I went on to tank-driving school and loved driving those big machines and feeling the sturdy recoil of the guns when we fired. It appealed to the part of me that has always been moved by any show of strength and force. In the afternoons we cleaned and oiled the tanks. However, after a few days I was excused from those afternoon duties. An order came down from the top that I was to train, to build my body. It was the nicest order I could have had.
A weight-lifting gym was set up and I was ordered to go there every day after lunch. I’d brought my own dumbbells and some of the machines from home because the Army had only barbells and weights. They were strict about my training. Every time an officer walked by the window and caught me sitting down, he’d threaten to have me put in jail. That was his duty. If you got caught goofing off when you were supposed to be oiling and greasing the tanks, you’d be put away. The Army felt it was no different with what I was doing. I must train, they said, I must be lifting weights all the time.
I paced myself and used this opportunity to continue building the foundation I’d begun three years before. I devised a way of training six hours at a stretch without getting totally wiped out. I ate four or five times a day. They allowed me all the food I wanted; but in terms of nutrition, Army food wasn’t worth much. It took a couple of pounds of the overcooked meat they served to provide the amount of protein you’d find in an average-sized medium-rare steak. Taking all this into consideration, I consumed huge quantities of food and then tried hard to burn off the extra calories.
Throughout the time I was in the Army I divided my training between bodybuilding and Olympic weight lifting. I was interested in lifting heavy weights over my head. The image of myself with a loaded barbell pressed up and my arms locked took a long time to get out of my system. Before I was eighteen, I had competed in the Austrian championships, winning first place in the heavyweight division. But after the Mr. Europe Junior contest I stopped Olympic lifting. It wasn’t what I wanted to do. I’d done it primarily to prove a point—that a bodybuilder not only looked strong, he was strong, and that well-developed muscles were not merely ornamentation.
Many people regret having to serve in the Army. But it was not a waste of time for me. When I came out I weighed 225 pounds. I’d gone from 200 to 225 pounds. Up to that time, this was the biggest change I’d ever made in a single year.
Chapter Three
After I won the Mr. Europe Junior contest, one of the judges, a man I will call Schneck, who owned a gymnasium and a magazine in Munich, took me aside and said, “Schwarzenegger, you have a real talent for bodybuilding. You’ll be the next great thing in Germany. As soon as you’re out of the Army, I’d like you to come to Munich and manage my health and bodybuilding club. You can train as much as you want. Next fall I’ll even pay your way to London to watch the Mr. Universe contest.”
“What do you mean, watch?”
“You can watch the Mr. Universe contest,” he repeated. “You can watch those guys and get inspired.”
“Watch?” The word stuck in my mind.
He gave me a funny look. “You don’t think—”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m going over there and compete.”
“No, no, no,” he said and laughed. “You can’t do that. Those guys are big bulls. They’re big animals—so huge you wouldn’t believe it. You don’t want to compete against them. Not yet.”
He talked as though they were years and years ahead of me. But as far as I was concerned, he had promised me a trip to London to the contest, and I was going to do what I wanted. “If I go over there, I’m going to compete,” I told him, “not to watch.”
He laughed and said, “Sure.”
Munich was ideal for me. It was exciting, one of the fastest cities in middle Europe. Everything there seemed to be happening at once. It was big, with this feeling of wealth and power and barely contained energy; it seemed on the point of exploding. Even before I was settled and secure, I could see a future for myself. I could grow and expand. For the first time, I felt I could really breathe.
But the day I arrived from Austria, I was overwhelmed. Inside the train station I encountered a flood of foreign languages—Italian, French, Greek, German, Spanish, English, Dutch, Portuguese. There was no one to meet me: I had only an address to find. Each time I turned to someone to ask directions, I was met with a shrug and a statement that either they didn’t speak German or they were strangers themselves. I carried my bags out of the station. Again, I couldn’t believe it. I had never seen so many people. There were crowds and crowds of people and they all seemed to be hurrying somewhere. Endless lines of cars honked and sped past. Buildings rose up close and tall.
I remember turning around slowly, looking at it all and saying to myself, “There’s no way back now, Arnold.”
Of course, I knew I would
never want to go back. I was meant to be there, and to go on. The plan I’d begun formulating three years ago was beginning to work.
I went to Munich fresh, naive, and pretty innocent. I was a big Austrian kid from a small country village and I was impressed with everything about this teeming city. I couldn’t get enough of it. Schneck, my new employer, drove me around in his Mercedes. He showed me all the things he owned, including his beautiful house, where he had promised I could have a room.
I stayed with him for three or four days. I did have a separate room, but there was no bed in it. I slept on a couch, which was uncomfortable for someone my size. Schneck promised he would get a bed: he said one had been ordered. It never arrived, of course, and he finally suggested that I should sleep in his bedroom.
I got the message. It went up my spine like a sudden chill. I packed my clothes and left the house.
He followed me outside. “Think about it, Arnold,” he said, stopping me. “You wouldn’t be the first one.” He told me about two other bodybuilders who had stayed with him. “Look where they are now. They’ve got their own gymnasiums. They’ve got an easy life, Arnold.”
“No,” I said. As tough and firm as I meant to sound, I remember being a little bit frightened. I was trembling inside. Partly it was from fear, but mostly it was rage.
Schneck had always seemed so smooth and sure of himself. Now I saw that he was sweating. He leaned close. “You know I can get you into films. I can finance you while you train for Mr. Universe. Later I’ll send you to America, to California, to train with the big champions.” He painted this clever picture based on all the things I’d told him I wanted to do with my life. I did want a health club and a career in the movies, the kind of life Reg Park had had. I wanted to go to America and train with the top musclemen. America was in my head always. It was the mecca of bodybuilding. The champions always seemed to go to America. And that impressed me more than any of his arguments.
Arnold Page 3
