• Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Peter Petre, Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story, Simon and Schuster, 2012, $35.00.
RALEIGH — In his new memoir Total Recall Arnold Schwarzenegger bulked up on the bodybuilding and movie sections. That led some reviewers to skip those parts and miss some good stuff, besides the well-known story of the Austrian immigrant who becomes governor of California.
He was “born into a year of famine,” and that is no exaggeration, as In the Ruins of the Reich by Douglas Botting confirms. Arnold is working class all the way. He shoveled sawdust, drove tanks, and sold ice cream. In America he laid bricks and taught weight training in prisons. He also earned a degree and learned how to flip houses before flipping was cool. His true essence, however, emerged in bodybuilding.
This sport is a matter of posing and one photo shows a ballet instructor giving Arnold instructions. Movie acting is similar. You stand where they tell you to stand and say what they tell you to say. Arnold got the coaching he needed and that served him well in the movie business. Movies, in turn, proved instructive in other ways, including politics.
Arnold learned that the Hollywood ethos classifies “action” pictures starring himself as Republican and “meaningful” pictures starring Tom Hanks as Democrat. That’s why, while filming “True Lies,” President Clinton’s Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt denied Arnold permission to ride a horse through the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument, even though it had been done before. And Clinton’s Health and Human Services boss Donna Shalala asked Arnold to resign as fitness czar.
But there was more to his Hollywood career than partisan wrangling.
Arnold trained with Harold Sakata, Oddjob in “Goldfinger.” Eric Morris, Jack Nicholson’s acting coach, told Arnold don’t act, only be real. On the “Conan the Barbarian” set, Arnold heard Wilt Chamberlain and Grace Jones argue furiously about who is really black. And Arnold had a fling with Brigitte Nielsen while making “Red Sonja.”
His future wife Maria Shriver knew about Arnold from the muscle magazines Secret Service agents used to read. It took a while before they tied the knot, and once into politics he got little help from the Kennedy clan. In those circles, it’s party over family all the way. And when he became governor of California, Arnold’s Hollywood experience did not exactly serve him well.
“I wasn’t familiar with the cast of characters in Sacramento,” he admitted. That is, he did not understand that government employee unions run state government.
He called for a “year of reform,” posed with a broom, and promised to clean house. He wanted to “blow up the boxes,” the maze of boards and commissions, soft landing spots for washed-up politicians. But the “governator” couldn’t take the bad reviews from union bosses and the liberal press. He retreated from reform and became a strategic ally of left-wing Democrats, his true handlers, just like the posing and acting coaches.
He worked with them on the California Global Warming Solutions Act, which the former governor called “our boldest policy leap,” promoting it as good for business. It’s not, and has helped perpetuate the recession in the Golden State, which he left a mess. But check out Arnold’s review of his own governorship.
“We made a hell of a lot of progress, and we made a lot of history,” he wrote, “workers comp reforms, parole reforms, pension reforms, education reforms, welfare reforms, and budget reforms … we made our state an international leader in climate change and renewable energy; a national leader in health care reform and the fight against obesity. … And we accomplished all this while dealing with the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression.”
Arnold’s recall was far from total. Arnold backed Proposition 71, the 2004 initiative of real estate tycoon Robert Klein II, a prominent Democrat. The measure promised to take $3 billion in bond money and conduct embryonic stem cell research that would turn California into a vast Lourdes, overflowing with miraculous cures for deadly diseases.
Total Recall did not mention that the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine created by Prop 71 has failed to produce a single cure or therapy. And not a word from a self-described fiscal conservative that CIRM is off-limits to state oversight and rife with conflicts of interest.
State Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, said Arnold, was “one of my closest allies among the Democrats.” In 2008, Fabian Nunez’s son Esteban was involved in the fatal stabbing of college student Luis Santos and sentenced to 16 years in prison. On Jan. 2, 2011, during his final hours as governor, Schwarzenegger commuted Nunez’s sentence to seven years, a “distasteful and repugnant” act, according to a prominent judge. Total Recall omits this episode entirely, and therein lies a lesson.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is in love with his own “narrative,” the story of immigrant who, against all odds, becomes a winner in business, movies, and politics. When anything fails to fit the narrative, he applies whitewash or simply leaves it out, the pattern of many in politics and show business.
In those fields poseurs rule, and that calls for vigilance. Poseurs should be judged not by their own reviews but by their actions. As with Bill Clinton’s final-day pardons, Schwarzenegger’s unbelievable truth had a way of emerging at the exit door.