The Arnold Era

You have seen him with his rippling muscles bared, hanging upside down from airplanes, killing men with large guns, knocking them to the ground with the thud of his fists or breaking their necks with a twist of his wrist. But there is nothing quite like seeing Hollywood’s reigning action hero being chased around a 20th Century Fox sound stage by a creature with antlers and a Santa’s helper cap on its head.

Arnold Schwarzenegger running for his life from a reindeer? It could only happen in a movie, in this case, a comedy called “Jingle All the Way,” which will be in the theaters in November. Following him as he strides purposefully across the film set--a path always clear before him--it is hard to imagine what could possibly strike fear into the giant muscle that is Arnold’s heart.

Brian Levant, the film’s director, only wishes that his reindeer had the work ethic of his star, who on location has been known to roust weary filmmakers out of bed at dawn, bellowing, “Get up! We must work out!” On the first take of the chase scene, Arnold sprints down a hallway into a living room and then through the dining room. But his timid pursuer quickly gives up the chase, staring at a Christmas tree by the fireplace, placidly urinating on the rug.

Many takes later, the reindeer pursues Arnold with enough enthusiasm for Levant to get his shot, but Arnold displays no sign of impatience or displeasure. Between takes, he regales the crew with the story of how he punched out a camel for a scene in “Conan the Barbarian,” using a journalist visiting the set as a stand-in for the camel. He throws a right hook, narrowly avoiding my jaw--don’t worry, he really didn’t hit the camel either--then comically mimics an ungainly, camel-like fall.

“That’s why it is so funny,” he explains in his familiar Austrian accent. “You do something brutal, but then there’s something funny behind it, so people laugh and know it’s only a movie.”

At 48, having spent two decades carefully crafting his image, Arnold has a canny sense of his on-screen self. He knows his fans prefer to see his heroics leavened with a pinch of sardonic humor. That afternoon, he and Levant watch a replay of a shot where Arnold stares down the reindeer, growling, “You picked the wrong day!” It is a signature Arnold line like “I’ll be back” or “Hasta la vista, baby.” Arnold tells Levant, “Let’s get a couple versions of that. It’ll be perfect for the trailer.”

As the camera team sets up the shot, a crewman approaches Arnold, who is knocking ash from his cigar into a custom-crafted ashtray attached to his director’s chair. The crewman is curious--what was Arnold’s biggest box-office success?

The actor replies, not missing a beat. “Terminator 2”--$206 million domestic, $508 million worldwide.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hollywood were the perfect marriage of power and money. In the 1980s, when junk bond kings and corporate raiders were making billion-dollar killings on Wall Street, Hollywood developed a blockbuster fixation of its own, concocting movies that were as big and flashy as any Ivan Boesky deal or Donald Trump hotel. Inspired by the heroics of Rambo and the Terminator, each summer has opened with a new burst of death-defying action and awe-inspiring explosions. Movies were designed to evoke the thrills of a theme-park ride, from “Aliens” and “Die Hard” to “Batman” and “Cliffhanger,” culminating with the computer-generated behemoths, “Jurassic Park” and “Twister.”

It was a time perfectly suited for someone whose very physique symbolized the medium’s larger-than-life aspirations. “Arnold became a movie star at the same time that the movies became special effects, because Arnold was the greatest special effect of them all,” says Steven de Souza, an action-film screenwriter who wrote “Commando” and “The Running Man.”

“Look at ‘Twister.’ Arnold could’ve easily starred in it. The difference is, he’d lasso the tornado and bring it down to the ground--and it would be believable. As a writer, with Arnold you’re working on a different scale. You’re writing scenes that are so much bigger than life that if you take Arnold out of the movie, it doesn’t work. You can’t just plug in George Clooney. Without Arnold, you might as well cast Billy Barty.”

His story has been told a thousand times over. Of humble Austrian origins, Arnold became the world’s most celebrated bodybuilder, then turned to Hollywood as a new world to conquer. And conquer he did, graduating first from jokey strongman parts to brawny sword-’n’-sci-fi slugfests and then to the kind of roles he plays today, which alternate between mythic action heroics and cuddly family comedies.

Throughout his career he has been a relentless achiever, always reaching for the next rung of the ladder to stardom. When Arnold arrived in Hollywood, the town’s biggest star was Burt Reynolds. “So that’s where he set his sights,” says producer John Davis, a longtime friend. “He said, ‘I want to be a bigger star than Burt Reynolds.’ ”

People showing up for script conferences would see Arnold’s dialogue coach leaving. On their way out, the acting coach would be arriving. When Arnold turned to comedies, Davis remembers having visited him one day and finding him smoking cigars and telling jokes with Milton Berle.

Having mastered the role of superhuman warrior, Arnold set about broadening his appeal. When producer Joel Silver and De Souza brought him “Commando” in 1985, they saw it as an action movie. But Arnold saw it as a career opportunity. He was taken by the opening of the film, where his character portrayed a family man, ordering pizzas and taking his daughter to a petting zoo. “He said, ‘Until now, I play a man in loincloths and an alien from outer space. I need to play a regular human being who wears clothes, a father with a family--a part John Wayne would do,’ ” De Souza recalls.

Unlike most Hollywood stars, who see script meetings as an opportunity to beef up their role in a film, people who’ve worked with Schwarzenegger say he views the process as a way to improve the film. Walon Green, who has written two scripts for Arnold, says the actor was on hand from the first story meeting, giving detailed notes after having read each draft of the script.

“I never had that sinking feeling that the actor was only thinking about his role,” Green says. “His script comments were about historical stuff and texture and clarity; it wasn’t about making his part better.”

On the movie set, Arnold is not just the star. He is the center of gravity. When “Eraser,” his contribution to this summer’s torrent of action films, fell weeks behind schedule, it put director Charles (Chuck) Russell’s job in jeopardy--until Arnold made it clear that he stood behind the director. He took the same stand for Paul Verhoeven when “Total Recall” went over budget.

“When there was a problem, Arnold stood up and took the heat,” recalls Verhoeven. “When you’re a director, you feel like you’re this one locomotive, trying to pull this big train. But with Arnold, you have two locomotives pulling the train.”

This involvement is, if anything, heightened once the movie nears release. “Arnold wants to know what the competition is, what kind of tie-ins we have, how we’re going to position it,” says 20th Century Fox Senior Executive Vice President Tom Sherak. “He makes you justify everything. When you have Arnold in a film, you know you’re not going to get cheated.”

A consummate huckster, Arnold faithfully promoted even “Last Action Hero” after the early buzz on the film had turned sour. Just days before the 1993 film opened to a fusillade of negative reviews, Arnold was faithfully hyping the picture as “the best movie I’ve ever done,” telling TV reporters “the movie is a 10 . . . it will be a spectacular.”

With an asking price of $15 million in salary, often supplemented by a piece of the back-end profits, Arnold drives a hard bargain. Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer remembers the star and agent Lou Pitt putting the deal together for “Kindergarten Cop,” which earned Arnold $10 million in salary and a healthy chunk of profit-participation payments.

“Arnold was very upfront about what he wanted,” recalls Grazer. “He puffed on his cigar and said to [former Universal studio chief] Tom Pollock, ‘OK, Pollock. Get ready to pay big. And maybe I need some gas for the jet, too.’ ”

*

Jamie Lee Curtis offers some advice about how to approach Arnold, who has a tendency to turn his media encounters into a blitzkrieg of promotion for his project at hand. “You have to prepare to duel with him,” says Curtis, who co-starred with him in “True Lies.” “He’s very charming, but in an in-your-face way. He loves to tease you.”

An example of his charm? “Oh, he’d see me coming onto the set, and he’d say, ‘Jamie Lee, your ass is getting really fat.’ ”

She laughs. “If he calls you ‘forehead,’ it probably means he’s getting comfortable with you.” Forehead? Curtis explains: “It’s Arnold’s affectionate term for stupid people.”

From the director down to the lowliest grip, everybody must endure Arnold’s take-no-prisoners teasing, a raffish humor not designed for the easily offended. When I ask whether he leases out his Gulfstream G-III jet to generate extra income, he responds with great laughter. “Lease it out?” he says, mocking me. “We call it ‘chartering’ in our profession.”

On the “Jingle” set one day, co-star Rita Wilson’s makeup woman jokingly attacks Arnold with a barrage of karate kicks to his backside. Arnold turns around to confront her. “Watch out or you will get it,” he says with mock gravity. “Get what?” she asks playfully. “You will get the nipple twist,” Arnold replies, demonstrating by flipping his wrists as if opening a pair of water faucets.

If Arnold’s humor is politically incorrect, so is his politics, at least by liberal Hollywood standards. Though married to TV journalist Maria Shriver of the Kennedy clan, he is an ardent Republican who stumped for George Bush; and he’s a big Newt Gingrich fan, having lobbied him for government funds to support cities involved with the Inner City Games, which offers Olympic-style sporting events for urban youth. (It’s OK to support government programs “that work,” he explains.)

Arnold first arrived in America at age 21 during the 1968 presidential elections. Unhappy with Austria’s socialist government--”it was a country packed with laws that prevented you from having opportunities”--he was an eager convert to the Republican gospel of unfettered private enterprise. His loyalty remains, even though Hollywood, an industry whose products are entirely shaped by marketplace demands, has come under increasing fire from presumptive Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole and other conservatives for making violent movies that undermine the country’s moral fiber.

Dole’s speeches carefully avoided mentioning Schwarzenegger films by name, but it would be difficult for Arnold to stump for Dole this year without being forced to disavow much of Dole’s strident rhetoric. “I like Bob Dole, but if he is saying we are responsible for creating the social ills in this country, he is wrong,” Arnold says. “One thing we can do is reduce the amount of violence in movies, but it’s only one problem among many. To point the finger at Hollywood is just saying, ‘We in Washington have failed, and we’re looking for someone to blame.’ ”

Now that Arnold has three young children--two daughters, Katherine and Christina, and a boy, Patrick, who live in a family compound set on three large lots in Pacific Palisades--he talks a lot about mixing up his movies. In the future, he plans to make as many family films as violent ones. “I’m always saying to Maria, ‘It’s too bad there aren’t more films for children.’ So I figure I must start with myself, so my kids can see some of my movies, too.”

This is not entirely an altruistic decision. Arnold is entering the twilight of his action-hero years, so he has been softening his image and honing his comic persona. Having surveyed his core audience--guys at the gym--he is keenly aware that filmgoers showed little interest in seeing him play a pregnant man in “Junior.” “They missed my doing comedy with my body,” he says. “I didn’t use that part of my luggage--the film needed more physical comedy.”

Like being chased by a reindeer. “That’s what people want to see,” he says. “Where I’m in a horrible predicament and they say, ‘How is he going to get out of that?’ ”

As befits someone with a degree in business and international economics from the University of Wisconsin-Superior, Arnold knows that it’s important to diversify. For years, he has heavily invested in real estate in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Denver. He is co-executive producer of the Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic, an annual bodybuilding event; owner of the Venice restaurant Schatzi on Main and a “significant shareholder” in Planet Hollywood, the worldwide chain of movie-themed eateries that uses its movie-star investors to promote the franchise.

“When Arnold goes to an opening, I call it the president’s tour, because we’re always invited to meet the head of state,” says Planet Hollywood Chairman Keith Barish, who produced an Arnold vehicle called “The Running Man.” “He’s always thinking about the future. We went to [open a Planet Hollywood] in Prague because Arnold thinks we have a great future in the old Iron Curtain countries.”

Tales of his financial acumen abound. Producer pal John Davis recalls being skeptical when Arnold bought an entire block of real estate in a dilapidated section of Denver about 15 years ago. Talk about good luck--or good timing--Arnold’s real estate isn’t run down anymore. It’s less than two blocks from Coors Field, the town’s wildly successful new baseball stadium.

Flush from income from films and investments, Arnold can afford to splurge, as he did at the fabled Jackie Onassis action in April. He spent $772,500 to buy a set of President John F. Kennedy’s MacGregor woods and an inscribed golf bag; he also acquired a leather desk set and a Norman Rockwell painting of J.F.K. Though on one hand a sentimental gesture--he says his children should have “a piece of the family history”--it was, Arnold stresses, also a shrewd purchase. “I knew what to go for,” he says. “I had an inside knowledge of what things were really valuable.”

No, Arnold is not a man who thinks small. When Jamie Lee Curtis wrote a children’s book, she told Arnold she was was going to help sell it by doing a book signing at Dutton’s, her “little neighborhood bookstore.” Arnold was appalled. “You forehead, what are you, crazy?” he groaned. “You have to do your book signing at South Coast Plaza, not Dutton’s. You could sell 10,000 books in a weekend, or 100. What do you want?”

*

To understand Arnold, you must think of him not as an act-or but as an athlete, armed not only with an athlete’s physical prowess but with a Super Bowl sense of determination and appetite for competition. “Arnold is the most confident man I know,” says producer Larry Gordon, who made “Commando” when he ran 20th Century Fox’s film division. “From the first minute, I knew I was dealing with a champion. He’s like Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky; he has this sheer determination to succeed.”

Arnold’s listed height is 6 foot 2, but all his cigar smoking must have shrunk him. He’s solid and well-proportioned but not physically intimidating. You don’t really notice his musculature until he appears one day wearing a sleeveless shirt that shows off his massive biceps, lined with veins that run like rivers under his skin.

Next to the trailer with a canopy where he hangs out on the set, smoking cigars with his pals, there is a second trailer filled with workout equipment, all of it bolted to the floor so it remains secure when the trailer is driven from one location to the next.

It was, of course, bodybuilding that made Arnold a movie star. It gave him his self-confidence, schooled him in self-promotion and provided him with the sculpted physique that made him such a striking screen presence. Watching Arnold’s early films, you are reminded that, physical feats aside, he was viewed the way Josef von Sternberg saw Marlene Dietrich: as kind of a sex god. One can only imagine what film historians will make of the way such macho directors as John Milius and James Cameron lingered over the sweeping curves in Arnold’s body, repeatedly showing him naked or topless, both at leisure and in battle.

Arnold says that as a boy he had no idea he had any skill or desire to perform. His local school didn’t have a stage or a playhouse, he laments, like his three children have today. “The first opportunity I had was when I was 16 in a weightlifting contest in a beer hall, and I was the youngest competitor,” he says, relaxing by his trailer, lighting a cigar with a gadget that looks like it came from a CIA assassination kit.

“So I put the chalk on my hands and I got the adrenaline going and--bang!--I did 150 pounds, my normal lift. But then with all the excitement from the crowd--WHAM! --I did 185 pounds. And I realized that I’d lifted 35 pounds more with people watching me than I did alone in the gym.

“That’s when I realized that I responded to an audience. It’s like a drug--you get addicted to it. And suddenly you’re doing it not just for you but for the gratification and the challenge and the risk of it, too.”

It’s a testimony to Arnold’s rigid control over his image that in the dozens of magazine cover stories about him over the years, it seems that nowhere except in Spy magazine was an obvious question addressed: Did he use steroids when he won all those bodybuilding titles? (In a 1985 Rolling Stone interview, Arnold solemnly praises the value of eating meat.)

When asked today, he answers without hesitation. “I used steroids. It was a risky thing to do, but I have no regrets. It was what I had to do to compete. The danger with steroids is over-usage. I only did it before a difficult competition--for two months, but not for a period of time that could harm me--and then afterward, it was over. I would stop. I have no health problems, no kidney damage or anything like that from using them.”

Steroids don’t help movie stars win box-office titles; Arnold has done that through choosing good scripts and allying himself with talented directors. He insists he’s not competitive with rival action stars such as Bruce Willis or Sly Stallone, even though he has been known to quiz journalists about the box-office numbers of Stallone films. But his equanimity vanishes when talk turns to his Mr. Freeze character in the next “Batman” sequel, a part I dismiss as a mere supporting role.

Arnold frowns--he’s insulted. In his mind, every movie is his movie. “Maybe I don’t play the title role,” he grumbles, “but it will still be a memorable character. I am the villain.” He jabs a finger my way. “The villain is often the best part, you know.”

Before he can continue, a crewman stops by to offer Arnold an Italian cigar. “You must be kidding,” Arnold says. “The Italians are great at lots of things--sports cars, suits, loafers, but not cigars.”

The crewman starts to leave, but Arnold won’t let him off the hook. Do you smoke cigars at home? he asks. “My girlfriend can’t stand ‘em,” the crewman says. “I have to smoke in the garage.”

Arnold roars with laughter. “Well, we know who the woman is in the family. His wife is the boss; she sends him off to the garage.”

Surely Arnold’s wife is no pushover. Does she let him smoke in the house? “Absolutely,” Arnold replies. “Maria has no argument. Her father introduced me to cigars in 1977, so it couldn’t be bad, because her father was everything to her. I just tell her, your father loved cigars, so my smoking should be a pleasure for you.”

Arnold pulls out his lighter to get his cigar going again. I ask him what the strange device is called. He stares at me, shaking his head. “It’s a torch, you forehead.”

“eraser,” due to open June 21, comes at a pivotal time in Arnold’s career. There are those in Hollywood who see Arnold as a Reagan-era action hero who may never again equal his dazzling “Terminator 2” success. Premiere magazine’s Power List, one indicator of Hollywood prestige, has dropped Arnold’s ranking three years in a row, from No. 11 in 1994 to No. 29 this year, behind not only slam-dunk stars like Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks, but even Brad Pitt and Robin Williams. The magazine predicted a modest $80-million domestic box-office gross for “Eraser,” a step down from previous Schwarzenegger epics.

Arnold shrugs off such downbeat prophecies. “What does Premiere know? They were the ones who predicted ‘Last Action Hero’ would be one of the three biggest movies of 1993.”

To Arnold, “Last Action Hero” was one of those inevitable tests that all great warriors must survive. “I saw it coming, it was my turn,” he says. “I was so high on the pedestal, where else could I go? As soon as there’s vulnerability, I knew the attack would come. The press threw everything into the pot--are movies too violent? Is this the end of the Bush era?”

Arnold offers a sardonic smile, one he reserves for nasty villains on screen, forehead journalists off-screen. “I know journalists very well,” he says. “I sleep with one.”

In recent weeks, stories have been published in which “Eraser” is said to have gone far over its original 94-day schedule, its initial $70-million budget mushrooming to nearly $100 million. Crew members claim the film was rushed into production before it had a satisfactory script, forcing a series of high-priced rewrites during production.

“The script changed all the time--it seemed like there were 97 screenwriters,” says one crew member, who recalled seeing new script pages arriving by fax machine at all hours. “We’d sit down and look at the new pages and say, ‘Where did this come from?’ It was frustrating because we’d plan one thing, and then we’d have to change everything when new scripts came in.” This kind of frenzied patchwork approach is becoming common with recent big-budget films; similar stories have surfaced about “The Fugitive,” “Waterworld,” “Out- break” and “Twister.”

No one seems to blame Arnold for the chaos on “Eraser.” Arnold acknowledges that movie studios often force filmmakers to agree to untenable budgets when they embark on a big action picture. “Warner Bros. knew our schedule was unrealistic,” he says. “We had a big scene at the San Pedro docks that was scheduled for 18 days. Some Warner executives asked me how long I thought it would take, and I said 26 days. Then they said to me, ‘We bet it will take 35 days.’ So they knew. But that’s the way it works.”

Arnold acknowledges that Warner “was nervous” about keeping Russell on, but says he stuck by him because of his talent. Russell was the director of the critically lauded hit film “The Mask.” “It is a character thing with me. I stick it out with people to the end,” Arnold explains. “Chuck was not a good communicator, and he was nasty with the crew sometimes, so I’d tell the crew not to take it personally--he was just frazzled.”

And just how did Arnold convey this? “I would tell them when Chuck said, ‘Give me the other gun!’ what he means is, ‘Please give me the other gun!’ ”

*

Arnold seems aggravated by this microscopic media scrutiny, perhaps because it is the one aspect of his life where he is not in control. On a movie set, he is clearly the boss. He can scan “Jingle” video replays while chatting by phone with Warner Films Co-President Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who is dutifully keeping him informed of potential changes in the opening credit sequence of “Eraser.”

But with the media, everything is a negotiation. After weeks of wrangling, Arnold agrees to let a reporter visit the set of “Jingle All the Way” and then be interviewed at a neutral site. (It’s hardly neutral; the site is a VIP office at Planet Hollywood.)

“If you were playing a word-association game, when you think of Arnold, controlling is the first word that comes to mind,” says one studio executive who worked with him on several films. “He’ll be that way to the end of time. He’s very Teutonic in that regard--’I am Arnold, and I make the rules.’ If you play the game with Arnold, you play by his rules.”

While waiting for Arnold to fit us into his schedule, I began interviewing his Hollywood cronies. Within days, I get a phone call from a nervous Warner Bros. publicist who asks me to stop making calls. Arnold hasn’t “officially” agreed to the story, she explains. In effect, I haven’t been playing by his rules. It’s a measure of his clout that the studio doesn’t want him hearing that a journalist is delving into his past before the amount of access to Arnold have been established.

Several writers have told us of attempts by Arnold to control interviews by putting certain subjects off limits. For example, reporters for Time magazine were told by his then-publicist, Charlotte Parker, not to question Schwarzenegger about steroid use for a 1990 story. When one of the reporters did, the actor left the room.

Presently without a personal publicist--a rarity among major stars--Arnold insists he has never prevented journalists from asking specific questions. “If there were conditions,” he says. “It was not done by me.” However, at least one studio marketing executive has said that several high-profile magazine pieces were scrapped because Arnold set too many limitations on the scope of the stories.

“It’s true, I am controlling about my image,” Arnold admits. “If I’m not controlling my image, then who is? People always push things in the press; they want to be seen as a serious studio executive, as a smart businessman or as a sensitive artist. Politicians do it all the time; everyone tries to create an image of themselves.”

Arnold says he has no problem facing a journalist who comes in with what he calls an “empty” mind. “It’s like [former Washington Post editor] Ben Bradlee says in his book: He would go in with an empty bucket and let the person he was interviewing fill it.”

Arnold’s command of English is sometimes imprecise: He talks about bringing a lot of “luggage” to a part. So I ask him, does he mean an empty mind or an open mind?

He smiles knowingly. “An open mind is OK, too.”

For Arnold, an empty mind is probably best. It’s an apt metaphor for what we bring to a movie theater as filmgoers. We let go of ourselves in the darkness, our minds empty and yet full of expectation, eager to be thrilled by Arnold’s bigger-than-life heroics. It’s quite a challenge to live up to such an imposing image. But then, Arnold has always relished such challenges. This is the muscle he has most exercised--his relentless quest for achievement.

Rehearsing a scene in “Jingle All the Way” one day, Arnold is introduced to a shy, freckled boy who has a small part to play. The boy is so in awe of Arnold that he can barely speak.

“So, you play the president’s son,” Arnold says. The boy nods. “What’s next?” Arnold asks, radiating self-confidence. “The president?”