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Getting the scoop on ArnoldDate: 14.12.2006
Posted by: Anabolic Info Team United States
It's that time of year again - holiday lunches - but there are some good ones along with the bad.
I know because of Sam Hale's and Rick Phelps' 87th annual Pasadena Curmudgeons hoedown Thursday, held in the darkest of back rooms at Monty's Steak House, graced with the anecdotal evidence of native Pasadenan Joe Mathews this time around.
Last year the assembled had to listen to me grouse, one in a long line of fellows who had to sing for their luncheons.
But Joe, the Poly grad and L.A. Times reporter whose book "The People's Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy" has been touted in this space, truly had something interesting to say.
Though he's now covering labor for the Times, there was a period when, perhaps more than any other reporter, he had access to the governor when Arnold was at ease.
As a good journalist, Joe knows that one way into this mode is simply to stick around long enough so that you seem like part of the entourage.
People in general can't stop themselves from talking, reporter in the room or not. But people such as Schwarzenegger in particular - the kind of person who refers to himself with the phrase "there's meat on that chicken" - could no more hold back from blabbing than he could turn into a human- looking, apparently unstoppable cyborg sent from the future to kill Sarah Connor.
Oh, wait - that's what he did in "The Terminator." OK - let's just say that Joe has heard Arnold talk - a lot. And that he consequently has a lot of stories.
Some of them were in the way of Arnold's penchant for pinching everyone who claims to "work out" in the biceps and giving his opinion of the claim.
Or about the time his advance people decided they would put him out in public in the most hackneyed of ways, dropping in at Dick Riordan's The Pantry restaurant downtown during the breakfast shift. The problem was that Arnold couldn't help but comment on the carbs and the fat on everyone's plates, chastising diners for the hash browns and extra sides of bacon so much that they couldn't get any schmoozing in.
Or the fact that the person he sees most often may be a very much out gay bodybuilding buddy who shares his Sacramento hotel suite and advises him on media issues, which may account for his remarkably open mind on so many gay-related social issues.
But the most telling thing Joe said about our governor was some advice Schwarzennegger says he once got from his mother-in-law, Eunice Kennedy Shriver.
Speaking of the electorate, she told him: "You ask for forgiveness, not permission."
Those are precisely the politics Arnold practiced in order to turn what were disastrous approval ratings just over a year ago into a re-election landslide last month.
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