His California girl

Memoir tells all about six years of living with Schwarzenegger
By CARLA MARINUCCI
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Barbara Outland Baker, 58, a Southern California English professor, knows Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as few women do - she lived with him for six years during his stratospheric climb from polyester-wearing immigrant to bodybuilding Adonis and fledgling movie star.

In a new book, Outland Baker captures it all: the rocky life with a charismatic charmer who - even then - exhibited a fierce drive to escape from an abusive childhood and show the world he could succeed. Yet the young bodybuilder also displayed a narcissistic focus on his own needs and a wild side.

Her self-published "Arnold and Me: In the Shadow of the Austrian Oak" is a detailed and most definitely affectionate memoir.

"It's not tabloid," says the author, who is happily married to John Baker, a photographer and retired aerospace manager. Schwarzenegger was "a man who touched my life. It's a deep, deep love story in a way, which turned out to have a different ending for both of us."

At the height of the hippie era in 1969, the willowy, blond Southern California sorority member and waitress received a come-on from a rather odd, German-accented muscleman during a lunch-counter break.

Thus began a six-year live-in relationship with Schwarzenegger, then an ambitious and promising bodybuilder in his early 20s. He was embarking on what was to be his wildest period, a time that would shape what he became later in business and politics.

Outland Baker said the book is the result of a journal she kept for years, as she tried to find fulfillment after the glamorous life with a magnetic personality on his way to superstardom.

She said she devoted herself to Schwarzenegger believed she would become his wife.

It took decades - and three marriages - to get over him, but she's releasing the memoir, she said, because her life is in order, and the timing is right. The book's appearance amid the governor's re-election campaign is purely coincidental, she said.

A measure of her continued relationship and friendship with the governor comes in his glowing foreword to the book - even as he allows that "sometimes Barbara's recollection of various events differ from my own."

Nevertheless, the book includes material that the Republican - and wife Maria Shriver - would probably have preferred left unsaid, particularly in an election year. There's evidence of his talent for salesmanship - his successful effort to talk her out of the virginity she was saving for marriage - his single-minded ambition and an often-selfish concern for his own career, which was a factor in their breakup, Outland Baker said.

There's the wilder stuff such as his fondness for "Maui-wowiecannabis, which led to "orgiastic" urges for forbidden foods, his roving eye and rampant cheating, and his previously admitted use of anabolic steroids, which Outland Baker said he consumed occasionally for a competitive edge.

There are some memorable moments, like his frightening anger when the bodybuilder discovers his competition footage had been used - without his permission - in gay porn movies.

Regarding allegations of early sexual misconduct with women, Outland Baker said Schwarzenegger was as much the gropee as the groper in the libertine world of Venice Beach's marquee bodybuilders.

"Big muscles attracted easy sex," she wrote.

She saw personality traits that have echoed throughout Schwarzenegger's political life - particularly his instinct for finding people who could help boost his career.

Outland Baker, who has been invited to the governor's election-night parties and his inauguration, said Schwarzenegger has gained a sense of compassion - and respect for his family and his roots he did not have as her young live-in lover, she said.

Even from early days, "he really knew he had a destiny," she said.

At a cafe in Santa Monica, he once told her, "You just wait - I'll be California governor in 10 years."