Even when Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke Spanish ("Hasta la vista, baby") they loved it. For the line came with a rocket launcher and a tombstone delivery and wrapped up Terminator 2. In a recent UK filmgoers' poll it was voted the fourth best parting shot in cinema history. The best? Of course the Terminator's "I'll be back."
Now the "I'll be back" man is back. Not just in Terminator 3, the most expensive film in history, but in a real-life movie we could call The Man Who Would Be Governor. Arnold has startled America by indicating that he might run for the governorship of California. The present incumbent Gray Davis, a Democrat, has reportedly so maladministered the state with the world's fifth-largest economy that opponents have demanded his mid-term recall. A new election could take place in September if 900,000 ballots are collected by mid-July.
Influential Republicans have urged Arnie to run and he hasn't discouraged them. As a self-styled "compassionate conservative" - pro-gay, pro-immigrant, pro-choice in abortion and even pro-gun control - he won't alienate the liberal-minded. His cross-party appeal is broadened by his marriage. As the husband of John F Kennedy's niece, TV news reporter Maria Shriver, he will have a Democrat behind the throne. "She has to give the green light and be comfortable with it because she moved away from Washington to get away from all that stuff," explains the he-man. And make no mistake. On screen this man may look like Godzilla the Hun. Off-screen, the ex-champion bodybuilder has been mugging up and mouthing off on politics ever since debarking from Europe to win the 1970 Mr Olympia contest.
Those were the days... I have to declare an interest here. I wrote a book about Arnold 10 years ago. Over lunch with a publisher, drunk on one of the star's higher follies just seen at a press show, I burbled the praises of this surreal super-achiever. What modern life story can compare!? He was born in a tiny Austrian village (Thal, near Graz, July 30 1947), won so many bodybuilding contests in the 1970s that he became the Muhammad Ali of the muscleworld, married into the Kennedy dynasty, and meanwhile made himself a millionaire by property speculation before the age of 30. Being the highest-paid movie star in the world seemed, after that, almost an afterthought.
So who is he, this living Horatio Alger story, this man who took the words "Go west, young man" and gave them intercontinental ballistic meaning? That he grew up in a quaint corner of Sound of Music country we know, a Styrian hamlet where his dad Gustav was chief of police and a member of the Nazi party.
That fact came to haunt the younger of Gustav's two boys. (Arnold's older brother Meinhard died in a drink-driving accident in 1971.) Schwarzenegger spent years in Hollywood saying yes, no, perhaps: he knew his father had joined the party, he didn't know, he might have known. In the early 1980s, hoping to terminate press speculation, he asked LA's Simon Wiesenthal Center to look into Gustav's past. In my research for my own book, this led to a Dadaist day when a British film critic writing a Hollywood star biog found himself speaking by long-distance telephone to the most famous Nazi hunter in the world.
Me: "Did you research Gustav Schwarzenegger's history as a Nazi member during the war?"
Simon Wiesenthal: "I never heard anything negative of him. It was a matter of his father's existence, since he was serving in the Gendarmerie, to become a member of the party. There is a difference between that and being a 'Nazi'. A man may be in the party because he will lose his job otherwise. Another man may do something in the spirit of the party."
Besides, who would visit the parent's sins on the son? As the Wiesenthal Center's head Rabbi Marvin Hier told me, "For years the Jews themselves have been victims of collective guilt. We're not going to take it out on Arnold for what his father did."
So. Case closed? No: a case is never closed with the press. In August 1986 they leaped upon the incident of Arnold's personal visit to Austrian president Kurt Waldheim at his villa near Salzburg. This was when Waldheim was under war crimes investigation. (Arnold had earlier invited him to his wedding, but Waldheim declined. So did the Pope.) The star had to do damage limitation once again. "All these claims that I am a friend of Waldheim's are nonsense. I have only met him once. We took some photographs and that made me a best friend of Waldheim."
It is maddening, but so was the occasion when Arnold was accused of making a Nazi salute at the climax to a bodybuilding contest. The raised right arm wasn't a Sieg Heil at all, insists his one-time British trainer Wag Bennett, "It's a posing classic that's been used for years."
Bad, but yet good. For didn't all this gossip about Nazi fathers and crypto-Nazi behaviour enhance rather than damage Arnold's screen image? His charisma as a comic-book hero, dealing out brute justice and vigilante vengeance, is high-order ubermensch kitsch. We almost want to believe that the actor-hero of Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, Red Heat and Predator is a hunk of might-is-right machismo, born from grim fascist fires, a dark reaper from alien realms or punitive regimes. So in his youthful action heyday Arnold had cause to pause before jeopardising the frisson of ambiguity about his family's past and even his own political belief system.
That was then, this is now. A lot of climbing down from Nietzschean crags has happened. Towards the end of the 1980s the star decided to do a run of family-friendly comedies (Twins, Kindergarten Cop, Junior). He also became a father, a process that turns even the toughest to mush. And suddenly, come the dawn of George H. Bush's "kinder, gentler America", our hero was disbursing wisdom about the environment, about recycling, about not eating junk food, about improving the health of America's kids.
"I have been very impressed with the seriousness of our Council on Fitness and of its chairman, Arnold Schwarzenegger," declared President Bush one day. Chairman? Of a government-appointed council? Yes, things happen quickly in Greater Lalaland. On a Friday in 1988, after attending a Bush rally in Columbus, Ohio, Arnold caught a ride with the Republican White House contender and father to today's president - and won a job. His mission would be to bombard America with encyclicals about health, especially children's health. So he went round the nation telling them to get into gyms and work out. And to eat properly. "Anything that tastes good or delicious is usually bad for the body" boomed the inveterate cigar-smoker and meat-chomper, whose favoured sport caused over 10,000 serious injuries a year. (Schwarzenegger may be thought to have atoned by becoming a leading promoter of the Special Olympics, for disabled athletes, and the Inner City Games, for facility-deprived kids.)
This was mad but mesmerising. Politics as showbiz. One day Arnold supervised a Great American Workout on the White House lawn. There he was, telling presidents, first ladies and future secretaries of state to put more into their arm-muscle stretches. ("Okay, General Powell, much further!") Add his value as a hustings celebrity and no wonder George Bush Senior demanded a nation's gratitude. "There are all kinds of courage. There is the courage of my friend Arnold Schwarzenegger, who more than once campaigned with me across the country - and then returned home to take the heat from his own in-laws!"
But Arnold had come through that fire already. He had baptised himself in the Kennedy flame and begun forging there his backup liberal values. By becoming engaged to Maria Shriver - daughter of Eunice Shriver, nee Kennedy, sister of JFK - the son of an Austrian village cop was soon discussing culture with Rose Kennedy, duelling dialectically with Teddy and coming to understand, in Arnold's words, "the importance of dealing with poor people, unemployment, stuff like that".
"Stuff like that." It doesn't sound promising as campaign locution, but Arnold got better. Besides, he had his own way of debating. Maria assured her uncle, the senator for Massachusetts, that he did not have to accept her fiance's political views. "Don't look at him as a Republican, look at him as the man I love. And if that doesn't work, look at him as someone who can squash you."
Today the Arnold soundbites still sound a little fresh-off-the-bone. But who wants cordon bleu communiques from a former screen-Neanderthal? Besides, Arnold's embracing vision of a tolerant America hardly needs extra tenderising or garnishing if it can be delivered as it appears on the menu. "I love the foreigner that comes in with no money as much as the gay person, as a lesbian, someone from the inner city..."
As a man who supported Clinton during the impeachment process, Schwarzenegger is proud to say that he is human and fallible. He has "inhaled, exhaled everything". (He is seen puffing on a joint in his fame-making docu-feature Pumping Iron.) As for guns, there is more liberalism. He stopped approving their use or promotion while gearing audiences for the low-death-toll Last Action Hero (1993). "I think America has seen enough of what violence has done in the cities," he said then, "and while it was okay for the Arnold of the '80s to kill 295 people on screen, it is not for the Arnold of the '90s." The star even sent the gun-toting doll designed for Last Action Hero's movie merchandising back to the factory to be disarmed.
Today he says: "I don't run around every day with a gun in my hand. So I want kids to understand the difference: one is make-believe like we do in the movies. But in reality I'm for gun control, I'm a peace-loving guy."
At the same time he is hardline-Republican in his economics. Self-help and enterprise capitalism have been part of the Arnold faith and folklore. Aged 11, he bought and resold ices at a profit in a Graz public park. After winning his first bodybuilding titles he told Austrian journalists, "the secret source of my protein comes from eating bull's balls" and tipped off local butchers to expect a run on taurine testicles, from which he shared in the profits. (This story may be an Arnold leg-pull.) In the US, he took business classes at UCLA and won a business degree by correspondence course from the University of Wisconsin. His economic views were defined early: "I am more comfortable with an Adam Smith philosophy than with Keynesian theory." (Not a line you expect to hear from Conan the Barbarian. Or then again...) In 1980, the year he became an American citizen, he bombarded friends with tapes of Milton Friedman's television series Free to Choose. Arnold himself felt free to speculate in property and real estate with bewildering success, or beginner's luck, during the 1970s.
Will all this be enough to get Schwarzenegger elected if he runs? And which Schwarzenegger will people be electing? When I titled my book True Myths: The Life and Times of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I wanted to suggest that there are two Arnolds, the private and the public. One is the "real" Arnold - the one who, like every celebrity, shuts the door on a prying world whenever he goes home - while the other is a complex construct of achievement and legend-making.
Truth becomes myth by being enlarged, just as Arnold's body became mythic by being enlarged into a competition-winning Colossus. I lost count of the number of Schwarzenegger tales that, while not lies, were bossed and buffed down the years - not always by him - so that they became part of a designer romance: the Song of Arnold. For instance, he declined to confirm that a full-frontal nude photo of him taken in the 1970s and later circulated by scandal rags and satirical magazines was done for a Cosmopolitan centrefold. "Why should I be upset about a nude photo I posed for an artist, a sculptor?" he grandly rebuffed when the question came up on The Oprah Winfrey Show. But photographer Francesco Scavullo later told me the picture was for Cosmopolitan, since he, Scavullo, took it. So: did Arnold lie? Not exactly. Not if you call Scavullo an artist, which you could. But a mythopoeic way of rendering the truth? Certainly.
If politicians are protean people, suiting word to opportunistic need, how protean and unreal is a bodybuilder/film star? During my research in Hollywood I met a man who devoted his life, in a room off Sunset Boulevard berserk with files, dossiers, overflowing ashtrays and unprocessed coffee cups, to running whatever is the opposite of a fan club. A fiend club? With missionary fervour and a fax-phone he circulated scuttlebutt about a man who was even then (1992) inspiring rumours of political careerism. "We are talking today about a bodybuilder turned 'actor'," inveighed this ill-wisher, "who could become senator or governor, then president of the United States. If he could get the Constitution changed. And with Arnold's track record I'm not sure he couldn't manage that. And I'm damned if I'm going to see this hypocrisy elected to public office."
But is a man who creates and controls his own legend a hypocrite? Isn't he - as a showman of sport or cinema - just an artist whose body and personality are his materials? And isn't the genesis of that body and personality also going to become a malleable thing, the more their owner wants to enhance the reverb of his charisma with a designer life-story?
Arnold has ended his sporting days, and may well suspend his filming days, if California calls. But the question of trust, in the case of candidates whose previous vocation has been masquerade, is a compelling one. When actor Ronald Reagan became the state's governor, few remembered his movie career. (Few remembered it even when it was going on.)
But Reagan brought his easy, mild, huckster charm to the office, learned on a thousand movie sets. The fact that no one then or during his presidency knew whether there was any reality - any passion or ideological conviction - beneath the folksy polish hardly seemed to matter. He was what 1980s America wanted: an affable, actorly poster boy for prosperity.
Arnold is a bigger, more battlesome icon. He could almost be seen as Mr Contradiction. This guy who got rich by shooting, maiming and flinging people around the screen - he is now a peacenik? America loves him, it seems, whichever direction he goes in. But how many directions can a man take before we ask, "Which is the real direction?"
True, the violence was fictive-filmic with Schwarzenegger and the liberalism is offscreen-real-political. But he has still spent most of his adult life advertising the joys of mayhem, vigilantism and brute justice. So are we addressing a quibble or a quandary?
In his favour, he doesn't change directions tardily or trend-followingly. He hits runways running, he jumps from aeroplanes before they land, without waiting for the "Thank you for flying with us" message. It was brave of him to puff a joint in Pumping Iron. It was brave of him - and his most brilliant single starmaking gamble - to play the evil cyborg in The Terminator when he was offered the good one.
As for Terminator 3 versus Hulk - the battle of the 2003 musclebound blockbusters - back in Pumping Iron Arnold even unwittingly blueprinted that contest. His main opponent in the 1975 Mr Olympia competition depicted in the film was Lou Ferrigno, who went on to fame as television's Incredible Hulk. During training scenes Arnold is seen playfully but systematically goading, psyching, outwitting and humiliating him, like a great general finding ways to spook the enemy before he attacks them. Ferrigno came third, Arnold first. Omen for the long-term payoff in the prizefight between a twice-lucky Terminator franchise and a humungous, not-so-jolly green giant? California is waiting. In more ways than one.
