When I was a teenager, the two things that rocked my world were martial arts and bodybuilding. Where most of my friends had cars or girls or musicians on their walls, I had posters of Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme and the bodybuilders I admired: Lou Ferrigno, Kevin Levrone, and of course Arnold Schwarzenegger. This led my mother to suspect I was gay – apparently not uncommon, since Schwarzenegger’s mother thought the same thing when he pinned up pictures of his idols such as Reg Park.
When I was about 16, my mother bought me a book called Arnold Schwarzenegger – A Portrait by George Butler. Few books have had such a deep impact on not just my mind, but how I ran my life. What I admired most, what inspired me, was Schwarzenegger’s drive: his machine-like ability to pick a goal and achieve it, against what others might have called insurmountable odds. And he did it not once but again and again between 1970 and the height of his fame in the early 1990s. When I heard Schwarzenegger was running for governor of California, I winced. I was old enough to know that in politics, no one gets out alive – not even the Governator. But at the same time I was also curious. Could he really behave like himself in a world where every minute detail of one’s life came under microscopic and often unfair scrutiny?
As it turned out, Schwarzenegger fell off my radar for most of his governorship. The reason was simple: as a movie star, his comings and goings were splashed across Australian newspapers and magazines, but his political life held little relevance to the local media. Then one day in 2011, my teenage idol re-entered my life with a thud. When I heard Schwarzenegger had fathered a love child with his maid – a maid named Mildred, for God’s sake – the superhuman Schwarzenegger suddenly seemed very human. Just one of us, in other words. I was embarrassed for him, and slightly ashamed that I had invested so much admiration in him. When I later heard he had released an autobiography, it went straight onto my must-read list. I suppose you could say I was like a jilted lover: I felt betrayed and wanted an explanation.
The answer I got was simple: when it came to sex and infidelity, Arnie was just as weak as anyone else. The iron discipline he applied to the rest of his life did not extend to faithfulness in matrimony.
His account of this affair is dealt with towards the end of this Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story (to be fair, his wife Maria Shriver confronted him about it pretty late in the piece), in a chapter called ‘The Secret’, and it’s superficial at best. Schwarzenegger never really explores his motivations for cheating on his wife beyond the idea that stardom went to his head and he thought he could get away with it. The same goes for his affair with his Red Sonja co-star Brigitte Nielsen in the 1980s, which he dismisses by saying it only served to prove to him he wanted Shriver as his wife. Both explanations are too glib by half, and the rest of ‘The Secret’ is largely about Schwarzenegger’s regret and the effects the affair had on his family.
But he also insists that the divorce won’t be final, that he believes he and Shriver will one day reconcile. It’s classic Schwarzenegger (and the theme of this autobiography): if I can visualise it, I can make it happen. And I’ll be buggered if there aren’t rumblings of reconciliation between the two as I write this.
In readability and comprehensiveness, Total Recall is one of the better autobiographies I’ve read, even if its stupid subtitle doesn’t make any sense. Schwarzenegger hired an excellent ghost writer in Peter Petre and his simple but effective prose makes for easy and compelling reading. There were many facts about Schwarzenegger’s pre-America life that were news to me, and the authors perhaps wisely skimmed over the ‘blockbuster years’ – as Schwarzenegger says in his acknowledgements, every facet of that period was pored over in contemporary magazines and TV shows.
I was hoping for some good detail on Schwarzenegger’s political life… and it was a case of ‘be careful what you wish for, lest you get it’. The emotional wrangling over his decision to enter politics makes interesting reading, as does his rather non-conformist way of conducting himself in office, but when he gets bogged down in policy and people of little consequence, the narrative becomes rather tedious.
While Schwarzenegger isn’t afraid to admit his mistakes, he is still afraid to properly confront them – and that’s what in the end reduces a great biography to a merely fair one. Thanks to Mildred Baena we know Arnold is human, but he doesn’t let much of that humanity show through. He is still in denial about his failings, which he admits is how he has always coped with the bad incidents in his life. I don’t begrudge him that – I’m a bit the same way myself – but an autobiography (at least one that will attract acclaim) can’t be like that. It has to be frank and candid, whereas Total Recall sometimes presents more as a self-help book. In fact, it becomes just that in the final pages, with the rather jarring chapter ‘Arnold’s Rules’.
In fine, this is an autobiography written in Schwarzenegger’s voice that does paint a picture of its subject… but it’s a terribly subjective picture, one where the blemishes are acknowledged and then toned down until they’re barely visible. A great autobiography is one where failures are brought to the fore to share equal billing with the greatest achievements. Just ask Anthony Kiedis, whose intense autobiography Scar Tissue is still a bestseller nearly a decade after it was released.