It was a challenge moving to a country where everything looked different, and the language was different, and the culture was different, and people thought differently and did business differently. It was staggering how different everything was. But I had the big advantage over most newcomers: when you are part of an international sport, you’re never totally alone.
There’s amazing hospitality in the bodybuilding world. No matter where you go, you don’t even have to know people. You always feel you are part of a family. The local bodybuilders will pick you up at the airport. They will greet you. They will take you into their homes. They will feed you. They will take you around. But America was something else.
One of the bodybuilders in Los Angeles had an extra bedroom where I could stay at first. When I showed up to start training at the gym, guys greeted me and hugged me and made it clear that they were happy to have me over here. The guys found me a little apartment, and as soon as I moved in, this friendliness turned into “We’ve got to help him.” They organized a drive and showed up one morning carrying packages and boxes. You have to picture a bunch of big, muscular guys: huge bears you’d never want near anything delicate or made of glass, who you’d hear in the gym every day saying, “Look at that chest, oh man!” or “I’m gonna squat five hundred pounds today—fuck it.” Suddenly, here they were carrying boxes and packages. One of them says, “Look what I brought you,” opens up this little box, and takes out some silverware. “You need some silverware so you can eat here.” Another one unwraps a bundle and says, “My wife told me that these are the plates I can take; they’re our old plates, so now you have five plates.” They were very careful to name things and give simple explanations. Someone else brought a little black-and-white TV with an antenna sticking out the top and helped me set it up and showed me how to adjust the antenna. They also brought food that we sat around and shared.
I said to myself, “I never saw this in Germany or Austria. No one would even think of it.” I knew for a fact that, back home, if I’d seen somebody moving in next door, it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to assist them. I felt like an idiot. That day was a growing-up experience.
The guys took me over to see Hollywood. I wanted to have my photo taken there and mail it to my parents, as if to send the message “I’ve arrived in Hollywood. Next will be movies.” So we drove until one of the guys said, “All right, that’s Sunset Boulevard.”
“When do we get to Hollywood?” I asked.
“This is Hollywood.”
In my imagination, I must have confused Hollywood with Las Vegas, because I was looking for giant signs and neon lights. I also expected to see movie equipment and streets blocked off because they were shooting some big stunt scene. But this was nothing. “What happened to all the lights and stuff?” I asked.
They looked at one another. “I think he’s disappointed,” one guy said. “Maybe we should bring him back at night.”
The others said, “Yeah, yeah, good idea. Because there’s nothing to see during the day, really.”
Later that week, we came back at night. There were a few more lights, but it was just as boring. I had to get used to it and learn the good places to hang out.
I spent a lot of time finding my way around and trying to figure out how things worked in America. In the evening, I often hung around with Artie Zeller, the photographer who’d picked me up at the airport. Artie fascinated me. He was very, very smart, yet he had absolutely no ambition. He didn’t like stress, and he didn’t like risk. He worked behind the window in the post office. He came from Brooklyn, where his father was an important cantor in the Jewish community; a very erudite guy. Artie went his own way, getting into bodybuilding in Coney Island. Working as a freelancer for Weider, he’d become the best photographer of the sport. He was fascinating because he was self-taught, endlessly reading and absorbing things. Besides being a natural with languages, he was a walking encyclopedia and an expert chess player. He was a die-hard Democrat, liberal, and total atheist. Forget religion. To him, it was all bogus. There was no God, end of story.
Artie’s wife, Josie, was Swiss, and even though I was trying to stay immersed in English, it was helpful to be around people who knew German. This was especially true when it came to watching TV. I’d arrived in America during the last three or four weeks of the 1968 presidential campaign, so when we turned on the set, there was always something about the election. Artie and Josie would translate from speeches by Richard Nixon and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who were running against each other. Humphrey, the Democrat, was always going on about welfare and government programs, and I decided he sounded too Austrian. But Nixon’s talk about opportunity and enterprise sounded really American to me.
“What is his party called again?” I asked Artie.
“Republican.”
“Then I’m a Republican,” I said. Artie snorted, which he often did both because he had bad sinuses and because he found a lot in life to snort about.
—
Just as Joe Weider had promised, I got a car: a secondhand white Volkswagen Beetle, which made me feel at home. As a way of learning the area, I would visit different gyms. I made friends with a guy who managed a gym in downtown LA, at what was then called the Occidental Life Building. I drove inland and also down to San Diego to see the gyms there. People would take me places, too, which was how I got to know Tijuana, Mexico, and Santa Barbara. At one point, I drove with four other bodybuilders to Las Vegas in a VW microbus. It couldn’t even get up to sixty miles per hour with all the muscle on board. Las Vegas itself, with its giant casinos and neon lights and endless gaming tables, really lived up to my expectations.
A lot of champions trained at Vince’s Gym, such as Larry Scott, who was nicknamed “the Legend” and who had won Mr. Olympia in 1965 and 1966. Vince’s had carpeting and plenty of nice machines, but it wasn’t a power lifter’s gym: they thought basic strength-training exercises like the full squat, bench press, and incline press were old-fashioned strongman stuff that didn’t chisel the body.
The scene was totally different at Gold’s. It was very rough, and monsters trained there: Olympic shot-put champions, professional wrestlers, bodybuilding champions, strongmen off the streets. There was almost no one in a workout outfit. Everyone trained in jeans and plaid shirts, tank tops, sleeveless wife-beater shirts, sweatshirts. The gym had bare floors and weight-lifting platforms where you could drop a thousand pounds and no one would ever complain. It was closer to the atmosphere where I came from.
Joe Gold was the genius of the place. He’d been part of Santa Monica’s original Muscle Beach scene as a teenager in the 1930s, and after serving as a machinist in the merchant marine in World War II, he came back and started building gym equipment. Just about every machine in the place was Joe’s design.
There was nothing delicate here: everything Joe built was big and heavy, and it worked. His cable rowing machine was designed with the footrests exactly high enough for you to work your lower lats without feeling like you were about to launch right out of the seat. When Joe designed a machine, he did it with everybody’s input rather than going off on his own. So on all of it, the angles of pulling down were perfect, and nothing got stuck. And he was there every day, which meant that all the equipment was maintained continuously.