The company was still based back east in Union City, New Jersey, but the Weiders were building a new headquarters in the San Fernando Valley. Joe would come out every few weeks to supervise. He took me along to the construction meetings and let me hang around with him to see how the business worked. When it came to the publishing side of his business, he was always looking for printers who could do a better job and charge less, and he’d include me in those discussions, too. I’d visit him in New York and sit in on meetings there also. After my English improved, he took me on a business trip to Japan, to learn how he conducted negotiations overseas and see how essential distribution is—not just in magazines but in the success of any business.
Joe emphasized the importance of going global rather than doing business in just one country. He knew that was where the future was headed. On every trip, he had multiple goals: in Japan, for example, we also met with the national bodybuilding federation, and Joe advised them on how to improve their contests. Long plane rides with Joe were always stimulating. He’d talk about business, art, antiques, sports. He was a student of world history and Jewish history. He was also heavily into psychology. He must have gone to a shrink.
I was in heaven, since I’d always felt that my future would be in business. No matter what I was involved in, part of my mind was always wondering, “Is this what I’m meant for? What is the mission here?” I knew I was meant for something special, but what was it? Being a businessman, to me, was the ultimate. And now this leader was taking me on business trips, and I was learning just what I needed. Maybe I could end up marketing and selling food supplements, home equipment, and equipment for gyms, owning a gymnasium chain, and running a business empire—like Reg Park but on a global scale. How wild would that be! I knew I looked at business differently than other bodybuilders did. If Weider had offered the Japan trip to one of the other guys, he would have said, “Nah, Japan sounds boring. What gyms do they have over there? I want to work out,” or something stupid like that. So maybe becoming the next generation Weider really was my destiny. Joe clearly was taking great joy in teaching me. He’d say, “You are really into this!”
What I learned from him went way beyond business. He was a collector of fine furniture and art, which I found fascinating. When I stayed at his apartment in New York, I looked at all the art and antiques. He talked about auctions, saying, “I bought this for this amount. Now it is worth this amount.”
That was the first time I understood that old furniture can go up in value. Up until then, I’d just looked at it as old junk, like we had in Austria. So now Joe was saying, “Look at this from the French Empire period. This wood is mahogany. See the swans carved in the armrests? The swans were the emblem of Napoléon’s wife the Empress Joséphine. And see, it has this sphinx made of brass embedded in the back? The French were really into Egyptian motifs.” I started going with him to art auctions in New York at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and other houses.
The Napoléon chair was one of Joe’s prize pieces. He kept it in the guest room. The first time I stayed there, he made a big fuss about it: “It’s very fragile, and very, very expensive. Make sure you don’t sit on it or even touch it, okay?” I wanted to be careful with the chair, but that night when I was taking off my pants to go to bed, my foot got stuck, and I lost my balance and fell right onto it. The chair collapsed under my weight—it looked like it had exploded. I went to find Joe and said, “You have to see this. I just destroyed the chair.”
He rushed into the room, and when he saw the pieces all over the rug he almost fainted. Then he started cursing. “Oh! Bastard! That’s an expensive chair!” But he caught himself because he realized it sounded cheap to be complaining so much. It doesn’t matter what chair it is, when they break, you can put them together again. It’s not like it was gone, because it only really broke where it was glued together; where the joints were. It just fell apart when I landed on top of it.
I felt guilty, of course, but I still couldn’t resist saying, “I can’t believe that I hurt my knee, I hurt my hip, and you never asked, ‘How are you feeling?’ or said, ‘Don’t worry about that, I’m more concerned about you.’ You are supposed to be like my father figure here in America! Here you are only concerned about this chair.”
This made Joe feel really terrible. “Aw, Christ,” he said, “you’re right. Look at this! How cheap they put this together.” And then he called them the bastards, the Napoléon guys who built the chair.
After that visit to New York, I flew to Chicago to see the AAU’s Mr. America contest and spend a week training with Sergio Oliva. We’d be competing that fall, but that didn’t get in the way of his hospitality. He and his wife had me to dinner at their apartment, and I received my first exposure to black Cuban Latino culture. Sergio had a jive way of talking and dressing and a different way of relating to his wife than I’d ever seen, with lots of temper and hollering on both sides. Even so, he was a true gentleman.
I was on a secret reconnaissance mission: I thought that you have to sneak into the enemy camp and experience how he sees the world! What is it that makes him a champion? What does he eat, how does he live, what is there to learn from the way he trains? How does he practice his posing? What is his attitude about competition? None of this information would give me the body to beat him, but it would motivate me and show me what I needed to win. Could I find a weakness I could use psychologically? I was convinced that sports are not just physical but also psychological warfare.
The first thing I discovered was that Sergio worked even harder than me. He had a full-time job at a steel mill, and, after spending all day in the heat of the furnaces, he’d go to the Duncan YMCA and train for hours. He was one of those guys that just didn’t burn up easily. Every day, to start his routine, he would complete ten sets of twenty chin-ups. That wasn’t for training his back. That was just to warm up. Every day. He had a number of unusual techniques that I could pick up. He did his bench press as half reps without ever locking out his elbows. That kept full tension all the time on the pectoral muscle, and he had beautiful, full pecs. There were also things I learned in the way that he practiced his posing.
Now, I also understood that what worked for Sergio wasn’t necessarily going to work for me. We were more like mirror opposites. I had great biceps and back muscles, but his front deltoids, triceps, and pecs were better than mine. To beat him, I would have to work those muscles much, much harder and do more sets. His other great advantages were years of experience and great natural potential—he was truly an animal. But above all it was the fire in Sergio that inspired me. I said to myself that I would have to step it up.
I knew who would help me do that. I had world-class training partners in California, but almost from the minute I set foot there, I lobbied Joe to bring over my friend Franco. I missed many of my Munich buddies, and they must thought it was strange how I’d disappeared to California. But I missed Franco especially because we were like brothers, and he was the perfect training partner for me. Franco was a foreigner like me, and even in Munich, we both had the immigrant mentality and the same kind of hunger. Hard work was the only thing we could count on. I thought America would be great for Franco like it was for me.