I liked having a girlfriend; someone you saw more often. I could enjoy Barbara’s life, her teaching career, her school, her goals. I could share my ambition and my training and my ups and downs.
She was much more of a girl-next-door type than a femme fatale: blonde, tan, and wholesome. She was studying to be an English teacher and obviously wasn’t just looking for a fun time. Her girlfriends who were dating guys in law school and med school thought I was strange, but Barbara didn’t care. She admired me for writing down goals on index cards. Barbara’s parents were wonderful to me. At Christmas, each family member had a gift for me—and later, when I brought Franco with me, gifts for him too. Barbara and I went to Hawaii, London, and New York together.
When Barbara graduated in 1971 and came to LA to start work, Franco was getting ready to move out. He was settling down too; he was studying to be a chiropractor and he’d gotten engaged to a girl named Anita, who was a full-fledged chiropractor already. When Barbara suggested moving in with me, it seemed totally natural, since she was already spending a lot of time at my place.
She was totally on board with my habit of saving every penny. We had barbecues in the backyard and spent days on the beach instead of going someplace fancy. I wasn’t the best candidate for a relationship because I was so wrapped up in my career, but I liked having a partner. It was great to have someone there to go home to.
The fact that Barbara was an English teacher was great. She helped me a lot with the language, and she helped when I wrote papers for school. She was also very helpful with the mail-order business and writing letters, but I hired a secretary early on. Even so, we learned that when you have a relationship in a foreign language, you have to be extra careful not to miscommunicate. We’d get into ridiculous fights. One time we went to see the movie Death Wish, and she said afterward, “I like Charles Bronson because he’s very rugged, very masculine.”
I said, “I don’t think Charles Bronson is that masculine. I mean, he’s a skinny guy! I would call him more athletic than masculine.”
“No,” she said. “You think I’m saying he’s muscular, but that’s not what I mean. I’m saying he’s masculine. Masculine is something else.”
“Masculine, muscular, same fucking thing, I think that he’s athletic.”
“But to me he’s very masculine.”
I said, “No, that’s the wrong . . .” and kept arguing. I went straight to the dictionary the minute we got home. Sure enough, she was right. Being masculine meant something totally different from being muscular—it meant that Bronson was manly and rugged, which he was. I said to myself, “How stupid. Oh God, you’ve got to learn this language! It is so stupid that you argue over something like that.”
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After I won Mr. Olympia, Weider started sending me on sales trips all over the world. I’d climb on a plane and make shopping mall appearances wherever he had distribution or was trying to expand. Selling was one of my favorite things. I’d stand in the middle of a shopping mall with a translator lady—for instance, the Stockmann shopping center in Finland—surrounded by a few hundred people from local gyms, because they’d have advertised my visit in advance. I’d be selling, selling, selling. “Vitamin E gives you fantastic extra energy for training hours every day to get a body like mine! And of course I don’t want even talk about the sexual power it gives you . . .” People would be buying, and I was always a huge hit. Joe sent me because he knew that the hosts would then say, “We sold a lot of stuff. Let’s make a deal.”
I’d be wearing a tank top and hitting poses every so often while I made my pitch. “Let me talk about the protein. You could eat as many steaks as you want, or as much fish as you want, but the body can only take seventy grams at a time. That’s the rule: a gram for every kilo of body weight. Muscle-building shakes are the way to fill the hole in your diet. So you can have five times the seventy grams if you want! You can’t eat enough steak to make up for protein powder, because it’s so concentrated.” I would mix the shake in a chrome shaker, like the kind used to make martinis in bars, drink it, and say to someone in the crowd, “You try it.” It was like selling vacuum cleaners. I’d get so excited that I’d rush ahead of the translator.
Then I’d move on to selling vitamin D, vitamin A, and special oil. By the time I finished, the sales manager would see all the interest. He would order Weider food supplements for the coming year. Plus barbell sets and dumbbells made by Weider. And Weider would be in heaven. Then a month later, I’d travel to another mall in another country.
I always went by myself. Joe would never pay for anyone else because he felt it was a waste of money. Traveling alone was perfectly fine, though, because no matter where I went, there was always someone to pick me up and treat me as if we were brothers because of bodybuilding. It was fun to go around the world and train in different gyms.
Weider wanted me to get to the point where I could sit down with the mall management to make the deal myself, and meet with publishers to line up more foreign-language editions of his magazines, and eventually take over the business. But that was not my goal. The same with the offer I received in the early seventies to manage a leading gymnasium chain for $200,000 a year. It was a lot of money, but I turned it down because it would not take me where I wanted to go. Managing a chain is a ten- to twelve-hour-a-day job, and that would not make me a bodybuilding champion or get me into movies. Nothing was going to distract me from my goal. No offer, no relationship, nothing.
But getting on a plane and selling was right up my alley. I always saw myself as a citizen of the world. I wanted to travel as much as I could because I figured if the local press was covering me there now as a bodybuilder, eventually I would be back as a movie star.
So I was on the road several times a year. In 1971 alone, I flew to Japan, Belgium, Austria, Canada, Britain, and France. Often I would add paid exhibitions to my itinerary to make extra cash. I was also giving free exhibitions and seminars in prisons around California. That started when I went to visit a friend from Gold’s who was doing time in the federal prison on Terminal Island near LA. He was serving two years for auto theft and wanted to continue his training. I watched him and his friends work out in the prison yard. He had made a name for himself as the strongest prisoner in California by setting the state prison record in the squat with six hundred pounds. What impressed me was that he and the other serious lifters were all model prisoners, because that was how they won training privileges and permission to bring in protein from outside to help them become these strong animals. Otherwise the prison authorities would say, “You’re just training to beat up on guys,” and take away the weights. The more popular bodybuilding grew in prisons, I thought, the more guys would get the message to behave.
Being weight lifters also helped them after they got out. If they came to Gold’s or other bodybuilding gyms, it was easy to make friends. Whereas most prisoners were dropped off at the bus station with $200 and ended up wandering around with no job and no connection to anybody, people at Gold’s would notice if you could bench press three hundred pounds. Somebody would say, “Hey, do you want to train with me?” and you’d have made a human connection. On the bulletin board at Gold’s there were always cards offering work for mechanics, laborers, personal trainers, accountants, and so on, and we would help the ex-prisoners find jobs as well.