I caught myself listening. “Artie, you almost scared me just now.” I laughed. “Don’t tell me any more of this information. I like to always wander in like a puppy. I walk into a problem and then figure out what the problem really is. Don’t tell me ahead of time.” Often it’s easier to make a decision when you don’t know as much, because then you can’t overthink. If you know too much, it can freeze you. The whole deal looks like a minefield.
I’d noticed the same thing at school. Our economics professor was a two-times PhD, but he pulled up in a Volkswagen Beetle. I’d had better cars for years by that time. I said to myself, “Knowing it all is not really the answer, because this guy is not making the money to have a bigger car. He should be driving a Mercedes.”
CHAPTER 9
The Greatest Muscle Show Ever
AS MR. OLYMPIA, I WAS the three-time winner of a world championship that 99 percent of Americans had never heard of. Not only was bodybuilding obscure as a sport, but if you asked the average American about bodybuilders, all you’d hear was the negative stuff: “Those guys are so muscle-bound and uncoordinated, they can’t even tie their shoes.”
“It will all turn to fat and they’ll die young.”
“They all have inferiority complexes.”
“They’re all imbeciles.”
“They’re all narcissists.”
“They’re all homosexuals.”
Every aspect of its image was bad. One writer said that the sport was about as easy to promote as midget wrestling.
It’s true that bodybuilders look in the mirror as they train. Mirrors are tools, just like they are for ballet dancers. You need to be your own trainer. When you do dumbbell curls, for example, you need to see if one arm trails the other.
The sport was so far down, it was nowhere. To me bodybuilding had always seemed so American that I was still surprised when people couldn’t guess what I did. “Are you a wrestler?” they’d ask. “Look at your body! No, no, I know, you’re a football player, right?” They’d pick everything but bodybuilding.
In fact, the audiences were much larger in third world countries. A crowd of twenty-five thousand turned out to see Bill Pearl at an exhibition in India, while ten thousand showed up in South Africa. Bodybuilding was one of the most popular spectator sports in the Middle East. A great milestone in Joe Weider’s career came in 1970, when the international community agreed to certify bodybuilding as an official sport. From that point on, bodybuilding programs qualified for state support in dozens of nations where athletics are subsidized.
But I’d been in the United States for four years, and basically nothing had changed. Each big city still had one or two gyms where the bodybuilders would train. The biggest competitions never aimed for more than four thousand or five thousand fans.
This bugged me because I wanted to see bodybuilding thrive, and I wanted to see the athletes and not just the promoters make money. I also felt that if millions of people were going to come to my movies someday, it was very important that they know where the muscles came from and what it meant to be Mr. Universe or Mr. Olympia or Mr. World. So there was a lot of educating to do. The more popular the sport became, the better my chances of becoming a leading man. It was easy for, say, New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath to get into commercials and films. In the major sports—football, baseball, basketball, and tennis—the stars would just cross over and make a lot of money. I knew that would never happen to me. I had to do more. I wanted to promote the sport, both so that more people would take part and to benefit my career.
Joe Weider was pretty set in his ways, though. He didn’t want to try broadening his audience beyond the bodybuilding fans and fifteen-year-old kids—no matter how much I teased. “These are comic books!” I’d say about his magazines. “ ‘How Arnold Terrorized His Thighs’? ‘This Is Joe’s Biceps Speaking’? What kind of silly headlines are those?”
“It sells the magazine,” Joe would say. His approach was to keep the products consistent and take every opportunity to expand their distribution around the world. Probably that was smart, because the business kept growing. But I realized that if I wanted to promote bodybuilding to a new audience, I’d have to find my own way.
I was passing through New York on the way to Europe in the fall of 1972 when I met the two people who would set me on the path: George Butler and Charles Gaines. Butler was a photographer and Gaines was a writer, and they were working as freelancers for Life magazine. They were on their way to cover the Mr. Universe contest that Joe Weider was staging in Iraq. They’d been told that they should talk to me to get background on bodybuilding.
I couldn’t believe my good luck. These were the first journalists I’d ever really talked to from outside the bodybuilding world. They had access to maybe a million readers who’d never heard of the sport. They were about my age, and we hit it off really well. Gaines already knew quite a bit about bodybuilding, it turned out: he’d just published a novel called Stay Hungry, which centered on a bodybuilding gym in Alabama. It was a bestseller. That summer, he and Butler had teamed up on a story for Sports Illustrated about a contest called Mr. East Coast in Holyoke, Massachusetts. And they were already talking about continuing with the subject after the Life story and doing a book. They knew they were onto a fascinating subject that was unfamiliar to most Americans.
I wasn’t going to be in Baghdad, but I promised that if they wanted to check out the bodybuilding scene in California, I’d make the arrangements and show them around. Two months later, they were sitting in my living room in Santa Monica getting acquainted with Joe Weider. I’d just introduced them, and it was somewhat confrontational at first. The visitors came on like cocky young guys who knew it all, even though Charles had been involved in bodybuilding for only three or four years, and George for less than that. They kept asking Joe why he wasn’t pushing the sport in this or that direction, why he wasn’t signing up corporate sponsors, and on and on. Why didn’t he get ABC’s Wide World of Sports to cover his events? Why didn’t he hire publicists? I could see that Joe thought they knew absolutely nothing, they were journalists, they saw everything from the outside. They had no understanding of the characters and personalities in the sport or what a challenge it was to try to bring in the big companies. You couldn’t just snap your fingers and say, “Here’s bodybuilding!” and have it be equal to tennis or baseball or golf.
But the discussion ended up being productive. Weider invited them out to his headquarters in the San Fernando Valley the next day, and they hung out with him and observed his operation. It was the start of bodybuilding going mainstream. I think at first it was a struggle for Joe. He was trying to figure out how to deal with a whole new kind of attention and not feel like someone was trying to take away his business, outdo him, or steal his athletes. I think there was a certain fear there. But he came to appreciate their way of looking at bodybuilding from the outside. Pretty soon he was including photos taken by Butler and stories by Gaines in his magazines.
I was right in the middle. I could see both sides, and I welcomed this development because I knew the sport needed fresh blood. I wondered if by working with Butler and Gaines, I could step into the mainstream too—get enough distance to reimagine bodybuilding and find ways to raise its public profile.