Over the coming months, the book they’d envisioned began to take shape. Doing research for Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding, George and Charles became familiar faces at Gold’s. They were fun to hang out with and added a completely different dimension to the usual cast of characters. Charles Gaines was a good-looking, self-confident guy from a rich family in Birmingham, Alabama, where his dad was a businessman and his friends were part of the country club. He’d had a wild adolescence, dropped out of college for a while, and hitchhiked around the country. He always said that discovering bodybuilding helped settle him down. Eventually Charles became a teacher and outdoorsman. By the time we met, he lived in New England with his wife, a painter.
He’d figured out that there was a whole world of fascinating sports subcultures that weren’t getting covered broadly: not only bodybuilding but also ice climbing and ice skiing. He was athletic, so he would try these sports himself and then write about them. Charles could convey what it felt like to improve as a weight lifter; to be able to bench thirty pounds more than he could a month earlier.
George Butler seemed even more exotic. He was British and had been raised in Jamaica, Kenya, Somalia, and Wales. His father was very British, very strict. George told stories about what a tough disciplinarian he was. He also described how, as a little boy, he’d spent half his time in the Caribbean with his mother while his father was off someplace. Then at a young age, he was sent away to boarding school. Later on, he went to Groton and the University of North Carolina and Hollins College, and he came out of it all with a million connections in New York society.
Maybe because of his background, George could strike you as cold and kind of prissy. He complained about little things. He always had over his shoulder an L.L. Bean bag containing his camera and a journal in which he wrote down things twenty-four hours a day. It seemed artificial to me, as if he had copied Ernest Hemingway or some famous explorer.
But George was exactly what bodybuilding needed to forge its new image. He was able to photograph it in a way that would make people say, “Wow, this is wild, look!” He didn’t do straight-on muscle poses, which didn’t excite the general public; instead, he’d photograph a bodybuilder as a little figure against the background of a huge American flag. Or he’d photograph the astonished faces of Mount Holyoke girls watching the bodybuilders compete. The Weider brothers did not think of things like that.
George could make something out of nothing. Or maybe it wasn’t nothing; maybe it was just nothing to me because I saw it every day and I was part of it, whereas to him it was really something. Once, after a day spent shooting photos at Gold’s, he asked me, “How do you walk around so fast in the gym and never touch anybody?”
To me the answer was obvious: when someone comes by, you move out of the way! Why bump into them? But George saw much more going on. A few weeks later, I heard him turn it into a story at a dinner party with his intellectual friends. “When Charles and I were in the gym, we watched very carefully the way these men moved around. And would you believe that in the four hours we spent there, we never saw any of these enormous bodybuilders bump into one another? Even though it was tight and there was a lot of equipment and not enough room, no one ever bumped. They just went by one another, just like big lions in a cage; they gracefully went by without touching.”
His listeners were mesmerized. “Wow, they never bumped into each other?”
“Absolutely not. Here’s another fascinating thing: Arnold never, ever had an angry look while he was training. He was lifting huge amounts of weight. He’s always smiling. I mean, think about that. What must be inside his head? What must he know about his future, that he is always smiling?”
I thought, “This is brilliant. I would never be able to articulate it this way. All I would say is that I find joy in the gym because every rep and every set is getting me one step closer to my goal.” But the way George expressed it, the scene he created of it, and the psychology he used made me say to myself, “This is perfect marketing.”
Once he realized that I was funny and that I liked meeting new people, George started introducing me around New York City. I met fashion designers, heiresses, and people who made art movies. George loved bringing together worlds. He made friends at one point with a guy who published a magazine for firefighters. “This will be the new thing,” George told everybody, “specialty magazines that cater to firemen, or law enforcement, or plumbers, or the military.” He was way ahead of that trend.
In addition to being a photographer, George had aspirations as a filmmaker too, and he really liked the idea of putting me on the screen. He made short films of me training or going to school or interacting with other people and would show them to acquaintances and say, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to put this guy in a movie?” He started trying to raise money for a documentary on bodybuilding to build on the book’s success.
Charles Gaines, meanwhile, was making friends in Hollywood. He introduced me to Bob Rafelson, the director of Five Easy Pieces, who had bought the movie rights to Stay Hungry. While Charles was working with George on the Pumping Iron book project, he also started collaborating with Rafelson on the screenplay. I met Rafelson when Charles brought him to watch me work out on Venice Beach. Bob’s wife, Toby, came along and took a bunch of pictures of Franco and me training, and she just loved it.
Connecting with Bob Rafelson suddenly swept me up into a whole different orbit. With him came a lot of the “New Hollywood” crowd: actor Jack Nicholson and director Roman Polanski, who were in the process of making Chinatown; as well as actors Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, who had made Easy Rider with Rafelson’s producer Bert Schneider.
Gaines and Butler were pushing Rafelson to cast me in Stay Hungry. There was a main part for a bodybuilder named Joe Santo. Rafelson was a long way from making up his mind, but I remember sitting hypnotized in my apartment one night in early 1974 listening to him talk about what that would mean for me. “If we did this movie, I want you to know it will be a life changer for you. Remember what happened with Jack when he did Five Easy Pieces? Remember what happened to Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda when they did Easy Rider? They all became superstars! I have a very good feeling for picking people, so when we do this movie, it will change your life. You won’t be able to go anywhere where people don’t recognize you.”
I was dazzled, of course. One of the hottest directors in Hollywood was talking about making me a star! Meanwhile, Barbara was sitting next to me on the couch staring into space. I could sense the wheels turning. What would this do to our relationship and to me? My career was pulling me away from her. She wanted to settle down, get married, and have me open a health food store. She could see a huge storm coming.
Of course, her instinct was right. My focus was on training, acting, and making sure Rafelson hired me, not on getting married and having a family. But after Bob left, I told Barbara not to worry about what he’d said; it was just the marijuana talking.
I liked getting swept up into a cloud of celebrities. Nicholson’s house was part of a “compound” up on Mulholland Drive next door to Polanski, Warren Beatty, and Marlon Brando. They’d invite me and some of the other bodybuilders up for parties, and sometimes people from that crowd would come to my building and we’d have barbecues on the little patio. It was hilarious: neighbors walking past on the sidewalk couldn’t believe it when they saw who was there. But at the same time, I told myself not to get carried away. I was barely scraping the outside of that world. At that point, I was only a fan of those people.