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When journalists dig for the darker side of Schwarzenegger's youth, something is there that makes him angry. Arnold, a tattly biography by British free-lancer Wendy Leigh, asserts that Schwarzenegger's father joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and that his older brother Meinhard died in a car crash after drinking heavily. Schwarzenegger attended the funeral of neither man. Leigh also charges Arnold with brutal practical jokes, coarse womanizing and relentless taunting of opponents in his body-building days. The star has dismissed Leigh's contentions, saying, "I don't want to give a third-grade journalist any credibility." He can hardly be held responsible for his kin's sins; the other allegations suggest that he took the rough passage, common in males, from boorish youth to robust maturity.
Arnold was 11 when he saw his first movie on a big screen. "That was a sensation." It was also his introduction to the kind of Hollywood fable that he would later live out. "Now I was fascinated with America. When I got to junior high school, I thought, 'What am I doing here?' The action was somewhere else. And all of the sudden, something woke up. It was an urge that I was meant for something big. If anybody asked me about getting to the top in acting and making movies -- becoming like a Clint Eastwood or a Warren Beatty or a Burt Reynolds -- people would say, 'Do you know what it takes to get there? How are you going to do it?' I didn't have an answer. But something was in me that made me feel like it was going to happen."
Arnold didn't just dream; he made it happen. Like a visionary athlete, artist or businessman (all of which he would eventually become), he devised a plan and climbed the mountain. More precisely, he became the mountain. "My parents wanted me to play soccer or be a skier," he recalls. "But I chose body building. It was a very American sport, and I thought, 'If I do well, it could take me to America.' " It was also a very American way for a boy to create a superman in his own image. Following Nietzsche's law ("That which does not kill us makes us stronger"), Arnold spent years punishing and pumping up his gangly frame until it was a prizewinning work of art -- a fabulous cartoon of muscularity.
To many people, body building is a bizarre pseudo sport: part weight lifting, part boylesque. It stands in that curious crossroads of exhibition and self-flagellation where Narcissus meets the Nautilus. If Schwarzenegger really thought this trail would lead to Hollywood, he would have to blaze it himself. Except for Steve Reeves, the Hercules of cut-rate '60s epics, few body builders had been able to work up so much as a sweat in pictures.
But Arnold did find fame in the sport. By 1975, long before moviegoers knew of him, he was the lone superstar of body building, earning the Mr. Olympia title an unprecedented seven times, Mr. Universe, five. At the climax of the documentary film Pumping Iron, which chronicles Schwarzenegger's last Mr. Olympia contest before retiring, the announcer tries to work some suspense into his revelation of the winner's name. But when he says, "The one and only . . . ," a broad grin breaks over Arnold's face. Who else could deserve that title?