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Could Arnold Schwarzenegger really run for governor?
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the bodybuilder turned actor who was once described as "a condom stuffed full of walnuts", has ambitions to become California's next governor. It wouldn't be the first time a Hollywood star took office, but asks Johann Hari, how scary is the idea of the star of 'Terminator' making the rules? When Ronald Reagan decided to run for the governorship of California, politics-watchers all over the United States chuckled. They even had a joke that was guaranteed to make everyone crack up - imagine if Reagan, that dumb right-wing schmuck, that fool who has only "acted" in a series of lame action movies and comedies, became President! Oh, how they laughed. We all know what happened next. Well, get your Valium out if you don't want to panic: Arnold Schwarzenegger is about to run for Governor of California, and I ain't laughing this time. Earlier this year, Arnie called the Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton and said: "I saw in the last 10 years that I'm getting much more pleasure out of [helping people] than making money and making movies. It could lead - and will lead probably - to some political office. I haven't really said that this is the time, but the bottom line is, if Gray Davis [the current, embattled Governor of California] goes on the way he is - then there will be a vacuum in a year and I could... " He went even further in an interview with an Austrian newspaper when he said: "It is now almost certain I will enter politics." Don't kid yourself that Arnie would be a joke candidate who could never win. Jesse Ventura, the WWF wrestler, starred alongside Arnie in the film Predator. Four years ago he ran for Governor of Minnesota - and won, becoming one of the most high-profile politicians in the US. Many people in California are panicking at the very real prospect of Governor Schwarzenegger. One columnist wrote: "With all the things the people of California have been going through lately [the electricity supplies keep breaking down and Californian stocks are in crisis], they must be forgetting the important things in life - like taking their medication." To understand Arnie's political roots you need to go back more than 50 years, to a remote Austrian village called Thal, and to a tyrannical, rule-breaking little Nazi called Gustav Schwarzenegger. Gustav was Thal's only police officer, and like the sheriff in those old westerns, he was the only source of authority in town. He enforced the laws erratically - and when it came to his own sons, Meinhardt and weedy little Arnold, he barely enforced them at all. Not that he was a soft parent. Far from it. He would terrorise his own sons, setting them against each other in tight contests - who can run the fastest, that sort of thing - and he would tell whichever son lost that he was a worthless nothing. Most often, Meinhardt, the Aryan looker, was the golden boy, and dumb Arnold was the embarrassment. He had sticky-out ears and big thick-rimmed glasses - and they could spot a geek, even in Austria, even then. Gustav would sometimes go into violent fits and accuse his wife of cheating on him, because he believed the freaky Arnold couldn't possibly be his son. Gustav was obsessed with power. When he was a child, the emperor Franz Joseph picked Gustav out of a crowd to travel in the royal carriage with him. Gustav never forgot this brush with authority, and he passed on his fixation with power to his youngest son. In 1938, Gustav joined the Nazi Party. It's not as if everyone was doing it - he was among only 11 per cent of the Austrian population who had chosen to join up by then. The world Arnold grew up in was a far-right racist hellhole. Styria, the region where you can find Thal (if you are especially masochistic), welcomed Hitler with open arms. The Führer was so chuffed with his reception that he gave the state capital, Graz, a special title. Hatred of Jews was everywhere. Arnold told his girlfriend years later that his mother almost swooned when she saw Hitler. Arnold was a pretty pitiful kid. Some of the locals dubbed him "Cinderella", because he was always trailing after Meinhardt. The young geeky kid decided to get out of this godforsaken town and make himself a star any damn way he could. Arnold ploughed his violent ambition into his own body by working out constantly. By the time he was 15, the glasses had been chucked into some mountainside skip, and he was on his way to being the youngest Mr Universe ever. Arnold became obsessed with breaking through the pain barrier. "Go on working out until you scream," his trainer Kurt Manul told him. "Go on until you cannot bear it." I decided to test this advice, so I rented Arnie's 1996 movie Jingle All the Way. After 20 minutes I was howling in agony, begging for something - anything - to stop this film. But I kept on - half an hour, 40 minutes, 50 minutes - as the pain became greater. Arnie's dialogue just got worse, the burning agony got greater - and then I wimped out. I guess this inability to endure the worst possible torture is why I'm a lowly hack while Arnie is a multimillionaire movie star. A key truth about California's possible next governor is that Arnie has always been prepared to do anything to achieve his goals. Early in his career he used steroids, as he later admitted. His friend Helmut Cerncic says that Arnold told him: "If you told me that if I ate a kilo of shit I would put on a pound of muscles, I would do it." The US magazine Premiere has speculated whether the heart condition that recently required an operation owed anything to steroid use. Arnie's motives in bodybuilding were always odd. He was quoted in the early 1980s, when asked why he'd entered the contest, as saying that his aim was to surprise his rivals and "to see them freak out and have diarrhoea, you know? And be confused and upset about it, and have a career that they had planned for themselves go down the tube in two seconds". Friends of Arnie always comment on his "hilarious" and "brilliant" sense of humour. Well, yes. An apocryphal story goes that Arnold tells a waitress that the cream on his dessert is off, and asks her to smell it. As she tries to sniff it, he rams her head right into the dish. It seems extraordinary, in light of this subtle comic genius, that Schwarzenegger's comedies have been such a disaster. Arnold's approach to women has apparently sometimes been rather strange. In May 2001, Premiere went to town on his reputation. The lurid stories were more reminiscent of The National Enquirer than the usual rather sober Premiere style. Anna Richardson, who interviewed the star, said that "the second I walked into the room, he was like a dog on heat". In the same magazine, one of his producers recounts a tale of how Arnie approached a fortyish female crew member out of the blue, put his hands into her blouse and pulled her breasts out of her bra. An observer said: "I couldn't believe what I was seeing. This woman's nipples were exposed, and here's Arnold and a few of his clones laughing." Another woman who once worked with him has alleged that, one day on set, she went to fetch Schwarzenegger from his trailer when a shot became possible earlier than expected - only to discover him performing oral sex on a woman she didn't recognise. He looked up and explained: "Eating isn't cheating." The reaction of Arnie's former colleagues to the article made the explosions in Terminator 2 look low-budget. Rae Sanchini, the president of director James Cameron's company and a frequent colleague of Schwarzenegger, wrote in a letter to Premiere: "I have never once witnessed any of the incidents described in your article or any other conduct consistent with the very slanted picture you paint of Schwarzenegger. Quite the contrary, he has always treated me and the other women producers and executives involved in these various projects with the utmost respect and courtesy." His co-star in True Lies, Jamie Lee Curtis, said: "Never, in the time of my relationship with him, has he ever shown anything like the behaviour you describe in your politically motivated hatchet job. You should be ashamed of yourselves. I admire him as a man, husband, father, friend and icon of the power of the American dream." Arnold's wife, Maria Shriver, works as a leading television presenter. She is also JFK's niece, and as a member of the Kennedy family, part of the US's liberal elite. Maria once said she was attracted to Arnold because he was "different" and "special". Many people were frankly astonished when she chose to marry a right-wing Republican - but perhaps part of the explanation is that Maria shares Arnie's relentless ambition. He recently said: "My wife, when she hears someone else is attached [ie, another actor is interested in a part Arnie might play], it's a very competitive thing. She started tracking the script down like a greyhound, and talked to me every day. We couldn't sit down one single time that she didn't say, 'You should read this script.'" Some people accuse Maria - who was born to an astronomically rich family and has never wanted for anything - of being spoiled and overprivileged. When an interviewer put this to her, she said: "People say, 'Oh, she's rich, she's pretty and she's marrying Arnold.' Well, every day I have to get through the day wondering if I'm going to eat five muffins and not gain 10 pounds. I'm thinking, should I go this weekend and see my parents, or should I go and see Arnold? It's very difficult." Truly, she has suffered. Marrying a Kennedy gave Schwarzenegger a sheen of social respectability and greater bipartisan appeal. Malicious rumours have circulated from time to time, claiming such things as that Arnie had been seen expressing admiration for Hitler, and belittling black people - but it must be remembered that he successfully won a fat wodge of libel damages in the UK in 1993 after a publication repeated unproven suggestions that he was racist. His political philosophy is undoubtedly, though, informed by an ugly elitist view of the world. His early political philosophy, according to Wendy Leigh's Arnold: the unauthorised biography, is informed by him seeming to see himself as a superman standing contemptuously above the stupid, dull herd that make up the majority of the population. Leigh reports him as saying: "I look down on people who are waiting, who are helpless. I like people who think there is more to life than eating and going to the toilet." (What, like building arm muscles that are bigger than their necks?) He is also quoted as saying: "I wanted to be part of the small percentage of people who were leaders, not the large mass of followers. I think it is because I saw leaders use 100 per cent of their potential." He then added, creepily: "I was always fascinated by people in control of other people." Similarly, the films that established Arnie as a movie star, the Conan the Barbarian series, have a strong resemblance to the fascist myths of a heroic Nordic pre-civilisation, when strapping Aryans would fight against vicious hordes of savages. The Waffen SS could have used Conan's philosophy: "I burn with life, I love, I slay and am content." The films relentlessly glorify violence - Conan is described as "afire with the urge to kill, to drive his knife deep into the flesh and bone, and twist the blade in blood and entrails". Couldn't he settle for a nice cup of tea? Arnie publicly backed a highly controversial former Nazi in the 1980s. Kurt Waldheim was an Austrian President who was revealed to be a former SS member. Arnie not only publicly supported him, he also said in his own wedding speech (just after Waldheim's past had been made public): "My friends don't want me to mention Kurt's name because of the recent Nazi stuff - but I love him." However, he told Playboy magazine in 1989: "I am so against that [Nazi] time period. I despise it." He attacked J?rg Haider, the Austrian far-right politician who joined the coalition government there in 1999 to a background of international condemnation. And he has done so much to combat anti-Semitism and to promote Holocaust remembrance that he was honoured with the National Leadership Award by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Clearly, these achievements spring from genuine conviction - but alongside this, Schwarzenegger's relentless thirst for power is also well documented. When asked why he liked Ronald Reagan, Arnie said: "He's done the impossible - he's never been beaten in any election." Schwarzenegger has a few more movies to make before he quits Hollywood altogether. He is currently shooting Terminator 3, and has recently revealed that in the new film, his character malfunctions, so he is "sometimes good, sometimes bad". Perhaps he drew on his father's ardent Nazi Party membership, and his own pro-Simon Wiesenthal sentiment today, for the role. Arnie is the last of the 1980s troika of action-movie stars (Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone were the others) who is still peddling his wares in the same old style. How long will audiences keep buying this stuff from a man who has already had a heart by-pass operation and is only a decade away from his pension? But when Arnie comments on political issues, the effect is surreal. He said recently about the war on terror: "Mullah Omar and Bin Laden are somewhere, obviously in hiding. I believe very strongly that they are in Pakistan." It was hard not to picture him donning a backpack and machine gun and heading out to the Pakistani caves to hunt them down himself. Reagan's films famously inspired his administrations' policies. There has been widespread speculation that senile Reagan got his idea for a nuclear missile defence shield from a 1950s B-movie he starred in. What would President Schwarzenegger do? Send robotic Terminators into Afghanistan to police the streets of LA? Have California's kindergartens manned by six-foot undercover cops who win the hearts of the aggravating little brats? And from the California Governor's mansion, the White House seems only a small step - one already taken by Reagan. Admittedly, it would take a small constitutional amendment in order to allow an immigrant to become US President, but that reform has been widely considered before. President Schwarzenegger? Calm. Breathe. Breathe. What's the worst-case scenario here? The movie The Running Man shows Arnold living under the US's first ultra-right government. I can't help thinking that any future version of this particular drama would be better staying on the silver screen. (The Independent, Britain)
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