As They Say In Hollywood...pex Sell Tix

"I do not go happily through my day without working out with weights," Schwarzenegger says in deep, guttural, no-nonsense tones. "I have no weights at home. I love going to the gym. I love the gossip with the guys. I don't need to tell my wife, 'Friday night is man's night out,' because I have my man's period of time every morning when I hang out with the guys at the gym."

When he goes on location, Schwarzenegger brings along the equipment that producer Dino De Laurentiis first bought for him to use during the filming of Conan the Barbarian. Sets it up in the hotel. Pumps his daily megadose of iron. He does this because he knows, and has always known, that his muscles are the merchandise, the real thing, the true grit, the main event, the meal ticket. He's big because they're big.

He's big in real estate, too, with a healthy chunk of Denver and a piece of Southern California among his assets. He's smart about money, and very conservative. But nobody's going to pack 1,600 theaters to see Conan the Contrarian or The Running Landlord. No. The muscles are the message. Always have been.

In his Mr. Olympia years, they were displayed naked and oiled and pumped to within an inch of surrealism. Candice Bergen photographed them and Jamie Wyeth painted them. Now, in his Hollywood years, Schwarzenegger covers them up like concealed weapons for long periods of time on screen, which is clever because that creates dramatic tension. You know they're there, biding their time, anxious to crack ribs and crush heads. When Schwarzenegger finally takes the wraps off, you react like his costar Kathryn Harrold did in Raw Deal when she got her first gander at the Arnold Bod and gasped, "Oh, my Gawd!"

Schwarzenegger, a policeman's son, has come about as far as a man can from his childhood home in Graz, Austria, where there was no telephone, no flush toilet, no refrigerator until he was 14. "When it came, I remember, we were all standing around the kitchen looking at it," says Schwarzenegger, who was one of two children, as if describing his first trip to Disneyland. "Then my mother opened it up, and we all stuck our hands in there, and it was cold, and we were freaking out like this was the strangest thing you could imagine. When you have this kind of upbringing, you don't take anything for granted."

He never has. Austria, he says, is a nice place to play a stringed instrument, a nice place to act old and safe and sleepy when you are still young. But it's not for hungry hearts.

So he comes over here in 1968 to compete because his dream is bigger than Austria. He's 21 years old. He has begun major construction on the Arnold Bod because he knows that his idol, Reg Park, started with the body, won a bunch of titles, made a bunch of Hercules movies, parlayed his name recognition into a string of gyms in his native South Africa and walked away with his pockets bulging bigger than his biceps, which were plenty big.

The 1968-model Arnold Arms and Arnold Chest are already massive, and he's working on the calves. He's carrying 250 pounds on a big-boned 6'2" frame. Already, he has a Mr. Europe and a Mr. Universe title under his belt and a head full of Mr. Olympia dreams.

Joe Weider, a muscle-magazine maven with the gift of gab and a lot of vitamins to sell, takes Schwarzenegger under his wing. Talks to him as a father talks to his son. Kid, he says, you got a build on you like Hercules. I've been schmoozing with some movie people. They got a need for a kid with a build on him like Hercules. Let me do the talking.

Schwarzenegger's eyes light up. Back home in Austria, when he wasn't pumping rusted iron and chinning himself on trees, he had spent his formative years watching Hercules Unchained, Hercules in the Haunted World, Hercules and the Captive Women, Hercules Against Rome, Hercules Against the Sons of the Sun, Hercules Against the Moon Men—everything except Hercules Goes Bananas, which happens to be the title of the picture Weider is touting.