As They Say In Hollywood...pex Sell Tix

"Weider is such a hype artist," Schwarzenegger says appreciatively, while sucking on his stogie, shaking his head and grinning his boyish, gap-toothed grin. "He did all the talking, I was just standing there like an idiot. He tells them, 'This guy's a Shakespearean actor in Europe!' And they believed him."

Schwarzenegger is understandably fuzzy about the plot of the film, which eventually was released with the title Hercules in New York . Something about Hercules being punished by Zeus, being sent to a different time period, landing in Gotham and going bananas. "I didn't speak English well," Schwarzenegger says, laughing. "I didn't understand most of what I was saying. I stepped off the boat and starred in a motion picture. It was crazy."

The film was worth $1,000 a week to Schwarzenegger for 12 weeks. That was not crazy. He invested the money in Southern California real estate, forgot about being Hercules and spent the next several years training religiously, winning Mr. Olympia contests and telling Johnny and Merv how bodybuilding would improve their sex lives.

He admits now that his claims about pumping iron feeling better than sex were part of his strategy—as was everything else he did in those years—to sell bodybuilding to a country that regarded it as more than a little weird. "I broke down what the problems were for the image of bodybuilding," he says coolly. "People believed that you had to take a tremendous amount of pills. People believed that you had to sleep 12 hours a day and never have sex, that you had to be on a severe diet and never eat anything but meat. People believed that the guys were dumb."

So he regaled Johnny and Merv with tales of his prodigious strudel and ice cream consumption, his even more prodigious sexual appetites, his need for only one, two, three hours' sleep a night. "Slowly, with a little made-up story, you package the whole thing, you unleash it onto the public, you make it sound real," he says, "and all of a sudden, it tears down all those barriers, all those things that people were scared of.

"The reality of it was that I never in my life pulled back and felt that I had to alter my life-style, whether it was staying out at night, having sex or eating. So, of course, there was some truth to what I said. But I made it more colorful to get the point across because I had to destroy something that was inbred in America. And I had to undo it in a short period of time."

He did, simultaneously selling Schwarzenegger and bodybuilding to the U.S. public until you could say "Arnold" and everyone knew whom you were talking about. He carved the Arnold Bod down to a svelte, severely cut 235 pounds. He made America say, "Ahhh!" But by 1975, the thrill of annually winning the Mr. Olympia title was gone. Goodbye, oil. Hello, greasepaint.

Like a great ballerina with one more Swan Lake in her aging legs, Schwarzenegger would return dramatically in 1980 just before filming Conan the Barbarian, win the title a final time and then leave competitive bodybuilding for good. But his real swan song had come in 1975.

"The idea was to cut the competition off cold. Boom!" Schwarzenegger says while waiting for a grilled sword-fish steak to follow the dearly departed duck pizza. "To have this energy that wants to reach out and hold on to the attention, the victory, all the things that bodybuilding brought me, but suddenly there is nothing to hold on to and that energy must now be channeled into acting, full-heartedly. Rather than wimp out and say, 'Well, if this doesn't work, I can always go back to bodybuilding.' "

Schwarzenegger hears himself philosophizing, cuts himself off abruptly and explains that he is not the kind of guy who lies around on the sofa at home, brooding. He is, he says, pure action. Do it. If you screw up, so what. Just do it. In other words: Goodbye, beefcakes. Hello, Hollywood.