As They Say In Hollywood...pex Sell Tix

After starring as himself in Pumping Iron, Schwarzenegger was typecast as a Mr. Olympia hopeful in Stay Hungry and underwent attitude transplant surgery by director Bob Rafelson. "He's the guy who made Jack Nicholson cry in Five Easy Pieces" says Schwarzenegger in soft, awed tones. "I was ripped out of the mentality of being an athlete, where you have to keep the blinders on all the time. I tapped a well that I'd never tapped before.

"I mean, when Sally Field grabs you and holds you and looks in your eyes and gives you that last hug before she leaves you, you believe her. And this shows in your face. And when the camera is close on you, it reads everything. You don't have to act. You just have to be you."

Sure, the Hollywood wits told him, with that thick Austrian accent and that thicker tree trunk of a body, who else can you be on the screen but a Mr. Olympia? Schwarzenegger figured he could be Flash Gordon, so he went to take a meeting with producer Dino De Laurentiis. Trouble was, Schwarzenegger didn't know the rules yet. He had a habit of blurting out whatever came to mind.

"I walked in, and I just kept staring at this desk," Schwarzenegger says. "It was enormous. Antique. Probably from Italy somewhere. And he was standing behind the desk. And only his shoulders and his head stuck out above it. I just couldn't figure it. So I asked him, 'Why does a little man like you need such a big desk?' And he went crazy."

For a guy with a heavy Austrian accent, Schwarzenegger does a pretty good imitation of a guy with a heavy Italian one. Flourishing the stogie in an aggressive manner, he impersonates De Laurentiis shouting angrily, "You have an accent! I cannot use you for Flasha Gordon! Nah! Flasha Gordon has no accent! I cannot use you! Nah!"

Then Schwarzenegger made another mistake. "I said, 'What do you mean, I have an accent? I barely can understand you.' And that was the end of the meeting. Exactly one minute and 40 seconds on the clock. My agent said it was the fastest meeting he ever saw."

Fortunately, Schwarzenegger is a quick study, and De Laurentiis is quick to forgive. When Conan became a De Laurentiis project, Schwarzenegger became Conan. Girded his loins, loined his lines, put in his time on the Wheel of Pain and the Tree of Woe, punched out a camel, bit the head off a vulture, made love to a wench who turned out to be a toothy demon with blue skin, broke off the romance, threw her in the fire and suffered the insane, faux-Nietzschean ramblings of James Earl Jones as the arch-villain, Thulsa Doom.

With $20 million being spent on the Conan production and another $10 million budgeted for promotion, Schwarzenegger was in barbarian hog heaven. "Conan." he says simply, "was God's gift to my career."

After starring in the money-making sequel, Conan the Destroyer, Schwarzenegger was cast as the cyborg in James Cameron's The Terminator. Suddenly and shockingly, it became apparent that just as many people would go to see him clothed as half-naked. "There was something else there," Schwarzenegger says, squinting through the stogie smoke, suddenly looking strangely Sherlock Holmesian. "But they didn't quite know what."

Unfortunately, his deal with De Laurentiis called for five pictures, and the third one was Red Sonja, a sword-and-sorcery bomb of career-threatening proportions that introduced Brigitte Nielsen to an uncaring world. Schwarzenegger sadly admits that he should have listened to Maria Shriver, then his girlfriend, now his wife, who said. "Don't." Out of loyalty to De Laurentiis, who needed a name to sell the picture, Schwarzenegger did.