As They Say In Hollywood...pex Sell Tix

Fresh from spending a long Los Angeles afternoon repeatedly slamming a pimp's face against a metal table on the set of his in-production police thriller, Red Heat, Arnold Schwarzenegger drives to Hollywood in his big red Jeep, strides purposefully through the gaggle of parking lot paparazzi at Spago, eases his large frame into a window seat, orders the duck pizza and a bottle of Evian water for starters and lights up a stogie the size of Rhode Island.

Schwarzenegger doesn't simply smoke his stogie. He hangs out with it for hours at a time. He cradles it gently between thumb and forefinger, drags on it thoughtfully and squints his blue-eyed, butt-kicking squint through the clouds of pungent stogie smoke that drift upward over his finely chiseled cheekbones, seriously bushy eyebrows, prominent forehead and close-cropped brown hair.

Clearly, Schwarzenegger and his stogie are much more than a man and his cigar. Having appeared with him in his last three pictures—Raw Deal, Predator and, his latest, The Running Man—the Schwarzenegger stogie, jammed between the clenched Schwarzenegger teeth, has become as much a part of the Arnold Movie as the need to blow apart as many extras as the budget allows and to punctuate the bloodshed with bons mots. "Give you a lift?" Schwarzenegger asks politely as he flings a prison guard to his death in The Running Man. "Stick around," he sneers as he impales an enemy guerrilla on a tree in Predator.

At 40, Schwarzenegger is a genuine phenom in a town that historically has not treated its musclemen kindly. Hollywood's highway to oblivion is paved with large guys in loincloths, but you're not going to find Schwarzenegger laid out there. He's the first world-class bodybuilder, and one of the few athletes of any kind, who hasn't fallen into the Pit of Laughable Quickies that has gobbled up his heavily biceped predecessors. Remember Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe, two of the early Tarzans? How about Steve Reeves in Hercules, wrestling a supposedly bloodthirsty lion without ever appearing in the same frame with the beast? (Lion, reaction shot of Reeves, lion, reaction shot.) Remember how drowsy the lion looked? Remember Jim Brown, the legendary running back, grimacing his way through turkeys like I Escaped from Devil's Island? How about Fred (Blaxploitation) Williamson in Black Caesar and Black Eye, or Joe Namath as an unconvincing motorcycle-riding hero in C.C. and Company? And how about O.J. Simpson as a doomed astronaut in Capricorn One? Were those guys hoots, or what?

The tube has proved kinder than the big screen to thick-thighed thespians. Lou Ferrigno, Schwarzenegger's rival in 1977's cult muscle-movie classic, Pumping Iron, painted himself green and did a few TV seasons as the Incredible Hulk; then in 1983 he made a limp spaghetti Hercules for the silver screen and faded away. Merlin Olsen spent a couple of years as the Big Defensive Tackle on the Prairie; Ed Marinaro and Mike Warren copped some Meeting glory on Hill Street Blues; Fred Dryer continues to blindside evil on Hunter, and Alex Karras is parent to a black sitcom son on Webster. Although Karras showed early dramatic promise by punching out a horse in the Mel Brooks western spoof, Blazing Saddles, none of these guys has ever seriously threatened to make the big leap from jock-actor to major star.

Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, has parlayed his two bare-chested Conan epics of 1982 and '84 into a string of fully clothed box office hits, from The Terminator (Arnold as a murderous cyborg) to Commando (Arnold single-handedly destroys an entire army to rescue his kidnapped daughter) to last summer's Predator (Arnold battles a deranged warthog from outer space).

Like Conan the Barbarian, Predator grossed more than $100 million worldwide while grossing out movie critics in many lands with its emphasis on disembowelment and similar unpleasantness. But years of critical battering have failed to bruise either the Arnold Psyche or the Arnold Box Office. He frames the sharpest taunts and hangs them in his home. One is a review of Schwarzenegger's 1979 cowboy farce The Villain, in which the critic expounds on how the horse is significantly more expressive than its rider.

On the set of Red Heat, writer-director Walter Hill watched a stone-faced Schwarzenegger, who plays a merciless Russian cop, slam that pimp's head into that table with such conviction that even Hill couldn't help flinching. "When you make an Arnold movie," Hill says dryly, "you're not exactly thinking about the refined sensibilities of The New York Times . Know what I mean?"

The Running Man—a futuristic tale of deadly, government-controlled TV game shows in a totalitarian America—opened last month in 1,600 theaters filled with the Arnold-obsessed and, despite the usual critical sneers, immediately became the top-grossing film in the country. Like every Arnold Movie, it was written and packaged specifically to market the Arnold Mystique according to the Arnold Plan that has been carefully orchestrated by Arnold Himself, just the way every step of his sensational bodybuilding career was.

The heart of the Arnold Plan has always been the selling of the Arnold Bod—the 57-inch chest, the 33-inch waist, the 22-inch biceps, the 28-inch thighs. Though it's trimmed down somewhat since Schwarzenegger's unprecedented seven years as Mr. Olympia, the biggest title in bodybuilding, the Arnold Bod still looks like a topographical map of the Rockies: all peaks and valleys and dangerous rock formations and arteries swollen like rivers at flood time. From the late 1960s to the mid-'70s, Schwarzenegger spent seven hours a day, every day, building those mountains, pec by pec, delt by delt, at the gym owned by his lifetime pal Joe Gold in Venice, Calif. Today, he spends an hour a day, every day, maintaining them at Gold's new World Gym in Santa Monica with his lifetime pal Franco Columbu.