More Lacy Rich, from the book "Fantastic" by Laurence Leamer -
Wendy Leigh, Lacy Rich, and Stallone supposedly connected -
"Leigh went ahead with the book. Behind the scenes, she claims, Stallone orchestrated much of the project. He found her an agent and put her in touch with Arnold’s former publicist Paul Bloch. He lined up three other sources to attest that Arnold had an affair with Nielsen. He put the journalist in contact with Lacy H. Rich Jr., a gay aficionado of the bodybuilding world obsessed with hurting Arnold, and he became Leigh’s crucial guide and confidant. Stallone also put Leigh in touch with a detective who led her to one of Arnold’s former girlfriends. The star was obsessed with Arnold. “I think of Schwarzenegger every night before I go to sleep,” Leigh recalled Stallone telling her."
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More from the book -
"As Arnold basked in the warm glow of adulation from his Hollywood peers, he had a strange, determined foe obsessed with destroying him. His name was Lacy H. Rich Jr. Though he made his living reproducing photos, his main goal was to bring down Arnold. He lived in a cluttered apartment in North Hollywood overrun with files, faxes, newspapers, dirty ashtrays, and unwashed dishes. Rich told some people that his hatred began when his friend Mike Mentzer was so devastated by his defeat in Sydney at the 1980 Mr. Olympia that he began a precipitous emotional decline. Rich managed the apartment building where the sadly diminished Mentzer lived, and Rich wanted to get even. But that is hardly enough to explain the depth of his hatred.
“We are talking today about a bodybuilder turned ‘actor,’ who potentially could become senator or governor, then President of the United States, if he could get the Constitution changed,” Rich told Schwarzenegger biographer Nigel Andrews in an unattributed interview. “And with Arnold’s track record I’m not sure he couldn’t manage that. And I’m damned if I’m going to see this hypocrisy elected to public office in this country.”
Rich did not like to be seen in person. He was a voice on the phone. He was a mysterious fax arriving in the middle of the night, pages and pages of material, everything from frontal nudes of Arnold to stills from porno movies involving Arnold’s past associates to allegations of all kinds of excesses and crimes. Some revelations were true, more were partially true, and many were demonstrably false or had nothing to do with Arnold, all of them blended together in a venomous stew. He sought to bait Arnold and those who tried to protect him. He tried in every way to create a media confrontation.
Rich called Charlotte Parker and faxed her pages of the material that he was also sending to journalists and anyone else in the media. He said he went to see Joe Weider and tried to get to Arnold through him. He picketed the Weiders. “He hated everybody,” Weider said. “He had a group walking in front of my house, saying that I hire illegals and create bodybuilders who are homosexuals and all that kind of crap.”
Arnold ignored Rich’s activities. “I paid absolutely no attention,” he said. “He was no obstacle to my career, period. Absolutely none. He was just a lunatic that was sending around pictures of me in underwear and saying, ‘Oh, Arnold had gay relationships.’ You know, it was so ludicrous because everyone that knew me knew that this guy was totally out of whack. He was a sick guy and that was the end of that. Otherwise, I would have sued him if I would have felt that he was really doing anything to my career.”
When the satire magazine Spy published a devastating article on Arnold in March 1992, Rich’s name was not mentioned but he had played a role. The writer of the piece, Charles Fleming, says that Rich supplied a nude photo of Arnold that illustrated the story, but Rich’s contributions probably went beyond that. Afterward, Rich talked about the piece as if he had almost written it, saying people had called to say that he “had a lot of courage to buck the system.”
“Here was the star of these huge movies, making this huge amount of money, and yet there were these appalling things about him that nobody was willing to say,” said Fleming. “Nobody was willing to discuss it, because of the way that he was wielding his Hollywood power—and that made him a target. Because he was behaving like such a bully, he was worth shooting at.
Spy was a witty magazine with an upscale audience, and the fact that it published the article suggested the distinction between the tabloids and the mainstream media was beginning to crumble and anyone and anything was fair game. Much of the material was scurrilous and ugly and based almost exclusively on anonymous sources. “All right, so what if the rumors confirmed for Spy by a businessman and longtime friend of Arnold’s that in the 1970s he enjoyed playing and giving away records of Hitler’s speeches are true?” the article asked. “There’s the journalist who mirthfully tells of the star’s back lot misdeed show he surprised Arnold in flagrante delicto during the filming of one of his blockbusters and how Arnold said, ‘Ve von’t tell Maria about dis’ but who will never commit that story to print. And there’s the movie executive who will tell you only in private, and never for attribution, about Arnold’s occasional suggestions to the owner of a store where he shops that the two find some chicks who will perform an act Arnold calls ‘polishing the helmet.’ Arnold’s rationalization, according to the store owner? ‘It’s not being unfaithful. It’s only some blo-jobs.’
Probably no one will ever quote the Hollywood producer who pals around with Arnold and says, ‘He’s an unstoppable womanizer, even worse than the Kennedys.’” Fleming detailed in Spy how with Parker’s help, Arnold controlled and manipulated his image, a task made easy by the symbiotic relationship between the entertainment reporters and Hollywood. The article stated that “by all accounts, he hopes to run for governor of California or the U.S. Senate” and “you can’t help but wonder, for example, how campaign reporters would have treated the dinner at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. If Arnold were in the middle of a political campaign and were honored by a Holocaust philanthropy, some intrepid reporter would be digging into his past associations.”
Fleming was one of the first reporters to write about Arnold’s political ambition. He recalls how reporters came up to his desk at Variety after the article appeared, to “whisper things like ‘Senator Schwarzenegger’ and fall all over themselves laughing. And I just kept saying, ‘Get off my back. I didn’t say he was running for office. But you watch. You just watch.... ’ ”
The Spy article had documented one of the essential problems of Arnold’s putative political career. If Arnold decided to run for political office, these accusations and stories might spill over into the mainstream political media, irreparably sullying his reputation. Rich’s efforts were a painful way for Arnold to see just how far these stories would go. Rich had already orchestrated a tabloid article alleging that Arnold had played Nazi music at a party in the early 1980s, and contributed to the Spy article.
In September 1992 Rich sent out yet another fax to a list of journalists and publicists, including Parker. “Coming in October will be the most complete outing Hollywood has ever seen. Thrill to week after week of gay outings of Hollywoods [sic] elite in words and picture. All the good ole boys that made Arnold possible. Yes they banded around him to cover his lies, now see if they band together to protect their own butts.” Beneath the words was a full frontal nude of Arnold with the caption: “A Smoking Gun? Republican Moral Values? Bush sure can pick ’em!!”
October came and went without the media picking up on any of Rich’s charges, and he continued his futile, doomed crusade. He wrote a pamphlet about his struggle against Arnold and in June 1995 placed several chapters on the Internet. Rich had become more and more marginalized, more and more possessed. In September he committed suicide. He and his obsession were gone, but his tales and accusations lived on as part of a whispered underground about Arnold’s life."
