Found this very interesting read on Arnold
HE'S A KENNEDY. HE'S BEST FRIENDS WITH GEORGE BUSH. HE'S THE BIGGEST STAR IN HOLLYWOOD. AND NOW HE'S VERY, VERY MAD AT US
by Charles Fleming
SPY, March 1992, pp. 60-65
One day not so long ago, the world woke up to find that Arnold Schwarzenegger an Austrian bodybuilder who arrived in America in 1968 unable to speak English had become the most powerful star Hollywood had ever seen. He makes $15 million a picture; unlike his muscle-bound predecessor Sylvester Stallone, he can alternate monstrously successful action pictures iwth hit comedies; neither Warren nor Jack can guarantee anything like the huge worldwide audience that Arnold can by simply showing up and saying, "Hasta la vista, baby."
More than just a well-paid Van Damme, however, Arnold has political influence and ambitions: His connections run from Ted Kennedy to George Bush, and by all accounts, he hopes to run for governor of California or the U.S. Senate. But best of all, Arnold is warmly regarded as a cheery and honorable fellow about whom one can truly say, "The bigger they are, the bigger they are." Famous, rich, powerful, beloved...
This guy?
On June 16, 1991, all the elements of Arnold's apotheosis politics and the movies, money and press agentry fused together into a brilliant quasar of shamelessness. That night, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which studies the Holocaust, held a dinner to honor the recipient of its National Leadership Award. George Bush spoke. The most expensive table cost $40,000, and the money raised at the event was to be used for the Wiesenthal Center's new Museum of Tolerance. The honoree? Arnold Schwarzenegger. He had been a generous supporter of the Center through the years, reportedly giving it $5 million.
All of Hollywood was there. Event chairmen for the evening were Peter Guber (Sony) and Jon Peters (formerly Sony). Cochairmen included the rest of the most powerful men in pictures: studio bosses Sid Sheinberg and Tom Pollock (MCA/Universal), Barry Diller (Fox), Michael Eisner (Disney), Martin Davis (Paramount), and Terry Semel and Bob Daly (Warner Bros.), former studio owners Marvin Davis and Jerry Weintraub (another of Bush's pals); monster agents Jeff Berg and Lou Pitt (ICM) and Michael Ovitz (CAA); and independents such as David Geffen and Mario Kassar (Carolco). one of the cochairs commented later, only a bit hyperbolically, "I think Arnold was the only goy in the room. Except for Maria."
Well, after all, what's so strange about Hollywood's applauding Arnold at a Wiesenthal Center dinner? Yes, his father was a Nazi; yes, he has been a consistent supporter and friend of renowned Nazi Kurt Waldheim. 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 Wiesenthal Center dinner still makes perfect sense. As one guest said of the gathered moguls, "Arnold's very big right now, and everybody wants to work with him. Besitdes, this is Hollywood, and these guys would hire Hitler if it meant making money." And Arnold is nowhere near as bad as Hitler!
More than anything, the scene at the Wiesenthal Center was a triumph of public relations. Indeed, the Wiesenthal Center itself seems to be alert to this aspect of its relationship with Arnold. When SPY called the Center to ask for a copy of Arnold's father's Nazi Party membership card, a minion told us to "call his publicist." Arnold has achieved his position in the world largely because he wields ruthless control over his press. As one Paramount executive says, "Arnold exercises power the way the old-fashioned moguls did they could cover up anything, make any problem go away."
Usually Arnold is successful. For example, there's the journalist who mirthfully tells of the star's backlot misdeeds how 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 plo-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." No, these tales will go with Arnold to the grave. Or at least they were supposed to have.
From time to time Arnold's defense perimeter is breached. Within 24 hours of the arrival at the SPY offices of an amusing photograph of Arnold, his publicist, Charoltte Parker, called SPY's editor to ask whether the magazine was doing a story on her client and was "seeking photos of a private nautre." Actually, we weren't seeking such photos. We already had one: a picture taken by an anonymous photographer sometime in the 1970s and recently faxed all over the world. After Parker called SPY, someone else at SPY received a phone call from an acquaintance who is one of Arnold's business associates. The acquaintance warned that Arnold's representatives were contemplating filing criminal charges if SPY published this photograph. Since he said nothing about the ownership of the photograph, he must have been referring to an assault on Arnold Schwarzenegger's modesty; as far as we know, however, this is not a crime in New York State.
We also came across another interesting picture of the future junior senator from California. This one shows Arnold eating breakfast off of very fancy china while wearing a tank top and tight underpants. He was spending a sociable weekend with Paco Arce, a Spanish millionaire and notorious gay playboy whom Arnold visited in 1975; Arce himself was the photographer. On the floor behind Arnold in the picture is a stack of Playgirls no doubt purchased for the articles.
Poor Charlotte Parker. Her job is to protect Arnold; when she recently offered a magazine only 30 minutes of Arnold's time in exchange for a cover story, she said airily, "We don't want one of those long pieces that tries to figure Arnold out, so you won't need more time than that." Alas, after Arnold sees his copy of the March SPY, Parker will have some explaining to do. Vat do you mean dere's no such t'ing as bed publicity?
No one has suffered more from Arnold's heavy-handed tactics to suppress unflattering material than Wendy Leigh, the author of Arnold, a biography published in 1990. Before her book came out, Leigh contributed some reporting to a piece about Arnold for Britain's News of the World. Arnold brought a libel suit against the paper and against Leigh, and the paper settled for a small amount. The suit against Leigh is still pending [as of March 1993]. Arnold's side offered Leigh a settlement, demanding a large sum of money, a full and public apology for the article and a promise from Leigh not to address in her book allegations (which Schwarzenegger denies) of Arnold's homosexual experiences, his use of steroids, his sale of steroids, his theft of automobiles or his involvement in passport forgery. We have no evidence of Arnold's engaging in any of those last three activities Arnold's lawyers just brought them up entirely out of the blue. Leigh declined the settlement.
Meanwhile, Franco Columbu and either Joe or Ben Weider, all longtime bodybuilding associates of Arnold's, offered Leigh's publisher, Contemporary Books, the choice of either a large amount of money or a biography written with Arnold if it would agree to cancel Leigh's book. Contemporary declined.
Arnold was released. The publisher suffered four break-ins in a month while preparing the book, although no connection has been established. Arnold contained the revelations that Arnold's father was a member of the Nazi Party and that Arnold has taken huge amounts of steroids, and Leigh had problems promoting it. Good Morning America discussed having Leigh on the show and then killed the idea, Leigh says. A spokesman for GMA says simply, "Leigh was never scheduled to appear." According to Leigh, another television show, AM Los Angeles, scheduled an appearance by the author, promoted it for a week and then canceled it the night before the taping. A Current Affair did give Leigh airtime but ran a very harsh segment on her. A reporter at Newsday has said he was warned that if he ran an item about Leigh's book, Newsday wouldn't get an interview with Arnold. As the reporter related the incident on Now It Can Be Told, "I had a call from someone at one of the studios saying, 'What's going on? Arnold andhis people aren't very happy....Go with this story and you probably won't get another interview with him at all.'"
Parker insists that Leigh's allegations are false. "We never said, 'Don't put on Wendy Leigh,'" Parker told SPY> But a highly placed television executive says, "Everything that has been said about what [Arnold's representatives] did to Wendy Leigh's book is true. To say it was heavy-handed...It was, 'If you want Arnold for the movie [Total Recall}, don't do the book.' It was blatant." Bruce Lynn, a publicist who handled Leigh's book in America, says Schwarzenegger and Parker "did everything in their power to make [Leigh's] life miserable in promoting the book. She didn't get on certain shows that Arnold had power over.'
Commenting on Leigh, Arnold has said, "Everybody in this country has the freedom to say what he or she wants to, but I sometimes think there is too much of that commodity for my taste." An interesting sentiment for a future American politician to express.
Wendy Leigh might be considered a special case. After all, she had written abook that contained particularly embarrassing information about Arnold. But even in the workaday world of celebrity journalism, Arnold is known for his obsessive attention to what is written about him. And important and powerful television journalist says that while everyone in Hollywood tries to control his press, Arnold is "a 1,600-pound gorilla in a town of 900-pound gorillas."
Before an interview with Arnold can even take place, a publication must agree to strict rules laid down by Charlotte Parker (whom two reporters describe as "the most loathed woman in Hollywood" quite a triumph, given the competition): The interview should be for a cover story, it must focus on whatever movie Arnold has coming out at the time, and it cannot touch on certain topics. When Time did a cover story on Arnold and was granted an interview, Parker explained that the interview would be ended instantly if the reporters introduced the subject of Wendy Leigh's book, the Nazi affiliations of Arnold's father, or steroids; of course, the restrictions just make those topics more intriguing. At the Cannes Film Festival in 1990, journalists were asked to sign a document promising not to ask certain questions of Arnold.
Unfortunately, even after a reporter has been granted an interview, he still hasn't got much. When Rolling Stone agreed to put Arnold on its cover, the magazine was promised more time with Arnold than any other publication had ever been given a whole weekend.
However, Bill Zehme, who wrote the profile, says the "weekend" turned into one 30-minute chat with Arnold at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles and, the next day, "45 minutes of sitting in some Eurotrash cafι in Beverly Hills where Arnold spent the entire time speaking German to some friends." A frustrated Zehme asked Arnold joshingly whether the Terminator was able to have sex; ths insulted the star. "You shame your magazine," he said. When Zehme an Arnold saw each other at the T2 premiere, Arnold was still outraged. "I'm a funny guy, and I can take a joke," he said. "But you waste 15 minutes on the Terminator's rod!" Parker denies that Rolling Stone was offered a whole weekend. "Arnold is going to spend the weekend with his family," she says.
In the end, Arnold got his cover story. And he even got to have his way about what he wore for the shoot. Rolling Stone had said that Herb Ritts would do pictures of Arnold. As Arnold. But Arnold wanted to dress up in his Terminator outfit, so that's what happened.
Arnold cares a lot about how he's photographed, and not only when he is posing freestyle or being shot for a magazine cover. His current obsession is with pictures that show him holding a cigar, since he thinks it ill suits the head of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports to be seen smoking. So let's get this straight: A man who took huge amouns of steroids becomes head of the President's Council on Physical Fitness, but his main worry is that people will think he smokes cigars. If cigars are Arnold's fitness scandal, then he really has made the steroid problem go away.
The reason Arnold gets his way with journalists is not a mystery: They need him more than he needs them. Arnold sells magazines; Arnold attracts viewers. If you don't play by Arnold's rules, then you don't get access to Arnold, and that's a difficult proposition for any magazine or television show that focuses on entertainment. In the case of a media conglomerate, the movie division may be upset if the company's newspapers or magazines offend Arnold Barry Diller, president of Fox, reportedly made complaints along these lines to his boss, Rupert Murdoch, whose empire once included Premiere and , among other periodicals. One reporter for The Star says that after it ran a piece displeasing to Arnold, "We got a lot of flak from higher up. We were told there's to be no more Arnold stories. Or at least nothing bad." A source close to Parker says she was successful in pressuring certain news organization: "In order to protect him, she did certain things to make sure that if people did [give Arnold a hard time], they would no longer have access to Arnold."
The luxury of always dictating terms seems to have given Arnold and Parker the impression that anyone who wants to write about Arnold owes them something. Clay Felker, the editor of M, says Parker called him when she learned the magazine was planning a cover story about Arnold. He had never heard of her and was "really surprised by her behavior." She asked what he story was about and who was writing it. "It seemed she thought we needed her permission to do a story about Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is ridiculous," he says.
SPY has had exactly the same experience with Parker. Last spring, when she discovered that SPY was going to put a photo of Arnold on its cover, she called the editors of the magazine. Her anger and bewilderment were palpable A magazine putting Arnold on the cover without talking to me first! In reporting this piece, we asked Parker about SPY's Arnold cover (June 1991) and she said, "We participated in that story" a bizarre delusion. When Parker called SPY to ask about photographs of a private nature, she also asked repeatedly about the story the magazine was preparing and about the reporter. In a further conversation, SPY asked Parker about the practice of insisting that certain topics cannot be broached in an interview. She answered, "It is our right to do whatever stories we want to do....We are out there to promote a project. Sometimes we tell them to stick to a subject."
If Arnold really believes it is his right to do whatever stories he wants to do, though, he is in for a rude shock. In a race for the governorship or a Senate seat, "the real press will eat him alive," as one magazine editor says. A longtime associate of Arnold's agrees. "[Running for office] isn't like doing a PR campaign for some movie. If there is anything at all unpleasant in his background, [the press] will go after it like animals."
You can't help but wonder, for example, how campaign reporters would have treated the dinner at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. This rather astonishing spectacle caused no stir whatsoever among the "outlets," as they are known to the movie business, that cover Arnold, except as an ocasion to puff him. Neither Vanity Fair nor Entertainment Tonight, Premiere nor Good Morning America seemed very interested in the event. However, 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 and comment faster than you can say, "Donna Rice." Or, as they would put it on Entertainment Tonight, if Arnold does indeed go into electoral politics, his relationship with the press will change from The Silence of the Lambs to Dances With Wolves.
