By the time he was established in America, Arnold appeared to regard his childhood as malleable, material to fuel his legend. Meinhard and Arnold, Arnold and Meinhard: this was the darkest subtext of his story. Like opposed twins, only one could prosper. At first it was Meinhard, athletic, good-looking, his father's son. But then it was Arnold, also athletic but more driven, a swimming champion, then a curling champion, then a bodybuilding champion. Meinhard loved women and women loved Meinhard. He had many girlfriends, and one of them, Erika Knapp, had his son Patrick in 1968. Arnold's success with women grew only with his extraordinary body. Neither stayed in Thal. Meinhard went to Germany, Arnold to Germany then England then America. Arnold's success earned him Gustav's love.
Caught on the other side of the equation, Meinhard started to drink. He began working for a publisher in Kitzbühel. Arnold got a job with bodybuilding magazine publisher Joe Weider in California. By 1970, he was Mr Olympia. Meinhard rented one room of someone else's house. Arnold began to invest in real estate. Meinhard drank heavily. Arnold was one of the fittest men on earth. Meinhard assaulted a woman and went to prison. Arnold lived in the 'Land of the Free'.
On the evening of 20 May 1971, Meinhard Schwarzenegger, depressed and drunk, was killed in a car accident. Somehow, the golden child and Arnold had exchanged destinies. 'Deep down I always expected something to happen to him,' Arnold has said of his brother, although he did not attend his funeral, just as he would be absent from his father's funeral a year and a half later. 'He lived on the edge more than I ... Now, I wish he was here to enjoy all this with me. Back then, I just brushed it off.'
When Butler and Gaines met Schwarzenegger, he was living in a small condominium in Santa Monica with his girlfriend, Barbara Outland. He had been in America for four years, hanging about at Venice Beach and waiting to get noticed.
Arnold had more than an awesome physicality. He was lively, funny, clever, cruel, quick, brave, egotistical and, above all, he was rapaciously ambitious. The life force poured from him. He had been Mr Olympia for three years. Long before he was the Predator and Conan the Barbarian, a decade before he became the Terminator, he was the Austrian Oak, an indelible vision of human perfection. George Butler saw it, and so did Charles Gaines, but they didn't see it as Joe Weider did, or as the bodybuilding fans did, or even as the bodybuilders themselves did.
'We discovered that, if you begin with Egyptians, go to the Greeks, go to the Romans, go to Michelangelo, right through the history of Western art, you'll discover that there's a tremendous interest in the musculature of the male body,' Butler said. 'So we may have been far out, but we weren't that far off the main line of what interests people. We really thought we were on to something. We were watching, and saying, there's no one else in the world who's watching. No one else in the world.'
Schwarzenegger was unlike anyone else in all of bodybuilding, or in anything else at all. Arnold told Butler and Gaines about a recurring dream that he had. In the dream, he was king of all of the Earth and everyone looked up to him.
Butler recalled that Arnold was also attending night school and had drawn up something he called 'the master plan'. 'It was kind of a campy mix of Nietzsche and a Soviet five-year plan, only it was more of a 50-year plan,' Butler recalled. 'He wanted to be very big. My own particular view is that he had it in his mind to be President of the United States, king of the universe. Probably if there are extraterrestrials out there, he'd like to rule them as well.'
Arnold had laid out the master plan for Butler and Gaines. 'I will come to America, which is the country for me. Once there I will become the greatest bodybuilder' - with his accent he said it 'baddybuilder' and still does - 'in history. While I am doing this I will learn perfect English and educate myself, but only with those things I need to know. I will get a college degree, then a business degree. I will invest in real estate and make big money. I will go into the movies. By the time I am 30 I will have starred in my first movie and I will be a millionaire. I will marry a beautiful and successful wife. By the time I am 32, I will have been invited to the White House.'
To Arnold, the master plan was as clear and as tangible as his recurring dream. To Butler, it would have been absurd but for one thing: Schwarzenegger had already begun to accomplish the goals he had listed for himself. The idea that anyone might succeed in Hollywood via their muscles was an unlikely one, but then, everything about bodybuilding was unlikely.
'What he did do, clearly,' Butler said, 'was choose the hardest path to fame and fortune that any potential Hollywood star ever chose. To become king of Hollywood through your muscles? I mean, give me a break. He'd been in Los Angeles for four straight years trying to claw his way beyond the beach. No one would give him the time of day.'
Before Butler and Gaines had laid eyes on him, Arnold had gone from Austria to Germany then to England. He came to London for the Nabba (National Amateur Bodybuilders' Association) Mr Universe show in September 1966, a baby-faced giant. In the front row of the Victoria Palace sat one of the world's richest men, J. Paul Getty, a bodybuilding aficionado, and also Jimmy Savile, a former wrestler who was becoming a famous disc jockey. Chet Yorton was placed first by seven of the nine judges. The other two, including Wag Bennett, who was married to Dianne Bennett, who owned gyms and ran bodybuilding competitions, gave first place to Arnold. He had electrified the crowd.
'And afterwards,' said Dianne, when I met her recently, 'he looked so forlorn, so we went up to him and he could see by the score sheets that Wag had put him first. And he looked very lost, so we invited him back to our home. And of course we had gyms and we had six kids so he knew we were a family who trained. He came back and stayed with us and trained with us, and I fed him.
'He was only a lad working at a gym in Munich and he didn't have any money or anything, so we would arrange a few times a year for him to come over and do a series of shows and earn some money. He'd start in London and he'd have to do a couple of shows for Wag and me, for which he got paid 10 quid and for which he'd help get the hall ready, put chairs out. Then the first stop would be down here in Portsmouth for my mum and dad, on the pier or at the Wedgwood Rooms, and then he'd go on to Plymouth where another friend, Bill Jackson, had a gym. Then Wag would take him on a tour to earn money for food, and that's how it started.
'When he stayed with us, not only did he learn quite a lot from me about food, I also taught him English. I used to help him with his clothes, too ... he was a bit of a hick dresser. And then he trained. He used to say he could only get a decent pump when he was in Wag's gym. Until the time he came to us, Arnold had never used music to pose to on stage. We said to him, "You've got to use music and you've got to learn to pose to music." "No no," he said. But we won him over. He learned to pose in our front room.'
Dianne gave me a tour of the gym, where she kept some of the equipment that Arnold had trained with. There was a set of old scales that he once used. Sometimes he'd say to Wag or Dianne: 'I'm not going to bed tonight until I weigh 230lb,' and he might be two or three pounds off so he would eat and eat until he weighed what he thought he should. Dianne showed me the machine that he had used for 1,000lb calf raises. His calves had been the body part that gave him the most trouble. Wag had told him to cut the bottoms out of his training pants so that he could see them at all times, to remind him he must work harder on them. Dianne said that she'd never seen anyone train as hard as Arnold did.
Arnold went to live in America in 1968, but he never lost touch with Dianne and Wag, or with the people who had helped him in Germany and Austria. Dianne said that they would all meet every year at the Arnold Classic, where she often judged. Arnold would stop in when he came to Europe, too, and he would call and chat about his life. She and Wag had watched his inexorable ascent and it had come as no surprise. He had even had the master plan at 19 years old when he could barely articulate it in English. 'He used to sit at the table and say, "I'm gonna be the biggest. I'm gonna be the best. I'm gonna be a film star ..."'
As Schwarzenegger's achievements began to match his ambition, his past, with its curious mix of fierce loyalties and ruthless self-interest, with its artful blending of truth and myth, with its translucent screen of 20th-century fame and money, became something else he would have to master.
Arnold, the great existential force, bought the rights to Pumping Iron and he reissued it in 2002 for the 25th anniversary, along with a documentary about the making of the film. He was going to run for the governorship of California, everyone knew that. He was just deciding when. The reissue of Pumping Iron was a smart move. It was public acknowledgment of his past. The same, too, with his admission that he had used steroids, which were not controlled substances in America in the 1970s. He could not be badly beaten up by these things. During his election campaign, in 2003, he made a speech about how bodybuilding had been drug-testing for years. He held it up as an example for others. He got elected. But even Arnold had to realise how far bodybuilding had come since his time in it and how it had arrived there.
Friends of Arnold, such as Dianne Bennett, now believe that he will become President. He is, of course, Austrian and anyone born outside America is barred from the presidency by the US Constitution. For Arnold, the solution is obvious: he will change the Constitution.
Andreas Munzer became the first bodybuilder to have a play written about him. Well, it was part of a play at least, a very long play by the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, best known for the novel The Piano Teacher and who last month won the 2004 Nobel Prize for literature. The play was called Ein Sportstück (A Sports Play). When it premiered in Vienna in 1998 it received a 55-minute standing ovation. Jelinek's themes were intellectual and postmodern. Ein Sportstück was about mediated realities, lives experienced through other mediums: television, movies, sport. She used Andi's hollowed body to stress the primacy of surface over depth. She said that Andi's freaky frame had been manufactured for rapid consumption and then thrown away. You had to be patient to get to Andi's bit: Ein Sportstück lasted for five hours.
And so Andi's body became metaphor, too. He represented something to bodybuilding, and something else to the wider world. In death, Andi had become someone on to whom things could be projected: ideas, theories, prejudices. He could be interpreted, reinterpreted, misinterpreted.
My vision of Andi was mediated, too. I had the raw facts of his life and death; they had all been well reported. I had the views of other bodybuilders, some of whom had been Andi's friends. I had some theories of my own about him. But I was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to get any closer.
Andi rode the curve. He made the deal. He played the zugzwang. In Munich, he doubled himself. He understood what it would take to make it with a body like his in the earliest years of the era of the freak.
The novelist Timothy O'Grady once wrote: 'The spectacle of greatness is thrilling, alluring, intoxicating. It can make the beholder want to do the same thing, breathe the same air.'
Andi saw greatness in Schwarzenegger, but that was through the simplicity of teenage ambition. Later, as he ascended to become the best bodybuilder in the German-speaking world, he looked at the small gap between his own excellence and that of the five or six men who existed above him. He thought about what it might take to close that gap. Andi was no freak. But he could turn his skin into paper and his veins into ringroads around his stripped physique. Andi could take the stage glowing with hardness and he could do it several times a year.
The effort it took was difficult to imagine. Andi had picked the toughest battleground, the most elusive state to appear in and maintain. His unique selling point demanded much of him.
Once he had chosen, he could not turn back. There was probably a moment, a tipping point, where he might have pulled out, perhaps when he first became aware of the pains in his stomach and sought a health cure for them. Only Andi would know for sure. But he was a bodybuilder and bodybuilding was about excess. After a while, you were surrounded by so much of it, it became impossible to see how much was too much: because almost everything was too much. In bodybuilding, the only response to failure was growth. That was the law of muscle. Stressed to failure, it grew. When Andi met failure, he grew to defeat it.
Andi gave it everything because that's what he demanded of himself. He had built an extraordinary body by any standards. He had decided to find out what was possible for him. He wanted to get as high on the curve as he could, as all of us do. He understood the risks. He took his courage in his hands. He pushed towards his limits. He discovered where they were. In that regard, Andi had lived ferociously, he had strived for the best that he was capable of. I saw it as an act of great bravery to live in that manner.
Andreas Munzer strived and strived, and he found out what he could do. He was able to manufacture one of the 10 best bodies from six billion on earth. In his curious arena, he had almost ascended to the top of the game. He answered every question he asked of himself. He did not die wondering.
I saw unrecognised honour in what he had achieved. He was more than just a dead guy who had taken too many drugs. He was not the end of bodybuilding as a sport. He was a symbol of what it sometimes took to succeed
· Extracted from Muscle: a Writer's Trip Through a Sport with no Boundaries, by Jon Hotten (Yellow Jersey Press, £10.99)