Arnold’s true lies

ARNOLD Schwarzenegger does everything big: muscles, movies, extramarital affairs.

With his forthcoming autobiography, Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story, Schwarzenegger is not shouting out “I’ll be back”, but “I am back”.

Few of his old friends agree. The fallout from his impending divorce from Maria Shriver, and the revelations that he fathered a child with their housekeeper, have dealt the former California governor a body blow no amount of hours in the gym can fix.

“Arnold is up there by himself in his mansion, all alone with his pictures and souvenirs of a career,” says one old friend. “He’s like Citizen Kane.”

A master at marketing and PR, Schwarzenegger is promoting the book with a publicity blitz as calibrated as any political campaign. A few weeks ago, the former governor met me for lunch, on condition that I not quote him until after a promotional 60 Minutes episode is aired.

Those who have read Total Recall say the title suggests Schwarzenegger is telling for the last time the story of the paternity scandal that brought him down. He believes the world will let him tell his tale and then allow him to go on with his “unbelievably true life story”.

But in returning to Hollywood at 65 (he made a cameo as a long-in-the-tooth action hero in this summer’s The Expendables 2), Schwarzenegger is trying to resurrect his career when his contemporaries have long stopped hoping to land starring roles. He is attempting his comeback without the help of Shriver, his wife for 26 years, who stood by him through accusations of infidelity, until she could no longer ignore the obvious. Friends and Kennedy family members told me that after separating from her husband, when he confessed to the affair with the housekeeper, Shriver asked Schwarzenegger to go to therapy. He went once, but refused to return — despite the fact that it would cost him his marriage, members of her circle say.

Shriver is watching the Total Recall spectacle with apprehension and disbelief. The daughter of Eunice Shriver, who was the sister of John F Kennedy, Shriver was brought up with a sense of public decorum.

She doesn’t know why Schwarzenegger has written the book now, talking about his affair with their housekeeper, revealing facts that will only hurt their four children, her friends and family say.

Shriver doesn’t understand why Schwarzenegger would use anything, even the most painful details, to climb back into the public spotlight. As recently as a few weeks ago, he had given her no idea about the contents of the book.

But that may have been too much to expect from the man who, one family member told me, angrily declared when Shriver asked for a divorce: “I have the money, the power, and the plane, and I will have the friends.”

I hadn’t seen Schwarzenegger since 2004, when I was researching a biography about him, Fantastic. As I greeted him at Caffe Roma in Beverly Hills, I saw a man who appears a diminutive, action-toy version of the movie and bodybuilding Arnold.

Schwarzenegger is devoid of his once-bulging muscles, and his face looks as if a master taxidermist has been at work. In the ’80s, you would find Schwarzenegger at his special table in the back of the restaurant, schmoozing with his bodybuilding buddies, smoking a stogie and commenting authoritatively on the breasts and buttocks of passing women. Schwarzenegger is still a fixture at Caffe Roma, dropping in after having his hair tinted at a salon behind it. But times have changed. When the scandal broke, a woman shouted “pig” as he walked to his favourite table, says a longtime friend of his. Schwarzenegger said that he did not hear the remark. But he has heard of the widespread public disgust, especially among women, at the betrayal of his wife in such a sordid fashion. For most of his marriage to Shriver, one of the fixtures in their home had been the Guatemalan-born Mildred Baena.

Guests to the house recall the divorced mother of four as a dour, chunky, uninviting woman, the sort of employee a wife might shrewdly hire if she were worried her husband had wandering hands.

Schwarzenegger slept with the middle-aged Baena for the same reason that George Mallory said he climbed Mount Everest — because she was there.

For Schwarzenegger, life is about taking everything he wants to take, touching anything he feels like touching, and going wherever he wants to go.

He does so with a boyish sense of humour, endlessly joshing as his hands move forward. It’s behaviour that in anyone else would be seen as repulsive, but in Schwarzenegger is passed off as part of the amusing game of his life. A woman is a spoilsport if she does not get the joke.

Schwarzenegger and the housekeeper carried on in the sprawling Pacific Palisades house where his wife and children slept. And when Baena gave birth to a son, Joseph — shortly after the arrival of the Schwarzeneggers’ fourth child, Christopher — Shriver celebrated the birth of her housekeeper’s baby without a clue that it was her husband’s.

As for Baena, she was newly divorced and newly in love. In her only interview after the scandal, she told the UK magazine Hello! that when she became pregnant, she thought the father was her ex-husband, with whom she’d had a bon-voyage liaison, but soon recognised the boy had Schwarzenegger-like features.

Schwarzenegger was already governor when he learned the truth about young Joseph. Fearing that if the story came out it would become the main issue of his governorship, he did nothing except keep the housekeeper near enough to him that she wouldn’t betray the secret, according to one person close to the matter. He couldn’t tell his wife, because he wasn’t certain what she would do. This is the story Schwarzenegger is telling, in some measure, in his autobiography.

Shriver’s confidantes tell me that her relationship with Schwarzenegger steadily deteriorated during his seven years as governor, as he became consumed with the incredible rush of power and prestige that, according to one source, was almost like an addiction. Addiction to power was a problem Shriver probably could have handled. But she had a growing awareness of something far more personally devastating.

For the first few years after Joseph’s birth, Baena didn’t bring the boy to the house that often. But it would have looked unusual if she didn’t bring him to the Christmas parties, to which all the staff were invited. Family members say it was at one of those parties that Shriver first noticed the blond little boy looked like a strange offspring for his dark-complected mother.

Shriver became suspicious. Her doubts were hardly assuaged by her husband’s friend, Tom Arnold. The comedian would later tell Howard Stern that he often joked about how young Joseph looked like Schwarzenegger. “I’m like: ‘Dude! You should get a fucking DNA test on this kid! He looks just like you!” the comedian said he told Schwarzenegger.

Every time Shriver talked to Schwarzenegger about it, he said it was not true, her family and friends say.

But there came a time in the months before Schwarzenegger left office that she could not help but see what stood so starkly before her. Those close to the couple sensed the tension.

In Jul 2010, Shriver gave a party to celebrate her husband’s 63rd birthday. There were about 60 guests, including Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilding buddies Sven-Ole Thorsen and Franco Columbu. One of the guests says Schwarzenegger and Shriver spent most of the time at opposite ends of the gathering, and Schwarzenegger did not say goodbye to many guests.

On Jan 4, 2011, the day after Schwarzenegger left office, Shriver confronted him, and he admitted that 13-year-old Joseph was his son, according to people close to the star. He profusely apologised. To hear Schwarzenegger’s account, it was a civilised encounter, where manners trumped feelings. But those who have felt the sting of Shriver’s anger say the decibel level of her wrath was a hundred-fold higher.

After the confrontation, Shriver talked to Baena. In Baena’s interview with Hello!, she told a tale that could have come out of a telenovela. As Shriver asked the fateful question, the housekeeper fell on her knees before her mistress. Shriver asked her to rise, and the two women held each other as Baena philosophised that “it wasn’t Arnie’s fault, that it takes two.”

As Schwarzenegger and Shriver sorted through the wreckage, they proved two very different characters. Family members and friends say Shriver told them that despite the betrayal she loved her husband and believed in marriage. She was a Kennedy, and she was a Shriver, brought up never to bring shame to the family. Beyond that, she was a shrewd political woman. Like Hillary Clinton at the time of Monica Lewinsky, Shriver was considering standing by Schwarzenegger’s side. But she needed time and space to figure out what she could do. She needed quiet, too, and, beyond anything, she needed this matter to stay private.

Schwarzenegger is a very different kind of person. Anything that posed emotional pain or difficulty, he was out of there. He could not understand why Shriver could not just forgive and get on with things, and when Shriver said she needed a trial separation, and told Schwarzenegger to move out, family and friends say that he refused. It was his house, and he wasn’t budging.

Shriver could not stay with her estranged husband. The California-style mansion had the scent of the affair in every bed and sofa, and wherever she looked she saw pictures and memorabilia of her husband. And so she moved into a hotel, where her children came to visit her. She had lost her mother and father within a year, and now she had lost her marriage.

In early May, 2011, the couple gave a joint statement to the Los Angeles Times announcing that they had separated after 25 years. They thought the details of why they were contemplating a divorce were between them, but a week and a half later, the Times ran the story that the couple had “separated after she learned he had fathered a child more than a decade ago with a longtime member of their household staff.”

Schwarzenegger has allegedly told his advisers that Shriver’s four brothers leaked the story to shame their sister into leaving him. But the brothers deny having anything to do with the story. They say they did not try to talk their sister into divorcing Schwarzenegger, but only gave her support so that she could decide what to do.

When Schwarzenegger refused to continue with therapy, Shriver asked for a divorce, people close to the couple say.

“If he had character, he would have done what had to be done,” says a family member.

“He would have gone to therapy and truly faced what he had done. He probably would have gotten Maria back if he had done that stuff. She truly loved him. She was looking for a basis to go back, but he was incapable of giving it to her.” Their divorce is still being finalised.

Ever the philosopher, Schwarzenegger told his next-door neighbour in Sun Valley: “I think things will work out OK with Maria, but if they don’t, I’m getting me a 20-year-old honey,” says one of Schwarzenegger’s friends.

Schwarzenegger does not seem to realise all that he has lost. He no longer has the wife who brought him to a world beyond the furthest parameters of Hollywood.

Everyone who knows Schwarzenegger well says that the purest feeling in his life is his love for his children, yet he does not have the affection of them in the way he did before. His son, Patrick, has started calling himself “Patrick Shriver” on his Twitter account. His two daughters, say family members and friends, fear that he wants to use them as part of his campaign to rehabilitate his image.

Schwarzenegger still tries to protect them, and when 60 Minutes wanted to interview them, according to those close to him, he said no. And yet, I am told by family members, the children remain suspicious of their father’s motives.

In earlier years, Schwarzenegger would have had pals with whom to discuss his life, but he has turned away from several longtime friends and seems to have no one in whom he can truly confide. He has a movie star’s entourage, but they are not friends. One Saturday night a few weeks ago, Schwarzenegger was spotted bicycling by himself through the darkening streets of Santa Monica.

“Arnold’s always been alone,” says a longtime friend who no longer sees him. “It’s just that it’s more obvious, and maybe now even he recognises something of his fate.”

Laurence Leamer is a bestselling author whose upcoming book, The Price of Justice, is a legal thriller about two Pittsburgh lawyers and their struggle against the biggest coal baron in America.

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