Hype Aside, Arnie's A Serious Contender
The Sunday Age
Sunday August 10, 2003
This might be giving away one of journalism's little secrets, but those intimate interviews you read with Hollywood's stars whenever the big new movies are coming out, well, they're almost always put-up jobs.
The studio rounds up a posse of pet reporters and ushers them in threes or fours into the presence of greatness.
It's about as spontaneous as an audience with the Pope and every bit as much of a ritual.
Looking back, there was only one standout moment in all those less-than-stellar encounters: Arnold Schwarzenegger, the man who has set his sights on becoming California's next governor. Asked about the steroids that helped build the famous physique and his early fame, Big Ah-nuld recited what, by that stage of his career, was the rote response: He was young, ambitious and, back then, nobody knew the dangers. But when pressed, the man famous for playing robots grew suddenly animated. Waving off the minder who stepped in to change the subject, he became very earnest and quite, quite dark.
It must have been all of 15 years ago, since the film was Twins, his first intentional comedy, but the response was so memorable that, even though the notes from that encounter are long gone, the words recall themselves: ``Vat, do want me to say?" growled the Terminator, demanding to know if his questioner expected him ``to deny I'm human, because humans make mistakes". Then, smooth as silk, the scowl receded, the PR lady retreated, and Schwarzenegger switched back to the fun of getting to work with a swell little guy like Danny DeVito.
There have been lots of those human mistakes lately in California, where Governor Gray Davis and his ruling Democrats have not merely presided over a runaway deficit but, when expedient, have actually fostered even more red ink. Just two weeks ago, when the party's senior lawmakers forgot to turn off a microphone in their caucus room, reporters outside heard them debate the case for making the fiscal crisis even worse: If they won the upcoming election, no problem; if they didn't, whoever replaced Davis would be hobbled by spending constraints so severe the electorate would soon hate him as much as his predecessor.
And that's why, despite the insanity and inanity surrounding the election - celebrity pornographer Larry Flynt wants to be governor, too - Big Arnie is anything but the strutting strongman in ``this circus", which were the words Senator Diane Feinstein used last week when declining to add her name to ballot.
For Californians, Arnie might be just the ticket. And oddly enough, the chief reasons could be many of the same ones that saw the state's liberal voters roundly reject his fellow Republican, George W. Bush, back in 2000.
Start with gay marriage, which the President recently said he opposed and always will. Schwarzenegger, by contrast, is pro-gay.
And then there are drugs. Whatever Dubya's youthful involvement with nose candy might have been, he's never 'fessed up to it. About Schwarzenegger, however, there's not the shadow of a doubt that he's done some self-medicating in his time. Apart from those steroids, there's the fleeting scene in the 1976 flick Pumping Iron, which captures its star taking an appreciative hit on what sure looks like a monster spliff.
If you want to understand what Davis is facing, rent that documentary. Much more than the freakish muscles, it's Schwarzenegger's psychological warfare against fellow Mr Olympia contestants, his intensity and sheer will to win a sixth straight title that should be scaring the daylights out of the Golden State's Democrats.
This is a man who sees a chance and goes for it. That same drive turned a wooden actor into a box-office champ. It saw him take the time between parts to earn a top-flight business degree and assemble a real estate portfolio that must have made Bob Hope, Tinseltown's other great land shark, green with envy.
The knack for handling money is another difference with Bush, who talks a good game about responsible budgets but hasn't hesitated to inflate a deficit that the small-government wing of his party abhors. Schwarzenegger is an unapologetic budget hawk. If he wins, Californians are going to see some two-fisted austerity. They won't like it, but they won't be able to accuse the would-be governor of deceiving them.
Where the moralising wing of the Republican Party and live-and-let-live libertarian strain coalesce is foreign policy. There's no difference between the pair on Afghanistan and Iraq - except, possibly, that Hollywood he-man might have gone in even harder.
He'll never get to make those decisions, since the accident of having been born in Austria precludes the self-made embodiment of the American Dream from ever becoming president. But in California, there can be no doubt. As at any of Hollywood's meet-the-stars strokefests, the press stuck to the script in insisting that Schwarzenegger was pulling a publicity stunt to hype Terminator 3. The commentators were wrong not to take him seriously, and they will compound the error if they persist in seeing him as a political lightweight. Arnie is the rootin' Teuton real thing.
© 2003 The Sunday Age