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ARNOLD'S POLITICS, PLANES, FILMS & EGGS! New Interview, political ambitions, films and more! Reported By: UK Times Wednesday, October 2, 2002 Reported by the UK Times: What is Arnold Schwarzenegger doing at a private investment conference in the home counties? Wearing a suit and selling timeshares. And there's still time for him to muscle in on US politics. He has flown to a mansion in the Home Counties for a private investment conference lavishly convened by Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and America¹s second richest citizen. Arnie wishes, I am told, to talk about two things. The first is his political ambitions in California, where momentum is growing for him to follow Ronald Reagan's lead and run for Governor. The other, I fear, is a timeshare airline called NetJets, which Buffett bought in 1998. NetJets' proposition is: why buy a whole airplane when you can more cheaply buy a bit of one? Arnie is one of the company's most enthusiastic customers but even he must appreciate the topic is a hard sell to the general, air-mile-scrimping reader. A 200-hours-a-year slice of a bottom-of-the-range Gulfstream still costs nearly $5 million. Various men in suits wait, like autograph hunters in Leicester Square, for the Last Action Hero to emerge from Buckinghamshire's morning mist. One of them is me. A model aircraft is placed on a table next to where he is predicted to sit. I am warned that Warren Buffett will interrupt our interview and be photographed beside Arnie at 8.45am. This too is part of the "deal". When the movie star finally makes his entrance, quietly, from a corridor, it is an anticlimax. He is, as Charlton Heston used to say of himself, a beautiful man, finely featured above his bull-neck and, of course, at 6ft 2in and 15 stone, imposing. But he is wearing business grey today, and it is not until he whips off his jacket and reveals the outline of a chest shaped like a giant egg carton that you appreciate what Clive James meant when he unimprovably compared him to a condom filled with walnuts. But with his jacket on, only the rings on his fingers, as chunky as the squares of a Yorkie bar, and a gold watch, as heavy as Kryptonite, suggest the weight of his wealth, his fame and his ego. He doesn't sit where, for purposes of our picture, we suggest. He prefers to sit nearer the log fire. He orders scrambled eggs, toast and coffee. Now, I taunt gently, I would have thought a guy like him would have his own plane. "I did," he says. "I had a plane, I think, approximately from 1990 to 1998." This would be right, for he took his $12 million fee for Terminator 2 in the form of a jet. But it turned out to be a hassle. Pilots came into the cabin demanding vacations. Flight attendants asked for maternity leave. They'd land somewhere after ten hours' flying and the crew would need to sleep. While he was waiting for his next jet to be delivered, he signed up with NetJets and found he liked its service so much that he cancelled his order. But wasn't it a loss of face among the Hollywood set? Didn¹t Sly Stallone say: "I've still got my plane"? "Well," he admits, "that was a concern of mine in the beginning." But he realised if he could only take his "ego out of the thing", then no one would ever again trouble him for sick leave mid-Atlantic and he would have millions of dollars to invest rather than watch it sit rusting in hangars. But what of his political ambitions? Are they about to take off? In California the incumbent Governor, Gray Davis, a Democrat with a reputation for incompetence, is facing a challenge from a Republican investment banker with a reputation for scandal. People are so desperate for an alternative that there is a movement afoot to "write in" Arnie's name on the ballot sheet, although, as he says solemnly, they need to learn how to spell it first. Has he ruled out running for Governor in November? "Excuse me," he hails a passing maid, "could I have my coffee and some scrambled eggs? Thank you very much. No, I haven't ruled out anything but I do not think about it because, basically, I have a proposition up on polling day." Elections in America contain referenda on scores of different propositions. His, Proposition 49, would increase funding for after-school programmes in California by $465 million in the hope that, engaged in sports and clubs, children will turn away from drugs and gangs. Schwarzenegger, with Maria Shriver, his wife of 16 years (and Ted Kennedy's niece), have personally contributed $1 million to the campaign. But the mission is to get the proposition passed, not to get Arnie into office, at least not this time around. The Davis camp is neverthleless rattled and is blamed for distributing copies of an article from Premiere magazine last year that claimed Schwarzenegger flirts with female interviewers and squeezed a breast during a junket in London. The next month the magazine printed contrary testimonials from women who had worked with him. Jamie Lee Curtis, his True Lies co-star, for instance, dismissed the allegations as "a politically motivated hatchet job". His eggs arrive quivering on their silver tray. "What the opposition party did is Xerox copies and send them to some of the political writers and, hey, why not? If they are worried about you running, why wouldn't you do that? So that's part of the politics. Remember for every attack there's a defence. As we say, if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen." But it must still hurt? "If you want to be a public figure in entertainment or if you want to raise issues, then that's what happens. It maybe is unpleasant, but that's just the way it is. It's not pleasant to train five hours a day for Mr Universe. A lot of people don't do it because it's so unpleasant." Schwarzenegger's story, from body-building champion in Stuttgart to Hollywood star, exemplifies the theory of gain through pain. The prequel began in 1947 in some poverty in a village outside Graz in Austria. His late father, a policeman and champion ice curler, was a disciplinarian who put his sons through a daily exercise regime. But it was his mother, who died four years ago, who enforced his homework regime. "She'd whack me over the head with a yard stick. I was terrified." But he is grateful now. "You have to look at the child's brain as an empty bucket. Someone is going to fill it. As a parent you put some good moral values there, discipline and education, or it could be something else. Something will fill it." People might say his gratuitously violent movies fill the buckets with precisely the wrong things. "But I am very lucky because they give me the opportunity, when the kids admire my movies, to go out and talk to them and teach them what the reality is: how much they have to study, how much they have to stay in school, how they have to do sports and make their body fit and their mind fit." From outside comes the grass-churning beat of a helicopter landing. Against the thunder, Arnie delivers his keynote, log-cabin-to-Governor¹s-mansion, address. "The bottom line of it is that because I had someone there at home all the time and because someone supported me and said, OYou will make it, you're great, it helped me and gave me the self-esteem and inner strength to make me feel like I would make it in life. Even though I went to America with no money, I felt I'm going to conquer the world". I had that fire in me, that will in me, that drive in me, that said, OI¹m going to be the world champion in bodybuilding. I¹m going to work my way up in showbusiness." My big goal always was to be another John Wayne or Kirk Douglas, my idols as a kid. I said, "One day I will make it." So he landed in the land of opportunity harbouring the discipline of an old-fashioned European childhood? "Yeah. I had the discipline and I had the support and the family foundation. I think what makes me interested in after-school programmes is because when I look in a lot of kids' eyes in America I don't see the will. I don't see the fire." An eccentrically tall and scuffed old guy in a sports coat enters: the helicopter's passenger, presumably. "Here's the man!" he greets Arnie. NetJets has a great spokesman here, I say, mistaking him for Buffett, but he turns out to be Paul Volcker. Yet Volcker, supposedly here for the conference, also wants to be photographed next to the former Mr Universe. "The last time I had a picture taken it was with Martha Stewart and you saw what happened to her," he jokes. The former Chairman of the American Federal Reserve gets his picture. Buffett, it later transpires, has forgotten all about it. When Schwarzenegger returns, he sits where the photographer suggested in the first place. As lovingly as a QVC presenter, he toys with the model plane in his giant's hands: "Look ad de pow-ah ovit! The power to take you round the world!" Arnold talks T3. "We had a fantastic script. We had a great director. We have a fantastic film with really epic proportions and the chance of utilising all the latest visual effects. So I think that we will have a good chance of it to look really good and to have a great impact next year when it comes out," he says. But what if it's released in the middle of a war with Iraq (a war, incidentally, that he has yet to be convinced is justified)? Will it not then suffer the indifference and hostility that greeted his last action movie, Collateral Damage, released five months after September 11? "Well, that's not my way of thinking. I don't go around saying, 'What if, what if?' Because you're wasting your time. You have to think about it the other way. You have to say, 'We're going to win our proposition in November. Terminator 3, when it comes out, will go through the roof and make millions of dollars and people will love it'." They say he visualised his body before he had it. "Yeah. Exactly. Very good with visualising, I always see things in front of me and then I make that vision turn into reality." But can he see where his career's going? "Yeah, right now I see very clearly every kid in California having an after-school programme. I see the impact that I can have and how many people I can help with my energy and with my vision." Which brings me to the question I wanted to ask all along. What happens to an action hero when he's 60? "I don't know. I'll let you know. I'm not there yet." Surely the action hero becomes Governor of California? "I haven't been there yet, so I really don't know." But I wouldn't be surprised, and I wouldn't be surprised either if he turned out to be a wise one. His career may have wobbled, his ego may have have slightly detumesced. But his vision, his vision thing, as Dubya's dad would say - is as steady and heroic as ever. ---------- |