My landlord the Terminator
By Denis Hamill
New York Daily News
September 2, 2003
Here's why, if I were still living in L.A., I might vote for Arnold.
In 1978, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner hired me to write a column.
The transition from Brooklyn to L.A. was difficult. I got my first driver's license at 26, and leased a duplex in a five-unit complex at 1108 19th St. in Santa Monica.
"The owner is a famous bodybuilder," the Realtor said, adding that this ape-shape lived in a unit a few doors away from mine. He mentioned the guy's name, and a documentary called "Pumping Iron." I half-listened. Since I had trained most of my post-draft-card days in Brooklyn saloons, I wasn't impressed by some Austrian weightlifter.
A few days after moving in, I went out to get my mail. Some letters in my box were for a guy with a last name longer than a suspension bridge. I knocked on Apt. 1. The door opened. And King Kong answered.
"You're dee new guy in numper five, hah?" Arnold Schwarzenegger said.
I introduced myself. I gave him his mail and looked into his pad, which was covered in art. He shook my hand, and said, "T'anks, Hamill." My fingers crackled like breadsticks. "You talk funny," he said, laughing at my Brooklyn accent.
Later, my now ex-wife asked: "What's he like?"
I said, "I wouldn't wanna be late with the rent."
After that, Arnold and I never became pals, but we'd often gab at the mailbox or the carport. He said he was an actor, that he promoted muscleman shows, did commentary, had a book out, and "Pumping Iron." I made him for a half-fast celebrity, but in Brooklyn we'd call him "good people."
"In life, you haf to haf a dream," Arnold told me. As has been reported elsewhere of late, yes, Arnold was a practicing heterosexual. Hey, you have a body like a temple, you attract worshipers. He threw these great parties, glistening with muscle mooks and überbabes from nearby Muscle Beach. I was never invited. (Maybe because I looked too much like their "before" pictures.) In addition to my regular column, I wrote a weekly saloon column. I told Arnold that I'd like to borrow his body for a few days to kick some butt in some of the rowdier saloons. He laughed, and roared off in a sports car to the gym or an audition, or a business deal, working, always working, chasing his American Dream.
Another time, I suggested he train me and turn this Brooklyn slouch into a California hunk, and I'd chronicle it in the Herald. (Where, coincidentally, I worked with a young reporter named Bobby Shriver, who hung around with Arnold and eventually would become his brother-in-law.) "First, you must stop vit the drinkink so much, Hamill," Arnold said. It would be 14 more years before I took Arnold's very good advice.
But back then, Arnold also got a kick out of the way I parked my car. New dents every week. "I call it on-the-job training," I said.
"I call it drunk drifing," Arnold said.
One day, when my car wouldn't start, I yelled, "Yo, Arnold, you think you can carry my Mustang down to the garage to get it fixed?"
"Get the drifer fixed," Arnold said, laughing, always laughing.
Here was a guy, an immigrant who had arrived 10 years earlier with nothing but a funny name, a set of muscles and a dopey dream. He worked his granite butt off in the gym until he was a Michelangelo, winning competitions, negotiating movie and book deals, acquiring real estate and fine art. Then, with "Pumping Iron" a big hit, his book a best seller and dating a Kennedy, this big, smart, amiable, funny guy bench-pressed himself into the stars. Luck had nothing to do with it. Like most immigrants, Arnold found the American Dream not at the end of a rainbow but at the end of a sweaty day's work.
We knew each other for maybe five months. Then I moved. We lost touch. But I ran into him a few times over the years, up in Elaine's or Planet Hollywood, and he's the kind of guy who remembers your name, gives you the same smile, same atomic handshake he gave you 25 years ago when he was still just a guy with a funny accent, funny name and an even sillier dream of stardom.
Wins on strength of work ethic
My politics are different from Arnold's. He might need more gym work on the issues. He'll need a spotter to help work the complicated universal machines of government.
But one thing I know - the Arnold Schwarzenegger I knew when I was a displaced Brooklynite in L.A. just as his star began to sparkle was "good people" who will give the citizens an honest, sweaty day's work. Which is more than you can say for most of the dumbbells we have running things now.
