Halo, shot while peeking through the stage curtain of San Francisco’s California Hall, is now in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1975 Max Aguilera-Hellweg/TASCHEN Dian Hanson has spent much of her career looking at naked bodies. Even by her standards, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a big job.
The longtime Taschen editor and former adult media editor — she got her start in the 1970s at fetish magazines like Oui, Biker and Leg Show — spent 11 years assembling Arnold, an obsessively complete photographic account of the bodybuilder, movie star, California governor, animal keeper and enthusiastic owner of cowboy boots.
Originally released as a $2,500 signed collector’s edition, the book is now available in a relatively populist $150 version that weighs 9.5 pounds and runs 528 pages. It includes photographs by master photographers like Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, Francesco Scavullo and Andy Warhol, as well as bodybuilding shots, movie stills and images excavated from Schwarzenegger’s private archive.
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Capitello/TASCHEN The project began shortly after Schwarzenegger left the governor’s office in early 2011. He initially put Taschen off for a year while completing his 2012 autobiography, Total Recall. After that, Hanson says, he was an extremely willing participant.
“Arnold loves to see himself,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter, “so he was happy to do it.”
Hanson conducted her interviews at Schwarzenegger’s 14,500-square-foot Los Angeles home, although she rarely found him making use of its more palatial spaces. He spends most of his time in the kitchen or beside the adjacent fire pit, where he can smoke cigars and leave the doors open for his miniature horse, miniature donkey, miniature pig and dogs to wander inside.
“He’s very rustic for all of his fame,” Hanson says. “He gets up in the morning and goes out there and cleans their stalls and brushes them and feeds them. He stays rooted in this kind of rural past that he had.”
Photographer Unknown/TASCHEN During those sessions, Hanson learned that Schwarzenegger enjoys turning interviews into one-man shows. He likes pranks, turns nearly everything into a joke and leaps out of his chair to march around the room, supplying his stories with gestures, character voices and sound effects. His specialty, apparently, is an uncannily accurate impression of someone eating potato chips.
“I don’t know how he does it,” she says. “But he’s a tremendous entertainer.”
She also learned why Schwarzenegger seems constitutionally incapable of buying a single pair of cowboy boots.
Growing up poor in Austria, Hanson says, he rarely received anything new. At Christmas, his older brother would get one new toy and Arnold would inherit the previous year’s toy, by then frequently broken. Success did not erase the deprivation so much as give him the means to overcorrect for it.
Jimmy Caruso/TASCHEN “When he buys a pair of cowboy boots, he has to have 10 pairs of cowboy boots because he never had anything,” Hanson says.
The same instinct made him a remarkably useful subject for a photographic biography. On every movie, Schwarzenegger requested a copy of every production photograph taken. He also had his contracts written so he could keep important props. His offices consequently resemble a storage facility for extremely expensive Halloween decorations, populated by assorted Terminators, the Predator and Mr. Freeze.
“Because I am a completist, I wanted to see absolutely everything that existed,” Hanson says.
Schwarzenegger’s archivist provided her with thousands of digitized images. His collection also included hundreds of photographs by bodybuilding photographer Artie Zeller, who documented Schwarzenegger from the beginning of his American career. Once the blockbuster 1977 doc Pumping Iron turned him into an international curiosity, eminent photographers began lining up for their own piece of him.
The hardest pictures to obtain came from a nude sitting with Scavullo. Hanson had seen the one image published in Playgirl, in which Schwarzenegger was naked but strategically positioned, and immediately suspected there must be more.
“This can’t be the only picture,” she remembers thinking. “There have to be other pictures.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger posing, 1974. Jimmy Caruso; 1996-98 AccuSoft Inc., All rights reserved./TASCHEN Scavullo was dead, however, and nobody seemed eager to help her. Hanson tracked down an old boyfriend, then members of the photographer’s family, before finally reaching the accountant who had somehow ended up with Scavullo’s archive. He told her the pictures might be inside a New York storage unit.
Hanson flew across the country and discovered a room she describes as “the size of 10 New York apartments,” packed with file cabinets and no obvious system for finding Schwarzenegger.
“I said, ‘Well, where do you think it is?'” she recalls. “And he said, ‘I don’t know. We’re just going to have to start looking.'”
They spent the day opening drawers. The Schwarzenegger file was close to the end.
“There they were,” Hanson says. “Black-and-white, color, all different poses.”
Albert Busek/TASCHEN Also inside was a letter Schwarzenegger had sent after the Playgirl publication declaring that the photographs could not be used anywhere. The pictures had effectively disappeared. Hanson now needed to return to the man who had forbidden their publication and ask him to un-forbid them. He did.
As Schwarzenegger explained it to Hanson, Austrians and bodybuilders are both comfortable with nudity. He had spent years creating a body in which every muscle had been developed according to his vision of perfection. Having accomplished that, he saw little reason to be shy about the results.
“He was happy for people to look at it,” Hanson says.
Schwarzenegger in Munich, Germany, 1967. Rolf Hayo/REX USA/TASCHEN The photographs help explain something Hanson found more difficult to put into words: Schwarzenegger’s peculiar physical charisma. She compares it to the effect created by Vanessa del Rio, the adult-film star Hanson encountered during her years editing men’s magazines in New York.
Del Rio, she says, seemed to generate an “electrical field” that caused a disturbance whenever she entered a room. She could be walking down the street in sweatpants without makeup and strangers would still gravitate toward her. Schwarzenegger possesses the same natural force.
“You cannot study it, you can’t learn it, you can’t pay for it,” Hanson says. “It is a natural disturbance in their own personal electrical system that draws other people to them. ”
Hanson struggled to define the source of his magnetism, eventually landing on his eyes. Their whites seem unusually white, she says, while his gaze possesses a kind of “laser focus.” One person she interviewed called Schwarzenegger one of the two best listeners he had ever met. The other was Bill Clinton.
There is a photograph in Arnold showing the two men at a dinner, staring with extraordinary concentration at something outside the frame. Hanson asked Schwarzenegger what had commanded their attention.
“Oh, we were talking about getting food for the poor,” he told her.
Then he laughed.
“No, we were looking at a woman.”
“We were looking at a woman,” Schwarzenegger confessed when asked what he and President Bill Clinton were staring at in this photo. Justin Short/TASCHEN For all the celebration of The Terminator, Predator and Total Recall, the movie Schwarzenegger discusses with particular affection is Kindergarten Cop. After Twins, he was eager to prove he had a comic personality and was more than a collection of muscles carrying a machine gun. Maria Shriver was pregnant with their eldest daughter during production, and Schwarzenegger, who had not spent much time around small children, became fascinated by his 5-year-old co-stars.
“When they would have breaks, he would stay and play with the kids while everyone else was off in their trailers relaxing,” Hanson says. “He found out that he really enjoyed children and enjoyed teaching them things.”
That discovery complemented a change Schwarzenegger said had begun years earlier. As a young bodybuilder, he was unapologetically self-interested, focused on escaping poverty and conquering whatever field he entered. Then the University of Wisconsin-Superior invited him to help teach weight training to people with intellectual disabilities.
After spending a day encouraging the students, Schwarzenegger returned to his hotel feeling strangely euphoric. The sensation confused him because the appearance had done nothing to make him richer, more famous or more successful.
Eventually, he understood that helping other people simply made him feel good.
Hanson says that realization led to his support of after-school programs and a decades-long tradition of buying and distributing Thanksgiving turkeys at the Hollenbeck Youth Center in Boyle Heights. Ironically, those charitable activities presented some of her most difficult research problems.
“He doesn’t alert the press,” she says. “I had so much trouble trying to find pictures of him doing these things.”
Finding unpublished pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger feeding poor families proved harder than finding unpublished pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger naked. After 11 years on the case, Dian Hanson eventually managed both.
Artie Zeller/Courtesy Weider Health and Fitness/TASCHEN THR Newsletters
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