Clipped from a New Yorker article on Mr. Schwarzenegger (thanks to a tip from Patrick Hayden)
In the Pumping Iron series, which chronicles events leading up to and including the Mr. Olympia contest of 1975, there are intimations that Schwarzeneggers ultimate goal, absurd as it would have seemed at the time, was power. I was always dreaming about very powerful peopledictators and things like that, he soliloquizes at one point in the original film. I was just always impressed by people who could be remembered for hundreds of years or even, like Jesus, being for thousands of years remembered. In Raw Iron, he recounts another dream: Me being a king and standing on top of a mountainand there was no room left for anybody else up there, O.K.? Just for me. Later, a fellow-bodybuilder teases, Arnold, when are you running for President? He shoots back, When Nixon gets impeached. And in A Portrait Butler recounts a conversation he had in a taxi with the actress Candice Bergen a few months after the Whitney show. Bergen is insisting that bodybuilding, and Arnold, has peaked. I disagree, Butler replies. Its here to stay, and Arnold is going to be the Governor of California one day. (Bergen, hooting with laughter, retorts, And one day Ronald Reagan will be President.)
All Hail King Schwarzenegger!