Rabbit Run

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Malibu, California, 1988. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

I first worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1975, when he was competing in the Mr. Olympia bodybuilding contest in South Africa. Arnold was 28. He’d already been Mr. Olympia five times and he was about to retire from bodybuilding. He wanted to get into films. The 1975 Mr. Olympia contest was the basis for George Butler’s documentary Pumping Iron, the movie that popularized bodybuilding and introduced Arnold to a wider audience. Butler was a friend of Jann Wenner’s. I don’t remember exactly, but I assume that my trip to South Africa was what is now known as a press junket. I can’t imagine that Rolling Stone would have paid for it. I do remember that Butler was always filming when I was trying to work.

Arnold is the center of Pumping Iron in every way. In terms of the narrative of the preparation for the contest, he is the guy everybody else has to beat, which they pretty much know they can’t. As a character, he is aggressively, if charmingly, self-confident. Witty. Intelligent. Full of himself. He somehow makes what is a rather freakish scene seem almost normal, although it never seemed normal to me. Steroids were legal then. I had just spent several weeks on tour with the Rolling Stones, where Mick Jagger was the male sexual ideal. Being around all those super-pumped-up guys made me feel like Diane Arbus. It didn’t help that we were in South Africa, which still had apartheid. There were separate bathrooms for blacks and whites. It was an uncomfortable situation.

Arnold was sharing a room with his friend Franco Columbu, who came in second in the final posedown. Arnold and Franco were very competitive and brotherly and I decided that I wanted to photograph them in bed. I had in mind something that was, in retrospect, along the lines of Bruce Weber. The magazine used one of the photographs of them horsing around. Standing on their heads on their pillows. It was more silly than erotic. They had their underpants on for that shot, but Arnold was also walking around naked that morning. Like most models or athletes who love their bodies, Arnold didn’t mind being naked.

Two years later, when I had to photograph Dolly Parton and needed an interesting background, I asked Arnold to pose with her. She was a much bigger star than he was. Most people had never heard of him then. I was thinking of chopping off his head in the frame, but it became a moot point because Dolly kept standing in front of him and blocking him out of the picture. In the portrait, all you can see of him are his flexed arms and legs. He’s furniture.

In Pumping Iron, Arnold says, “I was always dreaming about very powerful people, dictators and things like that. 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.” Ten years later he was the Terminator. I shot him for the Vanity Fair Hall of Fame in 1988. We were shooting on the beach, and he said he had a horse, and I said, Well, bring it along, not thinking much about it. I couldn’t believe it when the horse showed up. It looked like Arnold. Arnold’s thigh in those white pants looks like the horse’s thigh. It was not a picture that I liked right away, because it is primarily about form and I’m reluctant to have form impose the meaning on a picture. But in Arnold’s case, form is also content.