Thursday, May 19, 2011

An Encyclopedia of Every Other Awful Thing Arnold Schwarzenegger Has Done

By John Cook

An Encyclopedia of Every Other Awful Thing Arnold Schwarzenegger Has Done

While we're busy contemplating what an awful human being Arnold Schwarzenegger is for fathering a child out of wedlock and lying to his wife about it for 14 years, let's not forget all the other horrible things about America's favorite gay-porn-modeling, serial lady-groping, Nazi politician/statutory rapist.

Taken in context, Schwarzenegger's secret family on the side—the one he admitted to, at least—is one of his more charming attributes. Here's a brief survey of the foul swamp of rumor and reporting that has dogged him for decades and that he was somehow able to overcome and suppress on the way to two terms as governor of California.

Arnold Schwarzenegger Was a Nazi

An Encyclopedia of Every Other Awful Thing Arnold Schwarzenegger Has Done Well, his father was a Nazi. Arnold just liked Nazis. Though Arnold described his Austrian father Gustav Schwarzenegger in the 1970s as a "local police chief" in who "led a very regular life," Gustav was in fact a member of the Nazi Party who served in the Sturmabteilungen, or brownshirts—the party's paramilitary force. He later served in the German Army after war broke out, according to the Los Angeles Times, "in theaters of the war where atrocities were committed by the army." (There's no evidence that Gustav himself participated in any of those atrocities.)

But you can't pick your father, right? No, you can't. But you can pick your friends, and Schwarzenegger counted disgraced former Nazi and Austrian leader Kurt Waldheim as one long after Waldheim's past became known. At his wedding reception in 1986, of all places—months after allegations that Waldheim had served in German intelligence and had been aware of war crimes committed by the German Army in Greece had surfaced—Schwarzenegger raised a toast to his friend dismissing the "recent Nazi stuff" and saying "I love him and Maria does too, and so thank you, Kurt." He later went to Austria to visit Waldheim and sat next to him at a political event there in 1998. Schwarzenegger would eventually disavow Waldheim during his gubernatorial run, saying in 2003 through a spokesman that if he'd known about Waldheim's Nazi past—which he did, since he talked about the "Nazi stuff"—he wouldn't have offered the wedding toast.

So he liked one little Nazi. What's the harm in that? He also liked another big Nazi, if Spy magazine's monumental 1992 takedown is to be believed: "In the 1970s, he enjoyed playing and giving away copies of Hitler's speeches."

Arnold Schwarzenegger Was a Gay Porn Model

This isn't strictly horrible unless you later present yourself, as Schwarzenegger did, as a paragon of wholesome, masculine, Republican uprightness and veto two gay marriage bills. In 1977, he sat for an interview and 22-page nude photo spread for the gay magazine After Dark. (The issue Schwarzenegger modeled for also featured Ginger Rogers and Diana Ross. Click on the photo at right for the NSFW version.)

He also sat for Robert Mapplethorpe, and was given to more up-close-and-personal modeling: Spy reported that in 1975 he enjoyed a weekend visit to the estate of Spanish millionaire and gay playboy Paco Arce Gomez. Arce, a photographer himself, snapped some private photos of Schwarzenegger, including one where a stack of Playgirl magazines could be spotted in the background. Schwarzenegger's biographer Wendy Leigh told Radar that Schwarzenegger also sought out the affections of wealthy gay British patron John Dixey, a "well-known aficionado of muscle boys" who "was very, very kind to Arnold" in the late 1960s. "You have to understand," Leigh told Radar, "before Arnold came on the scene, it was common currency that bodybuilders were less than macho—it was absolutely given and accepted that they supported themselves by catering to the tastes of wealthy gay men." That's a sentiment Schwarzenegger seemed to echo in a 1977 interview with the hardcore porn rag Oui: "I have absolutely no hang-ups about the fag business."

Arnold Schwarzenegger Enjoys Group Sex

An Encyclopedia of Every Other Awful Thing Arnold Schwarzenegger Has Done

In that same Oui interview, Schwarzenegger told the story of the time a "black girl" showed up naked at Gold's Gym in Venice and got gang-banged by him and his pals: "Bodybuilders party a lot, and once, in Gold's—the gym in Venice, California, where all the top guys train—there was a black girl who came out naked. Everybody jumped on her and took her upstairs, where we all got together. [N]ot everybody, just the guys who can fuck in front of other guys. Not everybody can do that. Some think that they don't have a big-enough cock, so they can't get a hard-on." On a more admirable note, in the same interview, Schwarzenegger indicated that his need for instant, anonymous sex transcends any body issues: "I can look at a chick who's a little out of shape and if she turns me on, I won't hesitate to date her. If she's a good fuck, she can weigh 150 pounds, I don't care." That may explain a few things about his latest baby mama.

Arnold Schwarzenegger Is a Statutory Rapist

Gigi Goyette, the melodically named former actress who was identified in multiple outlets as having carried on an affair with Schwarzenegger for roughly a decade in the 1990s and after, says she first met—and had sex with—Schwarzenegger when she was a 16-year-old actress in Little House on the Prairie. Schwarzenegger was 28 at the time; the couple later reconnected for their long-term affair. If the first assignation took place in California, where both parties lived at the time, then it was a crime: The age of consent in California is and was 18.

Arnold Schwarzenegger Gets High on Drugs and Steroids

An Encyclopedia of Every Other Awful Thing Arnold Schwarzenegger Has Done Schwarzenegger has candidly acknowledged smoking marijuana. He kind of had to, since there's film of him doing it. He also told Oui in 1977 that he's into "grass and hash" because "I do what I feel like doing." All of which explains why he told Playboy in 1987 that he'd never taken recreational drugs, ever: "Never in my entire life." Schwarzenegger definitely felt like doing steroids in the '70s, for which he has offered no apologies: "I have no regrets about it, because at that time, it was something new that came on the market." It's unclear whether the propensity for long-term anabolic steroid use to damage heart tissue played any role in the surgery Schwarzenegger underwent in 1997 to replace three of his heart valves with replacements from a pig.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Nipple-Tweaking, Ass-Grabbing, Anus-Licking Maniac

An Encyclopedia of Every Other Awful Thing Arnold Schwarzenegger Has Done The stories are legion. In 2000, according to Premiere, after British journalist Anne Richardson interviewed him, he "tweaked her nipple" in an attempt to determine whether her breasts were real. During the filming of Terminator 2 in 1991, he abruptly lifted his co-star Linda Hamilton—who was dating director James Cameron at the time—on to his lap during a limo ride with Cameron in the car "and began fondling her breasts through the very thin top she was wearing." In 1975, according to the Los Angeles Times, he sneaked up behind a 19-year-old girl sitting on a workout bench, "reached under her T-shirt and touched her bare left breast." In 1980, he saw an acquaintance on the street, called her over to his car, and "grabbed and squeezed" her breast. On the set of T2, he asked a female crew member, "Have you ever had a man slide his tongue in your [anus]?" In the late 1980s, he told a waitress, "I want you to go in the bathroom, stick your finger in your [vagina], and bring it out to me." None of this counted as cheating on Shriver, however. According to Spy, Schwarzenegger plays Clinton rules: "It's not cheating. It's only a plo-job."