In the seventies, the photographer George Butler and a collaborator, the journalist Charles Gaines, looking for as yet uncovered subcultures to document for the magazine-reading public, began hanging around with bodybuilders. At the time, the sport was widely denigrated, considered an extreme and unsavory activity for homosexuals and freaks. Butler, who died in October, 2021, worked with Gaines to make the case for bodybuilding as an underappreciated art form—one that incorporates elements of classical sculpture and dance.
Butler and Gaines’s journalistic coverage of the world of bodybuilding led to the 1974 photo book “Pumping Iron” and a 1977 documentary of the same name, both of which document the sport’s strange and endearing main characters: among others, there is Mike Katz, a gentle teacher and father with an air of diffident sadness that bullies find irresistible; Franco Columbu, a docile, but self-assured, former boxing champion from a tiny Italian village and the best bodybuilder under two hundred pounds; and Lou Ferrigno, who would go on to play the Incredible Hulk on TV—a massive and slightly bewildered up-and-comer, shepherded through training and competitions by his overbearing father. But even the most intimidating among them become deferential in the presence of the film’s charismatic breakout star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who won the sport’s highest competition, Mr. Olympia, seven times, through some combination of his immaculate physique and the spectacularly ruthless mind games he plays with the other contestants. Years before his Hollywood career, his celebrity seems predetermined: he radiates an almost terrifying confidence, and it’s clear that he experiences every aspect of his labor as unfettered joy. (In one notorious scene, he describes the feeling he gets from each pump of his muscle as akin to orgasm.)
In the course of making the “Pumping Iron” book and documentary, Butler and Schwarzenegger formed a more enduring friendship and working relationship, and Butler eventually decided to turn his photos of the young and relatively unvarnished Schwarzenegger into the book “Arnold Schwarzenegger: A Portrait,” published in 1990. As a hulking figure who dedicates his life to testing the limits of the human body and will, he has obvious appeal as a subject. In Butler’s images of Schwarzenegger, who was considered among bodybuilders to have not only the best physique but the best style of posing, there is no shortage of gorgeous studies of the ripples and striations of his muscles and the elegant composition of his form. Shots of his face in frenzy, as he lifts the maximum weight his body can handle, tell a gratifying story of pure exertion. But Butler is equally attuned to the uncanniness of how Schwarzenegger moves through the world, a towering figure of boundless energy and impish self-regard. He looks totally unashamed as he approaches two old women on a park bench, wearing only a pair of bodybuilding briefs, and flexes his arm for their inspection.
At the beginning of the book, Butler explains that, when he met up with Schwarzenegger to ask permission to assemble the collection, Schwarzenegger, by that point one of the most famous and highly compensated actors in the world, puzzled at why Butler had not, since they had first met, made more of an effort to become rich. As Butler describes in the text of the book, Schwarzenegger—a quintessentially American figure fated to become the Republican governor of California—equates wealth and self-actualization, and is perpetually scheming about where to make his next buck. One of Butler’s most vivid anecdotes is one in which Schwarzenegger, after a world-championship victory, told newspapers based in Graz and Vienna that his consumption of bull testicles had helped him win and, in anticipation of the demand that this would create, arranged to receive from the bull-testicle industry in Austria a cut of its increased profits. (A representative for Schwarzenegger disputed this account.) Schwarzenegger, always moving forward, was not particularly attached to his memories from the era and didn’t understand what was so interesting about the parts of his past before he was fully formed. “These photos are not me,” he said.
The pictures’ rawness and intimacy, which may account for Schwarzenegger’s reticence around publishing the book, are, of course, what make them compelling. Butler spent enough time with Schwarzenegger to be taken on a trip to Austria, his home country, where they spent a week in Vienna visiting the finest shops and restaurants and being driven around in luxury cars. When it was time to drive to his childhood home in the mountains outside of Graz, Schwarzenegger pulled up to their hotel in an old Volkswagen sedan—a surprising signal of humility. A picture in which Schwarzenegger’s mother leans against him, the pair enveloped in the branches of a tree, captures a rare moment where his bluster retreats. Butler’s immersion in the athlete’s life also made possible a photo, caught spontaneously with one hand as they walked to the beach together, that Butler rightly describes as one of his best: Schwarzenegger’s hands, in shadow, press against a boulder, and we see the craggy contours of his back lit up with sunlight, each muscle in a state of lucid aliveness.
Despite Schwarzenegger’s desire to distance himself from his “Pumping Iron” days, Butler and Gaines’s storytelling clearly played a part in helping him cultivate his own image. When they first began working together, Gaines asked Schwarzenegger if it had ever occurred to him that his body was like a classical sculpture. In his ten years of bodybuilding, he said, it had not, but he was delighted by the idea and began incorporating a spiel about his body as a sculpture into interviews, including during a bodybuilding event that Butler and Gaines arranged at the Whitney, in an effort to convince museumgoers (and potential funders of their documentary) that bodybuilding was highbrow enough to warrant their attention. “New angles on his own career always appealed to him,” Butler writes. In one of Butler’s photographs, Schwarzenegger studies with a ballerina to smooth the transitions between his poses, and both his childlike curiosity and his rigorous attention to aesthetic detail are apparent as he watches her adjust his arm. After Butler’s passing last year, Schwarzenegger released a statement praising him for having “brought fitness—and this Austrian with an unpronounceable name and a funny accent—to the masses.”
In the most memorable scene in the “Pumping Iron” documentary, Schwarzenegger tells a story about the intensity of his devotion to bodybuilding. “If you want to be a champion,” he says, “you cannot have any kind of an outside force coming in and affect you.” He explains that once, two months before an event, a crucial time for preparation, his mother called to tell him that his father had just died. Without hesitation, he says, he told her that he would not travel to attend the funeral: “I said, ‘No, it’s too late,’ you know, ‘he’s dead. There’s nothing to be done.’ ” In the arc of the documentary, it’s a satisfying culmination of his characterization that complicates the temptation to see the baby-faced Schwarzenegger as guileless: undergirding his poise, there is something calculating and a little inhuman.
But, according to Butler’s account in “Arnold Schwarzenegger: A Portrait,” the story isn’t true. When the scene was shot, Schwarzenegger had recently heard Butler tell a story about a boxer at the Olympics who, when his father died during the Games, had to choose between flying home and competing for the gold medal. He stayed to fight and won, and was applauded for his decision. Schwarzenegger loved this story and said that he would have done the same thing, so he wove it into his self-mythology, just as he absorbed Butler and Gaines’s grandiose rhetoric about bodybuilding as art. (One aspect of the story does echo reality: when his father died, Schwarzenegger was on vacation in Mexico after an exhibition, unreachable by phone, and, by the time he got home and heard the news, his father had been buried. He immediately flew to his mother to comfort her.) Schwarzenegger’s fabrication of the anecdote reveals more about him than if the story had been real. Like the hint of bitterness that keeps Coca-Cola from being cloying, Schwarzenegger’s brutality is part of his verve. In that moment, at least, Schwarzenegger intuited that to be an enduringly compelling figure, he needed to go further than mere perfection.
An earlier version of this article included erroneous details in two photo captions.
