Copyright October 2003
“It’s
up to God now,” Arnold Schwarzenegger said as he cast his ballot in California’s
hotly contested gubernatorial recall. “We’ve worked hard, very hard, and gotten
the message out. Now it’s up to God.”
Those
of us fans who’ve watched his career through the years know that he meant every
word, and that he’d probably just said the same thing to his kids around the
breakfast table. Of course, anyone who could make it through the scrutiny of the
whole Kennedy Clan and marry Maria Shriver, herself a renowned journalist and
author of Christian children’s books, is A—O.K. to us.
More
than that, though, we know that movie scriptwriters face hundreds of possibilities
in how their words are delivered by the live actors who bring the characters to
the screen. The soul of the actor invariably come through. In True Lies, for instance, where the spy
loves his wife so devotedly, and in Kindergarten
Cop where his rapport with children is so evident, the real Schwarzenegger
shines through the star at work.
Schwarzenegger
has also been a good sport about playing the Terminator. Whether or not we want to admit it, cinema research
shows that American audiences still think the “heavy” is more believable with a
German accent. The situation is still worse in France, where French families
don’t usually want their kids to learn the German language, in spite of the
fact that it would make trade with a neighbor easier.
My
husband and I found this out in ’95 when we visited a Christian school in
Mulhouse, a French town in the Franche
Comté area near Alsace-Lorraine and close the German border. While
delivering a volleyball set from our hometown Christian school, and meeting the
teachers while the students were vacationing, we also managed to tour the old
mansion housing the school. The maps in each classroom of the three-story
building were incredible. They operated on fascinating steel mechanisms that
had been left during the WWII Nazi occupation of the mansion and still worked
perfectly. The equivalent of the PTA (Parent-Teacher Association) was not
pleased with the memories this map system provoked, but the blasted things
worked so well, that the teachers just went ahead and used them. They also said
they had radio equipment left in their basement that was too massive, and
impressive, to move until a museum could take charge of it.
It probably shouldn’t
surprise us that Schwarzenegger at one time, while being interviewed during his
bodybuilding days, had old vinyl exercise records of this father’s that,
unfortunately, touted the glories of the Fatherland in the 1940’s. All of who
love our dads have momentos—these were just unwieldy to find out about before
an election. Imagine, if you will, Schwarzenegger’s father as a kid like Rolf
in Sound of Music. Only built like
Schwarzenegger and quite a prize to a military recruiter.
Schwarzenegger’s name in
German means a piece of farm/forest equipment from the Black Forest (Schwarzenwald) area—the same place that
gives its name to the famous five or six layer German chocolate torte, with whipped
cream and cherries between thin layers of cake. When the cake made its way to Austria,
two restaurants fought over the recipe, leading to a legal tangle still
remembered as “the tort over the torte.” When the Schwarzenegger family made it
to Austria, however, they must have brought that other commodity for which the
Black Forest is famous…the Black Forest Fairy Tale as told by the Brothers
Grimm.
It has often been said
that because people of the Black Forest area believe in fairy tales, it is
possible for them to make their lives into fairy tales coming true. Our hero
has managed to do this. The French neighbors are still cackling over the
American headlines that say Schwarzenegger “improperly groped” women on the set
of his movies when he was a young man. This implies, of course, that there is
such a thing as “proper groping,” the eternal mission of the French.
In the past few weeks,
though, Schwarzenegger has proven just how American he has become. While “being
playful” and “not meaning to offend anyone,” he’s admitted to being as confused
as any American male today, and, adding icing to the cake, he’s made it through
his first election.
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