This article originally appeared in the February 22, 1977 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
It was clear from the start that Arnold Schwarzenegger, walking sculpture, and the Institute of Contemporary Art would make strange if congenial bedfellows.
An ICA publicist told me that, at her first encounter with the waggish, six-time former Mr. Olympia in an elevator at the Pru, he lifted her by the crotch and pronounced, in that bed-roomy Austrian accent, that he could tell she wasn’t horny. Then he lectured her like a coach on the importance of “doing it to yourself when you don’t have a regular guy.” Yes, folks, the gap between the chi-chi art world and muscle beach is as wide as the one between Schwarzenegger’s Ultrabrite front teeth.
But no matter: the ICA, no 90-pound weakling in the flashy fundraising department, had agreed to lend its arty allure to benefit a Boston premiere of Pumping Iron, the quasi-documentary film about professional bodybuilding competition, of which Schwarzenegger is the undisputed star. What the ICA got out of it was money (100 percent of the proceeds from a sellout house at the Exeter Theater Wednesday night) and publicity. What the musclemen got was some legitimacy for the peculiar and grueling rite that they are lately trying to lug — as “human sculpture” — from the gymnasium to the gallery.
In connection with the New York debut of Pumping Iron, three bodybuilders displayed their rippling wares at the Whitney Museum. More astounding, in the service of art, was that Schwarzenegger, who has stubbornly refused to “take it off” since retiring from professional bodybuilding to pursue an acting career, posed shirtless with some Roman sculptures at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts last week. According to Schwarzenegger’s boosters, Michelangelo’s David is nothing compared to their boy, a smooth-talking, perfectly proportioned combination of Joe Namath and Goliath. Certainly not even Michelangelo ever lingered so lovingly over David’s deltoids as the skimpily clad Charlie’s Angels-types do over Arnold’s in Pumping Iron. But then David, whoever he was, most likely did not spend his spare time, as Schwarzenegger’s Italian counterpart does in the film, picking up Fiats.
* * *
Probably about half of the audience at the benefit preview sashayed into the Exeter thinking that muscles were something to be slurped mariniere and Flex something you put on your tresses to make them look like Farrah Fawcett-Majors’s. The other half of the crowd looked as if they had jogged in from gyms in Melrose and Methuen. But with the Beautiful People, the Beautiful Bodies, and dutiful press, the theater was packed. After all, the preview was to be graced with a guest appearance by the Austrian Adonis himself and a live demonstration of the “art” by Ed Corney, Mr. America and Mr. Universe of 1972, and in real life, a 46-year-old Hawaiian nightclub owner who acted as his own bouncer before turning pro.
Pumping Iron met with an enthusiastic response, either as art or as high camp, from a crowd which, among other things, hooted and whistled at a glimpse of a panty-hosed tushy in a trailer for Truffaut’s Small Change. After the movie, the thrust of which seemed to be to convince us that bodybuilding is as wholesome and beneficial as scouting, Schwarzenegger sauntered on, a studly study of smug, sleepy-eyed charm and good humor. His awesome physique was camouflaged under an ordinary blue blazer (your standard 58 Long), and he looked like a normal, albeit well-built, human being.
