When Mildred gave birth the following August, she named the baby Joseph." As narrative ellipses go, it's not quite up there with "Reader, I married him", but it nips at Charlotte Bronte's heels. Instead, Mildred is dispatchfully dealt with as barely a sidenote in the final chapter: "Mildred had been working in our household for five years and all of a sudden we were alone in the guest house. But there, just beneath "Back-end, Arnold's, 362-63, 374" is not, as one might expect, "Baena, Mildred", the name of the mother of his non-Kennedy child, but Ban Ki-moon and Antonio Banderas.
Let us return to the aforementioned boffing and flip to the index.
Even aside from his constant cataloguing of his financial earnings and his unGuardian politics ("Taking the out of the equation, I admired Richard Nixon and thought he was a terrific president"), it's the way this condom stuffed with walnuts (copyright: Clive James) just radiates with self-love and a near sociopathic lack of interest in others that really sticks in the mind. But ultimately, this is very much a political as opposed to celebrity autobiography, which is an interesting choice from a man who is one of the most iconic actors of the modern era and was one of the worst state governors in history.īut despite his adherence to the more self-validating form, Arnie cannot help but come across as a reassuringly repulsive individual. Sure, there might be more references in Arnie's book to calf-sculpting exercises, "hot affairs" and Planet Hollywood than you probably get in, say, Robert Caro's The Passage of Power, the much-lauded recent biography of Lyndon Johnson (although maybe not that many more than in Bill Clinton's My Life). He then is forced to end his "immigrant made great" saga on the somewhat less than triumphal note of his wife leaving him after he boffed the maid and fathered her child. That, to no one's gratitude, is precisely what Arnie has produced, with his exhortations about how Predator 2 would have been a success if only the director had listened to him, and other important issues. A celebrity autobiography drips with gossip and humility, with the subject detailing at length their failings only then to end on a note of happy redemption and rehab, with positivity about the futureĪ political autobiography is generally a cut-and-paste job from old newspaper articles detailing what the politician was doing on this date or that, while the subject constantly tells the reader how he was in the right about certain decisions and everyone else in the wrong, and it all ends somewhat elegiacally with the politician now out of office. No, what Arnie (anyone who suffered the film Junior has earned the right to such familiarity) has done is write a political autobiography, which is a very different beast. Trust me, I have a degree in celebrity autobiographies from TMZ.com University, and this is not a contribution to that noble genre. The first thing to say is that this is not a celebrity autobiography. Thank you, celebrity gods! Tools down, everyone – it's a Lost in Showbiz book group special. While LiS is dismayed to lose its long-running bet that the title would be I Told You I'd Be Back – And I Am!, the subtitle does provide consolations with its pleasing similarity to Gary Shteyngart's tale of a plucky immigrant in America, Super Sad True Love Story, but Arnified. O ho! What gift is this from the celebrity gods, floating down on to the Lost in Showbiz desk? Why, it's Arnold Schwarzenegger's 650-page autobiography, Total Recall – My Unbelievably True Life Story.