The Bush White House was silent about Oui -- things with French names are never popular there -- but some of its allies on the religious right were plainly mortified. The Rev. Lou Sheldon's ultra-right Traditional Values Coalition launched a stop-Arnold campaign at about the time a photo of a youthful Schwarzenegger between the legs of a topless woman popped up on the Web, and Sheldon seemed more determined than ever this week to terminate Schwarzenegger's candidacy. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Sheldon said it is incumbent on Schwarzenegger to "repudiate and repent."

Schwarzengger's campaign staff did not return a call from Salon for this article. But the Terminator had predicted on Leno's show that he would face allegations of womanizing as part of a dirty campaign against him, and during a radio talk show in California Wednesday he brushed the interview aside as ancient history. "I haven't lived my life to be a politician," he said.

That "old news" approach has worked for Bush's days as a drunk and the three DUIs shared by the Bush-Cheney ticket. But it's a harder sell for Schwarzenegger because his trash talk about sex -- and the allegations that he has engaged in inappropriate behavior with women -- didn't stop back in 1977.

"The tabloid press got a nice Christmas present late last year when Arnold Schwarzenegger tore through a day of publicity work in London ... In less than 24 hours, the star was said to have attempted to, as high school boys used to say, 'cop a little feel' from three different female talk-show hosts.

"The level of consternation expressed by those who received this hands-on treatment ... ranged from none whatsoever (Denise Van Outen of 'The Big Breakfast' invites her guests to lie on a bed with her and, hence, probably has a rather elastic definition of what constitutes inappropriate behavior) to irked (on tape, Celebrity interviewer Melanie Sykes looks a little thrown off after Arnold gives her a very definite squeeze on the rib cage, directly under her right breast) to, finally, righteously indignant.

"Anna Richardson of Big Screen claims that after the cameras stopped rolling for her interview segment, Schwarzenegger, apparently attempting to ascertain whether Richardson's breasts were real, tweaked her nipple and then laughed at her objections. 'I left the room quite shaken,' she says. 'What was more upsetting was that his people rushed to protect him and scapegoated me, and not one person came to apologize afterward.'"

-- "Arnold the Barbarian," Premiere, March 2001.

Schwarzenegger surprised everyone, including his own political advisors, when he told Jay Leno that he had decided to enter the race to replace Gray Davis. But the recall campaign isn't the first time Schwarzenegger has thought about running against Davis. Schwarzenegger has long had political aspirations -- Manso said he was discussing them even back in 1977 -- and he has, over the years, repeatedly talked of wanting to be the governor of California. In 2001, he was said to be thinking seriously about challenging Davis, an unpopular governor who was struggling through the state's energy crisis.

But then came John Connolly's Arnold exposé in Premiere. The article catalogued allegations of all sorts of boorish behavior, almost all of it directed at women, beginning in the early 1990s and continuing into the new century. During the filming of 1991's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," Connolly alleged, Schwarzenegger fondled costar Linda Hamilton in a limousine and stuck his hands into the blouse of a female crew member, pulling out her breasts for the amusement of himself and a few of his friends. During the filming of 1996's "Eraser," Connolly alleged, a guest on the set happened upon Schwarzenegger performing oral sex on a woman in his trailer. As Salon reported last month, Schwarzenegger allegedly looked up from his work and uttered a line that has now become an inadvertent trademark of the Schwarzenegger campaign. "Eating," he reportedly said, "is not cheating."

Gray Davis' campaign staff jumped on the Premiere article, faxing copies to political reporters with a note about the "touching story" contained therein. Shortly thereafter, Schwarzenegger decided not to run against Davis after all. While the mainstream press will likely prove too squeamish to run explicit tales of Arnold's antics, and while Davis has been warned by at least one fellow Democrat not to run a "puke" campaign this year, it is hard to believe that Davis -- or one of the candidates seeking to replace him -- won't find a way to revive the Premiere piece in the context of the recall race. And if somebody gets the vulgar side of Schwarzenegger out in front of voters, it's likely that the actor's support among all sorts of people -- women, the politically correct, the religious right -- will begin to plummet.

In a Field Poll taken two weeks ago, Schwarzenegger and Bustamante were tied among likely voters who are men, but Bustamante led Schwarzenegger by 5 percentage points among likely voters who are women. It is likely that stories about Schwarzenegger play into that difference, and the Field Poll's Mark DiCamillo says it's likely that candidates will find a way to exploit those stories as the race rumbles toward the Oct. 7 election.

"The real unknowns in this race are the negative ads to come," DiCamillo said. "A lot of the stuff about Schwarzenegger and women will stick if the negative ads start hounding him on it. I'm sure he'll basically say that was his past life and not really a part of his adult life or whatever. But I honestly am not great at speculating how that will cut. It depends on how he handles it."

If the recent past is any indication, Schwarzenegger won't handle it all that well. The Premiere piece, for example, seemed to strike a nerve with him. In an interview with the Weekly Standard last year, he described Premiere as "that magazine that wrote that shitty article about me," and he claimed that the Premiere allegations were, at best, exaggerated. Yet he did so in a way that was every bit as crude as the allegations in the article itself.

"Half of it in there, right off the top, my wife [NBC News correspondent Maria Shriver] didn't believe, so I didn't have to explain it to her," Schwarzenegger told the Weekly Standard. "When someone said [they] walked into my trailer, and I was eating a chick in the living room, she [Maria] knows I'm not that stupid, number one. Number two, I have two guards standing out at all times in front of my trailer so no one could walk in. That already makes the story not credible."

Schwarzenegger admitted that he's guilty of having a ribald sense of humor, but insisted that he had "toned it down because it has become a different world now, because of the sexual harassment. You do things that someone today may take as going too far."

But the notion of evolving standards hasn't seemed to bother Schwarzenegger much -- at least if a July 2003 article in Entertainment Weekly is any indication. As set forth there, Arnie's appetite for going over the top -- particularly where dissing women is concerned -- was even too much for the sensitive effetes who made Schwarzenegger's latest action-adventure blowout, "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines":

... nothing in T3 bears Schwarzenegger's creative stamp more than his epic tussle with the Terminatrix, a battle that begins in a bathroom. The sequence was made longer and more elaborate thanks to the actor's largesse -- and his singular imagination.

"As we were rehearsing, I saw this toilet bowl," says Schwarzenegger, an impish smile crossing his face. "How many times do you get away with this -- to take a woman, grab her upside down, and bury her face in a toilet bowl? I wanted to have something floating in there," he adds. Apparently, he was vetoed. "They thought it was my typical 'Schwarzenegger overboard,'" he says. "The thing is, you can do it, because in the end, I didn't do it to a woman -- she's a machine! We could get away with it without being crucified by god-knows-what-group."

-- "The Running Man," Entertainment Weekly, July 11, 2003

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