Hollywood's battle of the sexes over Arnold

Movie industry women are working to expose the actor's sexual misbehavior, while men are protecting him. Their efforts have led at least some of his victims to come forward, but will voters care?

By Kathleen Sharp

Oct 6, 2003 | The minute Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he was running for California governor Aug. 6, all of Hollywood knew that tales of his womanizing would make headlines again. The prospect of news cameras zooming in on Schwarzenegger's private life was supposedly the big reason his wife, Maria Shriver, had reservations about his running. There had been plenty of stories about the actor's high jinks even before he'd officially become a politician: In March 2001 Premiere magazine printed a now-notorious article by writer John Connolly that featured named and unnamed sources detailing instances in which the actor groped women's breasts, bullied and humiliated assistants and crew members on movie sets, and cheated on Shriver.

Years earlier Connolly had revealed, in an October 1993 US magazine, that several women who worked for famed Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss had auditioned for Schwarzenegger's unsuccessful movie "The Last Action Hero." The Los Angeles Times reported that Columbia Pictures' parent company Sony was investigating whether these women were hired as "extras" on the overbudget movie. Around the same time, a French women's magazine reported that one of Heidi's women claimed the muscleman himself was a client while on the set of "Last Action Hero." Schwarzenegger sued and won under France's stringent libel laws, but with the actor's sudden entry into the recall race, all the old stories were being chased again.

The whole month of August, I watched the recall story swirl around me, as a spectator, not a reporter. While many of my colleagues were covering Arnold, I was putting the finishing touches on my book, "Mr. and Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and Their Entertainment Empire" (Carroll & Graf). It turned out that my seat on the sidelines gave me a remarkable view of one of the more riveting stories in town: how the media chased the women whom Schwarzenegger allegedly chased (or groped, fondled or harassed, depending on the source), and how a platoon of Hollywood women labored to bring forth their stories.

And once my book shipped to the printer, I got bit by the competitive bug and started chasing the story myself for a while, believing I had a line on one particular "action hero" tale (I didn't). In no time, I was swept into a web of media plotting and intrigue. Connolly himself was back, peddling another Schwarzenegger scoop that could supposedly blow his past stories about the actor out of the water. The Los Angeles Times had a team of reporters talking to women with awful Arnold tales, but as the weeks passed, insiders fretted that the paper would never pull the trigger. Everyone from the New York Times to the supermarket tabloids had reporters chasing Schwarzenegger's women. And suddenly, there I was, placing and taking calls from veteran actresses, Hollywood wives and Rodeo Drive hostesses, who began feeding me telephone numbers of Heidi's girls and other women, as well as some men -- big-time producers and writers and entertainment attorneys -- who would supposedly tell me tales of Schwarzenegger's misbehavior.

"I'm stuck in traffic here on Wilshire, calling you from a digital phone," said one such cadet. She gives me a lead, just as another Hollywood helper checks in. "A lot of people want to see this news come out," she tells me, while driving to her Chinese herbalist. Unfortunately, she adds, these people don't want to be quoted. "There is a lot of fear and intimidation out there," she explained. Some wives tried to persuade their husbands to go on the record with their eyewitness accounts of Arnold's bad behavior. "I can't do it," one Emmy Award-winning producer told me, who said he'd been sworn to secrecy about a Schwarzenegger incident people were gossiping about. There were tense domestic dramas being played out behind green hedges above Rodeo Drive and Ventura Boulevard. But as the election approached, an uneasy détente descended on these streets. At least one actor's-wife-turned-activist badgered her entertainment attorney friends to speak to the press, but evidently there was no percentage in their stepping forward. In Hollywood, you don't tell secrets out of school. Many men closed ranks around the popular actor-entertainer, even as their women seethed.

Although some people, such as L.A. Weekly columnist Nikki Finke, criticized Hollywood women for remaining silent about Arnold's notorious behavior on studio sets, many of them were in fact working behind the scenes to bring the stories to light. And of course some women, such as Candace Bergen, Cybill Shepherd and Barbra Streisand, were neither silent nor anonymous. They either spoke publicly about Schwarzenegger's misbehavior or joined a group of celebrities in a Variety advertisement, in which they urged a "No" vote on the recall.

Despite the claims by Schwarzenegger supporters that the campaign was being orchestrated by Gov. Gray Davis, it had the feel of a grass-roots rebellion to me: women mad as hell at the way they're treated in Hollywood -- as symbolized by Schwarzenegger's shameless groping and harassment -- who weren't going to take it anymore. Not all of the women working the cellphones were Democrats, either, although I admit I didn't ask every person I talked to about their political persuasion.

Next Page: Heidi Fleiss says Arnold stories are "in the past"

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