Current Affairs: It was not lost on his many admirers how Neil Postman, author of the seminal Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, died just two days before the October, 2003, special election in California, as if the prospect of Governor Schwarzenegger had provided one laugh too many.
In any event, the show goes on, with Laurence Leamer, biographer of US chat-show icon Johnny Carson and author of The Kennedy Men and The Kennedy Women, now offering us The Kennedy In-Law in Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger. "Fantastic", we learn in the first paragraph, is Schwarzenegger's favourite word, a revelation which effectively sets the tone for this lengthy, largely superficial look at "Arnold", as Leamer chummily refers to his subject throughout.
Leamer opens with Schwarzenegger's Horatio-Alger-scrawny-kid-from-Austria-made-good speech to the Republican National Convention in August 2004, before turning to the tiny Austrian farming village of Thal where Schwarzenegger, born in 1947, was reared a Catholic by a loving mother and an authoritarian, alcoholic, ex-Nazi Party, police-chief father.
Thal is also where Schwarzenegger, at age 14, first saw a body-building magazine. The rest, as they say, is - if not history, then show biz. Introduced to steroids at 15, Schwarzenegger followed a series of body-building awards in Germany and London with a trip to America in 1968, where he caught the eye of Joe Weidner, a multi-millionaire publisher of body-building magazines who offered to sponsor Arnold in the US in return for his endorsement of the nutritional supplements, barbells and other products in his publications.
Fantastic is not hagiography, and Leamer dutifully repeats various accounts of Schwarzenegger's youthful obsession with Hitler, including his documented admiration for the Führer's own rise to power from humble beginnings, and his own reputed record collection of Nazi marches. Leamer argues persuasively against charges of anti-Semitism, but he is less than convincing when suggesting Schwarzenegger's career has survived a history that inludes a penchant for groping women at will thanks to his "magnetic charm" rather than the Realpolitick of power, money and gender in the entertainment industry.
Some class of Realpolitick presumably also underpins his 19-year marriage to TV presenter and Kennedy family member Maria Shriver: a modern take on Beauty and the Beast or the ultimate union of Mars and Venus, take your pick. A formidable personality and intense workaholic, Shriver was integrally involved in her husband's Hollywood career and recent segue into politics, though the latter has seen her swap her media career for a full-time role as governor's wife and mother to their four children.
Leamer details Schwarzenegger's film career from Barbarian to Terminator, but arguably more interesting is the abiding impression of "Arnold" that emerges as much by an accretion of adjectives as anything else. Optimistic, ambitious, with unrelenting self-belief, surely, but also "cruel . . . emotionally stingy . . . arrogant . . . brutally hurtful . . . mean-spirited . . . abrasive . . . bullying" - all of which serve to offset that fabled "charm".
Leamer concludes with Schwarzenegger's run for governor in the 2003 recall election, but a superior account of these events emerges in US novelist and filmmaker Gary Indiana's Schwarzenegger Syndrome, an entertaining, albeit disjointed, unabashed polemic, which revisits the electoral circus with 135 candidates that ultimately gave us The Governator.
Like Leamer, Indiana opens with the Republican National Convention, "lighting and décor by Albert Speer", and he is especially sharp on how Schwarzenegger's personification of American superiority and violent film persona were perfectly in tune with the xenophobic militarism of the post 9/11 Bush administration. Indiana's invective about George W Bush - "a petulant, congenitally embittered, court-appointed president and sadistic 24/7 liar" - strikes this reviewer as fair comment, but he is more usefully reflective when detailing the conflation of civic sphere and celebrity culture that saw any sustained discussion of polity or public good fly out the window the moment Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy to Jay Leno on The Tonight Show, a perfect example of how the news in America is all about entertainment.
Indiana is also very good at reminding us how Schwarzenegger's bizarre physicality was first seen as freakish, and only evolved from sight-gag to international trademark as the consummate self-promoter cleverly marketed himself from muscleman to movie star to chief executive of the world's sixth largest economy. Thus voting for Schwarzenegger was more an "act of brand loyalty to a consumer product, a public image", than endorsement of his mixed salad of fiscal conservatism and liberal stances on women's and gay rights and gun control.
Schwarzenegger would clearly love to address a Republican Convention that has just nominated him for president, but there seems little likelihood of an amendment to the US constitution which denies the presidency to the foreign-born. Whether plummeting ratings and California teachers, nurses and state workers angrily opposed to his budget proposals presage a final curtain for the Last Action Governor is another story, but Arnold, like all brand-name products, may well have his own sell-by date.
Anthony Glavin is a novelist and short-story writer
Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger By Laurence Leamer Sidgwick & Jackson, 421 pp. £18.99
Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt By Gary Indiana The New Press, 140pp. £13.99