Arnold’s marriage-
breaking affair with
his family’s housekeeper wasn’t the only fling he had – there was a “hot affair on the set” with actress Brigitte Nielsen at a time when he was living with his future wife and “dream girl” Maria Shriver.
“A lot of people, no matter how successful or unsuccessful they are in life, make stupid choices involving sex. You feel you’ll get away with ignoring the rules, but in reality your actions can have lasting consequences,” he writes in his autobiography “Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story” publishd by Simon and Schuster. “Probably my background, and having left home at an early age, also had an effect. It hardened me emotionally and shaped my behaviour so that I was less careful about intimate things.”
In a startling revelation, the 65-year-old action star says how he cheated on his wife Maria to have a love child with his former housekeeper Mildred Baena.
Maria only found out about her husband’s affair when she saw Joseph, the 14-year-old son Mildred had with Schwarzenegger, at one of her Christmas parties.
Arnold admitted this before Maria at a marriage counsellor’s office. “It was one of those stupid things that I promised myself never to do. My whole life I never had anything going with anyone who worked for me. This happened in 1996 when Maria and the kids were away on holiday and I was in town finishing ‘Batman and Robin’.
“Mildred had been working in our household for five years, and all of a sudden we were alone in the guest house. When Mildred gave birth the following August, she named the baby Joseph and listed her husband as the father. This is what I wanted to believe and what I did believe for years,” Schwarzenegger writes.
Schwarzenegger is the son of an austere police chief, born in a small Austrian town. He dreamed of moving to America to become a bodybuilding champion and a movie star. And within 20 years, he moved to the US and was the world’s biggest movie star, the husband of Maria, and an emerging Republican leader who was part of the Kennedy family. He had developed a crush on Maria who was someone “full of joy, having a good personality, long black hair, and a bundle of positive energy that I wanted to be around”.
Schwarzenegger also got involved with Sylvester Stallone’s ex-wife Nielsen during the shooting of the 1985 film “Red Sonja”. “…We had a hot affair on the set. Gitte, as everyone called her, had a personality filled with laughter and fun mixed with a great hunger for attention. After the shoot, we travelled in Europe for a couple of weeks before parting ways. I went home assuming our fling was over.”
Later Nielsen wanted a continuing relationship but Schwarzenegger told her, “Gitte, this was on the set. It was fun over there, but it wasn’t serious. I’m already involved with the woman I want to marry. I hope you understand.” Nielsen then went on to marry Sylvester Stallone.
With Maria, Schwarzenegger raised four children. At the marriage counsellor’s office, Schwarzenegger tried to regain Maria’s trust by explaining that it was his screw up and she should not feel it had anything to do with her.
“You’re the perfect wife. It’s not because anything is wrong, or you left home for a week, or any of that. Forget all that. You look fantastic, you’re sexy, I’m turned on by you today as much as I was on the first date,” the book quotes him as telling her.
But Maria had made up her mind and their separation was inevitable. (PTI)