You're Fired

- Marshall Fine

Arnold Schwarzenegger, a cigar clamped between his jaws like a punctuation mark for his broad smile, climbs aboard a tank on a warm November afternoon. This is no movie prop, and it’s not just any tank. The 46 tons of moving metal belongs to Schwarzenegger himself, the larger than-life success story who has been everything from Conan the Barbarian to the Terminator, Governor of California to cigar-chomping icon. • Spend any time with Schwarzenegger and you quickly get the impression that this is his world. We’re all just along for the ride. • “It drives as well today as it did when I was 18,” he says. In his black, short-sleeved polo and black leather pants, he has a formidably muscular presence—not quite the perfection when he was dubbed “the Austrian Oak” as a young bodybuilder, but still extremely solid, his eyes glimmering with mischief beneath a head of preternaturally brown hair, his handshake firm but not aggressive.

He lowers his six-foot-frame through a hatch into the driver seat of the intimidating mass of metal. It’s an M47 Patton, named after the bombastic and brilliant American general of World War II, and it’s very likely the actual tank Schwarzenegger drove when he joined the Austrian army as an 18-year-old.

“From my youngest days, I wanted to drive tanks,” Schwarzenegger says, “but when I got in the army, they told me, ‘You’re too tall.’ My father had connections and so I got to go to tank-driving school.” He presses forward, taking the beast on a rumbling spin around the property.