Polar opposites driven to seek their fortunes

PETE Townshend and Arnold Schwarzenegger have been in the public spotlight since the 1960s and during that time neither has been exactly shy.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

PETE Townshend and Arnold Schwarzenegger have been in the public spotlight since the 1960s and during that time neither has been exactly shy of speaking or of seeking media coverage.

Their memoirs, taken together, reveal that we already know plenty about the private and public lives of both men.

Yet these books end up offering something unexpected: a sampling of two psychological polarities. You could say Who I Am and Total Recall give us an examination of extreme self-doubt in contrast with extreme self-confidence. Of course it's no surprise which belongs to who.

Townshend, always regarded as the thinking person's rock star, transformed popular music with a combination of guitar noise, songwriting craft and instinctive genius. It's hard to imagine any other rocker coming up with early songs as vital as The Kids are Alright, My Generation, Substitute or Pinball Wizard (which he describes as "daft, flawed and muddled, but also insolent, liberated and adventurous"). It's also hard to imagine anyone other than Townshend offering up something as freaked-out and quasi mystical as the rock opera Tommy.

Always ambitious and, it seems, relentlessly honest, Townshend offers a harsh critique of his own work. Tommy, he says, didn't work for him or the band until well after it was recorded and the Who played it live. The double album Quadrophenia is his "creative high point", but that was in 1973. Townshend's greatest achievements, he tells us, have all been under the umbrella of the Who.

Centring on self-doubt, substance abuse and alcoholism, infidelities and breakdowns, this memoir doesn't aim for personal hagiography. It's more an examination of Townshend's "artistic grandiosity" set alongside his "desperately low self-regard".

Townshend's parents, both musicians, were steeped in marital woe and chose to send him away at age six to live with his grandmother Denny. Describing her as a "perfect wicked witch", Townshend recalls he suffered beatings and abuse. He also suspects, but remains uncertain, that he was molested by various members of Denny's veritable conga line of lovers.

Psychotherapy has gone only so far in unlocking the secrets of a mind Townshend says "shut down" such memories. He offers flashes of what might have happened: an open and inviting car door, a small flat that seems empty but that draws him inside. Trauma seems to have worked deep into the mind of a small boy who was already insecure and more at home in the male-based gangs of his London neighbourhood's streets than with his family.

The passing down of the musical and entertainer's gene isn't very surprising, but something more nuanced in Townshend made him a genuine seeker - perhaps some instinct to find spiritual comfort away from the emotional turmoil of his childhood.

There's not much to be gained from hearing more about his 45-year devotion to Meher Baba, but when he speaks of being an 11-year-old sea scout sailing the Thames and experiencing a moment of the celestial sublime -- "extraordinary music ... violins, cellos, horns, harps and voices" - we know something important is going on.

The search to re-create that music has consumed his creative life. Coupled with teenage frustration and self-doubt, it initially led to his own interpretation of Gustav Metzger's belief in "auto-destructive art". The image of Townshend that will live beyond him is of the arm-windmilling, guitar smashing id of a generation. He acknowledges this in an obvious way: the inside covers of his memoir feature beautifully lit studio shots of a 65-year-old man smashing what looks like a perfectly good SG Gibson.

What is gratuitous today was of course full of visceral release in the late 60s. "As I raised the stuttering guitar above my head, I felt I was holding up the bloodied standard of endless centuries of mindless war. Explosions. Trenches. Bodies. The eerie screaming of the wind." Film of such early incendiary performances by the Who reveal Townshend wasn't the only one getting off: audiences loved the hedonistic joy of destruction and noise. One can't read about any of this without marvelling at what an angry, raging beast rock 'n' roll used to be.

Who I Am of course deals with the Who in some detail, but readers may be disappointed in the broad-brush presentation of Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle and Keith Moon. The bits there are we already know: the competitive relationships, the madness, the devouring of all-too-willing groupies, not to mention the love that has grown between the Who's two most combative, yet sole-surviving, members.

Townshend has written magnificent music, feature articles and prose (Horse's Neck, published in 1985, is an excellent collection of short stories), yet in these pages he doesn't come across as much of a storyteller; it's as if his story of the Who has failed to excite him since Moon's death in 1978.

Though the band has continued in various incarnations, there's a certain joylessness to what cynics may see as a touring enterprise meant to help ageing rockers pay their bills.

The second half of the book chronicles Townshend's solo career and the seemingly endless resurrections and restagings of Tommy.

Yet his creative output has been far from small, from the wonderful Rough Mix (a collaboration with Ronnie Lane) and Empty Glass albums to projects of variable quality, such as the musical adaptation of Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and Psychoderelict.

He fails to mention his first proper solo album, the excellent Who Came First. There's a hint of creative revival with the last proper Who album in 2005, Endless Wire, which manages to sit very well beside the band's classic albums of the 70s.

Even though Townshend's memoir tends to become laboured, his account of his years as an editor with Faber & Faber is unexpectedly compelling, as is his description of failed attempts at being a good husband and father. A letter from one of his daughters after she hears You Better You Bet on the radio is particularly poignant. She writes to say she misses him. Rock stars and the road rarely lead to happy families.

Then of course there's the elephant in the room: the moment Townshend used his credit card to access a child pornography site. He claims he wanted to prove banks were profiting from the processing of such credit card payments, but his efforts, misdirected in the extreme, resulted in official charges and a "caution" against him. His name was added to Britain's sex offenders register for five years. The stigma has remained: before the Who's performance at the 2010 Super Bowl in Miami, leaflets and protests decried the honouring of "a sex offender at large".

Leaving him chastened and perhaps even a little humbled, this episode gives us something of a sense of what this book is all about. Townshend doesn't want to aggrandise his accomplishments or justify his many mistakes. Like the best of his songs, these pages instead try to give voice to a tumultuous inner and outer world, to the dichotomies between art, ambition, spiritual longing and the crazy rock 'n' roll life.

As he writes in an early chapter: "While I made progress with my search for meaning, Keith was causing havoc with a birthday cake, a car, a swimming pool, a lamp and a young fan's bloody head."

AT the other end of the spectrum, there is little personal insight and no self-excoriation in Schwarzenegger's story. His memoir, Total Recall, is subtitled My Unbelievably True Life Story, and he's not fibbing.

Even before puberty Schwarzenegger was dreaming of success and escape. He started bodybuilding training, won small competitions, then quickly dominated the sport in his native Austria and greater Europe. These wins opened the door to the US.

Everyone likes a migrant-made-good tale and this one's a doozy. Schwarzenegger gets a part in a cheapie movie that goes broke before it's released (Hercules in New York), but lands a big role in hot director Bob Rafelson's Stay Hungry. From there Schwarzenegger knows exactly what to do.

He tries to learn the Method, is taken under the wing of Lucille Ball, and networks like mad. He seeks out Milton Berle and his cohorts to learn how to be funny, and is welcomed into the Kennedy clan even though he already has declared himself a Republican. If Schwarzenegger's story were a novel we'd barely suspend disbelief.

Before over-burdening his memoir with such an excess of success that reading the book starts to feel like being pounded by a golden dumbbell, Schwarzenegger paints some enthralling pictures of his early life, particularly of his boyhood in post-war Thal, a "very typical farm village".

As he writes, Austria was occupied by Allied forces that had defeated Hitler's Third Reich and the men of Thal "felt like a bunch of losers". There was bitterness and fear, too much drinking and violence. Schwarzenegger's father's answer to this life was physical discipline and education. Arnold's answer was to embrace these but to also see that a free and happy country such as the US was the place he needed to go.

Schwarzenegger's boyhood bedroom was adorned with cut-outs of the bodybuilding stars he wanted to emulate, yet in only a few years he was surpassing them all. He had genetics on his side, self-belief, the single-minded determination to succeed and an easygoing, almost sunny manner that hid a determination to have his own way in almost everything. Seven Mr Olympia titles don't happen by half-measures.

Still, none of this ought to have led anywhere near Hollywood filmmaking, but one person believed it could be so and therefore made it happen.

In many ways Schwarzenegger's view of life is as a series of giant, never-look-down steps towards success, plus a complete denial of the possibility of failure. In almost all aspects he portrays himself as a super-competitive businessman who enjoys beating and dominating his rivals.

First he was a businessman whose business was bodybuilding. Then he added real estate to the equation. (It wasn't long after his arrival in the US that he started buying up old buildings and land, and making plans for profitable redevelopments.) Next he was all about the business of movie stardom.

The business of running California, one of the biggest economies in the world, was another matter entirely. It's almost a surprise that the force of Schwarzenegger's will didn't transform the state into a sort of Nirvana. Instead he replaced a desperately unpopular governor but ended up leaving office with an even lower rating than his predecessor.

Worse was the fact in most estimations he more or less bankrupted the state. This was a failure the ex-"governator" barely acknowledges: "I do not deny that being governor was more complex and challenging than I had imagined."

The biggest elephant in Schwarzenegger's room is dealt with quickly, that of the child he fathered with the family housekeeper. It came to light only when the boy started to look a little too much like his mother's employer.

The revelation may have destroyed his marriage but Schwarzenegger's ambition appears unstoppable.

The American constitution (if not the economic basket-case that remains the state of California) makes it impossible for the tilt at the presidency he has dreamed of, but he has already launched a global policy think-tank in his name at the University of Southern California. Not to mention that there are at least six new films on the production line.

The most recently announced is the revival of his Conan the Barbarian character, this time as a wise and seasoned elder. Total Recall makes one wonder if Schwarzenegger's personal story may ever be described in the same way.

Who I Am 
By Pete Townshend
HarperCollins, 538pp, $39.99 (HB)  

Total Recall: My Unbelievable True Life Story  
By Arnold Schwarzenegger with Peter Petre
Simon And Schuster, 646pp, $32.99

Venero Armanno teaches creative writing at University of Queensland. His new novel is Black Mountain.