DEVASTATION
The war between AAU head honcho Bob Hoffman and Joe Weider raged— sometimes via lawsuits, but mostly in the pages of their respective magazines. Hoffman’s relentless rants against Joe were often personal and anti-Semitic, and his Strength and Health ridiculed the same small-waist, broad-shoulder archetype that Muscle Power and Muscle Builder championed. This was to the muscle magazines’ benefit because more people wanted to look like sculpted bodybuilder Steve Reeves than rotund weightlifter Paul Anderson. Meanwhile, the Weider brothers continued to grow the IFBB—which focused only on physiques, unlike Hoffman’s AAU—and that in turn inspired top bodybuilders to appear only in Weider magazines.
Joe eventually won the war with Hoffman, but another industry force devastated his business. In 1958, American News was taken over by financiers who promptly sold the company’s warehouses located in prime urban locations. Overnight, the country’s largest magazine distributor was liquidated. Weider Publications was printing more than two million issues per month when those numbers plummeted to zero. The sudden inability to publish while debts mounted nearly forced the company into bankruptcy. Instead, Joe folded every publication except Muscle Builder and Mr. America. (The latter had just replaced Muscle Power and covered bodybuilding as well as men’s lifestyle issues.)
“I’ll never know the exact total of my losses, which went into the millions,” Joe stated. “I had to quit publishing all the magazines that I had added with encouragement from American News. But I would not give up my muscle magazines, not as long as I lived and breathed. Somehow I managed to keep those magazines alive.” Rather than declare bankruptcy, he made settlements with entities he owed.
One great thing did happen for him in 1958—his daughter, Lynda, was born. The following year, he separated from his wife of 12 years. At the dawn of the ’60s, Joe had rescued his business and refocused it on his first love: bodybuilding. Another enduring love story had just begun.
RENAISSANCE
The former Betty Brosmer, one of the top models of the late ’50s, recalls that she and Joe shared a love of philosophy, antiques, and art. At first, there was only a business relationship—she modeled for his magazines. But a friendship formed. “We had a lot in common. And one night we had dinner, and he reached across the table and held my hand, and sparks flew,” she remembered. Their romance blossomed and grew. Divorces were difficult to attain then, so Joe moved to Las Vegas temporarily to legally terminate his first marriage. There, on April 24, 1961, Joe and Betty wed. (The gambling capital retained a special place in their hearts, and they later purchased a luxury condominium there.)
Rebuilding his business after the distribution disaster, Joe introduced new equipment and nutritional supplements, and he refocused on improving his two muscle magazines. (A third magazine, All-American Athlete, dedicated to sports training, launched in August 1963 and lasted until October 1969.) “With staffing cut back, I was like a publishing oneman band, doing practically everything cover to cover,” he recalled. “I wrote and designed all the ads and wrote a lot of the articles under various bylines. Sometimes I posed for pictures, too. I put Betty’s pictures everywhere—sometimes with dark-colored wigs and disguises so the readers wouldn’t know she was the same model they’d just seen a few pages back.”
OLYMPIA
As a Jewish immigrant, Joe Weider knew the sting of bigotry and was thus determined to fight it. One of his most commendable legacies was the groundbreaking color-blind treatment of nonwhite athletes on the stages of the IFBB and the pages of Weider magazines. This is most evident in the contest placings of African-American Harold Poole, who, despite having the superior physique, was second twice in the AAU Mr. America (no black man won that contest until 1970) before jumping to the IFBB and promptly winning its 1963 Mr. Universe. The following year, he won the IFBB Mr. America.
Poole defeated Larry Scott in the 1963 Mr. U. Absent Poole, Scott took the title in 1964. This raised an obvious question—which Mr. Universe winner was better? Whatever the federation, the Mr. U was then the ultimate title, and once a bodybuilder attained it he had little reason to continue competing. When 26-yearold Scott dined with Joe and Betty, he lamented his inevitable early retirement, and Betty began talking about a long-gestating idea for a new professional championship open to all major title holders. “Larry got excited about Betty’s idea, and I knew the time had come,” Joe remembered. “For the likes of him and the future of bodybuilding, there would be a new champion’s championship.”
As fate would have it, Joe was drinking a rare beer at that dinner, and his eyes settled on the Olympia beer bottle. That’s it! Heroic, mythic, celestial—Mr. Olympia. That moment was a turning point from the confusing titles and scant rewards of the past to the prestige and paydays of the future. Sixteen months before Super Bowl I, on Sept. 18, 1965, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Larry Scott won the inaugural Mr. Olympia. Poole was second. The modern era of bodybuilding began.
ARNOLD
Though it moved twice, Weider Publishing headquarters remained in Union City, NJ. Still, it had a West Coast office in Santa Monica, CA, which, with the opening of the first Gold’s Gym in neighboring Venice in 1965, was at the forefront of muscle. Weider photo shoots occurred at the beach, and throughout the ’60s, Joe’s magazines became increasingly synonymous with California sunshine and a perpetual holiday in what looked like paradise when viewed on a bleak winter day in New Jersey—or in a small mountain village in Austria.
In that village lived a muscular phenom with a peculiar name. After winning the 1967 NABBA Mr. Universe at 19, Arnold Schwarzenegger became the talk of bodybuilding. In 1968, he adorned his first Weider cover and entered his first Weider contest. On Sept. 28, backstage at the Miami Auditorium, hours before the IFBB Mr. Universe, 21-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger met Joe Weider, the man he would come to think of as his second father. Arnold didn’t win the show (Frank Zane did), but his boundless potential won over the publisher. “He had the mind of a champion, he had the heart of a champion, and I figured that he could be a star, and being a star, he would help the sport,” Joe said of Arnold.
Arnold recalled: “He always would say, ‘Arnold, I want you to be the best and the smartest bodybuilder of the whole world. I see fire in your eyes. I see the competitive spirit in your eyes. That is what I want. And this is why I’ll help you. You’ll come to California, I’ll take care of your apartment, and I’ll give you some spending money so you can live; and all you have to do is train, train, train and beat everyone.’ ”
Arnold was on eight Weider magazine covers over 16 months between July 1969 and December 1970. Articles were penned under his name. Though the advice was his, a writer (often Joe himself) structured and typed it. To get Arnold’s training and nutrition tips, as well as photos of his ever-expanding physique, you needed to buy Muscle Builder or Mr. America. Interspersed with the articles, the future seven-time Mr. Olympia appeared in advertisements for Weider training equipment and supplements. Arnold has, so far, appeared on the cover of a Weider muscle magazine 68 times, including the February 2013 issue of Muscle & Fitness.
ICON
The most prominent name in the Weider magazines was Joe Weider. He was editor and writer and also the ubiquitous pitchman of training courses and products like Power Twisters, Killer Karate Krushers, and Muscle Density RX7. In 1970, Sports Illustrated ran a lengthy profile of Joe, proclaiming he had “replaced Charles Atlas as the world’s No. 1 bodybuilder.” Think of muscles and you thought foremost of Joe Weider. The man, then known as the “Master Blaster” and “Trainer of Champions,” had reached the rarefied status of icon.
“Bodybuilding is about getting bigger, so I had to be a little bit bigger than life,” Joe wrote in his and Ben’s co-autobiography Brothers of Iron. “What I did, philosophically speaking, was to create a Platonic ideal of myself and make exciting images of this ideal to catch and hold the attention of millions of people so I could educate them about bodybuilding and provide products they required. The ideal was a lot like reality, because I was a muscle man and I truly deserved my titles Trainer of Champions and Master Blaster. All my life I followed my own advice, working out and watching my diet and health, and I loved bodybuilding with all my heart. If I didn’t walk the talk, as they say, people would have turned away from me long ago.”
Joe’s most distinctive physical characteristic appeared beneath his nose and over his upper lip sometime in 1970, and has remained there, almost continuously, ever since. Millions of people who couldn’t name the current Mr. Olympia knew Joe Weider—the man behind all those weight sets and muscle magazines—by his mustache. To those who’ve heard Joe speak, however, he has a greater distinguishing attribute—his voice. For the writers, photographers, and bodybuilders he worked with, mimicking Joe’s French-Canadian accent and pleasantly honking tone proved irresistible. Even Arnold has trouble quoting Joe without imitating Joe.
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