ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER has for the first time told about his 1996 affair – and the bombshell moment he had to tell his wife he had a son with housekeeper Mildred Baena.
In new Netflix documentary Arnold, the Terminator star says his “heart stopped” when his then wife Maria Shriver confronted him with rumours about Joseph Baena, now 25, in 2011.
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The couple, who married in 1986, were already having regular counselling sessions after his stint as Governor of California kept him away from Maria and their four kids and caused rifts in the marriage — which was finally killed off by the scandal.
In the three-parter, streaming from Wednesday, Arnie reveals: “One day, the counsellor said, ‘Today Maria wants to be very specific about something.
“She wants to know if you’re the father of Joseph’.
“I thought my heart stopped. And then I told the truth.
“‘Yes, Maria. Joseph is my son’. She was obviously crushed by that.”
Arnie, 75, says that after the 1996 affair Mildred continued to work for the family, who had believed her husband Rogelio was Joseph’s father.
He says: “In the beginning I really didn’t know, but the older he got, the more it became clear to me.
“It was then just a matter of, ‘How do you keep this quiet?’.”
Joseph was born days after Maria gave birth to Arnie’s fourth child Christopher, now 25, and the confession, 14 years later, proved too much for her to forgive.
Biggest regret
The couple, who also share daughters Katherine, 33, Christina, 31, and son Patrick, 29, announced their separation in May 2011.
Arnie admits the affair was his biggest “failure” but says he has a close relationship with Joseph, as well as with his other children.
“I have caused enough pain for my family, because of my f***-up,” he says. “Everyone had to suffer.
“Maria had to suffer, the kids had to suffer, Joseph, his mother, everyone.
“I’m going to have to live with that for the rest of my life.”
Arnie says he has always provided for Mildred, who split from her husband shortly after her son’s birth.
In 2010 he bought them a four-bedroom house with a pool in California.
Joseph, who followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a bodybuilder and actor, appears briefly in the show and Arnie says he is “very proud” of his once-secret son.
“I saw Joseph developing into a fantastic human being,” he says.
“It was wrong what I did but I don’t want Joseph to think he’s not welcome in this world because he is very much welcome and I love him.
“He has turned out to be an extraordinary young man.”
In the frank documentary, Arnie also addresses historic allegations of sexual harassment and groping made by numerous women in the run-up to his election as California’s Governor in 2003 — and says he now sees his past behaviour as “wrong”.
Arnie, who commanded £25million a movie at the peak of his success, speaks frankly about taking steroids as a young bodybuilder, reveals how he “cried like a baby” after coming second in the US Mr Universe contest and says he was “devastated” by movie flops including the 1993 turkey Last Action Hero.
But the actor, who cuts a lonely figure in the huge mansion he shares with his dogs in Brentwood, California, says messing up his marriage remains his biggest regret.
“People will remember my successes and they will also remember my failures,” he says.
“I’ve had failures in my career but this was a whole new dimension of failure. I am very happy within this sad story that Maria and I were able to raise the kids well.
“I think there’s nothing more important than to have a good partner by your side and, every step of the way, Maria was exactly that.
“We have a really great relationship. “Any kind of special day we are all together as a family and everyone is really happy about that.
“But it’s not what it was, where we were all together under one roof as a family.”
As a youngster, Arnie’s life changed when he saw the 1961 film Hercules Conquers Atlantis, starring Leeds-born muscleman Mr Universe Reg Park.
He decided bodybuilding was his way out of a tough upbringing with his violent dad Gustav and began following his idol’s fitness regime, training three times a day.
In 1966 he came second in the Mr Universe contest in London and was invited to stay with its organiser Charles “Wag” Bennett the following year.
There, Arnie met hero Reg, who became a friend and mentor and invited him to stay with the family in South Africa, where he now lived.
“It was extraordinary to have Hercules, who I saw in the movie, talking to me and being nice,” he says.
In 1967 Arnie won the Mr Universe title, aged 20.
He says: “I made my vision become a reality, on the same stage Reg won it, holding the exact same trophy.
“It was exactly the way I envisioned it, all the people were screaming. It felt like a fairytale.”
Next he was invited to compete in the US version in Miami, but the Americans were less impressed by his 230lb sculpted physique.
After coming second to Frank Zane — who he branded a “chicken with 17in arms” — he hit a low point, and says:
“I was devastated. I was lying in my hotel room and I thought the whole world was coming to an end.
“I’m in a strange country, I can’t communicate, I’m thousands of miles from home and I just lost. I’ve disappointed everybody.
“I cried all night. The next day I said, ‘OK, so you cried like a baby, you little a**hole. Let’s move on’.”
Arnie bounced back to take the 1970 Mr Olympia title, which he held for seven years, and began touring in muscle posing shows.
He admits taking steroids for “four months of the year” because “everybody in bodybuilding was taking them”.
The series covers Arnie’s rise from the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, which made him a star, to the lead in 1982 film Conan The Barbarian and his game-changing role in 1984’s The Terminator, which director James Cameron reveals Arnie almost turned down because “he only had 26 lines”.
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It spawned a franchise worth £1.2billion which included a blockbuster sequel that was 1991’s highest-grossing film.
It sparked a bitter rivalry with fellow action hero Sylvester Stallone, who tells the documentary: “We were incredibly antagonistic.
“We couldn’t even be in the same room. People had to separate us.
“We pushed each other. I wanted to push him off a cliff.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find one, so I had to live with him.
Lake proposal
“He wanted to be number one. Unfortunately, he got there.”
As his film career grew, Arnie met Maria, niece of former US President John F Kennedy.
He reveals he was introduced by her mother Eunice, and he told her: “Your daughter has a nice ass.”
He added: “She said, ‘Thank you’ and walked away as if to say, ‘What the hell? What a dumb thing to say’.”
In 1985 he took Maria to his home village in Austria, Thal, where he proposed to her on a boat in the middle of a lake.
They married in 1986 at the Kennedy family home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, in what Arnie calls the “biggest wedding I’ve ever been to”, and he adds: “I thought, ‘I’m the luckiest son of a bitch in life’.
“I was successful in my career and my personal life, and not many people can say they are successful at both.”
But he also reveals how Maria “flipped out and hyperventilated” when he suggested running for the Governor’s office, because of her own family history.
JFK was assassinated in 1963 and his brother Robert was also shot dead five years later.
Arnie says she had a “very emotional reaction to it” and also worried the family would be “pulled through the mud”.
Although Maria came round to the idea, her prediction seemed valid, as during his campaign 15 women accused Arnie of past sexual misconduct, including groping breasts, making lewd suggestions and trying to remove a woman’s swimsuit in a lift.
At the time he claimed his political opponents were trying to “tear me down” and although he admits being “rowdy” on film sets, he said many of the reports were made up.
But Arnie now takes full ownership, telling the documentary: “In my first reaction, I was defensive and tried to deny it.
“Today I can look at it and say it doesn’t really matter which time it is.
“If it was the Muscle Beach days 40 years ago or today, it was wrong. It was bulls*t. Forget all the excuses, it was wrong.”
He also admits his children hated him being Governor of California from 2003 to 2011 because he was hardly home.
He says: “It was very tough on my marriage, on the relationship with Maria and with my kids when I was Governor.”
Arnie now spends his days tending to his dogs and Shetland ponies, working out and using his considerable platform to record messages against hate.
They include a recent video message to Russians to inform them about the war in Ukraine and a video railing against anti-Semitism.
Living by his father’s mantra, “Whatever you do, be useful”, he is also building on the radical environmental laws he passed in California, becoming a global spokesman in the fight against climate change.
At 75, he has gone from the physical to the philosophical.
“I’ve had as close to a perfect life as anyone could have and of course you feel it’s too short,” he says.
“I hope when I’m long gone people say, ‘He made a difference’.”
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HE BEAT US WITH A BELT
ARNIE tells of his abusive childhood in Austria with his violent “schizophrenic” dad Gustav, which drove him to his huge success while “destroying” elder brother Meinhard, who died in a drink-drive accident in 1971.
Born in the Austrian mountain village of Thal two years after World War Two, Arnie says his upbringing was tough because his dad had been scarred by his wartime experiences.
“My father spent three days under the rubble of a bombed building,” he explains.
“Then they lost the war. They went home so depressed. Austria was a country of broken men. My father really struggled.”
Police chief Gustav was a “tyrant” who terrorised Arnold and Meinhard, a year Arnie’s senior, smacking them and beating them with a belt.
He also made them “earn breakfast” by working and pitted them against each other, making them compete in races and sport, even seeing which of them could pick the best Mother’s Day flowers for mum Aurelia.
Arnie says: “There is a kind of schizophrenic behaviour that my brother and I witnessed at home.
“There was the kind father, and other times when my father would come home drunk at three in the morning and he would be screaming.
“We’d wake up with our hearts pounding and we knew at any time he could strike my mother or go crazy, so there was this kind of strange violence.”
He says his childhood strife made him determined to escape Austria at a young age, and in 1968, aged 21 and a competitive body-builder, he moved to the US.
It was in 1971, while touring in bodybuilding shows, that he learned Meinhard had died aged just 25.
Arnie says: “I think he started drinking because our upbringing was tough.
“The brutality we got at home, the beatings . . . all of this he could not sustain. He was much more delicate.
“Nietzsche was right, ‘That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’.
“The very thing that made me who I am today was the very thing that destroyed him.”