Charles Gaines, the author whose book and documentary Pumping Iron helped bring professional bodybuilding into the mainstream and introduce Arnold Schwarzenegger to the world, has died. He was 84.
Gaines died on Tuesday, according to his daughter Greta Gaines. She did not reveal a cause. “You always marched to your own drummer and inspired everyone around you to do the same,” she wrote in a tribute. “Follow that bliss, catch that fish and kiss those lips while you can because my father was the live life to the fullest kinda guy.”
From book to documentary
Gaines collaborated with George Butler to write Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding, which led to the making of the documentary Pumping Iron, for which Butler and Gaines wrote the script. In the introduction to their 1974 book, Gaines wrote that they considered it “a sort of respectful report from the interior of an interesting, colorful and heretofore ignored region of American life.”
In a 2022 edition, he admitted that neither author thought “many people outside of the bodybuilding world would be interested in” the book. Gaines wrote that Schwarzenegger almost single-handedly “brought bodybuilding out of the shadows it had languished in since its earliest days in America and into the limelight.”
Schwarzenegger’s rise
Schwarzenegger, who won seven Mr. Olympia and five Mr. Universe titles and was pictured flexing on the cover of Pumping Iron, harnessed the attention into a career, first in films – including The Terminator, True Lies, Twins, and Predator – and then politics, becoming governor of California from 2003 to 2011.
Gaines wrote that he had been involved in bodybuilding since he was 16, when he began lifting weights. Pumping Iron began as an article for Sports Illustrated in 1972 on a bodybuilding contest for Mr. East Coast. “If we felt at times a little like 19th century explorers, it was because we found bodybuilding to be as primeval and unmapped as parts of Labrador,” he wrote. “Nobody, we discovered, had been back into it to send out a report on what it was like.”
Documentary legacy
Gaines and Butler used the book as the basis for their 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, which centers on the rivalry between Schwarzenegger and fellow bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno in the competition for a Mr. Olympia title. Ferrigno later starred on TV in The Incredible Hulk.
Gaines was raised in Alabama and earned a bachelor’s degree from Birmingham-Southern College and a master of fine arts in writing from the University of Iowa. He published numerous books throughout his career, including Waters Far and Near: Tales of Angling Adventure and Misadventure Around the World and the novels Stay Hungry, Dangler, and Survival Games. Stay Hungry was adapted into a movie starring Jeff Bridges, giving Schwarzenegger his first movie role.
Tributes
“He climbed mountains, trekked across ice, fished, and hunted on almost every continent, writing about every adventure in a way that captured people’s hearts and minds. He was interested in everything – and his interest was contagious,” Schwarzenegger wrote on Instagram. “I’m lucky that he was always looking for new frontiers, because that’s how he found me and our niche sport of bodybuilding.”
In addition to his daughter Greta, Gaines is survived by his wife, the artist Patricia Ellisor Gaines, and two other children, Latham and Shelby Gaines.
