Tom Arnold: The Mayor of Simpleton

With marital lunacy behind him, a hit movie under his belt and Nine Months currently on the big screen, the ever-boyish but all-too-experienced Tom Arnold is launching his solo career. Here he gives us his story, hair transplants and all.

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"So, what's it like to be endowed with the most talked-about penis since John Wayne Bobbit's?" I ask Tom Arnold, who's just emerged from a midday shower all rosy pink and smelling of Irish Spring. We're ensconced in the capacious sitting room of his rented, three-story, Moorish-inflected Beverly Hills manse, a former pad of Elton John, Lionel Richie and Bruce Springsteen. Before me is a fireplace roughly the size of my living room, a big-screen TV roughly the size of my living room, even a wet bar roughly the size of my living room. The master of this establishment is, I learn fast, the town's most puckish, eager-to-please, engagingly kid-like 35-year-old, and today he's in fine form. In such rare form, in fact, that, unlike most actors, he doesn't even try to work the conversation around to plugging the imminent arrival of the Chris Columbus-directed baby-love farce Nine Months, in which he co-stars with Hugh Grant, Julianne Moore, Joan Cusack and Robin Williams.

But back to the question I've posed to Arnold. I've done so despite having been asked by Arnold's publicists to lay off mentioning She Who Must Not Be Mentioned--that mouthy, heavily surgically-enhanced ABC TV sitcom megastar who mercilessly skewered Arnold's wiener in print interviews, then charbroiled it during a "Saturday Night Live" hosting stint. As God is my witness, I never so much as uttered the name of this comedienne, who recently married her younger (and presumably bigger) ex-body-guard, Arnold is a lot less reticent than I.

"When we were married, she used to talk about how big it was." he says out of the side of his mouth. "Anyway, things change. And, like I say, even a 747 looks small when it lands in the Grand Canyon."

Rim shot. Arnold may spew the put-down like a rat-tat-tat punch line from a stand-up comic's act, but I'm guessing he's not feeling funny. He tells me that sexual sniper fire from his ex-love-muffin, with whom he engaged in many of this decade's most out-there shenanigans, comes as no surprise. "I did have in mind the thought, 'Hmm, if she really wanted to get evil, what would she say?' And I thought. 'I know what she would say.' And then she did. I thought it was pretty funny. It doesn't bother me. The L.A. Times was the first place I read it. I was at my fiancée's house and she read it and went, 'Ugh,' and I go, 'Yes, but you see how funny that is?' And she's like, 'Which part?" It embarrasses me when she reads some of the stuff that's printed about me, but most of it doesn't affect her that much. This thing, though, is very funny. It's very funny. It's funny."

Hmmm. Methinks the gentleman doth assent too much and I tell him so. "Yeah, but there's a lot worse things that she could have said," he replies. Like what, making an offer on a late-night talk show to pay for Arnold's penis enlargement surgery? "No, I'd be scared of doing that, the pain would be terrible." he says, wincing. Terrible pain, huh? So, when I ask him to just relax and take off the baseball cap he's wearing--I know he's been undergoing hair transplant surgeries, also terribly painful--he gets the point.

"The hair thing, well... The only reason I got a hair transplant, which is just starting to grow now, is that I'm 35 and I want to be acting when I'm 40 and have the same amount of hair. I mean, the less time you have to spend in the makeup chair, the better. I hate it when they have to use an airbrush to "draw on' your hair. But, you're right, it's very painful. They open you up ear to ear, cut off a piece of your scalp, show it to you, then sew that up, take out donor hair from the back of your head, where hair always grows, punch 300 to 400 holes in the top of your head and put in the one, two, sometimes four little hairs in each of the holes."

Jeesh, "I've had this done five times," Arnold continues. "After the surgery, they wrap your head in a turban overnight and it hurts like hell because you realize suddenly how everything you do is head-oriented. It's horrible. Your face swells. Once you start, though, you have to finish it. I'm getting one more scalp reduction, then a couple of transplants in the back. I don't want a bunch of hair, just some. Every few years, you go back and get some more done."

Didn't he used to sleep with someone who seemed to be getting addicted to plastic surgeries, the kind where, every few years, you have to go back and get some more done? The person in question once said she kept going to plastic surgeons to compete with an employee with whom she had accused Arnold of having an affair. Is he too a physical perfection junkie? "I don't really demand that and never have," Arnold insists.

"You marry someone, with the way they look and stuff, that's her life and so you've got to accept that. I'm not exactly Fabio, so as far as her changing, I never ever wanted her to do anything like that. I always went when she had any surgery done. She was getting a face-lift one time, so I went in and the doctor showed me a picture of her face with the skin completely pulled off the skull. I felt like killing him. I think a person gets addicted to things like [plastic] surgery, just like tattoos or anything else. You can say it's about pleasing someone else, but it's really about not being happy with yourself on the inside. A lot of that stuff is a quick fix. But it never turns out quite like you want it to." Downing a belt of mineral water, he says, yocking it up, "Hey, I'm getting married. I don't need to have hair or penis surgery."

Suddenly, Arnold goes all earnest and, with an appealing semblance of vulnerability, seems to change the subject, "Well, this may sound really stupid, but Sharon Stone--big, giant star sex goddess right now, right?--well, I saw her movie with Sylvester Stallone and they both looked really good and I liked the movie, but I think it would be interesting to see her in a movie where she was with someone like me. I don't only want to do comedies, you know. I think it would be good for her career. And people may actually feel sorry for her after that. I just think it's lime that I was with one of those big female stars. And who's bigger?"

Ah, so we haven't changed the subject. Sharon Stone is being credited as inspiration for a hair transplant. Well, then, might the prospect of sharing the screen with Stone induce Arnold to submit his male member to length and girth enhancement? Shooting his crotch a quick look, Arnold shakes his head no, grins and assures me, in man-to-man tones, "I'm fine. It works. Everything's going well."

Actually, everything is going well for Arnold. In the past few years, he has reinvented the public perception of himself from moderately talented TV megastar fucker to sought-after big-screen commodity. He disarmed skeptics (including me) in True Lies, playing Arnold Schwarzenegger's pal, and followed up by doing the buddy trip again in Nine Months. He's next due in Big Bully, in which two school-yard enemies, now grown-ups, even up the score, and then The Stupids, Carpool and maybe Highway Patrol. On the personal side, he's scheduled to move onto a Malibu Hills ranch spread big enough to accommodate his horses, his motorcycles and his soon-to-be new bride, a lovely 21-year-old future schoolteacher, who, he says with obvious glee, shows "absolutely no interest in show business."

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