Charles Gaines, who has died aged 84, was a writer and outdoorsman credited with making Arnold Schwarzenegger famous and with inventing paintball.
His best-known book was Pumping Iron (1974), a study of America’s competitive bodybuilding circuit, with photographs by George Butler. As Gaines noted, although it was a popular spectator sport throughout the rest of the world, “in America… bodybuilding has advertised itself with consummate tackiness, confining itself to the back pages of pulp magazines and, in the national consciousness, to the same shadowy corners occupied by dildos and raincoat exhibitionists.”
Gaines sought to overturn the stereotype of “bodybuilders as narcissistic, co-ordinatively helpless muscleheads with suspect sexual preferences” and celebrate the dedication and artistry of its practitioners.
Schwarzenegger in the 1977 documentary film, Pumping Iron – Alamy
He was fortunate in finding an especially articulate and engaging champion of the sport in the reigning Mr Olympia – Arnold Schwarzenegger, “The Austrian Oak”. Schwarzenegger spoke candidly about the ups and downs of being, in Gaines’s words, “very possibly the most perfectly developed man in the history of the world”: “There are some girls who are turned on by my body, and some others who are turned off. But for the majority I just use it as a conversation piece. Like someone walking a cheetah down 42nd Street would have a natural conversation piece. Then when they get to talking to me they see I am not mean but gentle…”
Pumping Iron – a phrase hitherto unknown to most Americans – became a bestseller and then in 1977 an acclaimed documentary film co-written and narrated by Gaines. Camping up the rivalry between Schwarzenegger and his fellow man-mountain Lou Ferrigno (soon to be famous as The Incredible Hulk on television), it set “Arnie” on the path to cinematic and political stardom, and brought bodybuilding into the mainstream.
“Your average stockbroker still doesn’t put on skimpy little trunks on Sunday and hop on to a posing dais,” Gaines noted in 1982, “but the chances are very good now that he does exercises the way he has read that Arnold does them.”
As Schwarzenegger observed in his autobiography, Total Recall, “Charles Gaines was a good-looking, self-confident guy from a rich family… He’d had a wild adolescence, dropped out of college for a while… He always said that discovering bodybuilding helped settle him down.”
The son of Charles Gaines, a businessman, and his wife Margaret, née Shook, Charles Latham Gaines III was born in Jacksonville, Florida, on January 6 1942. The family moved to Birmingham, Alabama, when he was 10.
After abandoning his course at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, he hitchhiked around the United States, before marrying Patricia Ellisor, an artist and former Miss Alabama, in 1961. Having taken up bodybuilding “lazily and non-competitively”, he returned to academia, taking an MFA in writing at the University of Iowa and then teaching creative writing at New Hampshire College.
His first book, Stay Hungry (1972), was a novel set in the world of bodybuilding; it won wide critical acclaim and was a bestseller. The Sunday Telegraph’s Francis King judged this portrait of the “hermetic world of lats and pecs and quadriceps, of raw proteins, Tiger’s Milk and vitamin pills” to be “one of the funniest, and strangest, novels to have come my way in recent months… For [Gaines] the muscle-man, so often viewed as either a joke or monster, is the purest kind of artist – he is himself his own work of art.”
In 1976 Gaines wrote the screenplay for a film of Stay Hungry directed by Bob Rafelson, with Schwarzenegger in his first major acting role alongside Jeff Bridges and Sally Field.
Gaines collaborated with George Butler again on a biography of Charles Atlas, Yours in Perfect Manhood (1982), and a second volume of Pumping Iron, on women bodybuilders (1984). This time Gaines found much to disapprove of: “A lot of the top women are using testosterone. It gives them a lot of male characteristics, hair on their chests and backs and other less palatable things… It’s very easy to push bodybuilding too far.”
Charles Gaines in later life
Gaines wrote several more novels and screenplays, and innumerable books and articles on favourite pastimes such as mountaineering, fishing and bird hunting; he regularly made films for the ABC television series The American Sportsman. His busy professional life almost cost him his marriage, until he decided to reconnect with his wife and children by whisking them off to remote Nova Scotia and building a cabin, as recounted in his memoir A Family Place (1994).
In 1981 Gaines helped to establish the National Survival Game franchise, subsequently better known as paintball, which became an international staple of stag-dos and team-building weekends. Its origins lay in a competition between Gaines and his friend Hayes Noel, a Wall Street stock trader, to hunt each other down in the woods near Gaines’s home in New Hampshire.
Gaines armed them both with devices he had come across in a catalogue: pistols used by foresters to fire small balls of paint to mark trees that needed to be cut down or attended to. “Hayes shot first, and he missed, and I shot him right in the butt. It hurt!” Gaines recalled in 2018.
Explaining paintball’s appeal, he observed: “The idea of running through the woods, competing [and] symbolically surviving… goes way back into our genetic development.”
Charles Gaines is survived by his wife and three children.
Charles Gaines, born January 6 1942, died July 21 2026
