Arnold Schwarzenegger's Son to Sexily Conquer the World
In a new profile in Details magazine for totally straight dudes, the former Governator's 17-year-old son Patrick, already a shirtless squeal sensation, talks about his plans for the future—in the worlds of business and love. How precocious!
It's both strange and completely makes sense that Details would run a story like this. Patrick is young and cute, but maybe dangerously too young. And he's a half-blood Kennedy, a member of a strange and tragic clan. So there's a little adventure and preemptive melancholy in reading the piece. Though, ultimately, he comes across not as some mythic figure of American royalty, a lordling poised at precarious ascendancy, but more like another rich kid with 2011 California designs for living.
Patrick is trying to raise the profile, and the charitable output, of Project360, whose T-shirts, bracelets, and hoodies have been carried in Bloomingdale's and Henri Bendel, worn by the likes of Reggie Bush and Eva Longoria, and featured on Access Hollywood. At a café in the Country Mart, he and his partners, Nick Sheinberg (his oldest friend) and Kimberly Barth, met to discuss the pros and cons of using English-language appliqués like UNFORGETTABLE (benefitting Alzheimer's research) and SURVIVOR (cancer-stricken children) as the company expands into Asian markets. They also selected fabrics for their first men's line, due this winter, consisting of luxe sweats, windbreakers, and, in a nod to Patrick's father, leather bomber jackets.
Aha. Just another kid who wants to make hip street wear-lite for people like Reggie Bush and Eva Longoria. OK. In defense of the clothing line, Patrick does donate 10% of the profits to charity, which is in keeping with the charitable history of his mother's family. What else! Well, despite all the charity work, kids will be kids:
In one recent for-profit venture, he proved adept at getting out of trouble-a skill that is every bit as valued by the Kennedys as by the Schwarzeneggers. It was last Halloween, when Patrick cohosted "the biggest party any high-school kid has ever been to," in Pacific Palisades. "There were, like, 600 people there," he says. "We flew in a rap group from the East Bay called the Pack." The cops busted the party, handing out multiple citations for underage drinking.
The rascal! Patrick goes on to say that he made all his seed money back and that his parents weren't thrilled with the negative attention the party sent his way, but they were "glad I had fun with it." Oh, well, that's decent of them.
So what about the question on every young maiden's mind. What are the romantic ambitions of Patrick, prince of California? Well, his aims are, predictably, high.
In the meantime, it's not as if Patrick is uncomfortable with the Hollywood set. "I just saw Tallulah over winter break," he says, referring to the daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. "I was at their house in Sun Valley." Although he just reunited with an ex, Patrick cockily refers to his tweet-mates Kendall Jenner and Selena Gomez as "girls for the future."
"My eye, though," he adds, "is set on Miley."
Miley? Oh no no no, that won't do. There must be a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt or even a Hearst running around somewhere that you can court, Patrick. Someone befitting of your status. Miley Cyrus, escaped country barn swallow, is certainly not that! Tsk tsk, what would great-grandma Rose say?
So that's basically Patrick Schwarzenegger, future something. Of course if he chooses to go to college (and he'd better, though he's also just signed with a modeling agency), whatever campus is lucky to have him will greet him with great triumphal parades, victory horns blaring, and he will be carried to the nicest dorm on campus on the shoulders of his inferiors. It is as inevitable as the tides. But don't worry, despite everything, he really is just a down-to-earth kid.
"Coming from a family like Patrick's," [his uncle] Timothy [Shriver] says, "people anticipate superiority, bossiness, exclusivity, because most of the time, that's what you get from Hollywood kids. Patrick has absolutely none of that."
Well, if his uncle says it.