Schwarzenegger's image rehab tour hits a bump

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently paid $20 million for a think tank at USC, gets a segment on "60 Minutes" tonight to give just enough mea culpa on the whole cheated-on-Maria thing to make it sound like a blip on his historical screen. But at the Daily Beast, longtime Arnold chronicler Ann Louis Bardach says the chronology given to CBS' Lesley Stahl and in Schwarzenegger's forthcoming memoir, "Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story," is anything but true.

Bardach:

Schwarzenegger’s book offers a remarkable—and according to several former staffers and friends, fictitious—timeline and spin of his affair with Mildred Baena, the housekeeper with whom he fathered a son. (That would be at the same time and in the same house where his wife Maria Shriver was pregnant with son Christopher.)

Schwarzenegger’s account, according to several carefully-calibrated leaks, has him conveniently not learning about his paternity of Baena’s child until after he is elected governor—and Shriver, also conveniently, learning about the child in a joint therapy session just one day after he stepped down as governor....

But friends and former employees of the couple say Schwarzenegger’s version of events is pure confection. One former staffer, who worked at both their home and offices, said, “It was my impression going back to 2000 that it was common knowledge among the household staff that Joseph Baena was Mildred’s son with Arnold.” Said one former housekeeper, in Spanish: “No, it was not a surprise to me. But I don’t want to say anything more.

The book people should be waiting for, says Bardach, is Shriver's. "A mega-million book deal has been offered her, and according to one friend, she just might write her own account, and finally, set the record straight," the story says.

The subject of the affair with the housekeeper is corralled into a corner of the "60 Minutes" piece. From CBS:

"I went all around the world with him," says Lesley Stahl. "And it never came up. He never brought it up, I never brought it up." Finally, at the end of Stahl's final interview with former Gov. Schwarzenegger, it became clear that the hard questions had to be asked. "He knew the time had come and I knew the time had come-- and we both did our jobs. Let's put it that way."

Part 1 of tonight's "60 Minutes" segment:

Backstage extra: