IT IS the role Arnold Schwarzenegger was born to play – “the governator”, striding tall against a scarlet sky, cheering on heroic firefighters, comforting the dispossessed with a fresh twist on his worn catchphrase: “I’ll be back – with money.”

The unlikely story of an Austrian bodybuilder turned Hollywood star who was elected governor of the sixth-biggest economy in the world reached its apogee last week as he shepherded President George W Bush around the smouldering ruins of southern California and appeared more presidential.

Physically, the Austrian Oak, 60, has been shrinking. He is noticeably shorter than the 6ft 2in steroid-enhanced hulk who won all the top body beautiful competitions in the 1970s. But politically he has never been more popular or powerful in his adopted homeland.

From the media-saturated moment last Monday when the devout Catholic politician visited a burnt-out Presbyterian church in Malibu, an early casualty of the bushfires that continue to burn across southern California this weekend, Schwarzenegger has been in the public gaze 15 hours a day.

He has played cheerleader to weary firefighters dancing around 100mph gusts of flame, children’s entertainer as he greeted refugees taking shelter in a San Diego football stadium and, perhaps most importantly, guide and hustler for government aid to an array of visiting Washington officials.

“This is real-life drama,” said Rob Schultzman, the governor’s former communications director. “This is what all the bodybuilding and the movies prepared him for – a confidence that makes him more comfortable than the average politician in the middle of a real-life nightmare.”

“The governor is the optimistic larger-than-life figure people want to see coming over the hill when all seems lost,” said another former aide. “Sometimes he is far happier on the ground, with chaos all around him, than in his office surrounded by snakes in suits. Maybe it reminds him of a film set, but he seems to grow a few inches during a crisis.”

The governor has acknowledged this himself. “I know action, this is what it’s all about. I am a hands-on kind of guy who wants to get around and do these things,” he said in his distinct Austrian-Californian tones.

According to insiders, he has also made significant decisions away from the public gaze at dawn briefings with emergency co-ordinators: “Republican governors have diverted firemen to protect richer areas first, but he said safe firefighting was his priority, so some rich palaces have burnt,” said an impressed official from the firemen’s union.

“This is maybe why we have lost only one fireman so far, compared with five outside Palm Springs last year and 22 in San Diego in 2003,” he added.

“Considering the intensity and spread of the fires, the low mortality rate [seven deaths at last count] is amazing.”

Schwarzenegger brushed aside reporters’ comparisons with the feeble White House response to Hurricane Katrina two years ago, but he did promote the message that the Californian government cares: “I have personally made the calls for cots [camp beds] and food and water. I am listening to what people want. I am governor and I will make it so.”

Compared with New Orleans, the relative wealth spent on Californian evacuation drills and a taste for 4x4 cars big enough to carry entire household treasures have paid off.

Looting has been minimal – mostly illegal immigrants stealing food and rowdy teenagers snatching beer. More serious are the arsonists, now being hunted by the FBI. “We don’t have to understand why they do it, we only need to catch them,” said an FBI spokesman.

The governor even reached out to foreigners. He thanked the Canadians who sent water-carrying aircraft, when bureaucratic infighting and high winds had grounded the state’s own fleet. He praised the Mexican city of Tijuana which dispatched fire engines across the border to San Diego, a city that despite regular autumnal blazes does not have its own regional fire brigade.

He has been called presidential, but can never hold that office because of a constitutional ban on foreign-born presidents, originally drawn up to prevent King George III returning after the revolution. But a private straw poll taken last Thursday gave Schwarzenegger a 70% approval rating, twice as high as Bush, setting him up for a promising run for the US Senate in 2010, when term-limits end his governorship.

This weekend Schwarzenegger is expected to return to the woods of Lake Arrowhead, east of Los Angeles, where the state’s 9,000 firefighters, 3,000 of them prisoners seeking time off for good behaviour, are converging.

The San Diego football stadium and school gyms have finally emptied as 750,000 people, equivalent to the population of the city of San Francisco, return home. Many spent the past week dialling their answering machines: if they took messages, the house was still standing. Nearly 2,000 homes and £500m worth of property have gone up in smoke.

In Malibu, the site of the first of the blazes fanned by the hot Santa Ana winds, Hollywood stars have dispatched servants to investigate the damage. One of the first victims was Sean Penn, the actor-director, who was in Italy promoting his film about the glories of nature called Into the Wild when flames devoured his luxury caravan.

The hillside “double wide” trailer, Penn’s primary residence since a fire gutted his nearby house in 1993, was later visited by executives from CAA, his talent agency, wondering how to tell their volatile star that the only piece of furniture remaining was a skeletal beach umbrella.

The summer homes of Olivia Newton-John and Sting, the singers, James Cameron, the director of Titanic, and Bill Murray and Kelsey Grammer, the actors, were evacuated. A local landmark, Castle Kashan, owned by Lily Lawrence, the Iranian social-ite, was burnt.

James Keach, husband of Jane Seymour, the British star, ignored the mandatory evacuation orders to dampen down brush near their home, Seymour said.

Only a handful of Malibu homes were destroyed.

Locals say that they enjoy four seasons – earthquake, mud-slide, riot and, every autumn, Santa Ana fires. Some, like former resident Mike Davis, history professor at the University of California, Irvine, argue that it might be wiser to let the multi-million-dollar mansions burn and build elsewhere.

Schwarzenegger, whose own compound in west Los Angeles is in a constant flux of expansion and remodelling, would have none of such defeatist talk. “We shall rebuild bigger and better and safer than ever, and Washington will help pay for it. That is our way,” he said.

Bad air day

California residents hoping for a return to normal after a week of wildfires were being hampered by severely polluted air yesterday. Warnings were given that children and the elderly should stay indoors in several parts of the state.

During the fires residents protected themselves with industrial masks, and in the aftermath some were turning to surgical masks to avoid inhaling soot and dust hanging over the San Bernardino mountains, parts of Orange County and around San Diego.

“In the immediate aftermath of a fire we’re all at risk from the fine particulate matter in the air,” said a spokeswoman for Breathe LA, which monitors smog in Los Angeles. Past wildfires have led to increases in cases of asthma, pneumonia, bronchitis and heart attacks.

A drop in the winds helped firemen bring blazes under control, but smoke was dispersing more slowly.

California wildfires - links

Governor of California webpage : Arnold Schwarzenegger (includes videos of Schwarzenegger visiting evacuees)

Fire updates from California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection:

NASA Satellite Images of California Wildfires, October 24, 2007

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