Celebrity Gossip's

For most politicians a book detailing past infidelities, marijuana use and even an unknowing cameo in a gay porno film would be most unwelcome just two months before a re-election bid.Yet when California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's first serious girlfriend wrote a memoir that is being published this week, he embraced the project, offering a foreword and lengthy interview for the 325-page tome.Barbara Outland Baker, 58, met Schwarzenegger in 1969 shortly after he arrived from Austria and they dated for six years, living together for four of them, a time during which he became the world's most famous muscleman."For six years, I lived to inhale the essence of Arnold Schwarzenegger," Baker writes in her book "Arnold and Me: In the Shadow of the Austrian Oak.""Since our time ended, I have lived to exorcise his power over my psyche. I have not mastered this particular talent, however; the longer we have been apart, the more I realize I can never escape this man's shadow."

In an interview, Baker, who teaches writing at a college in Southern California, said Schwarzenegger's oversized persona still affects her life three decades after they broke up.

"Of course I am not in love with Arnold! Once he gets in your skin, there is just no total letting go because of the frequency in which you hear about him and so the world makes me react to him all the time," she said. "So he is far more active in my psyche than an old boyfriend would otherwise be."

Although Schwarzenegger's wild past was a big issue in the 2003 campaign that brought him to office, the subject has not been an issue in his effort to win a second term and the Republican is far ahead in polls.