The filing, which Shriver signed nearly two weeks ago, signals an end to a union that brought together a rising film action star and a princess of the Kennedy clan, herself an up-and-coming network newscaster.

Shriver’s filing does not indicate the couple had a premarital agreement.

That means Schwarzenegger’s earnings from a career as a Hollywood megastar, which allowed him to forgo a salary as governor and commute by private jet to Sacramento, likely will be evenly divided with his estranged wife.

Shriver is seeking spousal support but the amount will be determined later, either through a settlement or by a judge. The divorce is expected to be handled mostly behind closed doors.

Economic disclosure forms filed when Schwarzenegger left as California governor in January show he has interests in at least eight entities each worth $1 million or more. An exact tally of his wealth is impossible to calculate.

The forms also show he still retains rights to intellectual property from his days as a fitness guru and movie star.

Several of Schwarzenegger’s biggest hits, including “Predator,” “True Lies” and the blockbuster sequel “Terminator 2″ were made during his marriage to Shriver.

Shriver was an award-winning television journalist but put her career on hold when Schwarzenegger ran for governor.

Her holdings are more modest but are listed in the disclosure as being worth more than $1 million. She is a member of the Kennedy family and a beneficiary of some of its assets in addition to owning rights and royalties from her work as an author, the filings show.

In recent months, she has appeared in videos posted on YouTube in which she talks about stress in her life, the weight of expectations and the search for faith in a troubled world.

Shriver and Schwarzenegger have four children together, including two sons who are still minors. Shriver’s petition seeks joint custody of the teens, who are 17 and 13.

Schwarzenegger’s spokesman Adam Mendelsohn declined comment in an email. Shriver’s attorney Laura Wasser did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment. Her spokesman Matthew DiGirolamo declined comment.

Shriver publicly supported her husband when he ran for elected office, even after the Los Angeles Times reported accusations by several women that they had been groped by the movie star.

Schwarzenegger said he “behaved badly sometimes” and was twice elected to the governorship.

He failed to fix the state’s chronic budget problems and left office in January with an eye toward environmental projects and a return to the big screen.

One of his projects was an animated collaboration with comic book legend Stan Lee titled “The Governator,” but the project was shelved after Schwarzenegger admitted fathering the child out of wedlock. He has disappeared from the public eye in recent weeks and has not announced any plans to resume acting.

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Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/celebritydocket

3. Permanent bachelor of the day: Hugh Hefner, whose fiancée Crystal Harris called off their wedding five days before the duo was due to walk down the isle.

4. Amazing machine of the day: This gel-scooper-upper  doesn’t seem like it would have much of a purpose … until you spill mayonnaise on the floor in the exact shape you would have wanted it on your sandwich! Now who is laughing, Dad?!

5. Dalai Lama fail of the day: An Australian morning show anchor tries to explain a pizza joke to the leader of the Tibetan Buddhists. It does not go over so well.

Yes, maybe the problem was that he should have told the joke in terms of burgers.

“It was as Joseph grew and I started to see the resemblance that I wondered — but it became more apparent as time went on,” said Baena, who said that Maria Shriver also seemed to recognize  Joseph’s similarity to her now estranged husband. Shriver, says Baena, was supportive and eventually asked the housekeeper point blank whether Schwarzenegger was Joseph’s father.

And perhaps the most surprising aspect of the story: When Joseph learned his father’s identity last year, he apparently said, “Cool!” (No doubt, we assume, because he is too young to have witnessed firsthand Schwarzenegger’s acting career play out in “Kindergarten Cop” and “Twins.”)

These days, there’s a new rack of clever, grim headlines for comedians to invent:

“Maria & Arnold: Terminated!”

“IMF head sits in jail, waiting for a bail-out”

Meanwhile, I’m sitting at home, practicing my punditry and wondering why it is that after 36 years with the same woman — with whom I have made love more than 3,000 times — there’s nothing I’d like better right now than to go into the next room to strip off her clothes.

After all, I don’t really have much to say about Arnold and Maria. They’ve asked for privacy; I offer them indifference. I didn’t really know who Maria Shriver was, beyond her name (I don’t follow television news), until her husband ran for governor — and even today, after his two terms in office, I think of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a well-cast actor in a terrific sci-fi movie about robots. Judging from the Wiki versions of their lives — her father founded the Peace Corps, his father was a Nazi; she spends her spare time hugging people with disabilities, he spends his spare time grabbing ass — I find it astounding that they made it to their 25th anniversary.

As for Dominique Strauss-Kahn — like Schwarzenegger, married to a famous television journalist and driven to frenzy by the sight of a housekeeper — his alleged aggression is incomprehensible to me. What satisfaction does a man derive from rape (or, for that matter, hiring a woman for sex)? My own sexuality is so much about my desire to be desired that the thought of sex without reciprocity leaves me limp.

Schwarzenegger, Strauss-Kahn and I are about the same age (I’m the junior one at 59), so I can testify that none of us are testosterone-crazed (unless Arnold’s taking supplements). That’s where our peership ends, however. The two of them are multimillionaires, political bigwigs, media stars, with guys like me in their employ. That means I’ve had every advantage over them in terms of keeping together a long, happy marriage.

It takes a girlie-man to do it.

That’s what Schwarzenegger has been calling his political opponents since he campaigned for George W. Bush in 1988: “girlie-men.” It seems he wasn’t just acting in those “Terminator” films: He is a major-league alpha-ape fool.

Oh, it’s hard to be a girlie-man in this flaunt-and-taunt culture of ours. Quick, name one hit rock ‘n’ roll classic that explicitly celebrates long-term relationships. I can think of exactly one: Orleans’ happy number, “Still the One” (“We’re still having fun, and you’re still the one“), which made it to No. 5 in 1976 — a year that included No. 1 hits like Paul Simon’s “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” and Johnnie Taylor’s “Disco Lady” –

“If it wasn’t for the girl sittin’ next to me

I’d jump right up and outta my safety seat

You got me hypnotized, soul-mesmerized …”

And quick, name one porn scene (despite the fact that you never watch porn) in which the woman is truly pleasured. The only clips in which that happens involve girl-girl sex or gadgetry. As soon as a man enters the picture, intimacy, parity and female orgasms are banned. The “money shot,” as they call it, is always his orgasm, not hers. He is “ripping off a piece” while she is suffering a nympho-maniacal seizure. That’s the formula. You have to wonder if the titans of porn have even thought about its implicit message: To be used as a scum bucket, a woman should find a man; to get satisfaction, she needs another woman or a machine.

Whew. I’ve looked at these scenes of sex without kissing, without caring, without communion, and all I do is shudder. Is that what men really want? I can’t relate.

I’m a girlie-man.

It took a long while to achieve that status. For years, in fact, my poor wife was convinced that I’d someday renounce the comfort and intimacy of “the girl sittin’ next to me” and be “soul-mesmerized” by some hot Disco Lady. She knew that I sometimes felt frustrated by the sexual boundaries of monogamy; she knew that I would say yes to the right woman in the right situation (the only vow I’d made about having sex with other people was that I would not lie to her about it, neither to her face nor by omission). Therefore it was inevitable, she believed, that I would someday fool around and fall in love.

It took until our own 25th anniversary — as well as two tepid, fully disclosed flings (finally, the right women in the right situations!) — for me to look her full in the face and say: “Hey, you can stop worrying. I’m never going to leave you. Not until I die.”

I had finally reached an age, I explained, at which it might actually feel downright weird to get naked and share kisses and bodily fluids with a stranger. Certainly I could never match with another woman the level of trust, intimacy and freedom that she and I have in the sack. “It’s like, the longer we’re together,” I said, “the more like virgins we become.”

Virgins, indeed: sharing a bed, a refrigerator, a toilet bowl, for 36 years; sharing the mutual benefit of our successes and the mutual “oh, well” of our disappointments; sharing the incredible good fortune of having a person who really cares, knows, hears and sees; sharing a life in partnership, both of us made stronger and braver by our hand-holding.

Now, that’s the woman I want to make love with! C’mere, you!

Maybe strange flesh would still tempt me, but it barely ever passes through my field of vision: I’m a busy writer living in the country, where I see more squirrels than human beings in the course of any given week. Besides, what woman in her right mind would want to have a fling with me (notwithstanding my dimples)? I don’t represent danger or adventure, I don’t have bulging biceps, a motorcycle, a private jet, or a big roll of bills — and I’m famous only for my happy marriage.

And I’m so out of practice at groping! — first, because I need to be groped before I will grope, and second, because once a man learns to see women first as human beings, second as sex objects, it becomes difficult to reverse the order.

That learning took me years to accomplish — to lose enough of my vanity and my egotism, to feel some slackening of testosterone’s grip, to raise a beloved daughter to the age at which I met her mother, and to rewrite a few punch lines. Not:

Marriage is the process of finding out what kind of man your wife would have preferred.

Rather,

Marriage is the process of becoming the kind of man your wife can keep loving.

But bless my soul, I’m a girlie-man at last.

His governatorship was also set to star in three new big budget movies, including two installments of the legendary “Terminator” chronicles. But on Thursday, Schwarzenegger’s entertainment attorney issued a statement that he “is focusing on personal matters and is not willing to commit to any production schedules or timelines. We will resume discussions when Governor Schwarzenegger decides.” And it’s not looking too good for a return to politics either.

Can a man whose movies have made over a billion dollars in the U.S. alone stomp his way back into the movie-going public’s hearts? The real question is – how has this man ever had a film career in the first place? This is a guy whose most famous role was as a mechanical object.

Schwarzenegger has certainly never made any bones about where he fits in the world of typecasting. Though he’s mixed it up in his film career – swinging between action, action adventure, and action comedy, he’s certainly never had any delusions of being a serious actor. The amazing thing is that he’s had this career when he’s never been an actor, period. His more enjoyable films, like “Predator” or “True Lies,” succeed because they’re fun movies, not because of his robotic line readings or ability to carry heavy stuff. Watching Schwarzenegger, you find yourself longing for the subtlety of Steven Seagal.

Though he has a stellar track record at the box office, the world is a different place than it was when he withdrew from moviemaking eight years ago. He’s more than 20 years older than Jason Statham, and in action hero years, Jason Statham is old. And while grayer hits like “Red” and “The Expendables” — in which Schwarzenegger cameoed — prove there’s still an audience beyond the “Twilight” crowd, a 63-year-old man who also happens to be a disgraced public figure is a tough sell.

When all the hoo-ha around that cheating on his wife and having a secret second family stuff dies down, Schwarzenegger may yet return in cinematic triumph. There will always be an audience for “Terminator” flicks – there may even an audience for the “Kindergarten Cops” of the world. But if you want a beefy guy who can convincingly kick ass and take names, who can host “Saturday Night Live,” who then can then turn around and make your kids fall in love with him, folks, you’re not saying you want the Brobdingnagian European. You’re saying you want Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Maybe someday America will be ready to take the Governator back into acting. But there’s no doubt it’d be up for a Rockident of the United States.