If you lived in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, your choices for an aerobic workout class were truly slim. You could go to Jane Fonda’s studio in Beverly Hills, where everyone breaking a sweat was “feather-to-lightweight,” according to one observer. You could try a few dance studios where the professionally beautiful — actresses, models, media personalities — willed their bodies to become even more so. If building muscle was your goal, you could stop by Gold’s Gym or other palaces of pump, where an almost entirely male clientele strove for hard bodies in the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It was against this backdrop of fitness exclusivity that Richard Simmons kicked, shouted and shimmied to the forefront of the workout scene, inviting the people he encountered to move with him — first at his Los Angeles studio and then in their own living rooms, through his home workouts on TV and VHS.
With his trademark crown of frizzy hair, sequined tank tops, short-shorts and guy-next-door physique, Mr. Simmons, who died on Saturday at 76, “did not look like a god, and he spoke to those who didn’t aspire to look like a god,” said Daniel Kunitz, the author of the book “Lift: Fitness Culture, From Naked Greeks and Acrobats to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors.”
While other fitness evangelists promoted the idea that exercise was for every body, Mr. Simmons danced the dance, so to speak, and “helped break down barriers for all sorts of people who didn’t see themselves reflected in the fitness cultures of the time,” Mr. Kunitz said.
And yet, despite his embrace of the overweight and overlooked, Mr. Simmons was singularly focused on helping his followers shed pounds, seemingly convinced that while you didn’t need to aspire to look like a supermodel to be happy, losing weight was ultimately the key to health and well-being.
Mr. Simmons’s devotion to helping others lose weight stemmed from personal experience. Growing up in New Orleans in the 1950s, he was heavier than his peers, he told interviewers, and he was teased relentlessly. He moved to Italy as a foreign exchange student and found modest success as an actor, typecast for his size. “I was fat, had curly hair,” he told The Associated Press. “The Italians thought I was hysterical. I was the life of the party.”
Then one day he found an anonymous note on his car that read: “Dear Richard, you’re very funny, but fat people die young. Please don’t die.”
The message spooked him into starving himself, which led him to lose his hair and become severely ill, he said in interviews. He lost weight but knew there had to be a better way.
He eventually landed in Los Angeles, where he struggled to find a fitness community where he belonged: His loud, gender-bending persona left him feeling like an outsider at the era’s hypermasculine lifting gyms and hyperfeminine aerobics studios. Still, in sampling studios, he discovered that he loved aerobic dancing. On the dance floor, for the first time, exercise was fun, he wrote in his 1999 memoir, “Still Hungry — After All These Years: My Story.”
In the mid-70s he opened his first fitness studio, Anatomy Asylum, in Beverly Hills, followed by Slimmons, where he advertised “come one, come all” workouts and offered clients classes that were part exercise, part vaudeville. Instructors and clients remember him dressing up in women’s clothing, adopting different absurdist personas and generally putting on a show while he taught.
“He challenged the idea of fitness as this torturous process of self-discipline — because for him it was so fun,” said Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a historian of fitness culture at the New School in Manhattan. Mr. Simmons “got us to laugh, smile and find joy in exercising,” said Bill Hayes, the author of “Sweat: A History of Exercise.”
“He was naturally funny, unselfconscious, even campy,” he added.
He also earnestly believed he was saving the lives of his overweight clients, people close to Mr. Simmons told The New York Times. In class, he would show pictures of organs from autopsies of fat bodies for motivation. He saw this as an act of love.
Within a few years, Mr. Simmons translated his local success into best-selling books, TV shows and workout records and home videos. His “Sweating to the Oldies” video series sold tens of millions of VHS tapes. Unlike those of other popular fitness stars of the era, Mr. Simmons’s videos featured regular-looking people, an aspect that resonated with a wide audience.
As his empire grew, Mr. Simmons helped to usher in the contemporary era of fitness instructor as celebrity, Dr. Mehlman Petrzela said, alongside luminaries such as Ms. Fonda, Kathy Smith and Jake Steinfeld of Body by Jake. But perhaps even more than his peers, he “injected this performativity into the fitness world,” she said, “and also the instructor as revival leader, as entertainer, as comedian, as guru.”
“He thought of himself as the black sheep of fitness,” said Ken Alan, an aerobics instructor and kinesiologist who helped choreograph seven of Mr. Simmons’s videos. “He had no training, no degree,” he said, and “he wasn’t naturally gifted.” Over time, he enlisted experts, including Mr. Alan, to ensure that what he was teaching was safe and effective.
Amid today’s cultural push for body acceptance — and the mainstream debate over whether one can be fit and fat — much of Mr. Simmons’s branding now feels cringe-worthy and discriminatory. During his heyday, his license plate read “YRUFATT.” He reveled in calling himself a “former fatty” at a time when “fat” was an undeniable slur, Dr. Mehlman Petrzela said. He might have been trying to reclaim the word, but to contemporary ears it can land as cruel.
We know better today. If we’re to learn anything from Mr. Simmons, it’s that joy can be a powerful motivator for movement. But we now know that it can also be the end goal.
“Richard Simmons lives in a complicated part of my heart,” said Virgie Tovar, an activist for weight acceptance and the author of “You Have the Right to Remain Fat.”
“He showed a love and compassion for plus-size people that was unprecedented for any public figure, especially in the fitness world,” she said. “I have always seen Simmons as someone who was fighting the toxic body ideals and exclusivity of fitness, but his shortcoming was that he couldn’t see past weight loss.”
Ms. Tovar added: “I choose to believe that if he’d hit his heyday today, he would have been deeply moved by the body-positive and Health at Every Size movements. I think he would have led a fitness revolution that was truly weight-neutral, and it would have been absolutely amazing to see.”
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