The Church of Saint Richard
The late fitness legend believed that everyone deserved to feel good and move with abandon.
WELCOME ST. RICHARD, I LOVE YOU read the banner one woman held to greet Richard Simmons when he visited her home in suburban New York. One of his most devoted disciples, she had lost more than 200 pounds thanks to his uplifting, whimsical workouts. Like the dozens of other exercisers Simmons personally traveled to see to express encouragement, she credited him with her transformation, which was most easily quantified by weight loss, but was really about self-reclamation. Simmons, who died over the weekend one day after his 76th birthday, is most identifiable for his outlandish aesthetics made famous in his best-selling 1988 home-workout video, Sweatin’ to the Oldies. Yet his contribution to the world transcended the frizzy hair and extra-small Dolfin shorts that comprise a rare Halloween costume recognizable across generations. Even the online outpouring of grief from fans and luminaries such as Jane Fonda don’t fully capture his legacy.
Simmons abruptly left public life a decade ago, spawning a wildly popular podcast and documentary, and his departure was an enigmatically private last act for an over-the-top, in-your-face figure. He had spent his life dramatically expanding the definition of “the gym”—and who was welcome there—in ways that still shape how we move, and who does.
The notion of exercise as a sign of moral virtue is as old as the activity itself. Movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Muscular Christianity, positioned it as a means of disciplining the flesh, and physical work as bodily proof of God’s grace. That ethos was still thriving when Simmons burst onto the fitness scene in the 1970s, a decade when Oral Roberts University’s “Pounds Off” initiative required Christian students to maintain a particular weight, diet, and exercise regime, or else face suspension. Secularized versions of this mentality were everywhere, too. Avid runners described trading cigarettes and steak for daily miles as a “conversion” experience that made them superior to their slothful contemporaries.
Simmons took that religious devotion to exercise, stripped away its grim asceticism and elitism, and imbued it with pure emotionalism and inclusivity. In the opening segment of his eponymous television show, he appears as an angel at the supermarket, placing fruit in a woman’s shopping cart as a prelude to his exercise class. At the Anatomy Asylum, the studio Simmons opened in Beverly Hills in 1974, he alchemized the spirit of dutiful self-denial into a come-one, come-all celebration of the body and its capabilities. When the staid host of Real People, a prime-time TV show, described Simmons as “the Billy Graham … of bulk,” he accurately captured how the impulse driving millions of Americans to join megachurches led by charismatic leaders also accounted for Simmons’s appeal. Legions of exercisers flocked to the sweaty spectacle Simmons convened, where he made good on the promise that you deserve to feel joy right now, and not just once your jeans from high school fit again.
Born in 1948 to a Jewish mother and Methodist father, Simmons once considered the Catholic priesthood, but found his calling in converting Americans—especially those often cruelly excluded from the dominant fitness culture at the time—to exercise. In Southern California, where Simmons had relocated from his native New Orleans, the gyms and studios that multiplied in the 1970s and ’80s featured a common cast of characters: sinewy joggers in short shorts, men with rippling muscles, sylphlike women in leotards. Getting in shape was having a moment, but the conventional wisdom was that to even show up in such spaces, you had to already look “fit.”
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Simmons, a self-described “former fatty,” dispensed with all of that and focused on helping overweight people, because in his eyes, they represented versions of himself. Today, weight-loss-through-working-out narratives are a cliché, but Simmons was one of the first to articulate a formula that would preoccupy his generation and every one since: exercise as a means to shed, rather than gain, pounds. Exercise enthusiasts have always loved a reinvention story, but before the Baby Boom, those tales almost uniformly recounted a sickly, frail body made strong and healthy with exercise and diet. “You and I—our stories are exactly the same, but in reverse,” Jack LaLanne, Simmons’s forefather fitness personality, told him when LaLanne appeared on The Richard Simmons Show. LaLanne had overcome malnourishment, and Simmons obesity, a word that became far more ubiquitous in the ’80s than in previous decades. Both men had been “born again” through exercise and had committed their lives to this evangelism. But Simmons embodied an experience that was much more common in the second half of the 20th century: exercise as an antidote to American excess.
Simmons’s refusal to make fat people invisible in exercise environments was revolutionary, but only up to a point. Fat people were welcome as long as they aspired to become thin. Simmons worked to make the process exhilarating and accessible, but he never appeared to question that slimness was the one true path to salvation. At the time, such conditional fat acceptance may have been all that the world was ready for. Programs taught by fat women who decried size discrimination and insisted that fatness and fitness could coexist were far more modest successes. And Simmons’s work with disabled people was viewed with more skepticism than his outreach to overweight people. These clients’ bodily “problems”—a missing limb, a congenital brain injury—could not be “fixed” by fitness, and their enthusiasm for exercise had nothing to do with such aspirations. Despite the joy for movement Simmons witnessed in patients with spina bifida, for example, retailers wouldn’t promote his book on this topic or the adaptive events he planned. “This doesn’t look good,” one critic announced within earshot of an amputee. Despite Simmons’s efforts, this kind of inclusivity failed to inspire as widely and reliably as weight loss did.
Perhaps the most profound way that Simmons transformed the fitness industry was by challenging its gender norms. His trademark spangles, makeup, and campy showmanship were entirely new to the mainstream gym world. Although he never explicitly discussed his own sexuality, Simmons embraced this flamboyant persona in a way that only intensified his popularity. Before achieving success, however, he had faced alienation. Simmons wrote of having felt “like a failure” in men’s gyms, his ebullience and emerald-green tracksuit at odds with the militaristic trainers and muscle heads in stained gray sweats. Female-oriented dance-fitness classes were much more his speed, but although he finally felt “really alive” at the studio where Jane Fonda discovered aerobics, the proprietor refunded Simmons’s membership money, hard-earned from waiting tables: He was reportedly “too disruptive,” and “women were not comfortable with a man in the class.”
This humiliation, atop those of Simmons’s difficult childhood, fueled him to open the Anatomy Asylum 50 years ago. He was living proof to his disciples that they could turn their feelings of inadequacy and exclusion into fuel for fitness. Unlike those polished celebrities and perfect trainers who headlined other videocassettes, Simmons insisted that, just like you, he was a work in progress. Decades before trainers infused exercise with therapeutic talk or stories of personal vulnerability, Simmons held support groups and always returned to the message that everyone deserves to feel good, and to move with abandon.