Richard Simmons AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Maintenance Phase

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Richard Simmons) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (Maintenance Phase) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

Maintenance Phase episodes list: view full AI transcripts and summaries of this podcast on the blog

Episode: Richard Simmons

Author: Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes
Duration: 01:01:57

Episode Shownotes

Part 1: The Early YearsBefore building his fitness empire, America’s most bedazzled fitness guru was a guy named Milton from New Orleans. Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch Aubrey’s documentary in AU & NZ, or watch it at home anywhere else!Buy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts,

stickers and moreLinks!Still Hungry...After All These Years by Richard Simmons "Hair-Do" Anatomy Asylum CommercialRichard Simmons: New Orleans's hometown heroA Speedy History of America’s Addiction to Amphetamine Thanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

Summary

In this episode of "Maintenance Phase," hosts Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes explore the complex life of Richard Simmons, from his early days in New Orleans to his rise as a whimsical fitness icon. They delve into societal perceptions, media portrayals, and the impact of anti-fatness and eating disorders on his life. The narrative reveals the influence of his tumultuous family dynamics and the cultural backdrop of the AIDS crisis. Together, they highlight Simmons' journey through personal struggles with identity, body image, and his eventual contribution to wellness and body positivity, while critiquing harmful fitness trends and societal biases.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Richard Simmons) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:11 Speaker_06
All I know about Richard Simmons is like sad things, like melancholy things, but I'm trying not to have like a melancholy tagline.

00:00:16 Speaker_02
Wow, you really got surprised by this podcast. I've been planning for like a month. We keep pushing back.

00:00:23 Speaker_06
Oh, well, this one's bad, but whatever. Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that thinks tank tops and short shorts are appropriate for any weather. Yeah. I like that one. It was not very clever, but it is accurate.

00:00:36 Speaker_02
I'm Aubrey Gordon. I'm Michael Hopps. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase. You can also get bonus episodes through Apple podcasts. It's the same audio content.

00:00:48 Speaker_06
And if you live in Australia or New Zealand, you can see Aubrey in other ways.

00:00:53 Speaker_02
Yes. Jeannie Finley's documentary, Your Fat Friend, about yours truly, is in theaters now in Australia and New Zealand. And as soon as it leaves theaters, it will be joining doc play.

00:01:07 Speaker_02
For all the details on that and all of the screenings, you can go to YRFatFriendFilm.com or there's a handy dandy link for you in the show notes. Aubrey Down Under. Something something lesbian joke. Something something.

00:01:21 Speaker_02
Michael, today we're talking about Richard Simmons.

00:01:24 Speaker_06
We haven't done a good old, like, influencer episode in a while. Just like, here's a person. How do you remember Richard Simmons?

00:01:31 Speaker_06
I think I mostly remember him from late night TV appearances, where he would show up on, like, Jay Leno to talk about stuff. Or I was really into those, like, best of Johnny Carson tapes that you could get.

00:01:42 Speaker_06
He showed up on Johnny Carson a million times. I've seen all of those, like, 4,000 times. Him and, like, Sam Kinison are, like, the people I modeled my personality after. The thing is, I don't think he was like that great of a presence.

00:01:53 Speaker_06
And I think looking back, I think a lot of those appearances were probably like low-key pretty homophobic.

00:01:59 Speaker_07
Oh, baby.

00:01:59 Speaker_06
And then I listened to the podcast about him, Dan Taberski's, I thought excellent, but like complicated podcast about Richard Simmons. And then he emerged to me as kind of like a more tragic figure.

00:02:11 Speaker_02
Well, first of all, those appearances were not low key homophobic. Were they high key homophobic?

00:02:16 Speaker_02
One of the recurring bits that Richard Simmons would that people would call Richard Simmons onto their show to do would be to like, be like, you're going to be a guest on the show.

00:02:25 Speaker_02
And then they would hide cameras in his dressing room and do things to scare him. Oh, so that he would like scream and like jump up and down.

00:02:35 Speaker_06
Oh, and like an effeminate way.

00:02:36 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:02:37 Speaker_02
I mean, I think I remember him the way a lot of people remember him, which is honestly like, I think societally we just kind of treated him like a manic pixie dream gay, despite the fact that he never, you know, addressed his own sexual orientation.

00:02:51 Speaker_00
Right.

00:02:51 Speaker_02
I'll say, I just read as much Richard Simmons reporting as I could get my hands on, which is not a ton of reporting. Right. including the recent wave of eulogies, including missing Richard Simmons.

00:03:06 Speaker_02
All of those were sort of written in the way that you and I are talking about remembering him, right? Which is these sort of hazy, fond memories, really light on details. And none of them referenced his memoir, Still Hungry After All These Years.

00:03:26 Speaker_02
And when I read his memoir, it was 100% things I had not heard. Oh, really? OK. So this is part one of a two parter. Today, we're going to talk about Richard Simmons life sort of before he became a household name, because there is a lot there.

00:03:43 Speaker_02
So today is sort of about the messages he took in. And next time is sort of like what he decided to do with those messages and the messages that he put out.

00:03:50 Speaker_06
Wait, I just thought of a better tagline. What? His whole thing was like sweating to the oldies, right? Yeah. That's what we call it when people exercise while listening to maintenance phase because we're old and they're doing they're doing exercise.

00:04:03 Speaker_02
So many emails from people who are five to ten years older than us.

00:04:09 Speaker_06
Look, I am 42. I can do this.

00:04:12 Speaker_02
A heads up before we get into it. This story has some really dark moments. So we're going to be talking about anti-fatness. We're going to be talking about eating disorders. We're going to be talking about drug abuse, physical assault.

00:04:25 Speaker_02
So just like basically buckle up. Yeah. So we're going to start out with Richard Simmons as you might remember him. So here's a little refresh. I'm going to send you a link. Okay.

00:04:37 Speaker_04
Wow, what a beautiful, healthy looking audience!

00:04:41 Speaker_06
His energy.

00:04:45 Speaker_01
Richard! This is insane when I heard that this is your 59th video. 59th video! 59th DVD. Wow, that's amazing.

00:04:55 Speaker_04
It's when to the oldies 5. Hey, what are you sitting down for?

00:05:06 Speaker_01
He thought it was like, you thought we were serving something? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. He's going to show you. Well, first of all, tell people. Everybody has, I think, aspirations to get in better shape. What advice do you have for people?

00:05:18 Speaker_04
Number one, love yourself. Have a lot of self-worth. Number two, lower your calories and watch your portions. And number one, move those buns! Can I tell everyone that? What? Can I tell everyone? Mama? Mama? Mama wants to hear. Mama wants to see. Mama? Gypsy.

00:05:43 Speaker_05
Oh, my god.

00:05:43 Speaker_04
Anyway, it was from Gypsy. I know. I know. We can do, you know, Gypsy. Yes. Anyway, everyone, the audience is getting my new sweat and fire.

00:05:56 Speaker_02
This is the energy that Richard Simmons was operating with all of the time.

00:06:01 Speaker_06
This is also the energy that Ellen was operating on where she's like, let's get this over with. She's sort of officially joking, but you can tell in her face that she's like, this is annoying the shit out of me. She hates it. She hates it.

00:06:18 Speaker_06
Shut up, Richard.

00:06:19 Speaker_02
So clearly. She hates everything about it. I know. And I think that's maybe the greatest indictment of her yet, is like, you don't like Richard Simmons?

00:06:30 Speaker_06
I know. The funny thing is he's such a ray of sunshine, but also because he's so loud, because it's sort of so sticky. You can find it grating.

00:06:40 Speaker_06
Yeah, this is projecting based on everything else I know about him, but people who act like this oftentimes are covering up for something. To have this much energy and to be this on all the time just seems like it would be so much work.

00:06:52 Speaker_02
Yeah. There was a quote from Billy Eichner in one of the write-ups after Richard Simmons passed away. He was very straightforwardly just like, yeah, Richard Simmons goes in the long line of gay men who made it through by making themselves the joke.

00:07:06 Speaker_02
Right.

00:07:06 Speaker_06
Like, right. Yeah. Kind of. People come up with strategies to fit in and you're like 12 when you're coming up with these strategies, right? Because you realize you're gay and you're like, oh fuck, I have to like do something about this.

00:07:16 Speaker_06
And oftentimes established patterns that then are very hard to break, right? The way that you fit in in social situations is like the habits and the defense mechanisms that you developed by being in the closet.

00:07:29 Speaker_06
And so I wonder if Richard Simmons started doing this to compensate for something and then just like couldn't break the habit.

00:07:35 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, I think part of the way that you make it through is by telling stories about yourself, like fully concocted. but it's also based on, as you're saying, your kid brain. So it's like as convincing as two kids in a trench coat.

00:07:51 Speaker_06
Yeah. This was absolutely me in middle school. Guys were like, Ooh, she's hot. I'm like, yeah, I want to poke her boobs. I want to play her boobs like bongo drums.

00:07:59 Speaker_02
So Richard Simmons for the uninitiated built a fitness empire in the U S he had a chain of gyms at one point,

00:08:10 Speaker_02
Yeah, he had 22 DVDs and 38 home videos including sit tight, which I think is kind of a great Not gonna make a gay joke, I'm not gonna make a gay joke I'm gonna be I'm gonna be very mature on this podcast.

00:08:27 Speaker_02
I'm gonna Very classy cuz he made sit tight dance your pants off and No, ifs, ands, or buts. Oh, that was actually pretty good. B-U-T-T-S. That's very, that's very wholesome.

00:08:44 Speaker_02
He had one vinyl record with a bunch of ballads on it that he sang and he was an okay singer. Okay, fair enough. He also made one absolutely incredible music video and you and I are gonna watch it right now.

00:09:00 Speaker_05
Oh no, okay.

00:09:12 Speaker_06
Oh my god.

00:09:12 Speaker_00
Oh, just look at you. I think you need a new hairdo.

00:09:33 Speaker_03
Pick out a style that will give you a lip. Smite, juxtapose, bubble. Choose a dude that will get you in trouble. See how it plays. Audre Lorde. All right, no. Shut it down. Shut it down.

00:09:42 Speaker_06
Shut it down.

00:09:43 Speaker_03
Shut it down.

00:09:45 Speaker_06
We're stopping this episode. We're done. We're done for the day. I'm not watching Richard Simmons rap. Look, I hope you can tell this was recorded in the 2010s. I don't want to make fun of this man, Aubrey. He's like a tragic figure.

00:09:57 Speaker_02
No, it's like I really genuinely enjoy this song and have been listening to it recreationally. There are a bunch of stories about later in his career about Richard Simmons showing up to his gym to lead classes in drag. Oh.

00:10:16 Speaker_02
And he does some drag in this video. OK. To me, this feels like we're getting closer to how he saw himself.

00:10:23 Speaker_06
I love that you're trying to recast this as like an act of self-actualization when it's a music video called Hair Do and he's rapping. Get something cute. Get something girly. The thing is, I have exactly the same hair as him.

00:10:36 Speaker_06
Any any jokes about his hair off-limits?

00:10:39 Speaker_02
Michael, are you ready for story time?

00:10:41 Speaker_06
I know this man, but I don't truly know this man. So let's do it.

00:10:43 Speaker_02
Richard Simmons was actually born Milton Teagle Simmons. Okay. In the French Quarter in New Orleans in 1948. Okay. He was born to Leonard Simmons Sr. and Shirley Mae Simmons. His father was actually a professional MC before he was born.

00:11:02 Speaker_06
So he has a background in rapping.

00:11:03 Speaker_02
And his mother was a fan dancer.

00:11:07 Speaker_06
What does that mean?

00:11:07 Speaker_02
You know the ladies who would dance like burlesque with big feather fans to cover up their bodies? Like, whoa, salacious.

00:11:15 Speaker_06
I know about that theoretically, not personally, but yes.

00:11:18 Speaker_02
Some sort of cracks started to emerge pretty early on in their marriage. So when Shirley became pregnant, Leonard decided that he needed to quit show business.

00:11:31 Speaker_02
According to his memoir, the day that his mother told his father she was pregnant, his father started gathering up photo albums and headshots and publicity photos, sort of anything from their showbiz careers.

00:11:47 Speaker_02
He gathered it all up in the backyard and burned it. Oh, this is a quote from Still Hungry After All These Years.

00:11:56 Speaker_06
He says, This bonfire was not to be discussed. My father made all the decisions in his house. My mother watched from the kitchen window as he tore apart albums and tossed pages into the fire.

00:12:06 Speaker_06
With the fire still raging, he strode back into the house, not saying a word. He walked right past my mother and into the bathroom, shutting the door.

00:12:14 Speaker_06
While he was cleaning up, Shirley quickly went out into the yard, picked up a stick, and poked through the fire. She managed to salvage some of the photos. Aw.

00:12:23 Speaker_06
Quickly she trimmed the burnt edges from the photos and then hid them away, never saying a word again about the whole affair. So that's how I came to have no family history. Oh god, that's so sad.

00:12:34 Speaker_02
So clearly this is like a third-hand story, right? Presumably his mother told him and then he told his ghostwriter and here it is in book form, right? He was also, I should say, he was very open about his books being written by ghostwriters.

00:12:52 Speaker_02
He was like, I'm not a good writer.

00:12:53 Speaker_06
He's more of a rapper. He's more of a Sugarhill Gang type of figure in America.

00:12:58 Speaker_02
My guess here is that there is a kernel of truth to it or that it's just straightforwardly as real story. It's a really, it would be a weird one to make up for full cloth, right?

00:13:09 Speaker_02
And it's painting a picture that resonates with how Richard saw his father, right? Which is kind of a storm cloud of a dude.

00:13:19 Speaker_06
And also when you have mercurial presences like that in a family, oftentimes the rest of the family adjusts to avoid these outbursts. So I can imagine a family based around not getting these weird blowups from his dad.

00:13:31 Speaker_02
Yeah, absolutely. Things are sort of engineered toward don't make dad mad.

00:13:35 Speaker_06
Yeah.

00:13:36 Speaker_02
So his dad quits his job as an emcee. Different places report different jobs for him, but the most common ones are that sometimes he worked in a thrift shop, but most of the time it seems he was just unemployed.

00:13:51 Speaker_02
So his dad is a storm cloud of a dude in the forties and fifties who is not Providing for his family, right?

00:14:01 Speaker_02
That's also a cause of volatility often Yeah, totally if you have weird stuff about masculinity Especially in this era, right and you're not working and supporting your family Like that's only gonna make that stuff gnarlier dudes are weird about it dudes are weird about it After her years as a fan dancer surely became a cosmetic salesperson, which also seems fitting for a parent of Richard Simmons Yeah

00:14:28 Speaker_02
Oh, first I was in burlesque and then I started selling makeup. You're like, yeah, did you invent the bedazzler also?

00:14:37 Speaker_06
We all become a combination of our parents and I think Richard did too.

00:14:40 Speaker_02
He had one older brother, Lenny, who Richard refers to as Mr. Perfect and Mr. Business.

00:14:48 Speaker_06
Those are like, those are like guess who characters. Okay.

00:14:51 Speaker_02
It's really clear that Richard and Lenny loved each other, but that Richard felt really pitted against Lenny. Richard thought that in his parents' eyes, he was always doing the wrong thing and Lenny was always doing the right thing.

00:15:05 Speaker_02
It's that sort of sibling dynamic.

00:15:07 Speaker_06
Does he talk in the memoir about realizing he was gay or is this all under the surface?

00:15:11 Speaker_02
He never discusses his sexual orientation in the memoir. Oh my God. So like, listen, the backdrop of this story is that Richard Simmons rise to fame almost exactly mirrors the onset of the AIDS epidemic.

00:15:26 Speaker_02
You're going on Carson, you're going on Letterman, you're going on all these shows and you have this wide appeal coming out. puts you squarely in the middle of Pat Buchanan's culture wars, right?

00:15:37 Speaker_06
But then, do you get the sense that Richard Simmons, like, knew that he was gay and made a business decision not to talk about it? Or was he in denial about the fact that he was gay?

00:15:46 Speaker_02
I don't have any sense of any of it. Okay. According to some reports, he did have a long-term partner. Okay. That is the person who was sort of, like, saying that his housekeeper had kidnapped him in the missing Richard Simmons era.

00:16:00 Speaker_07
Yeah.

00:16:01 Speaker_02
Right? So like, it's just a whole frot. It's all unreliable narrators. It's all other people speaking for him. The thing that I feel really dead set on in this episode is Richard Simmons speaking for Richard Simmons.

00:16:14 Speaker_06
There's no chance that he's actually just an effeminate heterosexual guy, is there? Or is there?

00:16:17 Speaker_02
There's a YouTube video of outtakes and like prerecord from an interview he did at one point in like the 80s or something where somebody said something about out of the closet and he was like, Well, I've been out of the closet for a long time.

00:16:32 Speaker_06
No, he hasn't.

00:16:33 Speaker_02
And I was like, you have not. Yeah. But also you sort of have like, I see what he's saying. Yeah. Especially in the 80s, people were not being like, well, actually, he hasn't addressed it.

00:16:46 Speaker_06
I personally think Richard Simmons probably could have come out. I mean, everyone kind of knew already. But also it's like the psychology of this is so complex.

00:16:54 Speaker_02
I mean, this brings us to the next point in the story, which is that he and his brother were raised Catholic.

00:17:00 Speaker_06
Oh, good to add that layer in there.

00:17:02 Speaker_02
He talks about thinking that it was weird that he and his brother went to Catholic school. They dressed up and went to mass every week. Lenny was an altar boy, but neither of them had ever been baptized.

00:17:18 Speaker_02
And their parents never attended religious services or talked about religion.

00:17:23 Speaker_06
Oh, so they're like culturally Catholic, but not like actually beliefs. They don't believe stuff.

00:17:27 Speaker_02
So Richard sort of asked his parents and pressed about it and was like, Why do we go to mass? But you don't go to mass. Why do we go to a Catholic school? But you're not we don't seem to be Catholic.

00:17:40 Speaker_02
And his dad was like, look, it's a good school and it's three blocks away. It's where you go to school. Shut up about it.

00:17:47 Speaker_06
We want to instill in you a weird sense of constant shame.

00:17:50 Speaker_02
Yeah. We can tell how gay you are and we want you to feel bad about it forever.

00:17:56 Speaker_06
We are. This is a subsidy to your future therapist.

00:17:59 Speaker_02
In high school, Richard actually takes the plunge and fully converts to Catholicism. He gets baptized. He does the whole thing. He at that point strongly considers becoming a priest or even joining a monastery.

00:18:12 Speaker_06
And that's like a thing for gay people back then.

00:18:14 Speaker_02
One hundred percent. In his memoir, he says that he thought about becoming a priest because he, quote, likes the outfits.

00:18:23 Speaker_06
Richard, you're not making this easy. We're trying to be sensitive to you and the way that you wanted to be discussed, but it really seems like you want to tell the audience something and you're not telling them.

00:18:36 Speaker_02
It isn't until after he converts that he meets some cousins who live far away and they start talking about these bat mitzvahs that they've been having. And Richard is like, what's a bat mitzvah?

00:18:51 Speaker_02
And his cousins are like, oh, it's a Jewish thing because we're a Jewish family. Wait, what? You're Jewish? Wait, really? He's like secretly Jewish and he didn't know? His dad was raised Methodist and his mom was Jewish. Oh.

00:19:07 Speaker_02
And in Judaism, if your mom is Jewish, you are Jewish. His parents never told them. That's fascinating. through the grapevine that they were Jewish, the title of the chapter where he tells this story is, A Catholic? Oy!

00:19:22 Speaker_02
That's, that is, in fact, the chapter title.

00:19:30 Speaker_06
I like this man. I like this man.

00:19:38 Speaker_02
So this is sort of like the tone and tenor of life at home. We're not talking about things. We're not showing affection. We're not letting you in on what's happening. He talks about his parents not really showing affection even to each other.

00:19:50 Speaker_06
Man, they really did lean into the Catholicism, didn't they?

00:19:53 Speaker_02
It's a really odd and sort of cold sounding household. to wit, Richard had asthma in his memoir. He writes that he had asthma at a time when people didn't really understand it. Right.

00:20:07 Speaker_02
So we're talking about the fifties and some people didn't even fully believe in it. According to Richard Simmons, one of those people was His dad nice.

00:20:18 Speaker_06
So he didn't get like an inhaler and stuff quote.

00:20:20 Speaker_02
Well, my father didn't believe in all this asthma medicine He secretly thought that my asthma would get better if I weren't such a brat. Oh my god It's always the same thing. My dad also tended to be his own doctor No matter what was wrong with you.

00:20:34 Speaker_02
He felt that it could be cured with one of the four remedies from his medicine cabinet.

00:20:39 Speaker_05
Oh, no

00:20:40 Speaker_02
camphorphenic Cod liver oil calamine lotion or Mercura chrome.

00:20:47 Speaker_06
Oh, that's all you needed I thought he was gonna say the carnivore diet. We'd really go full circle.

00:20:52 Speaker_02
You don't think we go full circle on Mercura chrome His Relationship with his dad sounded like rough in a really deep way initially. I was gonna say strained But like that would be an improvement. I Yeah.

00:21:10 Speaker_02
So I'm sending you another quote from his memoir.

00:21:29 Speaker_06
Milton doesn't live here anymore. He had a short fuse, and if it went off, his words could be like daggers, cloaked in the most incredible vocabulary. His temper had style.

00:21:38 Speaker_06
Rather than being afraid of him, I wanted to see that temper in action and explore how I could twist it, so I'd push, just to get him going." Oh man, so he's just like trying to get any form of attention he can.

00:21:49 Speaker_02
He's just trying to get a reaction and his dad is like that not setting a place at the table for you is like chilling.

00:21:58 Speaker_05
Brutal.

00:21:59 Speaker_02
I also appreciate about this quote that he lifts up his response to it where he's like, Oh yeah, then I made it worse. Yeah. Then I would go in and be like, what else can I get him to do?

00:22:09 Speaker_00
Right.

00:22:09 Speaker_02
Right. So there's another little vignette in the book about his father ignoring him completely until Richard just starts singing show tunes at the table.

00:22:18 Speaker_02
Oh, man, until his father finally has to acknowledge him, even if it's just by being like, hey, stop it.

00:22:24 Speaker_06
That makes so much of his public persona make sense. Yeah, because it's like he's just trying to get your attention.

00:22:29 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:22:30 Speaker_06
And he's trying to get you to look at him.

00:22:31 Speaker_02
He's trying to annoy his way into your heart.

00:22:34 Speaker_06
Yeah. And his dad probably gave him his first ever Ellen face.

00:22:38 Speaker_02
One more thing about his dad. At one point in his childhood, his mother was rushed to the hospital and it turned out that she had an ulcer. And they all go to the hospital together. They're in the waiting room.

00:22:50 Speaker_02
And his dad immediately tears into him and says that Richard is the reason that his mom is sick. Oh, according to the memoir, he screamed at Richard, quote, It's not Lenny. It's you. I'll spell it out for you. M.I.L.T.O.L.

00:23:08 Speaker_06
Way. Jesus Christ.

00:23:10 Speaker_02
And then Richard turns it around on his dad and is like, no, you're the one who aggravates her. She's stressed out because she has to work all the time. Why don't you get a job? He says to his dad, choke on a COCK dad. So things were tough with his dad.

00:23:26 Speaker_02
Good with his mom. He loved his mom so much. Really tough with his dad. And they're tough at school, too. He's growing up in Louisiana in the 50s, and he is not a Louisiana in the 50s kind of guy. He's more of a Portland in the 2010s kind of guy.

00:23:44 Speaker_06
More than 2010s.

00:23:47 Speaker_02
24. He's got a huge personality. He's got big curly hair. He's super theatrical. He's fat at the time. He's left handed. And he talks in the memoir about trying to correct every single one of those things.

00:24:06 Speaker_06
He's trying to be a silent mask Northpaw. He's looking for an extremely specific kind of conversion therapy.

00:24:13 Speaker_02
He is desperate to fit in and he is painfully aware that he fails to fit in with his family and he also fails to fit in with his peers, right? Right, right. Those experiences of difference are most acute for him around his fatness.

00:24:32 Speaker_02
That difference plays out at home. He goes to the doctor when he's in grade school and the pediatrician gives him a lecture about weight loss and puts him on a diet. The way that he describes that meeting felt so familiar to me.

00:24:46 Speaker_02
They were like sitting in a doctor's office with this sort of authority figure that's not just an authority over you, but is also an authority to your parents. Yeah. And they're reporting to your parent that your body is a failure.

00:25:00 Speaker_06
Also, on top of everything else he has to be insecure about and he's getting shitted on for, it's like, oh, throw fatness in there too. It's just like so much for one little guy to deal with.

00:25:10 Speaker_02
And again, this is all happening before he's like 10. Yeah. So at that doctor's visit, the doctor hands him a photocopied piece of paper that lays out a diet for him to follow.

00:25:21 Speaker_06
God, it's gonna be bad, isn't it?

00:25:23 Speaker_02
You wanna hear the diet?

00:25:24 Speaker_06
Do you have any guesses about what the diet is? Isn't it gonna be some Scarsdale bullshit where it's like eat three blueberries in a bowl and then like salted ice cubes for lunch and then go jogging for dessert or something?

00:25:36 Speaker_02
Salted ice cubes is too light, but three blueberries is too heavy. Okay breakfast one slice of dry wheat toast a poached egg and Quote a beverage. They don't really specify that seems like a real kind of weird.

00:25:52 Speaker_02
Yeah So milkshake is fine, right lunch is three ounces of tuna that's been packed in water Drained and then dressed just with lemon juice.

00:26:03 Speaker_05
Oh, that's like the rocks diet. Oh, oh

00:26:06 Speaker_02
And two slices of rye crisp, in case that wasn't dry enough for you. Your snack is one apple and your dinner is three ounces of lean meat and one cup of dark green vegetables. And again, a beverage. Yeah, God, it's like a YouTube challenge.

00:26:23 Speaker_06
It's like for dinner, eat six saltines and then afterwards fold a piece of paper more than eight times.

00:26:28 Speaker_02
So I looked at his diet and did a little rough estimate on the calories. If your beverages are water, this adds up to 588 calories for the whole day. That's like prisoner of war rations.

00:26:42 Speaker_02
At this point, the Minnesota starvation study had already happened, and that was at fifteen hundred and seven.

00:26:49 Speaker_06
Yeah. Yeah. I don't like leaving it up to his parents to enforce this, I guess, which then just contributes to the bad relationship with his dad.

00:26:57 Speaker_02
Well, he also talks about sitting down to eat with the whole rest of his family and they're eating all of their normal dinner. Oh, God. And he's got like a little bowl of tuna with his sad little bowl of tuna. Yeah. Yeah.

00:27:10 Speaker_02
So he starts the diet food is terrible and he hates it. So he starts quietly feeding it to their dog under the table. That just means he's eating even less. Yes. And he starts just skipping meals.

00:27:22 Speaker_02
And the more weight he loses, the prouder his mom is of him. So he instantly gets the message that no one cares how you lose weight. It's just that you lose weight.

00:27:35 Speaker_06
I mean, it's bad for you at any age, but it's like to be doing this, this like important developmental time is like so dangerous and scary. I have, I have nothing to say throughout this whole episode other than like, that's bad.

00:27:47 Speaker_06
I'm contributing nothing.

00:27:49 Speaker_02
So that difference around his size shows up for him in a big way at school. He talks about arriving at school on the first day and being like, everyone here is thin and everyone here is staring at me. Oh yeah.

00:28:02 Speaker_02
He also talks about a kind of constant casual bullying of kids just being like, Hey fatso. And that kind of thing. He learns to deal with it by leaning into the fat joke. So when people are like, Hey fatso, can you even make it to the end of the block?

00:28:19 Speaker_02
He like start wheezing like asthma style wheezing. And then he'd be like, no, I can't. I'm not okay. Like he would like be like, you're so right. This is how out of shape I am.

00:28:33 Speaker_06
So he's got the gay compensatory stuff and the fat compensatory stuff. So he's like establishing all these really harmful patterns.

00:28:38 Speaker_02
It's kind of the same skill set that he developed with his dad. Right. Which is just like, you just go over the top with it. You go when they go hard, you go harder.

00:28:49 Speaker_06
I'm imagining like maintenance phase listeners who saw like, oh, they're doing a Richard Simmons episode now just sitting in their car staring into middle distance. Like, oh, God, I'm sad. I'm so sad about something that happened like 60 years ago.

00:29:02 Speaker_02
I told you. So at this point, when this happens, Richard's friends are all girls. Yeah. And they figure that if he isn't fat, this won't happen, which is like rookie mistake. Right.

00:29:14 Speaker_02
So they all raid their mom's medicine cabinets and bring in various diet pills.

00:29:22 Speaker_06
Oh, no. Which was like fucking meth back then.

00:29:25 Speaker_02
Right. He doesn't name the pills, but he does describe taking a bunch of different colors of diet pills. This was a thing in the 60s in particular. There was a huge boom in quote unquote diet pills, and they were sometimes called rainbow pills.

00:29:42 Speaker_02
Oh, there was very little information and research into their safety at this point. But pill mills started to pop up just fully walk in clinics. Yeah.

00:29:53 Speaker_02
Where patients would come in and be prescribed a quote unquote rainbow of pills that were supposedly like bespoke just for them.

00:30:01 Speaker_02
And the patients would get a consult and a prescription, usually a few prescriptions to be filled at a compounding pharmacy. And the appeal, the sort of selling point was that it was a medical solution and it was fully customized.

00:30:17 Speaker_02
Peter Cohen, a professor at Harvard Medical School, told the Smithsonian, quote, What they were really doing was selling stimulants combined with other medications to counteract the side effects of the stimulants.

00:30:29 Speaker_02
So all they're doing is giving you amphetamines and then things to make the amphetamines less amphetamine-y.

00:30:37 Speaker_06
Also, did I – okay, maybe we'll keep this, maybe we won't. Did I tell you I once took one of my dad's antidepressants because I thought antidepressants were like happy pills? I was in seventh grade.

00:30:46 Speaker_06
I was like, oh, if he takes them for depression, then it'll make me extra happy. So I took it. But then it turned out they weren't antidepressants. They were for his insomnia. You just went to sleep? It was like some like nuclear level sleeping pill.

00:30:57 Speaker_06
And it was the day it was the last day of school for seventh grade. And we were all going to a roller skating rink.

00:31:02 Speaker_07
Oh no, and you wanted to be extra happy?

00:31:04 Speaker_06
I wanted to be extra happy, and so I sat down to lace up my skates, and I was like, I'm tired, I'm going to lie down. And then I woke up at 3.15 when somebody was like shaking me.

00:31:14 Speaker_02
You missed the whole thing? The whole day. Baby, you took some Trazodone. There's none question in my mind.

00:31:21 Speaker_06
I have no fucking idea what it was but I was also a tiny child and I like the dosage was also deranged and then also there was speaking of bullying there was a kid who had been bullying me all year and that was like his last chance to like beat me up and like as I was sleeping at some point during the day he like shook me awake and he's like come out back bitch I'm gonna beat your ass and I was I was too tired to deal with it I was like not right now man I'm too tired

00:31:44 Speaker_06
Okay, and he just never fucked with me again.

00:31:47 Speaker_02
I'm too sleepy for you to mess me up. It's such a wild Like keep him on their toes.

00:31:54 Speaker_06
What a fighting move. So anyway could have been worse. You could have been on amphetamines Well, yeah, I mean that would have been way better and also I would have kicked the shit out of that guy

00:32:01 Speaker_02
So he keeps taking diet pills and he realizes that if he takes more pills, he loses more weight. Of course, he only stops taking the pills after he has a very intense episode of thinking, and I quote, that my heart would explode.

00:32:17 Speaker_05
Oh, God.

00:32:17 Speaker_02
So he backs off of the diet pills that freaks him out. And he's like, No, no, no, no, no, no. Never mind. So he finds out that one of his friends moms is going to Weight Watchers and he begs her to take him with her.

00:32:30 Speaker_05
Oh, God.

00:32:31 Speaker_02
This is early high school by this point. She agrees, and he's so happy that he runs home to tell his parents. And he writes that when he told his parents, they were really deeply proud of him.

00:32:45 Speaker_02
Oh, more proud of him for going to Weight Watchers than like most other things. Right. Which scans with the experiences of a lot of fat kids.

00:32:54 Speaker_06
Yeah, this is, I mean, some of these are parallels with your experience, right?

00:32:57 Speaker_02
I was reading this and I was like, I'm in this picture!

00:33:01 Speaker_06
They're just like, from a very young age, this is like the overwhelming, like, issue that people talk to you about and give you shit about.

00:33:06 Speaker_02
Pretty much the only times he writes about his parents being proud of him are around weight loss. Oh, God. So he describes going to this first Weight Watchers meeting with his friend's mom. Everyone lines up and weighs in.

00:33:18 Speaker_02
The group leader records everyone's weight and tells them how it changed from last week to this week. If your weight goes down, you get a star pinned to your shirt.

00:33:31 Speaker_02
If your weight plateaus and stays the same, you get a turtle, which is like slow and steady, whatever, into your shirt. And if your weight increases, Michael, you get a fucking pig.

00:33:43 Speaker_06
Yeah, God, I was like, Oh, it's not gonna be a pig, is it?

00:33:46 Speaker_02
Oh, yeah, it was gonna be a pig or a cow or a hippo.

00:33:48 Speaker_06
Yeah.

00:33:49 Speaker_02
Then the group leader announced everyone's weight loss or gain to the entire group and people clapped or did not clap. And his friend's mom, when he goes to the first meeting, gets the fucking pig pinned to her shirt.

00:34:09 Speaker_06
Oh my God.

00:34:09 Speaker_02
Here's what he writes about that moment.

00:34:13 Speaker_06
I held her hand. She looked over at me for a moment and then she said something that I'll never forget. You better do something about your weight now because it only gets worse later in life. Catch it now before it's too late.

00:34:24 Speaker_06
I'll never forget the look of shame on her face. Here was this happy lady, and one trip to the scale and 20 minutes later she's crying, her mascara is running down her cheeks, and she has a pig on her shoulder.

00:34:35 Speaker_06
I knew from past experience that the system and reward and punishment probably wasn't going to work for me. Oh god, it's like such a sad lesson for like a little kid.

00:34:43 Speaker_02
Totally. And I think this is like where you start to see the birth of the Richard Simmons who stays up all night on the phone with people who watch his videos or come to his classes, right? Yeah.

00:34:55 Speaker_02
This is where you see the person who's just like, I just don't want you to get wrecked to buy this, right?

00:35:01 Speaker_06
That's something I remember very vividly from the podcast that he has it like a deep well of empathy. He seems to like really care about other people.

00:35:08 Speaker_06
But then he also has like these weird blind spots where he sort of stops like, it seems like he struggled to form relationships with people that weren't around, like kind of rescuing them or like being a support for them.

00:35:19 Speaker_02
Yeah, he describes himself repeatedly in adulthood as someone who does not have friends, right? So he's just sort of doing this kind of like deep emotional support work, right? But he doesn't feel like a reciprocal relationship. He doesn't feel,

00:35:36 Speaker_06
You know, that's how I took that. And then you also think about this poor kid carrying around the fact that he's gay at the same time, right?

00:35:42 Speaker_06
It's like, okay, I have this fat thing that is like the number one thing that everybody is shitty to me about and then I have this big fucking secret that I'm carrying around or at least this feeling I have that I can't put words to even if he hadn't sort of identified it in himself yet.

00:35:56 Speaker_02
And he's left handed and inferior. So all of this, all of the crash diets, the diet pills, the doctor's visits, the Weight Watchers, all of this happens while he is a child or a teenager.

00:36:09 Speaker_02
He has not even gone off to college yet, and he's already been through the ringer, right?

00:36:14 Speaker_07
Mm hmm.

00:36:14 Speaker_02
So when it comes time for him to leave home, he is stoked. He started at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and then he transferred to Florida State, where he graduated, interestingly enough, with an art degree.

00:36:31 Speaker_02
We could have had a Richard Simmons Bob Ross. That's very fun for me to think about.

00:36:35 Speaker_06
Maybe there's a happy little tank top. Maybe there's a happy little tank top right here.

00:36:40 Speaker_02
He wanted to be a painter and he studied abroad in Italy, okay, and he Loved it. Oh, he is there to make his dreams to be an artist come true But things take a very different turn When he's sitting at a cafe after class one day. Oh, no. All right.

00:37:04 Speaker_02
There you go. Oh

00:37:04 Speaker_06
He says, I noticed a table of men across the way staring at me. I just assumed they must be admiring my gorgeous curly hair or my new paisley Gucci knockoff overalls. Overalls, okay. He's already Richard.

00:37:20 Speaker_06
One of the men came over and introduced himself, asking me if I knew Frederico Fellini, the Italian director. I said I didn't know him, but I knew who he was.

00:37:28 Speaker_06
Well, the gentleman who introduced himself was the casting director for the movie Satyricon, and Fellini wanted me for a small role. And he wanted me because I was fat, but in Italian it sounded so much nicer.

00:37:40 Speaker_02
So Richard Simmons appears briefly in Fellini's Satirica. Wait, this actually went through? This actually happened? It is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it kind of appearance. No way! But he is there!

00:37:54 Speaker_06
Dude, in his little overalls?

00:37:57 Speaker_02
No, but he is a little fat guy.

00:37:58 Speaker_06
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait! YouTube has it, YouTube has it, YouTube has it! Richard Simmons' Infelini's Satyricon! Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. Send me the clip. Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.

00:38:08 Speaker_06
Okay, sending it to you.

00:38:10 Speaker_02
This is fun.

00:38:18 Speaker_06
That is Richard Simmons. I would not in a million years have recognized that as him. Full beard, definitely like a fat dude.

00:38:27 Speaker_02
He looks like Jack Black. He looks like a young Belushi.

00:38:30 Speaker_06
Yes. Dude, one of the comments is, my God, the amount of people who think that's Richard Simmons is disturbing.

00:38:36 Speaker_02
According to his memoir, it is him.

00:38:38 Speaker_06
I don't know, somebody commenting without full context and information. I don't know.

00:38:42 Speaker_02
That doesn't sound like the YouTube comment section that I know. In a YouTube comment? I don't know. So the satiricon role leads to a bunch more acting work in Italy. What? Mostly in commercials. Really?

00:38:58 Speaker_02
In one, he played a bunch of grapes for an Italian fruit of the loom commercial.

00:39:04 Speaker_05
Nice. OK.

00:39:05 Speaker_02
In another, he played a dancing meatball that sings a jingle.

00:39:09 Speaker_06
God, now I'm imagining a life for Richard Simmons where he just became a successful Italian actor.

00:39:15 Speaker_02
just He's living there. He's 20 years old. He's supporting himself through acting. He's going to school. He's loving his life. This whole chapter of his life makes me so happy for him. Dude, I know.

00:39:43 Speaker_06
It's like his eat, pray, love era.

00:39:45 Speaker_02
And I just love that he gets this sort of era of just being appreciated as he is and celebrated as he is in his true form as a dancing meatball.

00:39:55 Speaker_06
You know, you're like, yeah. Stay there, Richard. Freeze frame. Keep Richard the happy meatball.

00:40:02 Speaker_02
So good.

00:40:02 Speaker_06
This is what we want for you, Richard.

00:40:04 Speaker_02
So one day, he borrows his friend's car to go grocery shopping. His friend has a little tiny Fiat. And once again, fat lady in a little car loves fat dude in a little car. He goes grocery shopping. He uses his friend's car.

00:40:19 Speaker_02
When he comes out of the market to go to the car, there is a note on the windshield. This is a note that he cites throughout the rest of his career as like the turning point when he was like, I finally have to do something about my weight. Oh, no.

00:40:35 Speaker_02
The note says, according to his memoir, Richard, you're very funny, but fat people die young. Oh, please don't die. Dude, leave the happy meatball alone. Totally, let him be a happy little meatball. God, that's awful.

00:40:50 Speaker_06
So then like this act of bullying becomes like this crucial part of his origin story?

00:40:55 Speaker_02
Well, and he goes on to say in later interviews, like, I thought people just didn't like me because I was fat. I didn't realize I was going to die because I was fat. Right.

00:41:03 Speaker_02
So one of his big messages later on was like, you gotta tell fat people they're gonna die.

00:41:09 Speaker_05
God, that's so sad.

00:41:10 Speaker_02
So he goes on this real emotional rollercoaster on this one, like who wrote the note? It's somebody who clearly knows or recognizes him. It wasn't signed, so he doesn't know who it was.

00:41:21 Speaker_02
He gets way up in his head about like which one of his friends probably wrote it. Say it to my face, motherfucker. Totally. If you have something to say. So he writes about how he ultimately sort of processed all of this, and this is how he dealt with

00:41:37 Speaker_02
The feedback from that note.

00:41:39 Speaker_06
He says, I knew I didn't want to die. So who or what was the enemy? I knew the answer. Food. I knew what I had to do. I had to stop eating. That was it, plain and simple. And that's what I did. I stayed very busy. I drank water. I walked everywhere.

00:41:54 Speaker_06
And the weight began to come off. And I do mean the weight began to come off. Almost like a sugar rush, I began to feel a sort of heady euphoria. It became a game. Every day, I found new ways to avoid eating.

00:42:07 Speaker_06
If I were going to a party or someone's house, I'd fill up with water, quickly drinking seven or eight glasses before I went. Every day, I'd roll the dice. How many days could I do this? Dude, this sucks.

00:42:18 Speaker_02
Yeah, and he's like, now this is a strategy for my health. Yeah, why can't people just be fat and you be fucking nice to them? Good enough for Fellini.

00:42:27 Speaker_06
Yeah, I know. Jesus Christ. Fat activist king, Frederico Fellini.

00:42:35 Speaker_02
God. So that's exactly what he does. He stops eating. And in two and a half months, he loses over a hundred pounds. No fucking way that fast. Michael, this is how Richard Simmons, quote unquote, loses the weight.

00:42:54 Speaker_02
It is just straight up wild, unchecked, happily embraced anorexia.

00:43:02 Speaker_06
I hope he's like lying or exaggerating about that. I mean, that's like so dangerous.

00:43:06 Speaker_02
He talks about his nails breaking off because they're so brittle. He talks about his skin thinning out and turning gray. Oh, God. He talks about finding clumps of hair on his pillow most mornings.

00:43:22 Speaker_02
And one day he's out running errands and he starts feeling nauseated and dizzy. And the next thing he knows, he wakes up in a hospital and he's talking to the nurses about starving himself.

00:43:36 Speaker_02
The nurses start refeeding him and they explain to him that this is not the way to lose weight.

00:43:42 Speaker_07
Yeah.

00:43:42 Speaker_02
He starts to slowly but surely come back a little bit from his disordered eating. But he's what 12 step folks or AA folks might call a dry drunk, right? He's not in therapy. He's not at peace with his body.

00:43:56 Speaker_02
He doesn't have a neutral, much less a positive relationship with food. He's just like, I'm eating because I'm supposed to eat. Leave me alone.

00:44:04 Speaker_06
Probably all kinds of like still like guilt and shame about how much he's eating and when he's eating stuff like that.

00:44:08 Speaker_02
Nothing is resolved. He's just managing to kind of bear down and knuckle through. So he's just starting to come back from his eating disorder stuff, and he gets a draft notice for Vietnam.

00:44:24 Speaker_06
Oh, God, I forgot this was taking place in like his history.

00:44:27 Speaker_02
He's told to report to a center in New York City for duty. He shows up, but he is still very early in refeeding from his eating disorder. God. So he's still losing hair. He still looks malnourished and he's given a deferral and doesn't serve. Right. OK.

00:44:48 Speaker_02
And he decides from there to move to Los Angeles and start working in restaurants. Is he attempting to become an actor at this point? Is that why he goes to L.A. ? He doesn't really say why he goes to LA. It's odd.

00:45:02 Speaker_02
I sort of thought, Oh, maybe he's going to pursue acting out there. No, no. He just starts working in restaurants. Oh, okay.

00:45:07 Speaker_02
His longest stint is in a restaurant called Derek's, which was a very CNBC in restaurant and it's celebrity guests are like peak seventies.

00:45:20 Speaker_02
He was like, the people who ate at Derek's were Dionne Warwick, Tom Jones, Johnny Carson and friend of the show, Ed McMahon.

00:45:31 Speaker_06
Aubrey, we don't have time to tell all the youths who all these people are. We now take an hour long detour to describe the youths already know who Dionne Warwick is from her excellent Twitter career.

00:45:43 Speaker_02
Oh, that's true. Actually, that is. Yes. And Ed McMahon, our listeners will know from a previous episode, scroll back our single least popular episode.

00:45:55 Speaker_06
You love bringing my number one favorite.

00:45:58 Speaker_02
I love it so much. It's your warm wars. As you can imagine, Richard Simmons is the Mater D, and he is built for front of housework. Yeah, he's an ENTJ.

00:46:07 Speaker_06
No, fuck off, Michael! From the completely real categorization, we now can diagnose him with one of the 16 people types.

00:46:15 Speaker_02
Oh, so like you, he's an extrovert.

00:46:17 Speaker_06
All right, all right, all right, all right, all right. How dare you?

00:46:20 Speaker_02
Never bring that up again. So he finds a way to supplement his income. He makes jewelry and he models it at the restaurant. And then people are like, oh my God, your jewelry, where'd you get it? And he'd be like, I made it. Do you want some?

00:46:35 Speaker_02
And would like pull jewelry out of his pocket. This is like early Instagram. This like is, he's like a little influencer. He's totally an influencer. But wait, do you want to know, what do you imagine? Let's just start here.

00:46:46 Speaker_02
What do you imagine the Richard Simmons jewelry looks like? I don't want to be mean. I don't want to be mean. The theme of his jewelry is... anatomy.

00:46:58 Speaker_06
Oh, what? Oh, is it just like dicks?

00:47:00 Speaker_02
No. No, not that kind of anatomy. Boobs, boobs, boobs. Kidney earrings. What? Wait, what? Lever brooches.

00:47:09 Speaker_06
Wait. Spleen hat pins. Are you sure you're not misreading? Are you having a stroke? Is this real? Well, a very special 24 karat gold uterus with opal ovaries. Some of those you wouldn't even know that it's the part of the body.

00:47:24 Speaker_06
The kidney necklace would just look like a bean.

00:47:26 Speaker_02
Well, famously the Tiffany design, the classic Tiffany design is just a little gold bean. So like, you know, maybe it looks like knockoff Tiffany.

00:47:35 Speaker_06
A uterus I feel like I would recognize because it has little ears.

00:47:37 Speaker_02
Anyway, I can't express to you how much I would wear like pancreas earrings. We have so many

00:47:45 Speaker_06
Richards like it's like the the happy meatball Richard. We want the best for the artist Richard the kidney gold maker Richard 24 karat gold uterus.

00:47:56 Speaker_06
Yeah, Richard one gallbladder, please We want the best for all of these people and we got this totally different Richard. It's

00:48:03 Speaker_02
So while he's working in restaurants selling his wares, he picks up some more extremely maladaptive weight loss methods, right? He's now working in restaurants. He is surrounded by food.

00:48:15 Speaker_06
And also he's in fucking LA where like everybody has disordered eating. So he's like, I'm sure he's getting all kinds of tips.

00:48:21 Speaker_02
A server at one restaurant where he works gives him a tutorial on how to purge. Oh, God. Another coworker introduces him to abusing laxatives for weight loss. And he was like, I like that they tasted like chocolate. Oh, my God.

00:48:34 Speaker_02
At one point, he notices some regulars are all at the restaurant all the time, but they're rarely eating and they're very thin. And they spend a lot of time in the bathroom and they come back having powdered their noses.

00:48:47 Speaker_02
He's like, so one day I just marched into that bathroom right behind them and he sees powder on the sink and he's like, what is this?

00:48:56 Speaker_06
Richard?

00:48:56 Speaker_02
And you're like, you live in LA and you work in the restaurant industry with famous people in the seventies, you know, cocaine.

00:49:03 Speaker_06
I have no experience with LA or cocaine, but I do assume that it was basically a snow globe at that time.

00:49:08 Speaker_02
Anyway, that is a point at which he's like, I actually don't think I'm going to do cocaine to lose weight.

00:49:15 Speaker_06
Good call, Richard. You should do cocaine because it makes you more fun to be around. You should do it for the good reasons.

00:49:19 Speaker_02
While he's living in LA, he starts experimenting with exercise, which is sort of a burgeoning leisure activity in LA at this point.

00:49:28 Speaker_06
Oh, right. Like the industry is forming. Yeah.

00:49:31 Speaker_02
Yeah. This is the 70s. We're not even into the 80s. So this is like. Exercises for like Jack LaLanne, right?

00:49:39 Speaker_02
And right strong men and that kind of thing and we're starting to move into like Oh, what if it's something that people do as part of their daily lives?

00:49:48 Speaker_02
Yeah, so he tries out Bikram yoga and he's like not for me Yeah, that does seem a little low energy for Richard And then one day a friend recommends exercise classes at a place called Body by Gilda. Okay. Body by Gilda was a studio run by Gilda Marx.

00:50:06 Speaker_02
I would say based on what I've read that Gilda Marx is sort of like the exercise equivalent of that saying about the Velvet Underground, like not everybody listened, but everybody who did started a band. Right.

00:50:19 Speaker_02
So Body by Gilda is where Jane Fonda started working out. Regular attendees also included Bette Midler and Barbara Streisand.

00:50:30 Speaker_02
So Richard goes to Gilda's class in LA and he talks about sort of all of the feelings of being a fat kid and learning that physical activity is a place where you get ridiculed or you get excluded or you get whatever.

00:50:44 Speaker_02
And he's like, this is the first time I didn't feel any of that. And I got to be exactly as exuberant as I wanted to be. I got to be exactly who I was. Someone was there playing the piano and they were playing like crowd pleaser kind of songs.

00:51:04 Speaker_02
Gilda is this kind of glamorous class leader. She always has her nails done for her gym class and her hair is done. She has like a signature red lip that she wears to the where I'm just like, holy hell, full face of makeup. Yeah, Jim, look at you.

00:51:21 Speaker_06
That doesn't like she looks like a Salvador Dali painting by the end, but I'm sure she was moving at work.

00:51:27 Speaker_02
It's exercise, but it's mostly about having fun. He feels like he can really cut loose and be his whole self with his whole energy level. And he leaves feeling strong, feeling amped, and with this sense that he really found the place for him. Hmm.

00:51:45 Speaker_02
So much so that he prepays for a whole series of 10 classes. He's like, OK, sign me up. He is also the only person in the class who's not a woman.

00:51:56 Speaker_02
That night he goes to work at Derek's at the restaurant and Gilda and her husband walk in the door of the restaurant and he thinks that they're there to have dinner. He's really excited to see her.

00:52:11 Speaker_02
And what she's actually there to do is give him a refund. What? And to tell him that he can't come back. What? And that the women in the class weren't comfortable with having a man in the class.

00:52:24 Speaker_02
And he's straightforwardly in the memoir is like, I don't believe her. So what do you think it was? I think probably like if you're not accustomed, if you didn't sign on specifically for Richard Simmons level of energy. Yeah.

00:52:38 Speaker_02
I could understand feeling like this is more than I'm up for.

00:52:41 Speaker_06
I'm just like marveling at how like hurtful that must have been. Cause like you finally find a place that you're comfortable and you're like, Oh, I found my people. And then an hour later they're like, no.

00:52:51 Speaker_02
Yeah. So this one, he describes this one as hurting him in more depth and detail than any of the other previous hurts in this book. Yeah, it must be. Yeah. Once again, he's getting the message that he's not wanted.

00:53:05 Speaker_05
Yeah.

00:53:06 Speaker_02
Yeah. So next in the book, he tells this story of being out for dinner and running into a customer of his from Derek's from the restaurant. Like a lot of his customers, this dude is wealthy as hell. And they start talking.

00:53:24 Speaker_02
And Richard is like, I think it's time for me to move on from restaurants. And this customer says, well, what do you want to do? And Richard says, I actually want to start my own gym.

00:53:35 Speaker_06
So that's what did it. He just like gets kicked out of one. He's like, I'm starting one.

00:53:37 Speaker_02
He went to one exercise class. He loved it. And he was like, Oh, you're going to kick me out. How about I start my own gym?

00:53:45 Speaker_06
I need to know how many public figures launched their careers out of pure spite. It has to be more than 50%.

00:53:52 Speaker_02
According to Richard Simmons in this memoir, this strains credulity to me. Okay. The customer at that dinner is like, what a great idea. I'll finance it. Yeah. Hmm. Like it occurs to him and he has a, you know, a financing partner, right? Just immediately.

00:54:10 Speaker_02
It's, there's this weird sort of way of storytelling that Richard Simmons has. Like he just keeps stumbling into major career victories. At one point he's like, I never wanted to write a book.

00:54:23 Speaker_02
And then I sat on a plane and I was sitting next to the VP of random house. I'm like, no, you weren't.

00:54:29 Speaker_06
Also, you wonder how much he was exploring the gay scene in LA at this time. For sure. Like it could have been somebody he knew from the restaurant. It could have been someone he was dating.

00:54:35 Speaker_06
It could have been like, as soon as you leave out this huge part of your identity, there's probably entirely entire people that you know that are not going to make it in your book and entire relationships and subplots that just aren't going to be in there.

00:54:47 Speaker_02
Yeah, I will say I did find a clip of an interview where he's being interviewed by Huell Hauser. California listeners will be familiar with Huell Hauser.

00:54:58 Speaker_06
It's like Dionne Warwick to our young listeners.

00:54:59 Speaker_02
For the entire interview, Richard Simmons is staring at Huell Hauser's chest. And then he goes, sorry, there's a chubby little alligator on your shirt. And then later he's like, do you want to arm wrestle me?

00:55:14 Speaker_02
Richard Simmons is working overtime to get laid and it's in an interview for CNN. Control your meatballs, Richard. It made me so happy. I was going to play it on the show and then I was like, do you know who Hewell Hauser is?

00:55:32 Speaker_02
And you were like, I've never heard that name in my life. And I was like, well, then it's not fun.

00:55:37 Speaker_06
This is what I would be like if I was ever in the room with Jeremy Irons. I'd just be looking at his neck veins.

00:55:41 Speaker_02
Oh, you got a Jeremy Irons thing.

00:55:43 Speaker_06
Specifically Jeremy Irons from Die Hard with a Vengeance, where he's all ropey and mean.

00:55:48 Speaker_02
So regardless of the origins, that is when Richard Simmons opens his first exercise studio. This is the gym that is later known as Slimmons. Okay, that's pretty good.

00:56:03 Speaker_02
So he opens his gym and he decides that it's going to be a gym that takes all comers, you know? Okay. And it really takes off with two demographics in particular, gay men and fat women.

00:56:17 Speaker_06
Just like this show. Just like the

00:56:20 Speaker_02
We are the Richard Simmons demographic.

00:56:22 Speaker_06
We cannot talk shit. We cannot come for Richard Simmons lest someone come for us.

00:56:26 Speaker_02
A number of gay men are into Nautilus gyms at this point, but those are described at the time as being kind of like nightclubs and sort of like hookup spaces. Yeah, so it's not a everyone is welcome and you're here to exercise space.

00:56:40 Speaker_06
My friend's gym in London, which is like around Soho, has like a women's changing room, a men's changing room, and another men's changing room. Just like everyone knows that's like the gay sex changing room, even though there's like not a sign.

00:56:55 Speaker_06
And the women's room is just like a tumbleweed. It's just storage. They keep like the paper towels in there. No one's ever been in there.

00:57:04 Speaker_02
There are these Nautilus gyms that are kind of like nightclubs. There are bodybuilding gyms. But if you're not a bodybuilder, you're going to feel so weird there.

00:57:11 Speaker_05
Oh, right.

00:57:12 Speaker_02
People use a particular phrase a lot when talking about the early years of Slimmons. And that phrase is, quote, You don't have to look like you already go to the gym to belong there. Oh, that's nice. Right.

00:57:25 Speaker_02
So he starts leading exercise classes at this gym and he starts getting press because he is Richard Simmons. And I, I left this out the gym, despite being like, come one, come all outsiders. Hello. The gym is In Beverly Hills.

00:57:43 Speaker_02
OK, and the classes were expensive in late 70s dollars. It was one hundred dollars for ten classes. Oh, that's six hundred and fifty dollars in today's dollars.

00:57:58 Speaker_06
Sixty five bucks a class.

00:57:59 Speaker_02
Yup. Damn. He also starts getting press just for being in LA and being Richard Simmons.

00:58:09 Speaker_05
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

00:58:10 Speaker_02
There are a bunch of like little profiles of him that start to pop up. There's an LA Times one where they call him quote, a kind of freaked out Jack LaLanne, which Jack LaLanne did not love. Y'all bet. Yeah.

00:58:25 Speaker_06
Just say the gay version of me, this is taking forever.

00:58:27 Speaker_02
The gym takes off and it becomes a chain. At this point, the gym is not yet called Slimmin's. Oh.

00:58:37 Speaker_02
Also, nowhere in the write-ups, I'm like, everybody was asleep at the wheel for these obituaries of him because no one mentioned that the original name of his gym was the Anatomy Asylum. What? That's garbage. So we're going to watch an ad. Richard.

00:58:55 Speaker_02
For the anatomy asylum that I found on YouTube.

00:59:00 Speaker_06
The man who brought us I'm a Catholic oi also did. A Catholic oi. Yeah.

00:59:07 Speaker_02
The anatomy asylum is so bad. Then wait until you hear the slogan. It gets better slash worse.

00:59:14 Speaker_05
Oh God. Okay.

00:59:17 Speaker_04
Hi, I'm Richard Simmons. My first anatomy asylum in Los Angeles was the start of something great. A great national network of 72 clubs in 13 cities, including yours, where people like you can lose weight, look good, and feel great.

00:59:28 Speaker_04
Now, we've got the music, the instructors, and the facilities right here to help you get yourself back in shape. Join me and over 100,000 members all over the country. Isn't it time you were committed to the anatomy asylum?

00:59:40 Speaker_02
Join the Anatomy Asylum now and get two people for the price of one or 50% off the enrollment fee of a VIP. Do you see what I mean about both better and worse? So we are at the beginnings of the Richard Simmons Fitness Empire.

00:59:58 Speaker_06
It's happening.

00:59:59 Speaker_02
And next time we're going to watch the empire sort of unfold in front of him. And we're going to see what Richard Simmons does when, uh, he stops being sort of the target of the messages and starts being the deliverer of the messages, right?

01:00:17 Speaker_02
We start seeing what he decides to do with the platform that he builds. And it's really interesting.

01:00:23 Speaker_06
So what did what was your takeaway from this section of the book? Like, how did it change the way that you think about Richard Simmons?

01:00:28 Speaker_02
I felt honestly like a little bit embarrassed that someone who had been such a constant presence in my life had been given so little thought by me, but also just kind of by the culture at large. Right.

01:00:41 Speaker_02
It made me sad that I had to go back and read this book from 25 years ago. Right. To hear from anyone anywhere

01:00:50 Speaker_02
that he actually had a really rough time growing up and that he had different dreams than this and that he thought he was going to be a priest and then maybe an actor and then maybe a painter. Right? Like all of this was new information to me.

01:01:05 Speaker_02
All of it makes sense. Right. And all of it makes me wish that we had been better to him when he was around to experience us being better to him.

01:01:13 Speaker_06
I mean, I do think next time we're confronted with a public figure like this, who's sort of happy-go-lucky almost to a fault, I think we should immediately ask ourselves, shouldn't you be a happy little meatball? Meatballing around somewhere in Italy?