What to make of Richard Simmons?
Born in New Orleans in 1948, he was an overweight teen who shed pounds through diet and exercise. This led to his own weight loss clinic in Beverly Hills, Slimmons. The successful business was profiled on the TV show Real People and Simmons himself became something of a national weight loss, if not leader, than certainly mascot.
I once interviewed pioneering TV fitness personality Jack LaLanne, who rose to stardom in the 1950s. He hated Suzanne Somers and felt her over-hyped “Thigh Master” only worked one muscle in your body and basically gave you “a fat ass.” LaLanne, however, had praise for Simmons, who not only preached weight loss through proper diet and exercise but made it fun through promotions and VHS tape offshoots such as “Sweatin’ to the Oldies.”
I ran into Simmons in Toronto years ago at one of those VHS Expos where Simmons was a superstar next to the likes of Jane Fonda in the home fitness world. He saw me there in a suit and made some joke about me joining “The Firm.” He was just as outrageous in person as he was on television.
He also, clearly, was obsessed with the medium. A devoted soaps fan, he had a semi-regular role as himself for a four year stretch on General Hospital and later appeared on All My Children. Through the ’80s and the ’90s he was on everything, as Robin Williams once said of himself, “but roller skates,” turning up on episodes of Amazing Stories and CHiPs and even The Larry Sanders Show.
He was also a sought-after guest on daytime and late night talk shows, including The Mike Douglas Show, Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, Jimmy Kimmel Live and Jay Leno’s Tonight Show and, most especially, both the NBC and CBS versions of David Letterman. His many appearances there grew less comfortable over the years, with Letterman turning fire hoses onto his high spirited guest, who generally appeared in spandex shorts and sequins.
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More fun, and a high point for the show, was Simmons’ outrageous 2003 episode of Whose Line is it Anyway? The kinetic fitness host got down on all fours during one skit and pretended to be a human jet-ski. Colin Mochrie wound up “riding” him, which sent host Drew Carey practically under his desk with laughter. See it here, and stick with it through Mochrie having a cigarette. The studio audience and Carey absolutely lose it.
And then he vanished. Simmons stopped appearing on every Hollywood Squares revival or talk-show-of-the-month. He became an obscure object of fascination, the TV star who flamed out and left the scene. Every now and then he would send word to let people know he was okay.
This week, a day after his 76th birthday, he was found dead, apparently of natural causes, at his home in the Hollywood Hills. Jane Fonda was one of the first to pay tribute through a social media post:
“Richard Simmons always wanted people to feel good and be happy,” she wrote. “He would go out of his way to make people happy. I often wondered if maybe nobody had made him happy when he was a little boy.”
