Maintenance Phase
Maintenance Phase
Growing Up Richard Simmons
Before building his fitness empire, America’s most bedazzled fitness guru was a guy named Milton from New Orleans.
Support us:
- Hear bonus episodes on Patreon
- Watch Aubrey’s documentary in AU & NZ, or watch it at home anywhere else!
- Buy Aubrey's book
- Listen to Mike's other podcast
- Get Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and more
Links!
- Still Hungry...After All These Years by Richard Simmons
- "Hair-Do"
- Anatomy Asylum Commercial
- Richard Simmons: New Orleans's hometown hero
- A Speedy History of America’s Addiction to Amphetamine
Thanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!
[Maintenance Phase theme]
Michael: All I know about Richard Simmons is sad things, melancholy things, but I'm trying not to have like a melancholy tagline.
Aubrey: Wow, you really got surprised by this podcast I've been planning for like a month.
[laughter]
Michael: We keep pushing back. Oh, oh, 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.
Aubrey: Yeah, I like that one.
Michael: It was not very clever, but it is accurate.
Aubrey: I'm Aubrey Gordon.
Michael: I'm Michael Hobbs.
Aubrey: If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase, you can also get bonus episodes through Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content.
Michael: And if you live in Australia or New Zealand, you can see Aubrey in other ways.
Aubrey: Yes, Jeanie Finlay'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 DocPlay. 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.
Michael: Aubrey down under.
Aubrey: Something, something lesbian joke.
Michael: Something, something.
[laughter]
Aubrey: Michael. Today we're talking about Richard Simmons.
Michael: We haven't done a good old influencer episode in a while. Just like, “Here's that person.”
Aubrey: How do you remember Richard Simmons?
Michael: 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. 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. [Aubrey laughs] The thing is, I don't think he was like that great of a presence. And looking back, I think a lot of those appearances were probably like low key, pretty homophobic.
Aubrey: Oh, baby.
Michael: Then, I listened to the podcast about him, Dan Taberski's, I thought, excellent, but complicated podcast about Richard Simmons. And then he emerged to me as kind of like a more tragic figure.
Aubrey: Well, first of all, those appearances were not low key homophobic.
Michael: Were they high key homophobic?
Aubrey: One of the recurring bits that people would call Richard Simmons onto their show to do would be to like, “You're going to be a guest on the show.” And then they would hide cameras in his dressing room and do things to scare him.
Michael: Oh, wow.
Aubrey: So that he would like scream and jump up and down.
Michael: Oh, in an effeminate way.
Aubrey: Yeah. I remember him the way a lot of people remember him, which is honestly I think societally we just kind of treated him like a manic pixie dream guy, [crosstalk] despite the fact that he never addressed his own sexual orientation. 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. All of those were sort of written in the way that you and I are talking about remembering him. Which is these hazy fond memories, really light on details and none of them referenced his memoir, Still Hungry After All These Years. And when I read his memoir, it was 100% things I had not heard. [chuckles]
Michael: Oh, really? Okay.
Aubrey: So this is part 1 of a two parter. Today, we're going to talk about Richard Simmons life before he became a household name because there is a lot there. So today is about the messages he took in and next time is like what he decided to do with those messages and the messages that he put out.
Michael: Wait, I just thought of a better tagline.
Aubrey: What?
Michael: His whole thing was like Sweatin’ to the Oldies, right?
Aubrey: Yes.
Michael: That's what we call it when people exercise while listening to Maintenance Phase [Aubrey laughs] because we're old and they're doing exercise.
Aubrey: So many emails from people who are 5 to 10 years older than us. [Michael laughs]
Michael: Look, I am 42, I can do this.
Aubrey: 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. So just like basically buckle up.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Okay.
[laughter]
Richard: Wow, what a beautiful, healthy-looking audience.
[cheers and applause]
Michael: His energy.
Ellen: Richard, this is insane when I heard that this is your 59th video. 59 videos.
Richard: 59th DVD.
Ellen: Wow, that's amazing.
Richard: Sweatin’ to the Oldies V.
Ellen: I know, but--
Richard: “Hey, what are you sitting down for, huh?”
[cheers and applause]
Richard: -You thought it was like-- you thought we’re serving something?
Ellen: Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, first of all tell people everybody has, I think aspirations to get in better shape. What advice do you have for people?
Richard: Number one, love yourself, have a lot of self-worth.
[cheers and applause]
Richard: Number two, lower your calories and watch your portions. And number one, move those buns. [chuckles] Can I tell everyone that?
Ellen: What?
Richard: Can I tell everyone? Mama, mama [crosstalk] wants to hear, mama wants to see, mama. [laughs] Anyway, it was from Gypsy.
Ellen: I know. I know.
Richard: We can do you know, Gypsy?
Ellen: Yes.
Richard: Anyway, everyone in the audience is getting my new Sweatin’ V.
Michael: Okay. [chuckles]
Aubrey: This is the energy that Richard Simmons was operating with all of the time.
Michael: This is also the energy that Ellen was operating on, where she's kind of like, let's get this over with.
[laughter]
Michael: She's sort officially joking, but you can tell in her face that she's like, “This is annoying the shit out of me.”
Aubrey: She hates it. She hates it.
Michael: Shut up, Richard. [laughs]
Aubrey: So clearly, she hates everything about it. And I think that's maybe the greatest indictment of her yet is like, so you don't like Richard Simmons?
Michael: I know. The funny thing is he's such a ray of sunshine.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: But also, because he's so loud, because it's sort of so schticky.
Aubrey: You can find it grating.
Michael: 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.
Aubrey: 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.”
Michael: Right, right.
Aubrey: He's like, “Yeah, kind of.”
Michael: 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 do something about this.” And oftentimes establish patterns that then are very hard to break. The way that you fit in social situations is like the habits and the defense mechanisms that you developed by being in the closet. And so I wonder if Richard Simmons started doing this to compensate for something and then just couldn't break the habit.
Aubrey: Yeah. 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.
Michael: 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. [Aubrey laughs] I want to play her boobs like bongo drums.”
Aubrey: So Richard Simmons for the uninitiated, built a fitness empire in the US he had a chain of gyms at one point.
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Aubrey: He had 22 DVDs and 38 home videos, including Sit Tight, which I think is kind of a great name.
[laughter]
Michael: Not going to make a gay joke. I'm not going to make a gay joke. I'm going to be very mature on this podcast. I'm going to stay very classy.
Aubrey: Get ready because he made Sit Tight, Dance Your Pants Off, and no ifs, ands, or butts.
Michael: Oh, that one's actually pretty hard.
Aubrey: Butts.
Michael: That's very wholesome.
Aubrey: He had one vinyl record with a bunch of ballads on it that he sang, and he was an okay singer.
Michael: Okay, fair enough.
[laughter]
Aubrey: He also made one absolutely incredible music video, and you and I are going to watch it right now.
Michael: Oh, no. Okay.
[music]
Short, long, straight, or curly-
Michael: Oh, my God.
-get something cute
get something girly
short, long, straight, or curly
get something cute, get something girly
Oh oh just look at you
I think you need a new hair do
short, long, straight, or curly
get something cute get something girly.-
Michael: Aubrey.
An afro, a buzzcut
a french twist
pick out a style
that will give you a lift
Spiked, duck tail or a bubble
choose a do that will get you in trouble
beehive, braid, or dreadlocks
go ahead, think out of the box.
Michael: All right. No. Shut it down. Shut it down. Shut it down. Shut it down.
Aubrey: [laughs] I can’t stop.
Michael: We're stopping this episode. We're done for the day. I'm not watching Richard Simmons rap.
Aubrey: Look, I don’t know if you could tell this was recorded in the 2010s.
Michael: I don't want to make fun of this man, Aubrey.
[laughter]
Michael: He such a tragic figure.
Aubrey: No. I really genuinely enjoy this song and have been listening to it recreationally. [Michael laughs] There are a bunch of stories later in his career about Richard Simmons showing up to his gym to lead classes in drag.
Michael: Oh, okay.
Aubrey: And he does some drag in this video.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: To me, this feels like we're getting closer to how he saw himself.
Michael: 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. [laughs]
Aubrey: Get something cute. Get something girly. [laughs]
Michael: The thing is, I have exactly the same hair as him. [Aubrey laughs] Any jokes about his hair off limits.
Aubrey: Michael, “Are you ready for story time?”
Michael: I know this man, but I don't truly know this man. So let's do it.
Aubrey: Richard Simmons was actually born Milton Teagle Simmons.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: In the French Quarter in New Orleans in 1948.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: He was born to Leonard Simmons, Sr., and Shirley May Simmons. His father was actually a professional Emcee before he was born.
Michael: So he has a background in rapping.
Aubrey: And his mother was a fan dancer.
Michael: What does that mean?
Aubrey: You know, the ladies who would dance like burlesque with big feather fans to cover up their bodies, like, “Whoa, salacious.”
Michael: I know about that theoretically not personally, but yes.
Aubrey: 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. 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. He gathered it all up in the backyard and burned it. This is a quote from, Still Hungry After All These Years.
Michael: 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. 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. 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. 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.
Aubrey: 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. I should say, he was very open about his books being written by ghostwriters. He was like, “I'm not a good writer.”
Michael: He's more of a rapper. He's more of a Sugarhill Gang [Aubrey laughs] type of figure in America.
Aubrey: My guess here is that there is a kernel of truth to it or that it's just straightforwardly a real story. It would be a weird one to make up--
Michael: Mm.
Aubrey: And it's painting a picture that resonates with how Richard saw his father which is kind of a storm cloud of a dude.
Michael: 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.
Aubrey: Yeah, absolutely. Things are sort of engineered toward don't make dad mad.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: 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. So his dad is a storm cloud of a dude in the 40s and 50s who is not providing for his family.
Michael: Right. That's also a cause of volatility often.
Aubrey: Yeah, totally. If you have weird stuff about masculinity, especially in this era and you're not working and supporting your family, that's only going to make that stuff gnarlier.
Michael: Dudes are weird about it.
Aubrey: Dudes are weird about it. After her years as a fan dancer, Shirley became a cosmetic salesperson, which also seems fitting for a parent of Richard Simmons. Oh, first I was in burlesque and then I started selling makeup. You're like, “Yeah, did you invent the Bedazzler also?”
[laughter]
Michael: Right. We all become a combination of our parents and I think Richard did too.
Aubrey: He had one older brother, Lenny, who Richard refers to as Mr. Perfect and Mr. Business.
Michael: [chuckles] Those are like, guess who characters. Okay.
Aubrey: 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. It's that sort of sibling dynamic.
Michael: Does he talk in the memoir about realizing he was gay or is this all under the surface?
Aubrey: He never discusses his sexual orientation in the memoir.
Michael: Oh, my God.
Aubrey: So listen, the backdrop of this story is that Richard Simmons’ rise to fame almost exactly mirrors the onset of the AIDS epidemic.
Michael: Yeah, yeah.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: But then do you get the sense that Richard Simmons 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?
Aubrey: I don't have any sense of any of it.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: According to some reports, he did have a long-term partner.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: That is the person who was sort of like saying that his housekeeper had kidnapped him in the missing Richard Simmons era.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: It's just all fraught. 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.
Michael: There's no chance that he's actually just an effeminate heterosexual guy, is there? Or, is there?
Aubrey: There is a YouTube video of outtakes and pre-record from an interview he did at one point in 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.”
Michael: No, he hasn't. [chuckles]
Aubrey: And I was like, “You have not.”
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: But also, you sort of have, like, I see what he's saying, right? [chuckles]
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Aubrey: Especially in the 80s, people were not being like, “Well, actually, he hasn't addressed it.”
Michael: 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.
Aubrey: This brings us to the next point in the story, which is that he and his brother were raised Catholic.
Michael: Oh, good. To add that layer in there. [laughs].
Aubrey: 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. And their parents never attended religious services or talked about religion.
Michael: Oh, so they're culturally Catholic, but not actually beliefs. They don't believe stuff.
Aubrey: So Richard 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 we don't seem to be Catholic.” 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.”
Michael: Look, we want to instill in you a weird sense of constant shame.
Aubrey: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. We can tell how gay you are, [Michael laughs] and we want you to feel bad about it forever.
Michael: This is a subsidy to your future therapist.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Yeah, that's like a thing for gay people back then.
Aubrey: 100%. In his memoir, he says that he thought about becoming a priest because he, quote, “Likes the outfits.” [laughs]
Michael: God, Richard, you're not making this easy. We're trying to be sensitive to you and the way that you want it to be discussed, but it really seems like you want to tell the audience something and you're not telling them.
Aubrey: [chuckles] 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?” And his cousins are like, “Oh, it's a Jewish thing, because we're a Jewish family.”
Michael: Wait, what?
Aubrey: You're Jewish?
Michael: Wait, really? He's like secretly Jewish and he didn't know.
Aubrey: His dad was raised Methodist and his mom was Jewish.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: In Judaism, if your mom is Jewish, you are Jewish. His parents never told them
Michael: That’s fascinating.
Aubrey: He found out through the grapevine that they were Jewish. The title of the chapter where he tells this story is “A Catholic, oi.”
[laughter]
Aubrey: That is in fact the chapter title.
Michael: I like this man. I like this man.
Aubrey: [laughs] 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.
Michael: Man, they really did lean into the Catholicism, didn't they?
Aubrey: It's a really odd and sort of cold sounding household. To wit, Richard had asthma.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: In his memoir, he writes that he had asthma at a time when people didn't really understand it, right. So we're talking about the 1950s and some people didn't even fully believe in it.
Michael: Of course.
Aubrey: According to Richard Simmons, one of those people was his dad.
Michael: Nice. So he didn't get like an inhaler and stuff.
Aubrey: “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.”
Michael: Oh, my God. It's always the same thing.
Aubrey: My dad also tended to be his own doctor. No matter what was wrong with you, he felt that it could be cured with one of the four remedies from his medicine cabinet.
Michael: Oh, no. Oh, no.
Aubrey: Camphor-Phenique, cod liver oil, calamine lotion or mercurochrome. Oh, that's all you needed.
Michael: Oh, no. I thought he was going to say the carnivore diet, we'd really go full circle.
Aubrey: You didn't think we go full circle on mercurochrome. [Michael laughs] So his relationship with his dad sounded rough in a really deep way. Initially, I was going to say strained, but that would be an improvement.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: So I'm sending you another quote from his memoir.
Michael: When I tried to one up him, I was punished. This happened a lot when my mother was away. His method of punishment was perfect. He just ignored you. It was the punishment of silence. Very effective for a child who craves attention. You didn't exist. He didn't do your laundry. He didn't set a place at the table for you. 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 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.
Aubrey: He's just trying to get a reaction. And his dad is like, “That not setting a place at the table for you is chilling.”
Michael: Yeah, brutal.
Aubrey: 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.” Then I would go in and be like, “What else can I get him to do, 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. [chuckles]
Michael: Oh, man.
Aubrey: Until his father finally has to acknowledge him, even if it's just by being like, “Hey, stop it.”
Michael: That makes so much of his public persona-
Aubrey: -make sense.
Michael: Yeah. Because it's like he's just trying to get your attention and he's trying to get you to look at him.
Aubrey: He's trying to annoy his way into your heart.
Michael: Yeah. His dad probably gave him his first ever Ellen face.
Aubrey: 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, and his dad immediately tears into him and says that, “Richard is the reason that his mom is sick.”
Michael: Oh, God.
Aubrey: According to the memoir, he screamed at Richard, “It's not Lenny, it's you.” I'll spell it out for you. M-I-L-T-O-N.
Michael: No way, Jesus Christ.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Choke on a C-O-C-K dad.
Aubrey: So things were tough with his dad, good with his mom. He loved his mom so much. Really tough with his dad. They're tough at school too. He's growing up in Louisiana in the 1950s, and he is not a Louisiana in the 1950s kind of guy.
Michael: He's more of a Portland in the 2010s kind of guy.
[laughter]
Michael: More than 2024. Yeah.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: What?
Aubrey: He talks in the memoir about trying to correct every single one of those things.
Michael: He's trying to be a silent mask northpaw.
Aubrey: 100%.
Michael: He's looking for an extremely specific kind of conversion therapy.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Right, right.
Aubrey: Those experiences of difference are most acute for him around his fatness. 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 that you're 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, and they're reporting to your parent that your body is a failure.
Michael: Also, on top of everything else he has to be insecure about and he's getting shitted on for. It's like, throw fatness in there too. It's just so much for one little guy to deal with.
Aubrey: Again, this is all happening before he's like, 10.
Michael: Yeah, yeah.
Aubrey: So at that doctor's visit, the doctor hands him a photocopied piece of paper that lays out a diet for him to follow.
Michael: Oh, God, it's going to be bad, isn't it?
Aubrey: You want to hear the diet? Do you have any guesses about what the diet is?
Michael: Isn't it going to 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?
Aubrey: Salted ice cubes is too light, but three blueberries is too heavy.
Michael: Oh, my God. Okay.
Aubrey: Breakfast one slice of dry wheat toast, [Michael chuckles] a poached egg, and “a beverage” they don't really specify that seems like a real thing.
Michael: That's kind of weird. Yeah.
Aubrey: Yeah.
Michael: So milkshake is fine, right.
Aubrey: Lunch is 3 ounces of tuna that's been packed in water, drained, and then dressed just with lemon juice-
Michael: Oh, that's like The Rocks diet. Ugh.
Aubrey: -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.
Michael: Yeah. God, it's like a YouTube challenge. [Aubrey laughs] It's like, for dinner I eat six saltines and then afterwards fold a piece of paper more than eight times.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: That's like prisoner of war rations.
Aubrey: At this point. The Minnesota Starvation study had already happened, and that was at 1570.
Michael: Yeah. Yeah, leaving it up to his parents to enforce this, I guess, which then just contributes to the bad relationship with his dad.
Aubrey: 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 stuff.
Michael: Oh, God. And he's got a little bowl of tuna, yeah [crosstalk]
Aubrey: With his sad little bowl of tuna, yeah. So he starts the diet food is terrible and he hates it. So he starts quietly feeding it to their dog under the table.
Michael: That just means he's eating even less.
Aubrey: Yes. And he starts just skipping meals. 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.
Michael: It's bad for you at any age but it's like, to be doing this at this important developmental time is so dangerous and scary. I have nothing to say throughout this whole episode other than, like, “That's bad.”
[laughter]
Michael: That poor guy. I'm contributing nothing.
Aubrey: 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.”
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Aubrey: He also talks about a kind of constant casual bullying of kids just being like, “Hey, Fatso.”
Michael: Oh, yeah.
Aubrey: 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?” He'd start wheezing, like asthma-style wheezing. And then he'd be like, “No, I can't. [wheezing] I'm not okay.”
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: He would be like, “You're so right. This is how out of shape I am.”
Michael: God. So he's got the gay compensatory stuff and the fat compensatory stuff. So he's establishing all these really harmful patterns.
Aubrey: 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. When they go hard, you go harder.”
Michael: I'm imagining Maintenance Phase, listeners who saw, like, “Oh, they're doing a Richard Simmons’ episode.”
Aubrey: I know.
Michael: Now just sitting in their car, staring into middle distance like, “Oh, God. I'm so sad about something that happened like 60 years ago.” [laughs]
Aubrey: I told you. So at this point when this happens, Richard's friends are all girls.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: And they figure that if he isn't fat, this won't happen-
Michael: Oh, okay.
Aubrey: -which is like, rookie mistake. So they all raid their mom's medicine cabinets and bring in various diet pills.
Michael: Oh, no. Which was like fucking meth back then.
Aubrey: 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 1960s in particular. There was a huge boom in “diet pills.” And they were sometimes called rainbow pills.
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: 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 where patients would come in and be prescribed a, “rainbow of pills” that were supposedly bespoke just for them. 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. Pieter Cohen, a Professor at Harvard Medical School, told the Smithsonian, “What they were really doing was selling stimulants combined with other medications to counteract the side effects of the stimulants.”
Michael: Oh.
Aubrey: So all they're doing is giving you amphetamines and then things to make the amphetamines less amphetamine.
Michael: 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.
Aubrey: Oh, no.
Michael: 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.
Aubrey: You just went to sleep.
Michael: It was like some nuclear level sleeping pill. And it was the last day of school for seventh grade and we were all going to a roller-skating rink.
Aubrey: Oh, no. And you wanted to be extra happy.
Michael: 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 03:15 when somebody was shaking me. [laughs]
Aubrey: You missed the whole thing.
Michael: The whole day.
Aubrey: Baby, you took some trazodone? There's none question in my mind.
Michael: I have no fucking idea what it was. But I was also a tiny child, and the dosage was also deranged. And speaking of bullying, there was a kid who had been bullying me all year, and that was his last chance to beat me up. And as I was sleeping, at some point during the day, he shook me awake, and he's like, “Come out back, bitch. I'm going to beat your ass.” And I was too tired to deal with it. I was like, “Not right now, man. I'm too tired.”
[laughter]
Michael: And he's like, “Okay.” And he just never fucked with me again. [laughs]
Aubrey: I'm too sleepy for you to mess me up. It's such a wild, like, keep him on their toes. What a fighting move.
Michael: So anyway, could have been worse.
Aubrey: You could have been on amphetamines.
Michael: Well, yeah. That would have been way better. And also, I would have kicked the shit out of that guy.
Aubrey: So he keeps taking diet pills and he realizes that if he take more pills, he loses more weight.
Michael: Of course.
Aubrey: He only stops taking the pills after he has a very intense episode of thinking, and I quote, “That my heart would explode.”
Michael: Oh, God.
Aubrey: So he backs off of the diet pills that freaks him out. And he's like, “No, no, never mind.” So he finds out that one of his friend's moms is going to Weight Watchers, and he begs her to take him with her.
Michael: Oh, God.
Aubrey: 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. More proud of him for going to Weight Watchers than most other things, which scans with the experiences of a lot of fat kids.
Michael: Yeah. Some of these are parallels with your experience, right?
Aubrey: 100% I was reading this and I was like, “I'm in this picture.”
Michael: Just from a very young age this is like the overwhelming issue that people talk to you about and give you shit about.
Aubrey: Pretty much the only times he writes about his parents being proud of him are around weight loss.
Michael: Oh, God.
Aubrey: So he describes going to this first Weight Watchers meeting with his friend's mom. Everyone lines up and weighs in, 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. If your weight plateaus and stays the same, you get a turtle, which is, like, slow and steady, [crosstalk] pinned to your shirt. And if your weight increases Michael, you get a fucking pig.
Michael: Yeah. God. I was like, “Oh, it's not going to be a pig, is it?” Oh, yeah.
Aubrey: It was going to be a pig or a cow or a hippo.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: Then the group leader announced everyone's weight loss or gain to the entire group and people clapped or did not clap.
Michael: Fuck.
Aubrey: And his friend's mom, when he goes to the first meeting, gets the fucking pig pinned to her shirt.
Michael: Oh, my God.
Aubrey: Here is what he writes about that moment.
Michael: 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. 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 cheek, and she has a pig on her shoulder. 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 a little kid.
Aubrey: Totally. 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 watches videos or come to his classes, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: This is where you see the person who's just like, “I just don't want you to get wrecked by this, right.
Michael: That's something I remember very vividly from the podcast, that he has it like a deep well of empathy. He seems to really care about other people. But then he also has these weird blind spots where he sort of stops. It seems like he struggled to form relationships with people that weren't around, kind of rescuing them or being a support for them.
Aubrey: Yeah. He describes himself repeatedly in adulthood as someone who does not have friends.
Michael: Right, right. So he's just sort of doing this kind of deep emotional support work. But he doesn't feel like a reciprocal relationship. You know that's how I took that.
Michael: And then you also think about this poor kid carrying around the fact that he's gay at the same time, right? 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. And he's left-handed so inferior. [Aubrey laughs]
Aubrey: 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. He has not even gone off to college yet, and he's already been through the wringer, right? So when it comes time for him to leave home, he is stoked.
Michael: Yeah, I'll bet.
Aubrey: 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. We could have had a Richard Simmons’ Bob Ross. That's very fun for me to think about.
Michael: Maybe there's a happy little tank top, maybe there's a happy little tank top right here.
Aubrey: [laughs] He wanted to be a painter and he studied abroad in Italy.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: And he loved it. 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.
Michael: Oh, no.
Aubrey: All right. There you go.
Michael: 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.
Aubrey: Yup.
Michael: [chuckles] He's already Richard. “One of the men came over and introduced himself, asking me if I knew Federico Fellini, the Italian director. I said, “I didn't know him, but I knew who he was.” 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.”
Aubrey: So Richard Simmons appears briefly in Fellini's Satyricon.
Michael: Wait, this actually went through. This actually happened.
Aubrey: It is a blink and you'll miss it kind of appearance.
Michael: No way.
Aubrey: He is there.
Michael: Dude in his little overalls.
Aubrey: [laughs] No, but he is a little fat guy.
Michael: Wait, wait, wait, wait. YouTube has it, YouTube has it, YouTube has it. Richard Simmons in Fellini's Satyricon!!!
Aubrey: Send me the clip.
Michael: Hang on, hang on, hang on. Okay, sending it to you.
Aubrey: This is fun.
[music]
Aubrey: That is Richard Simmons.
Michael: I would not in a million years have recognized that as him.
Aubrey: Full beard, definitely like a fat dude.
Michael: He looks like Jack Black.
Aubrey: He looks like a young Belushi. Yes.
Michael: Dude. One of the comments is, “My God. The amount of people who think that's Richard Simmons is disturbing.”
Aubrey: According to his memoir, it is him.
Michael: I don't know somebody commenting without full context and information. I don't know.
Aubrey: That doesn't sound like the YouTube comment section that I know.
Michael: In a YouTube comment. I don't know.
Aubrey: So the Satyricon role leads to a bunch more acting work in Italy.
Michael: What?
Aubrey: Mostly in commercials.
Michael: Really?
Aubrey: In one, he played a bunch of grapes for an Italian Fruit of the Loom commercial.
Michael: Nice. Okay.
Aubrey: In another, he played a dancing meatball that sings a jingle. [chuckles]
Michael: God, now I'm imagining a life for Richard Simmons where he just became a successful Italian actor.
Aubrey: Just only did commercials.
Michael: Yeah, just like a fat, happy guy in Italy. [laughs]
Aubrey: Totally. He did the skinny, sad guy in America version, like, he did make his money off of commercials. There's no question.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: This all leads to him becoming a little local celebrity in Florence. 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.
Michael: Dude. I know. It's like his Eat, Pray, Love era.
Aubrey: 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.
[laughter]
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: You're like, “Yeah.”
Michael: Stay there, Richard. Freeze frame. Keep Richard the happy meatball.
Aubrey: So good.
Michael: This is what we want for you, Richard.
Aubrey: 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 [Michael laughs] fat dude in a littler car. He goes grocery shopping. He uses his friend's car. 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 the turning point when he was like, “I finally have to do something about my weight.”
Michael: Oh, no.
Aubrey: The note says, according to his memoir, “Richard, you're very funny, but fat people die young. Please don't die.”
Michael: Dude, leave the happy meatball alone.
Aubrey: Totally. Let him be a happy little meatball.
Michael: God, that's awful. So then, this act of bullying becomes like this crucial part of his origin story.
Aubrey: 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.”
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: So one of his big messages later on was like, “You got to tell fat people they're going to die.
Michael: God, that's so sad.
Aubrey: So he goes on this real emotional roller coaster 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. He gets way up in his head about like, “Which one of his friends probably wrote it?”
Michael: Say it to my face, motherfucker-
Aubrey: Totally.
Michael: -if you have something to say.
Aubrey: So he writes about how he ultimately sort of processed all of this, and this is how he dealt with the feedback from that note.
\
Michael: 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. 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. [sigh] 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.
Aubrey: Yeah. He's like, “Now this is a strategy for my health.”
Michael: Yeah. Why can't people just be fat and you be fucking nice to them?
Aubrey: Good enough for Fellini.
Michael: Yeah, I know. [laughs]
Aubrey: Jesus Christ.
Michael: Fat activist King Federico Fellini. [Aubrey laughs] God.
Aubrey: So that's exactly what he does. He stops eating and in two and a half months, he loses over 100 pounds.
Michael: No fucking way, that fast?
Aubrey: Michael. This is how Richard Simmons, “loses the weight.”
Michael: Dude.
Aubrey: Is just straight up wild, unchecked, happily embraced anorexia.
Michael: I hope he's lying or exaggerating about that. I mean, like, that's so dangerous.
Aubrey: He talks about his nails breaking off because they're so brittle. He talks about his skin thinning out and turning gray.
Michael: Oh, God.
Aubrey: He talks about finding clumps of hair [Michael sighs] on his pillow most mornings. 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.
Michael: Oh, God.
Aubrey: The nurses start refeeding him and they explain to him that this is not the way to lose weight.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: 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?
Michael: Hmm.
Aubrey: He's not in therapy. He's not at peace with his body. 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.”
Michael: Probably all kinds of still like, guilt and shame about how much he's eating and when he's eating stuff like that.
Aubrey: Nothing is resolved.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: 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. He gets a draft notice for Vietnam.
Michael: Oh, God. I forgot this was taking place in history.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: God.
Aubrey: So he's still losing hair. He still looks malnourished. And he's given a deferral and doesn't serve, right.
Michael: Mm, okay.
Aubrey: He decides from there to move to Los Angeles and start working in restaurants.
Michael: Is he attempting to become an actor at this point? Is that’s why he goes to LA?
Aubrey: He doesn't really say why he goes to LA. It's odd. I sort of thought, “Oh, maybe he's going to pursue acting out there.” No, no he just starts working in restaurants.
Michael: Oh, okay.
Aubrey: His longest stint is in a restaurant called Derek's, which was a very CNBC restaurant. And its celebrity guests are like peak 1970s. He was like, “The people who ate at Derek's were Dionne Warwick, [Michael chuckles] Tom Jones, Johnny Carson, and friend of the show, Ed McMahon.
Michael: Aubrey, we don't have time to tell all the youths who all these people are. [Aubrey laughs] We now take an hour-long detour to describe these folks.
Aubrey: The youths already know who Dionne Warwick is from her excellent Twitter career.
Michael: Oh, that's true. Actually, that is why we know her. Yes.
Aubrey: [laughs] And Ed McMahon our listeners will know from a previous episode.
Michael: Scroll back.
Aubrey: Our single least popular episode.
Michael: You love bringing that up. [laughs]
Aubrey: My number one favorite. I love it so much.
Michael: It's your worm wars.
Aubrey: As you can imagine, Richard Simmons is the maître d’, and he is built for front of housework.
Michael: Yeah, he's an ENTJ.
Aubrey: No. Fuck off, Michael.
Michael: We know this from the completely real categorization. We now can diagnose him with one of the 16 people tests.
Aubrey: Oh, so like you, he's an extrovert. [laughs]
Michael: All right, all right, all right. How dare you? Never bring that up again.
Aubrey: So, he finds a way to supplement his income. He makes jewelry.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: 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?” And would pull jewelry out of his pocket. [laughs]
Michael: This is like early Instagram. He's like a little influencer.
Aubrey: He's totally an influencer. But wait, do you want to know? Let's just start here, “What do you imagine the Richard Simmons jewelry looks like?”
Michael: I don't want to be mean. I don't want to be mean.
[laughter]
Aubrey: The theme of his jewelry is anatomy.
Michael: Oh, what? Oh, is it just like dicks?
Aubrey: No, not that kind of anatomy.
Michael: Boobs. Boobs. Boobs.
Aubrey: Kidney earrings.
Michael: What? Wait, what?
Aubrey: Liver broaches.
Michael: Wait.
Aubrey: Spleen hat pins.
Michael: Are you sure you're not misreading? Are you having a stroke? Is this real?
Aubrey: A very special 24 karat gold uterus with opal ovaries.
Michael: Some of those you wouldn't even know that it's the part of the body. The kidney necklace would just look like a bean.
Aubrey: Well, famously, the classic Tiffany design is just a little gold bean. So maybe it [crosstalk] looks like knockoff Tiffany.
Michael: A uterus I feel like I would recognize because it has little ears.
Aubrey: Anyway, I can't express to you how much I would wear pancreas earrings.
Michael: We have so many Richards. Like, it's like the happy meatball Richard we want the best for, the artist Richard, the kidney gold-maker Richard.
Aubrey: The 24-karat gold uterus Richard.
Michael: One gallbladder, please. [Aubrey laughs] We want the best for all of these people. And we got this totally different Richard.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: And also, he's in fucking LA where everybody has disordered eating. So he's like, “I'm sure he's getting all kinds of tips.”
Aubrey: A server at one restaurant where he works gives him a tutorial on how to purge.
Michael: Oh, God.
Aubrey: Another coworker introduces him to abusing laxatives for weight loss. And he was like, “I like that they tasted like chocolate.”
Michael: Oh, my God.
Aubrey: 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. 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?
Michael: Richard.
Aubrey: And you're like, “You live in LA and you work in the restaurant industry with famous people in the 1970s, you know cocaine.”
Michael: I have no experience with LA or cocaine, but I do assume that it was basically a snow globe back at that time.
Aubrey: Anyway, that is a point at which he's like, “Mm, I actually don't think I'm going to do cocaine to lose weight.”
Michael: Good call, Richard. You should do cocaine because it makes you more fun to be around. You should do it for the good reasons.
Aubrey: While he's living in LA, he starts experimenting with exercise, which is sort of a burgeoning leisure activity in LA at this point.
Michael: That's right. The industry is forming, yeah.
Aubrey: Yeah. This is the 1970s. We're not even into the 1980s. So this is exercises for, Jack LaLanne and strongmen 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?”
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: So he tries out Bikram yoga and he's like, “Not for me.”
Michael: Yeah, that does seem a little low energy for Richard.
Aubrey: Then one day a friend recommends exercise classes at a place called Body by Gilda.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: Body by Gilda was a studio run by Gilda Marx. 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.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: So Body by Gilda is where Jane Fonda started working at. Regular attendees also included Bette Midler and Barbra Streisand.
Michael: Nice.
Aubrey: So Richard goes to Gilda's class in LA and he talks about 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. 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 crowd pleaser kind of songs. 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 a signature red lip that she wears to the where I'm just like, “Holy hell, full face of makeup for the gym, look at you.”
Michael: Yeah. She looks like a Salvador Dali painting by the end, [Aubrey laughs] but I'm sure she was making it work.
Aubrey: 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. So much so that he prepays for a whole series of 10 classes. He's like, “Sign me up.” He is also the only person in the class who's not a woman. 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. And what she's actually there to do is give him a refund.
Michael: What?
Aubrey: And to tell him that he can't come back.
Michael: What?
Aubrey: That the women in the class weren't comfortable with having a man in the class. And he straightforwardly, in the memoir is like, “I don't believe her.”
Michael: So what do you think it was?
Aubrey: I think probably, if you're not accustomed, if you didn't sign on specifically for Richard Simmons; level of energy, [chuckles] I could understand feeling like this is more than I'm up for.
Michael: I'm just marveling at how hurtful that must have been, because 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.”
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Yeah, it must be. Yeah.
Aubrey: Once again, he's getting the message that he's not wanted.
Michael: Yeah. Yeah.
Aubrey: 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, and Richard is like, “I think it's time for me to move on from restaurants.” This customer says, “Well, what do you want to do?” And Richard says, “I actually want to start my own gym.”
Michael: So that's what did it. He just gets kicked out of one. He's like, “I'm starting one.”
Aubrey: He went to one exercise class, [Michael laughs] he loved it, and he was like, “Oh, you're going to kick me out? How about I start my own gym?”
Michael: I need to know how many public figures launch their careers out of pure spite. It has to be more than 50%.
Aubrey: According to Richard Simmons in this memoir. This strains credulity to me.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: The customer at that dinner is like, “What a great idea. I'll finance it.” [laughs]
Michael: Yeah. Huh.
Aubrey: Like, it occurs to him and he has a financing partner just immediately. There's this weird sort of way of storytelling that Richard Simmons has. He just keeps stumbling into major career victories. At one point he's like, “I never wanted to write a book.” 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.”
Michael: Also, you wonder how much he was exploring the gay scene in LA at this time.
Aubrey: For sure.
Michael: Like, it could have been somebody he knew from the restaurant. It could have been someone he was dating. 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.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: No idea. It's like Dionne Warwick to our young listeners.
Aubrey: For the entire interview, Richard Simmons is staring at Huell Hauser's chest.
[laughter]
Aubrey: 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?”
Michael: Oh, my God.
Aubrey: Richard Simmons is working overtime to get laid. And it's in an interview for CNN.
Michael: Control your meatballs, Richard.
Aubrey: [laughs] It made me so happy. I was going to play it on the show. And then I was like, “Do you know who Huell Hauser is?” And you were like, “I've never heard that name in my life.” And I was like, “Well, then it's not fun.”
Michael: 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.
Aubrey: Oh, you got a Jeremy Irons thing.
Michael: Specifically, Jeremy Irons from Die Hard with a Vengeance, where he's all ropey and mean.
Aubrey: [laughs] 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.
Michael: Okay. [laughs] It's pretty good.
Aubrey: So he opens his gym, and he decides that it's going to be a gym that takes all comers.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: And it really takes off with two demographics in particular. Gay men and fat women.
Michael: Just like this show, just like our show, just like our podcast.
Aubrey: Ahaa. We are the Richard Simmons demographic.
Michael: We cannot talk shit. We cannot come for Richard Simmons lest someone come for us.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Like cruisey. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Aubrey: Yeah, so it's not a everyone is welcome and you're here to exercise space.
Michael: 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.
Aubrey: And the women's room is just like a tumbleweed.
Michael: It's just storage. They keep like the paper towels in there. No one's ever been in there.
[laughter]
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: Oh, right.
Aubrey: People use a particular phrase a lot when talking about the early years of Slimmons. And that phrase is, “You don't have to look like you already go to the gym to belong there.”
Michael: Oh, that's nice.
Aubrey: Right.
Michael: Yeah.
Aubrey: So he starts leading exercise classes at this gym and he starts getting press because he is Richard Simmons. And I left this out, the gym, despite being like, come one, come all, outsiders. Hello.” The gym is in Beverly Hills and the classes were expensive in late 1970s dollars, it was $100 for 10 classes. That's $650 in today's dollars.
Michael: So like $65 bucks a class.
Aubrey: Yup.
Michael: Damn.
Aubrey: He also starts getting press just for being in LA and being Richard Simmons. [chuckles]
Michael: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.
Aubrey: There are a bunch of like little profiles of him that start to pop up. There's an LA Times One were they call him, “A kind of freaked out Jack LaLanne,” which Jack LaLanne did not love. [laughs]
Michael: Yeah, I'll bet. Yeah. Just say the gay version of me. This is taking forever.
Aubrey: The gym takes off and it becomes a chain. At this point, the gym is not yet called Slimmons. 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.” [laughs]
Michael: What? That's garbage.
Aubrey: So we're going to watch an ad,-
Michael: Richard,
Aubrey: -for the Anatomy Asylum that I found on YouTube.
Michael: The man who brought us, I'm a Catholic Oi also did--
Aubrey: A Catholic Oi. Yeah.
Michael: The Anatomy Asylum is so bad.
Aubrey: Wait until you hear the slogan, it gets better/worse.
Michael: Oh God. Okay.
Richard Simmons: 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. 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.
Speaker 3: “Join the Anatomy Asylum now and get two people for the price of 1 or 50% off the enrollment of a VIP. “
Aubrey: Do you see what I mean about both better and worse?
[laughter]
Aubrey: So we are at the beginnings of the Richard Simmons fitness empire.
Michael: It's happening, it’s happening.
Aubrey: 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 he stops being sort of the target of the messages and starts being the deliverer of the messages, right.
Michael: Okay.
Aubrey: We start seeing what he decides to do with the platform that he builds and it's really interesting.
Michael: So what was your takeaway from this section of the book? How did it change the way that you think about Richard Simmons?
Aubrey: I felt, honestly, 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.
Michael: Right, right.
Aubrey: It made me sad that I had to go back and read this book from 25 years ago.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: To hear from anyone, anywhere 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. Like, all of this was new information to me all of it makes sense.
Michael: Right.
Aubrey: 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.
Michael: 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, [Aubrey laughs] meat balling around somewhere in Italy?
[Maintenance Phase theme]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
