Richard Simmons, self-proclaimed ‘pied piper of pounds,’ dies at 76
Richard Simmons, the frizzy-haired fitness guru who championed positivity, exercise and healthy eating, helping people lose millions of pounds through an idiosyncratic blend of earnestness and camp, died July 13 a day after his 76th birthday.
His publicist, Tom Estey, confirmed the death but gave no other details.
Simmons, who retired to his Los Angeles home and abruptly left the public eye in 2014, revealed on social media in March that he had been successfully treated for skin cancer. The announcement came days after he published a startling post in which he declared that “every day we live we are getting closer to our death” and urged readers to “enjoy your life to the fullest.”
For more than 40 years, Simmons was a zany, irrepressible champion of physical fitness and weight loss, wearing sparkling tank tops and striped Dolphin short shorts while exhorting Americans to get off the couch and get moving. “If your underwear isn’t wet,” he would shout, “you’re not working hard enough!”
Adopting playful titles like “the Pied Pipers of Pounds” and “the Clown Prince of Fitness,” he led classes at his Beverly Hills exercise studio, Slimmons; published best-selling fitness guides, including the “Never-Say-Diet Book” (1980); promoted portion-control kits like Deal-a-Meal; and released hit workout videos including “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” (1988), in which he led aerobics routines to songs such as “Dancing in the Street” and “Great Balls of Fire,” backed by a live band in a gym setting meant to evoke a high school reunion.
A self-described “former fatty,” the 5-foot-7 Simmons “represented a much more accessible physical ideal” than svelte or muscle-bound peers like Jane Fonda and Jack LaLanne, said Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a history professor at the New School in Manhattan and the author of “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession.”
Recounting his story in books and exercise classes, Simmons said he had struggled with compulsive eating ever since he was a boy in New Orleans, entranced by opulent French Quarter restaurants and his parents’ home cooking. He “went directly from pablum to crêpes suzette,” weighed 268 pounds by the time he graduated from high school and became a plus-size model while studying in Italy as an exchange student, playing a dancing meatball, a bunch of grapes and an earthbound Peter Pan in commercials for food and underwear.
Simmons said he decided to transform his body after finding an anonymous note left under the windshield wiper of his car, which he had parked outside an Italian supermarket where he was autographing packages of gnocchi. “Fat people die young,” it read. “Please don’t die.”
Overcome with fear and anxiety, he turned to “pills, shots, massages, hypnosis, anything and everything” while trying to slim down in a hurry. For a time, he simply stopped eating. He lost 112 pounds in two and a half months, devastating his mind and body, before he checked himself into a hospital.
Simmons underwent plastic surgeries for his chin, eyes, nose and hair. After moving to Los Angeles, he started his exercise studio in 1974, complete with an adjoining restaurant, Ruffage, that included one of the first free-standing salad bars independent of a steakhouse.
His workouts were part performance art, part burlesque show, part therapy session, in which he comforted students as they burst into tears; donned wings, a tutu and other outrageous costumes; and maintained an almost theatrical intensity, shouting out compliments about pupils’ thighs and butts or chanting, “Fat, fat, go away, give it all to Doris Day!”
“Forget exercising: just speaking with him can raise your heart rate,” New York Times reporter Brooks Barnes wrote in 2013 after a visit to Slimmons. “He likes to stand about three inches from your face and stare at you. One minute he’s laughing maniacally. The next he is teetering on the verge of tears and what appears to be genuine sadness.”
Discussing the perils of junk food, Simmons could be solemn and grave, walking around his studio showing pictures of internal organs that belonged, he said, to the morbidly obese: “Do you see this heart? This heart is covered with cookies and pies and grease, and your heart may look like this, and you never know when it’s going to stop beating.”
But he also leavened his message with humor, including on episodes of “The Richard Simmons Show,” a syndicated series that ran for four years in the early 1980s. The show featured interviews and exercise lessons along with comedy sketches in which Simmons played characters like the Rev. Pounds, declaring, “Though I waddle through the valley of linguine and clams, I shall fear no evil.”
Simmons welcomed celebrities to his classes and salad bar – Dustin Hoffman, Diana Ross, Barbra Streisand and Joanne Woodward were all early customers – but catered more to ordinary people, mainly women, who said that they had never felt comfortable at a gym before walking in to Slimmons.
In a 2024 interview for this obituary, Petrzela said that Simmons was unique among his contemporaries in “welcoming and highlighting people who were not thin,” including by featuring them in his exercise videos.
She added that while he never discussed his sexuality, Mr. Simmons “brought a new, gender-bending aesthetic into mainstream America,” embodying “a kind of gender-line crossing flamboyance” that was more common to gay nightclubs than gyms. Cultural critic Rhonda Garelick, among others, described Mr. Simmons as “unmistakably camp,” writing in a 1995 article that his “elaborately constructed persona is part cheerleader, part father confessor, and part Broadway chorus boy.”
Outlasting fitness stars including Fonda, Mr. Simmons continued to preside over the studio’s classes into his mid-60s, and said he traveled 200 days a year while promoting exercise programs and meeting with fans whom he considered members of his extended family.
But in 2014, he made what Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor who studies television and popular culture, called an “almost J.D. Salinger-like, Thomas Pynchon-esque pivot” into seclusion, disappearing from view and then closing his gym in 2016.
His withdrawal spawned rumors and conspiracy theories that were amplified by a popular 2017 podcast, “Missing Richard Simmons,” which investigated tabloid speculation that the exercise guru might be held hostage in his home or transitioning from male to female.
Mr. Simmons rebuffed those reports in social media posts and phone interviews, insisting that he was simply living a more private life in the aftermath of a “very difficult” knee replacement. He had decided to make “a new beginning for myself,” he said, one that seemed to fulfill an earlier promise he made about doing what he loved.
“I work real hard to make people laugh and to make them think,” he told People magazine in 1981. “The day I don’t love any of this, I’ll walk away.”
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‘Too much of a cutup’
The younger of two sons, Milton Teagle Simmons was born into a show-business family in New Orleans on July 12, 1948. His mother, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, supported the family while working as a fan dancer; his father, who looked after the children, had once performed in a vaudeville act and emceed for big bands in Chicago.
To bring in extra money, Mr. Simmons sold pralines on street corners in the French Quarter – work he credited with teaching him how to work a crowd.
He sang and put on a smile, he said, but the joy was mostly an act at a time when he was oscillating between binge-eating and extreme weight-loss techniques, feeling isolated as the only member of his family who was heavyset. He told NPR that he began taking laxatives at age 11 and was eventually consuming 30 a day. By age 13, he was throwing up after meals.
Mr. Simmons went to Catholic schools and contemplated becoming a priest or a monk, writing in a 1999 memoir, “Still Hungry – After All These Years,” that he interviewed with a recruiter for the Dominican Order, believing that the monastery would be a refuge from jokes about his weight.
He ultimately changed his mind (the black cape worn by friars “was not my color,” he said) and studied art at what is now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. After two years, he transferred to Florida State University, later explaining that the school offered a two-year exchange program that gave him a chance to study in Italy, where he said he was cast in bit parts in the Federico Fellini movies “Satyricon” (1969) and “The Clowns” (1970).
Mr. Simmons received a bachelor’s degree in 1970. After settling in Los Angeles a few years later, he worked as a maître d’ at an Italian restaurant and began searching for exercise classes. He tried yoga and Pilates but found it too self-serious – “no one cracked a single joke” – and was disappointed by a visit to Vince’s Gym on Ventura Boulevard, where an “agonizing” weightlifting workout left him bedridden for days.
Then he discovered a class taught by Gilda Marx, a high-energy instructor who played music and danced. He was the only man in the course, and recalled that after one class, Marx told him the other students were uncomfortable with his presence. Mr. Simmons speculated that the real issue was that he “was just too much of a cutup,” cracking jokes and singing along to the music. The encounter inspired him to start his own exercise studio.
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‘No Ifs, Ands or Butts’
By the early 1980s, Mr. Simmons was appearing regularly on the ABC soap opera “General Hospital” – he played himself, leading exercise classes at the fictional Campus Disco – and appearing on late-night television shows hosted by Johnny Carson and David Letterman.
Looking to emulate the success of Fonda’s workout videos, he began releasing his own exercise tapes in 1983, with titles including “Dance Your Pants Off,” “Party Off the Pounds” and “No Ifs, Ands or Butts.” His first VHS tape, “Everyday With Richard Simmons,” opened with shots of diners enjoying pizza, fried chicken and a corn dog; Mr. Simmons made a dramatic entry while bursting out of a banana split, outfitting everyone in yellow jogging suits and transporting them into his studio, where the sweating commenced.
Altogether, his exercise videos collectively sold more than 20 million copies, according to his website. Their success helped him accrue a fortune that enabled him to settle into a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, where he lived alone with his housekeepers and pet Dalmatians; maintained a collection of more than 400 dolls; and parked a Mercedes luxury sedan with the license plate “YRUFATT.”
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Late in his career, Simmons often noted that he found it difficult to talk with fans and students who told him about their struggles with weight loss and depression. He took their setbacks personally, he said, and cried more than he laughed. Prayer helped, as did keeping busy.
“People need the court jester, so I keep that smile on and keep going out there to do what I do,” he told Men’s Health magazine in 2012. He added, “I’m the clown you take out of the box and wind up when you need a good laugh. And then, when you’re done with me, I go back in my box.”