Richard Simmons Isn't Missing

The internet gets weird investigating the "disappearance" of America's gay best friend. 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! Richard Simmons ShowRichard Simmons, the Original Queer EyeThe Grand Duke of Diet and the Clown Prince of Fitness The Sultan of Svelte The Deregulation Of Commercial Televisio...

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Man, I'll tell you what, all I ever want to drink when we're recording is like fizzy things and it's the worst idea.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  I know, because you have fizz in the background and you have the burps.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, you get just lovely little gurgles to join us on the podcast.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  The gurgle cut. We're releasing the gurgle cut. I think, I mean, I think maybe I'll go literal. Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that will make you cry slightly less in this episode than the previous episode?

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  This is what I was promised. This is why I'm here.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  You're really selling it.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  I'm fucking, I'm leaving if you make me cry.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  But I think, listen, I think the main arc of this episode is Richard Simmons' rise to stardom and then decision to disengage from stardom.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  I'm Michael Hobbs.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  I'm Aubrey Gordon. Oh my God, we hadn't said our names.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  We haven't, we forgot again. You have to say your thing.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  If you'd like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the same audio.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Same stuff.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  Michael.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Aubrey.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  We're talking about Richard Simmons again. Can you give us like a, like a brief nutshell overview?

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  Of sort of what we learned last time.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Grew up Louisiana. He talks a lot about being bullied for being fat by his father and also other kids. Then he moves to Italy, becomes a happy little meatball, ends up moving back to LA and essentially having like a very severe eating disorder to lose 100 pounds and then discovers a group exercise and opens a gym and then a chain of gyms.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, because his gym is based in Beverly Hills and because he is such a theatrical dude, it is not long until the media takes note. Richard and Anatomy Asylum are ultimately featured for the first time on TV on a show called Real People. Are you ready to watch a clip?

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do it.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  What was it that compelled you to lose all that weight? I had a friend who had a friend who, who died from obesity, from just being fat. And that's when I started going to autopsies, like, you know, looking at people's hearts and being able to take this picture into the classroom and go, "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 gonna stop beating." Weren't you afraid that if you lost weight, you couldn't get work as an actor if you were thin? Every fat person has the fear that they will change in some way, mentally, physically, spiritually, and sexually if that weight loss goes.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  I tried every diet in the whole world. I had the jaws wired, I tried the pills, I tried the shots. And finally, I basically starved. I lost 123 pounds in two and a half months. My hair fell out, the eyes drooped, the chin drooped. If you don't exercise while you're losing the weight, you will end up to look like a very thin glad bag. I had to go to a plastic surgeon. Chin had to go up, eyes had to be done, nose fixed, 900 hair transplants. I mean, you're looking at a four-door Cadillac paid for when you look at this face. What's to prevent other people from looking at you and saying, "Hey, Richard did it, why can't I do it?" Because they shouldn't make the same anguish mistake that I made, 'cause I almost died.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  I didn't know he had that much plastic surgery.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, he had quite a bit of, I assume there was like some loose skin removal stuff to do, but like, yeah, he, he was very open about having had a lot of work done.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  He also has this weird thing of like, "I lost weight the wrong way, so that's why I, you know, had this kind of drooping face." But my understanding is that like, you have that no matter what. It's like, if you lose weight, you just have extra skin on your face.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. It's the same thing as like when people are like, "Ozempic face." And you're like, "Yeah, that's just people losing weight and you got less fat everywhere."

• 4:11Speaker 01

  People just lose weight.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then your skin hangs a little lower, and there you go.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  I feel like it, it makes me kind of like respect the message a little bit less if he's promising people, you know, that they can look Like Richard Simmons after losing so much weight when he's presumably spent thousands of dollars on a bunch of plastic surgery.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  This is some of the sort of selective stuff that people listen to with Richard Simmons. He was very consistent about saying that he starved himself and that that was a bad idea. A lot of people missed that message. He was pretty consistent about talking about having work done. A lot of people chose not to pay attention to that. And he was also pretty consistent, as you see in this clip, with really haranguing fat people. About being to blame for their own deaths, basically, right? In a People magazine profile from the time called, "Former fatty Richard Simmons is the grand duke of diet and the clown prince of fitness."

• 5:11Speaker 01

  That's not even, what?

• 5:14Speaker 00

  It's exactly right. They write, quote, "Off camera, Simmons himself has even been known to accost strangers caught in the act of overindulging." "I'll see an overweight woman eating a butterscotch sundae," he says, "and I'll sit at her table and say, 'What is this? For me, this is not a job. It's a mission."

• 5:34Speaker 01

  He's like bullying worked for me, so I have to bully people. But it's like, Richard, it doesn't sound like it actually worked for you.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. And I will say, he doesn't really talk a ton in interviews about his relationship with food. But when you get little glimpses of it, it's very clearly not an easy relationship.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:53Speaker 00

  There's one Men's Health interview where he lists off just like dozens of foods that he can't have in his house.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Let yourself have a potato chip once in a while, my guy.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  So he probably just has like a low-grade eating disorder for like essentially the rest of his life. It's like how he keeps the weight off.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Well, and now not only is it his perception of his own health and his perception of his own social value and other people's perceptions of those things too, it's also his fucking job.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He can't ever be seen to gain any weight.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  I think the thing that I took home from this clip when I first saw it is I was like, holy hell. His message was so much gnarlier.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  And more like tough talk than I remembered, you know?

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the scared straight stuff.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  I think people tend to think of him as the antidote to like toxic weight loss messages. And I think that's the part that people listen to the loudest.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  But he had plenty of extremely judgmental

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  messages in there because that is how he felt about himself.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  So is this just a show that's just like, here's a random guy?

• 6:57Speaker 00

  It's the TV show equivalent of get a load of this guy.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Like the guy who got calf implants on True Life on MTV that I still remember for some reason.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  Oh, boy.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Remember that one?

• 7:07Speaker 00

  No.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  What? I think about that all the time.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  And here you said you didn't get TV references. Nice try.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  That's all I did as a kid was go over to friends' house who had cable.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  And watch MTV.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  And they'd be like, go away, I'm watching MTV.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  Were your parents like a we refuse to have cable house?

• 7:21Speaker 01

  We were a cheapskate house and cable was like $32 a month.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  That's where you get it.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  It is Aubrey. Yes. It's a genetic trait.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  So unsurprisingly, after his appearance on Real People, Richard is a huge hit. And the next thing he did, Michael, was that he landed a recurring role as an aerobics instructor on General Hospital.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Oh, here come the weird references to things the youths will not understand.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, uh, General Hospital is an extremely long running, uh, American soap opera and soap operas, I would say are like, uh, telenovelas that never end.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  We have to give it to people in Mr. Beast. Imagine, uh, Mr. Beast, but there's a script that he talks and there's 50 Mr. Beasts and they work in a hospital. That's how young people will understand.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Imagine you unwrap your shredded cheese and there's a big pile of blueberries. The way that he talks about getting the role is another one of these sort of, I don't know, Richard kind of ingenue stories where he's like, I was on a plane to Las Vegas and I got into my seat and I was sitting next to a professional looking brunette in a three piece suit who asks him, aren't you that guy who jumps around on television?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  And he says, yes, I guess I am. And she says, you're very funny. I've never seen anyone like you on TV. And he says, well, that's because there isn't anyone on TV like me.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  Like, I was like, I don't think this exchange happened at all in this way.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  And I don't think you stumbled into a role on General Hospital. She, this professional looking brunette then says, hey, I'm in casting for General Hospital, and I'd like to write a role for you on the show. And he's like, I turned her down.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Oh, what?

• 9:14Speaker 00

  No, you didn't.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  I feel like a theme in celebrity memoirs is people write out their ambition oftentimes.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  It sounds like he probably wanted to get on TV. He got a little taste of celebrity. He liked it. And he's like, okay, what other opportunities are there? And he probably went out of his way to try to make these opportunities happen. There's nothing wrong with that. But people want to make it seem as if it's like, I'm so special that people couldn't help but notice.

• 9:36Speaker 00

  I think he had gotten a taste not only of sort of being on camera, but of the kind of adulation that he had absolutely never gotten in his life before, right?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Everything up until now has been mostly people rejecting him.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  And then he gets this thing where people not only accept him, they adore him.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 9:59Speaker 00

  He talks during this era about how there were whole bags of fan mail just for him.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  This is around the time that he starts his pretty legendary relationships with his fans. In his memoir, he writes that he usually makes 40 to 50 phone calls a day.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  Even when he's on the road. And on a really busy day, he'd go up to 100 phone calls.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  This is my bad place.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Hellscape.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  This would kill me.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Hellscape. So, Richard lands this role on General Hospital. It goes really well. He's really loved on the show. He calls his dad to tell him he's on General Hospital.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. And his dad's response is, basically, why don't you have your own show?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  What the fuck?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  That's such garbage.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  So from there, Richard went on to host his own daytime talk show, The Richard Simmons Show.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Wait, really? Like immediately?

• 11:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, he started General Hospital in 79, and he started The Richard Simmons Show in 1980.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  We're gonna watch the intro, which will give you a taste.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Good, good, good, good, good.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  I sent you the link.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Intro.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Okay, The Richard Simmons Show.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Okay, it's him doing fitness. Great transitions, PowerPoint transitions.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Okay, there's like a preacher skit.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Okay, fitness in top hats.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Vaudeville fitness.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Oh, it's like pranking people in grocery stores.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  In the grocery store, getting into a hot tub, fully clothed for some reason.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  God, he's driving a car with "Why are you fat?" on the license plate.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  Why are you F A T T?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Why are the comments turned off? They're afraid of people roasting him?

• 11:59Speaker 01

  It's too spicy.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  I really hope that that's not for bad. But listen, this was uploaded by someone with 13 subscribers.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, with 13 subscribers. Okay, fair enough.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  In that intro, Mike, we get Richard Simmons, among other things, we get him doing a lot of fitness with a lot of costumes.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Very weird. Yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  At one point, we see him dressed as an angel. That costume is for a character he called the Weight Saint.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Who was the angel on your shoulder reminding you to count calories, right?

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Oh, that's what he was doing in the grocery store, was like telling that lady?

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Don't get that, get this.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. She was in the produce aisle, Richard.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  He had other characters on the show. He frequently did like sketches on the show.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  That... I don't know if that's his gift. I don't know if that's his gift.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  He played a nun named Sister Mary Locall.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Wait, is it a whole talk show dedicated to weight loss? This sounds so boring.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  It is a fitness-themed half-hour talk show every day.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Why would anybody watch this?

• 13:04Speaker 00

  He has another character named Anna Maria Spaghetti.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  He plays a reverend named Reverend Pounds.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Who is a man of the tablecloth.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Oh my, okay, that's pretty good. All right, fair enough.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Who says things like, "Twinkies are my shepherd I shall not want."

• 13:25Speaker 01

  What?

• 13:26Speaker 00

  And, "Though I waddle through the valley of linguine and clams, I shall fear no evil."

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Richard, that's terrible.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  He has a sketch about broccoli going to the unemployment office because, quote, "People just don't eat vegetables anymore."

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Oh god.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  He plays a cop from the Slob Squad. He gives out tickets at grocery stores to people who are buying fattening foods. He had celebrity guests on. Bob Barker came on, Betty White came on, Phyllis Diller, Jack Lalanne, and Barbara Eden. You wanted your 70's celebrities, let's go!

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Oh man, we're not explaining a single one of those.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  Barbara Eden, just, "I dream of genie," that's all you need to know.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't actually know that one. I didn't actually know that one.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  It was my ringtone for years.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Mine is just the "My Neck, My Back" song in its entirety.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  So, doing the Richard Simmons Show allows Richard to buy a house for himself. He doesn't really want a house, he's never really home for it, but everyone keeps telling him, "There's this gorgeous house and he just ought to buy it." So, he buys this house, he can afford it, he buys this house, and he calls his family and says, "Come out to LA, I'll fly you all out, I'm hosting Christmas, I got a house, I'd love for you guys to come out and see it." His family arrives and his dad walks through the entire house making note of all of the flaws.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  That's such toxic dad behavior.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  It is such a specific parent move.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  The pipe's a little loose here, Richard. You're like, "What? What am I supposed to do about this right now?"

• 15:03Speaker 00

  The appliances are all stainless steel, which is like a very fucking fancy thing in the early 80's.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  And he just keeps going, "They're gonna be covered in fingerprints."

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Ooh, anti-cyber truck king, Richard Simmons's dad.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  And he's like, "They're-" Too many steps in one house. I've never seen this many steps in my whole life.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  So Richard gets his family settled into their rooms and his dad immediately starts shouting to him about how there's no hot water, like the hot water is out.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Okay, I would complain about that. I would complain about that.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  So I'm gonna send you his quote from his memoir explaining what happened next.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  We're back in the crying in the driveway section of the podcast episode.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so get ready to get sad about a dad.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  My father said, "We fly all the way out here and now we're in a mansion, this big, modern thing, and there's no hot water? Do something, Richard. I called the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and managed to get a string of rooms. That's how I spent Christmas that year. The next day, December 26th, I put the house up for sale. I didn't want to clean all those windows anyway." Oh, that's so sad.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  It's so sad. So like, he bought the house because other people thought he should buy the house.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  And he sold the house because other people didn't like the house.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  It's sort of like, what did his dad, like, want? Like, what did he expect?

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I think, listen, I'm just spitballing here, but I think his dad was a showbiz guy who gave it all up to have kids. And here, Richard is having a good amount of success in showbiz.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  And who said that he didn't want showbiz kids because they are annoying.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  And I'm like, well, you got an annoying kid who is having a great deal of success in the thing that you left.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  I will say, over time, Richard says that his relationship with his father starts to sort of soften.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  He doesn't give a lot of great examples of that. The closest he gets is like, there is a conversation that he recounts where his dad says, "I'm really proud of you."

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  And it's clear that that meant a lot to Richard. "I remain skeptical in a protective way."

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  Leave him alone!

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  You know what I mean? Because his dad has been like, bad news. And also, as part of that relationship softening, Richard's like, "I started sending him gifts."

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  And it's like cashmere sweaters and tailored shirts and like, nice ass shit.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Look at what my gay son got me. Look at the gay things that my son got me.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  Richard eventually ends up buying another house and he wants to hire a housekeeper to look after the house because he has gone so much. Richard Simmons has... Many dogs, and they are all Dalmatians.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Like famously difficult to care for dogs?

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Every Dalmatian is named after a character in Gone with the Wind.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Oh, wait, really?

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Scarlett, Patty, Ashley, Rat.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Dude, Richard Simmons and I would not have been friends. We met each other under different circumstances.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  He also collected dolls, lots, so many old dolls in the house.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  How you doing, buddy?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  No way. I want to maintain my affection for this man. These are not the choices as an adult that I have made.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  So he's interviewing housekeepers and he interviews someone and he says, hey, do you like dogs? And she says, yes, I like dogs. And when I was a kid, I had a Dalmatian. And he goes, you're hired.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  Her name's Teresa. She lives with him for decades, uh, working as his housekeeper.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  When people ask him if he's married, he says, I live with a wonderful woman named Teresa.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Ooh, okay.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, according to Teresa, who has shared this since he passed, he also bought two grave sites side by side, one for him and one for her.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  While Richard is doing the Richard Simmons Show, his father falls ill. He goes in for surgery for kidney stones and Richard is like, how bad do you need these kidney stones removed? You're 85. There are complications from the surgery. So Richard flies out to New Orleans to see his dad because he's 85 and he's experiencing complications from surgery. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to put together the risk there, right? He talks about seeing him in his hospital bed and sort of scarcely recognizing him.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  He should walk around his dad and criticize all the flaws with it. Your nose doesn't look right. You're like, oh, your ears are garbage.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Once his father's released from the hospital, Richard gets him all settled in. And then says, okay, is there anything else that I can do for you? And his father says, yes, Richard, there is one other thing you can do for me. Go to Rome and meet the Pope.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  What?

• 19:55Speaker 00

  And say a prayer with him for me.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  This is like some sort of like three riddles to cross this bridge type shit. This is like a video game character. He's like, go on this quest.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  I'm gonna go cameras on for a second so that you can see.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay. Wait, what?

• 20:11Speaker 00

  That is Richard Simmons meeting the fucking Pope.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Wait, so he actually pulled this off somehow?

• 20:16Speaker 00

  He went to Rome and he met the Pope. He does not explain the mechanics of how that happened?

• 20:22Speaker 01

  He sat next to him on a plane. I think he sat next to him on a plane. Yeah, what do you do?

• 20:26Speaker 00

  He like really yada yada's it where he's like, I called my agent who worked out the details and I was on a plane to, and I'm like, no, that is not a sufficient explanation, Richard.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  I wonder if he told the Pope that he's Jewish.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  By the next year, spring of the next year, Leonard Simmons Sr. Died on April 18th, 1983. This is a big loss for Richard. His relationship with his dad was complicated and rough, but even in its complication and roughness, it still loomed large in his life in a big way.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  And I think for anybody who's grieved somebody who you.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Who sucked, who sucked? You can say who sucked.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, who, who was really close to you and also who sucked. You know how complicated it can be to feel grief and relief and anger and all of that at the same time?

• 21:19Speaker 01

  This is how I felt when Queer Folk went off the air. It was, it was not good, but it was very important to me.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  So he's lost his father. While all of that is happening, his career continues to take off. In addition to his talk show, in addition to General Hospital, in addition to all of that, he releases a diet book. It's his first book called Never Say Diet.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Is this supposed to be a pun on never say die?

• 21:46Speaker 00

  Yes, he says, he doesn't like the word diet because the first. Word is die. The first part of the word is die. So his is a live it program is what he calls it throughout.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  He takes these little things and he makes them so much worse.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  They're so sweaty.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  A live it?

• 22:05Speaker 00

  So he's talking in this section about people who've tried everything and just can't lose weight and like, why should you listen to me about this? Right? He started credentialing himself.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  He says, "The difference is that you failed and I haven't. I used to weigh 268 pounds. I used to be fat and round and miserable and I didn't like it. So I found the way to beat the fat and come out a winner. And I know where you've gone wrong and why you've failed so far." Well, this is kind of mean.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. And also like, I'm so sorry. You beat the fat and came out a winner? That's how you're describing like hospitalization induced by starving? You're like, what are you talking about?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  He just said this more succinctly on the show with the why are you fat license plate. That's kind of like his whole thing. Yeah.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  I think the other thing to know here is that like, this is absolutely the template for how former fat people are urged to feel about themselves, whether or not they feel that way.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  Their urge to feel and say like, I was fat. That was bad. I made a decision to be thin. I had the grit to achieve it and I came out a winner.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  And I should say, he is not a person who has mentioned any formal training at any point in any of this.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Good point. Yeah. He's just like a guy.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  I think a lot of his shit is based on vibes.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And his own experience.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  And his own experience.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Your own experience is not replicable. Yeah.

• 23:31Speaker 00

  While all of this is happening, he keeps teaching his classes at the anatomy asylum now called Simmons.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Finally. He's becoming himself. He's starting to believe.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  He starts teaching classes. His regulars really love him and one of his regulars is named Ellen. She became a favorite of his. She made these teeny tiny little teddy bears and would sell them at local gift shops and would bring them to him as a gift. She'd bring little bears every so often. He doesn't see her in class for a while and asks after her and finds out that she has passed away. And he's like, what happened? And the person is like, well, she was anorexic for a really long time.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  And he says that at this point, anorexia is not a term that he has heard. So he asks another couple of regulars who are both nurses, what anorexia was.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  This is the passage that he writes about it in his memoir.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  He says, "So, an anorexic is a person who stops eating for no reason and millions of reasons. It's someone who gets smaller and smaller, just like those little teddy bears. That alarmed me, because I had once starved myself to lose weight. I asked the nurses, when I starved, was I anorexic? Not necessarily, though it's a fine line, they told me. You starve to lose weight. Anorexics starve to disappear. There are usually feelings of self-loathing or lack of self-worth connected with anorexia. In Italy, when I'd starved, it was because I finally realized my own self-worth, so I thought. I'd wanted to live and to look my best so I would fit in, although I'd gone about it in a very harmful way." Oh, this is like what he's telling himself. He's like, "I didn't hate myself. I just did it because I hated myself."

• 25:10Speaker 00

  It's so sad.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  And self-soothing by being like, even though I behaved indistinguishably from someone with profound anorexia.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  Being thin is still healthier than being fat, even if you starve to do it.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  It's like someone who is really bending over backwards to tell himself stories that make sense of his own experience and sort of protect it.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  It's also so interesting how you can like, you can make somebody stare this stuff in the face.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Right? Of being like, starving yourself because of low self-esteem and poor body image, et cetera, is unbelievably bad for you and an actual like diagnosed medical condition. And he can look at that information and still be like, I mean, I did that, but not in like the bad way.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Like, it's not, it's not that you can like tell people that this exists. And they'll have this eureka moment and be like, oh my God, I shouldn't do that. It's like, oh, oh, but I don't count.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  We are now, Michael, solidly in the mid 80s.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  And 1985 is the dawn of the infomercial era.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Another thing we have to explain.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  I had not know why infomercials sort of showed up in the 80s. I just sort of knew that they did. Do you have a guess about why infomercials showed up?

• 26:24Speaker 01

  The invention of the Ron Cogan rotisserie oven. It was so good. They were like, let's put this on TV six hours a night.

• 26:30Speaker 00

  The Shamwow. They just had to.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Look, they had to get the word out.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  This is part of the Reagan administration's massive deregulation effort.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  What?

• 26:40Speaker 00

  So Reagan's changes to the FCC abolish the fairness doctrine.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  That had been in place since 1949, which was the doctrine that required broadcast television to fairly cover differing viewpoints on controversial issues.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Should chicken rotate? Should chicken not rotate?

• 26:56Speaker 00

  This deregulation also removed restrictions on advertising to kids. So this is when we also start to get a huge wave of ads aimed directly at children during children's programming.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  And it loosened restrictions on how long an individual advertisement could last. So now you could have a 30 or 60 minute advertisement.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Wait, those were advertisements? I thought they were just like talk shows that only ever existed for one episode.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  All of them had the same catchphrase, which is just like, there's got to be a better way.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  The thing is, I did watch them when I was like six years old and like, I absolutely fell for it. I was like, oh, I learned on a talk show about like this knife that can cut paper or whatever.

• 27:38Speaker 00

  I grew up in a house with Cutco knives and a miracle thaw. I am not above the infomercial.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  The miracle thaw was the best one. It was just like a cutting board on the counter. It's like meat defrosts. Like, yeah.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  And it's metal, so meat does not defrost. It just makes the metal cold. Now everything's cold. Congratulations. So at this point, when infomercials sort of roll around, Richard Simmons had a two-minute TV ad for his product Deal-A-Meal, which is sort of like a hybrid board game diet. It's like a very bad board game and a okay diet.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  We don't have time, Aubrey.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  We don't have time. We're not doing it. We can't run through every part of the Richard Simmons empire because we would be here for, I would come out of my office with a Rip Van Winkle beard.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  The diet board game.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  Deal-A-Meal, for many of our listeners in our age group, will have been their first diet because it's sort of a gamified, kid-friendly.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Is it like you spin a wheel and you can like eat an apple or a blueberry or something?

• 28:42Speaker 00

  No, you have like a little play wallet and you have cards in the wallet that are like, you get seven vegetable cards and two lean protein cards.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Oh my God, it's a rogue-like.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  And you move them over to the other side of your wallet when you eat them.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  It's Bellatro.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  I don't know any of the words you're saying.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Just don't worry about it.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  Not a single one of them.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Welcome to my world, Aubrey. Anytime you mention Survivor to me.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  I don't watch Survivor.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Or whatever.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  It's 90 Day Fiance and you know that.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Are those different?

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Direct your hate mail to michael.pods.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  So the ad, his two-minute ad for Deal-A-Meal was a big hit and so was the product. So the production company approaches him about doing an infomercial for Deal-A-Meal. He does and it becomes a big hit and Richard just sort of keeps doing infomercials.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  The very next year, 1986, Richard Simmons starts making exercise videos.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  In 1982, Jane Fonda's complete workout came out and was a massive hit.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  One of the things that people say about that time is that the video was so popular, it increased VCR sales.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  I couldn't find confirmation of that anywhere, but like, that's like, I think it's a gesture at how popular those videos were.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, my understanding is that the rise of the VCR was like 99% pornography.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  Oh, that makes more sense.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  But 0.5% was probably at-home fitness. There's only two things that you need privacy to watch.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  Most of those tapes were cranked out.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  Few of them used any recognizable songs. Richard describes them as elevator music.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  And I went back and did watch some other, I watched Richard Simmons workout tapes and I watched some others from the time. And you're like, yeah, it's a little bit like the Angela Lansbury Positive Moves one.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Where you're like, oh, it's just like sort of synth-y vibes.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Or in today's parlance, creative comments. It's Pottington Bear. Early Pottington Bear.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  So, the production company once again approaches him and this time is like, what if you made an exercise tape? And he was like, cool, cool, but I want it to be like my classes where we play my records. And he wants it to be his favorite songs that he listened to as a kid in the 50s and 60s. So he plays It's My Party and He's a Rebel and Beyond the Sea and these like, older timey songs for the 80s.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  And for his middle-aged audience, which is actually like, very smart. Yeah.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  He casts the videos like his classes. They are mostly women, but not exclusively women. They include fat people and they include super-vat people and they include visibly disabled people. It's radical inclusivity for that era. Radical, right? But it's also inclusive in the name of making those fat people thin.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's all on a relative scale. It's advancing from what it was before, but it still has a long way to go. Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  I'm gonna go cameras on again. Up until this point, Richard's personal uniform is like a ballet dancer.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Oh, what?

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Tights and a leotard, and he looks gorgeous.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Oh, wow, the hips.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  Right?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Like, he looks stunning.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, he looks great. Yeah. I also recently discovered leggings.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  Oh, you're gonna start getting into leggings?

• 32:16Speaker 01

  I found them at the children's section of Goodwill, like everything else I wear. I'm a very small man.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  He's like, people always told me I had great legs, and they're right. I do. And I'm like, yes, you do, Richard. You do have great legs. Good job.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, man.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  In the lead up to Sweating to the Oldies, he meets a wardrobe person named Leslie Wilshire, who he calls, quote, "my own Edith Head." Which I'm like, boy, Richard, the references are not getting timely, my guy. She is the one who brings him a pair of dolphin shorts for the first time.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Wait, explain dolphin shorts to me. People have been tweeting this at us, too. Why are they dolphin shorts?

• 32:50Speaker 00

  Uh, it was the brand name, D-O-L-F-I-N, but then people over time thought it was like just the animal.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Okay, I've never heard of this. But those are like the little tiny short shorts that he's wearing in like every video.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  Seen them, yeah. They're the little tiny short shorts. They're like the dude version of hot pants.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  This is my only, like, traditional, like, we used to be a proper country take. It's like, bring back short shorts on men.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Shocking take from a gay man.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Just wanna see more of the gentleman.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  She brings him the dolphin shorts, which he describes as being like very in at the time. Like, this was like the look.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  And she gives him a flowy, flashy, like, tank top, and he writes in his memoir about trying it on for the first time. I just sent you a quote.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  He says, "In that tank top and those shorts, I finally knew what Superman must have felt like when he put on the cape for the first time. My legs looked great, and the tank top covered my waist. It camouflaged the area where my underwear made little love handle dents around my waist. It also gave me an incentive to work a little harder on my chest and arms. It was the perfect outfit."

• 34:00Speaker 00

  I just love him having this moment of like, I look awesome, I feel awesome. It makes me sad that built into that is like... My waist is covered and I need an incentive to work on my arms and that kind of thing.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  But I'm like, this is a moment of Richard feeling straightforwardly like great about how he looks and how he feels in his body and all of that sort of stuff. And I'm like, I love this for you.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  There's also you striving to find any like moments of joy in this book that is so joyless. You're like, we found one.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  So this becomes his signature look, of course.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Sweat into the oldies also became a huge hit in the exercise tape world. It made him even more of a household name and it opened the floodgates for sort of Richard Simmons, Inc., right?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  He starts making branded clothing. He starts making Richard Simmons workout shoes. He starts making fat-free popcorn, which I would argue, oh, popcorn is fat-free popcorn. What?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  It's just popcorn with like a bunch of Nutrasweet sprinkled on it.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Just dry, plain, air-popped popcorn.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Also, one thing we have not talked about yet is, is the economics of all this. Home videos for like $20 in like 1985 money, which is like 45 or 50 bucks now. Like it must've been so profitable to have like a home videotape empire.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  He also starts making huge appearances in malls and big box stores.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  In order to promote this merch. Like he releases a steamer at one point.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  And he goes and does like a big like exercise class in the middle of a mall with the steamer so they can sell the steamer.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  Richard Simmons keeps sort of Energizer bunny-ing his way through his work life, right?

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  Until 1999, when his beloved mother Shirley Simmons passes away.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  And Richard describes this very openly in the memoir as a real turning point for him. It is sort of an earthquake in his personal life.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  This is from one of the final passages in Richard Simmons memoir.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  He says, "After Shirley passed away, I was asked to do several national television shows. Even though I was so proud of myself for being so strong, I had lost my enthusiasm. Remember the saying, 'The show must go on'? Well, I just..." Didn't feel that way. I just didn't feel like being funny. Jay Leno's parents had both died recently and he had done a moving tribute to them on his show. I remember that I had been a guest during the time he'd returned from his father's funeral. I was there for him and now I guess he was going to be there for me. I still had my doubts, but I knew I couldn't hide forever. Eventually I said, yes, of course, I'll go on. I feel like I know what's gonna happen. People aren't gonna let him be serious about his mom because he's Richard and he's a clown and nobody wants to hear him be serious.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  That's not the story that he tells.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  God, I want to cancel Jay Leno again. God damn it.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Well, you can do that for other reasons.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  For the cars, due to the cars.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Due to the denim. After this little passage, he writes about having a pep talk from his late mom. That he heard her voice telling him to just be himself and to not say anything to aggravate his brother, which I absolutely believe his mom said to him a lot.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Mr. Business, Mr. Heterosexual.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  So that is where the memoir ends, is like, I don't feel like being funny anymore, but I guess I kinda have to.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I gotta go on Jay Leno and get made fun of. Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  It is hard to read and I think, to me, it has the tone of an editor being like, you can't end on such a sad note.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  It's funny because his like alleged happy ending is also kind of a sad ending.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  It's like, continue being the clown for everyone.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think that is sort of the chapter that we're leading into is like, culture does not let him.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  Have some space.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  From there, Richard continues to make some media appearances, but he is sort of slowing down from the 80s and 90s, right?

• 37:56Speaker 01

  How old is he at this point? He's born in 46, you said, right?

• 37:59Speaker 00

  He's born in 48.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  48, okay.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  So in 2000, he would have been 52.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  As I've gotten older, I used to have like two hours a day of extroversion in me and now I'm down to like one interaction with a Trader Joe's cashier. He probably started at a higher baseline than me, but I can see how some of the energy that he's using on this is probably dwindling by 52. It's funny because like at the time when people kind of noticed that he had disappeared from public life, it was sort of in some ways constructed as a mystery, but it seems like this book kind of answers this question.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  He was a guy with a lot of hurt that he was carrying around and nobody really took any of that seriously or like listened to him and he had this kind of one dimensional public persona. So like, yeah, of course he was just like, I don't really want to do this anymore. That makes perfect sense to me.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  Doesn't it?

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  So I felt like I had sort of, even just after reading the memoir, I was like, oh, well, I feel like I have a real good sense of why he disappeared from public life. He was experiencing grief, right?

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  And he just like, was like, I don't have this level of like, you know, be the life of the party in me.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  What an extremely human response.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  And he didn't step away from public life entirely at this point. He just started to slow down like people, like our fellow people in middle age tend to do.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Cut to Mike and Aubrey going, we're not going to produce as many episodes. Yeah, it's like a normal, a normal thing.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  So we start getting these reports of Richard getting really short with people and which is something that doesn't really exist in previous media about him.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  So in March of 2004, The Smoking Gun reported that Richard Simmons was charged with assault.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  In the Phoenix airport.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  I do not remember this at all.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  So here is the report from The Smoking Gun.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  It says, "The 54-year-old fitness guru laid the smackdown on one Chris Farney, a 23-year-old Mesa man who happens to cage wrestle in his spare time. According to the Phoenix Police Department report, when Farney spotted Simmons walking through the Sky Harbor International Airport, he said, 'Look, Richard Simmons, drop your bags, let's rock to the 50s.'" Farney told cops he was referring to an old Simmons workout tape. The diminutive star, guys, the diminutive star responded by walking over to the strapping Farney and saying, "It's not nice to make fun of people with issues." He then- slapped Farnie's face. The motorcycle salesman, who was not injured, called cops who cited an emotional and repentant Simmons for assault.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  I mean, don't slap people, but also I can see how you would sort of snap.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Yes, and also, Richard Simmons tells a very different version of this story.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Oh, OK.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  In 2012, Richard gives an interview with Men's Health, and he talks about this instance. Richard Simmons says that Chris Farnie was talking shit about fat people and making fun of the fat people in his videos.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  That, I believe.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Dude, have you seen the video of Bjork attacking that paparazzi?

• 41:02Speaker 00

  Why are you saying it like this when I'm sure that you know it's not?

• 41:07Speaker 01

  I've heard a lot of Icelandic people get it wrong, but it's actually Bjork.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Oh, OK.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Have you seen the video, though?

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Of Bjork slapping someone?

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Dude, it's wild. It's like normal paparazzi video of like a celebrity leaving an airport. You know, you've seen this clip a million times. And then this lady goes, "Welcome to London," or like, "Welcome to New York," or whatever city it is. And Bjork just goes fucking nuts on her, like, feral. Like, jumps at her, grabs her microphone, and is just like beating her fucking ass with this microphone. And it's like, out of context, you're like, what the fuck? Like, this, like, this pop star is completely unhinged. But according to Bjork later, this is this paparazzi lady who had been hounding her for like weeks and showing up in her like private vacations and fucking with her. And like, it felt super passive aggressive, just like, "Welcome." And that's when she like really snapped.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  So if you have the full context, it's like, I mean, again, it's not defensible to sort of blow up and like physically attack somebody, obviously. But it actually kind of makes sense in context, or at least it's like more legible as human behavior in context. And I can see something like that happening with Richard Simmons. You imagine that this must have been some sort of prolonged interaction.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  So when Men's Health asks Richard Simmons in 2012 about this instance, this is his response.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  He says, "You can't just do that in front of me. You can say anything you want to me, but you better not say anything that's going to upset me about obese people. I've gotten emails where they go, 'My wife's a fat pig. She'll buy your video.'" But then she eats Doritos. I'll email that man back and say, you should be ashamed of yourself. You are there to support your wife, not call her animal names. How dare you? This is the woman that loves you. She's the mother of your children. You need to embrace her. Tell her that you love her and never call her names or embarrass her in front of other people. Yeah, slap that motherfucker, Richard.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  Right. I was like, I read that quote and I was like, I have been fully turned around on the slap.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Some people do deserve violence.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  This is the kind of energy that you never actually see from thin people or from formerly fat people who are now thin people, right?

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Oh, sorry. You were gonna yell about fat people in the middle of the airport? I'm absolutely gonna fucking

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  Do the human being equivalent of like getting out the squirt bottle and being like, hey, cut it off. Right? Like, no.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  I would respect him more if he had a literal squirt bottle. That would be amazing.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  This is the thing that I was thinking about recently is if I got into a fight, I'm not confident that I would know how to throw a punch.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Wait, really? You've never been in a fight, Aubrey?

• 43:31Speaker 00

  A physical fight?

• 43:33Speaker 01

  You've never been in a physical fight?

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Sorry, what about me?

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Oh, cuz you went to a fancy school. Somebody didn't go to public school.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  No, that is not what's happening here. I'm just docile.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  I'm just chill.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  I think I was in my 30s before I would consider being like, hey, you got my order wrong at a restaurant.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Dude, the last day of eighth grade, I was getting bullied by this other, this is like a chronicle of me being bullied in middle school now, this podcast?

• 44:02Speaker 00

  Were you too sleepy to be bullied?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  No, this was after, this was not after the seventh grade roller skating. This was after the eighth grade cruise and this, this kid whose name I really wanna say, but I'm not gonna say it, who had bullied me all fucking year, was fucking with me. And he shoved me down and I tripped and fell. And he started, he was like, oh bitch, or whatever. And he started walking away from me. And I got up and I like, I tapped him on the shoulder and I was like, oh, hey. And he turned around and I just did the cheapest fucking shot. I just punched him in the face as hard as I could and it felt so good. I was just like, boom. And he had fucked with me all year. And then he like fell down. It was like, it was like, uh, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out where like, they go like different directions. Hella long to fall down. And like, as he was falling down, I like realized what I had done.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  I was like, I just punched like a popular kid in the face and I'm like, not a popular kid. So like, as he was like, still slow motion falling, I turned around and ran. Cause I was like, if he gets up, he's gonna beat the shit out of me. Obviously, the only way I could have done this is with a cheap shot. So I like, I booked my ass off to the school bus because I'm like, if I can get to the school bus, it's the last day of school. I'm just never gonna see this person again. And like, if I can get to the school bus, I'm like in safety. I booked as fast as I could to the school bus. I like, jump on, I'm like, uh, uh, uh, get on the school bus. And this, this kid goes, I heard you just punched somebody in the face.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  I was like, how did the rumor get here?

• 45:24Speaker 00

  Travels fast.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Before I got here, what the fuck? And everyone's like, is it true? I'm like, how the fuck do you people know about this? But yes, it was. And I feel great about it. And I never saw that guy again.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  God, my heart was just pounding for Tiny Mike.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Oh dude, I know.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  For T D Tiny. I was like, the stakes could not be higher. And then I was like, I know how it turns out. You're here, you're fine.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  I did live, but I'm still Tiny Mike.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  So in that same Men's Health interview, Richard Simmons talks about some more things that I personally found really troubling. He talks about keeping himself strictly to a 1500 calorie a day diet, which is again, like Minnesota starvation study levels ish, it's a little bit lower. He was born with what he calls quote unquote, a crippled leg. And has been wearing corrective shoes since early childhood.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  It's so weird. He doesn't say that in the book.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  He just deals with it. It's painful, but he says, quote, "Thank goodness for ice and hot baths." So you get the impression that he is in pain with some regularity, enough that he has a routine around it.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  Right? And his job is exercising in public.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  It's also funny how, again, it's like, he was telling us in public, like, I'm a more complicated public figure than you think I am. And just like, nobody listened.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. He said, he described his role in the world as being part priest and part clown.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh God.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  It is no mystery at all that this was a person who needed a break.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  So in February of 2014, just a couple of years after that Men's Health interview, Richard Simmons stops making public appearances. It's not long before rumors start to circulate about his quote unquote disappearance, which is a sort of wild word choice in this case, right?

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  It's not someone who's vanished off the face of the planet. It's a guy who's at home.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  And like a, by that point, like 60 something year old guy who just like isn't out and about doing stuff anymore.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Which is like totally, he's basically retired.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  The wrench in the works here is that he also sort of stops responding to a bunch of people that he knew through Simmons.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Friends start calling, some of them show up at the house and Teresa turns them away.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  And she tells them that he doesn't want any visitors right now.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  On a friend level, I can absolutely understand how that would be like really hurtful and confusing.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  But also, this is not an unclear boundary.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Well, his life probably feels like a prison of his own making, right? Because if he's playing this role where he's everybody's therapist, he might not want to play that role anymore. And he might feel like a lot of those relationships, even as, you know, you can say it's kind of self inflicted and, and on some level, these people of course do care about him. You can see somebody who's created this life for themselves that they just don't really want to participate in anymore.

• 48:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  That's not like necessarily defending it. I'm like, my feelings would be hurt too. But also it's like you kind of, it, it, it's understandable and human.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  So in January of 2015, TMZ reports that the LAPD did a welfare check on Richard Simmons. They had gotten an anonymous tip. They reported out publicly, like he's okay, he's quote responsive and alert, like he's fine. Then, over a year later, the New York Daily News runs a story called "The Haunted Twilight of Richard Simmons."

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  This is where the sort of disappearance quote unquote story really seems to take off. It's just a bunch of people who they considered him a friend, who were like, he's not returning calls, right?

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  My favorite of his friends was a woman named June, who owned a store called Wigs Today in Los Angeles. And said that she and Richard became friends because he was a regular customer at Wigs Today. And I was like, I love this.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  I love that he was like, I'm at the wig store so much, I've made friends.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  But does she say it's just like, we used to hang out, now we don't hang out anymore? Is that like the extent of it?

• 49:37Speaker 00

  Well, there's a fair amount of that, but the, the bulk of the story, the main source is Moro Olivera. Moro Olivera was on Richard Simmons payroll, first as a massage therapist and then as a personal assistant. There have been all these rumors that they were partners, right? That they were romantically involved, but Richard Simmons doesn't say that ever out loud to anybody.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Does the guy, does Moro identify himself as a boyfriend or partner?

• 50:09Speaker 00

  Uh, he never really says either, at least not that I have seen.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Interesting, okay.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  He lived in an apartment that Richard Simmons owned and he, according to him, he sent in a rent check every month that he says that Simmons never cashed.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  So he would just write a check every month and Richard Simmons would like, you know, throw it in the garbage or whatever, recycle it. He seemed like a recycler.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did, he did.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  So we're going to start with one of his early, one of the early passages.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  Uh, about Moro's story from this New York Daily News story.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  "Let's talk it over," Olivera said. "I want to sit here and make sure you'll be okay. Let's go upstairs. I'll give you a massage and relax you." Simmons called up to Teresa Ravelas, his live-in housekeeper of nearly three decades. "Moro is going upstairs with me," he said. "No, no, no," Ravelas shouted from the second floor, according to Olivera. "Get out, get out." Olivera looked at his friend, who told him in a soft voice, "You've got to go." Olivera leaned in towards Simmons. "Is she controlling your life now?" As Olivera tells it, Simmons looked down and with one resigned word confirmed his worst suspicions. Yes, this was the last time he saw his friend.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  This is sort of the key part of his story. He believes, and the story that he tells to the New York Daily News, is that Teresa is keeping Richard Simmons captive in his home.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 51:29Speaker 00

  He doesn't offer a motive for that. He just says, she is a witch who practices witchcraft.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Oh, he literally says this?

• 51:36Speaker 00

  Yes, he's careful to note in the interview that that isn't part of many Americans' belief system, but that it's a very real thing. Where he comes from, which is Brazil, and where Teresa comes from, which is Mexico, he tells the New York Daily News that he thinks that black magic is what caused Richard to be, in his words, tormented.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Oh, so a very unreliable narrator.

• 51:59Speaker 00

  Well, you like another layer of unreliable?

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, give it to me.

• 52:03Speaker 00

  He wrote and self-published a book about the whole situation called King Rich and the Evil Witch.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  He learned from Richard. You could tell, maybe they were boyfriends. Maybe something rubbed off.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  A shared love for terrible titles.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  He calls the book a living fairy tale. He self-publishs it. Characters in the book include the good goofy King Rich, the evil witch Bereza, which is Teresa.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Bereza?

• 52:39Speaker 00

  There is King Rich's brother, Prince Benny, Lenny.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  It's the fictional story of Bitchard Bimmins.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  No relation to any real.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  And then there's a character just called The Artist, and that is very clearly Mauro.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  This beautiful, intelligent young man who gets caught in the witchcraft, yes.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  And the thing that I find maybe most galling about this piece is that it ignores its own context. In this piece, they talk to Richard Simmons' manager, who's like, he's fine. He's been on the road for 40 years. He's just at home.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  He'd had trouble with his knees. It makes sense to me that you would need what he got, which was a full knee replacement on one side, and he needed another. And it reports in this piece that his last living Dalmatian, Hattie, had a terrible, long health decline before ultimately being put down. Moro says in the piece that he visited at 2:00 PM on a Sunday and Richard was asleep. And Moro was like, this is out of control. You gotta get out of the house and you gotta get up and at him. And I was like, his fucking dog just died.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  He's in his 60s. You let the man nap.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Let the man have a depression nap when he has lost so many beloved people and creatures in his life, right?

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  I think especially in periods of grief, like it does call you to like zoom out on your life and be like, is this what I fucking wanted?

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  It's very conceivable that in that state you would go, I think I'm actually fucking done working.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  In response to all of this dust kicking up, Richard gives an interview to the Today Show, saying he's totally fine. He's doing what he wants to do. Nobody needs to worry.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Yeah.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  The fact that it is an audio only interview just adds fuel to the fire for people.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  It's true crime brain happening.

• 54:38Speaker 00

  In direct response to Richard Simmons being like, I'm fine. Please stop. They're like, this means he's definitely not fine.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  This whole time I'm thinking, like, okay, you're a fan of Richard Simmons. It turns out he's like been whatever semi kidnapped by his mate or whatever. Or like, yeah, he's in some like severe depressive funk. Now what? What do you do? You don't know this person.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  It really just seems like people were treating him like an ATM for validation.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  And not like a person. And when he was like, hey, I'm a person and I need a break. People were like, where the fuck is my money? This ATM is busted. Where did it go?

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Weird.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  They're absolutely treating him like a utility that got shut off.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Also, you're allowed to just not be a public figure anymore.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  I think you and I are probably both two people who will just one day be like, well, I'm done.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I will also be kidnapped by my housekeeper.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  And there will be a strange Brazilian man who tells a story about me. That's.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  Brian Bicep.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  I'm gonna be there.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  How dare you do a callback to that? My telephone habits.

• 55:44Speaker 00

  To a bonus episode, dude.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Ridiculous.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  Bold as brass.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  So in November 2016, Richard Simmons closes Simmons.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  There's not really a formal statement from Richard. They just like post up signs on the door being like, hey, this is gonna be our last day.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  I'm sure this just digs up the controversy again.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  Right, so on the last day, people are like, maybe he'll show up for the last class. He doesn't. He hasn't shown up to anything in over two years at this point.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  He finally later addresses it in a Facebook post. Here is that post.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  He says, "I've never been very good with beginnings and endings. Well, it's been over 40 years now and I'm finally taking my own advice. I'm being kind to myself and putting myself first. I'm making changes and taking time to do the things I want to do. Please know that I'm in good health and I'm happy. No one has ever been able to tell me what to do and the same is true today. I'm still independent, determined, and opinionated. I simply am making a new beginning for myself, quietly and in my very own special way."

• 56:49Speaker 00

  Simmons closes in November of 2016. It's four months after even that last chapter that Missing Richard Simmons premieres.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  Okay, right.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  So at this point, there's been the wellness check, there's been the Today Show interview, there's been this Facebook post about Simmons. He's been really clear. "I am taking time off." His manager is saying that. And that's when this podcast comes out. It's hosted by a journalist who had become a regular at Simmons and who had been over to dinner at Richard Simmons' house. This is kind of the apex of the Richard Simmons is missing narrative, right? This is the biggest stage that it gets. The next month, on the heels of the podcast release, the LAPD got more tips to conduct another welfare check.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Man.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  They go so far as to issue a public statement saying that Richard Simmons is quote unquote, "perfectly fine" and quote, "right now, he is doing what he wants to do and that is his business."

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Man.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  In the following month, the month after that, Richard Simmons was hospitalized for severe indigestion.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  While he's in the hospital, he posts a photo of himself on Facebook with the caption, "I'm not missing, just a little under the weather."

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  But the picture is from a few years earlier because as we know, Richard Simmons in the hospital is probably not posting a picture of what Richard Simmons looks like while he's in the hospital.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Oh, no. So then I'm sure the internet sleuths are like, "Oh, the picture's old." Whatever. Remember the Kate Middleton psychotic?

• 58:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Thing?

• 58:26Speaker 00

  People are like, "It's an old picture. He's faking it. This is Teresa doing it." I also think there are plenty of public figures who would not elect to post a picture of what you actually look like when you're checked into a hospital.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  Especially if you're making a post that's trying to reassure people.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Also, ultimately, Richard Simmons is a boomer and he's like, he's just posting on Facebook. He's like, "I'm posting a little thing and I'll just put a photo on there. Why not?"

• 58:50Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  He just like attaches a photo and the whole internet is just like, "What about the metadata of the photo?" Like, people just like zoom in when like, he might just not have been thinking about it all that hard.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Right. Richard Simmons was born the same year as both of my parents and I'm like, "Oh, was he also gonna attach a photograph of his TV screen?"

• 59:09Speaker 01

  The post is in all caps for some reason. He doesn't know why. He doesn't know how to turn that off.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  He also FaceTimed someone, but it was just showing his ear because he lifted the phone up. That same year, the National Enquirer starts publishing a series of articles alleging that Richard Simmons was trans and started accessing gender-affirming care.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  What?

• 59:30Speaker 00

  One of the headlines was, "Richard Simmons: He's Now a Woman."

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Oh, my fucking god. Where the fuck is this coming from?

• 59:37Speaker 00

  It's the National Enquirer, right? So there, someone's kicking up some dust. That is all made possible by the "he's missing" narrative, right?

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  If we don't have the "he's missing" narrative, Richard Simmons' name- Is not in the news and this doesn't become a story that the National Enquirer probably cares to publish, much less cares to publish at the level that they did.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  It's funny contrasting him with Johnny Carson, who also like retired from public life very publicly, right? Like there was this like series of shows, the end of The Tonight Show. And then he just never did anything again. He just like played golf and hung out on his yacht. But like, no one cared. There wasn't like a narrative of like, he's missing or whatever. He also, it appears, stopped hanging out with all of his like celebrity friends.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  He disappeared from public life and most people were like, oh, this is kind of cool.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  It's weird that the culture did not allow Richard Simmons to do that when we allow people to do this all the time.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So on July 13th, 2024, Richard Simmons died at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76 years old. According to the LA Medical Examiner, his cause of death was a fall the day before with heart disease reported as a contributing factor. According to People Magazine's interview with Teresa Revellis, this is her first time speaking to the media. It's after his death. She says that he spent his final days doing what he wanted. He was working with a well-known composer on a Broadway musical about his life. He was in touch with his fans and was writing people letters.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  And he was planning some media appearances for the first time in a while. She was like, he was kind of starting to feel up to like doing an interview or something. So there's a funeral mass for Richard in New Orleans. New Orleans has embraced Richard Simmons with its whole heart. People from New Orleans love Richard Simmons so much. We heard from some listeners who were at that funeral mass. And one of them said that they were really shocked and sad to see that the church was not full.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  That's shocking.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  It really underscores this sort of theory that I've been developing of like, again, like, validation ATM.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  You know, we talked in the last episode about like, these are all ways that formerly fat people are encouraged to feel. The way that people were interacting with him is as a currently fat person. Which is like, he doesn't have a story of his own. He's the fat best friend, right?

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  He's the gay best friend. He's the bit characters who are there for comic relief and the comic relief just is their difference.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Just say Rosie O'Donnell in Sleepless in Seattle, this is taking forever. Also, when all the information was so available too. It's like the man wrote a fucking memoir.

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  Hundred percent.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  None of this was hidden at any point from anyone. He was saying this in interviews for years. He was saying it in his book. When people asked how he was, he would be pretty honest.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  People put me, you know, take me out of the box when they need entertainment and then put me back in the box when they don't.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  I think he was right.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  In the same way, there's like the Happy Meatball Richard and the selling his jewelry to people, Richard. And like, we want the best for all these Richards. There's also, I think, the last 10 years of his life, Richard.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  We don't know that much about that period of his life. He never got the chance to write about it. He never got the chance to tell us about it. But like, I choose to believe that he got some of what he wanted. And he decided at the end, you know, like he said in his Facebook post, like he's an independent guy. He made a decision that this is what he wanted to do with the last 10 years of his life. And like, all evidence is that he did.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of internet talk about like so and so doesn't owe you anything, right? And I'm like, this is a moment where we have to go, Richard Simmons didn't owe us anything.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  That doesn't mean that people didn't have genuine feelings about him and don't still. That doesn't mean that people aren't allowed to feel close to him. It just means that we should do a little check on like, how much of that was us projecting?

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  I think it's also worth thinking about like people in your life who have that kind of energy, that like really kind of social energy. It's, it's, it's always important to sort of check in with those people to make sure there isn't something behind it or

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  They're training you not to see them in a certain way. I always like, uh, my, um, this is a really dark little transition, but my, uh, my friend who killed himself when I was in my twenties was very much like that. Like social butterfly.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Everybody's friend, always making jokes, the last person you Think would be struggling with stuff and then out of the blue, he killed himself. It's like, people, it doesn't mean every single person who's like bubbly is like hiding some dark secret underneath it, but like, just because somebody is bubbly and like, oh my God, you seem so happy, doesn't mean you shouldn't be checking in with that person.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think it is sort of incumbent on all of us, right, to like, do a little relational inventory on that front. Is there someone who you're treating as just sort of entertainment for you, or as a vessel for your complaints or your grievances, or as just a source of guidance for you, right? Are you treating someone as a wellspring of a resource, or are you treating them as a person?

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  And things, if you recognize us from the podcast and you come up to us and I get the slightest whiff that that's the way you think of us, I will slap you in the face. I will spin you around like Tekken 8.

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

  I might start carrying around a tiny squirt bottle.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  You've had some bad interactions too. I feel like, yeah.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  Just a can full of rocks I can shake. Get it?