Clown Prince of Weight Loss Takes Big Interest in Fans

The door opens at the ersatz American Colonial in the Hollywood Hills, and there stands a very tanned Richard Simmons in red tank top and red-striped exercise shorts.

“Hellllllloooooooooooo,” he coos, smiling and striking that Richard Simmons pose the stand-up comics love to spoof.

“Hello, Mr. Simmons.”

“I’m Richard, “ he says, patting my shoulder.

I brace for what’s next. Plenty of slim, fit writers work in the newsroom, but they assign Simmons to me, a man whose weight is slightly above average--for a family of four.

What will he say about that? I’ve read of him accosting strangers, scolding them and snatching the Fritos from their hands. He once shrieked at a passerby: “It’s a Coke! Oh, my God, say a prayer for him, girls!”

It’s all for real, one of his neighbors had assured me: “There is no sham, no charade. I’ve spent a fair amount of time with him, and what you see is what’s there. He really is the kind of individual who will reach out to someone and try to make it better.”

Reaching out has earned him thousands of followers and millions of dollars through the sales of six books, six audiotapes, nine videos and Deal-A-Meal--a folder of cards, each representing a portion of food allotted for that day. All espouse only mainstream ideas for controlling weight: eat less, exercise more, bolster your self-respect.

His “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” exercise video has been on Billboard’s best-selling chart for 38 weeks, currently at No. 9. He’s sold about 5 million videos in all--enough, if laid end to end, to reach from here to my favorite Italian restaurant in San Francisco.

And now I’m going to be spending the day with him, chauffeuring him to a shopping mall in Orange County and watching one of his shopping center shows. He’s been doing them for 12 years, but this is his first in his home territory, Southern California.

We’ve been on the road only five minutes, but already drivers are waving at him. He makes no attempt to remain aloof. There is no bodyguard, no disguise. He’s easy to recognize: He looks exactly like the Richard Simmons on the tube.

“When you have a face and a voice like a box of Duz, I mean, people know you. So they wave and say hello. It’s nice. It’s nice to be liked, ‘cause growing up I didn’t particularly like myself. And if you don’t like yourself, I don’t think other people like you that much either.”

When he waves back, he turns on the performer for a moment--not so much a change as an exaggeration. He mugs and waves with boyish enthusiasm. Only when he relaxes do you see the 43-year-old face that with a tie and different hair could belong to a school principal or lawyer.

We get down to business, and he recounts the now-familiar biography. Addicted to food as a child, he peaked at 268 pounds while studying art in Italy. He reacted to an anonymous note--”Fat people die young”--by going anorexic and winding up in a hospital.

After working as an illustrator, cosmetics demonstrator and waiter, Simmons opened a salad bar and aerobics studio in Beverly Hills. The rest is fitness history.

Now he travels 300 days a year to more than 100 malls, performing for fees of $2,500 to $7,500.

The malls are his natural habitat. Most shoppers are women; his audience is mostly women--95% at first, now more like 65%.

“There (aren’t) too many guys in this field. I think a lot of guys thought aerobics were kind of sissy. But I don’t go out to make someone a jock. I’m not a jock.”

This is true. He shoots baskets two-handed. His stride is splay-footed and short. He is not hard and muscular. At 153 pounds, he looks as if he could still stand to lose a few. The only obvious evidence of exercise is his thighs, which bulge somewhat.

“Richard, I suppose some men are. . . .”

“Jealous,” he cracks. “You’re right!”

I try again: “I suppose some men are nervous about the anti-macho image you project.”

“This is just who I am. I was this way when I was a kid, you know. Some people love me and some people don’t understand me.” It doesn’t affect his life, he says.

“I try to be who I am and stand for what I believe in. I get a lot of respect for what I do, and I think that’s what counts more than a deep voice. But maybe I’ll reach puberty one day and it’ll change.”

“I’ve seen some of your videos. . . .”

“Did you do them or did you watch them?”

(Uh-oh, here it comes.) “I watched them.”

“Ohhhhhhh, I’m a failure, “ he wails and dissolves into mock sobbing.

“I knew a jab would come sooner or later.” I said it under my breath, but he heard.

“No,” he said, suddenly dead serious. “I’m not like that. You can’t force people. It just makes them angry. Whenever my mother said something about my eating, I ate more.”

“I’ve seen some of your videos, and what they recommend is very conventional. Most people already know this stuff, don’t they?”

“They know it from a doctor, but they (have) never heard it from a clown. That’s the big difference. They know I’m a compulsive eater and I would arm-wrestle Mother Teresa for an ice cream bar. They know that I face food every day. They don’t hear it from anybody else like they hear it from me. I gift-wrap it for them.”

And they respond, often with dogged loyalty. These veterans of the calorie wars “love him because he’s been there,” his secretary, Marilyn Lamas, told me. “They think he’s God.”

It’s just before show time and Simmons is heading down the mall at The City in Orange. It’s slow going because he stops to talk and kid with many people along the way.

An obese woman with two children in tow approaches him.

She smiles at him, and he lets fly a loud “How arrrrre you?”

“Fat,” she replies.

“Don’t say that,” he says, instantly serious. “Don’t ever say that.” She breaks down and weeps openly. He talks to her softly. You can’t hear what he’s saying. She nods between sobs. He whispers something to an aide and motions toward her. The aide takes down a name, address and phone number.

“Uh-oh, gotta fluff and run,” he shouts and jogs out of sight down the mall. The sound of rock music rises from somewhere down there, then is drowned in a din of shouts and screams. By the time I get there, Simmons and an immense woman are dancing to the music on stage. His groupies are down front and center in their Simmons T-shirts, but hundreds more surround the stage--perhaps 800 or 1,000 in all.

His show lasts 39 minutes, a well-received combination of silliness and dance-exercise. But he remains another 2 1/2 hours, signing autographs and talking with everyone in a waiting line that extends 100 yards. Almost all are women or girls. Many kid or gush. Some cry.

One of them, Bernadette Wells of Santa Ana, explains why: “He’s great. He’s sincere. He takes (an) interest in people.” She gestures toward her 16-year-old daughter, Tamara. “She wrote him a letter, and a week later he called her.”

Between autographs, Simmons looks up. “You didn’t get up on stage and dance with me, Steve,” he pouts. “I was very disappointed.”

I went home, had a pizza and took a nap. But I felt guilty about it.