Getting physical: in search of aerobics guru Richard Simmons

Having chanced on the 80s fitness star and pop culture icon, Emma Forrest was bereft when he disappeared. Where did he go, how would she cope without him?

For as long as I lived in Los Angeles, I was looking for the angels of its name. The mural of the Virgin Mary above the local ATM. The ongoing saga of the Silver Lake convent over which pop star Katy Perry was in a legal battle with nuns. There was the Apache psychic who called, “Archangel Michael, guide us!” from the back room of her husband’s boxing studio in the Valley. And the movie star who rescued the worst of the worst addicts – people in the industry whisper “He’s a saint!”

Though instantly recognisable for his halo of hair, Richard Simmons, who arrived in the city in the 1970s, emerged too strongly from the realm of camp to receive nomination to sainthood. Once he gave up dreams of acting, he’d make his name through his Sweatin’ to the Oldies aerobics videos, his place in 80s pop culture recreated by The White Lotus’s Murray Bartlett in the most recent season of Apple’s exercise dramedy, Physical. Through the decades Richard was so famous he appeared regularly on David Letterman and Howard Stern, and guested on shows from CHiPs to Arrested Development. It was easy for contestants to “become” him on RuPaul’s Drag Race because his signature upbeat energy was so extreme as to appear deranged. His short shorts and tights, combined with the way his female followers loved him as they had Liberace, made him mockable in TV sketch shows. But from the moment I met him, I believed he was a kind of saint.