the seemingly eternal master of health and fitness who first
popularized the idea that Americans should work out and eat right to
retain youthfulness and vigor, died Sunday. He was 96.
LaLanne died of respiratory failure due to pneumonia at his home in
Though for many years dismissed as merely a “muscle
man” — a notion fueled to some extent by his amazing feats of strength
— LaLanne was the spiritual father of the health movement that
blossomed into a national craze of weight rooms, exercise classes and
fancy sports clubs.
LaLanne opened what is commonly believed to be the nation’s first health club, in
in 1936. In the 1950s, he launched an early-morning televised exercise
program keyed to housewives. He designed many now-familiar exercise
machines, including leg extension machines and cable-pulley weights.
And he proposed the then-radical idea that women, the elderly and even
the disabled should work out to retain strength.
Full of exuberance and hyperbolic good cheer,
LaLanne saw himself as a combination of cheerleader, rescuer and
savior. And if his enthusiasm had a religious fervor to it, well, so be
it.
“Well it is. It is a religion with me,” he told What
Is Enlightenment, a magazine dedicated to awareness, in 1999. “It’s a
way of life. A religion is a way of life, isn’t it?”
“
hereafter. I’m for the here and now,” he told the Los Angeles Times
when he was almost 92, employing his usual rapid-fire patter.
Another time, he explained, “The crusade is never
off my mind — the exercise I do, the food I eat, the thought I think —
all this and how I can help make my profession better-respected. To me,
this one thing — physical culture and nutrition — is the salvation of
America.”
When he started, he knew that most people viewed him
as a charlatan. That’s when he decided to do the stunts that made him
famous.
“I had to get people believing in me,” he said.
His first feat was in 1954, when he was 40 and wanted to prove he wasn’t “over the hill.” He swam the length of the
Other feats during his 40s: swimming from Alcatraz to
wearing handcuffs; swimming the Golden Gate Channel while towing a
2,500-pound cabin cruiser; pulling a paddleboard 30 miles from the
Farallon islands to the
At age 60, he upped the ante by swimming from Alcatraz to
The next year, he did a similar feat underwater. And at age 70, he towed 70 boats with 70 people from the
Why attempt such feats?
“I care more than you cannot believe how much I
care! I want to help somebody!” LaLanne explained. “Jesus, when he was
on Earth, he was out there helping people, right? Why did he perform
those miracles? To call attention to his profession. Why do you think I
do these incredible feats? To call attention to my profession!”
Well into his late 80s, LaLanne continued his
personal fitness routine of two hours a day — one hour of weight
training and another hour exercising in the pool — beginning at 5 or
5:30 in the morning (a concession to his age; in earlier days, he
started at
No one — not even
“Nobody could,” Schwarzenegger told the Times. “No one even wanted to try.”
to French immigrant parents; his father worked at the telephone company
and was a dance instructor and his mother, who was a maid, was a
Seventh-day Adventist, a religion that advocates “eight keys” to good
health, including nutrition and exercise.
LaLanne grew up in
LaLanne often told the story of how his mother
spoiled him, giving him sweets for rewards. By the time he reached
adolescence he had become a “sugarholic” with a violent temper and
suicidal thoughts.
But that was only the beginning: He was failing in
school; his stomach was upset; he wore glasses; he had terrible
headaches; he was weak and skinny; he had pimples and boils.
“I was demented! I was psychotic! It was like a horror movie!” LaLanne said of this time of his life.
When he was 15, his distressed mother finally dragged him to a lecture on healthful living being given by nutritionist
“We were a little late getting there and there were
no seats available so we started to leave,” LaLanne told What Is
Enlightenment magazine’s
lecturer saw us and said, ‘Lady with the boy, we don’t turn anybody
away! Ushers, bring two seats and put them up on the stage!’ “
At some point, Bragg asked the young LaLanne what he
had eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and LaLanne told him:
“Cakes, pies, ice cream!”
“He said, ‘Jack, you are a walking garbage can,’ ” LaLanne said.
But Bragg offered salvation to LaLanne: He could be
“born again” and be the healthful and strong person he wanted to be —
if he changed his ways.
“That’s what I wanted! I wanted to be an athlete, I
wanted the girls to like me, and I wanted to be able to get good grades
in school, and this man said I could do all that,” LaLanne said.
LaLanne took Bragg’s message fully to heart. And, by
his own testimony and that of everyone around him, he never had cake,
pie, ice cream or any sweet from that day forward, nor did he drink a
single cup of coffee or tea.
He also started working out with a passion, and was
a star athlete for the rest of his high school years. All his maladies
disappeared; he even stopped wearing glasses.
“I was a whole new human being,” he said of this
transformation. “I liked people, they liked me. It was like an
exorcism, kicking the devil outta me!”
After graduation from high school, LaLanne started
his own business, selling his mother’s healthful bread and cookies. He
also set up a rudimentary gym and started training police and
firefighters — “the fat and skinny ones who couldn’t pass their
physicals” — in exercise and weight-lifting.
“When I first started out, I was considered a crackpot,” he said. “The doctors used to say, ‘Don’t go to that
you’ll get hemorrhoids, you won’t get an erection, you women will look
like men, you athletes will get muscle-bound’ — this is what I had to
go through.”
In 1936, he opened his first real gym —
But business was slow. LaLanne went to a local high
school and picked out the skinniest and the fattest kids, offering
(with their parents’ permission) to “turn their lives around” the way
his had been.
Word of his success spread, and business was good
enough for him to open other gyms. In 1952, he went on TV but because
he could only afford time in the early mornings, he found his audience
was mostly young children. So he got a dog — Happy — to appeal to the
kids, who were encouraged to go wake up their mommies for a workout.
The show eventually got syndicated nationwide, and ran for 34 years.
LaLanne met his wife, Elaine, whom he called LaLa,
in 1950 on the set of a local TV show, where she booked talent. She was
initially unimpressed by the 5-foot-6 1/2-inch LaLanne — she ate a
doughnut and blew cigarette smoke in his face. But she took a closer
look at him when a friend agreed to go out on a date with him. They
were married in 1959, and she became an integral part of his business
operations.
LaLanne’s business interests would grow to include a string of gyms across
By the time LaLanne was in his late 80s, however,
the business consisted mostly of juicers that he advertised on
infomercials and his lectures.
LaLanne also knew when to back off. An interviewer
described him as “intensely unfussy for being such a fanatic.” And
LaLanne once said that one of his best friends was a man who “weighs
about 300 pounds, drinks a quart of booze a day and smokes like a
fiend. I’ll light someone’s cigarette for them. This bull about
changing people — you never change people! Accept ’em, accept ’em,
accept ’em!”
For himself, he seemed to live by a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I philosophy that required him to be hyper-vigilant.
“With my personality,” he said, “I could be a
runaway, out with a different woman every night, drunk every night,
eating and doing things that — well, you know, you’ve got it in you,
we’ve all got it in us. But that’s why you’ve got to take control!”
He had his pleasures — beautiful cars, singing, fine
wine and a long and happy marriage that he said was passionate after
many decades
He felt proud every time he fulfilled his promise to
himself to never eat between meals or not to eat sweets. While he was
the first to agree that his liquid meals — the least repulsive
breakfast was carrot juice, celery juice, some fruit, egg whites and
soybean — tasted pretty awful, he didn’t mind. And of his two-hour
daily workouts at his home gym, which he called his “cathedral,” he
said: “I want to see how long I can keep this up. It’s kind of a macho
thing, using me as an example.”
LaLanne retained a high level of energy well into
what, for the rest of us, would be dotage. But his feats tapered off
after his 70th birthday. Although he talked of swimming underwater to
for his 80th birthday, his wife threatened to divorce him if he did.
“Let him rest on his laurels,” she said. He vowed to do the swim for
his 90th birthday in 2004, but when the birthday rolled around, he told
the San Jose Mercury News that he planned only to “tow my wife across
the bathtub.” His plans for his 100th were even tamer: “I’d like to
have the biggest group I’ve ever had watching me and lecture to them.”
LaLanne was given a star on
Walk of Fame in 2002, long after he had attained the respect he long
craved. But his biggest thrill was to see what he had been preaching
and advocating for over 50 years ago was being taken seriously.
“Back then I was a crackpot, today I am an authority,” he said in 1998.
Besides his wife, who resides in
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