For about a year in the early eighties, I had…I guess you'd call it a nodding acquaintance with Richard Simmons. He was at the peak of his early fame, starring in The Richard Simmons Show — a show I don't believe I ever watched but its offices were right down the hall from the offices of a show I was writing. You always knew when Richard was in the building because you'd hear him singing or hear him yelling and we'd occasionally chat about nothing important.
He seemed to have a way of going instantly from being The Happiest Person in the World to The Maddest Person in the World and then on to The Saddest Person in the world without a lot of segue between them. One afternoon when all three put in an appearance was when he got word from a Daytime Emmys ceremony in New York that his show had won one. That made him The Happiest Person in the World.
Then someone told him that because he was not listed as a Producer on that show, he would not be getting an Emmy statuette to put on his mantle or in his trophy room or wherever he would display such a thing. That was when The Maddest Person in the World put in an appearance and even down the hall with my door shut, I could hear him.
(This, by the way, is why you'll often see stars of a TV show get a Producer credit even though they aren't doing any of the duties commonly associated with that title. Sometimes, it's because they wanted more money and it didn't cost anything to give them that credit instead. But sometimes, it's because they just want to be sure that if the show wins an Emmy, they get one.)
That day, Mr. Simmons became The Happiest Person in the World again when he heard that the official producer was giving the physical statuette to him. Then he became The Saddest Person in the World when he realized how he'd screamed at so many people and he began apologizing. He even apologized to the folks in our office for the ruckus he made.
I saw enough of him that year to like him when he was in Happy Person mode and to see that he was the real deal…genuinely passionate about helping people lose weight, genuinely moved to tears when someone thanked him for helping them save their own lives. He received a lot of fame and fortune along the way that but the impression I got was that he lived for those moments when someone would say to him, "Because of you, I'm alive today."
Furthermore, it was my sense that he put up with a lot of ridicule and not-always-good-natured abuse from TV and radio personalities because he felt it came with the job; that the good he was doing made it all worth it. So I liked the guy and I don't know what the hell happened to him the last decade or two when he fell off the face of the planet. I hope whatever it was, he was comforted by those "you saved my life" moments because I saw a few of them. The man deserves to be remembered for that more than for the clown act he sometimes performed to get his message out there.