For a child of the 1980s—like myself—the deaths of Ruth Westheimer and Richard Simmons over the past few days have been a reminder that we live in an era with a serious deficit in goofballs. They were true eccentrics. How else to describe a 4-foot-7 grandmother with a thick German accent doling out explicit sex advice with an impish giggle or an exuberant man in short shorts with a halo of curls who talked with his hands and implored everyone to sweat to the oldies?
Dr. Ruth and Richard Simmons were as brightly colorful as my Saturday-morning cartoons or my bowl of Trix. But looking back at them now as caricatures risks obscuring the subtle revolutions they helped bring about. Dr. Ruth pushed intimate conversations about sex into the open, discussing orgasms and premature ejaculation with Johnny Carson. Simmons took exercise and loving your body from the reserve of the chiseled and gave them to anyone unafraid to twist their hips with him along to the strains of “Great Balls of Fire.”
At the core of their celebrity was a total lack of self-consciousness. They broke taboos, not by judging society for its hang-ups, but by being game to say or do anything—even becoming the butt of the joke themselves. Did they know we were often laughing at them? Probably. But that seemed to be the point; that’s how they broke through.
On her first The Tonight Show appearance, in 1982, Dr. Ruth, dressed in a red pantsuit, her hair a ginger cloud floating around an elfin face, sat down with Carson. Her feet dangled above the floor. “One has to discuss the issue of self-gratification in a context,” she said, as the audience tittered. Just the way she’d pronounce the word arousal (Uh-rous-ul) could make you smile. She once caused David Letterman to walk out of his own studio by sweetly describing the story of a widow who had called in to her show looking for masturbation advice; Dr. Ruth had suggested employing the help of a cucumber. (Letterman, that collector of glorious weirdos, had Dr. Ruth and Simmons as regular guests on his show.)
[Read: The goddess of ‘good sex’]
Their unabashed messages of acceptance came across because they both seemed so absurdly authentic themselves. When Simmons showed up on television in the 1980s, he was like some strange ethereal creature in a glittery tank top. He stared straight into the camera and gave simple advice about what we would now call healthy living and positive self-image. As he once put it in an interview, “You must eat on a regular basis, and you must eat correct food. You gotta exercise every single day. And you have to like you. Here’s the main thing that gets people in trouble: You have to like who you are. You have to believe in yourself.” His “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” videos are cringey, for sure. But the people moving behind him are truly of all sizes—they could have just spilled out of a random subway car—and they seem happy and comfortable, long before “body positivity” was an accepted concept. (Also worth noting: Those VHS tapes and DVDs have sold tens of millions of copies.)
Perhaps the miseries they each survived growing up made them less concerned about being laughed at. Dr. Ruth was orphaned during the Holocaust. She came to Palestine after the war and joined the Haganah, the paramilitary group fighting for Jewish statehood, and was injured when a shell exploded near her legs. Eventually making her way to New York, she finally found her calling in her 50s, teaching what she called “sexual literacy,” first on her radio show, Sexually Speaking, and then seemingly everywhere. Simmons grew up in New Orleans a self-proclaimed “little fat kid” who weighed nearly 200 pounds at one point. He starved himself to try to lose weight and made himself extremely sick. Alienated from the then-dominant forms of exercise—and eschewing both the macho-ness of pumping iron and the perfectionism of most fitness studios—he realized he was drawn to aerobics and invented his own zany, proletarian version.
They arrived at their authenticity by realizing that they could not be anyone other than themselves. This is what made people chuckle: being in the presence of individuals who had stopped caring what others thought, and who genuinely wanted to pass along this spirit to their listeners. I’m glad I got to know them as a young boy.
Today our eccentrics—by which I mean those who push at the boundaries of the acceptable—are more likely to provoke for the sake of provoking, not to expand possibilities but usually out of petty resentment; they are most often trolls. In shorter supply are public figures who act earnestly and gleefully, who use their idiosyncrasies and status as odd outsiders to bring joy to others. Dr. Ruth and Richard Simmons had this quality. They were so kooky, so free in their passions and their readiness to be ridiculous in the face of self-seriousness, that they made the rest of us do what’s usually so hard: drop our guard.
