“You’re just a vessel,” Dan Taberski told me, only half joking. “You’re the conduit through which I’m trying to reach Richard Simmons. And I hope that it works.”
Taberski, a former producer on the Daily Show, got on the phone with me to chat about Missing Richard Simmons, his sleeper hit podcast that’s currently topping the iTunes charts (the third episode of a planned six just went live today). As the title suggests, the project is about Taberski’s quest for Simmons, the fitness guru and body positivity evangelist who went from remarkably accessible for a celebrity—well into his 60s, he was still teaching regularly at his Los Angeles workout studio Slimmons—to fully reclusive. On February 15, 2014, Simmons didn’t show up for class, abruptly cut off contact with his friends and correspondents (he had a therapist-like phone relationship with dozens of people), and vanished almost completely from public life.
For Taberski, Simmons’s disappearance was at least a little bit personal. “In 2012 I was living in Los Angeles and I heard that Richard was still teaching,” he told me. “You could still take his class in Beverly Hills for 12 bucks. I couldn’t believe it.” Taberski did just that, and was so floored by the experience that he approached Simmons about doing a documentary. “He said no, but he said it with a wink,” Taberski remembered. “I said, alright, I’ll keep coming.” The two men developed a friendship. “And then, all of a sudden, Richard stopped returning my calls. I realized he had stopped returning everyone’s calls.”
Missing Richard Simmons isn’t the first investigation into its subject’s whereabouts. In 2015, the police stopped by Simmons’s Hollywood Hills mansion on a tip alleging elder abuse. No arrests were made. Last spring, the New York Daily News published an investigative piece that relied heavily on interviews with Mauro Oliveira, Simmons’s masseur and one-time assistant, who alleged that his former boss’s housekeeper of three decades, Teresa Reveles, was holding Simmons captive with the help of some sort of black magic (Oliveira even self-published an e-book in which he spun that story as a thinly veiled work of speculative fiction). And soon thereafter, Simmons resurfaced momentarily to dispel the rumors in a phone call with Today’s Savannah Guthrie. “No one is holding me in my house as a hostage,” Simmons insisted, claiming, essentially, that he was just taking some long-postponed time to himself. “I do what I want to do, as I’ve always done. So People should just sort of believe what I have to say. Because I’m Richard Simmons.” And then: “All the people that are worrying about me, I want to tell them that I love them with my whole heart and soul, and not to worry, Richard’s fine. You haven’t seen the last of me. I’ll come back and I’ll come back strong.”
At the end of the segment, the panel of hosts clucked over Simmons’s well-being. “Let’s take him at his word,” concluded Matt Lauer. Taberski, though, who was already four months into production at that point, felt inclined to do just the opposite. “It raised more questions than it answered,” he told me. “Not just for me. For a lot of people.”
His podcast also raises some provocative and uncomfortable questions: How hard should you look for someone who says he doesn’t want to be found? Does a public figure owe anything to the public? What’s the line between compassionate inquiry and intrusive exposé? (Wired, for example, called the project at once “gripping,” “icky,” and “a little tawdry.”) Taberski and I chatted more about the ethics of his endeavor, how this podcast fits into the Serial paradigm (comparisons have been made), and why Richard Simmons is so much more than an exercise guru.
Before you went to one of his classes, did Richard Simmons play a big role in your life?
I’ve never had a weight problem. I really just liked him because he was an original. My first memory of him: I was very young. He was dressed like an angel with a white robe, big fluffy wings, a tinsel halo. He was on roller skates rolling down the aisle of a grocery store, to keep some woman from making a bad food decision. It was the opening of his talk show in the early ’80s. I thought he was great: interesting, weird, emotive, just fascinating. And he turned out to be all that, and so much more complicated.
Why turn this into a podcast instead of a documentary?
I had decided to start shooting it as a documentary project, shooting it myself. I was just too curious and there were too many people who were worried about him. I met with the people at First Look Media who produced Spotlight, Citizenfour. They said, oh, this is a podcast. It made total sense. I didn’t want it to be about me. A podcast solves that problem: You need somebody to narrate, which allowed my perspective to be in there, while still keeping the focus on him. And without video it’s much less obtrusive. People feel more comfortable talking to a small microphone than a big old camera. That was helpful because everybody I talked to is a friend or former colleague of Richard’s. They’re all very protective of him still. There was a lot of skepticism. I had to convince people that my motives were good.
On the show, you compare Richard to a therapist. Why is he so much more than just a workout guru?
Oh my gosh, the working-out part is such a small part of it. Richard would wake up at four in the morning. He would email people. He would call 30, 40, 50 people a day, for free. He did that for years. These people who were alone and isolated. He was helping people one by one, not just to exercise, but to really work out how they dealt with food, how they felt about themselves, self-image, self-worth, all these really intense issues that are behind why someone might have a weight problem.
[Aerobics] was for hard bodies who just wanted to get a little bit harder. Richard saw way beyond that, saw that there were people who would never set foot in a Jane Fonda class because they didn’t feel comfortable enough with their bodies.
I’m so glad to hopefully remind people of that, and to recontextualize him. He’s a much more three-dimensional person than the guy in short shorts jumping up and down and making people laugh. People like him become punch lines. Their characters flatten out into what fits on a chyron. Exercise Guru. But to go back and dig into just how complicated and intense and devoted the work he was doing was? It’s important that he knows that’s remembered. I want him to know that we know and respect him for all that he’s done.
I think one of the interesting questions at the heart of this podcast is: Is it right to look for someone who might not want to be found? How’d you come to terms with that?
So here’s how I would answer that: Richard Simmons spent the past four decades reaching out to people who were isolated and alone, showing them kindness. And I like to think that it’s our turn to return the favor. And that’s this project. I spent months getting his friends to do this, and understand that our motives are good. I talked to dozens of people who love him and have worked with him for years. They want him to know he’s loved and respected and cared for. And this is a great way of doing that.
Were you worried that you would put out the first episode and Richard would call and say, please stop doing this?
I know Richard. I know his publicist, his manager. I reached out early on. I was like, You guys need to tell me if this is something really grim, if he’s sick, if there’s something I need to know so I just drop it. They still insist: No he’s fine, he just doesn’t want to do it anymore. I was concerned, and I feel confident that I gave them the opportunity to tell me. What they say Richard is doing doesn’t square with the realities. That I think worries people. It worries me. He’s not just retired, he cut everybody off, in a day. It’s shocking and scary, and there still isn’t an answer. And people want to know that he’s okay.
In the second episode you use the rhetoric of the criminal justice system: “There’s a break in the case, if you can call it a case. . . . Let’s say a break in the situation.” That made me think of course about cold case podcasts like Serial. Do you think of what you’re doing as similar?
We’re investigating. It certainly has a similar vibe at times. I’m not an investigative journalist. I’d just as soon there wasn’t a mystery. I’d just as soon talk for six episodes about how fucking amazing Richard Simmons is. You have no idea how incredibly strange and complicated and wonderful he is. The mystery just compounds that. I would be doing it without the mystery. That being said, I fricking loved Serial. I will take comparisons to that anyday. But I don’t want to intimate that I think there’s necessarily something criminal going on here.
Lately all I listen to are politics podcasts. Now I’m listening to a podcast about Richard Simmons. Do you hope to offer listeners a respite?
I don’t know that people will necessarily use it as an escape from politics, though I will take it for sure. There were points where I thought: nobody’s going to give a flying fuck about me searching for Richard Simmons when the world is coming to an end, or it very often feels that way. But I also think they’re not unrelated. There’s a thing by Charles Blow in The New York Times about how this administration, politics in general right now, is very often completely devoid of any real sense of human compassion. Nobody’s thinking about all the lying and how it affects real people. No matter what you think of all the screaming and the wackiness, Richard Simmons is a superhero, and his super power is empathy. You just don’t see that much of it anymore. To celebrate it is, I think, awesome. And I’m glad people are responding to it.
With a podcast like Serial, there was a lot of conversation about choices the producers made to keep listeners in the dark about major plot twists for the benefit of pacing and entertainment value. Are you right now harboring secrets about Richard Simmons’s life that you won’t reveal? How do you weigh the demands of good storytelling against the right of people to know information when it becomes available?
I’m trying to tell a good story, and that’s important. But just to be clear: I don’t think everybody has the right to know everything about what’s going on with Richard Simmons. There are things that I don’t talk about because I don't think it’s anybody’s business. This is not an exposé. I’m not looking to lay bare the personal, private life of somebody that I love and respect. That being said, this story and the investigation, it takes a lot of crazy turns, things I did not expect. This thing is not done. There is no ending. We are still trying to make contact with Richard Simmons. I’m still trying to get him to talk to me. It’s great that people are listening to the podcast, it’s amazing. But for me, I’m doing this because I want to create a groundswell for Richard. I want Richard to see this. I want to make contact with him.
This interview has been condensed and edited.