Ahead of the premiere of her ABC News special on the late Richard Simmons, Diane Sawyer appeared on The View to preview what audiences can expect from her deep dive into the life, disappearances, and, ultimately, death of the TV fitness icon.
Sawyer, who hosts The Mystery of Richard Simmons: A Diane Sawyer Special, airing Tuesday (May 12) night at 9/8c, revealed that, during her research on Simmons, she learned about his past as a bullied child and how that inspired everything he did to help others on their fitness journeys.
“He was a small kid. They didn’t have a lot of money, and he was bullied — by kids who had baseball bats, by the way, kids who were so hard on him, he didn’t want to go to the bathroom at the school because they could be waiting for him — because he loved show tunes,” Sawyer explained. “No question that the memory of that, and the memory of how he felt as an overweight little boy, and he was seriously overweight, trying so hard to lose that weight, was the nuclear fuel that stayed inside him the whole time.”
She also detailed what it was like to visit his home, which he died in after spending so much time in mysterious isolation.
“It was not at all what I expected. First of all, remember, it was 10 years in that home we didn’t see him. The door was closed. He didn’t come out after this long life at the top of the world. And I walked in, and I say it’s a kind of time capsule of innocence and childhood, and around you are fluffy clouds and angels and dolls, babies in their mother’s arms, crosses on the wall. And you understand it was the place that he could go, and maybe was to feel safe, to feel he had an inspiration of his own,” she explained. “He’d wake up every day, and the first thing he could see were these affirmations that were painted on the wall. ‘The only life worth living is a life lived for others,’ was one of them. And so each day, while he was giving other people reasons to believe in themselves, he needed something to believe in himself.”
She also revealed that, in the documentary special, she was able to speak to certain people who were close to Simmons at the time of his death, including his housekeeper, Teresa Reveles, and learned what really motivated him to stay out of the spotlight for so long.
“It’s one thing not to want to be seen. It’s one thing to think you don’t look like the Richard Simmons everybody remembered, but I think it’s another thing to be afraid, to go out to be afraid of, maybe, the old ridicule, the old wound,” Sawyer speculated. “I want everyone to watch it and see this arc from his childhood, this arc across his life, and maybe you can give a name to what it was that had happened to him.”
Sawyer also recounted the time she was asked by Simmons directly to cover his story, saying, “It’s how I got to be part of the story. I mean, I didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘I think I’m going to talk to Richard Simmons,’ but we had all tried to see what was going on in the house. And then at one point, he sees something on television, somebody is going to do a biopic of his life. And he goes, ‘Oh, no, you’re not going to do a satire of my mission, of what I believed in my whole heart?’ And he decided — he, first of all, sent out an email, and there was a flood of uninterrupted love for him. And he was so shocked that people still loved him, and they cared about him and remembered him. And he called me. First of all, I get vase upon vase upon phase upon vase full Richard Simmons flowers. Each had the same note: ‘I trust you. I trust you.’ And then we talked on the phone about what he wanted to do, and he was going to write lyrics. He was in the middle of writing lyrics feverishly for a Broadway play. When he decided he was coming back, he was coming back ever faster than ever. And I loved that he told me he was going to move all the seats out of the front of the theater so people could come down and dance, sweating to the oldies.”
Lastly, Sawyer gave a preview of the conclusion her research offered her about the circumstances of Simmons’ death in July 2024. “What we know is there was a serious fall and that he was immobilized, and he was lying on the floor for hours. And the medical examiner, the coroner, is very non-detailed about what really happened, but we do know that when you fall, and you have that kind of lingering immobility on a floor, that it can cause things like kidney damage, strokes. We don’t know exactly which one it was, but we do know that it was not a heart attack. It was not substance abuse. We know he was the same weight he always was, and that it was the result of this fall, and it just, again, leaves you wondering if he had not been afraid to go to the hospital… would everything be different today?”
The View, weekdays, 11a/10c, ABC
The Mystery of Richard Simmons: A Diane Sawyer Special, May 12, 9/8c, ABC
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