In the beginning, he wore a T-shirt and your standard pair of pants to train. He liked the feeling he got from stressing the weave. Then he had the idea to display himself in fitted jumpsuits—a uniform of self-improvement—so he went to the Oakland Pants Factory. He gave them sketches, an array of color choices. Blues and grays mostly. An African American woman took his measurements with a cloth tape, rolling around him on a squeaky metal chair. In those days wool was the only fabric that would stretch, and so they made the jumpsuits out of that, milled as thin as the material would allow. Jack liked them shiny, he told her, peacocking, and sleeveless to show his rolling arms, and tapered at the waist.
Jack wore them so tight you could see what he ate for breakfast.
A local health store paid Jack to create a local access show for KGO-TV. He taught people about the power of diet, designing workouts for every muscle, from toe to tongue. Six years later, the show went national. People ate breakfast to images of Jack bouncing on his tiptoes. They ran in front of their television, aping what they saw, bending at the waist and rotating their arms in bird-like windmills. As things picked up steam, certain words and phrases entered the American lexicon. Jumping jack, squat thrust, leg lift.
His jumpsuits had a tone-on-tone belt that cinched at the waist.
In his prime, Jack was a square-jawed hourglass of a man, his ink-black shag cut into a classic Italian wave on his head. Frankie Valli, for example. To most people in the early years he existed only in black and white, an ethnic fireplug pointing at anatomy charts, explaining what went on inside the human body. See, he seemed to say, we’re not just animals. We’re architecture. Bones and sinew and ligament as a foundation for a rolling musculature. Jack showed us that everything about the human anatomy was connected and could be used in glorious tandem.
To smile was to use an entire system of muscles, powered by joy.
One day he showed Americans how to get their faces “ath-u-letic looking,” opening and closing his mouth comically wide, to the take-me-out-to-the-ball-game lilt of a sports organ.
Then, in the 1970s, Jack went full color, bounding onto a wood-paneled set in shiny blues and purples. He became a kind of talk-show host, interviewing bodybuilders about diet and lifestyle. It was the era of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Vietnam had been lost, American men had walked on the moon, and Nixon seemed poised to resign in disgrace. You tuned in because you liked his boundless energy. You tuned in because you were tired of looking down and seeing your own stomach. You tuned in to get your heart rate moving and turn your life around.
“Now, direct from Hollywood,” boomed the announcer, “here’s your personal health and fitness instructor, Jack LaLanne.”
For thirty minutes what you got was can do gumption. You got a corporate-sponsored attitude adjustment. You got mountains to climb, inspiration. You got skills.
“Isn’t it better to be happy with a problem,” he said, “than to be miserable with it?”
Don’t wallow, Jack told a nation stumbling under recession. When life gets hard, you need to get harder.
This was during Jack’s inspirational phase, when he realized that what people needed was not just a muscular regimen, but a better way of looking at the world. The network would throw back from commercials and there he’d be, the jumping jack man, sitting backward on a metal chair, laying down the science.
“You know,” he’d say, “there are so many slaves in this country. Are you a slave? You’re probably saying, Jack, how can you be a slave in this wonderful free country of America? I don’t mean a slave in the idea that you’re thinking of it. I’m talking about you’re a slave when you can’t do the things you want when you want to do them. Because you are a slave, just like the slaves of old who were captured and put in chains. They were shackled, you know, and not allowed to go anyplace.”
Jack looked directly into the lens.
“You’re a slave just about as much as that.”
And at this point he leaned forward and pointed right at the camera, enunciating each syllable.
“You’re a slave to your own body.”
The mind, said Jack, remains active until the day you die, but it is a slave to the body—bodies that have become so lazy all they want to do is sit. The dawn of the couch potato. And you’ve allowed it to be that way.
“Instead of you ruling your body,” he said, “your body is ruling you.”
It was the dawn of the television age, and already the lethargy had set in, that flicker-glow hypnotism. The idiot box. And here was Jack speaking truth to power, trying to break you from the smothering shackles of the modern world.
This is not complicated shit, he told you with his eyes, the movement of his body seeming to answer every question he asked. No French philosopher living or dead could convince Jack LaLanne that the problems of man were existential. It was a matter of will, of perseverance, of mind over matter. Where Sartre saw ennui, Jack saw energy. Where Camus saw pointlessness and death, Jack saw the board-breaking power of repetition.
Jack rose to power in the era of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, the age of John Wayne. America was the go-getter nation, as far as he was concerned. There was no challenge too great, no obstacle too big.
Jack told us that America was the nation of the future, that we were all on the verge of traveling to a science-fiction nirvana in gleaming rocket ships.
Except, as far as Jack was concerned, we should be running there.
Chapter 30
Imago