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Pilates guru dishes

By Benjamin Thomas Cunningham
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
June 18th, 2008 issue

The first star to walk through the door at Ron Fletcher’s Pilates Studio for Body Contrology in the tony Beverly Hills, California, was Candice Bergen (television’s Murphy Brown).

Bergen had heard the Pilates (similar to yoga) studio, opened in the early ’70s, could help her soothe her sore back.
Bergen brought actress Ali McGraw (Love Story) who invited Dyan Cannon (Heaven Can Wait) and other friends.
At least that’s how Fletcher remembers it. In Prague last week to promote his Pilates method, Fletcher, 87, has the scoop on the stars of the 1970s and ’80s, since so many of them took classes at his small studio on the first floor of the building at Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive.
Shirley Jones (Shirley Partridge on The Partridge Family) once put on Joan Van Ark’s prized Gloria Vanderbilt jeans by accident. Van Ark (scheming Valerie Ewing on Dallas) threw a fit when she went to put on her clothes after a leotard workout, Fletcher said, screaming “Where are my Vanderbilts?”
Jones, mortified, had a servant return them later that afternoon.
Another time, a reporter came to the studio to do a piece on Fletcher but quickly was sidetracked by all the famous people. McGraw was in class, and she got fed up with the reporter’s rubbernecking, Fletcher said.
“There’s only one star in the room,” McGraw reportedly said. “And you’re talking to him.”
Betsy Bloomingdale and Nancy Reagan showed up, curious about all the hoopla. In a superb bit of marketing, Fletcher says he blanketed Beverly Hills with flyers, but purposefully didn’t put his phone number on them, so people would have to stop by to see what was going on.
Pretty soon, he had producers and scriptwriters hanging around as well. Stephen Spielberg and Barbra Streisand were adherents.
Sex symbol Raquel Welch and writer and actress Joan Collins were the only two stars who dropped out once they started, Fletcher says. Welch wanted to keep her earrings on when everyone else had a simple black leotard and no makeup; Collins confided in him that she didn’t like being a “small frog in a big pond” among all the other stars, he says.
But Fletcher truly knew he had arrived among the Hollywood aristocracy when Judith Krantz (blockbuster author of Scruples, among other novels) wrote, “If you’re not in Ron Fletcher’s Rolodex, you may as well leave town.” He had 200 celebrities on a waiting list trying to take classes at that point.
All of the attention made Fletcher a star in his own right. He never thought twice about asking for certain conditions when someone called from the Johnny Carson-era Tonight Show asking if he would like to be a guest.
Fletcher says he asked the woman on the other end of the phone to assure him Carson would be serious about Pilates, rather than funny.
“She said, ‘Mr. Fletcher — we don’t tell Mr. Carson how to do the show,’ ” and hung up, Fletcher says, chuckling ruefully.
While he regretted losing the chance to be on with Carson, it appears Fletcher’s hard work traveling around the world to promote Pilates may be giving him the last laugh now. The evangelist appears to be a great advertisement for his movement, showing off his limber muscles with some basic movements in front of reporters in Prague.
And, because of his dedication, an estimated 12 million people now do Pilates around the world, stars and normal people alike.

Benjamin Thomas Cunningham can be reached at bcunningham@praguepost.com


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