Jack LaLanne Shocks The Crystal Cathedral
Around 1998, I found myself one Sunday morning in a church service at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. This was in the heyday of the Cathedral, and on this particular morning the joint was packed. I was sitting toward the front about three or four rows back stationed pretty near the royal throne of Rev. Robert Schuller, waiting for him to appear. At the prescribed moment, the choir, the orchestra, and the 16,000 pipe organ began with a rousing anthem. At its crescendo, Schuller himself emerged on cue and waltzed out from behind his throne decked in his signature gray-blue robe with his hands held high like Moses before the Amalekites. As all eyes were lifted up beholding the silver-skulled Schuller like he was a god, a friend who was with me leaned over and whispered in my ear, "The coronation of the king!" There was a striking similarity.
In any case, the services at the Crystal Cathedral always featured some celebrity interview with someone often out of Hollywood that Schuller brought in to inspire the throng with a I-can-do-anything-type of message to complement his quasi-Norman Vincent Bannana Peale, all-things-are-possible, gospel message. On this particular Sunday, it was Jack LaLanne, the aged, exercising, and musclebound midget who was seen on TV infomercials dropping bananas, berries, and oranges into a power juicer and pouring the mix down his fire hydrant throat. Anyway, the moment that Schuller finished introducing LaLanne, LaLanne took over. Now generally speaking, Schuller would conduct an interview with his guests, asking leading questions and letting the celeb respond. But on this day, Schuller knew better than to do this. LaLanne was not a man who was lost for words or who bored everybody to death. LaLanne was an entertainer and promotor as well as a Charles Atlas and Joe Weider rolled into one. So as soon as LaLanne was introduced, Schuller plopped back down on his throne, and LaLanne commandeered the next segment as if a towering, pompadour-coiffed, Bible-slamming tent evangelist had just taken the pulpit and was about to start the tried and true religious patter that would bring the souls down the sawdust trail. Now at the time, LaLanne was about 84, he said. I leaned over to see if I could get a closer look, and to me he looked every bit of 84. But he did not act like any 84 year old man I ever saw or knew. LaLanne was talking as fast as ad man Billy Mays selling a bucket or a tub of OxiClean. As he was ramping up his enthusiasm, he could not help himself from bringing out his bare 24 inch guns on his arms and flexing them like SuperMan standing on a world globe. The crowd of weakling geezers burst into applause. This was like a catalyst to LaLanne whenever he could inspire a pack of 80-100 year-olds who were on their last legs with this kind of Fountain of Youth stuff. He knew that if he could persuade these people who were confident they would not outlive their money into believing they could get out of bed at the crack of dawn, curl iron weights like Man Mountain Dean, and look good again in their wool, knee-length bathing suits, they would probably start buying his power juicer as the new, technological way of packing in the fiber instead of knocking off a nice ice-cold glass of Metamucil.
The first time I ever saw LaLanne was when I would come home from school for lunch in grade school in the 50's and watched The Jack LaLanne Show. Jack LaLanne was a sawed-off Lilliputian of 5'6" who was obsessed with diet and exercise. As I lay back on the sofa pounding in two pieces of bread wrapped around two pieces of cheese floating between two walls of mayonnaise and drinking a Coke, I would watch LaLanne jumping up and down like a madman on a bed of hot coals doing calisthenics on black and white TV in a short-sleeve jump suit that made him look like someone who changed oil at Jiffy Lube. As he performed these boring machinations, some guy who was out of sight in the studio was trying to make it all interesting by merrily playing along on a Wurlitzer and accenting each rep that LaLanne grunted out. It sounded a bit like the guy on the console at a baseball stadium who hammered on his organ in an ever-building staccato to get people to scream, "Charge." The idea here was that LaLanne believed there was a huge army of people at home huffing and puffing along with him and doing all this nonsense while he encouraged each one of them personally between each rep. In his mind's eye, he could see some skinny or fat Sad Sack imitating his every move as he groaned along in the belief that he would continue to do this for more than one day. Like a personal trainer at a gym, LaLanne coddled each self-deluded gymnast standing naked in front of his TV with crap like, "That's it. You can do it. Just 3 more to go. We're almost there. One-two. And ten. Now breathe. Yada, yada, yada." At the end of what looked like an absolutely exhausting routine that we kids used to do - and hate - at the YMCA gym classes when we would all collapse like accordions, LaLanne would tell everyone to relax and shake down those flabby, trembling muscles. Again, the guy on the Wurlitzer would whinnie the organ like Mr. Ed in sync with LaLanne as he shook his bulging, iron arms and legs - as if he was tired - before mounting up for the next round of pushups. All the while LaLanne was going on and on with his spiel about having been a sugar-eating, flour-pounding 90 pound weakling who had been miraculously transformed by having gone berserk with endless exercise. According to LaLanne, he had been eating an over abundance of white flour and sugar. This, in turn, had turned him into a juvenile delinquent who set his house on fire and attacked his brother with an axe. Some nutritionist named Paul Bragg inspired LaLanne to load up with boring fruits, raw vegetables, and fish breath for the rest of his life and forsake anything with the color white in it, like sugar and flour. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It all sounded very interesting, but most people thought LaLanne was a crack pot shoveling a truck load of crap, and no one I knew was going to do any of that where I lived. The health foods in Kentucky that people survived on were sugar, Wonder Bread (which helped to build strong bodies 12 ways), biscuits, butter, pork chops, flour gravy, and bacon grease. Before heading back to school for the afternoon drag, I took one last swig on the Coke and finished it off as the effervescent glucose bubbles washed over the bed of potato chips lying at the bottom of my stomach.
That was about the last I saw of LaLanne for many years. The next time I heard about him he was doing miraculous things that no one in his right mind who had a TV, a sofa, and a channel changer would even think about. Usually on his birthday, LaLanne was out in public doing some kind of knucklehead fitness gimmick. At age 40, he swam the length of the Golden Gate Bridge underwater with 140 pounds of equipment, including two air tanks. A world record. Like anyone was going to compete at this. At age 41, he swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco...handcuffed. At age 42, he set a world record of 1,033 pushups in 23 minutes on the TV show "You Asked For It." At age 45, he did 1,000 pushups and 1,000 chin-ups in 1 hour and 22 minutes. At age 70, he loaded up 70 boats with 70 people, attached them to his back, and dragged them for a mile and a half swim while hand-cuffed and shackled in chains. On this particular Sunday in the Crystal Cathedral, I think I heard him say that he got up at 4 am every day and lifted weights for four hours.
Anyway, like Billy Sunday, LaLanne went on and on about the benefits of exercise. He was inspiring, but the codgers in the Crystal Cathedral weren't going to do anything more than go home and go to bed at the end of the service. That is, until LaLanne spoke his next paragraph. When LaLanne started his first gym in 1936, most doctors scared the pants off of people against working out with weights. There was this view that it could cause a heart attack or ruin a man's sex drive. LaLanne had apparently dispelled this myth, and in the Crystal Cathedral on this particular Sunday, LaLanne was there to prove it. He was in the part of his speech about the advantages of lifting weights at 4 am, and I will never forget the comment he blurted out ON TV in this church service simply because I had never heard anyone in any church anywhere ever say anything like this before. LaLanne said, "...and I have SEX with my wife every night." Now THIS was possibility thinking. More like IMPOSSIBILITY THINKING. Everyone there immediately recognized that we now had a conflict in what Schuller usually said and what LaLanne had just now intoned. I don't know what it is, but there is something in the human brain - no matter what state of consciousness one is in, be it awake, asleep, a stupor, or inattentive - that when the word "sex" is spoken, it is as if someone rang a doorbell or took a hammer and slammed a chime or a gong. Instantly, everyone became ears. They just heard the word that stops time like no other and compels all nature to come to attention. Everyone had been rapt listening to LaLanne simply because of the nature of the man and his vigor. But when he said the magic word, it was as if Robert Schuller had swung down on a vine from the rafters of the Crystal Cathedral, landed on the marble pulpit, and was standing there completely naked. But LaLanne didn't just say the "S" word. He went another step further and defined it narrowly both in terms of a specific person and in terms of frequency. Several thousand people were now at that point that every preacher dreams of and works toward. People were waiting for the next golden nugget that dropped from LaLanne's muscled, juice-stained lips. If LaLanne wanted to say something significant, his next sentence was the time to say it. LaLanne did not disappoint. He delivered the big one. His next announcement was this: "There she is over there...Honey, would you stand up?" That statement was the same thing as if host Art Baker had just announced an unbelievable feat, looked at the audience through a 1951 wide screen 8" TV and said, "YOU ASKED FOR IT."
Now I have hung around churches all of my life. I know what goes on there. I know how people behave. I have been in liberal churches, and I have been in conservative churches. I have been in churches scores of times when the special speaker has said, "My wife is here with me today. Honey, would you stand up?" I have seen what people do on this occasion. Some may turn completely around to see if they can find her. Some may turn their heads slightly to see if there is any noticeable movement. If she isn't immediately visible, who cares? Some wouldn't look if she was wrestling with an anaconda. They aren't interested no matter what simply because it isn't relevant to what is supposed to be going on there. But on this day when LaLanne asked Honey to stand up, EVERYONE IN THE CRYSTAL CATHEDRAL not only turned his head but lifted himself from his chair and made a full body turn to lay eyes on this spectacle that LaLanne had just defined. In fact, heads snapped around like they were watching the lead car in the Indianapolis 500 cross the finish line at 200 mph. I was among those who were wondering if this feat that LaLanne had just described was even possible, and, if it was, who was this woman that this 84 year old workout marathon was having sex with every night of his weight-lifting life? However, before I turned around and got a gander at her, I had pretty much determined at that point that as soon as I could I was going to sign up for a membership at Gold's Gym. When I turned, Elaine LaLanne was rising from a seat about 10 rows back directly in front of Schuller's throne and LaLanne himself. I think LaLanne said she was 77 at the time. She had what looked like maroon colored hair. I looked at her, and then I turned to look at LaLanne. I looked at her again. I was trying to wrap my mind around this concept. So was everybody else. This was stretching credulity to the breaking point.
I don't remember anything else from that moment on. I don't know if LaLanne said another word. I don't know if he sat down or did jumping jacks while leaving the stage. I don't remember Schuller getting up or a single word he said. It could have been his most dramatic and inspiring sermon of his entire life, or he could have gotten undressed. I don't know. I don't remember anybody praying or singing or the service ending or anybody leaving at the end. I don't remember anything. As Schuller was presumably pounding away on his marble pulpit and beating on his you-can-do-the-unimaginable gospel, the only thing I could think of was Jack LaLanne and his maroon-haired 77 year old wife. Who knows? Maybe it WAS possible.
In any case, the services at the Crystal Cathedral always featured some celebrity interview with someone often out of Hollywood that Schuller brought in to inspire the throng with a I-can-do-anything-type of message to complement his quasi-Norman Vincent Bannana Peale, all-things-are-possible, gospel message. On this particular Sunday, it was Jack LaLanne, the aged, exercising, and musclebound midget who was seen on TV infomercials dropping bananas, berries, and oranges into a power juicer and pouring the mix down his fire hydrant throat. Anyway, the moment that Schuller finished introducing LaLanne, LaLanne took over. Now generally speaking, Schuller would conduct an interview with his guests, asking leading questions and letting the celeb respond. But on this day, Schuller knew better than to do this. LaLanne was not a man who was lost for words or who bored everybody to death. LaLanne was an entertainer and promotor as well as a Charles Atlas and Joe Weider rolled into one. So as soon as LaLanne was introduced, Schuller plopped back down on his throne, and LaLanne commandeered the next segment as if a towering, pompadour-coiffed, Bible-slamming tent evangelist had just taken the pulpit and was about to start the tried and true religious patter that would bring the souls down the sawdust trail. Now at the time, LaLanne was about 84, he said. I leaned over to see if I could get a closer look, and to me he looked every bit of 84. But he did not act like any 84 year old man I ever saw or knew. LaLanne was talking as fast as ad man Billy Mays selling a bucket or a tub of OxiClean. As he was ramping up his enthusiasm, he could not help himself from bringing out his bare 24 inch guns on his arms and flexing them like SuperMan standing on a world globe. The crowd of weakling geezers burst into applause. This was like a catalyst to LaLanne whenever he could inspire a pack of 80-100 year-olds who were on their last legs with this kind of Fountain of Youth stuff. He knew that if he could persuade these people who were confident they would not outlive their money into believing they could get out of bed at the crack of dawn, curl iron weights like Man Mountain Dean, and look good again in their wool, knee-length bathing suits, they would probably start buying his power juicer as the new, technological way of packing in the fiber instead of knocking off a nice ice-cold glass of Metamucil.
The first time I ever saw LaLanne was when I would come home from school for lunch in grade school in the 50's and watched The Jack LaLanne Show. Jack LaLanne was a sawed-off Lilliputian of 5'6" who was obsessed with diet and exercise. As I lay back on the sofa pounding in two pieces of bread wrapped around two pieces of cheese floating between two walls of mayonnaise and drinking a Coke, I would watch LaLanne jumping up and down like a madman on a bed of hot coals doing calisthenics on black and white TV in a short-sleeve jump suit that made him look like someone who changed oil at Jiffy Lube. As he performed these boring machinations, some guy who was out of sight in the studio was trying to make it all interesting by merrily playing along on a Wurlitzer and accenting each rep that LaLanne grunted out. It sounded a bit like the guy on the console at a baseball stadium who hammered on his organ in an ever-building staccato to get people to scream, "Charge." The idea here was that LaLanne believed there was a huge army of people at home huffing and puffing along with him and doing all this nonsense while he encouraged each one of them personally between each rep. In his mind's eye, he could see some skinny or fat Sad Sack imitating his every move as he groaned along in the belief that he would continue to do this for more than one day. Like a personal trainer at a gym, LaLanne coddled each self-deluded gymnast standing naked in front of his TV with crap like, "That's it. You can do it. Just 3 more to go. We're almost there. One-two. And ten. Now breathe. Yada, yada, yada." At the end of what looked like an absolutely exhausting routine that we kids used to do - and hate - at the YMCA gym classes when we would all collapse like accordions, LaLanne would tell everyone to relax and shake down those flabby, trembling muscles. Again, the guy on the Wurlitzer would whinnie the organ like Mr. Ed in sync with LaLanne as he shook his bulging, iron arms and legs - as if he was tired - before mounting up for the next round of pushups. All the while LaLanne was going on and on with his spiel about having been a sugar-eating, flour-pounding 90 pound weakling who had been miraculously transformed by having gone berserk with endless exercise. According to LaLanne, he had been eating an over abundance of white flour and sugar. This, in turn, had turned him into a juvenile delinquent who set his house on fire and attacked his brother with an axe. Some nutritionist named Paul Bragg inspired LaLanne to load up with boring fruits, raw vegetables, and fish breath for the rest of his life and forsake anything with the color white in it, like sugar and flour. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It all sounded very interesting, but most people thought LaLanne was a crack pot shoveling a truck load of crap, and no one I knew was going to do any of that where I lived. The health foods in Kentucky that people survived on were sugar, Wonder Bread (which helped to build strong bodies 12 ways), biscuits, butter, pork chops, flour gravy, and bacon grease. Before heading back to school for the afternoon drag, I took one last swig on the Coke and finished it off as the effervescent glucose bubbles washed over the bed of potato chips lying at the bottom of my stomach.
That was about the last I saw of LaLanne for many years. The next time I heard about him he was doing miraculous things that no one in his right mind who had a TV, a sofa, and a channel changer would even think about. Usually on his birthday, LaLanne was out in public doing some kind of knucklehead fitness gimmick. At age 40, he swam the length of the Golden Gate Bridge underwater with 140 pounds of equipment, including two air tanks. A world record. Like anyone was going to compete at this. At age 41, he swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco...handcuffed. At age 42, he set a world record of 1,033 pushups in 23 minutes on the TV show "You Asked For It." At age 45, he did 1,000 pushups and 1,000 chin-ups in 1 hour and 22 minutes. At age 70, he loaded up 70 boats with 70 people, attached them to his back, and dragged them for a mile and a half swim while hand-cuffed and shackled in chains. On this particular Sunday in the Crystal Cathedral, I think I heard him say that he got up at 4 am every day and lifted weights for four hours.
Anyway, like Billy Sunday, LaLanne went on and on about the benefits of exercise. He was inspiring, but the codgers in the Crystal Cathedral weren't going to do anything more than go home and go to bed at the end of the service. That is, until LaLanne spoke his next paragraph. When LaLanne started his first gym in 1936, most doctors scared the pants off of people against working out with weights. There was this view that it could cause a heart attack or ruin a man's sex drive. LaLanne had apparently dispelled this myth, and in the Crystal Cathedral on this particular Sunday, LaLanne was there to prove it. He was in the part of his speech about the advantages of lifting weights at 4 am, and I will never forget the comment he blurted out ON TV in this church service simply because I had never heard anyone in any church anywhere ever say anything like this before. LaLanne said, "...and I have SEX with my wife every night." Now THIS was possibility thinking. More like IMPOSSIBILITY THINKING. Everyone there immediately recognized that we now had a conflict in what Schuller usually said and what LaLanne had just now intoned. I don't know what it is, but there is something in the human brain - no matter what state of consciousness one is in, be it awake, asleep, a stupor, or inattentive - that when the word "sex" is spoken, it is as if someone rang a doorbell or took a hammer and slammed a chime or a gong. Instantly, everyone became ears. They just heard the word that stops time like no other and compels all nature to come to attention. Everyone had been rapt listening to LaLanne simply because of the nature of the man and his vigor. But when he said the magic word, it was as if Robert Schuller had swung down on a vine from the rafters of the Crystal Cathedral, landed on the marble pulpit, and was standing there completely naked. But LaLanne didn't just say the "S" word. He went another step further and defined it narrowly both in terms of a specific person and in terms of frequency. Several thousand people were now at that point that every preacher dreams of and works toward. People were waiting for the next golden nugget that dropped from LaLanne's muscled, juice-stained lips. If LaLanne wanted to say something significant, his next sentence was the time to say it. LaLanne did not disappoint. He delivered the big one. His next announcement was this: "There she is over there...Honey, would you stand up?" That statement was the same thing as if host Art Baker had just announced an unbelievable feat, looked at the audience through a 1951 wide screen 8" TV and said, "YOU ASKED FOR IT."
Now I have hung around churches all of my life. I know what goes on there. I know how people behave. I have been in liberal churches, and I have been in conservative churches. I have been in churches scores of times when the special speaker has said, "My wife is here with me today. Honey, would you stand up?" I have seen what people do on this occasion. Some may turn completely around to see if they can find her. Some may turn their heads slightly to see if there is any noticeable movement. If she isn't immediately visible, who cares? Some wouldn't look if she was wrestling with an anaconda. They aren't interested no matter what simply because it isn't relevant to what is supposed to be going on there. But on this day when LaLanne asked Honey to stand up, EVERYONE IN THE CRYSTAL CATHEDRAL not only turned his head but lifted himself from his chair and made a full body turn to lay eyes on this spectacle that LaLanne had just defined. In fact, heads snapped around like they were watching the lead car in the Indianapolis 500 cross the finish line at 200 mph. I was among those who were wondering if this feat that LaLanne had just described was even possible, and, if it was, who was this woman that this 84 year old workout marathon was having sex with every night of his weight-lifting life? However, before I turned around and got a gander at her, I had pretty much determined at that point that as soon as I could I was going to sign up for a membership at Gold's Gym. When I turned, Elaine LaLanne was rising from a seat about 10 rows back directly in front of Schuller's throne and LaLanne himself. I think LaLanne said she was 77 at the time. She had what looked like maroon colored hair. I looked at her, and then I turned to look at LaLanne. I looked at her again. I was trying to wrap my mind around this concept. So was everybody else. This was stretching credulity to the breaking point.
I don't remember anything else from that moment on. I don't know if LaLanne said another word. I don't know if he sat down or did jumping jacks while leaving the stage. I don't remember Schuller getting up or a single word he said. It could have been his most dramatic and inspiring sermon of his entire life, or he could have gotten undressed. I don't know. I don't remember anybody praying or singing or the service ending or anybody leaving at the end. I don't remember anything. As Schuller was presumably pounding away on his marble pulpit and beating on his you-can-do-the-unimaginable gospel, the only thing I could think of was Jack LaLanne and his maroon-haired 77 year old wife. Who knows? Maybe it WAS possible.