Chapter 1ReducePat: I've been around physical ed for years.
Mike: Physical Ed? Who's he?
-Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in
Pat and Mike, 1952
America, manpower conscious, is almost oblivious
of the potential of its neglected womanpower.
-
Eugene Register-Guard, 1962
New Yorkers who spotted Bonnie Prudden striding through midtown Manhattan in August 1957 couldn't have known they were glimpsing the future. With the space race revving up and new technological marvels emerging every day-color TV! Teflon pans!-who would give serious consideration to a petite forty-something woman going about her day in a stretchy jumpsuit? She was an anomaly, a head-scratcher. They couldn't have known that someday their city would be filled with Bonnies, sheathed in workout clothes that allowed them to move as they pleased.
But that summer, after weekly appearances on NBC's
Home show, she knew she was onto something. The morning show was hosted by Arlene Francis and Hugh Downs, and featured her, America's leading fitness expert, alongside some of the biggest names of the day-Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis,
Dear Abby's Abigail Van Buren. "We are raising a nation of children with muscles of custard," Bonnie told the hosts. She had a gift for dramatic exaggeration that annoyed her critics. The whole country was falling apart, she said.
Now the editors at
Sports Illustrated seemed to agree, asking her to appear on the cover of their August 5 issue as both a model of physical fitness and its number one champion. So what if they'd be featuring her during the languid final stretch of summer? A cover was a cover.
It would be the latest in a string of platforms to promote her controversial message: Everyone should exercise.
Everyone. Every day. Even the mostly male readers of a magazine devoted largely to golf and baseball highlights-who thumbed through issues while smoking cigarettes and sipping scotch, or grabbing 25-cent burgers at a coffee shop counter on a lunch break, only to commute via train or bus or car home, where they would plop into an easy chair and watch a few hours of television. Even their girlfriends and wives, who were raised to believe ladies should never sweat.
(Horses sweat, men perspire, but ladies merely glow, went the old adage.)
For the cover, shot at her "fitness institute" in the suburb of White Plains-a predecessor to the kind of gyms that would become a fixture in this country decades later-Bonnie slipped into her trademark workout uniform, a one-piece wool outfit of her own design called a "leotite," covered in a jaunty star pattern.
It was a novel concept, both the outfit and the notion that a woman would prioritize comfort and flexibility in her wardrobe. After all, it was a moment when most of the decade's fashions were shaped by girdles and petticoats. Once, when Bonnie was late to an appointment, she ran through the streets of Manhattan in one of her leotites covered only by a thin white medical coat. A well-meaning police officer stopped her-Was she okay? he wanted to know. It was highly unusual for a woman to be running in public, especially one so scantily clad.
Sports Illustrated assigned staff photographer Richard Meek, whose previous credits included baseball great Ted Williams and hockey legend Gordie Howe, to her cover shoot. Bonnie styled her close-cropped brown curls into a no-fuss 'doo and wore just a smidge of makeup. Her leotite advertised that her arms, legs, stomach-every inch of her 5-foot-3-inch frame-were harder than those of most women her age (or any age). Her boundless energy belied her forty-three years, the challenges of raising two teen daughters, her chronic loneliness.
For the winning photo, Bonnie got down on the ground, shot a toned leg high into the air, and smiled.
Click! The move was so familiar to her, but so exotic to most Americans. Inside the magazine, the reading line accompanying her feature would offer this mantra:
Bonnie Prudden says: You are NOT too young, too old, too full of aches, too fat, too thin, too far gone, too lazy, too flabby, too anything to have fun keeping fit. She would devote the next few pages attempting to convince a skeptical nation.
"The secret is simple," she told readers. You "substitute activity for inactivity as much as you can during the course of a normal day and take a few minutes of each day to do some easy exercises." It was straightforward enough. "For more fun and best results do the exercises to music," she added. "Use Leroy Anderson's 'Sleigh Ride' or 'China Doll.'" Women should "never wear girdles while exercising," she warned, "but should wear a brassiere."
She demonstrated four floor exercises to get readers started, the first in a pictorial column that would run in more than forty issues of the magazine.
The secret may have been simple, but it was a tough sell in postwar America. What would daily exercise look like for Americans in the late fifties? For men, it would mean reconsidering the three-martini lunch. For women, it would mean something more profound: taking time out of their day to care for themselves, when nearly every social institution stressed that a woman's sole purpose in life was to care for others.
Unless exercise could be sold as a wifely duty-and a path to winning the Cold War.
***
Americans had long prided themselves on being a hardy people. They were puritans and pioneers and immigrants, tough and industrious. They were can-do workers and strivers. But by the 1950s, they were moving less than ever before, and the lack of activity was taking a toll. Politicians and pundits questioned whether the nation was becoming soft.
Gone were the days when Americans' survival depended on physical competence. As the twentieth century progressed, the growing middle class embraced what it called "our modern way of life." It was a lifestyle defined by ease and abundance, which felt like a balm after the Great Depression and World War II. It prized comfort, convenience, efficiency. It also made Americans' bodies "largely irrelevant," writes historian Shelly McKenzie in
Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America.The rise of the suburbs transformed nearly every aspect of middle-class life, as a single-family home with a yard in a well-groomed neighborhood became the new American dream. From 1950 to 1960, the country's suburban population exploded from 21 million to 37 million. But over time, those living in the new sprawl succumbed to what Bonnie Prudden liked to call "the tyranny of the wheel." Walking was replaced by driving, as cars were now required to get around. Kids who in previous generations had been active since they could scoot were now pushed in strollers, then shuttled to school in buses. (No more walking a mile, uphill both ways, in the snow, to class.) Children also had fewer open spaces for playing and fewer trees for climbing, as land was paved into parking lots. In many towns sidewalks were narrowed or eliminated completely.
Suburban homes themselves were built and furnished to minimize physical exertion. The decade's popular one-story ranch houses eliminated the need to climb stairs. Air-conditioning units and central heating and new push-button appliances required only the touch of a finger. By 1960, three-quarters of families owned cars and washing machines, and 90 percent owned a television, as sitting in front of the small screen became a favorite American pastime.
Women still did plenty of housework, of course-a woman's work truly was never done-but as anyone who has ever cleaned a home knows, the physical labor it requires doesn't always benefit the body. Bonnie Prudden warned as much. "Housework won't raise a bosom to where it belongs or keep it there," she told a reporter in 1956. "Housework is no good for all-round muscular fitness."
Then there was the matter of the dinner table. Americans were eating more, and they were eating
worse. In the fifties, the "golden age of food processing," the food industry churned out mass quantities of products rich in sugar, salt, fat, and preservatives. The decade saw the birth of McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Dunkin' Donuts. Swanson introduced the "TV dinner" to the masses in 1954, after the company found itself with a surplus of 260 tons of turkey after Thanksgiving, and it sold 10 million in the first year. Supermarkets expanded to house the vast quantities of new, modern cuisine. As Cold War fears grew, the government drilled home the message that democracy was defined by abundance-and communism by scarcity-which turned purchasing into a patriotic act. Madison Avenue admen and -women reinforced these values by linking factory-made food with positive emotions: family, celebration, and love.
When Americans went to work, they sat some more, as desk jobs surged. In many professions, drinking on the job was accepted or encouraged, and considered a necessary lubricant to woo clients and conduct daily business. (The Time & Life Building that housed
Sports Illustrated offered staff a dimly lit room where employees could lie down during the day if they overdid it at lunch.) Factory jobs didn't involve as much sitting or imbibing, but they did become more automated.
To top it all off, more Americans were smoking more cigarettes, too. Smoking had gradually increased throughout the century largely thanks to Hollywood, which portrayed cigarettes as sexy, sophisticated, and glamorous. By 1964, when the U.S. Surgeon General first revealed cigarettes could cause lung and laryngeal cancers, 40 percent of adults smoked-not to mention hordes of teen baby boomers.
The "modern way of life" was starting to impact American bodies. While the rise of vaccines and antibiotics had dramatically lowered rates of contagious and infectious diseases, the country now saw a surge in disease borne out of abundance. More Americans began to suffer from hypertension, diabetes, gallbladder disease, and heart attacks. Meanwhile, military generals reported that new recruits were weak, raising fears about America's ability to defend itself. During World War I, the military turned down 37 percent of potential draftees for being physically unfit; by the Korean War, it rejected 52 percent. As Bonnie Prudden was discovering through her own research, even the country's kids had grown weaker and less limber.
But few Americans saw exercise as the solution.
Mid-century Americans loathed exercise. They considered it painfully boring, a silly way to spend one's precious leisure time. "The mere mention of formal exercise is enough to bring a shudder to the average American spine, weak as it is alleged to be at present," Robert H. Boyle wrote in
Sports Illustrated in 1955. Besides, few medical experts were telling people they
should exercise. Doctors were more concerned about the dangers of over-exertion than under-exertion, believing strenuous exercise could lead to heart attacks in men and reproductive problems in women. "Whenever I get the urge to exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes," University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins famously quipped, and in the 1950s, he spoke for the mainstream.
Mid-century Americans with the time and means played sports and games, to be sure-tennis and golf, sailing and skiing. Young men played baseball, basketball, and football; young women rode horses, danced, or played volleyball or field hockey or half-court basketball in knee-length skirts. Some people swam, if they had access to a pool. Americans might accidentally break a sweat dancing the jitterbug or hula-hooping. And a few "kept fit" by doing calisthenics-a nineteenth-century term that comes from the Greek for beautiful strength-recognizing that stretching and moving their bodies made them feel good. But for most, exercise was the by-product of sport, not an activity unto itself. Few saw the point of exercising to maintain one's health or quality of life. There was no such thing as training, unless you were an athlete preparing for competition.
American popular culture treated those who did devote significant time to exercising-and particularly to building muscle-as oddities, or worse. Thanks partly to Hollywood's portrayal of muscular men as thickheaded, the public generally believed that brain and brawn were incompatible. Men with big, visible muscles were often cast as villainous henchmen, thugs, or simply dummies. In other cases, men who appeared overly concerned with their physique were viewed with suspicion. In a culture that was deeply homophobic, such behavior was thought to signal homosexuality.
Americans would learn, in time, the power of daily movement. But the summer Bonnie Prudden posed for her
Sports Illustrated cover, her suggestion that Americans-men, women, and children-make a regular habit of exercising and strengthening their bodies struck most as ridiculous.
During a 1956 radio interview with journalist Mike Wallace, the future
60 Minutes correspondent asks Bonnie, with a chuckle: "You think that there should be a formal exercise, a kind of 'joy through strength' period for husband, wife, and family when the father gets home from work at six thirty at night, before the martinis? . . . You think that we should have a routine,
all of us?" To which she responds without missing a beat: "I'm more convinced of it than you are." For a country bracing for a war against the Soviets, however, becoming a nation of "softies" wasn't acceptable, either. The lady in the leotite was offering a solution.
***
Ruth "Bonnie" Prudden was a descendant of Davy Crockett, the folk hero crowned "King of the Wild Frontier," and she wore her lineage like a badge of honor.
She had been hyperactive as a kid. She never walked anywhere, she liked to say-she ran. In 1918, when she was four years old, she began a habit of climbing out of a second-story window of her family's home at midnight and roaming the streets of their middle-class neighborhood in Mount Vernon, just north of the Bronx. Her father was concerned and suggested her mother take her to the family doctor.
Why so much energy? she asked the doctor.
"There is nothing wrong with this child that discipline and exhaustion won't cure," the doctor said. He suggested they enroll Bonnie in a local Russian ballet academy, and it worked. "After my three strenuous dance classes each week, I was much too tired to wander in the night." Her parents would soon supplement her dancing with classes at German and Swedish gymnastics schools as well.
As she grew up, Bonnie became a "scrubby little tomboy." She went bare-legged in the New York winters, her knees covered in cuts and bruises from climbing, exploring, adventuring. "When I wanted to find out if I liked a boy, I'd climb a tree and challenge him to follow me," she would say. "If he couldn't make it, he was out."
Bonnie's life indoors was lonely. Her mother's worsening alcoholism and sharp tongue created constant stress. She could feel her mother's disappointment in having birthed such an aberrant daughter. "I was not frail, not pretty, nor golden haired and blue-eyed. That was my little sister, Jeanne," Bonnie wrote. "My mother's repetitive question,
Why can't you be more like your sister?, was a thorn in my heart." Bonnie preferred spending time with her father, who was an outdoorsman, but he worked in newspaper advertising and was rarely home. When he was, he liked to call his eldest daughter his "bonnie lass"-a nickname that stuck.
Bonnie loved to read, to be transported to other worlds through books, but her talent for dance would be the thing that would grant her access to real-life new worlds. After graduating in 1933 from New York City’s Horace Mann High School, she spent a summer working at a ranch in Arizona, where her “well-trained body learned to break horses, brand and castrate cattle, and ride for days.” She returned to New York that fall and took a few college courses before joining a professional dance company. Bonnie loved performing; her mother wondered aloud what would become of her daughter. At twenty-one, she snagged her dream job—a role dancing in a Broadway musical revue called
Life Begins at 8:40.
Copyright © 2022 by Danielle Friedman. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
