Elaine LaLanne’s morning exercises often begin before she’s even out of bed. Lying on the blanket, she makes two dozen folding knives. She does push-ups at the bathroom sink. After dressing and putting on makeup, she goes to her home gym, where she spends a few minutes running uphill on a treadmill and doing lat pull-down exercises on a machine.
“Twenty minutes a day gets me going,” she said from her home on California’s central coast.
But her greatest daily effort, she says, happens above her shoulders. At 97, Ms. LaLanne reminds herself every morning, “You have to believe you can do it.” She said faith not only kept her physically active despite injuries and emotional obstacles, but it also helped her do so Living the life of someone decades younger than you. “It all starts in the mind,” she said.
Ms. LaLanne’s habit of speaking in aphorisms (“It’s not a problem, it’s an experience”; “With the equipment you have, do the best you can”) is the result of a lifelong attempt to educate people inspire you to move more and better. For nearly six decades, she was the wife and business partner of television star Jack LaLanne, widely considered the father of the modern fitness movement and whose workout show ran for 34 years, from 1951 to 1985.
“She was the driving force behind Jack,” said Rick Hersh, Ms. LaLanne’s talent agent for more than 40 years.
While Jack was a born showman – he rose to fame performing acrobatics on Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach in the 1930s – Elaine preferred to work behind the scenes, supporting him and running her sprawling entertainment and business empire, which included not only a TV show, but dozens included fitness equipment, food and supplements, as well as a chain of gyms with more than 100 locations across the country.
Since Jack’s death in 2011, however, Elaine (who friends call LaLa) has quietly developed a following of her own. She still runs her family’s remaining business, BeFit Enterprises — which sells archival videos and memorabilia and licenses the LaLanne name — from a ranch nestled among dusty hills and cattle.
She has published two books in the last four years and is developing both a documentary and a feature film with Mark Wahlberg, who has signed on to play Jack. And longtime fitness industry leaders — 1990s home-workout queen Denise Austin, Tae-Bo guru Billy Blanks and bodybuilding legend Lou Ferrigno — seek her advice on navigating life and business.
“She’s almost like a second mother to me,” Mr. Ferrigno said.
Last month at the Idea Health and Fitness Association’s annual conference, Ms. LaLanne walked the halls with a smile and a shiny new walking shoe as a steady stream of toned, Lycra-clad fitness professionals stopped her for selfies. For more than a decade, she has presented the Jack LaLanne Award, an industry lifetime achievement award given to fitness personalities who promote health and exercise in the media.
“A lot of our members come because of her,” said Amy Thompson, Idea’s executive director. “We may have to change the name to the Elaine LaLanne Award.”
After all, in 1926, when Ms. LaLanne was born, few Americans made sweating a part of their daily lives, said Shelly McKenzie, an independent scholar and author of “Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America.” Nearly a century later, Ms. LaLanne is a “testament to the effectiveness of a lifelong exercise habit,” said Dr. McKenzie – and perhaps more importantly, for the power to choose how you want to look and feel as you age.
“I don’t want to be old when I’m old.”
Elaine grew up in Minneapolis and dreamed of a career in entertainment. In the mid-1940s, she went west to San Francisco, where she dabbled in the emerging medium of television, eventually becoming producer and co-host of a daily live variety show, at a time when there were few women , was rare The medium went beyond the secretarial functions. By the early 1950s, she had become a local celebrity, whom one reporter called “the sweetheart of San Francisco television.”
Then 27, Elaine, a divorced single mother with a demanding job, smoked cigarettes, ate candy bars for lunch and, like most Americans of the time, didn’t care much about exercise and diet.
Then one day in 1951, a local bodybuilder and gym owner’s publicist called the studio and said their client could do push-ups for an entire show. Jack LaLanne actually did it, raising and lowering his 5-foot-10 frame throughout a full 90-minute program as the hosts carried on as usual.
Shortly after they met, Jack went to Elaine’s desk in the studio and reprimanded her for eating a donut and smoking. “She literally blew him away by gratuitously biting into her donut and blowing cigarette smoke in his face,” fitness historian Ben Pollack wrote in 2018.
But over time, she fell in love not only with him, but also with his beliefs about whole foods and exercise – which he learned from early 20’s lifestyle star Paul Bragg, a bodybuilder. It got her thinking, “I don’t want to be old when I’m old.”
With Elaine’s television background and Jack’s charisma, the LaLanne star rose. Jack’s appearance on Elaine’s show eventually led to his own live show on the same station and then to “The Jack LaLanne Show” in Los Angeles, which became the first national series on diet and exercise. As Jack settled into Hollywood, Elaine hosted his show in the Bay Area and lectured on healthy living throughout the state.
She also began managing the business details of product development and licensing deals that anticipated the modern, personality-driven fitness market – including a Jack LaLanne bathroom scale, a “Glamour Stretcher” resistance band and vitamins.
However, she became best known for her appearances in front of the camera as a co-host.
“I was always looking for role models,” said Jan Todd, a pioneer in women’s powerlifting and interim head of the department of kinesiology at the University of Texas at Austin. “I grew up before Title IX was passed. “Mom didn’t go to the gym.” Dr. Todd found inspiration in Ms. LaLanne, whose blonde bob and cheerful disposition made building muscle seem acceptable to women.
In retrospect, not all of the LaLannes’ messages promoted health. “If you look at the first episodes, you can see the emergence of a contemporary diet culture that promotes the ideal of a thin body and presents fat as a problem to be overcome,” said Dr. McKenzie. They coined and spread catchphrases like “10 seconds on your lips and a lifetime on your hips.”
Ms. LaLanne stands by these messages and says they give viewers tools and confidence to achieve their goal. But she admitted that “it’s better now” because there is a diversity of body sizes on TV.
With her ever-present smile and penchant for catchphrases, Ms. LaLanne’s positivity could easily be mistaken for naivety. But she fought hard for her sunny disposition, especially on May 24, 1973, when her 21-year-old daughter from her first marriage, Janet, was killed in a car accident. The night she learned her child had been killed, she said, she was faced with a choice: fall apart or pull through.
She thought to herself, “Janet, if she can see you up there, she would never want to see me cry,” Ms. LaLanne said, choosing her words carefully. “I mean, I can’t – she’s gone, there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t bring her back.”
The woman who preached the gospel of changing your life knew she could never change it. She dealt with her grief the way she dealt with everything else — by throwing herself forward, she said, and by training her brain like a muscle to focus not on her loss but on the joy that her daughter had prepared for her during her lifetime.
“If you don’t move, you become immobile.”
The LaLannes’ greatest legacy, said Dr. Todd, could be to “show us the value of exercise in the context of aging.”
As he grew older, Jack performed media stunts on his birthday. At 70, he towed a flotilla of 70 rowboats carrying 70 people during a mile-long swim. Elaine began writing books about the transition to middle age, with titles like “Fitness After 50” and “Dynastride!”
While people who worked closely with the LaLannes say she was the backbone of the empire, Elaine herself refuses to acknowledge her role in building the empire. When pressed to highlight her successes, she quickly changes the subject to something else – usually Jack – or lapses into her trademark aphorisms (“It takes two to tango,” “A one-man band is good, but more in.” the band makes it “better”). Even their emails appear as “Jack LaLanne.”
Ms. LaLanne said she has slowed down since she was 92. She also fell several times in the last decade. But the physical strength she gained in the gym helped her get back on her feet, she said.
In addition to her daily exercises, Elaine devotes time to stretching and hanging from a pull-up bar, letting her body hang loosely like a rag doll. She uses the same exercise equipment that she and Jack have used most of their lives, including weight machines that Jack designed in the 1930s and a treadmill that the couple purchased in the early 1970s.
“You have to move,” she said. “If you don’t move, you become immobile.”