Muscle Beach: Where the Best Bodies in the World Started a Fitness Revolution

by Marla Matzer Rose

Overview

The Story Behind America's Iconic Patch of Sand--Muscle Beach, California
Almost half a century before health clubs, fitness videos and weight training became American obsessions, a pioneering enclave in Santa Monica, California, started the physical culture boom. In the 1940s, Jack LaLanne, Vic Tanny, Joe Gold, Les and Pudgy Stockton and others like them drew thousands of visitors to the beach to watch their feats of strength and acrobatic displays. As more viewers became participants, body building and fitness became a part of the mainstream culture.
Muscle Beach by Marla Matzer Rose is full of rich, new material about the original Muscle Beachers, many of whom are still alive and testaments to the benefits of a life devoted to fitness. With its fresh anecdotes and thirty-two rare and wonderful photographs, this history brings a legendary stretch of beach into focus.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466873490
Publisher:	St. Martin's Press
Publication date:	05/01/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Marla Matzer Rose, author of Muscle Beach, is a Los Angeles-based journalist. She currently works as an editor/reporter for Business.com. She has worked for the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News and Forbes magazine. She won a Golden Quill award in 1996 from the Western Pennsylvania Press Club for an investigative feature in Pittsburgh Magazine.

Read an Excerpt

Muscle Beach

Where the Best Bodies in the World Started a Fitness Revolution

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By Marla Matzer Rose

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2001 Marla Matzer Rose
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7349-0

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CHAPTER 1

Exhibitionists: The Beginnings of Muscle Beach

Muscle Beach is a famous name today worldwide, but it is especially so in Southern California. Santa Monica alone is home to Muscle Beach Burgers, the Muscle Beach Café, and Muscle Beach Hair and Nail Salon. Visit the greater Los Angeles area — from the boardwalk souvenir stands in Venice to the gift shops along down-at-the-heels Hollywood Boulevard — and you'll find postcards, T-shirts, and keychains with the name emblazoned on them.

Many of the items are cheesy, emphasizing sexy cheese- and beefcake over athleticism ("Muscle Beach, California" postcards featuring suggestive photos of thong-clad women or leering, buff men). Few people today seem to know what Muscle Beach really was. In our prepackaged world, it's easier to grasp the simplified idea of a place where buff men went to lift weights and pick up girls. There was some of that, of course, but it was infinitely more rich. In generalizing, we lose the unique individuals on which accurate, three-dimensional history is based.

The reason we think Muscle Beach was a bunch of muscular men lifting weights is because that's what it largely became in later years — after the acrobats who had made up the tapestry of Muscle Beach's first decade moved on. But before that, it was a much different place.

Muscle Beach in its heyday was made up of men, women, and children who were learning, performing, and teaching athletic feats, to the delight of thousands of people. It was a place where rank amateurs could learn from each other and from professionals who were passing through town, and emerge as world-class athletes, stuntmen, Mr. Americas. It was a remarkable, outdoor, public training ground for some of the best all-around athletes America has ever produced. It also became an incubator for some of the country's most influential fitness entrepreneurs: Jack LaLanne and Vic Tanny were just two of the many who made names for themselves there. And yes, there were buff musclemen and the beautiful, buxom, women who loved them.

All this existed on the beach, in the shadow of one of the great amusement piers of its time: the Santa Monica Pier. Families and people of all ages would come to play in the surf, have a hot dog, and watch the folks of Muscle Beach put on a remarkable, day-long show. They could even join in if they wanted, trying a handstand or a balancing act.

The athletes of Muscle Beach literally changed their lives through exercise, and, in turn, changed the world around them. Many of them were children of poor immigrants, who found their version of the American dream through pumping iron. Others were corn-fed Americans, who changed just as dramatically through their pursuits as the immigrants' sons.

If you had come to Muscle Beach on, say, July 4, 1948, you would have witnessed quite a scene. Several thousand people would have been jamming the area all around Muscle Beach: many of the men properly dressed for the times in shirtsleeves, slacks, and straw hats; women in plaid shirts, cotton pants, and coordinating head scarves. A number of the spectators may have been former GIs, who had fallen in love with Southern California when they passed through during the war, and later moved there with their young families as soon as they could.

The fine, white sand was all but invisible, hidden by a sea of colorful swim outfits and beach umbrellas. Early arrivals had claimed seats on the benches that faced the raised Muscle Beach platform, long before the festivities began. The beach was lined with snack shops, though many budget-conscious beachgoers brought their own picnics to spread out on the sand.

By early afternoon, several dozen gymnasts, bodybuilders, and weight lifters would have been entertaining the crowd. Professional stuntmen and circus performers were among those onstage. Acrobats would form human pillars, three and four people high, to amuse the crowd. They would do flips and handstands; a brave and brazen few would even go on the rooftops of buildings overlooking the beach, and perform their handstands there on the edges of roofs while the crowd gasped and hollered.

Several strong women might have come out to lift weights, tear phone books in half, and even "wrestle" with men using martial arts techniques. Girls as young as ten would be part of accomplished teams performing "adagio," a kind of acrobatic dance. Others would support adults several times their own body weight on their backs.

The crowning event was the Mr. and Miss Muscle Beach physique contests, with the winners receiving gleaming trophies that were several feet high. The crowd would whoop and whistle for their favorites. No doubt, a number of Southern California kids developed their first serious crushes on the bronzed Adonises and Venuses who won those awards.

Muscle Beach's reach extended far beyond Los Angeles, though, through pictures and traveling exhibitions put on by people from its community. Its reach ultimately extended around the world, to millions of people. By the '50s, fans and followers worldwide would write to the stars of Muscle Beach, addressing their letters simply to "Muscle Beach, U.S.A." The post office knew where to make the delivery: bags full of mail would arrive at the beach each week.

Little of this history is remembered by present-day Angelenos. Even in Muscle Beach's backyard, the image of Muscle Beach is simplistic and hazy. A "new" Muscle Beach in Santa Monica, opened in the fall of 1999, barely does the original justice. In fact, children are barred from using much of the equipment there, and no weights are allowed. Even sunny weekend afternoons often find the place deserted.

What happened? Decades have passed, and the story of the beach has been clouded by the years and by controversy. Memories among the old-timers with regard to who was there first and when it all started vary widely, as do their versions of the events that led to the closing of Muscle Beach in the late '50s.

There is no escaping today's emphasis on a beefcake image of Muscle Beach. Part of it is guilt by association. It is true that a significant number of enthusiasts for photographs and exhibitions related to fitness has always been those with what might be euphemistically called "impure thoughts." It's also true that the audience for photographs of muscular male nudes was catered to by a handful of periodicals by the early 1950s. Some of these magazines, with such titles as Physique Pictorial, Vim, Grecian Guild Pictorial, and Adonis (the latter published by fitness entrepreneur Joe Weider), tested — and sometimes overstepped — the strict limits of United States law at the time. Whereas "girlie" magazines at the time pictured soft, rounded women, the men's magazine emphasized Grade A, highly developed beef.

Publishers of these periodicals faced an uphill battle, often running afoul of strict censorship laws. Not only was male frontal nudity verboten, so were the crack between the buttocks and any pictures that were judged to be purely titillating in nature.

Though the core members of Muscle Beach were not involved in the seamier side of the world of nude photography, where many models were hustlers and small-time criminals, some did pose for "artful" nude shots. Unfortunately, as the 1950s went on, many legitimate musclemen suffered from guilt by association by those who scorned the soft-core porn physique magazines of the day.

Most of the Muscle Beach athletes didn't take part in this world. Plenty of flirting and dating that actually led to marriages came out of the socializing between the men and women at Muscle Beach. Certainly, the men liked to impress the pretty girls in the audience. But it was pretty much on the up-and-up, as they would have said in those days.

A number of the people of Muscle Beach, both male and female, admit they received a number of propositions in their day. These ranged from all-expense-paid "visits" to well-heeled fans in faraway places to inducements of hundreds of dollars in exchange for posing for nude photos. Such offers were, as a general rule, turned down flat.

Still, there has always been a connection between images of strong, healthy bodies and sex. This has been the case for millennia — the average person doesn't see sexually explicit paintings and sculptures from ancient times on display in museums, but they exist in back rooms and private collections. In modern times, it's been in evidence from the turn of the century, when photographs of naked men and women in classical poses became popular on "French"-type postcards, to the present day, when you can buy illicit videotapes of athletes in locker rooms. Incidentally, an Internet search today for "Muscle Beach" yields numerous references to pornographic Web sites — virtually all unconnected to the real Muscle Beach.

Certainly, there was a small amount of crossover between the athletes at Muscle Beach and the shadowy world of mostly gay-oriented physique photography. In the book Beefcake by F. Valentine Hooven III and the 1999 movie of the same name, it's pointed out that Jack LaLanne, for example, posed for the same photographers who peddled nude male photos by mail in the 1940s. Some of these photographers no doubt visited Muscle Beach, to try to recruit models.

No matter who their audience was, those in the fitness movement itself have often used sex as a selling point in pitches for everything from "energy" potions to gyms. From the earliest days of the "modern" health-spa-type gyms, sex has been a greater motivator than health in getting people in the door.

"When the [Tanny] gyms were in operation, we did a survey," recalled Armand Tanny, a former Mr. America who was brother to and, for a time, the business partner of early gym mogul Vic Tanny. "We found that the main reason for working out was not for health, but for looking good. That," he added with a smile, "was among both men and women, I might add."

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that as far back as the 1930s, stuck among the more lurid magazines on newsstands — alongside the tabloid rags covering movie-star scandals and "true crime" stories — were a number of titles covering "physical culture." That's what they called fitness in those days; it was considered a scientific study of the human body rather than just a quest for physical perfection.

Bernarr Macfadden's Physical Culture and Bob Hoffman's Strength & Health were the leaders. Iron Man was started in 1936 by school custodian Peary Rader and outlived most of the others. But at least forty other physical-culture magazines are estimated to have debuted in the 1930s. Most folded due to low subscription rates and financial woes. As is the case today, publishers in those days found it was hard to make a stand-alone magazine profitable. The most successful found ways to capitalize on related products — often promoting athletic contests that would draw sponsors, and endorsing and selling fitness-related items.

The physical culture magazines' proximity to the more scandalous fare on the newsstand was no accident: Macfadden also published such titles as True Story, the first of the "confessional" magazines. In a way, publishers like Macfadden were providing the print equivalent of the tabloid TV shows of our time.

Like fitness gurus before and since, Macfadden was a genius of showmanship and hard-nosed salesmanship. Even those who acknowledge his great influence on the fitness movement often label him a "huckster." His fitness motto was blunt: "Weakness Is a Crime, Don't Be a Criminal."

Their grainy pictures of muscular men — and, particularly in Physical Culture's case, cheesecake-y cover renderings of toned, scantily clad women — were often considered indecent at the time. Moreover, what the magazines espoused — working out with weights — was still very much frowned upon by mainstream society and the medical establishment, for both sexes.

"Doctors told men ... they'd get 'musclebound'— or wouldn't be able to get an erection. They told women they'd look like men," recalled early fitness guru Jack LaLanne. In 1936, LaLanne founded his first gym in Oakland, California — across the bay from San Francisco — and became a regular visitor to Muscle Beach. He ended up spreading his fame through television and a nationwide chain of gyms bearing his name, and with the famous media-ready birthday stunts that showcased various feats of strength.

Les and "Pudgy" Stockton, who would become one of Muscle Beach's most famous couples, also recall those days when weight training was practically verboten. When Les attended UCLA, the weights there "were locked in a room that was only accessible to special people ... too 'dangerous' for general use," said Pudgy.

Modesty was also a consideration: people in polite society did not wear formfitting outfits. Though skirts had gotten much shorter in the '20s, they were still relatively loose fitting. In a way, the "flapper" dresses actually de-emphasized the female form, since a flat chest (sometimes achieved by more buxom girls by taping their breasts down) was part of the look.

There were still many fashions that were considered beyond the pale in the 1930s. For example, in the mid-1930s, only at the beach and only among more liberal types were topless men's suits and skirtless women's suits accepted. Pudgy recalls a young woman she worked with at that time whose husband unequivocally forbade her to wear a swimsuit she'd bought because it didn't have the requisite little skirt in front. "We all got a chuckle out of that," Pudgy admits.

If there was one place in America where the scandalous was practically mundane, it was Los Angeles. The city always had a conservative element, but the best they could do to stave off the inevitable encroachment of showfolk was to try to ban them from their country clubs and social groups. Meanwhile, movie stars like Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle continued to make headlines with their bad behavior.

By the 1920s Los Angeles had firmly established itself as a place that attracted offbeat types from the four corners of the earth. Every type of physical, mental, or religious philosophy seemed to be represented in L.A. in greater numbers than just about anywhere else; they catered to the entertainment crowd and to the thousands of others flocking to California to chase their dreams.

The proximity of flesh-worshiping Hollywood, coupled with mild weather that lent itself to year-round outdoor activity, created a perfect breeding ground for the physical-fitness boom. Muscle Beach would become part old-time revival meeting, part infomercial — and all show business.

Actually, the foundations of the fitness movement, including weight lifting and gymnastics, came primarily from Europe. The old country had a much more deep-seated tradition of these kinds of sports. Beginning in the Renaissance, Europeans rediscovered basic tenets of fitness as it was practiced in ancient times.

The rediscovered pursuit of fitness moved ahead by fits and starts from the Renaissance through the early 1900s. Inventors came up with crude dumbbells and even cast-iron crowns meant to strengthen the neck muscles, but they would go by the wayside due to their cost or impracticality. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, producing useful materials for equipment building and bringing a greater concentration of people to cities where gymnastics and other fitness pursuits would become popularized, that the progress of fitness began to move forward in a fairly straight line.

Nineteenth-century America was only a century removed from being a totally agrarian nation, with few big cities. Weight lifting and gymnastics first started taking hold in the mid-1800s on the East Coast, and remained largely confined there until the second or third decade of the twentieth century.

But it was on the beaches of Southern California, decades later, that the various strains of sports enthusiasm combined to create a truly American fitness movement. Acrobats, stuntmen, weight lifters, and other "health nuts" found common ground at Muscle Beach.

The qualities that led to the success of the American muscle movement included its emphasis on individual achievement and the sheer size and zeal of the athletes themselves. In a land of cowboys, the musclemen became the ultimate cowboys: charming and intensely physical yet aloof and untouchable, idealized, and admired by all.

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Today, sixty-plus years since the place got its start, the name Muscle Beach still has a mythic quality that has far outlived its twenty-five-year existence in Santa Monica, California. Over the years, there have been other attractions and physique contests up and down the coast — and surely around the world — that have borrowed the moniker.

Muscle Beach defined the tanned and toned image of Southern California on film and in print, decades before TV shows such as Baywatch, which also use the Santa Monica Beach locale. That's surely a major reason for the staying power of the Muscle Beach name: it sums up, in a nutshell, what fitness came to represent in Los Angeles, and what the place in turn reflected back to the world in a thousand movies, photographs, and postcards.

The name Muscle Beach was an invention of outsiders — not those who congregated at the area of the Santa Monica Beach Playground, where Muscle Beach was founded. Between about 1932 and 1934, the core athletes assembled. Eventually, a platform was erected, acrobats arrived, and the place was christened Muscle Beach.

Some young people started working out at the beach informally, using rugs and tarps laid directly on the sand. Within a couple of years, a low wooden platform was built. That was replaced by a sturdier, raised platform, and still later the fully formed, L-shaped platform with its own equipment shed and rows of benches to accommodate spectators.

The beginning — like the end — of Muscle Beach remains a subject of some controversy among old-timers. It is a point of pride to be able to claim to have been among the first to arrive. Muscle Beach alumni disagree about whether it was 1934, 1932, or even earlier when the first young people who became the core of the Muscle Beach crowd started frequenting the area.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Muscle Beach by Marla Matzer Rose. Copyright © 2001 Marla Matzer Rose. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
Acknowledgments,
PROLOGUE The Foundations of the Modern Fitness Movement,
ONE Exhibitionists: The Beginnings of Muscle Beach,
TWO The Muscle Comes to Muscle Beach,
THREE The Women of Muscle Beach,
FOUR The Salon of Figure Development: The Gym Explosion,
FIVE The Entrepreneurs,
SIX The Performers,
SEVEN Teachers and Students,
EIGHT The Nature Boys,
NINE Into the Mainstream,
TEN The Downfall of Muscle Beach,
ELEVEN The Rise of "The Pit",
TWELVE Lifelong Fitness,
EPILOGUE Present and Future,