Many people start Pilates without knowing too much about Joseph Pilates the man. So we thought you might like to know a few facts about his eventful life.
Joseph Pilates was born in Germany in 1883. He was apparently quite a sickly child with asthma but then became a keen gymnast and boxer. At the start of world war one in 1914 he was touring England with a circus where he performed as a strongman and “Greek statue”. While staying in Blackpool he was interned as an “enemy alien” at the Knockaloe camp on the Isle of Man. Here he read books on health, anatomy and sport, observed the ease of movement of Manx cats and developed his ‘contrology’ system of exercises to keep the inmates fit, turning bunks into early versions of the Reformer.
Sports Illustrated Interview
In Pilates’ famous 1962 interview with Sports Illustrated, journalist Robert Wernick summarised how Pilates’ ideas were formed on the Isle of Man. He wrote of Joseph asking: “Why were the cats in such good shape, so bright-eyed, while the humans were growing every day paler, weaker, apathetic creatures ready to give up if they caught a cold or fell down and sprained an ankle?…He began demonstrating these exercises to the dejected figures around him, and since they had nothing else to do, they began to do the exercises too. Awkwardly and timorously at first, but under his firm supervision they became more and more confident, more and more bouncy, like cats.”
Pilates returned to Germany after world war one, but emigrated to the US in 1925. With his wife Clara he founded his body-conditioning gym in New York. Joe was granted US citizenship in 1935 and Clara got hers two years later in 1937. Pilates published two books, Your Health in 1934 and Return to Life Through Contrology in 1945.
Celebrity Clients
His methods achieved great results and he attracted many celebrity clients, including dancers Martha Graham, Hanya Holm and Ruth St Denis, ballerina Romana Kryzanowska, choreographer George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins the co-director of the film West Side Story and actors Katharine Hepburn and Sir Laurence Olivier. Christopher Isherwood, author of Goodbye to Berlin, noted in his diary of May 5 1947, “Started at Pilates’ gym.” Modern dancer Ruth St Denis had a career-threatening knee injury but after a year on Joe’s massage table her knee pain had gone and she “had ankles like a young girl”.
Pilates Elders
The studio was a functional place. On the BBC radio’s Sporting Witness show Pilates Elder (a Pilates Elder is someone who was trained by Pilates) Mary Bowen, an actress and comedian who trained with Pilates in 1959 remembered, “an old building in New York where everything creaked. There was a large room with apparatus, completely masculine, not a single thing of beauty, a flower or anything.” Clara would be at the gym in her white nurse’s uniform running the business side, while Joseph taught the clients. He was not one for small talk. “They wouldn’t talk, they would sculpt you,” said Bowen.
Iconic Photographs
When Pilates was interviewed by Robert Wernick for Sports Illustrated in 1962 the photographer I. C. ‘Chuck’ Rapoport took a set of iconic photos of Joe at work in his studio. Pilates asked Chuck to touch his toes. He couldn’t, but the septuagenarian Pilates could. Joe was smoking a cigar and challenged the 24-year-old photographer to an arm-wrestling contest, which he duly won. Among the shots Chuck took were journalist Robert Wernick standing on Joe’s taut stomach and Pilates coaching clients on his Reformer machines.
Pilates was not averse to a good PR stunt. On a Pilatesology interview on YouTube his barber and friend Tony Carlino recalled Joe, wearing just his shorts, using the power of his mind to roll in the New York snow in front of a group of reporters. Carlino added: “He was like a movie star walking down the street in his shorts with his cigar…He was so straight, so chiselled with beautiful white hair and as tanned as tan can be.”
PTSD Help
Pilates also helped Carlino overcome his PTSD from his time in the US Navy: “He taught me that with your mind you can overcome fear. I had battle fatigue and his exercises helped calm me down. I found I could sleep better.”
By 1965 Joe was sure his methods had been proved correct, saying: “I must be right. Never an aspirin. Never injured a day in my life. The whole country, the whole world, should be doing my exercises. They’d be happier.”
Sadly there was a fire in a storeroom at the studio in 1966, which Joe helped to fight. He died a year later aged 83, suffering from the lung condition emphysema. Mary Bowen attributed his death to smoking cigars, though there were also reports he had inhaled smoke during the fire.
Joe’s Obituary
His obituary in the New York Times read: “A white-maned lion of a man, with steel-blue eyes and mahogany skin, Mr Pilates kept as limber in his 80s as a teenager.” After his death, Joseph’s techniques of ‘contrology’ became known throughout the world as simply Pilates. This “lion of a man” would be gratified to know that the world has caught up, and now he is a household name.
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The Pilates Central Team
[photo credit: I. C. ‘Chuck’ Rapoport]