Correcting 'Alternative Facts' about Joseph Pilates' Life

Caution: If you read “Do You Speak Pilates?,” the blog I posted here on April 6 earlier this year, you need to know I repeated some information about Joseph Pilates that I have since learned is not entirely true. Today, I’ll try to correct that. 

Before I do, consider what Josephine Baker reportedly once said when asked her age. One of my favorite people (for numerous reasons), she named a highly unlikely number and then added, “not counting summers.” That’s proof that even a primary source is not always reliable — and in these troubled times, we know all about that.  

Anyway, here's some of what I've learned about Joseph Pilates. In “Bodies by Joe,” Alma Guillermoprieto’s amazing article published Aug. 21 in the New York Review of Books, she called him “a compulsive self-mythologizer,” saying "apparently Joseph Pilates did not always tell the whole truth.” (Thanks are due here to John, my Pilates instructor, for alerting me about the article.) 

For entirely different reasons, Guillermoprieto added, ”Pilates died in 1967, and I am grateful to have missed the opportunity to train with the master.” By all accounts, the master was something of a task master, though his concern for the health, muscle tone and flexability of his students apparently was genuine.   

In her article, Guillermoprieto listed three sources for readers who wanted to know more: “Caged Lion: Joseph Pilates and His Legacy” by John Howard Steel, “Hubertus Joseph Pilates” by Javier Pérez Pont and Esperanza Aparicio Romero” and “Love All Around: The Romana Kryzanowska Biography” by Cathy Strack and Carol J. Craig. 

Steel’s book appealed to me the most and it was the easiest to get, so I ordered “Caged Lion” with confidence, because Guillermoprieto described the author as “a devoted pupil who wrote a fair-minded and helpful book.” 

Now a retired lawyer, decades ago Steel trained in New York City with Pilates and he also became friends with the gifted but eccentric man who developed the exercise program that he called “Contrology.” Now better known as “Pilates,” the low-impact regimen currently is practiced by more than 15 million people in the U.S., according to CNN, and Pilates has been dubbed “the fastest-growing fitness trend.” Statista reports that in 2024, “nearly a million people participated in Pilates training in the U.S.” Yowsa! 

Unaccustomed as I am to being part of any trend since my hula hoop days, I’m a Pilates convert, as I explained in that earlier post. In his book, Steel writes about his own early days on the reformer in the tiny studio, but he also writes about his relationship with Clara Pilates, who died in 1977, a decade after Joseph's passing.  While serving as Clara’s lawyer, Steel discovered that the couple had no paper trail — no licenses, leases or bank accounts — and they ran the studio as a cash-and-carry operation. 

Over the years, Steel and other devoted Pilates practitioners rescued the business from extinction twice, and as he tells it, the story features numerous twists, turns and lessons in diplomacy. Though he never abandons his tone of respect for Joseph Pilates and his significant accomplishments, at the end of the book, Steel does refute a lot of the conventional wisdom (it's everywhere) about Joseph’s personal history. 

Was he a boxer? A circus performer? A prisoner of war? Did he leave behind two wives and a couple of children before heading to America on a ship? Did he marry Clara? Did he ever acknowledge her contributions to Contrology? If you are at all tantalized, read “Caged Lion.”    

As a writer who likes when readers contact me with kind words about my work, I sent Steel a note. I thanked him for writing the book, and also said I appreciated his connecting Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory with the mindfulness element that is key in Pilates classes. (Full disclosure: I was privileged to edit my  friend Linda’s doctoral thesis on Csikszentmihalyi’s theory as it applies to mathematics classes in elementary schools, so I know about his theory of "flow" and can even pronounce “Csikszentmihalyi” correctly. Try me.)    

Steel wrote back: “I loved your blog and thanks so much for your kind words. I still think “Flow” explains so much, even though not fully appreciated by many teachers or students. I was fortunate to find Mihaly’s book when trying to understand my deep attraction” to Pilates exercises. Steel said he also enjoyed what I wrote about Fred Pilates, who lived and taught in St. Louis. (For details, see my earlier blog post.) 

Steel continued, “I never met him and, typically, Joe never once mentioned him. But I suspect the machining that went into the reformer started with Fred, not Mr. DeSafio. Fred’s family was very upset with me after Clara died and the apartment had been stripped bare of memorabilia (and perhaps money). I was in California in a long trial when Clara died and the judge wouldn’t allow me to go back.” We'll never know what was lost.

Over the last two months, assorted sprained/strained muscles and/or a pinched nerve — complemented by a ridiculous gash on my hand — have kept me away from Pilates classes, but I’m easing back in and glad of it. Back on the reformer last week, I was pleased that my body remembered we’d been here and done that before, so I can confidently report that I still speak Pilates.

And now, I can speak more accurately about the man behind the method.