LOS ANGELES — Richard Simmons is gone.
His fitness studio in Beverly Hills is shuttered. On its stoop is a sun-bleached edition of the Beverly Hills Courier from January. Inside is the wreckage of a livelihood: piles of debris, tongues of pink insulation, a dusting of pulverized drywall on the ballet barres. In the middle of it all, a forlorn scale where his students measured pounds sacrificed to the oldies.
“I knew him very well, but I don’t know what happened to him,” says Germen Helleon, the proprietor of a hair salon next door, on Civic Center Drive.