Joseph Pilates' Lawyer Helped Turn an Exercise Method into a Fitness Movement

In 1963, John Howard Steel was a 28-year-old Jewish attorney living in New York with a demanding law practice, an unhappy marriage, and a stiff neck.

One day, his mother urged him to find a cure to his aching neck. He walked into a gym run by a German immigrant named Joseph Pilates.

Pilates’ gym was filled with various medieval-looking apparatuses, lengthening and strengthening machines, that Pilates used for his new “Contrology” method.

The machines, and a lifelong friendship with the man he called Joe, changed Steel’s life. And now thanks to his well-written and witty book, “Caged Lion: Joseph Pilates and His Legacy” (Last Leaf Press)it was a meeting that would change the way that the man behind the Pilates phenomenon is understood and remembered.

What many do not know — and what Steel’s memoir tracks so well — is that Pilates, the multi-billion dollar global fitness phenomenon, was founded during a period of profound social and economic turbulence not unlike what we are experiencing today.

Joseph Humbertus Pilates was an enigmatic German immigrant who arrived in New York in April 1926. His life before New York is shrouded in mystery.

World War I broke out in 1914 while Pilates was working as a circus tumbler in England. He and the members of his German circus troupe were taken into custody as enemy aliens and spent the duration of the war on the Isle of Man. In addition to leading the camp’s daily exercise routines to over 24,000 inmates, Pilates developed the ideas and movements that comprise the physical fitness system known as Pilates in prison, during moments of confinement.

“We know very little about Joseph’s time in the Knockaloe Prison on the Isle of Man,” said Steel in an interview with the Forward. “We don’t know why he went to Great Britain in the first place, but he obviously fled Germany for some reason. It probably had to do with the death of his wife. But he abandoned her son and their son—just left them with her parents and just fled.”

The state of the world, even on the cusp of World War I, had little interest for Pilates. All that mattered was the human body as a system, a tool, and what he then called the Contrology method he invented to fix all of its ailments, said Steel.

“My theory is that he spent his time learning about his body, the human body, and how it moved,” said Steel from his home in Santa Barbara, California. “My theory is that he also didn’t have any space when he devised the method. For four years he was probably confined pretty much of the time to a very small space.”

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“He never had a big following,” said Steel. “At the time of his death, during which his following was on the decline, there may have 50 or maybe 100 people in the whole world that knew who he was.”

When Pilates died in 1967, Steel was part of a committee of Pilates’ clients that helped his wife, Clara, maintain the studio. The Pilates method, though, was largely transmitted through dancers, particularly his student Romana Kryzanowska who was first brought to Pilates by the choreographer George Balanchine, co-founder of New York City Ballet, after she suffered an injury while training at the School of American Ballet.

Steel took over the financial management of the fledgling studio, helping to keep it alive as Americans tried and discarded one exercise fad after another. Maybe that’s because, as Steel emphasizes throughout the book, Pilates is addictive. Something about Pilates kept him and other clients coming back over and over again to Joe’s gym.