When Susan Powter started teaching exercise and nutrition to fellow housewives in Texas, she never expected to become a fitness guru.
Powter, 66, hoped to connect with other women who could relate to her story. This story became the backbone of her blockbuster hit Stop the Insanity! Fitness infomercials, best-selling books and videos from the early 90’s. Her weight was 260 pounds. A mother of two takes revenge when her husband leaves her for another woman by becoming healthy.
“I stood up and talked to the women,” she tells PEOPLE. “That’s what I did with the infomercial. There was no rehearsal, no script. And the women responded to it.”
Mr. Powter’s “Stop the Insanity!” Unofficial circa 1993.
When Ms. Powter signed her first contract with her manager and the investment partners who founded the company, “it was about an exercise studio and maybe a clothing line, and that’s it,” she says. But within a year, she appeared on the nationally syndicated daytime talk show “The Home Show” and received $2 million before the publication of her first book. “No one expected that,” she says.
He says the success was “huge and fun.” powderA cultural icon who was fooled by SNL, he was named one of PEOPLE’s 25 Most Intriguing People of 1993. I’m alive. ‘And I was so happy because I had a current husband who was a musician who never worked during our marriage, and an ex-husband who I was paying for the childcare. ”
Susan Powter, PEOPLE’s Most Intriguing People issue, 1993.
However, she soon realized that she had handed over too much control and money to her business partner. “I wasn’t running a company. It was a 50-50 deal,” she says. And business began to force her to become someone she was not.
“They started creating an ‘I’ out of me,” she says. “And that’s what happened when the money came here (hands held high). At that time, I was like, ‘Oh, Suze, don’t say that. No, no, that’s a little too much. I was like, “Oh, you’re in shock.” Shocking. But it was the same shock that led me there. ”
She felt the effects of that control most acutely in 1994, when she began filming the syndicated television show “The Susan Powter Show.” “I worked really hard on that show. We shot three shows in a day. I did it with everything I had,” she says. “But it was frustrating. They put me in pearls. Look at me, do I look like a pearl type? And I had no say in all those segments. , I can’t even see them now.”
She tried to terminate her television contract and renegotiate her business partnership, but it ended in litigation. “In the ’90s, the only option was litigation,” she says. She declared bankruptcy and realized how much of the money she earned was flowing into other people’s pockets. “Yes, I had money, but I never had $300 million in my bank account,” she says. “I never earned the money I generated.”
Dissatisfied with Hollywood and seeking a simpler, less expensive life, she moved to Seattle with her adopted third son, whom she raised as a single mother, after separating from her second husband. (She later came out as a lesbian in 2004.) “I didn’t just decide to quit. Half my heart was trampled on,” she said of feeling betrayed by her business partner. she speaks. “It was shocking. I was furious. And I thought, this is it.”
In Seattle, he rented a cabin, taught cooking and fitness classes, and began taking photographs, living the “hippie” lifestyle that suited him. “I was away from all the big companies…and I was very happy.”
However, as time went on, the money ran out and by 2018 she was unable to get a job. “Try finding a job as a 60-year-old woman,” she says. She was living nearly penniless in Las Vegas, where she had been making deliveries for Grubhub and Uber Eats to make a living for the past six years. She tells People she was “so scared.”
Susan Powter, photographed for PEOPLE, July 2024.
Chloe Aftel
But over the past year, she has found hope again. I started receiving Social Security checks, which gave me the financial stability to save again. Then she met Zebelia Newman, a filmmaker who was making a documentary about her life. The film, Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter, executive produced by Jamie Lee Curtis, is scheduled for release next year.
Powter, who just published her memoir, is planning an RV tour across the country and hopes to reconnect with her fans. And this time, she says, “no one is telling me what to do.”
