The Martha Graham Dancer Who Brought Pilates to Beverly Hills

Ron Fletcher was born May 29, 1921, in Dogtown, a working-class neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri, and arrived in New York in the 1940s with a plan that was, like most plans at that age, fairly vague: to make a life in dance and advertising. What he found was far more concrete: a place in the Martha Graham Dance Company, then the absolute vanguard of American modern dance, and a bodily education that would shape everything he did afterward.

His career as a performer and choreographer stretched across more than two decades. In 1946 he made his Broadway debut in Lute Song, alongside Mary Martin and Yul Brynner; five years later he choreographed Top Banana, the Phil Silvers musical comedy that ran for 350 performances. He worked on NBC’s weekly variety show All Star Revue with Tallulah Bankhead, directed the choreography for the Ice Capades between 1954 and 1967, and staged numbers for Pearl Bailey and Shirley Jones in Las Vegas. For all those years, he was a man of the stage — not a therapist, not an anatomist.

The hinge, as almost always in this story, came through an injury. In 1948, with a knee that wouldn’t fully heal, Fletcher walked into Joseph Pilates’ studio at 939 Eighth Avenue looking for relief. He stayed twenty years. He studied Body Contrology directly with Joseph and Clara, first as a patient and then as a formal student, and kept training there well past 1967, the year of Joseph’s death. Today he’s counted among the so-called Elders — the first-generation teachers, the ones who learned the method from the only source that matters.

On May 1, 1972, Fletcher opened the Ron Fletcher Studio for Body Contrology on Rodeo Drive at Wilshire Boulevard, in the heart of Beverly Hills. It wasn’t a franchise or a replica of the New York studio: it was Pilates filtered through twenty years of theatrical choreography and through Martha Graham’s movement vocabulary, more expressive and less rigidly mechanical than the original. The clientele arrived with the same speed anything new arrives in Los Angeles: Ali MacGraw, Barbra Streisand, Candice Bergen, Katharine Ross, Betsy Bloomingdale, Nancy Reagan. Within a few years, the method Joseph Pilates had devised for injured dancers and for internees at a World War I camp had become Hollywood’s best-kept — and then worst-kept — physical secret.

But Fletcher’s real contribution wasn’t the roster of famous names; it was a technical decision: creating Floorwork and Towelwork, mat-based sequences using nothing more than a simple towel for resistance, which reproduced the method’s logic without needing a Reformer or a Cadillac. He’s been credited as the first to take Pilates work vertical, and the first to unhook it from the equipment that had, until then, made it nearly impossible to teach outside a fully outfitted studio. That portability — a towel, a floor, nothing else — is probably the quiet reason the method could travel beyond a handful of addresses in Manhattan and Beverly Hills and reach, decades later, any gym in the world.

In 2003 he founded the Ron Fletcher Program of Study in Tucson, Arizona, an apprenticeship-based training model that became an Arizona-licensed school in 2005. In December 2008, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted him exclusive rights to the “Fletcher Pilates” trademark — a right that, eight years after a New York court ruled that no one could monopolize the bare word “Pilates,” could still legally protect the compound name that carried his own signature. Fletcher died on December 6, 2011, in Stonewall, Texas, of congestive heart failure, at ninety. He had gone from an injured knee in Manhattan to a studio on Rodeo Drive without ever really stopping being what he’d always been: a choreographer who found a way to teach everyone he met to move better.