Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  But Jim had something else, too. He had Dear.

  Even with her daughter Betty living more than a thousand miles away, Dear continued to make regular trips from Maryland to Mississippi, usually traveling by train, with daughter Bobby for company. Perhaps because Betty tended to indulge the more fragile, less independent Paul Jr., and often left Jim to entertain himself, Jim was exceptionally close to Dear—they even shared the same birthday—and on her arrival, Jim and Dear would immerse themselves in paint and pencils and crayons and glue. Like her mapmaking father, Dear was quick and sure with a pencil, and she encouraged Jim in his own drawings—which were often of loopy-eyed birds or wide-mouthed monsters—as Jim discovered how the placement of two dots for eyes could convey emotion, or how a slash could make an angry mouth. It was the same simplicity that he would later bring to his sense of design for the Muppets.

  Dear was equally certain with a paintbrush—she had oil-painted a picture of the roses Pop had given her when he proposed, for example, which remained a family heirloom until it fell apart in the 1970s—and had a knack for crafts and delicate woodwork, including carving and sculpting, all skills she had also learned from Oscar Hinrichs. “[He’s] the one who taught our mother to do the handwork things she did,” said Attie of her grandfather—and Dear nurtured the same talents and enthusiasm in her grandson.

  Apart from her considerable painting and drawing skills, Dear excelled with needle and thread. Her sewing ability, in fact, was the stuff of family legend. Enormous quilts and needlework decorated her home, and Dear had made not only all of her own clothes, but all of her daughters’ clothes as well. Attie recalled with awe Dear’s ability to sew with nearly any material, including a coat she had sewn from a heavy, scratchy army blanket. “How she sewed that material,” Attie said, “nobody knows.” This skill, too, Dear would cultivate in Jim, who would later build, sculpt, and sew his puppets out of nearly any materials he could find lying around.

  Perhaps most important, Dear was Jim’s best audience. She encouraged Jim in his play and in his dressing up and prop making, coaxed stories from him and indulged his fondness for puns and practical jokes. A voracious reader, Dear also inspired a love of reading in Jim, whether it was L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz books or the comics pages of the newspaper. And with her proud Southern heritage—“the Brown girls were never allowed to forget they were Southerners!” said Bobby—Dear instilled in Jim a similar sense of genteel self-importance. It wasn’t arrogance, but simply a conviction that he could do and be anything he wanted—a confidence and self-awareness that, for the rest of his life, family and colleagues admired and found reassuring. “He was convinced he was going to be successful,” his wife, Jane, said later. “I think he knew he was extraordinary. But it was in a quiet way where he just quietly knew that he knew things.”

  With such encouragement at home, it was no surprise Jim found school relatively easy. While he wasn’t the best student in class—that distinction fell to Jones, who later became a physicist—Jim was ranked in the top three. Jim’s classmates remember him as being very clever, but never seeking the spotlight. No one could recall Jim taking an interest in school productions, apart from obligatory supporting roles in chorus or Christmas plays. It was perhaps just as well, for Jim was so soft-spoken that audience members would likely have had to strain to hear him.

  While Jim was taller than most boys his age, he was neither gawky nor an athlete, though Kermit Scott admitted that Jim was “a little bit more of a nerd” than the rest of the gang. Still, Jim could surprise his classmates by exhibiting the same brand of toughness that had sent his paternal grandfather rumbling wildly into the Cherokee Strip. One evening out at Jones’s farm, Jim and his friends took part in a boxing match—a sport at which the well-built, and slightly older, Tommy Baggette excelled. The boys took turns putting on the gloves and fighting one-on-one, but when it came time to find an opponent to take on the good-natured but solid Baggette, all eyes went downward. Finally, Jim stepped forward. “[He] would do things like that,” Jones remembered. “He had guts … if somebody else wouldn’t do it, he would—and … he’d just go ahead and make the best of it.” The result? “Tommy hit him with an uppercut and knocked him down,” Jones said. “But I just remember thinking how much nerve it took for [Jim] to put himself in that spot.”

  Still, there were no hard feelings between Jim and Baggette, whose mother, Jessie Mae, served as one of the den mothers for their Cub Scout troop. It was in Cub Scouts, in fact, that Jim got his first taste of performing, putting on a kind of pantomime with Gordon Jones as part of a troop skit night. As Jones stood with his hands clenched behind his back, giving a short speech in a deadpan manner, Jim stood pressed up behind him, poking his arms through the crook of Jones’s arms to perform the speaker’s hands. “He’d reach out his handkerchief and pat [Jones’s] forehead, doing all these kinds of things which we all thought was hilarious,” Frazier remembered. It was no accident, Jones said later, that Jim performed the expressive hands, which was the part of the skit “calling for originality and showmanship.… Jim was the showman.”

  Betty Henson also served as a den mother for Jim’s Cub Scout troop. As it turned out, the Henson home was a favorite gathering place, not only because Betty was known to serve warm pecan pies at Scout meetings, but also because the Henson household was a genuinely warm one. Everyone liked each other and a good sense of humor mattered. The Hensons, said Jones, “were very quiet people.… But they all had a sense of humor and they would say things that were funny. But there was no loud-voice laughing. Everybody was very merry, and they did a lot of wordplay and things of that nature.”

  While Paul Sr.—“Dr. Henson,” as the boys respectfully called him—was perhaps the quietest member of the family, he was known around the Stoneville compound for his way with a story. During the almost weekly summer fish fries at the Experiment Station, a crowd would gather around Paul as he launched into one funny story after another. As for Betty Henson, she was “absolutely delightful,” said Jones, with “a bright, witty sense of humor.” She took great delight in gently teasing the boys, pouring a glass of milk to overflowing, for example, if the boys didn’t literally say “when.” “I’d say ‘Okay, that’s enough,’ and she’d keep pouring!” laughed Jones. “His mother was great for jokes,” agreed Frazier, who recalled Betty trying to convince him that a blurry baby picture actually showed Jim with six toes. “She said, ‘You never noticed he had six toes?’ … And I kept saying, ‘Take off your shoe, Jim!’ ”

  Jim, it seemed, could see the humor in almost any situation. For a while, the Hensons owned a horse named Peggy, a volatile creature that Jim and Kermit Scott would attempt to ride among the pecan trees near the Henson house. Instead, Peggy would bolt for the low-hanging branches to knock Jim, or anyone else, off her back. While Jim howled with laughter at the nerve of the horse, Scott was less amused. “Both of us nearly got killed,” he grumbled.

  Wild horses aside, Jim and Paul Jr. were always tinkering with something. While Paul was more mathematically inclined, working on detailed projects with small parts, Jim was the more ambitious of the two brothers, often taking on big, messy projects that required a great deal of space. While Jim and Paul were four years apart, they remained close—given his slight build, Paul was more comfortable playing with Jim and his friends than boys his own age (Paul Henson would, in fact, remain of slight build for the rest of his life)—and he and Jim would spend hours together in their side yard, hunched over model airplanes and crystal radio sets. Jim would always be a gadget freak, a passion he had likely inherited from his great-uncle Ernie, Dear’s younger brother, who had built his own crystal radio in the 1920s so he and Dear could listen to Two Black Crows together on the radio’s earpiece. To Frazier’s delight, Jim’s radios worked, too. “You could get one radio station very faintly,” said an impressed Frazier. “But it worked!”

  As much as Jim liked building radios and knowing how they worked, he loved listening t
o them even more. “Early radio drama was an important part of my childhood,” Jim said fondly. “I’d go home at four-thirty or five in the afternoon to hear shows like The Green Hornet, The Shadow and Red Ryder … and of course I loved the comedians.” Fibber McGee and Molly was one of Jim’s favorites, as was Jack Benny. But most of all, Jim lived for Sunday evenings, when NBC radio aired The Chase and Sanborn Hour, featuring ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy.

  Bergen was that oddest of phenomena—a ventriloquist who had rocketed to success on the radio, where no one could see the performance. Those watching Bergen live in the studio might have argued that was for the best, as Bergen’s ventriloquism skills could often get sloppy, his lips visibly moving when he spoke through his dummies. It was a charge Bergen shrugged off; to Bergen, the technique was secondary to the characters—and Bergen excelled both at creating memorable characters and bringing them to life almost purely through the sound of his voice. Bergen engaged his characters in rapid-fire banter so nimbly—rotating flawlessly between his own voice and the voices of his impish sidekick Charlie McCarthy or dimbulb Mortimer Snerd—that radio listeners were convinced they were real people. Jim Henson, for one, was certain of it. “I wasn’t thinking of any of those people as puppets,” he said. “They were human to me.”

  But it went even further than that, as Jim would explain years later; using a dummy allowed Bergen to do something indefinable. “Edgar Bergen’s work with Charlie and Mortimer was magic,” Jim enthused. “Magic in the real sense. Something happened when Edgar spoke through Charlie—things were said that couldn’t be said by ordinary people.” As Jim would discover, there was a kind of magic, a wonderful kind of freedom, involved in letting a character at the end of your arm give voice to sentiments one might not feel comfortable expressing while wearing the guise of, as Jim called them, “ordinary people.”

  In 1948, the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent the Henson family back to Maryland, where Paul returned to work at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. The family purchased a cozy new 1,500-square-foot house at 4002 Beechwood Road in the recently incorporated town of University Park, only a little more than a mile from the University of Maryland. It had been hard leaving Leland, not only for twelve-year-old Jim, but for his circle of friends as well. “I was really sad and upset that he was getting ready to move,” said Gordon Jones, who would also move from Leland a short time later. But being back in Maryland did bring with it one major blessing: it meant being close to Dear, who still lived with Pop in the house at 4306 Marion Street in Hyattsville, less than ten minutes away. Now, instead of gathering as a family perhaps once every three months, the Hensons and the Browns could get together every week to eat large family dinners around Dear’s meticulously set table, then retire to the porch to talk and tell stories as they rocked in rhythm on squeaking metal gliders. Those gatherings would always be some of Jim’s fondest memories. “There was so much laughter,” he said, “because everyone was always telling jokes and saying funny things.”

  It was easy to see where Betty Henson had gotten her sense of humor, for both Pop and Dear were funny, though in different ways. Where Dear tended toward the silly, Pop had a more “keen, subtle sense of humor.” But “he never laughed in ridicule,” Attie explained. “He didn’t think ridicule was funny at all.” In fact, Pop would never allow conversations to veer toward anything remotely unpleasant or disagreeable—a trait that would define Jim as well. “If the dinner conversation seemed to be getting out of hand,” recalled Paul Henson, “he’d get a Reader’s Digest and read to us!” Many times, Pop would come to the table with a joke or funny story already in mind, fully prepared if necessary to seize control of a wandering conversation or glum mood.

  Things could get even livelier at the holidays when Attie and Bobby and their families were added to the mix. “Fifteen or twenty people would be there, sitting around the dinner table,” Jim remembered, “and my grandparents would have stories to tell—usually stories from their childhood. They would tell a tale, and somebody would try to top it. I’ve always felt that these childhood experiences of my family sitting around the dinner table, making each other laugh, were my introduction to humor.” In fact, Jim’s own sense of humor was a heady mix of every kind of humor seated around the table—a touch of Dear’s laugh-out-loud sensibility, a bit of Paul’s quiet joy in storytelling, a dash of Betty’s twinkling delight in wordplay, then seasoned with Pop’s more subtle edge that always laughed with an audience, never at them.

  But by 1949, there was something else that had perhaps an even more pronounced effect on Jim. Always the gadget freak, there was a new device that had him absolutely fascinated. It was an obsession that would direct his focus, shape the artist he would become, and change the very course of his life.

  It was a television. And Jim was going to make certain he “drove ’em all crazy” until he had one.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A MEANS TO AN END

  1949–1955

  Jim’s first Muppet, Pierre the French Rat. (photo credit 2.1)

  THE STORY OF TELEVISION BEGINS—LIKE ANY GOOD AMERICAN SUCCESS story should—with a birth in a log cabin.

  More precisely, it begins in a log cabin near Beaver, Utah, where Philo Taylor Farnsworth—or Phil, as nearly everyone would call him—was born on August 19, 1906. A precocious child, everyone around him was certain Phil was a genius—and he didn’t disappoint. In 1919, at age thirteen, Phil invented a burglarproof ignition switch for automobiles, earning him an award from Science and Invention magazine. At seventeen, he entered Brigham Young University, specializing in chemistry and electronics. By age twenty, he was running his own business.

  But it was an idea that came to him at age fourteen—allegedly with one of those remarkable Eureka! moments that are probably too good a story to be entirely true—that would ensure Phil a place in the pantheons of both popular culture and history. In 1920, while tilling a potato field in a monotonous back and forth pattern with his horse-drawn plow, Phil imagined that an electron beam might scan an image in exactly the same way, moving across the image line-by-line.

  He was right—and on September 7, 1927, in a makeshift laboratory in a San Francisco loft, Philo T. Farnsworth transmitted the world’s first electronic television image: a straight white line scratched into a piece of black-painted glass. When the glass slide was slowly rotated ninety degrees, so, too, did the image on the screen. “There you are,” Farnsworth said with typical aplomb, “electronic television.”

  Farnsworth would become increasingly irritated with his best-known invention over the next twenty years—he even prohibited his own family from watching it—but his annoyance was definitely not shared by an eager viewing public. Even with little on television to watch in 1950, such scant fare had little effect on the public’s enthusiasm for the remarkable machine. As one historian later put it, “the simultaneity of television overrode all defects; when people could see things happening far away, they couldn’t get over the wonder of it.”

  For Jim Henson, that simultaneity was more than just exciting, it was practically magic. To the boy who had sat spellbound in the movie theater watching exotic tales of the Far East, this was like a genie’s sorcery. “I loved the idea that what you saw was taking place somewhere else at the same time,” Jim recalled. “It was one of those absolutely wonderful things.” After watching television at a friend’s house in late 1949, Jim was convinced his family had to have a television set of their very own. Now.

  There was one problem: as a relatively new and rare commodity—in 1948, there were an estimated 350,000 television sets in use, compared with 66 million radios—televisions were expensive. In 1950, a sixteen-inch black-and-white television—like the boxy Admiral, with an “Automatic Picture Lock-In” guaranteed to “bring you steady, clear reception even in hard to reach areas”—would set a family back $250, the equivalent of about $2,000 today. Fancier televisions with footed cabinets or, for the big money,
those with a radio and record player built in, could run as much as $399, about $3,500 today.

  Despite the costs, Jim was determined. “I badgered my family into buying a set,” he later admitted somewhat sheepishly. “I absolutely loved television.” It was a battle of wills Paul Henson, Sr., had little chance of winning. In 1950, Jim Henson had his television. And he watched it. Religiously.

  There were four television channels available in the Washington, D.C., area in 1950—not bad, considering that only two years earlier there were fewer than forty television stations broadcasting in only twenty-three cities nationally. In fact, by 1950, it was reported that people in the Baltimore-Washington area already spent more time watching TV than listening to the radio. As stations played with the new technology and different formats, local shows came and went, some wildly experimental, some mundane, and most lasting only a few weeks before being pulled from the air, never to be heard of again. Jim watched them all, and as he did so, one thing quickly became clear: “I immediately wanted to work in television.”

  Doing exactly what, he wasn’t certain—but in the meantime, Jim soaked up all television had to offer, including the conventions and formats that he would lovingly parody later in life, and the technical tricks he would master, then reinvent. He was especially intrigued with variety shows, one of the staples of the early television era, many with ensemble casts featuring comedians, singers, orchestras, magicians—and all performed live, with comedy sketches, songs, monologues, and performances of every kind boomeranging off each other at a breakneck pace. And more often than not, presiding over the show was a host or emcee, who was usually just as much a part of the chaos around him despite his best efforts to keep things moving smoothly. It was a format Jim found irresistible.