Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  The newly christened Muppets, as part of the Afternoon lineup, would be going out live over the air each day, and Jim and Jane were expected to come prepared with new pieces to perform. There was little time for rehearsals from one show to another, but Jim—as he would for the rest of his life—seemed to thrive on the spontaneous, seat-of-the-pants performing. According to host Mac McGarry, Jim was able to work out his routines “just by sitting down and thinking for a few minutes.”

  As its talented cast began to learn to play off of each other’s strengths, Afternoon quickly built a following. Washington Post reviewer Lawrence Laurent elegantly described the show as “integrated chaos,” which seemed to be the kind of atmosphere in which Jim would flourish. But looking back, Jim wasn’t happy with what he called his “little entertainment pieces,” which mostly involved having the Muppets lip-synch to novelty records. “The work I did in those days is not stuff that I’m creatively very proud of,” Jim said later. “That stuff was really experimenting and it was just stuff that I did as a lark. I was going to college and so I was doing this and it was a way of working my way through school.”

  Jim was so uncertain about his performance, in fact, that he approached a WRC reporter who was rumored to have an inside line with Kovach and asked “in his stumbling unsure way” if the reporter could talk with Kovach about getting Jim a job with the floor crew. The reporter—or so the story goes—told Jim to stick with his Muppets and “get very rich.”

  The Afternoon crew were dazzled not only by the Muppets, but by their quiet, unassuming creator. “Jim Henson was a very nice young guy. Thoughtful. Obviously a genius in the making,” remembered host Mac McGarry. “Everybody loved his characters.… He subdued his own being and made his characters come to life. It was not too long on the show before I realized I was not talking to Jim Henson. These characters were there, independently. They have their own being.” But it was Afternoon producer-director Carl Degen who most neatly summed up the consensus around the studio: “The kid is positively a genius,” Degen told The Washington Post. “He’s absolutely amazing.”

  As Jane recalled, she and Jim were originally put on Afternoon “to do spots for children. But we were college students amusing ourselves, and we did these wild things with the puppets, lip-synching to Stan Freberg records—like his takeoff on ‘Banana Boat’—and things like that.” The madcap recordings of Stan Freberg were, in fact, a favorite not only of Jim’s, but also of other performers and sometime puppeteers like Soupy Sales, who often used Freberg’s songs for his puppets Pookie and Hippie to clown to. Freberg had a sense of humor very similar to Jim’s, as both adored bad puns, non sequiturs, deadpan delivery of a punch line, and silly songs. But what made Freberg’s records especially useful was that his recordings were fully realized routines—three frantic minutes filled with jokes, sound effects, conversations, and commentary that made them perfect for several Muppets to lip-synch and perform to.

  Other times, Jim would choose tamer and more straightforward material, like contemporary songs, which made for routines that were often funnier than those using novelty records simply because Jim would make them so waggishly ridiculous—dressing characters in wigs, concluding the songs with an explosion, or having one creature devour another, just the kind of absurd ending Jim loved. “We very often would take a song and do strange things to it … that nobody could understand,” Jim said. “I always enjoyed those!” Looking back, Jane, too, could only shrug and laugh. “I guess it had a quality of abandon and nonsense and of being somewhat experimental,” she said. Afternoon’s music director Mel Clement—who remembered absolutely “falling down” with laughter at the Muppet sketches—was impressed. “Those kids,” Clement said admiringly of Jim and Jane, “knocked us all out.”

  They were knocking out plenty of others, too. In the spring of 1955, after a little less than two months of performing on Afternoon, Jim and Jane were offered the chance to create their own five-minute show on WRC, in a prime piece of TV real estate: 11:25 P.M., the five-minute slot between the local evening news and the Tonight show with Steve Allen. “A choice time slot,” Jane remarked.

  It was indeed—one that Jim would make the most of. The Muppets were on their way.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SAM AND FRIENDS

  1955–1957

  Jim with the cast of Sam and Friends, 1961. (photo credit 3.1)

  ON MONDAY, MAY 9, 1955, NINE WEEKS TO THE DAY AFTER THE DEBUT of Afternoon, Jim and Jane’s five-minute romp Sam and Friends premiered on WRC-TV. There was actually little fanfare; there was no brief mention in the “TV Highlights” section, as had marked Afternoon’s first appearance, only a single word inserted after the hyper-abbreviated TV listings for WRC’s 11:00 P.M. news broadcast with anchorman Richard Harkness: “Harkness; Wthr. Sports; Muppets.”

  Despite its initial quiet appearance in the TV listings, there was nothing calm or serene about Sam and Friends. Unshackled from Afternoon’s variety show format, Jim and Jane were free to create their own manic world for their Muppets, giving them their own slightly skewed reality. For their Muppet cast, Jim turned to the growing collection of Muppets he had built, many of which he had already been using on Afternoon. For his new show’s point man, Jim had decided on Sam, a bald, bulb-nosed human character, with knobby ears that stuck straight out from his head and wide-open eyes that gave him a perpetually surprised look. “I made him originally to use with Phil Harris records,” Jim said, “but he proved the most popular Muppet of all. That gave us the idea for Sam and Friends.”

  The “Friends” of Sam and Friends, however, were more abstract, hazily defined and colorfully named: Harry the Hipster, a snakelike beatnik in sunglasses; Yorick, a prune-colored, skull-like creature that was id incarnate; the beak-nosed Hank and Frank; the squashed-looking Mushmellon. Considerable thought had gone into both the concept of the show and the design of the Muppet cast. The title was no mere throwaway; there was actual method to the show’s madness. At its core, Sam and Friends was all about the quiet, amiable Sam making his way through life with the help of his Friends—“abstract companions” who egg him on, move him forward, and encourage him through their own loony behavior, even if that behavior was still nothing more than lip-synching to records. The Friends, while real to Sam and to viewers, explained Jane, “are actually within him, within Sam.” A rather high-brow conceit for a show that got its biggest laughs from characters exploding, but it was typical Jim: even a five-minute comedy romp, no matter how absurd, had to mean something.

  There was another abstract Muppet in Sam’s cast who, while still only relegated to mostly small parts—and usually getting devoured at the end—already had a special place in Jim’s heart. It was a puppet Jim had built while passing several long sad days tending to his grandfather Pop, who was slowly dying of heart failure—a puppet that, even early on, Jim would always call his favorite.

  It was a milky blue character named Kermit.

  Maury Brown had always been frail—his daughters remember him demanding quiet in the house to ease his nerves—and in 1955, a doctor had insisted that he and Dear move from their two-story home on Marion Street into a smaller, single-story apartment. The move had depressed Pop—“he intended to die in that house” on Marion Street, Attie said—and his health had deteriorated rapidly, as Pop grew increasingly senile even as his heart failed. Jim was shaken by the impending death of his grandfather—he had, after all, been partly named for him—but Jim would do as he always did in the face of grief: he would build and create. Foraging for any suitable materials, Jim settled on his mother’s old felt coat, and as he leaned over the table in the Hensons’ living room he sewed a simple puppet body, with a slightly pointed face, out of the faded turquoise material. For eyes, he simply glued two halves of a Ping-Pong ball—with slashed circles carefully inked in black on each—to the top of the head. That was it. From the simplest of materials—and, perhaps appropriately, from a determination to bring a bit of order from darkness�
�Kermit was born.

  Those who knew Jim as a boy would often wonder if he had named his most famous creation after his childhood friend Kermit Scott. The answer—according to both Jim and Kermit Scott—was no. The name Kermit, while quirky, was by no means uncommon in 1955; President Theodore Roosevelt had named his second son Kermit in 1889, which made the name somewhat faddish in the first half of the twentieth century. To Jim, though, as with grackle or Muppet, it was all about the sound of the word; with its hard K, pressed M, and snapped T, the name Kermit was memorable and fairly funny.

  As a relatively no-frills puppet, Kermit was the epitome of elegant simplicity, which made him that much more fun for Jim to play with. “Kermit started out as a way of building, putting a mouth and covering over my hand,” Jim later explained. “There was nothing in Kermit outside of the piece of cardboard—it was originally cardboard—and the cloth shape that was his head. He’s one of the simplest kinds of puppet you can make, and he’s very flexible because of that … which gives him a range of expression. A lot of people build very stiff puppets—you can barely move the things—and you can get very little expression out of a character that you can barely move. Your hand has a lot of flexibility to it, and what you want to do is to build a puppet that can reflect all that flexibility.”

  If Kermit was one of the most flexible of Muppets, one thing he was not—at least not yet—was a frog. While it is nearly impossible for viewers today to watch Kermit on Sam and Friends and think of him as anything but a frog, viewers in 1955 saw him as simply another of the silly supporting cast. Oddly colored—“milky turquoise” Jim called it—with padded oval feet, Kermit was still as vague a being as the fuzzy Mushmellon, or the wide-mouthed Moldy Hay. “I didn’t call him a frog,” Jim said. “All the characters in those days were abstract because that was part of the principle that I was working under, that you wanted abstract things.”

  For Jim, that abstraction was also, in some ways, an exciting way of challenging his audience—of making them an active part of the performance. “Those abstract characters I still feel are slightly more pure,” Jim later explained. “If you take a character and you call him a frog … you immediately give the audience a handle. You’re assisting the audience to understand; you’re giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don’t give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it’s almost more pure. It’s a cooler thing. It’s a difference of sort of warmth and cool.”

  It wasn’t only their abstract quality that made Jim’s Muppets—and Sam and Friends—unlike anything on television. Until Jim and the Muppets, puppetry on TV had essentially looked like filmed puppet shows—on Kukla, Fran and Ollie, for instance, Burr Tillstrom performed his puppets while standing behind a puppet stage, poking his characters out underneath a gauzy curtain as he stood concealed behind the proscenium. Jim had sometimes performed in a similar manner on Afternoon, squatting down behind low walls or maneuvering puppets up through openings in sets when the show required the Muppets to interact with the human cast members. But that was really still just a puppet show on television, and not a puppet television show.

  Like Ernie Kovacs before him, who understood that a mutual tilt of the camera and the set could playfully manipulate an audience’s perception, Jim, too, was intuitively aware that he could use the eye of the camera—and the four sides of a home viewer’s television screen—to create his own reality. Now that there was no need for his Muppets to coexist with live actors, Jim saw that no puppet theater was needed at all—that, in fact, the space between the four sides of the TV screen was his puppet theater. Jim had learned Kovacs’s lesson well; namely, a television audience can only see what you choose for it to see. No walls were needed to conceal the puppeteer when he or she could kneel down just out of sight of the camera, giving the Muppets the entire viewing area in which to perform and exist.

  But Jim understood that it went even deeper than that. Jim knew that for all its technical prowess, the television camera is, in a sense, blind. It has no peripheral vision, and it doesn’t get distracted by what’s taking place just beyond the range of its lens. All it sees is what is visible through the eyepiece, no more, no less—and Jim instinctively appreciated that if the eye of the camera defines your performance, then you’d better make certain you know exactly what the camera is seeing. The only way to do this, then, was to watch the performance on a television monitor.

  At first, it was merely a matter of spot-checking their performance, making sure heads were out of sight and the Muppet was centered on a screen, similar to a habit Burr Tillstrom had developed on Kukla, Fran and Ollie, where Tillstrom would often keep a TV placed off to one side to keep an eye on how his puppet theater looked on camera. Soon Jim and Jane had monitors placed in opposite corners of the studio, so no matter which way a performer was facing, a monitor was visible. Eventually, Jim had one small monitor placed on the floor directly in front of the performers, where he and Jane could closely scrutinize the performance from their knees. But Jim’s approach to the use of the monitor differed from Tillstrom’s in a significant way. For Tillstrom, the monitor was passive, merely relaying the performance, which remained confined by the puppet theater. But for Jim, the monitor was the puppet theater—as such, it defined the performance.

  Moreover, using the monitor to watch themselves perform on screen made the show that much better. Unlike other television actors, who can’t see their own performance as it happens, “you can actually see what you are doing as you do it,” Jim explained, “and have the opportunity to modify your performance for better effect.” It also allowed the puppeteer to share the viewing experience with the audience at home—a dynamic Jane found particularly thrilling. “You’d perform but you’d also be the audience,” said Jane. “I think that’s a big difference, because the people at home watching are seeing a very intimate, internal thing that’s happening with that performer.”

  While the use of the monitor was a brilliant innovation, it required one real bit of mental gymnastics: since the performer is facing the camera, what he sees on the monitor in front of him is essentially his own image in reverse. So, while the performer might be moving a Muppet to his or her own left, on the television monitor, it moves to the right—a bit of reverse orientation that takes some getting used to. But for Jim, the effort was worth it to get the performance exactly right. “After you go through working with the monitor for a particular period of time,” said Jim, “then it’s totally automatic and you never even think about it.”

  Now that Jim had removed the need for a puppet theater—and, through the use of the monitor, given the performer the ability to watch and modify his performance—the Muppets themselves suddenly, almost magically, had a life of their own. In the eyes of the camera, it was as if they were simply actors being filmed. “What Jim came to love right away was how convincing the reality is on a television screen,” Jane said. “It’s not like going from a [puppet] stage at all; the reality was extraordinary.” So long as Jim and Jane were careful to remain out of the shot, the Muppets could move freely anywhere in the viewing area, even approaching the camera—and the audience—for an intimate close-up, something that could not happen with a traditional puppet theater. This was something brand-new: it was puppetry made expressly for the medium of television, making TV’s strengths and weaknesses work for the performer.

  For Jim, it had all been a matter of problem solving—and his relative inexperience in both puppetry and television allowed him to look for solutions that might not have occurred to more seasoned performers, even when, as in the case of the television monitor, that solution was lying in plain sight. “Many of the things I’ve done in my life have basically been self-taught,” Jim admitted later. “I had never worked with puppets … and even when I began on television, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I’m sure this was a good thing, because I learned as I tackled each problem. I think if you study—if you learn too much of what others have done—you may tend to take the same direction
as everybody else.”

  There was little danger of Jim doing that—he was already too far ahead of everybody else. Still, for all his success and innovation, Jim was always respectful of the work of his predecessors in television. The differences in their approaches both to puppetry and the television medium, were, he thought, simply generational—a matter of when you learned the craft and what media were available when you began performing. “Burr Tillstrom and the Bairds had more to do with the beginning of puppetry on television than we did,” Jim explained. “But they had developed their art and style to a certain extent before hitting television.”

  Jim’s puppets, however, were born in and made for the television generation—and as such, they had to look good on TV. “We pretty much had a form and a shape by that time—a style,” Jim said of his early days on television, “and I think one of the advantages of not having any relationship to any other puppeteer was that it gave me a reason to put [the form and shapes of the Muppets] together myself for the needs of television.” Jim would have no marionette strings in the shot, or painted wooden heads frozen into perpetual grins, breaking the illusion. With the TV camera allowing for close-ups, Jim wanted his puppets to breathe with a life of their own, with working mouths and hands, capable of expression and personality. “Very early on we discovered what you could do with the flexibility of the faces,” Jim said. “It was a question of combining that with what you could do with the hand in order to get the expressions to work. Most puppeteers at that time still worked with absolutely rigid faces, and generally no expression at all, because—before television—puppets were generally meant to be seen at a distance of fifteen to twenty feet,” he explained. “I think we were among the first to design puppets specifically for television, where you’re relating to the camera and working with what you can do with the face seen from very close.” “[They were] puppets that didn’t look like puppets had ever looked,” recalled Muppet veteran Jerry Juhl. “It was the mobility of the faces, and the total abstraction of them.… They were just mind-blowing, certainly to puppeteers.”