In fact, it was almost too easy for Jim to come up with increasingly ridiculous scenarios for punishing Wontkins—for Jim really didn’t like Wilkins coffee, or coffee of any kind for that matter. To Jim, the Wilkins commercials were a playful way of working out what it would take to get him to drink coffee—and the answer was: quite a lot. (Jim would, in fact, later politely gag down a sip of Wilkins coffee at a formal dinner at the Wilkinses’ home, much to the delight of Jane, who knew of his aversion to the stuff.) For the commercials, then, Jim would always perform the crotchety Wontkins, while Jane performed Wilkins, lip-synching the puppet to Jim’s prerecorded voice.
Jim’s early segments capitalized on his fondness for ending sketches with explosions—or, at least, on explosive variations. In one of the first spots Jim produced, Wilkins points a cannon at Wontkins and asks, “Okay, buddy, whattaya think of Wilkins coffee?” “I never tasted it,” Wontkins admits. Wilkins fires the cannon, blasting Wontkins off-screen, then turns the cannon toward the viewer. “Now what do you think of Wilkins?” he asks calmly. Quick cut to a shot of Wilkins coffee, commercial over, point made. In another, Wilkins and Wontkins stand at a microphone, as if aware they’re recording a commercial. “Care for a cup of Wilkins coffee?” asks Wilkins. “No, I don’t like coffee,” Wontkins growls—and a hand holding a pistol emerges from off-screen and shoots him pointblank. “This has been a public service!” Wilkins says to the viewer.
For Jim, this was an opportunity to gleefully indulge in near chaotic humor. And at only eight seconds, it all went by so quickly viewers hardly knew whether to shriek or laugh. As it turns out, they did both, exactly as Jim expected. In Wilkins and Wontkins, Jim had created the kind of silly and endearing characters that were already becoming his trademark—the kind of characters that could even let him get away with being a little dangerous. And as Jim had learned from Walt Kelly’s Pogo, your audience was willing to let you be a little subversive when you were giving them something fun to look at and, more important, when they were being entertained.
The ads were enormously successful, sending sales of Wilkins coffee soaring by 25 percent, and winning for Jim and Jane—and the Ver Standig advertising firm—local awards for excellence in advertising. “The commercials were an immediate hit and they made a big impact,” Jim recalled. “In terms of popularity of commercials in the Washington area, we were the number one, most popular commercial.” Many viewers, in fact, confessed that they were merely “sitting through” afternoon westerns or quiz shows in hopes of catching the latest commercial.
The Wilkins Company was delighted—“This is the biggest thing that has ever happened to Wilkins Coffee,” exclaimed John Wilkins—and for Helen Ver Standig, her confidence in Jim had been vindicated. “He had the creative ability of being able to get his audience to identify emotionally with his Muppets,” she said. “Everybody in the morning feels like killing their husband or wife anyway.… People went mad for these puppets.” So mad, in fact, that they spawned the first bit of Muppet-related merchandise, a pair of Wilkins and Wontkins “Hand Muppets” that fans could get by sending in a dollar and “the last inch of winding band on Wilkins Coffee.” Made of “soft but durable vinyl,” more than 25,000 pairs of Wilkins and Wontkins puppets sold during the 1958 Christmas season. Despite the use of the Muppet name in the promotion, Jim and Jane saw none of the profits—which at the time didn’t bother them much. “I’m sure it cost them more to make than they ever sold,” Jane said.
Jim and Jane would end up filming nearly 180 commercials for Wilkins coffee over the next several years—filmed mostly at Rodel Studios in Washington—coming up with new and more creative scenarios in which Wilkins could torment poor Wontkins. Some ads let Jim indulge in his delight for puns (“I shoulda saw this coming!” says a tied-up Wontkins as he inches toward a roaring buzz saw. “He always was a cutup!” Wilkins says, one-upping his partner for the punch line), play with nonsensical endings (Wontkins gets crushed by a falling Washington Monument), or indulge in good old-fashioned pie-in-the-face humor. Perhaps due to their obvious, almost aggressive glee, there were surprisingly few complaints about their cartoonish violence—in fact, most viewers understood exactly what Jim was up to. “The funniest thing we have seen in many a moon,” wrote one viewer. “[It] has a message that gets across to people in a most unusual way.”
Jim’s Wilkins commercials also caught the attention of other coffee companies across the eastern seaboard, who wanted the Muppets selling their coffee, too. “[The commercials] got a lot of talk, and so then the advertising agency started syndicating them and they would sell them to a coffee company in Boston, another coffee company in New York,” Jim recalled. “We had up to about a dozen or so clients going at the same time,” Jim said, including Community Coffee of Louisiana, La Touraine Coffee of Boston, Nash’s Coffee of Minnesota, and even the carbonated drink CalSo in California. “At that point, I was making a lot of money,” Jim said. That was typical understatement—in 1958 and 1959, Nash’s Coffee alone would pay Jim a total of $20,000 (about $150,000 today) for eight commercials. But it was also a lot of work, as Jim preferred to reshoot old Wilkins commercials using the names of the other products. For the perfectionist Jim, it would have been cheating, for example, to dub in the five syllables of “La Touraine Coffee” over Wilkins mouthing the four syllables for “Wilkins Coffee.”
Apart from their phenomenal marketing and financial success, the Wilkins spots marked another kind of personal victory for Jim. “That was almost the first voice stuff I did,” he noted proudly. Up until now, he had, by his own admission, done only “a couple of little tiny things” with voices on Sam and Friends. Now he was doing all his own voices, giving Wilkins, after a bit of experimentation, a slightly quavering voice pitched just a bit higher than his own, and Wontkins a gruff rasp, similar to the voice he would later use for Rowlf the Dog.
The Muppets were becoming wildly successful—in 1958, Sam and Friends would win an Emmy for Best Local Entertainment Program—and yet, Jim was still uncertain whether there was a future for him as a puppeteer. While the Muppets were still paying the bills—and, with their new foray into advertising, paying remarkably well—Jim was still looking toward a future as a painter or as a set designer, while Jane was hoping for a career in commercial art or fashion. In a profile of Jim in a 1958 issue of the University of Maryland’s Old Line magazine, Jim would only promise to “continue with the Muppets as long as there is a demand for them.”
Privately, in fact, Jim was ready to quit Sam and Friends altogether. “I decided to chuck it all and go off to be a painter,” Jim said. “I was an artist, you see, so I was going to take the shows off the air, just quit for a while.” Jim’s decision sent WRC executives scrambling for a way to keep their twenty-one-year-old ratings magnet on the payroll. “The station prevailed upon me,” Jim said later, laughing. “They said, ‘Look, we’ll pay you money and you can put somebody else doing the show,’ and so I realized I can get money and at the same time be off painting.”
To take over his performing duties on Sam and Friends, Jim engaged the services of a friend he had known since Northwestern High School, a fellow University of Maryland student named Bobby Payne. Payne, a quiet and somewhat shy young man, was awed by the supremely confident Jim. “He already knew what he was wanting!” Payne said with amazement. Late that spring, Jim picked up Payne in his convertible and drove to WRC’s new studios on Nebraska Avenue in Northwest Washington to give Payne a crash course in the Muppet style of performing.
Payne quickly came to appreciate the sheer strength and stamina Jim brought to the job. Performing Sam, Payne recalled, could be a workout. “He had this bar inside him that you could [use to shrug Sam’s shoulders],” said Payne. “It would kill you to do a whole number. He was made of plastic wood in his hands and head—he was just heavy!” But even as precise and as demanding as he could be, Jim was always patient and encouraging. “Jim more or less said, ‘You should be able to do anything,’ �
� Payne said. “And so he really challenged me to try to do those things.”
In June 1958, then, with the Muppets in good hands—in addition to hiring Payne as a performer, he had left the general management of the Muppets in the capable care of Jane—Jim “wandered over to Europe,” as he casually described it, with no real plan but to travel the continent and study painting. It would turn out to be a critical journey for Jim and his development as an artist—though not as the painter he had initially aspired to be.
Initially, Jim traveled in Europe with Joe Irwin, who was more than happy to continue in the same aide-de-camp role as he had for their cross-country trip, snapping pictures of Jim as he stood in front of the Eiffel Tower, stretching himself as tall and dignified as he could get, or gleefully leaping onto railroad tracks in Germany to pretend to push a freight train. As a twenty-one-year-old on his first European adventure, Jim was a whirlwind of activity, weaving through museums in France, scrambling over rocks in Lucerne, and craning his neck at barmaids in Germany. Irwin, who had enlisted in the military, finally had to leave Jim in France after a few weeks to report for active duty. “But I know the kind of adventures he had while in Paris,” Irwin said later, laughing. It was, as Irwin characterized it, “ ‘Sex on the Seine’ … I’m surprised he came back!”
For weeks, Jim simply roamed, attending the World’s Fair in Brussels, and gazing at paintings and sculpture in Switzerland, France, or Germany. But to his surprise, there was another art form Europeans enjoyed, and that they took just as seriously as painting or sculpture. “In Europe,” said Jim with amazement, “everyone goes to puppet shows.” As Joe Irwin recalled, Jim was particularly fascinated by the countless amateur Punch and Judy shows—and was even more intrigued with the reaction of the audiences, who hooted and hissed and actively engaged with the puppets, often throwing out story suggestions or having shouted conversations with the characters. It was one of the first times Jim had ever been an active audience member, and he “absolutely marveled” at how completely an audience could get caught up in the performance. “[Audiences] were very involved,” said Irwin. “These puppets became live entertainers, [especially] to the children.”
Jim traveled more deliberately now, seeking out puppet shows of every kind, and talking with puppeteers, puppet makers, even audiences. What he saw was craftspeople who took real pride in their work, painting elaborate wooden heads and sewing beautiful cloth puppets. He saw puppet theaters and sets that rivaled opera houses, while others were equally as gorgeous in their stark minimalism. “That was the first time I’d ever met any other puppeteers.… When I traveled around, I saw the work of a number of people,” Jim said. “They were very serious about their work. I thought that what they were doing was really interesting.”
It was a turning point. Until now, no matter how good or groundbreaking his own work might have been, Jim had always had Rudy Pugliese’s question burning in the back of his head: Why are you wasting your time with those puppets? Now he finally had his answer: he wasn’t. As he headed for home in August 1958 after six weeks abroad, he had made his decision. “It was at that point I realized the puppetry was an art form, a valid way to do really interesting things,” Jim remarked. “I came back from that trip all fired up to do wonderful puppetry.” He also came back with a beard, a variation on the European-style Vandyke, making a brushy circle around his mouth and trimmed to a slight point. It was both fashionable and, in Jim’s opinion, functional, as it covered the acne scars that were always more visible to himself than to others.
It was as if those few weeks in Europe had opened a creative floodgate—for what followed would be a period of enormous experimentation and artistic growth as Jim pursued a wide variety of interests and began to play with other forms of media. Many projects would never make it beyond the idea phase, drawn into Jim’s sketchbooks with elaborate notes, while others would result in wonderful bits of animation or recordings that Jim would keep privately to himself, satisfied merely with the act of creating and imagining. He was reaching out, exploring new ways to tell stories and create worlds, the ideas coming almost faster than he could scribble down or carry out.
That autumn, Jim took no courses at the University of Maryland. Invigorated by both the puppetry and the literature of his European trip, he was determined to stage a European-style production of Hansel and Gretel, and spent the fall filling pages of his sketchbooks with set designs and rough story outlines. Jim’s pencil drawings for Hansel and Gretel alone justify his initial enthusiasm for a career in set design; his sketches of a haunted forest are alive with energy, filled with smiling trees that twist themselves into thorny, gnarled knots, and grimacing tree stumps with spooky, blank, jack-o’-lantern eyes. It’s just the kind of place in which a fairy tale should exist, and Jim clearly had a sense of the look and feel of the world in which his story would take place—the same design mentality he would bring to The Dark Crystal two decades later. Working with Bobby Payne, Jim got as far as building several sets for Hansel and Gretel, as well as several puppets—including a witch with light-up eyes—but in the end Jim shelved the project, calling it “ridiculously overcomplicated.” Still, the writing and design work had been good experience. Jim was becoming a storyteller.
Even without Hansel and Gretel, there was plenty to keep Jim busy. First and foremost, Jim returned to school full-time in 1959, determined to complete his degree. On the work end of things, during Jim’s absence, WRC had made the Muppets a regular part of In Our Town, a half-hour daily variety show airing at 1:00 each afternoon, giving the Muppets three regular spots in the daily lineup. Jim also arranged for more appearances on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show and continued to film commercials for Wilkins and other coffee companies at the rate of about one a week.
With a steady income and the Muppets increasingly in demand, Jim and Jane were ready to take their business to the next level. Moving beyond a mere business partnership, they decided to create their own company—and in 1958, Jim and Jane officially established Muppets, Inc. While Jim always described them as equal partners in the business, Jane would always refer to Jim as the boss. Jim replied that if he was, indeed, the boss, it was “just a little bit.” In truth, it was more than just a little bit; Jim had drawn up the papers for Muppets, Inc. so that he owned 60 percent of the company to Jane’s 40.
But there was another relationship Jim wanted to make official as well. “When he came back from Europe, he had it in his mind that we were supposed to get married,” Jane said later. “He said, ‘We’re going to do this with the puppets and then we’re going to get married.’ ”
The proposition wasn’t entirely out of the blue. In the four years the two of them had been working together, they had developed an ability to speak without talking, each almost intuitively understanding what the other was thinking. It made for great puppetry, and lately it had made for some interesting moments for Jim’s fiancée Anne Marie, and Jane’s fiancé, Bill. “I remember an elevator ride at WRC one night, when Jim had gone up to get Anne Marie from school,” Jane said. “And we’re all [four] in the elevator … and Jim and I were like, ‘You know, we’re here and that’s important but those other two people don’t need to be here.’ It was that kind of feeling about it. We had a kind of permanency about us.”
And so the engagements were broken off, and Jim and Jane had gone out a few times—dinner at a Mexican restaurant where Jim was more interested in the murals than the meal, going ice skating, or attending outdoor performances by the Kingston Trio or Harry Belafonte—but mostly, said Jane, “they weren’t dates, they were working situations.” Their courtship was part of Jim’s life plan, the next logical step after forming Muppets, Inc. toward becoming Jim Henson. Jim and Jane’s relationship was based on passion—passion for art, for performance, and for each other—but it was more a business proposal than a marriage proposal. “It was like, ‘Do I have a choice in this?’ ” Jane recalled, laughing at first about their unusual courtship—but then grew more refle
ctive about their complex thirty-year relationship. “Every marriage comes with an agreement, and our agreement was that we would support his work,” she said firmly. “So, in many ways, the work came first. That’s not necessarily a good agreement. This isn’t against Jim—I just think that the general agreement of the whole marriage and family thing was that the work was primary. Where that came from I’m not really sure. I guess it’s because Jim and I were working [when we] got married, but that wasn’t always a good agreement … and it really was not supposed to be questioned.
“I can say this about Jim and me,” she said finally. “He is totally a natural leader. And I am absolutely a follower. I really am. I’m pretty good at allowing things to happen when they’re supposed to rather than being a leader. But Jim was always a leader. Always.”
To those who knew of Jim’s penchant for “the cheerleader type,” the artsier Jane didn’t seem, on the face of it, to be Jim’s sort. But Joe Irwin, who knew them both, thought he understood. Jane had one thing to which Jim would always be attracted: talent. She was also warm and “had an artistic bent,” Irwin explained, which Jim found compelling. But there was also, he thought, a mutual sexual attraction that Jim couldn’t deny. Jane was three years Jim’s senior, and older—and more experienced—than most girls Jim had dated. “She was mature,” Irwin said delicately, “and probably more adventurous.”
Jane couldn’t deny there was an intense intimacy there—that “permanency” that Jane had sensed during their elevator ride at WRC. “We were very fond of being with each other,” Jane said. “There was a love there. Quite honestly, I can’t remember falling in love; it was more like a recognition of ‘Look, this is what’s been happening.’ ” It had been, as many would say later, admiration at first sight.
Jim Henson: The Biography Page 9
