In early 1961, Jane learned she was pregnant with their second child. Jim was delighted—and he and Jane decided the time was right to make a difficult but crucial decision: following the birth of their next child, Jane would retire from performing. For now, she would remain an active performer for as long as she could—and would always stay involved with the company even as she devoted herself nearly full-time to the children. But with the Muppets showing no signs of waning in popularity—and Jim increasingly anxious to expand into other media—Jim was going to need help sooner rather than later.
That summer, Jim, one-year-old Lisa, and a very pregnant Jane made the trip to the Puppeteers of America convention in Asilomar, California, driving out this time in a much more comfortable but significantly less flashy station wagon. While Jim didn’t necessarily regard this as a recruiting trip, he was always interested in watching others perform and making contacts. His trip to the Detroit convention had sparked a professional friendship with Burr Tillstrom and led him to Bernie Brillstein. The journey to California, however, would mark the beginning of an even more extraordinary relationship.
Arriving at the convention, Jim immediately attached himself to Mike Oznowicz and his wife, Frances, two talented performers he had met briefly at the Detroit convention in 1960. The Dutch-born Oznowicz had fled Nazi-occupied Europe with his family in the late 1930s, taking refuge first in North Africa and then England, where Frances bore two sons—her second, Frank Richard Oznowicz, would be born in Hereford, England, on May 25, 1944—before immigrating to the United States in 1951. Arriving in New York, Oznowicz spent his last dollar putting his pregnant wife and two sons safely on the train for their new home in Montana, where the family who had sponsored their immigration were waiting, then hitchhiked the rest of the way himself. After a short stay in Montana, the family moved to Oakland, California, living briefly in an attic until Mike found employment as a window dresser for women’s apparel stores. A lifelong puppetry enthusiast, Mike and his wife had become active members of the Puppeteers of America and were, in Jim’s opinion, “marvelous, very outgoing” people and terrific performers.
Jim was just as intrigued by their son Frank, now a quietly intense teenager approaching his senior year in high school, and already a gifted performer of marionettes. But despite his talent, for the young Frank Oznowicz—he would later shorten it to Oz—puppetry was only a hobby, and an almost incidental one at that, placing a distant third behind girls and sports. “I never wanted to be a puppeteer,” Oz said. Still, it was difficult to ignore puppetry in the Oznowicz home—“Our house was like a salon for puppeteers and performers,” Oz said later—and by his own admission he had “latched on to” puppetry both as a way of pleasing his parents and to raise money for a planned trip to Europe. At age fourteen, then, he had joined Lettie Schubert’s traveling Vagabond Puppets team at the Oakland Recreation Department, then performed regularly—and without pay—at Fairyland Amusement Park, where he struck up a friendship with a young man named Jerry Juhl, five years his senior, and an equally talented performer who had lately become a regular in the Oznowicz home “salon.”
Oz had come to the Asilomar convention mainly to perform with Juhl and another Vagabond puppeteer in a show Juhl had written called The Witch Who Stole Thursday; he also wanted to participate in a talent contest, which, predictably, he won. While his parents had met Jim in Detroit a year earlier, Oz knew nothing about him, though he was slightly familiar with the Muppets, thanks to the Wilkins and Wontkins commercials Jim had produced for the regional carbonated drink CalSo. Those ads had impressed him, Oz remembered, because “they weren’t like anything else!” When he finally met Jim in person, Oz couldn’t help but be enchanted by the soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old who could suddenly become a manic force of nature once a puppet was placed in his hands. “He was this very quiet, shy guy,” Oz said, “who did these absolutely fucking amazing puppets that were totally brand new and fresh, that had never been done before.”
Once in Jim’s presence, it was easy to get caught up in the excitement, and Oz—who admitted that puppetry was a good way for a self-described “shy, self-effacing boy” to express himself—performed several short routines with his father, including a sketch called “Sunday Painter,” in which a painter sets out to paint a picture of an uncooperative flower, which sags and rights itself, much to the painter’s frustration. Afterward, Jim pulled Oz aside to discuss the performance. “He said, ‘The ending is weak!’ ” Oz recalled, still laughing at the comment five decades later. “That was very Jim. My ending was a bit arty, whereas Jim liked things to be blown up or eaten!”
Despite the ending, Jim was impressed enough with the young man’s skills to discuss with Mike and Frances Oznowicz the possibility of their son coming back east to join him at Muppets, Inc. But Oz was barely seventeen, and still in high school. “He was really still at home and not ready to come east,” Jim remembered, “but we talked about it as an idea.” And with that idea, a seed had been planted—one that would grow and blossom into one of the finest, and funniest, creative and productive partnerships in entertainment.
Years later, Jim would admit that there were moments in his life when he felt that “somebody or something” was guiding him. This felt like one of those moments—and he would later chalk up his lifelong partnership with Frank Oz to a fortunate bit of serendipity. “I think it was an accident,” Jim said years later. “I don’t think I was consciously looking for somebody.” Instead, somebody or something had found them for each other. Oz might have agreed: it was only by chance that he had even been at the convention in the first place. “I never used to go to [puppetry conventions] ever … except for this one I went to when I was seventeen years old, and Jim happened to be there.”
For now, Oz would remain in California to finish high school. But Oz thought he knew someone else who might work well with Jim, and recommended Jim speak to his fellow Vagabond puppeteer, Jerry Juhl.
Juhl, unlike Oz, did want to be a puppeteer. Born Jerome Ravn Juhl in St. Paul, Minnesota, the twenty-one-year-old Juhl had been building and performing puppets since the age of eleven—and after moving to Menlo Park, California, had founded the Menlo Marionettes while still in high school. After graduating from San Jose State College with a degree in speech and drama, he had joined, then headed, the Vagabond Puppets—where he tapped the young Frank Oz as his assistant—and co-created and performed the puppet Pup on the local children’s television show Sylvie and Pup. With his thick glasses and neatly coiffed hair, Juhl looked more like an insurance salesman than a puppeteer. But behind the businesslike demeanor was a wit as rapier sharp as Jim’s, and the same sense of playful fun.
Juhl was familiar with the Muppets through their various television appearances, and found their unpredictable edge strangely fascinating. “The Muppets already had a cult following,” Juhl said, “with a reputation for bizarre, slightly dangerous comedy.” Juhl was unprepared, then, for his first glimpse of the man responsible for such outlandish humor. “Jim seemed so utterly normal,” Juhl recalled. “He had driven across the country in a shiny new station wagon with his wife, Jane, and baby Lisa. They looked as average and suburban as actors in a Chevrolet commercial.”
Jim invited Juhl out to the parking lot where he had parked his station wagon with the large black box of Muppets in the back. In a scene that would have been familiar to Bernie Brillstein, Jim opened the box, took out his Muppets one by one, and began to perform. And like Brillstein, Juhl never forgot what he saw that afternoon:
The things he brought out of that box seemed to me to be magical presences, like totems, but funnier. An angry creature whose whole body was a rounded triangle; a purple skull named Yorick; a green froglike thing. One after another, Jim pulled them from the box, put them on his hand and brought them to life. Who was this Henson guy? These things weren’t puppets—not as I had ever seen or defined them.
Juhl was speechless. “This guy was like a sailor who had studied the com
pass and found that there was a fifth direction in which one could sail.” There was no doubt in his mind as to his decision. “When he offered me a berth on that ship, I signed on,” making Juhl the first official full-time employee of Muppets, Inc.
Shortly after returning to Maryland in August, Jane gave birth to their second child, Cheryl. The newly hired Jerry Juhl took over Jane’s performing duties on Sam and Friends, which was still one of WRC’s most popular programs after more than six years. Jim, however, was again growing tired of the five-minutes-twice-a-day routine of Sam and Friends. The show had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams—but Jim was dreaming even wilder now, and was looking for opportunities to try something new.
He would have his chance sooner than expected, thanks to a fortuitous invitation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture—an invitation so out of the blue that it may have come about, in part, through Paul Henson’s contacts inside the USDA. In mid-November 1961, the USDA would be hosting a weeklong U.S. Food Fair in Hamburg, Germany—part of the U.S. government’s effort to “develop and expand the sale and use of U.S. foods and agriculture products and commodities” throughout Europe—and fair officials were wondering if Jim, and Sam and Friends, might be interested in providing entertainment at one of the pavilions.
Jim agreed to participate—but not with Sam and Friends. For Jim, this was the opportunity he had been looking for to try something different—and, better yet, it could be done far away from a home crowd that still expected Sam and Kermit to lip-synch to Stan Freberg records. He and Juhl set to work writing a number of skits that would allow them to showcase several new kinds of puppets, and even tapped the brilliant young beat comedian Del Close—whose work Jim was likely familiar with through Close’s 1959 comedy record How to Speak Hip—to write a sketch for the show. If the Hamburg fair was a trial run for the next stage of Muppets, Inc., Jim was taking the opportunity seriously, diligently typing up a formal presentation for government officials, renewing his passport, and corresponding politely with USDA employees who were convinced they knew better than Jim what was funny. For Jim, it wasn’t just about being funny; it was also about gauging the audience’s response to new kinds of puppetry and performances and figuring out what worked and what didn’t. “If … one or two of these bits either doesn’t live up to expectations, or doesn’t perform well with the audiences,” Jim assured his hosts, “I will withdraw that particular bit and double up one of the others.”
One of the first sketches presented in Hamburg was “The Drill Team,” featuring, as Jim explained, “a rather ingenious set of mechanical puppets”—a military drill team made of wood, each with moving arms and painted, smiling faces, mounted to a rolling rack so the figures would move in unison. The piece—which mainly involved their commanding officer barking inarticulate orders as he put the drill team through their moves—was full of little surprises: the drill team fired guns that emitted smoke—usually just powder blown through a straw—and when at the end of the skit the team trained its fire on their captain, the figure’s nose lit up. But the audience responded with only polite enthusiasm. While Jim would haul the routine out from time to time over the next few years, he would eventually shelve it.
Much better received was “The Chef’s Salad,” an improv piece featuring Omar as an inattentive chef who crazily cuts up food—and everything else—as he prepares a salad. For the first time, Jim performed with a “live hand” puppet, in which the main puppeteer performs the puppet’s mouth and inserts his other hand—usually the left, since most right-handed puppeteers prefer to operate the character’s mouth with their dominant hand—into the puppet’s left glove hand. Meanwhile, a second performer, in this case Juhl, operates the puppet’s right hand. This setup requires a great deal of coordination to ensure the puppeteers work seamlessly—the right hand needs to know almost instinctively what the left hand is up to—but when done well, it allows the puppet to handle objects deftly and turn in a much more believable performance. In this case, Jim and Juhl performed the character flawlessly, with Jim ranting in mock German as they hurled cheese and eggs into a bowl, blew Omar’s nose into a handkerchief—which was thrown in the bowl as well—then stirred the mix with gusto. Jim still couldn’t resist ending the sketch in true Muppet fashion—the concoction exploded in Omar’s face—and the crowd roared its approval. The piece would stay, and fifteen years later, Jim would use almost exactly the same setup—all the way down to the mock foreign dialect—for The Muppet Show’s Swedish Chef.
One of the most ambitious and weirdly odd pieces was a lip-synch performance to Marlene Dietrich’s “Time on My Hands,” performed by a new puppet Jim called Limbo the Floating Face. Limbo, as Jim described it, was “a very flexible face”—mostly just a mouth and eyes—performed by tugging on an elaborate rigging of nearly invisible fish line at the bottom of a frame that caused the foam rubber mouth to open and close and the eyes to widen or crinkle shut. It was a complicated puppet, and Jim was proud of it, calling it “revolutionary.” The Hamburg crowd greeted the performance warmly, though with some confusion—but Jim was pleased with it and would perform variations on the piece for the next decade, unveiling it on talk shows and, in an ambitious computer-animated form, on Sesame Street.
The USDA was thrilled with Jim and Jerry’s performance, hailing it as “a spectacular feat of entertainment,” and Jim must have been pleased as his plane touched down in New York at the end of November. For the most part, the performances had been a departure from his more familiar style of Muppets, but the crowd had responded favorably. With some more work, he could start introducing these more experimental forms of puppetry in front of American audiences.
First, however, it was time to close up shop on Sam and Friends. Sam would make his exit quite literally with a bang, as the final episode—broadcast at 11:25 on Friday, December 15, 1961—would conclude with what was becoming a Muppet kind of ending, with the Sam and Friends set exploding and falling to pieces around the cast.
There was an uproar from Sam’s fans over its demise, but Jim was too busy to notice. In February 1962, he and Jerry Juhl headed for Europe again, this time to take part in a “Green Week” show in Berlin, hosted by the U.S. Information Agency. Jim chose to perform many of the same skits he and Juhl had used in the Hamburg show, with one major addition: he was determined, after the lukewarm reception of the “Drill Team” piece in Hamburg, to come up with a mechanical puppet performance that worked.
He succeeded, for the most part, because the new performance was so funny. Lampooning “the average European impression of the average American tourist,” Jim’s new mechanical puppets were based on the stereotype of the ugly American, featuring a cigar-chomping loudmouth in a Hawaiian shirt who demands he be sold one of the Alps so he can build a hotel, and an abrasive, gum-smacking woman who patronizingly advises audiences to always learn a few words in a foreign language “to make the natives feel more at home.” The audience loved it, and Jim went home satisfied with his early experiment in animatronics—a field he would come to redefine decades later in his highly successful and always innovative Creature Shop.
In June 1962, Jim and his team—including Jane, Jerry Juhl, and Bobby Payne—traveled by train to Atlanta, Georgia, to tape a half-hour pilot Jim and Juhl had written, called Tales of the Tinkerdee. Tinkerdee was Jim’s opportunity to work with the conceits of folklore and fairy tales, still of great interest to him since his visit to Europe, and to put to work—in a pared-down manner—some of the “overcomplicated” storytelling elements of the unrealized Hansel and Gretel project. Instead of adapting an existing story, however, Tinkerdee allowed Jim to create his own magical kingdom, populate it with his own characters, and tell a story in his own unique madcap style without the need to be deferential to source material. It would also be a chance to introduce a number of live hand Muppets, the first Jim would use in an American production following their successful Hamburg debut.
The plot of Tinkerdee revolves around King Go
shposh and his plans to throw a birthday party for his daughter, Princess Gwendolinda, and the parallel efforts of Taminella Grinderfall, “the witchiest witch of all,” to crash the party, conk the princess on the head, and make off with the gifts. With the help of Charlie the Ogre, Taminella uses a variety of disguises to infiltrate the castle, where she is finally caught and imprisoned by the king. “It was really just half-an-hour of one-line jokes,” said Juhl later. “We’d done those kind of gags before, on Sam and Friends … but this was the first time we’d stretched them to fill thirty minutes.”
Stretched was a rather unfair assessment, for Tinkerdee is a gallopingly fast-paced piece. At no time does the camera linger or the pace sag, and with only six speaking characters, Jim makes all their moments count. Jim’s King Goshposh is the kind of clueless authority figure Jim loved to play, dispensing nuggets of dopey advice while gnawing on a cigar (in a masterful bit of puppet design and craftsmanship, the cigar seeped real smoke). Jim himself even makes a cameo appearance, of sorts, as Taminella’s dimwitted sidekick, Charlie the Ogre, visible only from the waist down, his bare legs spattered with mud.
Serving as Tinkerdee’s narrator and Greek chorus is Kermit, dressed as a minstrel and strumming a lute. “You’d see him on little grassy knolls singing the narration we had written in the form of quatrains and god-awful puns and hideous rhymes,” said Juhl. More significantly, with his crenulated minstrel collar on, Kermit suddenly looks every inch a frog—or close enough so that from here on out it would be a no-brainer to definitively call him one. “We frogified him,” Jim said later, only slightly lamenting the loss of the abstraction. “He just slowly became a frog.”
Despite the more nimble live hand Muppets, rock-solid performances, and some laugh-out-loud moments (typically, Jim couldn’t resist ending the episode with a pie in the face), Tales of the Tinkerdee failed to pique the interest of any TV network. Perhaps the humor was too similar to Rocky and Bullwinkle—an admitted influence—for executives to fully appreciate its originality. More likely, the networks simply didn’t share Jim’s confidence that the Muppets could hold their own for thirty minutes—or, barring that, attract a demographically desirable audience. While Jim had never billed himself as a kids’ act, network suits simply couldn’t see puppets as anything but entertainment for children, in spite of Jim’s hard work to the contrary. Just as The Flintstones—or, later, The Simpsons—would demonstrate that cartoons could transcend a stereotypically young audience and hold their own with adult viewers, so, too, would Jim have to decisively prove that the Muppets could attract and hold a decidedly more grown-up audience.
Jim Henson: The Biography Page 11
