Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  In less than a year, Jim would make his point—and the Muppets would become a national phenomenon. But it would be a dog, not a frog, who would lead the way.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A CRAZY LITTLE BAND

  1962–1969

  Frank Oz, Jim, and Jerry Juhl wrestle with Muppet monster Big V. (photo credit 5.1)

  IN JUNE 1962, AROUND THE TIME JIM WAS COMPLETING WORK ON THE Tinkerdee pilot in Atlanta, the Puppeteers of America—this time holding its annual festival in Oxford, Ohio—announced that it had elected Jim Henson as president of the organization. That made Jim, at twenty-five, the youngest performer to hold the position. Considering both his youth and the fact that he had been a member of the organization for only a little more than two years, Jim’s election as its leader says much about his increasing importance and influence on puppetry.

  To Jerry Juhl and other puppeteers who understood how far Jim had advanced their craft beyond traditional puppetry, Jim’s ascension within their ranks was no surprise. “For puppeteers, [watching the Muppets] was just absolutely startling,” Juhl said. “[They were] puppets that didn’t look like puppets had ever looked. It was just phenomenal.… It was the mobility of the faces, and the total abstraction of them.”

  While puppeteers may have appreciated how different and sophisticated the Muppets were, television executives didn’t. The lack of interest in Tinkerdee, while disappointing, was, Jim thought, typical of those who didn’t understand the craft. “When you try to sell anyone on puppets, it’s the old problem,” he told the New York Post. “They automatically say, ‘Puppets are for kids.’ ”

  While network executives may not have been willing to green-light a regular Muppet television show, booking agents were still more than happy to have the Muppets appear on variety and talk shows. In late spring, the Muppets were asked to be regulars on Mad, Mad World, a new sketch show satirizing news and current events, and co-written by Larry Gelbart, whose A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum had just opened on Broadway. On paper, it seemed it couldn’t miss, and Jim and Jerry Juhl gamely performed the Limbo bit, as well as “Visual Thinking.” But the show sagged when the Muppets weren’t on-screen, bogging down in stale political humor and faux man-on-the-street interviews. Mad, Mad World wouldn’t survive beyond the pilot episode.

  A better opportunity began in the fall, when the Muppets began appearing regularly on the Today show, with Jim and Jerry Juhl making the trip from Washington to New York at a pace of about once a week to be ready for the 7:00 A.M. broadcast. Apart from the more familiar sketches—there was “Visual Thinking,” as well as variations on the “Chef’s Salad” piece—Jim was anxious to introduce skits featuring characters from Tinkerdee. He was proud of the advances he had made with live hand puppets, and considered the Taminella Grinderfall Muppet a genuine breakthrough. “We have a witch who is delightful,” Jim said of Taminella. “The gestures and expressions she can get are wonderful. I consider her probably our best character to date.” So pleased was Jim with the live hand performances, in fact, that he would take the first available opportunity to perform one for a commercial.

  In late 1962, Jim was approached by Ralph Freeman, an ad man for the James Lovick & Company advertising agency of Toronto, about putting together a series of Purina Dog Chow commercials for Canadian television. While Purina wanted its ads to have the same edge as the Wilkins coffee commercials, it didn’t want the ads to feature Wilkins and Wontkins. Instead, Freeman helpfully passed along several ideas from Purina, most featuring two dogs bantering about Purina Dog Chow. Jim likely groaned at the material from Purina—here was someone trying to tell him how to be funny again—but agreed to produce seven commercials for Purina, and set to work designing new characters for the ads.

  In his sketchbook, Jim drew several different kinds of dogs, finally deciding that the two he liked best were a small dog with a pointy nose and fluffy ears, and a larger one with a round head, wide mouth, floppy ears, and wide eyes. The smaller dog, in a nod to the Sherlock Holmes story, Jim decided to name Baskerville. As for the other, Jim had written up a list of possible names—Barkley, Woofington, Howlington, Boundwell—but most of those were a mouthful. A better name, it seemed, was signed at the bottom of each letter Jim received from his contact at the Lovick advertising agency: Ralph Freeman. Ralph it would be, then—or Rowlf, as Jim would later spell it—much to the delight of the Lovick firm.

  For the first time, Jim decided not to build his Muppet himself, handing the character sketches off instead to Burr Tillstrom’s master puppet builder, thirty-four-year-old Don Sahlin, whom Jim had met at the Puppeteers of America convention in Detroit in 1960. Using Jim’s sketches, Sahlin drew his own design for Rowlf, noting the height and relative scales of the puppet, then set to work building the puppet. Sahlin—a talented marionettist and puppeteer who had also created special effects for films like Tom Thumb and The Time Machine—had a remarkable ability to translate Jim’s sketches into three dimensions, a bit of artistic symbiosis Jim appreciated. “I would generally do a little scribble on a scrap of paper, which Don would regard with a certain reverence as being the ‘essence’ which he was working toward,” said Jim. “Don had a very simple way of working—reducing all nonessential things and honing in on what was important.”

  In particular, Sahlin understood—as did Jim—that the placement of the eyes was critical. “That single decision seemed to finalize the character more than anything else,” Jim said later. Part of the trick was to pay careful attention to an area Sahlin came to call “The Magic Triangle”—the zone defined by the relative position of the character’s eyes to its nose and mouth. So important were the eyes, in fact, that Sahlin would always ask that Jim be present when he placed any character’s eyes. “He always wanted me there, to make sure it was right for both of us, making sure the eyes had a point of focus,” Jim said. “Because without that, you had no character.”

  The Ralph/Rowlf Muppet that Sahlin delivered to Jim definitely had character—a beautifully constructed, live hand puppet that almost magically seemed to embody Jim’s initial sketches. He was also a deceptively simple puppet, not much more than the wide mouth, floppy ears, and wide eyes Jim had drawn—and yet something in Sahlin’s nearly abstract design gave Rowlf an expressiveness, a twinkle that Jim would spark to life. Impressed, Jim quickly hired Sahlin as the Muppets’ chief designer and puppet builder, where his sense of expressive abstraction—as well as his ability to sew an almost invisible seam that came to be known as “the Henson Stitch”—would define the look of the Muppets for more than a decade. Indeed, it was Sahlin, Jim said, who “had more to do with the basic style that people think of as the Muppets than anybody else.”

  Jim billed Purina $1,500 for the costs of building Rowlf and Baskerville, then shot seven quick commercials for the company. Bernie Brillstein later recalled—though he was never certain if the offer came from Purina or another client—that Jim was offered $100,000 for the company to own Rowlf outright. Brillstein nearly leapt at the offer, but Jim immediately squashed the deal. “Bernie,” warned Jim, “never sell anything I own.” “He knew then,” said Brillstein. “He has this whole business side. He had these sides to him that were so complex, and when I least thought he’d understand something, he understood it better than I did. So he taught me a long time ago, don’t sell what you create.” (Frank Oz thought Jim’s determination in this regard was rooted in his business dealings with the Wilkins company, where Jim had often struggled—not always successfully—to maintain clear ownership, and marketing, of his characters.) With Rowlf still safely in Jim’s ownership, work was completed on the commercials and Rowlf, said Jim, was “tossed into a cupboard with a dozen other puppets and nearly forgotten.” “We were never told whether the commercials sold the dog food or not,” Jim said with a shrug, then—quite literally—moved on.

  On Wednesday, January 23, 1963, a moving truck pulled away from the Henson home in Bethesda, bound for New York City. The famil
y—and the Muppets—were moving to New York, a decision that had prompted little discussion or hesitation on Jim’s part. “Anyone in this business of television has to live in Los Angeles or New York,” said Jim plainly.

  The Hensons and Juhl began their drive to New York later that afternoon, with Jim and Jane traveling with the kids in the station wagon and Juhl driving Jim’s newest sports car, a glimmering Porsche. It was so bitterly cold that the rear window of the Porsche shattered, leaving Juhl shivering at the wheel and coming down with the flu as he drove. Eventually the car broke down, stranding Juhl at a roadside hotel.

  While Juhl was marooned, Jim and Jane managed to continue driving through the night toward their new apartment, arriving in Manhattan around 5:00 A.M. The Muppets were scheduled to make an appearance on the Today show that same morning—and rather than cancel or reschedule after the exhausting drive, Jim and Jane simply headed to the NBC studios at 30 Rockefeller Center, arriving just in time to rehearse and perform two pieces live—and without Juhl. It was chaos, but it was “totally typical of the way Jim worked,” laughed Juhl. “He was moving his entire family, his entire life, and me, from Maryland to the middle of New York City. His whole life [was] in total upheaval.” Yet, Jim’s attitude, said Juhl, was “we might as well do the Today show!”

  The Hensons moved to Beekman Place on Manhattan’s East Side, taking up residence on the eleventh floor of the same “wonderful old apartment building” as Burr Tillstrom, who had helped them find the place. While it had two good-sized bedrooms and large living spaces, it actually wasn’t much bigger than their place in Bethesda. But with its stern facade and an apartment that afforded spectacular views of the city, it was definitely more exciting and glamorous than Maryland. The Hensons were moving up.

  So were the Muppets. At the same time, Jim set up headquarters for Muppets, Inc. just around the corner from the Beekman Place apartment, renting out the second floor of a townhouse at 303 East 53rd Street, above a trendy nightclub called Chuck’s Composite. In the small front room overlooking 53rd Street, Jim set up a workshop for Don Sahlin—who officially began his employment with the Muppets in February 1963—cramming Don’s sewing table and workbench alongside Jim’s animation stand. As a final touch typical of both Jim and Sahlin, an oversized version of Yorick gaped out the window at the street below.

  In the main room, just across from the front door, sat Jerry Juhl at a desk next to the Ampex tape machine, on which Jim would still prerecord some voice tracks for Muppet performances. Against the opposite wall was a long workbench and a small closet door on which Jim hung a dartboard—and, above that, a light-up, papier-mâché moose head. In the back corner, directly in front of the sliding glass door that led out to the rear balcony, Jim set up his desk, with a big black padded Eames chair and matching ottoman. “[Our] spaces never looked like offices,” Juhl said. “We did it up as a kind of lovely, pleasant living room.”

  For the next few months, Jim and Juhl continued their regular routine of weekly Today show performances and filming more explosive coffee commercials, even as Jim—actively embracing his role as president of Puppeteers of America—presided over the organization’s annual festival in Hurleyville, New York. Following a family vacation to the Olympic Peninsula near Seattle in July, Jim returned to New York in early August to hire a secretary to handle correspondence and answer the phone. He also readied a space in the offices for another performer he had recently hired: nineteen-year-old Frank Oz, who had graduated from high school in Oakland in late spring.

  Following Oz’s graduation, Jim had called Mike and Frances Oznowicz to have a “very serious” conversation about their son moving to New York to join the Muppets. “Having your young son move across the country … I mean, they knew I wasn’t coming back. It had to be hard,” Oz said. “But my parents knew Jim. They knew he was a good person.” And so the Oznowiczes had said yes—and in August 1963, Frank Oz formally joined the Muppets, bounding up the narrow stairway at the townhouse on 53rd Street and entering the living-room-like space that would change his life. “This is the room where Jim, wearing his bright flowered ties and speaking just above a whisper, would hold meetings with clients,” Oz recalled fondly. “This is where Jim and I and Don and Jerry would hear that Kennedy had been shot. This is where we’d eat the deli sandwiches with those funny-tasting East Coast pickles. For the kid from Oakland, everything here was new and strange and exciting and adult.”

  While the kid from Oakland had committed to moving to New York to work, he was hired at first only part-time, mostly performing Wontkins in commercials, and earning $100 a week. When Oz wasn’t working, he was taking classes at the City College of New York, mainly to appease his parents, who wanted him to get an education. “But I didn’t come to New York to go to school,” Oz said. “I came to work!”

  Regular work would come shortly. That summer, the Muppets were asked to make an appearance on the first seven episodes of a new version of The Jimmy Dean Show, a variety show featuring the popular country singer, which was set to debut on ABC in early fall. The timing was ideal: Jim and Juhl had wrapped up their weekly Today show appearances in late June, and no new appearances had yet been scheduled. The offer from Dean was definitely worth considering.

  Tall, lanky, and goofily handsome, the talented, Texas-born Jimmy Dean had an easygoing manner—and matching drawl—that belied a hardscrabble determination. A high school dropout who had been raised by a single mother, his first real break came in 1953 at the age of twenty-five with the small hit “Bummin’ Around.” That opened up a career for Dean as an on-air personality in Washington, D.C., working first on radio and then, in 1957, as host of Country Style on WTOP-TV—a show so popular that it was picked up and syndicated nationally by CBS.

  In 1961, Dean had a monster hit with the song “Big Bad John,” which camped at number one for several weeks and won Dean a 1962 Grammy. Riding high on the single, Dean made numerous television appearances, including a successful stint as a guest host of The Tonight Show, which racked up impressive enough ratings that several networks, as Dean put it, “began looking at ol’ JD with dollar signs in their eyes.” The winner of the bidding war was ABC—and now that he was at the helm of his own show, Dean was searching for guests for his first few weeks. In particular, Dean recalled an act he had seen on television while living and working in D.C. in the late 1950s, and asked producer Bob Banner to “check out a particular act … that I remembered doing Wilkins Coffee commercials,” Dean said. Jim, and the Muppets, were tracked down by producers and immediately hired.

  On August 29, 1963, as videotape rolled at ABC’s Studio 51, Dean introduced the Muppets as “one of the most talented groups I’ve ever seen.” Jim, Jerry Juhl, and Frank Oz launched into “Cool Jazz,” one of their artier pieces in which gloved hands “dance” to various kinds of music, a reliably solid piece that Jim had recently put into their variety show rotation. For the Muppets’ next segment, Jim and Oz performed Rowlf—only just rescued from the cupboard at the Muppet workshop where he had been retired after the Purina commercials—singing “Moon River” with the Willis Sisters. This, too, was a solid performance, though there was little indication that something special was happening. That changed the following week, when Rowlf was given the opportunity to participate in a sketch with Dean himself. The two chatted amiably for several minutes, then sang a spirited duet of the old Bert Williams song “Nobody,” which Dean had recorded the year before.

  The performance sparkled. With Jim giving a charming and entirely convincing performance—and Dean believing in Rowlf completely—there was a chemistry that “turned out to be the hit of the show,” said Dean. ABC was bombarded with fan mail for Rowlf, and the following week, as he introduced Rowlf as his “old hound dog buddy,” Dean acknowledged that they’d “had all kinds of people asking us to have him back again.” The two then launched into a lively duet of “Side by Side”—and with that, what was initially to be a seven-week stint turned into regular weekly
appearances on the show for the next three years, with Jim and Oz performing Rowlf for twenty-seven straight weeks in the first season alone.

  Performing Rowlf on Jimmy Dean was a different experience from previous Muppet performances. For one thing, Jim wasn’t directly involved in the writing of Rowlf’s sketches. While Rowlf and Dean’s banter sounded casual and ad-libbed, it was actually tightly scripted, all the way down to Rowlf’s double-takes and slow-burn reactions—and Jim had to put himself, and his character, in the hands of Dean’s writing staff. It was a creative leap of faith, but Jim was fortunate in that Dean had surrounded himself with seasoned comedy writers like Buddy Arnold, who’d written for Milton Berle, and John Aylesworth, Will Glickman, and Frank Peppiatt, who wrote regularly for countless variety shows. “These were old-school guys,” Oz said, and Jim—who had been willing to learn camera tricks and production techniques from old hands at WRC—was equally as thrilled by the opportunity to immerse himself firsthand in this old school of comedy writing. And so, Jim would sit in the writers’ room as Aylesworth and his staff hashed around ideas and punch lines. “We would spend all week working on this little dialogue until it was honed to perfection,” Jim said. “They would work with me in terms of performance and the delivery of punch lines.… It’s amazing the little things the audience is not aware of—things that affect their response in terms of a laugh.”