Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  Jim also had to adjust to working live; since he and Dean would be playing off of each other, there would be no prerecorded soundtrack for lip-synching, as Jim had done for Sam and Friends. Instead, Dean would chat with Rowlf live in the studio, usually seated on a bench against a low wall over which Rowlf would appear. Jim and Oz would crouch together behind the wall, Oz pressed up under Jim’s right armpit as he operated Rowlf’s right hand, and both of them intently watching their performance on a small monitor. It might have looked like a tangle, but Jim claimed performing the live hand puppet was “really quite simple. The only complicated gestures are things like trying to applaud.” As for performing the right hand, the trick, Oz said, “is not to do too much.” It was physically tough work, squatting with their arms over their heads for over seven minutes, but the results were remarkable. The performance was so convincing, in fact, that Jim would often catch the cue card man holding up cards for Rowlf to read, while other times the microphone boom operator would swing the microphone over Rowlf’s head, forgetting that Jim was actually speaking on a miked headset behind the low wall.

  “As we first had Rowlf set up, he was a deep thinker, a dog who went into monologues,” Jim said. “Working with Jimmy suddenly transformed Rowlf into a most human thing.… None of my Muppets had ever worked with humans before, and Jimmy Dean … turned Rowlf into a perfectly believable human kind of dog.” Indeed, Dean believed in Rowlf so completely that he would sometimes genuinely break up when Rowlf delivered one-liners, laughing so hard that he was unable to sing. “I treated Rowlf like he was real, but he was real to me,” Dean said, “and I think that’s one of the reasons he made such an impression on everyone.” For many, the impression continued even after the cameras stopped rolling. Dean’s secretary, for one, could easily lose herself in the illusion. During a particularly boisterous rehearsal in Dean’s office, Dean gave Rowlf a playful cuff on the ear that sent his eye flying off his head and across the room. Horrified, the secretary screamed and ran. Dean’s secretary wasn’t the only believer; viewers were sending Rowlf over two thousand fan letters each week, more than even Dean himself received. “It’s been interesting for me to watch people come to believe in a puppet so completely,” Jim remarked.

  The Jimmy Dean Show was so successful that Dean took it on the road, performing an extended version of his television show before live audiences in a wide variety of venues across the country, from Las Vegas and Carnegie Hall to Purdue University and the Louisiana State Fair. Jim and Dean got along well both onstage and off. Besides being a top-notch performer, Dean had a working style very similar to Jim’s. “He’s free-form. He’s quick on his feet and he knows what he wants,” said one producer, describing Dean much the way Bob Payne had described Jim (“He already knew what he was wanting!”). Yet, even as the boss, Dean got on famously with his writers, producers, and other performers. He was a good time as well—“a rascal,” Oz called him—hosting regular parties at his home in New Jersey, where he proudly showed off a large collection of dainty crystal champagne flutes. Oz was charmed. “That was completely unexpected” of a cowboy, Oz said.

  Dean also paid generously. In 1963, Jim earned $1,500 per show for the first seven weeks—about $10,000 today—then $1,750 per show for the rest of the first season. By the third season, Dean would pay them $1,800 per week. More important to Jim than the money, the enormous success of Rowlf on a program aimed at an adult audience had proven that puppets weren’t just for kids.

  Capitalizing on that success, however, would continue to prove difficult. With Rowlf’s popularity soaring, Jim proposed a television series featuring Rowlf traveling around the galaxy in a homemade spaceship. The proposal met with some enthusiasm, but Jim was up against the usual puppetry prejudice: no one could see Jim’s idea as anything more than a kids’ show, which was not where Jim wanted to be. “He was not interested in kids’ stuff,” stressed Juhl. “Puppetry was so pigeonholed as a children’s medium, particularly on television, and that just wasn’t what he did.”

  Juhl also admitted that, despite their regular appearances on Jimmy Dean—which only meant regular pay for about half of each year—there were many times he felt the Muppets might not make it. “I probably felt a lot more uncertain about it than I think Jim did,” Juhl said, but “it all did seem fairly like we were just hanging in there.”

  Actually, they were more than just hanging in there; when they weren’t working on Jimmy Dean, Jim had his crew back at Muppets, Inc. continue working on commercials, which were still the company’s most reliable source of income. The Wilkins ads continued to be hugely popular, and Jim was still fielding offers from coffee, tea, milk, and bread companies around the country who wanted to make use of the Muppets. Initially, Jim allowed the Ver Standig advertising company, which still managed the Wilkins account, to handle the negotiations for these transactions, leaving most of the legwork to Ver Standig’s creative director, James W. Young. Unfortunately, as Jim soon discovered, Young had a tendency during tough negotiations to openly bad-mouth Jim, as if doing so would earn him sympathy from potential clients. “I would have been just as happy if we had not gotten into the muppet business,” Young griped to one coffee company, while complaining to another that “it’s taken years off my life to deal with them.”

  Finally deciding that enough was enough, Jim hired his own business director, tapping Alden Murray, a former attorney for NBC, to manage “business operations, including supervision of productions, client contract negotiation and administration, sales development and presentations, public relations … billing and collection.” Murray, however, would last less than a year. Jim finally decided he could retain greater creative control, and better relationships, if he handled most of the business himself.

  Now it was up to Jim to deal directly with Wilkins and other clients, explaining the finer points of union wage scales and costs of videotape, pitching new ideas for commercials, negotiating contracts, writing reams of correspondence, and running down cans of film that had gone astray in the mail. Errant film cans, in fact, were a major source of headaches. Most of the time, Jim used Memphis Picture Laboratories in Tennessee to develop and print his commercials, and the firm had an unfortunate tendency to deliver materials late or at the very last minute. Other times, Jim would mail copies of his commercials—many times the only copy—to a potential client for review, only to scramble to get the film canisters back. “Could you please return that last film that was sent to you?” Jim wrote in near panic to one executive. “I had just spliced that film together … before I could have it duplicated—so that’s the only copy in existence.”

  “It was slapdash,” Frank Oz said, but one had to remember that there was really “[no] company behind Jim where he could call upon the resources of various departments to help him with the high quality.… The resources were Don … and Jerry and me.… There was no art department, there was no merchandising … it was just kind of us guys and Jim the leader.”

  As it turned out, those resources were more than enough to produce some remarkably memorable, and profitable, commercials. One advertising executive noted that when the Muppets were hired to do ads for Kraml milk in Chicago, Kraml leapfrogged from twenty-third in sales among fifty Chicago dairies to an astounding fifth. “Until we had the Muppets nobody had heard of us outside a five-mile radius of the dairy,” said an amazed Jim Kraml. “Today everyone within 50 miles of Chicago knows Kraml dairy.” With those kinds of results, Muppets, Inc. would end up producing commercials for more than fifty companies in less than ten years.

  When it came to filming the commercials, Jim’s studio of preference was still Rodel Studios in Washington, a warehouselike facility in the Foggy Bottom District where Jim and Jane had produced some of the first Wilkins spots. Typically, Jim would make the trip down to D.C. with Oz, Juhl, and Sahlin. “We’d usually stay in this little hotel in Rosslyn [Virginia], right across the river,” Oz recalled, “only we couldn’t afford rooms for four people, so we’d g
et two rooms and flip a coin to see who would share a room with who.”

  The team wasn’t sharing hotel rooms because Jim was being tight-fisted. While the Muppets were being paid well for their commercials—Claussen’s Bakeries, for example, laid out $7,500 for eight spots—shooting them could be expensive. Studio time at Rodel could cost as much as $3,500 a day, bringing the costs for a four-day shoot to $12,000. Consequently, there were times the Muppets were barely breaking even for their efforts. But Jim was determined to stay at work, racking up countless hours of studio time, until he was happy with the results. “Part of what makes the Muppets work,” said Oz, “is that we do lots and lots and lots of takes until we get it right.”

  That kind of commitment made shooting even one ten-second commercial a time-consuming process. There were the usual problems associated with any kind of filming—“false start” noted the camera report sheet for one spot—but filming puppets presented its own unique set of challenges that had to be worked around. “Jim’s head in shot,” one report sheet noted, while another take was scratched because “[Wilkins] looks wrong.” Then, of course, shots could break down due to “very crazy horeseplay” among the performers. Oz recalled filming one spot where Wontkins was to get hit with eggs, only to find the rest of the Muppet crew too happy to oblige, chucking egg after egg at Wontkins as the cameras rolled. Oz gamely remained hunched beneath for shot after shot, wearing a raincoat dripping with yolk.

  Other spots required more elaborate special effects, and Jim was just as determined to keep filming until he was happy with the results. One particular Wilkins ad, for instance, called for Wontkins to be set on fire, an effect achieved through the use of cold flame, a generally harmless substance that burns away quickly and cleanly without actually setting the underlying object on fire. But “they soaked Wontkins in it,” Oz recalled. “I was nervous about it, but Jim said, ‘you’ll be fine,’ which he always said when one of us had to do something crazy!” As the cameras rolled, a match was touched to Wontkins from below, and the puppet suddenly erupted into a flaming ball of blue and white, dripping and splattering burning cold flame down on Oz, scorching the hair on his arm. Oz plunged his arm—and the still burning Wontkins—into a bucket of water. “Hmmm,” said Jim as Wontkins and Oz smoldered. “Let’s do it again.”

  While Jim was still drafting many of the commercials himself—neatly typing out proposals or scripts on fine milled paper with an orange bar across the bottom that read Muppets Script—he was turning more and more to Jerry Juhl to do the writing. It was a task Juhl was happy to take on; while he had been hired as a performer, it didn’t take long for Juhl to realize that with Oz around, he had “some pretty high-powered” competition for performance time. Consequently, said Juhl, “I thought I’d better do something else if I’m going to make a living here.… We were getting more and more things that needed script material so I just sort of drifted slowly over to become a writer.” As it turned out, writing was Juhl’s true forte.

  Following the birth of their third child and first son, Brian, in November 1963, Jim and Jane had begun to run out of space in their Manhattan apartment. In April 1964, then, Jim moved his growing family out to Greenwich, Connecticut, choosing a charming nineteenth-century farmhouse on busy Round Hill Road. The house had a distinguished pedigree, having once been owned by the American Impressionist painter John Henry Twachtman, and later remodeled by Stanford White, the New York architect who designed the iconic Washington Square Arch in 1889. Over the next ten years, Jim and Jane would add their own touches as well, colorfully painting many of the house’s built-in fixtures and tiling the bathroom in a vibrant mosaic of fish and flowers. “The house in Greenwich was a special kind of home,” Lisa Henson recalled. “I think it must have felt really great to buy a home like that, and to have that piece of property. It was beautiful.”

  The surrounding property had personality as well. A picturesque stream ran near the rear of the house—it had shown up on several of Twachtman’s canvases—where the Hensons would play and skip rocks. Over the garage was an old studio, likely abandoned by the painter, crammed full of old furniture and half-finished paintings, with a dangerously rotten floor. One of the closest neighbors was the creaky, cranky Colonel Twachtman, the son of the painter, who had a parrot that spoke and squawked in the voice of his dead wife. The Henson children would creep up near the house only “close enough to be shooed off by him,” then run back down the hill, shrieking, to the safety of their own yard. “We were always terrified of him!” Brian Henson said later, laughing.

  Most mornings, as Jane drove the children to school in the station wagon, Jim would drive his Porsche the thirty miles from Greenwich into the city, where he was often the first to arrive at the Muppet workshop. One spring morning, Jerry Juhl opened the office door to find Jim sprawled out at his desk, “sitting with a storyboard pad, drawing this idea out.” It was an idea for a film, said Jane Henson, which “came just completely full-blown out of his mind.”

  Jim had been working in television for nearly a decade now, and while he had done remarkable work, redefining the way puppets looked and acted on television, he was beginning to feel as confined by the four sides of the television screen as one of his Muppets. The Jimmy Dean Show had provided some welcome national exposure, proving not only that Jim could create a fully formed character but also that puppets could be for adults. But while puppetry had provided Jim with an entry into television—that handy means to an end—television itself was no longer the endgame. Jim was ready to move beyond the confines of the television screen, and he was determined to show that he could do it without puppets. That was no surprise to Juhl, as he watched Jim sketching away at his storyboards. “Jim wasn’t a puppeteer,” Juhl stressed. “He got into puppetry because it was a way of getting into television and film … that was really his passion.”

  So Jim was going to make a movie. Not a full-length feature, or at least not yet; at the moment, that would take too much time. And time was, in fact, exactly what this short film would be about—Time to Go, Jim called it for several weeks, before finally deciding on Time Piece, “the story of an Everyman, frustrated by the typical tasks of a typical day,” as Jim described it. While the Muppet crew would be called on to assist with some of the props or setups, Time Piece would be almost entirely a one-man production, with Jim serving as the film’s writer, producer, director, animator, and lead actor. He would even write the music, most of it percussion, with a bit of help from Don Sebesky, who served as Jimmy Dean’s musical director. And for the first time, there wouldn’t be a single puppet in sight.

  While there was no script—only the storyboards Juhl had seen—Jim’s notes, it seemed, were everywhere. Lists of props were jotted on yellow pads. Across the back of a large envelope, Jim had scribbled LITTLE THINGS, followed by a cryptic checklist: CLOCK BLOW-UP. MARCHING. STAMP PADS. TICKER TAPE. Beneath that was BIG THINGS, with an equally odd list of items: FACTORY. DUNE AREA. FLYING. TOILET FLUSH. On a newspaper-sized sheet of white paper, Jim had drawn up a calendar with his shooting schedule, describing exactly what he or his team would be filming on a given day. Inside the square for Thursday, June 11, 1964, for example, Jim had written:

  SHOOT

  WHISTLER’S MOTHER

  +

  MARTINI TABLE

  SAWING WIFE IN HALF

  SONG + DANCE

  BATHROOM

  It may have looked like an avant-garde haiku, but to Jim it all made sense—which was more than the rest of the team could say. “We didn’t know what was going on,” Oz said later. “I didn’t know what the hell the movie was.” “There was this storyboard and Jim pointed and we did it,” agreed Juhl, who remembered spending the summer of 1964 tromping around mud flats in Newark, “dropping clocks in mud and having to wade into the mud to get them back.”

  For the next eight months or so, between appearances on Jimmy Dean, trips to D.C. to film commercials, and a puppetry conference in Miami (Jim would step down as
president of the Puppeteers of America for 1964, though he would remain on the board), Jim would grab any opportunity to shoot even a few seconds of footage for his film. “We were all over the place,” remembered Oz. “We were doing [a show in] Vegas and Jim and I went out in the desert and I just [shot a] handheld camera roll. He was running along the mountains in silhouette.” Other days, Jim would have himself filmed strolling down a New York sidewalk in a loincloth, or shoot several minutes of Oz pogo-sticking in a gorilla costume. “All those Time Piece shots were so bizarre,” said Oz.

  Whether the rest of the Muppet staff understood what Jim was up to, it was, they knew, clearly “a personal piece.” “It came totally from Jim,” Juhl said. “I don’t think there was ever a project that came more specifically.” Thematically, it was a subject Jim had explored before in “Tick-Tock Sick”: the incessant, relentless, perpetual passage of time. Creatively, it was an opportunity, as Jane said, for Jim to tap “all [the] different places in his artistic thinking.”

  Time Piece opens simply enough, with Jim—the Everyman—in a hospital bed being examined by a doctor. The sound of Jim’s heartbeat and blinking eyes become the percussive rhythm of drumbeats and machinery clicks, and over the next eight minutes the main character’s everyday routine—going to work, eating dinner, going out to a nightclub with his wife—unfolds rapidly through a series of “repeated cuts from realistic scenes,” as Jim described it, “to wild dream sequences that seem to comment on the reality they interrupt.” Each shot, Oz recalled, “was maybe about a second or four seconds long,” but Jim made every second count, even tracking in a notebook precisely how many frames of film each shot would take up. Looking at it today, Time Piece plays like an extended alternative music video, cutting quickly from shot to shot—sometimes almost quicker than the eye can register—under a frantic percussion soundtrack.