Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  “I was … playing with a kind of flow-of-consciousness type of editing,” Jim said later, “where one image took you to another and there was no logic to it, but your mind put it together.” That was true enough, as even the most casual of viewers can’t help but feel they’ve gotten … well, something from it. But the plot is beside the point. The real star is Jim’s strong visual sense, which carries the film forward on one memorable image after another: Jim as a gunslinger shooting the Mona Lisa. Jim as a factory worker pulling levers as a conveyor belt carries rusty cans. Jim painting a real elephant pink. “Richard Lester did A Hard Day’s Night at about the same time I was doing Time Piece,” Jim said later, “and I just loved what one could do with the montaging of visual images.”

  Through it all, Jim’s Everyman is in constant motion, strolling down sidewalks, swinging Tarzan-style through the jungle, leaping from a diving board, flapping on makeshift wings, or dodging through a cemetery in top hat and tails. It’s a race against time, and every sound in the film—Jim’s tapping fingers, a cough, a nightclub drummer, a woman’s high heels clacking—vibrates with the regular rhythm of a ticking clock. Perhaps tellingly, Jim’s Everyman speaks only one word of dialogue, repeating it four times in eight minutes: “Help.”

  “Time Piece is about time and a man running, and I understand that about Jim,” Juhl said later. “Jim was always running from time.… There never would’ve been enough time, and I think he knew that really early.” Perhaps it was Jim once again coping with the loss of his brother, Paul, and the feeling that there would never be enough time to do all the things he hoped to do—but then again, maybe it wasn’t. “A lot of people want to say something,” Jim said. “But I don’t start out to say things. I try to keep it first of all entertaining, and then humorous.” For the most part, Jim would remain coy about whether he was really trying to make any kind of statement with Time Piece, remarking that he was simply exploring “the possibility of filmic stream of consciousness.”

  After completing the film in May 1965, Jim hosted a premiere party for his “rather weird little movie” at the Museum of Modern Art, renting out the fourth-floor screening room and running the film continuously for several hours. Oz, who had initially been unsure exactly what to make of the snippets of film they were shooting, was enthusiastic about the final product: “It was Jim pushing the form.” Following the premiere, Jim held a reception at the Muppets headquarters on 53rd Street, drinking champagne with friends and mulling over ways to put the film into a nationwide release, a task he assigned to Bernie Brillstein.

  The agent aggressively made the rounds with copies of the film, which baffled several potential distributors. (“I don’t think there’s anything we can do with it,” wrote a confused representative at United Artists, adding that “the short does show a certain talent, but I think it’s a gimmicky sort of a talent.”) Eventually, Brillstein landed a deal that would distribute the film nationally with French director Claude Lelouch’s acclaimed A Man and a Woman. That put Time Piece squarely in art house circles, including a highly successful eighteen-month run at the Paris Theatre in New York—an unexpected and distinguished venue for a twenty-eight-year-old whose previous film work had mostly been ten-second commercials with creatures exploding or devouring each other.

  While Time Piece had been Jim’s pet project for nearly a year, there was still plenty going on at Muppets, Inc. During the summer of 1964, following a performance in Las Vegas with Jimmy Dean, Jim and his team had made a trip out to San Francisco to film another Tinkerdee-based pilot, this time at the behest of the Quaker Oats company, which was interested in working with the Muppets on a Saturday morning television series. While Jim would normally have bristled at the idea of straitjacketing himself into a children’s puppet show, with Time Piece under way, he perhaps felt he had a project in the works that would help him define himself as more than just “a puppet guy.”

  Still, this new pilot, The Land of Tinkerdee, was far less ambitious than the earlier Tales of the Tinkerdee. Clocking in at less than ten minutes and filmed only in black-and-white, the Land of Tinkerdee pilot was limited to one set—a tinker’s workshop—and featured appearances by only two Muppets, King Goshposh and a new live hand sheepdog puppet named Rufus. It’s not subpar work, but it does appear that Jim’s heart was elsewhere at the time—which it was—and in a December meeting with Quaker Oats, the company opted not to pick up the show. What makes The Land of Tinkerdee memorable, however, is its setup: Land featured a live performer (Darryl Ferreira, a friend of Oz and Juhl’s from Oakland) as a tinker who interacts with a Muppet dog in a workshop at the gateway to a magical domain—nearly the same setup as Fraggle Rock twenty years later.

  As the Muppets took on more and more projects, Jim was looking at adding several more employees, at least on a part-time basis, to the Muppet offices. The most notable addition was a bearded thirty-one-year-old performer named Jerry Nelson, a gifted puppeteer who, like Jim and Oz, initially had no interest in puppetry. Born in Oklahoma and raised in Washington, D.C., Nelson had served in the army and, after briefly attending college, moved to New York to become an actor, taking walk-on roles in shows like The Defenders and Naked City. In 1964, while out of a job, he learned that puppeteer Bil Baird was looking for performers to work marionettes for a New England tour. Nelson, who hadn’t touched a marionette in twenty years, nevertheless ad-libbed his audition with Baird, performing a tough-talking, trench-coated mobster, and landed the job. Later that same summer, while performing with Baird’s troupe at the New York World’s Fair, Nelson met Jim’s old friend Bobby Payne, who suggested Nelson give Jim a call. “He thought our senses of humor would mesh very nicely,” recalled Nelson.

  At Jim’s request, Nelson submitted a recording of himself performing some character voices, “mostly just Stan Freberg impressions,” Nelson said later, laughing. At the moment, Jim was the only performer providing voices—and with Oz insisting that he would “never” do a voice (a vow he would stick to only another year), Jim was likely looking at ways to give the Muppets a more diverse sound. If that was indeed the case, Nelson was an ideal find. With his acting background and love of music, Nelson provided not only a wide range of voices, but he could sing—and sing beautifully—as well. Jim listened to the recordings and liked what he heard, then brought Nelson in for a quick audition. The two fell in together immediately; hiring him would be an easy decision.

  Jim’s professional family wasn’t the only one that was growing. In April 1965, shortly after returning from a vacation in Puerto Rico, Jane gave birth to their fourth child, a son they named John Paul. That left Jane—with the help of a young au pair—to manage a house with two young girls, a toddler, a newborn, and a new Great Dane puppy named Troy, which Jim had rather cluelessly presented to the already swamped Jane. (Troy, in fact, would prove to be more than anyone could handle and would soon be given away.) With her hands full, and Jim’s schedule changing daily, things could get frantic at the Henson household, once with frightening consequences. One June afternoon, Lisa, nearly five, and Cheryl, just shy of four, were playing in the gravel driveway of their Greenwich home when Jane—turning quickly into the short driveway out of the speeding traffic on Round Hill Road—accidentally ran over them with the station wagon.

  When the phone rang at Muppets, Inc., both Juhl and Oz remember watching Jim as he learned what had happened. One of Jim’s strengths as a father, said Cheryl later, was his ability to “approach things in a calm and kind way,” but Jane’s news shook him deeply. “He just went ashen,” Oz recalled, then hung up the phone and rushed from the room without saying a word. “A terrible day,” remembered Juhl with a shudder. Although Lisa had been pinned by the car, she wasn’t badly hurt, but Cheryl’s ankle had been fractured. To Jim’s and Jane’s relief, both Cheryl and Lisa would be running through the woods by autumn as if nothing had happened—though Lisa would be haunted by nightmares for some time—with Jim trailing behind them, movie camera rolling, gettin
g the footage he would use later in a charming short film called Run, Run.

  Jane could still be found at the downtown offices from time to time, often sitting in front of a mirror with Frank Oz, helping him perfect his lip-synching. “I sat in front of that mirror for hours. Jane was really good at lip-synch,” said Oz appreciatively—but he thought he understood why Jane had gotten out of regular performing, for reasons that went beyond motherhood. “A great puppeteer needs to be aggressive and selfish,” Oz said—qualities, he thought, the artsier Jane lacked. “It’s also important to be uncomfortable. You should be prepared and ready at all times,” Oz continued. “If you’re comfortable, you’re doing it wrong.”

  If discomfort was truly the mark of a great performer, then when it came to filming a series of commercials for Southern Bread, Jim and his team were definitely doing things right. For the Southern Bread campaign, Jim had asked Sahlin to create a live hand puppet resembling the company’s mascot, a white-mustached Southern colonel in a starched white suit and hat. Jim filmed most of the commercials on location, requiring him and Oz or Nelson to squeeze and mash themselves into odd places, lying on railroad tracks, hunching down in cars, or squatting on the pavement outside Yankee Stadium.

  More perilous, however, was a Southern Bread spot Jim had dreamed up that required an arrow to fly in from off-screen and puncture an apple on top of the colonel’s head. Jim decided to film the ad in his backyard in Greenwich—this time performing the character with Jerry Nelson—and hired a professional archer, a young woman of about twenty-five, to shoot the arrow through an apple balanced on the puppet’s head. “The gal started walking away to do this,” Nelson recalled, “and Jim said ‘Oh, you don’t have to go that far. You can come up close because the camera won’t see it.’ And she said, ‘No, I have to get a certain distance away, because when the arrow leaves the bow, it waffles.’ ” As the archer moved into position twenty yards away, Jim and Nelson knelt on the ground, Jim with his hand up inside the puppet’s head, and Nelson crouched under Jim’s armpit. “Jim was fearless,” Nelson said, but Nelson was terrified—and ducked his head as low as he could as the young woman drew back the bow and took aim.

  “She shot it and hit the apple and knocked it off … [and] I said ‘Oh, great!’ ” laughed Nelson. But Jim—just as he had with Oz and the flame-engulfed Wontkins—was determined to get the shot right. “No, that’s not what we want,” Jim insisted; the arrow had to stay in the apple. “When he had a vision in his mind, he would chase it,” said Nelson. With cameras rolling, the archer nocked another arrow and fired again and again, finally nailing the apple on the fifth take. As Jane said later, “That’s one of the times I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s crazy!’ Jim was so fearless at things like that, and [yet] he was so afraid of spiders in the shower!”

  That was life with the Muppets: a kind of fearless craziness that pervaded nearly every aspect of the business. “Working at the Muppet office was always fun,” said Oz, “especially when Don Sahlin was around.” While all the Muppet staff enjoyed pranks and jokes, Sahlin was an especially notorious trickster, with the added advantage that he could invent and build nearly anything, which made him particularly potent as a prankster. “I loved the way Don played,” said Jim. “Throughout his life he would play—pick up some bit of feathers and attach a long rubber band to it, stretch it down the hall, and release it as you came into the room. Or he’d put a puppet on the john. He had this sense of playfulness that he actually used, and inspiration would come out of these free-release moments.”

  Where Jim was involved, too, nothing was ordinary. Even the official letterhead for Muppets, Inc. had a ragged colored bar angling across the page so that letters had to be oddly formatted—a task that fell to secretary Carroll Conroy, who had taken on responsibilities as a bookkeeper in addition to her tasks as Jim’s executive secretary. Conroy brought her own sense of fun to Jim’s formal correspondence, writing pithy letters to Brillstein or bantering with clients on Jim’s behalf (“With typical speed and efficiency of the broadcasting industry,” begins one note, “we just got your letter”). She also managed to resist the urge to correct the countless clients who constantly misspelled Jim’s last name as “Hensen.”

  The confusion was probably understandable; after all, it wasn’t Jim’s name on the door or the company letterhead, but rather The Muppets. Booking agents hired the Muppets, not Jim Henson. “The Muppets were known,” Brian Henson said later, “but he wasn’t.” With their plentiful commercials, countless appearances on variety shows, and Rowlf’s continued prominence on Jimmy Dean, it may have looked from the outside like the Muppets was a large organization. Even Jerry Nelson admitted as much; after being hired, he had headed up the stairs of the townhouse of Muppet Studios with stars in his eyes only to discover, to his surprise, that “it wasn’t all that big.”

  “We were just kind of this crazy little band at that time,” Oz said later. “We would go into The Tonight Show … with these black boxes and Jim’d have this beard. We’d be these guys and they’d think we were rock musicians.… We were The Muppets, like an act.” In fact, in an era when rock groups had names like the Troggs or the Animals, being booked into hotels as “The Muppets” could sometimes lead to confusion. Once, following a Muppet performance in Los Angeles, a hotel manager refused to give the team their rooms. “They thought the Muppets were a rock group,” Juhl said, and were concerned the performers would trash the hotel. Jim managed to smooth things over by having “a serious conversation” with the hotel management, though Oz added that Jim “didn’t look very clean cut either!”

  Actually, in the mid-1960s, Jim looked more like a beatnik businessman, wearing slacks and crisply starched shirts with brightly colored ties, his brown hair cut short and his beard neatly clipped close to his face. After arriving at the workshop, Jim would roll up his sleeves, then sink down into his black Eames chair, scrunching down until he was almost lying on his back, one long leg on the desk or crossed over the other as he sketched in his notebook or jotted story ideas on yellow notepads. From this position, too, he would discuss story or commercial ideas with the rest of the Muppet team, hmmmming or laughing as he considered each suggestion. “Someone would have an idea, and we’d laugh out loud at it and throw it around some more,” said Oz.

  One of Jim’s more playful ideas—which was thrown around, then finally deposited squarely on the shoulders of Oz—was a spirited ad campaign for La Choy Chinese food. For the first time, Jim designed and built a full-sized walkaround character: a fluorescent pink-and-orange-colored dragon named Delbert who, with the help of some Don Sahlin sorcery, breathed real fire. For the La Choy commercials, Oz lumbered around in the gigantic dragon costume, surprising Boy Scouts and housewives as he knocked over rows of food in a supermarket, crashed through walls, and shattered a television. “I hated those costume things, and Jim knew it,” Oz said. “That’s why he reveled in me doing it!” The problem, Oz explained, was that once he got into the dragon costume, “I was blind … I counted steps to figure out where to walk and listened to voices so I would know which way to turn.” It was a dry run for the kind of large walkaround characters that Jim would refine for Sesame Street’s Big Bird, then perfect for sweeping fantasy projects like The Dark Crystal.

  Just as ambitious were a number of short films that Jim would produce for IBM at the behest of a charismatic and forward-thinking IBM executive named David Lazer, who was hoping to inject Jim’s “sense of humor and crazy nuttiness” into short “coffee breaks” to be shown at IBM business meetings. Briskly written and enthusiastically performed and edited, some of these films were to promote new products, while others were simply intended as “icebreakers” for business meetings and staff retreats. Jim reported that IBM was “ecstatic” when it received the first four short films in early 1966—and Jim, too, was delighted with the opportunity to work with the company, forging a friendship with Lazer that would eventually extend beyond their work for IBM.

  As a
gadget enthusiast, Jim was intrigued by the company’s constant stream of new contraptions. For most of his IBM films, Jim chose to use the versatile Rowlf, in part because as a live hand puppet he could pick up and fiddle with each new machine—such as an electric guitar from the “Hippie Products Division”—but also because Lazer was a fan of the character. “We made Rowlf a … bungling salesman,” Lazer said, and “everyone just went crazy over him.” Jim also created a number of artsy films for the company, such as Paperwork Explosion, a rapid-fire appraisal of IBM’s technology set against a background of electronic music by Raymond Scott, in which Jim cautioned viewers to remember that “Machines should work; people should think.”

  Lazer loved escaping his “dinky little offices” at IBM to come brainstorm with Jim and Jerry Juhl at Muppets, Inc. “There was this aura of calmness, gentleness,” Lazer recalled. “Everybody was so nice. It was a nice warm feeling. It sounds trite now, but it was true.” As with much of the commercial work, Jim was barely breaking even on the IBM films. But Lazer came to appreciate that, for Jim, it was usually more about fun than profit. “I knew that he was taking a beating [financially],” Lazer said later. “Something about Jim—it’s not the money. It’s got to feel right for him. It’s got to click for him.… I liked that about him very much.” The affiliation with IBM would also give Jim the opportunity to take short working vacations to perform Rowlf at a number of IBM’s high-powered meetings, traveling with Jane to Florida and with Juhl and Nelson to Nassau, where Jim was excited to win $75 gambling—a new pastime that agent Bernie Brillstein claimed was due to his influence.