Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  Jim was still traveling across the country with Jimmy Dean, too, though the appearances at enormous nightclubs and open-air venues were more work than vacation, especially since the members of the Muppet team were responsible for serving as their own stagehands, setting up and taking down the puppet stage for Rowlf’s appearance in complete darkness. “We’d do our little bit,” Nelson recalled, “and then the lights would go out and we’d pick up our little stage in the dark and find our way out.” During one intermission, Jim stepped out of the darkened theater with Rowlf still on his arm, and was immediately mobbed by fans. “Next thing you know,” said an amused Dean, “they’ll be calling the dog the star of this here ol’ show.” After a show in Anaheim, Jim dodged around fans and dashed immediately to the airport, to arrive back home in Connecticut just in time for Lisa’s sixth birthday party. No matter how hectic his schedule, Jim would always take the time to be an active, attentive parent.

  To Jim’s delight, Time Piece was continuing to attract audiences—and awards—not only in the United States, but overseas as well. In August 1965, he was notified that the film had received the Plaque de St. Mark (“whatever that is,” Jim wrote dryly in his journal) at the Venice Film Festival, as well as several smaller prizes, including recognition in Berlin at the XII Oberhausen Film Festival. Reactions to the film still varied, as Jim noted, “from ‘A frightening look at modern living’ to ‘A very funny movie,’ to ‘What the hell is it?’ ” In early 1966, Jim learned Time Piece had been nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Short Subject, Live Action category. He and Jane attended the awards ceremony in Los Angeles in April, where the film lost to Claude Berri’s French comedy The Chicken. Nevertheless, the Hensons, Jane remembered, still had “such fun!”

  While Jim could shrug off losing the Oscar, there was one potential loss that wouldn’t be so easy to shake. In early 1966, Frank Oz, now twenty-one, was notified that he had been drafted and was being asked to report for duty in February. Oz vacated his New York apartment and Jim, trying to make the best of the situation, informed Jerry Nelson that he would now be hired full-time to take over Oz’s performing duties—welcome news for the recently divorced Nelson, who was caring for a daughter with cystic fibrosis and looking for more than just part-time jobs. Oz was working to secure placement in a unit to entertain troops, rather than serving in combat, “which lessened the dramatic impact of my leaving,” Oz said, but the team was still determined to send him off with a flourish. On February 18, the Muppet staff and their families threw a goodbye party for their youngest performer, waving to him from the second-story window as his cab sped toward Whitehall Street, all but certain they had lost Oz for at least the next two years.

  As it turned out, they lost him for barely an hour. “I reported for duty,” Oz recalled, “and was let go because of a minor heart condition.” Oz excitedly climbed back into a cab and ordered the driver back to the Muppet offices, where his own farewell party had only just ended. “I came back up the stairs to the office, and there was Jerry Nelson, sitting by himself on the couch,” Oz said, laughing. “And he looked up at me with this blank look on his face and just said, ‘Shit!’ ” Jim was delighted. “FRANK OZ is not drafted!” Jim wrote in his journal, with near palpable relief.

  Nelson’s job, meanwhile, would remain secure for most of the year, as Oz decided to take some time visiting relatives in England and Belgium; indeed, Jim and Nelson would perform Rowlf for the final episode of Jimmy Dean on March 25, 1966. On Oz’s return, Nelson would remain on staff as a part-time performer, splitting his time between Jim and Bil Baird. According to Nelson, “Jim would call me up and say, ‘Are you able to do an Ed Sullivan? And I would check with Bil to make sure it was okay—he always said ‘yeah, sure.’ He liked Jim a lot and respected his work.”

  Fortunately for Nelson, the appearances on Ed Sullivan or The Tonight Show would continue with an almost rhythmic regularity. Jim was writing more and more new material for these appearances, honestly appraising the relative success of each in his private journal. Jim was unhappy, for example, with a Thanksgiving-related appearance on Johnny Carson, scrawling BOMB in his journal entry in all capital letters (“Johnny is not one of those people who is really comfortable talking to the puppets,” Juhl offered helpfully). Better were two sketches on a live New Year’s Eve appearance six weeks later, though Jim was only willing to call the appearance “fair,” perhaps realizing that one sketch had gone on a bit too long. For a Perry Como Christmas special, the Muppet team performed a piece involving five of Santa’s reindeer trying to make it snow for Christmas—a skit Jim decided was “Fairly good,” and it truly was, getting laughs in all the right places and enthusiastic applause from the audience.

  Despite insisting that he would never perform voices, Oz had made his vocal debut in July 1965 performing half of a confused two-headed monster on trumpeter Al Hirt’s Fanfare. The same show featured another new skit involving two Oz-designed abstract Muppets—basically flexible tubes with wide eyes and fuzzy feet—who danced to Hirt’s chart-topping “Java.” The “Java” sketch, which became one of the Muppets’ most popular, was a throwback to the earliest Muppet performances, essentially a game of one-upmanship that ended with the smaller character blowing up the larger one. “Our material does have a certain similarity,” Jim good-naturedly admitted.

  Jim, it seemed, could find inspiration anywhere. In late 1964, Jim—along with Juhl, Oz, and Sahlin—arrived at NBC studios at 10:00 A.M. for a morning rehearsal for The Jack Paar Program, only to be told they weren’t needed until 4:00 that afternoon. As the Muppet performers lounged around the dressing room with nothing but time on their hands, someone pulled open a door at the other end of the room, “expecting it to lead somewhere,” said Juhl, “but instead it was just this shallow closet with a maze of pipes.” Where others might see twisting pipes and valves and spigots, Jim saw monsters and faces and noses. The rest was easy. As Juhl explained:

  We had nothing to do, and Don had brought paints because we were performing something that needed touch-ups, so one thing led to another and we started decorating the pipes. It was Jim’s idea—a typical Jim idea—and as the whole thing got more elaborate, one of us hopped in a cab and brought more material from the workshop.

  Soon the team had the pipes and valves decorated with colored paint, fake fur and hair, googly eyes, and grinning or roaring mouths—a shrine to the Muppets’ brand of “affectionate anarchy,” as Oz said later. Even as the team worked, Juhl said, “people at the studio began to hear about this crazy closet and started stopping by, asking if they could take pictures.” By the time of their 4:00 performance, even Paar had heard what the “crazy Muppet people” were up to and sent a cameraman to film the closet for his television audience to see. “What’s interesting is that Jim never intended for those pipes to be discovered that quickly,” Diana Birkenfield remembered later. “He wanted it to be a surprise for the next person who might open that closet door.”

  During the summer of 1966, the Muppets spent a week cohosting The Mike Douglas Show, which gave Jim the opportunity to perform several quirky pieces, such as feathers dancing to the Young Rascals’ recent hit “Good Lovin’ ” (soldiering on even as one feather puppet accidentally wrapped around the blades of a spinning fan) and yet another variation of the Limbo character. Jim was increasingly fascinated by Limbo, which gave him the opportunity to explore his own interests in how the brain processed information and imagination. To produce one memorable sequence, Jim maneuvered a camera slowly through a tangle of materials he had strung throughout the Muppet workshop—webs of yarn, scraps of paper, wads of plastic wrap—then projected the final film behind Limbo as a representation of various regions of the brain.

  While Limbo’s somewhat surreal style may have baffled fans expecting to see Rowlf, Jim was unapologetic about giving audiences something new. “Good puppetry has a broad range,” Jim said. “It appeals to the children, the squares, and sophisticates.” So appealing were the M
uppets, in fact, that in early 1966 Jim accepted an offer from the Ideal Toy Company to produce Rowlf and Kermit puppets, the first merchandising Jim had allowed since the Wilkins giveaways seven years earlier. Naturally, Jim produced the commercials for the toys, poking a little fun at himself by having two Kermit puppets plead with viewers to “buy us … [or] we’ll bite you in the leg.”

  As the decade passed, Jim would let both his hair and his beard grow out and begin wearing soft suede or leather jackets with flowered shirts, looking very much the hippie many thought he was, despite the fact that his age—he turned thirty in September 1966—put him at the edge of what the hippies themselves would derisively tag as “The Establishment.” But Jim, by his very nature, defied such easy labels. By 1967, certainly, he had attained a degree of financial success—though with four children, it would still be a while before he would approach the domain of the truly wealthy—with the attractive house in Greenwich and, in August, a brand-new Porsche Targa. “He always had those fancy new cars,” recalled Lisa Henson. “But he also really, really liked things to be nice. He had fantastic taste, whether it was clothing, or homes, or furniture, whatever.” Jim’s style, in fact, was almost directly opposite Jane’s, who liked simpler things and would always feel somewhat “conflicted” about wealth or possessions.

  But while Jim’s financial success may have made him look like one of the “squares or sophisticates,” by 1967—that acid-soaked, Day-Glo year of Sgt. Pepper when psychedelia went mainstream—Jim entered one of the most experimental and creative phases of his career, motivated largely by a desire to become something more than just Muppets. “Except for Jimmy Dean, there were just commercials and guest spots on other people’s shows—and in the end these were frustrating because they provided no opportunity for character development,” said Jane. “The Muppets were pretty well liked by then. All of the big shows were ready to at least listen to our ideas, and when they had an opening they’d put us on. But nobody was prepared to give the Muppets a show of their own, and Jim began to feel maybe he should be looking in another direction.” Over the next three years, then, Jim would pursue a wide variety of projects in various media, very few of which involved a single puppet.

  One of the most ambitious projects was not a television or movie-related project at all, but rather “a new concept in total entertainment,” a themed nightclub Jim was calling Cyclia. “The idea began during the first wave of psychedelia,” recalled Jane. “Jim went to see Jefferson Airplane and he was very intrigued with it—the light shows and the psychedelic graphics.” To provide his potential guests with “the entertainment experience of the future,” Jim envisioned that the walls, floor, and ceiling of his nightclub would be broken into faceted, crystal-like shapes onto which films would be projected—completely immersing dancers in a sea of images, choreographed precisely to the volume and type of music being played. When the music was quiet, for example, there would be images of trees or water; when the music got loud, there would be traffic, machinery, and explosions. And once an hour, a woman in a white leotard would rise from a pedestal in the center of the floor to have film projected on her body as she danced. It would be, Jim proposed, a very fashionable place, with “a definite prestige atmosphere, and as such [the cover charge] will not be inexpensive.”

  While senses-soaking, high-tech themed nightclubs would become fashionable by the late 1970s, in 1967, Jim’s idea for Cyclia was clearly ahead of its time—so far ahead, in fact, that finding the necessary space, materials, and technology to make it happen was a major challenge. To take care of the legwork, Jim hired Barry Clark, an enthusiastic West Coaster who had experience managing musicians and clubs, and asked him to scout possible locations as well as potential investors. Meanwhile, Jim and the Muppet team would take care of the films that would be projected on Cyclia’s faceted surfaces and dancing girls.

  Jim had been shooting film for Cyclia as early as 1965, dispatching Frank Oz and Jerry Nelson to Shea Stadium in August to film the crowd screaming and reacting during the Beatles’ landmark concert. Other times, as they had with Time Piece, footage would be shot whenever there was a spare moment, filming city streets from the back of a motorcycle, or rain rippling through puddles as they stood on a corner on Broadway. “I shot thousands and thousands of feet of sixteen-millimeter film for Cyclia,” recalled Oz. “It’s where I got the first experience that enabled me to become a movie director.” But “you couldn’t shoot just random stuff,” continued Oz. “Jim was actually thinking thematically. Since there would be sixteen projectors showing images, they had to be thematically sound—like sixteen screens of people screaming at the Beatles.” In fact, Jim had thirteen themes in mind—including “Woods,” “Junk,” “City at Night” “India,” and “Nude”—all of which would then be edited together into an hour-long film called Cataclysm that would project constantly on walls and bodies throughout the evening.

  For most of 1966, Jim was seriously considering purchasing and converting ABZ Studios, a set of buildings at 266-268 East 78th Street in Manhattan, to house his club. Local zoning ordinances were a bit vague, allowing for a restaurant—though not “a cabaret”—and for music, “as long as there were no more than three instruments used, excluding any brass instruments.” Despite the limitations, Jim was prepared to purchase the property, and its two mortgages, outright for $200,000—about $1 million today, and an astronomical sum for a company that could barely afford to keep five full-time employees on its payroll. However, when legal difficulties arose regarding the original owner’s certificate of occupancy, Jim formally rescinded his offer. “Nearly bought ABZ,” he noted in his journal with a touch of regret.

  Following the breakdown of the ABZ negotiations Jim looked at several other locations, including buildings at West 60th Street, just off Central Park, a site in Santa Monica, California, and a large vacant lot on Second Avenue in New York City, at the foot of the Queensboro Bridge, where Jim proposed building a geodesic dome or even dropping in an inflatable structure. None of these ambitious ideas, however, moved much beyond the discussion phase.

  More promising, it seemed, was a joint venture agreement with the El Morocco club on Broadway to take over the famous club’s Garrison Room—but that, too, proved to be a dead end. “We went to the El Morocco,” Oz said, “[and] Jim and I went to [the dance club] Electric Circus just to look at it … [but] it just wasn’t selling.” Still, Jim remained almost defiantly committed to the project, incorporating Cyclia Enterprises in the fall of 1967, running endless cost analyses, piecing together a rough cut of Cataclysm, and handing out fluorescent-colored brochures to potential backers. “It could well be that he was toying with a dream,” said Jerry Juhl later, “[but he was] enjoying the process tremendously.” Oz agreed. “Jim went where the excitement was.” Eventually, the nightclub idea was abandoned, though Cyclia Enterprises—perhaps a testament to Jim’s ridiculous optimism—would not be formally disbanded until 1970.

  Even as he spent late evenings sketching Cyclia floor plans, painting concept art, or editing Cataclysm, Jim would still return home each night to Greenwich where he would join the family in the latest crafts or art project—and there was always some project spread out at the Henson household, whether it was wooden boxes to be dabbed with acrylic paints or materials to construct custom dollhouses. “You would think that he would be tired of making things by the time he came home at night, but it wasn’t the case,” said Lisa. “Even on weekends, he was still working on the art projects with us.” “There was a lot of making things,” said Cheryl, “and there was a lot of respect for childhood.”

  “Jim loved to come home and be with the kids,” said Jane. “He’d just come up with all these different projects. If we were driving along and we saw high grass, Jim would say, ‘Oh! Let’s do a film with you coming in and out of the grass and popping up over the grasses!’ So we’d stop the car and out comes the Bolex [camera] and they’d do a film. In the spring, he would get photographs of little teeny f
erns opening up. What was very basic to his work is that he was really in love with life. He was really intrigued with how all these little pieces of life worked and he was equally as intrigued with his children. He loved just watching them be children and doing the things they enjoyed doing.”

  While the Henson children all knew their father worked with puppets, they were never encouraged to believe that any of the Muppet characters were living, breathing creatures. To Jim, puppets were merely one of the tools of his trade, a part of his act, to be thrown into a cabinet when they were worn out or no longer needed—an attitude he imparted to his children, who found more than a few discarded Muppets in their toy boxes. “He was very matter-of-fact about it,” said Lisa. “His attitude was, ‘None of this stuff is really precious—you can make it and then you can take it apart and make something else with it.’ He even had some of the old Sam and Friends Muppets lying around the house and they became rags because we played with them. Chicken Liver was a particular victim of our playing!” (In 2010, Chicken Liver would be rescued and restored and now resides in the Smithsonian Institution.)

  All three school-age children had been enrolled briefly in the Whitby Montessori School, then the North Street School in Greenwich, before entering Mead School, where Jane became actively involved in the school’s dynamic art program. It was an activity that required even more of her already precious time but gave her “an embracing environment,” recalled Cheryl, and a much needed creative outlet. To keep things in order at home, then, Jane had help from a savvy nanny named Lillian Soden, who would take over the household, usually on each Tuesday and Wednesday, to give Jim and Jane the chance to spend the evening together, heading into New York for dinner and a movie or music in a nightclub. Though she was only in the house briefly each week, Lillian’s presence was pervasive in the Henson household. In some ways, Lilly served for Lisa and Cheryl the same role that Dear—who passed away in August 1967—had for Jim, encouraging and inspiring the girls with her own particular skills and talents. “There were times when Lilly just really held it all together in terms of her incredible cooking and her great values,” Cheryl said later. “Lilly was just amazing.” To Lisa, Lillian “was like my surrogate grandmother. She taught me everything I know about etiquette, whether it’s sending thank-you notes or how to set the table. She was incredible.”