Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  “We did the test shows that way,” Stone continued, “and we realized right away that we had a problem, because the people on the street couldn’t compete with the puppets. We had children watching these shows and their attention span just went way down when we cut to the street.… So the information we got from these test shows demonstrated that we needed a transition from the fantasy to the reality.”

  The solution to this unforeseen hitch, then, was simple: Muppets were needed on the street.

  Jim thought about it, and after taking his family on a quick vacation to Barbados and St. Lucia at the end of July, returned to Jon Stone with several ideas. One of his thoughts was “to have a character that the child could live through,” a Muppet who was representative of the audience. “Big Bird, in theory, is himself a child,” said Jim, “and we wanted to make this great big silly awkward creature that would make the same kind of dumb mistakes that kids make.” To make things even more interesting, Jim and Stone decided on another character that was nearly the antithesis of the wide-eyed, innocent Big Bird: a cynical, complaining grouch named Oscar. “Oscar is there because we didn’t want a bland kiddie show,” said Stone. “We didn’t want to let it get too sweet.”

  The remaining issue, at least for Jim, was one of personnel. Doing brief Muppet sketches and inserts on tape was one thing; appearing regularly on a daily show was another. Performing Big Bird and Oscar would be a time-consuming task that would require the puppeteer to be present for all 130 shows CTW anticipated filming each year—and Jim, who intended for both characters to be performed by the same puppeteer, was not inclined to devote himself to full-time puppeteering. The versatile Oz was briefly considered for the task, but Jim had envisioned Big Bird as a full-body, walkaround puppet, and Oz, after his experience in the stuffy La Choy dragon costume, was remaining steadfast in his refusal to perform any more large characters—and besides, Oz was too valuable to spare for 130 shows. With the first episodes of Sesame Street going before the cameras in less than four months, then, Jim needed to quickly hire a puppeteer specifically for the job of performing Big Bird and Oscar.

  Fortunately, Jim already had a recruiting mission on his calendar—and in August 1969, he traveled to Salt Lake City for several days to attend the annual conference for the Puppeteers of America. There he attended a performance by a thirty-five-year-old puppeteer named Caroll Spinney, who advertised his performance as “an experimental production” of live puppetry interacting with an animated background. It would have been an impressive combination of media had it actually worked. But as Spinney began his performance, an errant spotlight shone down on his movie screen, completely washing out the animated background. “I couldn’t see my films to synchronize my movements,” Spinney lamented. “It was an immediate disaster. I lost the whole bit.” Spinney managed to salvage the performance through a bit of ad-libbing, then slunk offstage. To his surprise, Jim greeted him backstage in his near-whisper way, and asked Spinney if he could meet with him later to talk.

  That invitation sounded familiar to Spinney, who had met Jim several years earlier at a puppetry convention in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. There, Jim had suggested Spinney come to New York “to talk about” working for the Muppets—but Spinney hadn’t followed up on the suggestion, failing to realize that “Jim never just wanted to chat. If he said he wanted to talk about something, it meant that he wanted to do it.” This time, Spinney wouldn’t make the same mistake.

  Spinney stashed his gear, then ran to the lounge where Jim was already waiting, slouched down on a couch. “I saw your show,” Jim told Spinney. “I liked what you were trying to do.” Spinney laughed, relieved. Jim understood—and when offered another chance to “join the Muppets,” Spinney eagerly accepted. As usual, Jim had a knack for choosing the right people for the job—and despite Spinney’s disastrous live show, Jim had seen the performer’s talent.

  Even as Jim was finding his puppeteer, the workshop at Henson Associates was bustling with activity. With production on Sesame Street ramping up, Jim had employed several more designers to work alongside Sahlin, including Caroly Wilcox—a talented puppeteer with a penchant for design—and the serendipitously named Kermit Love, a marionettist and former Broadway costume designer with a Santa Claus beard who excelled at crafting full-body puppets. Meanwhile, in the administrative offices upstairs, Jim had recently hired Diana Birkenfield, a former production assistant on The Jimmy Dean Show, to act as his first full-time producer, reviewing and vetting potential projects.

  One office, however, sat empty. In June, Jerry Juhl had approached Jim and amiably informed him that he and his wife, Susan, were planning to move to California, where Jerry hoped to make it as a freelance writer. “I wasn’t in California very long at all before I got a call from Jon Stone,” recalled Juhl. “They actually had a really hard time finding writers [for Sesame Street].” Like many, Juhl was skeptical about whether Sesame Street would last more than a season—and he didn’t want to relocate to New York to find the worthy experiment had failed after three months. But Stone, and Jim, were persistent; when it came to the Muppets, Jim was certain Juhl knew their temperament and rhythms better than anyone—Jim wanted and needed him. So Stone tried again, offering Juhl the option of remaining in California and working long-distance. With that, Juhl agreed to become one of Stone’s most important Sesame Street writers, mailing in Muppet scripts from California—and commuting into New York when necessary—for the next five years.

  As fall approached, the Muppet builders were putting the finishing touches on both Big Bird and Oscar, readying them for the first full day of street shooting on October 13, 1969. Jim wanted Big Bird to be the next phase in full-body characters, an improvement over earlier efforts that had limited facial expressions and squatty arms that inhibited arm and hand movements. Jim wanted Big Bird to have a more expressive face, with eyes that blinked, and a flexible body that allowed the performer to more easily move and react. Sahlin, then, was eagerly at work on Big Bird’s head and the whirl of gears that would allow the performer to open the puppet’s eyes, while Kermit Love, with his flair for the dramatic, assembled the body. Apart from the drawings he had provided, Jim had inspired Big Bird’s design in other ways. “When Big Bird was being developed, I kept the image of Jim Henson in mind,” said Love. “I always thought of Jim’s stature—he was well over six feet tall, and that loping gait he had when he walked down a hallway. Somehow or other, that was what stuck in my mind.” For a moment, Jim had even considered constructing a puppet in which the performer walked backward, to more closely simulate the actual bend of a bird’s leg. “Fortunately,” said Spinney, “Jim abandoned that idea, or I could have spent over thirty years walking around backward.”

  There was nothing overly complicated about Oscar, however—he was a Muppet typical of Jim’s ferocious yet somehow nonthreatening monsters, originally an orange shag rug with a wide mouth and angry eyebrows. Oscar had been partly inspired by regular lunches at a seafood restaurant just around the corner from the Muppet workshop called Oscar’s Salt of the Sea, where the grumbling, growling owner often reduced Jim and Jon Stone to fits of giggles. As initially envisioned by Jim and Stone, Oscar was supposed to be a grouch that lived in the sewers, accessible through a manhole cover. “It would lift up and you’d see these little eyes looking at you, and you’d [go] down through the dripping water in the sewers [and] here would [be] these scruffy little things in half darkness that were picking things out of the water and eating them,” recalled Stone. It was an idea he and Jim found hilarious, but ultimately, “we decided that was too gross.” Oscar would live in a much more easily accessible—and far less gross—garbage can.

  On Monday, September 29, 1969, Jim and Oz began filming their first set of Muppet inserts at Reeves Teletape at 67th and Broadway, just a short cab ride across Central Park. The first segment, written and directed by Stone, featured Ernie and Bert riffing on what would be one of the themes for Sesame Street’s first episode: the letter W
and the word wash. The very first look preschoolers would have of Ernie and Bert, then, featured Ernie singing in the bathtub, asking an already annoyed Bert to toss a bar of soap “into Rosie.”

  “I call my bathtub Rosie,” explained Ernie.

  “Ernie, why do you call your bathtub Rosie?” asked Bert.

  “Because every time I take a bath,” responded Ernie, “I leave a ring around Rosie!”—and then came what would quickly become a signature sound from the show, mimicked by countless four-year-olds across the nation to the exasperation of preschool teachers everywhere: Ernie’s trademark laugh, a rapid-fire series of guttural, slightly slurpy gunshots: kkkkhi-kkkkkhi-kkkkkhi-kkkkhi-kkkkhi! A star was born.

  A little less than two weeks later, on Friday, October 10, Jim went to the Teletape facility at 81st and Broadway—residing in an old RKO movie theater that had been converted for television—and strolled the recently completed Sesame Street set with Sahlin and Spinney, inspecting the various nooks where the Muppet performers would be kneeling, crouching, or lying as they worked. The area around Oscar’s trash can was immediately problematic: it had been constructed in such a way that the right-handed Spinney couldn’t wedge his arm into the trash can’s opening. Spinney would have to perform Oscar left-handed until the set could be adjusted. “Left hands are much stupider than your right if you’re right handed,” Spinney explained. Still, Jim was anxious to see how Oscar would look on the set and asked Spinney to perform the character anyway, regardless of the difficult setup.

  Even without the contorted trash can, Spinney was nervous about debuting Oscar in front of Jim. He had only just decided that morning on the voice he would use for the character—based on a gruff Bronx cabdriver who had driven Spinney to the studio and growled, “Where to, Mac?”—and had yet to find out if it met with Jim’s approval. “I hoped I had the right voice,” Spinney said later. Jim waited patiently as Spinney pulled Oscar onto his left arm and twisted himself awkwardly behind the cutaway can. After a moment, Jim rapped on Oscar’s trash can; the lid banged open and the dingy orange Oscar emerged to glare at Jim. “Get away from my trash can!” Spinney snarled in his cabdriver’s voice.

  Jim smiled and nodded appreciatively. “That’ll do fine.”

  Beginning Monday, October 13, Jim would spend a few days on the Sesame Street set performing Kermit and Ernie, but for the most part the fall of 1969 was business as usual at Henson Associates, with continued appearances on variety shows and work on commercials. For Jim and his team, Sesame Street was, for the moment, just another assignment to add to the already lengthy list of projects Jim was either working on or had in development. In fact, when the first episode of Sesame Street aired nationally on November 10, it didn’t even merit mentioning in Jim’s private journal. That may have been due, in part, to a stinging review of the first two weeks’ worth of Sesame Street episodes by New York Times critic Jack Gould, which Jim later admitted had bruised his feelings. In his review, Gould sneeringly referred to the Muppets as “stocking puppets” and thought them “distressingly bland.” “One yearns for Burr Tillstrom,” Gould concluded. It would not be the last time Gould would claw at Jim.

  Still, Gould’s harsh review was decidedly in the minority—for it was clear almost immediately that Jim had helped create something extraordinary. In the October 31, 1969, issue of Life—which hit newsstands several weeks before the first episode of Sesame Street aired—Jim and the Sesame Street Muppets were featured in a full-page photo and story. In November, the Washington, D.C., City Council approved a resolution renaming a local road “Sesame Street” for a week. By December, Big Bird was already making a featured appearance on Ed Sullivan, dancing with chorus girls in a piece by noted Broadway choreographer Pete Gennaro. That same month Woman’s Day featured sewing patterns readers could use to make their own Muppets—and then perform them to an original routine written by Jerry Juhl. “It’s clever and witty and charming,” enthused the Detroit Free Press. “It’s integrated. It’s non-violent. It’s fun. It may even be educational.” Before the end of the year, even Jack Gould had to finally admit Sesame Street was “an undisputed hit.” “I didn’t know what success meant, but I knew we had it,” Joan Cooney said later.

  Even with Sesame Street building momentum, Jim continued writing new pieces for variety show appearances. On November 30, he and Oz performed a musical skit on The Ed Sullivan Show using several new Muppets, including a crazy-haired puppet in sunglasses who would come to be known by the name of the song performed that evening, a bit of nonsensical scat by the Italian composer Piero Umiliani called “Mah Nà Mah Nà.” Jim had found the song in a location about as far away from Sesame Street as possible: a 1968 Italian sexploitation film called Sweden: Heaven and Hell, which premiered in New York in August 1969. Oz felt sure that he and Jim had probably both seen the film when it played at the Avco Embassy Theatre five minutes away from the Henson offices, but “only Jim,” Oz said, laughing, “would have recognized its potential so quickly!”

  As sung by Jim—with Oz performing two vaguely bovine backup singers known as Snowths—“Mahna Mahna” (as Jim would always spell it) seemed custom-made for the Muppet brand of madness. Jim took great delight in playing with the four sides of the television screen, zipping his character in sideways, rushing the camera from upstage, or even backing in from downstage. It was an affectionate nod to the simpler days of Sam and Friends—while there was no explosion at the end, the sketch concluded with the puppets smashing into the camera, blacking it out—and the Sullivan crowd went wild, laughing and applauding spontaneously several times during the three-and-a-half-minute performance.

  In early 1970, with Sesame Street officially a success, ABC-TV expressed interest in reviving a Muppet project that had been languishing, unaired, for nearly two years: a fairy tale satire called Hey Cinderella! that Jim had taped in the fall of 1968, using the basic outline of the failed Cinderella pilot he and Jon Stone had collaborated on back in 1965. Jim was delighted with ABC’s decision to pick up the hour-long special; he was hoping to make Hey Cinderella! the first in a regular series he was calling Tales from Muppetland, and set to work filming several short spots with Kermit that could be inserted into Hey Cinderella! just before each commercial. That seemingly innocuous decision would lead to unexpected headaches.

  Following the April 10 airing of Hey Cinderella!, Jack Gould—the same critic who had already dismissed Jim’s work on Sesame Street as “distressingly bland”—took a swipe at Jim again, this time taking great umbrage with the use of Kermit in the filmed lead-ins to each commercial break. “Apparently, the Children’s Television Workshop … is not adverse to cashing in when success strikes,” lamented Gould. “Sesame Street last night lost a little of its luster as Kermit broke the faith and became one more pitchman.”

  That was too much for Jim. It didn’t seem to matter to Gould that although the production team included Jim and Jon Stone, Hey Cinderella! had absolutely no affiliation with CTW or Sesame Street. Further, Kermit was the furthest thing from a pitchman; Jim had been very careful not to show Kermit actually endorsing any products. Frustrated, Jim appealed to Gould in writing, trying, without much success, to set the record straight. “For the past ten or twelve years, approximately half my income has been derived from producing Muppet commercials,” Jim explained. “Since the advent of Sesame Street, and my own interest and concern for television … I have become a great deal more selective, and have turned down many lucrative offers that seemed to be trying to capitalize on Sesame Street.” Rightly pointing out that “it is my income from commercial TV that makes my participation in educational TV possible,” Jim assured the critic that he would continue “to work with a degree of integrity and responsibility to the children of the country.”

  Commercials would remain Henson Associates’ primary source of revenue, at least for a while, but Gould’s criticism, however unfair, had stung. In August 1970, Jim refused to renew his contract to film additional commercials for the Fri
to-Lay company, citing both his time commitment to Sesame Street as well as Henson Associates’ “extreme sensitivity to commercialization of the Muppet characters.” As he had assured Gould, Jim was indeed becoming more selective in the kinds of projects he took on, preferring to produce short sales or promotional films for internal use by companies rather than major advertising campaigns. In a sense, he was lying low.

  One of the most successful of those internal campaigns was another series of short films with Rowlf for IBM. Working with IBM meant Jim could continue to work with David Lazer, who impressed Jim with his energy and enthusiasm. Jim and Lazer could sit talking for hours in Jim’s office or even huddled together in the editing room while Jim cut film or dubbed sound effects. Some evenings, Lisa or Cheryl—or sometimes both—would join Jim and Lazer in the workshop, giving Lazer the opportunity to observe Jim with his children—and Lazer immediately understood why Jim could so effortlessly produce segments for Sesame Street that resonated with children.

  “We were really checking the clocks to finish the edit,” Lazer said, “and either Cheryl or Lisa asked a question, and he turned around—and I was going crazy—and he turned around as calm as could be and gave her a straight, honest adult answer. And I learned a lesson then: he had such respect for his children.… They asked him a question, and he took the time to answer it.”

  “The attitude you have as a parent is what your kids will learn from more than what you tell them,” Jim said later. “They don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.” As Lazer had noticed, Jim valued the views of his children and, in fact, frequently asked for their opinions of his work, gauging their reactions to performances and asking questions. “Jim was intrigued with his children,” said Jane. “They had a great sense of humor and so he immediately started using them to find out what was funny, what worked. He really respected their opinions.” Generally, if the children laughed, the routine stayed in. If they didn’t, ten-year-old Lisa was often the first to pipe up with a critique. “Lisa has great taste,” Jim told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “She can tell you specifically if something is working, or if you’re doing a punch line above children’s heads. If she feels they won’t understand it, we make it simpler.”