Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  While Ernie and Bert—and therefore Jim and Oz—would come to be almost universally hailed as a comedic duo on the same upper stratum as Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, or Burns and Allen, Oz never really thought of Jim and himself as a comedy team. “We were two people so in tune with each other that we didn’t have to say anything to communicate,” Oz said. “We’d get done with a take and we’d look at each other and we both knew without saying anything that we’d have to do it again, and we both knew why. That was the special bond we had.” They didn’t make comedy, said Oz; instead, “we created a kind of aliveness.” Whatever it was, “it was a magical coming together of a couple of characters,” said Jon Stone. “Frank and Jim were yin and yang.… They were this inseparable couple. It was a beautiful love affair, in the best sense of the word.”

  Besides Ernie, Jim was regularly performing Kermit for the Sesame Street inserts, though he had scaled back the frog’s appearances somewhat following Gould’s confusion over Kermit’s appearance in Hey Cinderella! The incident had left such a bad taste in his mouth, in fact, that Jim took Kermit off Sesame Street altogether for nearly a year. Trying to fill the void, the writers introduced Herbert Birdsfoot, a nice guy lecturer performed by Jerry Nelson, “to be a kind of Kermit spokesperson,” said Stone. It was an experiment doomed to fail from the beginning. “It never really took off,” Stone said. “Trying to follow Kermit is like trying to follow Will Rogers.”

  Actually, it was like trying to follow Jim Henson—for the more Jim performed Kermit, the more the two of them seemed to become intertwined. While Jim always described Kermit as somewhat “snarkier” than himself—as Jim had discovered from Edgar Bergen, a puppet could say things that couldn’t be said by ordinary people—it was becoming harder to tell where the frog ended and Jim began. Over the past few years, Kermit had become a more rounded, more refined character. “Kermit is the closest one to me,” Jim said later. “He’s the easiest to talk with. He’s the only one who can’t be worked by anybody else, only by me. See, Kermit is just a piece of cloth with a mouthpiece in it. The character is literally my hand.”

  Jim’s other regular character was the excitable game show host Guy Smiley, a performance Joan Cooney always thought was Jim’s funniest. Whether he was hosting game show parodies like “Beat the Time” or “Here Is Your Life,” Guy was an amped-up version of Jim’s own personality, brimming with enthusiasm, rooting for contestants, and always convinced that whatever game they were playing was pretty much the greatest game ever. “I live kind of within myself as a person, so my outlet has always been the Muppets; therefore, I tend to do sort of wildly extroverted characters,” said Jim. The only downside to performing Guy was that his higher-pitched, nearly shouted manic voice could be hard on Jim’s vocal cords; at times, Jim would finish taping Guy Smiley segments with his voice nearly ragged.

  Oz had nearly the same problem performing a character who was one of Guy Smiley’s regular contestants, a furry blue monster with a rumbling voice who, like other characters Oz would perform, moved from being a face in the background to front stage, where he became a break-out star: Cookie Monster. The voice, Oz said, was “an explosion of energy” that could “absolutely rip” his throat, and took some time for Oz to master without shredding his larynx.

  Monsters had been a Muppet staple for nearly as long as there had been Muppets—Yorick had devoured Kermit on national television as early as 1956—making it all but inevitable that Jim would introduce monsters on Sesame Street. Oscar, despite his appearance, somehow seemed to defy the label monster—he was a grouch, which seemed to give him a status all his own. Cookie, on the other hand, was unapologetically a monster—but if educators were worried that Jim’s monsters would give preschoolers nightmares, Jim was already one step ahead of them, saliently explaining the educational aspects of his monsters even as he acknowledged educators’ concerns. “On Sesame Street, the monsters are kind of soft and cuddly and fuzzy, but for a three- or four-year-old child, they might be rather frightening things,” Jim said sympathetically. “At the same time, the child can get to know these monsters and understand that they are not things to be frightened of. It’s a scary image, but the child can learn to handle it.”

  Cookie could trace his roots back to a prototype built by Don Sahlin for a 1966 ad campaign for General Foods, when Jim had sketched three different monsters to each steal one of three shaped snacks called Wheels, Crowns, and Flutes. Cookie’s ancestor, the Wheel Stealer, was a fuzzy, twitchy, googly-eyed fanged monster who grabbed and gobbled handfuls of wheel-shaped chips. When General Foods opted not to use the ad, Jim recycled the Wheel Stealer for one of his IBM Coffee Breaks, where the monster devoured a talking coffee machine, then exploded—a sketch Jim enjoyed so much he recreated it for The Ed Sullivan Show in 1967. The monster was used again in 1969, this time with his fangs removed, for the Munchos potato chips commercials. That defanged version eventually made his way onto Sesame Street, where he first appeared among a crowd of monsters. At the end of Oz’s skillful right arm, Cookie—referred to in early publicity simply as “Blue Monster”—slowly worked his way to the front of more and more inserts, devouring not just cookies, but salt shakers, telephones, and letters of the alphabet.

  Another Oz-performed monster would become almost as synonymous with Sesame Street as Big Bird—and if Big Bird, as Jim and Jon Stone hoped, was the “representative of the audience,” then the fuzzy, lovable Grover was the audience’s devoted best friend. As with many of Sesame Street’s most memorable characters, it had taken some time before the character finally clicked. Like Cookie Monster, Grover had been simply one in a crowd of previously used monsters, having first appeared as a monster named Gleep in a 1967 Christmas sketch on The Ed Sullivan Show. In his first Sesame Street inserts, the still unnamed Grover was more monsterlike, with darker, matted fur and slightly sinister eyes.

  By the second season, that would change. Part of the transition had to do with design—the monster was given a brighter, bluer fur, and wider eyes. But Oz had also begun to get a handle on the character, finally arriving at a name as he played with the puppet between takes, and developing a better understanding of Grover’s motivation, thanks to some help from his dog, a devoted mutt named Fred. Watching Fred romping buoyantly in the park one afternoon, Oz said, “I noticed the purity of the dog.” It was suddenly clear. “There’s a purity in Grover,” said Oz. “He wants to please.” Grover had arrived.

  Finding a character to act as Grover’s primary foil fell largely to Jerry Nelson, who started on Sesame Street in 1970 just as he had on The Jimmy Dean Show in 1965: performing right hands. As he began taking on more characters, Nelson developed the first major straight man for Grover with the eternally annoyed Mr. Johnson, a blue, round-headed Anything Muppet who seemed to constantly dine in restaurants where Grover served as his waiter, and received perpetually poor—though enthusiastic—service. Acting as a foil for Grover “really enabled me to get a real feel for that kind of ongoing, day-to-day playing in an ensemble manner,” said Nelson. Nelson would become one of Sesame Street’s most versatile and valued puppeteers, performing Herbert Birdsfoot, Sherlock Hemlock, Herry Monster, and, by the fourth season, the number-loving vampire Count Von Count.

  Nelson also served as the lead puppeteer on Snuffleupagus, one of Jim’s first two-man, full-body, walkaround Muppets, unveiled in 1971. “Jim loved complicated puppetry,” said Cooney, though Jim admitted that the success of Snuffy was largely through trial and error. “Every time we built [a full-body Muppet], we would learn a lot about what to do and not to do next time,” said Jim—and Snuffy was a true feat of engineering, requiring two performers to work cooperatively beyond merely right and left hands. Such cooperation required enormous intuition between two performers, and Nelson quickly learned that he and Richard Hunt could communicate just as silently, and just as seamlessly, as Jim and Oz. Into the rear of Snuffy Hunt went. “It wasn’t much fun for Richard,” Nelson admitted later, but their per
formance, all the way down to Snuffy’s dancing, was flawless. “Richard was good and gave him good movement,” said Nelson.

  For Hunt, it was all an adventure. “He was like a puppy … really bouncy and eager,” said Nelson. “So we had to sit on him a lot.” It didn’t seem to matter. Assigned largely right-hand (and tail-end) work and background Muppets, Hunt threw himself into any assignment with zeal and without complaint. Jim, too, quickly appreciated Hunt’s ability to fall into sync with other performers, though Hunt admitted there was a bit of a trick to performing a right hand with Jim. “I always used to do Jim’s right hand as Ernie,” Hunt said later, “and I would hold one of his belt loops with my left hand so that I was with him literally. Otherwise you’re being dragged along … by grabbing his belt loop, the minute he moves, I’m feeling him move—with the first real spasm of the first twitch, I just immediately move with him.”

  Many of Sesame Street’s most memorable moments involved children interacting with the Muppets, a brilliant decision that was driven more by idleness on the part of the writers than inspiration—when bits were ad-libbed, no scriptwriting was necessary. (When children were on the set, Stone would call out “blue sky!”—code that a child was present and performers and crew members should refrain from swearing.) Instead, said Stone, “we’d give the puppeteer a concept or a problem … and have them just talk it over with the kids. And we found early on that certain puppeteers—Jerry, Frank, and Jim—were wonderful at it.” Even more surprising, said Stone, the team found that “as soon as the puppet goes up on somebody’s arm, the puppeteer ceases to exist.” Jim was delighted. “I’m working with Ernie, [who] has no bottom half or legs or anything like that. He ends at the waist,” Jim explained. “Yet, the kids will look right at Ernie and me—this strange, bearded man—standing right there, talking for the puppet, and there’s no question the kids believe Ernie is a real personality.”

  Jim was proud of his involvement with Sesame Street, and knew early on he was involved not only with something that could make a difference in the lives of children, but might also give his bruised-but-beloved television what he saw as a much needed sense of purpose. “Family, school and television are the most important factors in raising children,” Jim remarked to TV Guide in 1970. “Of these, television has the least sense of responsibility.” Elsewhere, he complained candidly that “TV is frustrating. It is an exciting art and communications form capable of contributing so much, but it just isn’t set up to do it. It’s geared to sell products—the whole reason for being against all other things which are neat and innovative.”

  Still, if his hope for a higher calling for television was destined to disappoint, Jim was committed to making his corner of television as bright as possible. “Kids love to learn, and the learning should be exciting and fun,” he said. “That’s what we’re out to do.” Echoed Juhl, “It’s why the show is a success. The show is obviously done to be entertaining and everybody has a wonderful time.” And no one, said Cheryl Henson, was having a more wonderful time than her father. “He loved to perform with Frank and Jerry and all the puppeteers,” she said. “When we were little kids watching Sesame Street, we often felt as if my father was performing just for us—but I think that he was really just having a good time with his friends.”

  As Sesame Street began its second season, it was clear the show had become a full-blown phenomenon, endlessly discussed and analyzed by everyone, including television critics, educators, psychiatrists, clergymen, physicians, and writers like George Plimpton, who confessed that his addiction to the show had “destroyed God knows how much writing I could have done.” In November 1970, Big Bird appeared on the cover of Time, fronting an extensive article that discussed Sesame Street’s “profusion of aims, [and] confusion of techniques,” then asked rhetorically, “how could such a show possibly succeed? Answer: spectacularly well.” Already the show was broadcast in fifty countries—though not yet England, where the BBC’s chief of children’s programming called the show “nondemocratic and possibly dangerous for young Britons”—and was seen by seven million American children each day.

  Through it all, everyone acknowledged that the Muppets were instrumental in Sesame Street’s success. “Jim’s contribution was absolutely essential,” said Jerry Nelson. “I mean, the show never would have had the success it has without Jim’s contribution to it.” Even Jim’s tormentor at The New York Times, Jack Gould, became a grudging cheerleader. “Jim Henson’s Muppets … is still central to the success of Sesame Street. They are fun for youngsters and intriguing to adults in the imaginative ways in which he uses them.”

  The success of the show, in fact, became nearly overwhelming for Jim and quickly came to define the creative direction of Henson Associates, despite Jim’s best efforts. The company that had produced such avant-garde, experimental fare as Youth 68 and The Cube over the last two years was now all Muppets, all the time—but Jim was optimistic, even grateful, for the opportunity to devote his time to the Muppets again. “I think it wasn’t until Sesame Street that the Muppets took over most of my creative energy,” Jim said later.

  It was what the audience wanted and so I felt I should be putting my time and energy into that. The Muppets have always had a life of their own and we who do the Muppets serve that life and the audience. This entity called the Muppets is something that I don’t dictate at all. The audience doesn’t dictate it either—but the response of the audience is all part of it. It has a natural flow of life that one goes with. It’s been fun and rewarding—just wonderful—and I hope that will continue.

  The success of Sesame Street affected more than just his ability to develop other film projects; it was also the final impetus toward Jim pulling the plug on commercials altogether. “When Sesame Street came on … we were too busy to do commercials,” said Jim. And, he had to admit, “it was a pleasure to get out of that world.… It’s a world of compromise.” While Jim would continue to produce ads intermittently for the rest of his career, the creative thrill was gone. “I just stopped doing that stuff,” he explained later. “At that point, I was at the level where they respect you and your opinion and all that sort of thing. But even then … every meeting is a meeting with a dozen people who all have opinions and the whole process is really not easy on a creative person.”

  So Jim was determined to get out of advertising—“my goals have changed, and are taking me farther away from the commercial area,” he told a disappointed Quaker Oats—but doing so would mean shutting off a major source of revenue for Henson Associates. Jim never liked discussing money; he had angrily scratched out a paragraph in his copy of a TV Guide interview that speculated he had “hauled in $350,000 in ’69” and earned about $25,000 per commercial. While the article had actually been fairly accurate, for Jim it had been rude to bring the matter up; talking about finances, he told another reporter, was “really ugly.” And yet the dilemma remained: Jim had given up most of his outside projects to commit himself to Sesame Street—and that commitment had impeded his ability to pursue the other projects he needed to stay in business. Clearly, another source of revenue was needed.

  Children’s Television Workshop also understood that finding that revenue stream was critical to its continued existence. The organization—which relied almost solely on taxpayer funding and contributions from social-minded companies—knew it couldn’t count on such largesse forever. “Foundation support is impermanent,” CTW co-founder Lloyd Morrisett said plainly. “Governmental funding is uncertain. Every organization needs a stable financial base in order to attract talented people.”

  Jim had actually made just such an argument at an October symposium hosted by Action for Children’s Television, where he laid out the critical need for money in public television, addressing his comments to educators and possible benefactors in the same clear language he used when speaking with his own children. “If I have a song to sing, it is about money,” Jim wrote, “because I think good children’s television is more a money p
roblem than anything else.… Good shows cost money, and if you want to have a lot of programs for kids, it costs a lot of money and someone has to pay for it.”

  Both Jim and CTW, then, had the same problem. And they found their mutual answer in the most unlikely of places: the Billboard charts. At the end of Sesame Street’s first season, Columbia Records had issued The Sesame Street Book and Record, which sold half a million copies, peaked at number 23, and would eventually win a Grammy Award—not bad for a year in which it had to jockey for position with albums by the Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Even more impressive, a single from the Sesame Street record—the catchy “Rubber Duckie,” sung by Jim as Ernie—had reached number 16 in September 1970. Clearly, there was a market for Sesame Street- and Muppet-related merchandise.

  It had been Bernie Brillstein who had first broached the subject with Jim, calling on him at the house in Greenwich to make the case. “I told him, ‘Sesame Street is now boom,’ ” Brillstein said. “And Jim was very peculiar about merchandising, because he usually didn’t like what people did. And I’m saying, ‘Jim, you have to merchandise those characters. It’s insane! It’s the most popular show in America!’ ”

  And yet, Jim was skeptical. While he was always careful to make certain he owned his characters, that principle, to the frustration of toy manufacturers everywhere, had translated into little merchandise; in the last decade, he had permitted very few Muppet-related items beyond a series of Kermit and Rowlf puppets and a few promotional giveaways. “You can’t take advantage of the love the kids have for these characters,” Jim would say time and time again. Oz, too, noted that bags of money had already been waved under their noses, to no avail. “If Jim or the Muppets wanted to go only after money,” said Oz, “we could have truly cleaned up. I can’t tell you how many cookie manufacturers wanted Cookie Monster to pitch their product.”