Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  In fact, the Sinatra show had been a trial run, an opportunity not only to try out some new kinds of puppetry, but also to learn what would and wouldn’t work on a darkened stage in a large room. “Working here [in Vegas] appealed to us in many ways,” he explained—then announced a surprising new project: “I have in mind doing a stage show,” he continued, “a full Broadway show with puppets. This [Sinatra show] enabled me to try a few things I wanted to try onstage.”

  With the Sinatra show running smoothly, Jim opted to take a quick vacation, handing his Las Vegas performing duties over to Oz and Nelson. In late June, Jim piled Jane and the five kids into the station wagon for a long, leisurely drive—Jim always loved to drive—from New York to California, sleeping at motels, and stopping every now and then to take pictures of amusing signs and sights. In early July, they joined Jerry and Sue Juhl at the Wilderness Trails ranch in Colorado, spending nearly a week horseback riding and hiking.

  While Jim enjoyed vacationing, he had a tough time staying in one place for very long—and just as he had in Las Vegas, he would become increasingly fidgety as the days passed, thinking about projects and scribbling ideas in small notebooks or yellow pads. Predictably, then, after only a few days in Colorado, Jim and Jerry Juhl stole away together to write—they were still passing pages of the screenplay for Tale of Sand back and forth—and kick around ideas. “We spent half our time riding around on horses, and of course the other half Jim and I sat working somewhere, which was always the standard pattern,” said Juhl. “[Jim was] not a vacation kind of guy.” Still, when the children were around, Jim lavished them with attention, and Cheryl would always recall their vacation at the ranch as one of her favorites.

  The Hensons closed out their trip with a swing through Las Vegas, where Jim returned to perform with Nancy Sinatra for closing night on July 18, then finished up with three days at Disneyland—“a great success,” Jim said. By early August, Jim was back in New York, just in time to turn around and travel to Nashville to attend the latest Puppeteers of America conference.

  Jim’s continued membership in Puppeteers of America wasn’t just a show of good faith to his profession. “My dad … always remained faithful and involved with the serious puppeteers,” said Lisa Henson. “Jim was loyal to puppetry and to Puppeteers of America because he believed in the value of the art as a form of expression,” said Oz. “When you’re a puppeteer, you act with the end of your arm. Your arm is your trade, and Jim appreciated that.” That attitude was in direct conflict with Oz’s, who never got comfortable with identifying himself as a puppeteer. “The more I was associated with puppets, the harder it was for me to be associated with the other things I wanted to do,” Oz said, “or, at least, that was my own neurosis speaking. But Jim didn’t have such apprehensions.”

  In fact, since his eye-opening trip to Europe in 1958, Jim had learned all he could about the long history of puppetry, reading about puppets in ancient Indonesia and Java, or studying the subtle differences in performance styles across European countries. Still, Jim refused to approach puppetry too intellectually. “When I hear the art of puppetry discussed, I often feel frustrated in that it’s one of those pure things that somehow becomes much less interesting when it is overdiscussed or analyzed,” he said later. “I feel it does what it does and even is a bit weakened if you know what it is doing. At its best, it is talking to a deeper part of you, and if you know that it’s doing that, or you become aware of it, you lessen the ability to go straight in.” More than anything, he was a fan, often collecting puppets for display in his home workshop. He was particularly pleased with a Sicilian rod puppet he had picked up, a four-foot knight in full armor with a detachable head ideally suited for losing in sword fights.

  That autumn, between daytime work on inserts for Sesame Street’s third season and late night recording sessions for The Muppet Alphabet Album—an ambitious Sesame Street–related project that featured a song for every letter of the alphabet—Jim and Jane moved their family from the relatively secluded neighborhood in Greenwich to a more suburban home near Bedford, New York. “That was a big difference,” said Lisa, “because we moved from this very historic building with a lot of personality to a brand-new home on a cul-de-sac suburban neighborhood.… We could ride bicycles and get out and walk to the bus and everything.”

  “It’s nice for the children to be living in a neighborhood like this and going to the [local public] schools,” Jim said. “Jane and I are both essentially loners.… I don’t think children should be isolated, but we don’t get involved with the neighbors.” That wasn’t quite true—some days, Brian would cut through the woods to visit a nearby horse barn, managed by a single mother with ten kids who allowed even her youngest children to rake their horse track by towing a large rake behind a converted milk truck. Brian was quick to lend a hand at the wheel. “I was driving early,” he said diplomatically. As Brian got older, Jim would permit him to drive their own cars from the street down their long curving driveway to the garage—a task the twelve-year-old Brian “absolutely adored.”

  As usual, the Henson home bustled with projects and activity. Jim and Lisa set to work building a highly detailed dollhouse inspired by a real Manhattan townhouse they had scouted out and photographed—an ambitious project that took several years to complete. Brian built elaborate contraptions that would allow him to roll a marble from their bedrooms on the second floor all the way through the house down to the basement, while John would speed around the yard on his bike. Cheryl would ferry toddler Heather around the house and yard, painting Easter eggs in the downstairs playroom as Heather banged on a toy xylophone. Assorted pets, including cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, and a ferret, freely roamed the property, and Jane decorated the house with handmade crafts and pottery. “At home, we had all kinds … of creative things going on,” said Jane. “So if there were puppets, they were made in the kitchen out of wooden spoons and paper cups and things like that.… Just a general feeling of creativity was always around the house.”

  Still, there were times when even such quiet pleasure was too loud for Jim, particularly when there were projects to brainstorm, scripts to be written, or times he just needed to think. “He loved to take a chair out into the garden and sit quietly, away from the hustle and bustle of the home, and just be,” said Cheryl. “He needed to find quiet time to hear himself.”

  On Thanksgiving Day 1971, Jim was the featured guest for all ninety remarkable minutes of The Dick Cavett Show, performing several sketches—including old standbys like “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” newer skits like “Mahna Mahna,” as well as new Sesame Street pieces—and demonstrating how Muppets were built and performed. It was a fun and fascinating appearance, yet Jim looked uncomfortable, loping onstage in black pants and buckled boots with a slightly too short woven tunic pulled over a beige turtleneck. Slouching down next to Cavett on the couch and crossing his long legs in front of him, a bit of bare calf was slightly visible above his boot line. As he spoke, his hands played with his beard; Jim was visibly nervous. He had never really gotten comfortable on camera—even the few times he had been called out onstage by Ed Sullivan after Muppet performances, Jim would shake hands and exit rapidly, saying as little as possible. “It took him a while to get comfortable in his own skin,” said Oz.

  Jim admitted as much. “I’ve … sat on the panel as myself just talking, not performing with the Muppets,” he said later. “I liked it, sort of. I was comfortable, but not really comfortable. It’s not what I was meant to be here for. Frankly, I’m a lot more comfortable if I’m wearing a puppet.” For this appearance, however, Jim, Oz, and Nelson would be performing their puppets as they sat next to Cavett on the couch, visibly interacting and ad-libbing in character. “He was nervous about going on a live situation, unlike Frank, who kind of glories in that sort of thing,” said Jerry Juhl. “Frank really loves to go in, to work live and work dangerously and ad-lib.… Jim was always nervous about it.” And yet Jim bantered gamely with Cav
ett, and even the few times things went wrong—several tapes wouldn’t cue up, and Ernie’s sunglasses wouldn’t stay on in one sketch—Jim always recovered, using self-deprecating humor. But if Jim was nervous about his ability to match wits with the clever Cavett, the host himself was in awe of Jim. “No matter how much you know about how this works,” Cavett told his audience, “the minute you see them again, they’re completely convincing. It’s amazing.” As Jim performed Kermit from the couch, Cavett was captivated. “It’s hard to tell where Kermit leaves off and you begin!” said Cavett.

  “Yes, I’ve noticed that,” Jim responded, smiling.

  Jim spent most of the Christmas holiday working out ideas for his Broadway show, a project he was determined to stage sooner rather than later. Despite his recent work in more adult venues and more sophisticated puppetry, the label reading children’s performer, Jim feared, was beginning to stick. “It’s something I’ve always faced, this slight condescension toward puppets,” said Jim. “Well, my kids like puppets, certainly, but so do adults.” The problem, as he saw it, was that adult audiences—at least in the United States—had never had the chance to see what good puppetry was capable of. The Broadway show Jim envisioned would finally give adult audiences that opportunity; more important, in the process, it would help him shed the stifling image the media was creating of Jim, and the Muppets, as purely sugarcoated kids’ entertainment.

  “Puppeteering covers a wide range of stuff,” Jim explained to The San Diego Union patiently. “The nice thing is, you do it all—you can write it, stage it, build the sets, the puppets. It’s a complete thing. Puppetry has been around for thousands of years. It’s a part of theater in which small wooden figures serve to represent people. In theater, people represent things. And with puppets, you can deal with subjects in a way that isn’t always possible with people. I think of puppetry as expressing one’s self through charades.”

  In the four months since he had publicly announced his intent to pursue a live show, Jim had filled page after page in his yellow pads with ideas for skits and draft scripts, scribbling them out as he always did with a black felt-tip pen, then handing the pages over to his assistant to type. In early December, in fact, he felt he was far enough along with the project to meet with representatives of Lincoln Center about staging the show in one of their theaters, eventually reserving the elegant, and practically brand-new, Alice Tully Hall.

  There was good reason for Jim to assume the time was right for a live stage show for puppets. Sid and Marty Krofft had recently produced a traveling show—basically a live version of their Saturday morning television hit H.R. Pufnstuf—the success of which was noted at Henson Associates a bit enviously. Additionally, in early 1971, puppeteer Wayland Flowers—with his outrageous, wisecracking puppet Madame—had opened a successful off-Broadway show called Kumquats, billed as the “World’s First Erotic Puppet Show.” Jim wasn’t proposing anything quite that bawdy, though one of his first notes for the show—called In Uffish Thought in its earliest drafts—stressed that “it would not be supposed that the show is for children. It is intended to be an adult presentation.” But perhaps realizing that aiming at a primarily adult audience might limit the show’s commercial appeal, Jim had scrapped that idea and started over. While he still wanted to address more grown-up themes and write more sophisticated material, “We know that many people will bring children, just because of the … Muppets,” he wrote, “so at no time will we do material in bad taste.” Still, he assured potential investors, “This will not prevent this from being strong theatre.”

  Jim would write countless drafts and proposals for his show—pitched variously as An Evening with the Muppets, The Muppets Get It Together, and The Muppets in Concert—submitting presentations containing beautifully colored illustrations, drafting complete show outlines, hiring songwriters, and continually filling notebooks with new ideas and character sketches. While proposals could vary depending on whom Jim was pitching—whether potential funders, television executives, or Broadway producers—they all had one thing in common: “This is a very unusual evening of theatre,” Jim would write in one pitch after another. “It is puppetry—but puppetry unlike any you’ve ever seen before.”

  One of the earliest and more intriguing sketches was a piece written by Juhl, based on an idea that Jim and Oz had regularly considered, but never carried out, during their days of performing Rowlf live with Jimmy Dean. “We loved the idea of Rowlf sitting there on a huge podium, and then it collapses and you see Jim and me performing him,” Oz said. “We loved the idea of being seen. That was one thing I loved about Jim—he was never precious with the puppets.” This progressive attitude toward puppetry was well ahead of its time; forty years later, puppeteers would routinely be visible to audiences as they performed their characters onstage in shows like The Lion King and Avenue Q. In 1971, however, such an approach challenged nearly every expectation American audiences had for a puppet show.

  Juhl’s script, then, began with Rowlf alone onstage addressing the audience. “I’m not a real dog,” Rowlf says earnestly. “Where real dogs have hind legs, do you know what I’ve got? Puppeteers!”—at which point the podium hiding Jim and Oz would be pulled away, exposing the puppeteers, and shattering the barrier between reality and illusion. It was a theme that fascinated Jim—The Cube had practically been built around it—and the concept would run through several sketches in yet another proposal, this time featuring a gigantic puppet named Clyde, who would be visibly operated onstage by five puppeteers. “You will pay no attention to them,” Clyde insists, “because that is our illusion—and that illusion is our reality, and the reality is the illusion.” (Typically, Jim refused to end the piece on such a cerebral tone, noting that immediately after delivering this speech, Clyde “explodes in all directions.”)

  In other pieces, there was a new sociopolitical edge Jim hadn’t shown with the Muppets before. Unlike Walt Kelly in Pogo, however, Jim was never comfortable aiming his satirical punches at individuals; instead, he took on higher concepts like technology, science, the generation gap, and, in one particularly biting piece, greed and the economy. That particular sketch—in which a giant, rolling face ingested stock funds and tax shelters—was one of Jim’s favorites; he had even gone so far as to have the Muppet builders construct a gigantic face, and took great delight in allowing reporters to take photographs of him being gobbled up by it. Ultimately, the show, as Jim saw it, was designed to “present a series of contrasting moods and scale, showing the full range of what puppetry is capable of doing.” It was clearly something new and unique: a puppetry tour de force, cleverly written and ambitiously designed—so ambitious, in fact, that Jim was finding it increasingly hard to hold it together.

  In early 1972, Jim was back in Toronto to oversee preliminary work for a new installment of Tales from Muppetland called The Muppet Musicians of Bremen, adapted from the Grimm fairy tale. Many of the Muppets in Bremen would have a slightly different look from puppets in previous specials, thanks to the addition of a new designer named Bonnie Erickson, whose sense of design was a bit more cartoony and less abstract than Sahlin’s. Where Sahlin designed and built in flat abstractions, sewing soft, malleable Muppets from fabric and stuffing, Erickson thought and worked in three-dimensional textures, carving Muppet heads out of enormous squares of polyurethane that could be easily mooshed and mashed and manipulated by performers to give the puppets a dynamic range of expression. Erickson’s most notable contribution to Bremen would be the malleable foam heads carved for its hillbilly villains, giving each a look so bizarrely lifelike that one Hollywood special effects artist asked Jim how it had been done. “He thought that we were applying the foam directly to people’s faces,” laughed Jim.

  To give the foam heads a softer, fuzzier appearance, Jim had recently adopted a process called flocking, commonly used in lining the interior of jewelry boxes. Flocking involved coating the Muppet’s foam surface with an adhesive, then shaking fine synthetic fibers—the so-
called flock—through a screen onto the glue. When an electrical charge was run through the wet, sticky surface—and for Muppet heads, this was usually done by sticking a pin into the puppet’s face and electrifying it—the flock would stand up perpendicularly and then set in place. It was flocking that gave the interior of jewelry boxes their velvety feel; when applied to the Muppets, it gave each puppet a fuzzy look. As an added benefit, it also caught the light in a manner Jim loved, lighting the puppet beautifully on television. From here on, the flocking of Muppet heads would become a regular practice, giving Muppets like Miss Piggy or Statler and Waldorf their soft, slightly stippled appearance.

  Still, the process for designing and building Muppets was always the same. “The character comes first,” Jim said, “then I do a bunch of sketches and one of those will have an essence of the character.” The workshop staff was small enough in 1971 that Jim was still able to oversee the development and building of nearly every Muppet himself. “[Jim] was the art director,” said designer Caroly Wilcox, “so at least once a day he would make comments on how things were progressing.” Sometimes, Jim would hand the designers a piece of yellow paper with nothing more than a squiggle with eyes and ears. “It was fun to play with that,” said Wilcox, “the individual puppet builder designer had a lot more to put in.”

  With a growing staff, increasing revenues from merchandising to manage, and more and more contracts and legal agreements crossing his desk, Jim decided it was time to bring in a full-time business manager and administrator to keep an eye on the fine print and the bottom line. In March, he hired Al Gottesman, an attorney with a bit of showbiz savvy—as a young man, he had served as a page for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows—who had earlier impressed Jim with his level head and steady hand during the negotiations that produced the complex math formula that divvied up merchandising revenues between Henson Associates and Children’s Television Workshop. That made Gottesman ideally suited for his first task: protecting the Muppets from copyright infringement.