Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  For two weeks, Jim—along with Oz, Spinney, Nelson, and much of the Sesame Street crew—zipped back and forth between the Cavendish Hotel and Grade’s ATV Studios in London’s Borehamwood district, piling the entire team into several cabs each day for the thirty-minute trip north. Julie on Sesame Street featured the Muppets in nearly every segment—there would be only a brief interlude for Andrews to sing a duet with guest Perry Como—and Jim and his team worked almost constantly, rehearsing their singing and dancing all day, then filming into the evenings. There were plenty of charming moments, from Kermit singing “Bein’ Green” with Andrews to rows and rows of dancing grouches in trash cans, though Jim had scuttled an idea for a similar performance featuring multiple Big Birds, politely but firmly explaining to Andrews’s producers that “Somehow it seems to make a rather unique large bird not quite so unique.”

  Between tapings, Jim managed to catch Joe Raposo at the Dorchester hotel for lunch, and spent time at the home of Mia Farrow and husband, André Previn, for some last-minute discussions with the Muppets’ now visibly pregnant costar. When taping with Julie Andrews wrapped on November 5, Jim wasted no time returning to New York and his own project. But his hard work in London had landed him squarely on the radar of producer Lew Grade, who later admitted that he had been “struck with [Jim’s] originality and humor.” Quietly, the savvy Grade, who was always on the prowl for talent, made a note to discuss Jim and the Muppets with his ITC producers.

  Taping on Jim’s pilot—which he was calling The Muppets Valentine Show—began at ABC studios on December 3, 1973. Jim spent three days taping Farrow’s segments, then returned to the studio a week later to complete two Muppets-only pieces. Final editing took place in early January 1974—and just like that, Jim had completed his pilot. To celebrate, Jim threw a party at his home in Bedford where he screened the pilot for his guests, then immediately took off on a fifteen-day press tour to promote the show in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, San Francisco, and several other major television markets, including an appearance on The Tonight Show. As usual, Jim was up against the puppetry prejudice, constantly reminding reporters that the Muppets were for more than just children. “We made this special to appeal to all ages, because a lot of people just think of us as a company that does shows for children because of all the Sesame Street shows,” Jim told The Hollywood Reporter patiently. “We want to maintain a separate image. Not all of our shows are for children.”

  With The Muppets Valentine Show, Jim was clearly still feeling his way around for a format, placing the core of the show on a set that looked like an overgrown conservatory, and populating it with an assortment of monsters, most of them holdovers from The Great Santa Claus Switch. There were also several new humanoid characters, including George the Janitor and the detonator-wielding Crazy Harry (here called Crazy Donald, a nod to the explosion-loving Don Sahlin), both of whom would eventually make their way onto The Muppet Show. For the hosting duties, Jim turned things over to another new character, the vaguely human Wally, a sunglasses-wearing hipster who managed the Muppet cast while banging out stage directions on a typewriter. Kermit was there, too, but largely as a supporting character: while he did get to star in his own musical number—where he pedaled across the stage on a bicycle, a trick that would wow audiences several years later—he was otherwise blended into the crowd.

  Only two weeks after completing final edits, The Muppets Valentine Show premiered on ABC on January 30, 1974. Reviews were overwhelmingly positive—“absolutely delightful,” bubbled Variety—and most seemed to acknowledge that the special played well across all age groups. The show impressed executives at ABC, including network president Martin Starger, who called Jim into his office in March for a conversation about other projects. While the weekly series Jim wanted wasn’t yet on the table, Jim was still hoping to be given the opportunity to put into production several more holiday-themed shows he had outlined. Jim left the meeting in Starger’s office without a firm deal in place, but each promised to keep the discussions going. It was enough for now.

  Late in the spring, Jim took the family on another car trip, spending Easter in North Carolina with his Aunt Attie and Uncle Jinx, along with cousins Will and Stan and their families. Attie, Betty Henson’s oldest sister, was nearing seventy now, but remained in good health and spirits—and for Jim, it may have briefly seemed like those days in Hyattsville again, with the families crowded around the dinner table, swapping stories and jokes. It was also a reminder to Jim of just how alone his father must have been in Albuquerque following the death of Betty Henson nearly two years earlier.

  Recently, however, Paul Henson had been spending more and more time with Attie and Betty’s youngest sister, Bobby, now nearing sixty, who was also living alone following her divorce. Paul and Bobby’s relationship wasn’t necessarily romantic, but the two had known each other for nearly forty years—and with each now living alone, it seemed somehow appropriate for the two of them to take care of each other. On May 22, as Jim, Jane, Lisa, and Cheryl looked on, Paul and Bobby were married in Albuquerque. While Jim acknowledged the marriage was one of convenience, he was pleased his socially inclined father would again have the companionship he craved and needed. For his part, Jim would continue his habit of regular visits, affectionately referring to the new couple as “Dad and Bob.”

  Back in New York, Jim was having—by his definition, at least—a relatively leisurely summer, auditioning performers at the new workshop in late May, discussing toys with Fisher-Price executives in June, and in July overseeing a segment for the national tour of the Ice Follies that featured several of his Sesame Street characters. Jim was particularly excited about the Ice Follies project; after being approached by Ice Follies representatives with the idea, Jim had eagerly handwritten a twenty-nine-page script for the show, including lyrics for several songs. He was also intrigued by the mechanics of recreating characters that had only been seen in a smaller, hand puppet size as full-sized, figure-skating walkarounds. Working with designer Bonnie Erickson and the Muppet workshop, “we blew them up so they were exactly in scale,” Jim said proudly. When the segment finally debuted at an Ice Follies show in Sacramento that August, the crowd greeted the characters with thunderous applause—“one of those great roars of appreciation,” recounted Jim. “It was really neat to see it.”

  Most days, Jim would drive into the city to check in at the Muppet workshop, arriving about ten in the morning, loping up the long stairway and quietly calling out “Hi, guys!” as he entered the main room. Most mornings, he would briefly gather the designers and builders around him to discuss individual puppets and projects before heading up the street to his office, half a block away. While Sahlin and Goelz could almost always be found tinkering with something, Sahlin had, for a while, turned the entire workshop into a whirring, clicking mouse terrarium, with wires and pulleys stretched across the ceiling and down the walls. “Bonnie Erickson’s boyfriend worked for Sloan-Kettering Hospital, and he would liberate mice every now and then, save them from being experimented on, and give them the dubious advantage of surviving in our shop,” said Goelz. Sahlin had set up an elaborate elevator system by which mice could be dropped on the benches of unsuspecting Muppet builders; later, he built an aerial highway made of wires and Slinkies, allowing mice to clamber over cupboards, desks, and light fixtures. “It was like a mouse freeway,” said Goelz—and more than once, Jim entered the workshop to find Sahlin bent over a table, working intently as a mouse sat perched on top of his head.

  There were spiritual matters to tend to that summer, too. Over the past several months, Jim had been reading the metaphysical Seth Material, written by spiritualist Jane Roberts, who claimed to be channeling a male personality that called itself Seth. In her books—and through Seth—Roberts explored life after death and the pros and cons of reincarnation, with the underlying message that “You create your own reality.” That intrigued Jim—it was a message that must have resonated with a man who regularly spent hi
s days creating completely new personalities at the end of his arm—and on July 30, he drove to Elmira, New York, to pay his respects to Roberts and her husband. “I find this inspired material very beautiful,” Jim said of the Seth Material. “It puts everything into a harmonious totality that I just love.” Jim’s interest in other realities was no surprise to Jon Stone. “He was always interested in getting beyond,” said Stone. “I think he saw his mind as a sort of prison. He was always kind of outside of it, trying things that the rest of us just … keep going with our blinders on, down our own little path, and he was out in the woods somewhere. He was great.” Oz, too, understood, and listened patiently but skeptically as Jim enthused about Roberts and Seth. “I didn’t believe a word of them,” said Oz, “but Jim truly believed in other realms. His willingness to believe gave him a kind of noble cause. There’s a nobility in the Muppets, and Jim brought that.”

  That nobility was genuine, for Jim saw virtue and worth in nearly everyone. His own generosity, in fact, could be staggering. When Bernie Brillstein went through a divorce in 1974—and lost nearly everything in the settlement—Jim immediately loaned the agent $100,000 and told Brillstein there was no need to hurry to repay him. “That’s Jim Henson,” said Brillstein. “He was grand in this strange, quiet way. His love was unbounded.” Jim’s faith in his fellow man was unbounded, too. Jim rarely, if ever, locked his car—and if anything were ever stolen, he would simply shrug and say “someone must have needed it.” Even after his wallet was stolen from the front seat of his Jaguar—yet another in a long line of flashy cars—Jim refused to get angry; instead, he saw it as another teachable moment, and Brian Henson remembered his father launching into a mock sermon at the breakfast table, speaking in inflated tones on the value of forgiveness: “My car was broken into and things were stolen,” Jim told his family, speaking in the voice he would always use for his most self-important characters, “but I realize I have a very wonderful life, I have plenty of money, and whoever it was who stole my wallet needs it more than me, so I find it in my heart to forgive them.” While their father might “make fun of himself a little bit” at these moments, said Brian, “his intention was to teach a lesson.”

  In August 1974 came the word that Jim had been waiting for: ABC had agreed on a development deal for several programs, including an after-school special, a ninety-minute movie of the week, and exclusive use of the Muppets on ABC for a period of time. While ABC hadn’t opted for a weekly Muppet series, Jim had deftly persuaded the network to give him another shot at it, clearing the way for a second pilot. Jim, in fact, had already prepared an outline for a show he was calling The Muppet Nonsense Show. “It would be a half hour show, with no guest star,” Jim wrote, “a lot more zany comedy, more magazine-type pieces [and] continuing characters that the audience will get to know and love.”

  With the deal in place, Jim was determined to get his second pilot in front of the cameras as soon as possible. Jim immediately put the Muppet designers to work on several new puppets he’d drawn, handing Bonnie Erickson pages of character sketches scribbled in his distinctive swooping style. One new character was a grinning piano player that Jim had based on the flamboyant New Orleans musician Dr. John, who had charted in 1973 with “Right Place Wrong Time.” Dr. John personified the kind of laid-back, hep-talking bandleader that had appeared all the way back in Jim’s proposals for Zoocus in 1960, and Jim’s first drawing for the character boiled the performer down to the basics: a wide, grinning mouth over a scrap of beard, sleepy eyes, and a bulbous nose holding up wire-rimmed glasses. Erickson assigned the design of the character to a new member of the Muppet team: Michael Frith, a brilliant, thirty-two-year-old illustrator with a wickedly droll sense of humor. Frith—who had been an art director and editor at Random House, where he had overseen much of Dr. Seuss’s work—wasn’t a puppet builder, but he had a knack for taking Jim’s energetic drawings and fleshing out their personality in beautiful full-color sketches that builders could use for further inspiration. Working off Jim’s drawing, Frith sketched out a slightly more polished version of the character, giving him long rubbery arms, a potbelly, and a tall, feathered top hat. Across the top of the page, he scrawled out a potential name: Leon “Doctor” Eltonjohn Dontshoot (The Piano Player). However, given the character’s wide grin and glinting gold tooth, Jim had a different, and simpler, name in mind: Dr. Teeth.

  Another new character, too, could also trace its origins almost as far back as Zoocus. In Jim’s outline for The Muppet Nonsense Show was a regular skit featuring a frazzled foreign chef who “create[s] new dishes—with subtitles in various languages.… In the end, the dish explodes, walks away in disgust, or even eats him.” At the USDA show in Hamburg in the early 1960s, Jim and Jerry Juhl had performed Sam and Friends’ Omar as a live hand puppet creating a messy chef’s salad as he ranted in mock German—a bit Jim loved, but had kept out of his repertoire for nearly a decade. Now he would bring it back, though for the Nonsense Show, the Chef, and his mock language, would be Swedish. Jim initially named the character Jarnvagskorsning, a Swedish word that translated roughly as “railway crossing,” then decided that the name, while funny, was too hard to remember or pronounce. In his earliest appearances, then, Jim would refer to the character as “The Swedish Meatball,” and then simply as

  “The Swedish Chef.”

  Despite the relative simplicity of the puppet—it was essentially a head with two empty sleeves through which a second performer could insert both hands—the Swedish Chef was one of the last Muppets completed before filming on the pilot began in December 1974. It had been only a few months since ABC had approved the pilot, and in that time Jim had been in motion almost constantly, overseeing the writing duties with Marshall Brickman—his collaborator on the unrealized Broadway show—and Sesame Street writers Jon Stone and Norman Stiles, as well as visiting the workshop every day to check on Muppet production.

  There was a quick break in September for Jim to celebrate the Muppet team winning its first Emmy for their work on Sesame Street—a major accomplishment to be sure, though Jim was typically low-key about it, grinning somewhat stiffly in his tuxedo as he accepted the award along with Oz, Nelson, Spinney, Hunt, and Brill. Three weeks later, Jim and the Muppet team took nearly a week to travel to London for an appearance on The Herb Alpert Show, dancing two enormous Boss Men Muppets to Alpert’s “Spanish Flea.” But the rest of the time, “[he] was in the office every day, and he was always either upstairs or he’d come down and work the shop,” recalled Bonnie Erickson. “Even to the end … Jim came in and worked on the Swedish Chef and I sort of finished for him.”

  Jim’s work extended beyond the office and workshop; in preparation for his performance as the Swedish Chef, Jim was even working in his car, practicing his mock Swedish during his daily drives from Bedford into New York City. Jim had installed a cassette deck in his Jaguar on which he could both play and record tapes, and each day he would listen to a cassette prepared for him by writer Marshall Brickman—who could bring Jim and Oz to tears with his ability to mock foreign languages—instructing him on how to speak mock Swedish. After listening to Brickman’s tape, Jim would then record himself—speaking into a full-sized microphone he had clipped to the dashboard—and play back his performance, trying to get it right. “I used to ride with him a lot,” said Brian Henson. “And he would drive to work trying to make a chicken sandwich in mock Swedish or make a turkey casserole in mock Swedish. It was the most ridiculous thing you had ever seen, and people at traffic lights used to stop and sort of look at him a little crazy.”

  In mid-December, Jim spent six days taping his second pilot—which he was now cheekily calling The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence in an almost cathartic defiance of his kids’ stuff reputation—bringing in ten puppeteers, including Jane and several designers from the workshop, to perform more than seventy Muppets. Unlike the more deliberately paced and sweeter Valentine Show, the snappier, snarkier Sex and Violence bounced itself around a number of r
unning gags, ranging from the homespun to the slightly surreal. Notably, Sex and Violence also marked the debut of a number of characters who would later move into the upper tiers of the Muppet pantheon. Besides Dr. Teeth and the Swedish Chef, Jim introduced the rest of the Electric Mayhem Band—the lanky bassist Floyd, the laid-back guitarist Janice, the silent, sax-playing Zoot, and the wild drummer Animal—as well as Sam the Eagle (“who represents the older establishment values,” wrote Jim) and the curmudgeonly Statler and Waldorf, grumbling from oversized chairs in a parlor as a grandfather clock ticked loudly in the background. A prototype of Miss Piggy was even there, too, a carryover from the Herb Alpert special taped in London earlier that fall, and used here as a supporting member in the movie parody “Return to Beneath the Planet of the Pigs.” “These are all characters that the audience will get to know and love—or hate—over a period of time,” wrote Jim.

  While Jim didn’t necessarily have any characters to hate, he did have one to yawn at—a milquetoast, vaguely amphibious character named Nigel who, unfortunately, Jim had placed in the role of emcee. “He’s a lot like me,” said Jim, though apart from the voice, that really wasn’t the case. Nigel was an admitted “middle of the road” character, but lacked any real personality—a failing that was especially obvious when the blasé Nigel was played up against Oz’s Sam the Eagle or Nelson’s Floyd. Kermit, meanwhile, had again been relegated to the background cast, appearing only in a dance sequence. According to co-writer Jon Stone, the decision to bench Kermit had been deliberate on Jim’s part. “Jim wanted to get out of performing a little bit,” said Stone. “At Jim’s request, we did not use Kermit, because he wanted to establish somebody else to be able to do it on a day-to-day basis and free him up to do his daydreaming and fantasizing and all that other stuff he did.” Regardless, the decision to put Nigel at the helm was a mistake—one that Jim would come to appreciate only after it was too late to remedy.