Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  As originally written by Juhl, Gonzo was “a loser who did these horrible acts and thought they were great art.” Jim had selected almost at random the sad-eyed, bent-nosed Cigar Box Frackle from The Great Santa Claus Switch, retrieving the character from a box in New York and telling Goelz, “This could be Gonzo.” For the first season, then, Goelz played Gonzo as “this little dark frightened character,” but remained frustrated with his own performance, which he thought was boring even to the Elstree crew. “They loved watching Jim and Frank work,” said Goelz. “When I came onstage, I could hear the newspapers come up.”

  That would change late in the first season when a simple “No!” from Gonzo helped Goelz find himself—and thus the character. At first, the insecure Goelz would only feebly croak out “no,” and “Jim kept saying, ‘Well, do it again. Make it big!’ … And I couldn’t do it,” said Goelz. “We did take after take after take, and Jim was so patient. I finally just went, ‘Nnnnoooo!’ And I could hear the newspapers all come down.… I got a laugh from the crew.” Gonzo—and Goelz—had finally gotten excited about something—and “when you got excited,” discovered Goelz, “it was good.”

  With a new enthusiasm, Goelz rebuilt Gonzo to remove his permanently sad eyes and replaced them with an eye mechanism that allowed the character to open his eyes for a wider range of emotion. Now, said Goelz, “Gonzo can still get very, very depressed, but he has moments of high, intense excitement.” Jim’s faith in Goelz, and Gonzo, had paid off. “As I got confidence, he got confidence,” said Goelz of Gonzo. And both would regularly get laughs from the Elstree crew.

  Rounding out the top tier of the Muppet performers was Jerry Nelson, who had taken a leave of absence during The Muppet Show’s first season to spend some additional time with his teenage daughter and was unable to commit to a full season. Consequently, Nelson was not assigned any of The Muppet Show’s central characters—a necessary but inadvertent slight that would later cause some hard feelings. Instead, Nelson would become the team’s invaluable utility player, making even minor or one-note characters, like Lew Zealand, Crazy Harry, or Uncle Deadly, memorable, while his gravelly singing voice would establish the Electric Mayhem’s bass player Floyd as the epitome of Muppet cool. Nelson’s performance mentality was halfway between Oz’s and Hunt’s; each character, explained Nelson, “is an aspect of my own personality. The Muppets are roles I assume, rather than puppets I manipulate.”

  Performing and filming the Muppet segments would begin in earnest on Tuesdays. On that day, the Muppet team would spend the entire day taping the sketches featuring that week’s guest star, then continue on with Muppet-only segments on Wednesday and Thursday. Spending all day Tuesday with the star could be “really tough” though it depended largely on the guest star. Fifth season guest Tony Randall would be one of the few problematic guests, micromanaging Muppet performances and growing increasingly pushy as the filming progressed. “Some [guests] relate to us more easily than others,” Jim explained earnestly to The Christian Science Monitor. “A person who is cool personally can play marvelously well with the Muppets.”

  Working with the Muppets, said Jim, was an opportunity for guests “to work in a sort of fun land, a Never-Never Land,” where the atmosphere was laid-back, a sense of humor was mandatory, and the dress code was casual. In the first few years of The Muppet Show, before he began wearing stylish sweaters or tucking colorful scarves around his neck, Jim was at nearly his shaggiest, his long hair falling against his denim collar and his beard a bushy bib that he absent-mindedly stroked while hmmmming his way through a problem. Lazer, in his impeccably tailored Jaeger suits, then, was there to provide a dose of showbiz conventionality. “Although he never told people what to wear … some part of [Jim] liked that I was wearing a tie and jacket,” said Lazer. “We had all these major stars coming in, and they needed to zero in on one person who was familiar … because they were coming into a strange world!”

  And yet, it was Jim who the guests couldn’t stop watching. “The women stars fell in love with Jim,” said Lazer, “[and the] male stars couldn’t stop talking about him.” Guests wanted nothing more than to please Jim—to make him laugh or to see him enthusiastically raise his eyebrows in approval of their performance. But Jim related particularly well with his female costars, who were drawn not only to his talent but responded strongly to his charisma and inherent Southern-bred sweetness. “They clicked with him,” said Lazer. “In the beginning they weren’t sure. And then as soon as they watched him in operation … he was in such control, and so gentle … and he would direct them, and they would just listen to anything he said. They trusted him.” When first-season guest Ethel Merman struggled slightly with a feathery costume during a complicated sketch, Lazer approached the singer between takes to offer his assistance. Merman shooed him away. “Listen,” she said, “you tell that Jim Henson that if he wants me to wear a feather up my ass, I’ll do it for him!”

  Following the taping of the show, Jim would take each guest, along with much of the Muppet crew, out for dinner. Lazer called them “wrap parties,” though they were usually just large dinner parties with copious amounts of wine—and Jim joked that he only knew enough about wine to order exactly one kind of red and one kind of white. Even after their appearance on the show, no guest would ever be truly forgotten; Lazer kept a running list of the home addresses and birthdays of all his guest stars, and after the publication of a book about the making of The Muppet Show, Jim went out of his way to ensure that every guest received a copy. “I’ve heard stories about other shows that thrive on the tension that exists between the stars, or between the star and the producers, but that wouldn’t work for us,” said Jim. “If we didn’t manage to maintain a friendly atmosphere, we’d be in deep trouble.” As Lazer put it: “Unless our guests go home telling everyone that they had a great time doing The Muppet Show, then I haven’t done my job.”

  While Brillstein had called in favors to secure guests during the early part of The Muppet Show’s first season, “as the show kept gaining in popularity,” said the agent, “we had a waiting list.” The success of the first fifteen shows in particular—featuring a wide range of talents such as Peter Ustinov, Rita Moreno, Joel Grey, and Lena Horne—went a long way toward sealing The Muppet Show’s reputation as a hip hit. “The calls started coming in,” said Lazer. Not only was the show a success, but word had spread quickly that “we took such good care of the stars … we gave them a chance to do what they wanted to do. If they ever wanted to sing, we’d give them a chance to sing. Or be a comedienne if they were straight, or whatever.” Only on The Muppet Show could Sylvester Stallone sing and dance with a lion or Beverly Sills hang a spoon from the end of her nose—and bring in big ratings to boot.

  Even Lord Grade was impressed. “The atmosphere and excitement during the making of these shows was electric, and in a very short while we had international celebrities clamoring to do the guest spot,” recalled Grade. Grade even loved dropping by the set every once in a while to watch the Muppet team at work, strolling the studio and casually asking, “Everything all right, boys?”

  Most sets for The Muppet Show were “platformed up,” elevated about four feet off the ground on stilts, with plenty of low walls, boxes, stairs, or doorways for the performers to poke puppets into. Most of the budget for The Muppet Show, in fact, went into sets, which had to be carefully designed and constructed so that the Muppets could interact seamlessly with the human guest star. Doors and stairs for the Muppet theater’s backstage set, for example, had to be built at a scale small enough for Muppets, but not too small or the guest stars couldn’t use them. And since most sets were mainly just backdrops and low walls for the puppeteers to poke puppets between, movable platforms had to be built for the guest stars to stand on during any scenes in which they had to interact with the Muppets.

  Down on floor level, things were perhaps even more hectic. As they performed, puppeteers had to step over cables snaking across the floor, and around the
struts elevating the sets over their heads. Sketches that involved cars or motorcycles or any moving vehicle required another group of performers to push the vehicle, elevated on a raised platform, across the studio floor while the puppeteers walked along behind it performing—and “everybody,” directed Jim, “has to see a monitor.” At almost all times, all eyes were on one of the countless monitors placed strategically around the floor of the studio, so it was always possible to see how the puppets looked on camera, no matter which way the performers were facing.

  Amid the chaos in Studio D, Jim was calm, cool, and clearly in charge, mapping out shots with cameramen, consulting with the writers over script changes, or huddling with Muppet Show directors Peter Harris and Philip Casson, who alternated directing duties from week to week. Unlike Jon Stone, who preferred directing the Sesame Street Muppets down on the main floor in the thick of things, Harris and Casson were more comfortable directing from the glassed-in booth overlooking the studio floor, patiently broadcasting instructions over the studio’s squawky sound system, or calling down directions for floor managers Richard Holloway or Martin Baker to convey to the crew. Jim had initially wanted to direct The Muppet Show himself, but discovered that trying to direct while performing the show’s central character only slowed things down. Instead, said Jim, “I settle for a set of headphones so I can make a suggestion once in a while,” communicating directly with Harris and Casson through a headset with a microphone covered with green foam carved to look like Kermit.

  While the bulk of the responsibility for keeping things running smoothly fell largely to Jim, he never made it look like work. “Everything was play for him,” said Juhl. “Work was play. That was the thing that we all plainly understood.” Agreed Oz, “Jim wasn’t a workaholic. Our job was playing.” For Jim that meant encouraging the team—from the Muppet performers to the lighting crew—to ad-lib or interject ideas, and maintaining an overall atmosphere of collegiality in which everyone’s performance and opinion was valued. “We know each other so well that we can kind of bounce off each other when we’re working together,” explained Jim. “This working relationship … has a kind of marvelous chemistry to it, and I think it’s terribly important that when we’re working in the studio, we work with this kind of affection and high spirits.”

  And spirits were high indeed. The Muppet performers would constantly joke and banter without ever breaking character, their puppets jabbering at each other with eyebrows waggling and arms waving. “Even when they’re not shooting, they keep talking [in character],” said impressionist Rich Little, a second season guest. “It’s incredible.… After a few minutes at the studio … the Muppets become real.” Even those who worked with the Muppets daily found it a bit disorienting. Watching the performance from the booth, director Peter Harris would notice Jim’s head in a shot and would call out, “Sorry, Jim, we have to go again”—and Kermit, rather than Jim, would turn to the camera and respond. “In the end you just talk to Kermit,” said Harris. “It’s a very weird experience.”

  Other times, Oz and Goelz would grab the struts elevating the Muppet sets and send themselves racing across the studio floor in rolling chairs, cheered on by cameramen and Muppets alike. Jerry Nelson would sprawl in the theater seats over the Muppet workshop and strum a guitar, one eye on the monitor, waiting to be called in to perform. Richard Hunt, the always willing master of ceremonies, was in everybody’s face—and no one, not even the guest star, was off-limits. “If he was driving to work and he passed the limo with the guest in it, he would roll down the window and … just yell and go crazy,” said Goelz fondly. “All the guests who went away from the show remembered Jim and Frank and Richard Hunt—and that was because Richard’s personality was so big.”

  But the best moments, as nearly everyone agreed, were when Jim laughed. “He laughed until he cried,” said Oz. “It didn’t matter if we were taping or prerecording for a TV show or a record, we would just end up cracking each other up. He had to wrangle us, yes, but other times he was the instigator.” More often than not, it was performing with Oz that got Jim laughing the hardest, the two of them collapsing in fits of laughter as they performed Kermit and Fozzie—or Kermit and Miss Piggy—and tried desperately not to break character.

  “Frank and Jim were incredible at getting the play started,” said Lazer. “The combination of Jim and Frank was just magical,” added Goelz. “Jim had this light playful side, and Frank had the underpinnings, the drama, the backstory, the depth of character—and the two just meshed perfectly.” For Richard Hunt, it was like watching “the 70s and 80s Laurel and Hardy.… It was hysterical.”

  And yet, when Oz wasn’t performing, he was “this very intimidating figure,” said Brian Henson. “He really was kind of like Sam the Eagle—he was dark and brooding and if Frank was coming down the hall, you got out of the way!” Juhl remembered Oz as “incredibly moody” during those years. “Frank has this incredible thing,” said Juhl. “He is quite clearly the best puppeteer in the world, and he fights it.” Discussing Oz’s moodiness with Juhl, Jim would merely shake his head in genuine pity. “That’s just such a shame, you know,” he told Juhl. “Everything is happening right now, this is just an incredibly exciting time in our lives.… I wish Frank could enjoy it.”

  The highlight of the week—indeed, the one time when it was certain that every member of the Muppet team and the ATV crew would be watching—was the moment Jim and Oz, usually performing as Kermit and Fozzie, stepped in front of The Muppet Show’s trademark red curtain to film two short promotional spots for the week’s episode. There were no scripts for these ten- to twenty-second segments; the name of the game was to improvise the piece, with Oz doing his best to surprise and provoke a response from Jim—or, better yet, make him laugh. It was thrilling, said Hunt admiringly, “the way they could second-guess each other.… They would laugh so much that they would end up crying.… It got to a point where they couldn’t really talk, but they were still going.… Frank was capable of reducing Jim to giggles, and vice versa.”

  Even the very proper English crew at ATV grew to love working for Jim and with the Muppets—especially after Jim came to understand and appreciate the quirks of working with a British crew. Tea time was strictly observed—a tradition Jim found charming and willingly embraced. The canteen at Elstree was also equipped with a fully stocked bar, where some of the British crew would polish off one or two shandies during lunch before returning to the studio floor in what one insider diplomatically described as a “more relaxed” state. It was a custom Jim neither questioned nor complained about, as long as the work got done.

  If there was anything distinctly British that would plague Jim during his five years at Elstree, however, it was the British union’s strict requirement that the studio lights at Elstree be turned off at exactly 8:00 P.M. Unlike American or Canadian studios, where filming could continue into the early hours of the morning until the work was completed, British studios stationed union representatives on the set at all times to ensure work ended promptly at the required hour. “We could be in the middle of a number,” said Lazer, “and it was ‘Lights out!’ and [they’d] walk off.” Consequently, if the Muppet team was still filming after 7:30, Jim would assign a crew member to watch the clock, calling out after each take the minutes remaining before eight. As the clock ticked, either Jim or Lazer would negotiate for additional time—which, if granted, would be parsimoniously doled out in five-minute increments. By Lazer’s account, the Muppet team was left standing in the dark “probably ten times”—enough, he said, “to make you crazy.”

  Filming the Muppet-only segments usually took two days—especially if the union’s lights-out policy had left them unable to finish the first day on time—and for Jim, Thursday was often the busiest day of the week, though not because of filming. Mostly, he was in meetings, discussing upcoming shows or music or scripts, meeting with set builders, or in the workshop checking on the progress of any new puppets—and “once [the meetings] started,�
� said Juhl, “they didn’t stop.” Meetings would continue over lunch—“we have to eat anyway,” Jim would say with a shrug—either at Signor Baffi’s, an Italian restaurant across the street with famously slow service, or back in the Muppet Suite where trays of lukewarm grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches and even warmer bottles of beer would be delivered from the canteen and lined up on the side tables. No matter how many meetings he attended during the day, Jim could almost always concentrate intently on the task in front of him, getting down to business so quickly that Burns, Juhl, and the writing team often couldn’t turn the pages of their scripts fast enough to keep up.

  Still, there were days when Jim was so pressed for time that he couldn’t always prepare for meetings. He was reluctant to let on that he was unprepared—more than anyone in the room, he understood the consequences of wasted time—and with every head in the room turned toward him, he would quietly eat his sandwich and flip through the pages of his script. And suddenly, said Juhl, “he’d start improvising this piece of material … it was blowing jazz. He would start free-associating.” At times like this, no idea was too outrageous, whether it was penguins singing “Lullaby of Broadway,” a killer lamb attacking the Muppet newsman, or a Chopped Liver monster antagonizing the cast of the “Pigs in Space” sketch. “He’d just start calling for things, and people would start writing them down,” said Juhl, “and the whole show … was done that way.” Only Jim could make such madness seem so routine. “He had,” said Juhl, in perhaps the most apt description of Jim, “a whim of steel.”