Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  A trip to France had saved one of Jim’s worlds; a week later, a trip to Scotland would spawn a new one.

  On May 24, 1980, Jim flew to Scotland at the invitation of Jocelyn Stevenson, one of Jim’s favorite editors and writers from the Children’s Television Workshop. Stevenson and Jim had gotten to know each other in the early 1970s when, as a young secretary for CTW, Stevenson had sloshed through a New York downpour to deliver some pages of Sesame Street magazine to Jim for approval. As the two of them talked, they learned they shared a similar commitment to the television medium and its potential for quality children’s entertainment. “And he just said to me, ‘You’re really creative,’ ” said Stevenson. “It was a really big moment for me to have someone … see [me] that way. He was really huge in terms of his influence on me.”

  Now, a decade later, Stevenson had asked Jim to serve as the godfather for her son and dispatched a private plane to pick up Jim, Jane, Cheryl, John, and Heather in London and ferry them to her husband’s family estate near Edinburgh, Scotland. When Stevenson’s brother-in-law Peter Orton learned Jim was attending the event, he pleaded with Stevenson to seat him near Jim at dinner. “I want to talk with him about an idea I have,” said Orton cryptically. Stevenson obliged, and over dinner Orton—a savvy British television executive who had done some international sales work for Sesame Street—enthusiastically pointed out to Jim that the worldwide success of both Sesame Street and The Muppet Show had opened up a unique opportunity. The time was right, said Orton, to produce a children’s show aimed specifically at the international market. Jim was intrigued. He would think about it. The seeds of Fraggle Rock had been sown.

  Returning to London, Jim spent the next eleven weeks taping the last twelve episodes of The Muppet Show. The show had come a long way in five years; after the shaky first season when Brillstein had rifled through his client list in search of guest stars, Jim could now get almost any celebrity he wished. “Who excites you?” he would ask his children—and for sixteen-year-old Brian Henson, the answer was easy: Blondie’s alluring lead singer, Debbie Harry. “I said, ‘She’ll be great!’ ” Brian said later, laughing. “And I was like, ‘Well, I don’t know if she’ll be great, but I love looking at her!’ ” Jim booked Harry for the first week in August, when Brian would be in London for summer break—and at the weekly dinner party that Jim always threw for each guest, Brian found himself sitting goopily next to the sultry singer. At one point, Harry excused herself, then strolled across the restaurant and sashayed up an open staircase toward the powder room. Every head turned. Jim looked at Brian and winked. “You were right,” he said, and grinned.

  On Sunday, August 17, 1980, The Muppet Show team gathered in Rehearsal Room 7/8 for the final time. Jim would have no sad faces; it had been a happy five years at Elstree, and Jim wanted their last week to be a joyful one, bringing in dancer Gene Kelly as guest star for a week of singing and dancing. There would be only one small hint of the show’s end in the final episode: a running gag in which Scooter performs a Tarot card reading for Beauregard the janitor and incorrectly informs him the world is coming to an end. As far as Jim was concerned, the world wasn’t ending; he had other projects to attend to, and The Muppet Show would live on in reruns.

  Still, Jim appreciated that a milestone had been reached, and to mark the occasion he began the week by hosting a dinner party at the White Elephant on Sunday evening, draping an arm warmly around Brillstein and ITC’s American executive Abe Mandell, both of whom had come from the States to celebrate The Muppet Show’s final week. Gene Kelly finished taping his sequences by Thursday, leaving Jim and the Muppet Show team to wrap things up on Friday the 22nd. That afternoon, as the Muppet performers completed the show’s final take—a sequence featuring Fozzie and Scooter dodging knives hurled by the myopic Signor Baffi—floor manager Richard Holloway called out, “Ladies and Gentlemen, that’s a final wrap!” and was hit in the face with a pie. It was an ending worthy of the Muppets themselves.

  There was another party that evening, this time with Lord Grade in attendance, and Lazer handed Jim a pile of congratulatory telegrams that had come into the Muppet Suites over the past week. Despite the strike and their strict lights out policy, the last five years with the Muppet team had been fun for ATV’s British staff, and the electricians, cameramen, and lighting crew were genuinely sorry to see Jim and the Muppet team leave. “All at Elstree hope the Muppets will return,” said one telegram. “A marvelous five years with marvelous people.” Jim appreciated the sentiments, even as he remained unsentimental. “We finished our 120th Muppet Show this summer, and that wraps that up—we felt it was a good place to stop it,” he said plainly. “We certainly enjoyed it.… It was a nice show to do.”

  Another important chapter came to a close that summer as well: after more than a year of living in London, Jane had decided to return home to New York. Living, working, and traveling with Jim over the last year “was a great adventure for all of us,” said Cheryl, “but ultimately it was not [Jane’s] life; she felt out of place and she decided to go back.” Their year on Downshire Hill in London would be the last time the two of them would truly live together as a couple; the ocean now separating them was a tangible reminder of the gulf that was widening between them. Following Jane’s departure, in fact, Jim began quietly seeing other women.

  Decades later Jane was still inclined to be understanding. Jim, she said, “really didn’t like being by himself”; there had been occasions in the past when he had casually “gone out,” as Jane put it, seeking dinner dates or companions for a movie or show after long days of working in the city. Jim was always respectfully discreet—and, the Henson children thought, felt slightly guilty about it. At one point, in fact, Jim had actually tried to discuss things with Jane, no small feat for someone who generally didn’t relish talking about his feelings. Jane had become understandably upset, and Jim—who hated hurting anyone’s feelings even more than he disliked talking about his own emotions—wouldn’t broach the subject again.

  Now that Jim was in London alone, however, Jane conceded that there was likely more going on in the London evenings than merely dinner or movies. “We didn’t talk about it,” she said flatly, “but I certainly knew he went out to dinner with people and everything.” As always, Jim generally tried to keep a respectfully low profile—and was stunned when he learned one of his relationships had become “somewhat public.” “It horrified him,” said Jane. “It really did. Because he himself still really did not want that to be his picture, even though it’s sort of what life had become. He didn’t like that picture.” At that point, “I think [Jim] was evaluating his own marriage,” said Muppet performer Steve Whitmire, who had enthused about his own marriage during a drive with Jim in the Lotus. Whitmire had married his high school sweetheart, and Jim seemed genuinely interested in understanding the dynamics of their relationship. Finally, recalled Whitmire, Jim quietly said, “ ‘You know, Jane and I haven’t really been living like a married couple for some time.’ He didn’t elaborate … and I thought, ‘He’s telling me something quite intimate, and I really don’t know what to say.’ … It was mostly quiet.”

  In late August, Jim headed for Bermuda for a company-wide staff retreat. It was the first time Jim had pulled together his entire staff from both sides of the Atlantic, and the size of the group likely surprised him: eighty-one employees filled the seats around the room. Lisa and Cheryl also sat in on the three-day retreat, where Jim knew he could count on them for honest feedback. Lisa could immediately feel the New York–London tensions that were troubling her dad. “For the life of him, he couldn’t get his group to think together as an organism,” said Lisa. “Puppeteers, when they perform together, they have that alchemy, like they’re all one organism. But in the company there were always a lot of personalities or ego issues and things that were frustrating for him.” Jim did his best to mingle with as many people as he could, playing tennis, swimming, and eating with a different group at every meal to ensure e
veryone got the face time they needed, since Jim’s presence—whether he liked it or not—could, as David Lazer pointed out, “make or break someone’s day.”

  All summer long, work had continued on the second Muppet film—now officially The Great Muppet Caper—with Patchett and Tarses finishing up their script and Raposo submitting the final songs and musical score for an orchestra to record. Cinematographer Ossie Morris, too, had been busy scouting locations, and even Morris—who had worked on more than ninety films since the early 1930s—had come to feel the odd magnetism of Jim’s presence, almost frantically appealing to him to immerse himself in Caper as quickly as possible. “I feel a little distant from you and I believe that is shared by the art and production [departments],” wrote Morris.

  On Thursday, September 4, 1980—less than two weeks after shooting the final episode of The Muppet Show—Jim settled into his director’s chair in London’s Battersea Park, now at the helm of his first full-length motion picture. “It has taken me twenty years to get [here],” Jim noted, “and I’m delighted to have made it.” In a way, Jim had already been directing for years, watching the television monitor as he performed his characters and adjusting on camera as needed. He brought the same mentality to directing film, rarely looking through the camera’s eyepiece, preferring instead to rig a small video monitor next to the camera so he could see exactly what the camera was seeing—a complicated and innovative system that made sense to Jim, and which would eventually become a standard technique for filmmakers. “Usually the cameraman insists I look through [the eyepiece],” Jim said, “[and] I say ‘I can see it over here.’ ”

  The first scene Jim would film for Caper would be another one of those How’d they do that? moments that Jim loved to tease his audiences with. In The Muppet Movie, critics had been awestruck by the footage of Kermit riding a bicycle. If audiences had been wowed by one Muppet on a bike, then, for Caper, Jim would put his entire Muppet cast on wheels—“lots of people on bikes” he wrote in his notes—pedaling them through Battersea Park as part of a large musical number.

  It was actually sixteen-year-old Brian Henson, spending several weeks working in the London workshop with Faz Fazakas, who had helped figure out how to make it all work. While shutting down The Muppet Show had also meant bidding farewell to the Muppet workshop at ATV, Jim had relocated the workshop to 1B Downshire Hill, the abandoned postage sorting facility he had purchased in 1979 across the street from his home. As the team working on the puppets for The Crystal began slowly moving in, Jim already had Fazakas working his wizardry for The Great Muppet Caper—and Brian, on a break from his classes at Andover, had been assigned as Fazakas’s right hand. “My dad wanted me to just figure it out,” said Brian.

  Ultimately, the trick was pulled off by using a combination of radio-controlled bikes, marionette rigging, and in some cases attaching several bikes together with rods so they could stand upright on their own. Brian served as one of the lead performers for the sequence, wheeling marionette versions of Kermit and Miss Piggy around on Battersea’s wide sidewalks as Jim beamed proudly. Watching the scene on playback, Jim nodded approvingly. “Brian, you did a really, really good job there,” he said quietly.

  As impressive as it was, the bike riding sequence wasn’t The Great Muppet Caper’s showstopper. From the very beginning, Jim knew he wanted Caper to have “something new—something to talk about.” As he filled several pages of a notebook with possible ideas, he scrawled out “Kermit swimming,” and then, below it, “Piggy/Ester [sic] Williams.” That would be it—an elaborate homage to the swimming, diving, and underwater ballet numbers made famous by Esther Williams in the 1940s and 1950s. “If I had to search out any guilty pleasures,” Jim said later, “it is that I probably indulged myself in Caper in the underwater sequence with Miss Piggy.”

  However, making a pig swim—especially a Muppet pig—was no easy task. While the puppetry itself would be a challenge, Oz couldn’t just take a regular Miss Piggy Muppet and dunk it in a swimming pool. Not only would the puppet’s foam head soak up the water like a sponge, but the water eventually would wash away the flocking sprayed on the character, discoloring the puppet and leaving a scrim of flock shavings floating on the surface. Before a single frame of film could be shot, then, the Muppet builders had to figure out a way to design a waterproof, colorfast, flexible puppet for Oz to work with.

  Under the direction of Caroly Wilcox, the New York Muppet workshop became a kind of Muppet Labs. After much trial and error, the team settled on carving and constructing the puppet out of compressed urethane foam, which didn’t soak up water but did tend to lose its colored flocking when it got wet. Wilcox then spent several weeks looking at different kinds of flocking in various colors, even writing to the American Fish and Chemical Company—which specialized in shoe and leather chemicals—for advice about stronger adhesives to keep the flocking intact. Eventually, Wilcox and her team developed an elaborate recipe for carving, cutting, gluing, flocking, and then baking the individual puppet parts—to cure them and fuse the flocking into place—finally reporting their findings to Jim as the “Piggy Research and Development Department.”

  There was only one problem: while the new puppet didn’t soak up water and held its shape and color beautifully, the material still didn’t stretch very well. “So as soon as Frank would open up the mouth and do a nice exaggerated move,” said Wilcox, “the corner of the mouth would tear.” The solution, then, was to build as many heads as possible—and if the mouth tore during a take, they would replace the entire head with a new one before the cameras rolled again. In the end, nearly forty different Miss Piggy heads—and seven different bodies—would be used during filming. After each take, the Muppet designers took great delight in smashing each discarded head to bits—mostly, said Wilcox coyly, “to get even.”

  Oz knew of none of the complex science experiments that had put the puppet in his hands—but he wasn’t at all surprised that Jim’s quiet confidence in Wilcox and her team had inspired them into finding a workable solution. “He had no patience for, ‘I can’t figure it out,’ ” said Brian Henson—but the moment anyone started working to find a way around a problem, no matter how ridiculous the approach, “he was there with you.”

  Now that Jim had a collection of waterproof Muppets on hand, he and Oz were ready to film the movie’s most impressive feat of puppetry, spending a week shooting a water ballet sequence that would last only a little over three minutes in the completed film. On a soundstage at Elstree film studios—the same enormous soundstage where Luke Skywalker had recently fought Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back—Jim had constructed a swimming pool eighty feet long, fifty feet wide, and eight feet deep. For the comfort of Oz and the eighteen swimmers who would be participating in the water ballet, the water was heated to a swampy eighty degrees, “so the whole place,” said Jim, “was like a tropical jungle in the sound stage while we were shooting.”

  Jim had mapped out most of the mechanics of each shot for the sequence—some shots would use a stiff figure with a remote-controlled head, while the final shot of Piggy diving into the water called for a swimmer in full-body costume—but for the most part, Miss Piggy would be a puppet, manipulated underwater by Oz. Wearing a wet suit the same color blue as the walls of the pool—so he would blend with the background if caught on camera—Oz would sink himself down to the bottom of the pool with the help of asphalt blocks. A scuba diver with an oxygen tank sat on the bottom, holding a breathing tube over Oz’s face until Jim signaled the beginning of a take—at which point Oz would take a last gulp of air, then they would film Piggy swimming underwater for as long as he could hold his breath. Jim had placed a number of monitors on the bottom of the pool so Oz could keep an eye on his performance, and lined the underwater walls with speakers so Oz could hear the music and Jim’s directions. “It was quite elaborate,” said Jim. “But it was fun. We had a good time.” Oz—who developed a painful ear infection from spending so much time in the water—said “
it was difficult at times, but so what? I was with Jim. That was the joy of it.”

  Filming on The Great Muppet Caper lasted twenty weeks, spanning through the fall of 1980 and into early winter of 1981. While a swimming Miss Piggy had been one of the film’s flashier moments, there was a quieter scene that would later be especially poignant. As Kermit sat on a park bench overlooking a lake, Jim had filmed Jerry Nelson and his daughter, Christine, walking past. “Look, Dad, there’s a bear!” said Christine brightly, pointing to Kermit. “No, Christine, that’s a frog,” replied Jerry. “Bears wear hats.” It was a moment Jim had put in just for a bit of fun for Christine. The following September, Christine Nelson would die of complications from cystic fibrosis at age twenty-two. Jim attended the service, his presence quietly reassuring Nelson—but Jim’s actions always spoke louder than any words. Several years earlier, when Henson Associates’ insurance provider had notified Jim that it would no longer be paying all of Christine’s medical expenses, Jim had insisted that Henson Associates change insurance companies to ensure her costs would continue to be fully covered. Nelson had gone to Jim’s office and tearfully thanked him in person, nearly choking on emotion. “Jerry,” said Jim, smiling, “that’s what insurance companies are for.”

  Work was rapidly progressing on the film Jim was now calling The Dark Crystal, with Muppet Show writer David Odell laboring to turn Jim’s story outline into a workable script even as Froud continued drawing—and builders continued building—at the makeshift Muppet workshop on Downshire Hill. A bit of tension was beginning to develop between the Muppet builders in New York, who were doing the work on puppets for Caper and Sesame Street, and their counterparts in London working on The Dark Crystal. “It [Dark Crystal] had become overblown,” said Muppet performer Kathy Mullen, who was already rehearsing with her puppet for the film. For one thing, the London shop didn’t consider their creations to be mere Muppets; they were building creatures—a distinction Jim supported, but which caused considerable eye-rolling back in New York. Worse, to the annoyance of Caroly Wilcox—who claimed to be working her staff without vacation or overtime pay to meet the demands of Caper’s tight shooting schedule—the head of the London shop had a habit of reassigning Wilcox’s builders to work on Dark Crystal without clearing it with her first.