Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  Jim was devastated by the response. “I was stunned and dazed for several months trying to figure out what went wrong—where I went wrong,” he said later. “[It] was a real blow,” added Jane Henson. “He couldn’t understand it.” “I think that was the closest I’ve ever seen him to turning in on himself and getting quite depressed,” said Brian Henson. “It was rather a bad time.” Arthur Novell, Jim’s publicist, thought the response took a physical toll as well. “[It was] really despair,” said Novell. “He changed physically … the beard got lighter.… He had great hopes for Labyrinth. The buildup toward it was so heavy and strong and positive, and he got bit by it. He was stung by the criticism. But it was never about the money. It wasn’t about … what he lost, what he spent.”

  As with The Dark Crystal, it had been all about artistic vision and artistic integrity. Labyrinth was “absolutely the closest project to him,” said Jane, the one in which he had invested most of his creative capital—and to have audiences reject it felt to Jim like they were rejecting him personally. “That movie looked exactly the way Jim wanted,” said creative consultant Larry Mirkin. “Everything you see on the screen looks exactly the way Jim imagined it.” But as Oz noted, apart from the grousing of a few perpetually unhappy critics, the problem really wasn’t with Jim’s vision; it was with the storytelling. “Take a look at Labyrinth and forget the story for a moment,” said Oz. “The images you get are abso-fucking-lutely amazing. Absolutely amazing. That’s Jim’s production design and that’s what his love was. It was just staggering the work he did. But as a story, it just didn’t hold up.”

  “Life is a kind of labyrinth,” Jim had once mused, “with all its twists and turns, its straight paths and occasional dead ends.” For the moment, Labyrinth itself was one of those dead ends—and so, it seemed, were movies. He had wandered down a blind passage into a stone wall—but a bit of offhanded good advice at a party, courtesy of a drunken Jerry Nelson, would help set him back on course again. “You know,” slurred Nelson, draping an arm warmly around Jim’s shoulders, “you should stick with television.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  STORYTELLER

  1986–1987

  Jim directing the “Heartless Giant” episode of The Storyteller in 1988. (photo credit 13.1)

  AS LABYRINTH FADED FROM MOVIE SCREENS IN THE SUMMER OF 1986, Jim—after the brief period of hand-wringing that had so alarmed some of his colleagues—became increasingly pragmatic about the movie’s fate. He took full responsibility for the film’s tepid reception, acknowledging that it “wasn’t the movie audiences were waiting to see.” It would be easy to blame bad distribution or a poor release date, he told The Hollywood Reporter, but “obviously, the picture was not in tune with our audience completely, or they would have found us wherever we were.” Typically, he refused to take up much time second-guessing the film’s misfortune. For Jim, who had seemed to so effortlessly walk away from the world’s most popular television show at the height of its success to pursue a new venture, it was easy to move beyond the relative failure of Labyrinth and on to newer, exciting projects. “I work in one capacity for a while, and then it’s time to jump over to some other kind of thing,” he said earnestly, explaining that he already had in mind “a handful” of other projects. “To me, it’s just fun.”

  Fun, in fact, was the name of the game for Jim’s first post-Labyrinth project, a one-hour television special taped in February 1986 for HBO and the BBC called The Tale of the Bunny Picnic. Jim had undertaken the project due in no small part to the encouragement of Cheryl, who thought that after The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth—“these huge, grandiose visions”—it might be fun to get back to doing “something with cute, fun, funny puppets and do it as a family show.” The story, too—in which the well-meaning but overly imaginative Bean Bunny tries to warn his fellow rabbits about a nearby dog—had been inspired by a bit of real-life cuteness, dating back to The Muppet Show years in London when Jim and the Muppet performers would regularly picnic out on Hampstead Heath at dusk. As the puppeteers sprawled on the ground to eat, groups of rabbits would emerge from the brush to forage in the shadows—and Jim came to refer to these excursions to the heath as “bunny picnics.” One particular evening, as rabbits shuffled about in the grass—“looking to all the world like they were gonna have a meeting or convention or something,” remembered Jim—a dog raced over, barking madly. “The rabbits, of course, disappeared in a flash,” said Jim, “[and] Cheryl and I thought it might be fun to make up a story about what had just happened. And from that notion came The Tale of the Bunny Picnic.”

  Bunny Picnic was a bit of warmhearted, homespun fare cut from the same cloth as Emmet Otter or The Muppet Musicians of Bremen, intentionally cute and with lively songs by the Fraggle Rock team of Philip Balsam and Dennis Lee. After more than a year of seeing themselves as backbenchers to the Creature Shop, the builders in the Muppet workshop leapt into the new production with relish, building fluffy, fuzzy, huggable rabbits, dogs, and other animals, based on designs by children’s illustrator Diane Dawson Hearn. For the Muppet workshop, “it was really fun to make puppets again”—and Jim delighted in the two weeks he spent in London in February directing and performing. He enjoyed working in television again—but after spending the last five years immersed in fully realized worlds of goblins, Mystics, and Gelflings, there now had to be more to television than just the bright colors and soft edges of the Muppets. “Having done the Muppet stuff so beautifully, [and] having nothing else to explore or prove there,” said Jerry Juhl, “[Jim] wanted to move on.”

  There was an employee moving on at that time, too, leaving David Lazer—who would always be involved with the management of the company, despite his best efforts to stay retired—with a sticky personnel issue at Henson Associates. Following the promotion of Jim’s longtime assistant Mira Velimirovic in January 1986, Jim had been planning to hire thirty-year-old Mary Ann Cleary—who had worked for Henson Associates several years earlier, and in whom Jim had always had more than just a professional interest—as his new assistant. Lazer, astutely gauging the likely outcome of Jim’s proposed arrangement, called publicist and close personal advisor Arthur Novell and judiciously asked him to arrange a lunch date for Jane and Mary Ann. “See how Jane reacts to all this,” suggested Lazer.

  The arranged lunch was amicable enough, recalled Novell, but it was clear that Jane and Mary Ann “were sizing each other up.” Later, Jane would only coyly describe her lunch conversation with Mary Ann as “interesting”—and Jim, perhaps preferring not to chum the waters any further, opted for Cheryl as his assistant instead, hiring her in February 1986. By the end of the summer, however, following a working vacation through Egypt, Japan, and Indonesia, Cheryl left to study textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, leaving the position once again vacant. This time, Jim quietly installed Mary Ann as his assistant, and within two months—just as Lazer predicted—Jim and Mary Ann were vacationing together on a yacht cruise in Sardinia with Bernie Brillstein and other friends, celebrating Jim’s fiftieth birthday. But Lazer, and others, had rightly sensed that this new relationship would be more than just a casual office romance or fling.

  It was easy to see Jim’s attraction to Mary Ann. “She was spirited, outgoing, and attractive,” said Al Gottesman matter-of-factly. Good-looking and lithe, with an easy smile and a shaggy mane of sandy blond hair, Mary Ann was, in many ways, what Jane was not. Mary Ann, who had initially had little physical attraction to Jim—she had spurned his advances several years earlier—soon found herself drawn in by the sheer power of his personality, that same undefinable trait that even the most seasoned Hollywood veterans found irresistible. She was charmed by his ease in conversation, and would watch in adoring fascination as he punctuated his sentences with a quick sweep of his hands or a flutter of his long fingers. “Jim really used his hands,” said Mary Ann. “They were very powerful and present, as much as any other attribute. A puppeteer’s hands.” In no time, she and Jim
would be practically inseparable.

  That fall, Jim already had a more ambitious television project under way—an anthology show as gorgeously designed as The Dark Crystal and with the same kind of fairy tale—cum—music video look and rhythm he had tried, with only some success, to instill in Labyrinth. The basic idea had come from Lisa, who had studied folklore and mythology at Harvard. Lisa had written a long treatment for a show presenting what she called the “unfamous” versions of fairy tales “that really capture the flavor of how these stories were told and could be told with visuals that feel more authentic.” Jim had taken to the idea immediately, sending graduate students fanning out to academic libraries to photocopy old Russian folktales, Celtic and Japanese fairy tales, Italian myths, and heroic tales—and the more stories he read, the more excited he became. “Most folktales … are really very good, very solid, gutsy material that is really quite adult and sometimes quite violent,” he said later, “and we were intrigued with the idea of treating the material honestly, the way it was meant to be treated.”

  As Jim and Lisa talked through the concept and began putting more ideas down on paper, Lisa suggested that the best way to tell the old stories might be to have them dramatically narrated by a storyteller. What made folklore truly special, she explained, were “the words, and the sound of a man’s voice telling a tale and evoking a host of images.” With that description, Jim could immediately see the visual possibilities—and when he called Duncan Kenworthy to propose that the Englishman oversee production of the show in London, he excitedly described a man sitting by a fire telling stories of fantastic creatures he was certain the Creature Shop could bring convincingly to life. Once the reliable Kenworthy had agreed to serve as his producer, Jim was certain the look and feel of the show—which he was proposing to call The Storyteller—would be just as he wanted. However, there were still two critical pieces that had yet to fall into place.

  Jim intended to treat The Storyteller much as he had Fraggle Rock; while he would serve as executive producer, establish the overarching look and feel for the series, and direct an episode from time to time, for the most part he planned to leave the show in the hands of his creative team, including Kenworthy and, ideally, a director with a distinctive style. However, finding a director suited to Jim’s vision of The Storyteller wouldn’t be easy—after all, how exactly did one film something in an “oral tradition” where the voice evoked images? The answer, suggested Jim, was already at work in music videos, where lyrics often suggested a story against which the accompanying video established its own narrative. Jim had done something similar with Time Piece, using quick cuts and seemingly unrelated images to convey a story with a percussive soundtrack behind it. In the fledgling modern music video era—the upstart MTV channel had been launched only five years earlier—no one made music videos that were more interesting or visually compelling than Steve Barron, a twenty-nine-year-old Irishman who had directed Michael Jackson’s groundbreaking “Billie Jean” and the cutting-edge “Take on Me” for the Norwegian band a-ha. “He was the absolute top of the heap,” said Lisa—and with only minimal prodding from Kenworthy, Barron signed on as Jim’s primary director.

  The most important part of The Storyteller, however, was the stories themselves. From the start, Kenworthy was enthusiastic about the work of thirty-two-year-old English playwright Anthony Minghella, who had written a thoughtful British television miniseries called What If It’s Raining, which explored the effects of separation and divorce on an English family. At Kenworthy’s prompting, Jim had invited Minghella to lunch to discuss writing The Storyteller, a summons Minghella excitedly accepted simply because he wanted to meet Jim. Over lunch, recalled Minghella, “[Jim] told me he had an idea for a series which they’d been exploring for a while, which involved a man by a fire telling stories.” But “nobody,” said Minghella, “wants to look at a man telling stories.… I just didn’t get it.” The writer politely declined.

  And yet, the image Jim had enthusiastically described, of the storyteller sitting with his dog before a roaring fire, stayed with him. “This was something I learned about Jim later,” said Minghella. “He had a brilliant sense of the possibilities of something without ever really being able to articulate those possibilities.” Kenworthy was still convinced Jim and Minghella would be a good fit, and after several false starts, arranged for them to spend an evening listening to actual storytellers weave folktales. “I was even more convinced then that it wouldn’t work out,” said Minghella, but he agreed to write a pilot episode anyway, eventually turning in an intelligent script based on the Brothers Grimm tale “Hans My Hedgehog,” about a half man, half hedgehog who can only be freed from his curse by true love.

  As the Creature Shop went to work building the necessary characters—including the man-hedgehog Hans, a giant chicken, and the Storyteller’s dog—Jim and Kenworthy assembled their cast, bringing in English actor John Hurt to take the critical role of the craggy and enigmatic Storyteller. Jim was paying for the pilot himself, and Kenworthy did his best to keep an eye on the bottom line, regularly alerting Jim to any potential cost overruns. Keeping with its music video mentality, The Storyteller would feature computer-generated backgrounds and animation, requiring long and expensive computer time to render. Most of the budget busting, however, was on the part of the Creature Shop, which was trying to maintain motion picture standards on a television budget. Kenworthy grumbled to Jim about what he called the Creature Shop’s “ ‘sculpted foot syndrome,’ where the level of finish on everything is pitched at feature film standard.” With the pilot for The Storyteller already budgeted at a whopping $943,000 for a thirty-minute program, Kenworthy promised to keep the production on budget. Still, Jim went through his own script to see if there were any places where an otherwise elaborate or expensive visual effect might be eliminated, writing “SHOW THIS” on some pages and “DO WE NEED THIS?” on others.

  It didn’t get any cheaper once director Steve Barron began shooting at Lee International Studios in London on August 26. Barron was a tough director, with high expectations of himself and his performers—including Brian Henson, performing the role of the Storyteller’s straight-talking dog—and Barron would work the cast and crew ten hours one day, then edit for fourteen hours the next. “I really don’t think we could sustain the effort on a weekly basis,” Kenworthy confessed to Jim. But Jim was delighted with the results and proudly pronounced the effort as “some of the prettiest television we’ve ever done.” Making the most of Jim’s artistic vision, director Steve Barron’s rock ’n’ roll rhythms, and Anthony Minghella’s poetic scriptwriting, The Storyteller was a simple concept, sumptuously done. Now Jim just needed to find a television network that believed in it as much as he did.

  For much of the fall, Jim was sorting out private matters. While he loved his apartment at the Sherry-Netherland, for tax reasons he had recently closed on a second apartment, a Southern-style structure at 633 Steamboat Road, overlooking Smith Cove in Greenwich, Connecticut. The apartment at Steamboat Road would become his official home address, and for the rest of his life accountants at Henson Associates would carefully track Jim’s schedule to ensure he spent the appropriate number of days in Connecticut to qualify for Connecticut residency, and its marginally lower tax rate.

  As he had done at the Sherry-Netherland, Jim tore down and rebuilt the interior of the Steamboat Road apartment, then called a professional—this time designer Connie Beale—to assist with the decorating. Like many of Jim’s most fulfilling projects, the work with Beale was a true collaboration. Where Beale’s tastes were more traditional, Jim leaned ethnic and international, and the resulting décor was an eclectic but tasteful merging of artistic temperaments. Jim loved spending the afternoon shopping with Beale, discussing decorating over lunch, then buying handmade furniture from antiques stores or browsing for sculpture, fabrics, and art at Elements in Greenwich or Julie’s Gallery in New York. Jim filled his rooms with Windsor chairs, African masks, and Indonesian
cabinets—but his favorite place in the apartment was the back room with its floor-to-ceiling windows, where he would sprawl on the sofa beneath a sculpture of herons, and watch the waves out in Smith Cove.

  One thing Jim didn’t have in his apartment—either at Steamboat Road or the Sherry-Netherland—was memories. “As much as he loved objects,” said Cheryl, “he didn’t care about holding on to things.” When Jim had moved out of the house in Bedford, then, he had left behind not only Jane, but nearly everything else—from furniture and floor coverings, to school report cards and souvenirs—and simply started over again, building a new life in a new apartment with new everything. Jane, meanwhile, after spending the past year living in Bedford with fifteen-year-old Heather, had decided to move into a house of her own, carefully packing up boxes of painted wooden toys and handmade Christmas ornaments and rearranging old furniture in her new house in Greenwich. Their new homes, as much as anything, symbolized their differing approaches to their relationship with each other as well as their perspectives on life in general: Jim was always looking forward, excited about new things and the future, while Jane carried the weight and obligations of the past. Perhaps tellingly, their homes in Greenwich were less than three miles apart; even legally separated, Jim and Jane could never be entirely removed from each other.