Over the next few hours, Jane settled into Jim’s guest bedroom, but spent most of the night making tea and sitting with Jim in his bedroom as he sipped it delicately. “We just talked,” said Jane. “There was no discussion of broken marriage or anything like that. We were just there together.” None of the Henson children was surprised Jim had asked Jane to stay with him. “He and Mom were always just really fond of each other,” said Brian Henson. Agreed Cheryl, “she was his best friend for so much of his life. He loved her and wanted her to be happy. He just couldn’t make her happy himself.… Of course it is complicated; life is.”
Around 2:00 A.M., Jim’s breathing became more labored; it hurt his abdomen to cough, and with each raspy bark he was coughing blood. Jane had finally had enough, and insisted on calling a doctor, but Jim refused. “Just rub my back,” he said, rolling over onto his stomach. “Try to calm down my breathing.” As Jane massaged Jim’s back, he laughed weakly. “Maybe I’m dying,” he said darkly. But by 4:00 A.M., even Jim could no longer joke about his condition: his heart was racing, and he was struggling for breath. “Okay,” he finally told Jane. “I’ll go to the hospital”—but he made the request grudgingly. “He really didn’t want anyone else to be disturbed by his pain,” said Jane.
However, now that Jim was ready to go to the hospital, Jane suddenly didn’t know what to do. “We really didn’t know anything about hospitals,” she said later, almost apologetically. Jim suggested she call the reliable—and discreet—Arthur Novell, who was managing a press event out in San Francisco that evening. While Novell never considered himself to be Jim’s “fixer,” Jim held him in high regard as a confidant whom he could trust implicitly. “In every family,” said Anne Kinney wryly, “there are some people that can manage things.” Additionally, Novell knew his way around New York and its operations with a savvy that rivaled any cabdriver or politician. If there were anyone in the Henson organization who could get Jim to a hospital quickly and quietly—even all the way from San Francisco—it was Novell. Jane made the call.
It was just after 1:00 A.M. in San Francisco when the phone rang in Novell’s hotel suite. “I’m here with Jim at the apartment,” Jane blurted out immediately.
“Is everything all right?” asked Novell.
“No,” said Jane. “Here’s Jim.”
Jim came to the phone, breathing heavily. “I’m very sick,” he said quietly.
The normally unflappable Novell felt the ground drop out from underneath him. “It was so out of character for him to even utter those words,” he said. Novell ran through several quick potential courses of action in his head, then told Jim he would make some phone calls. “Jim, it’ll be okay. I love you,” Novell assured him.
Jim thickly murmured his thanks, then added quietly, “Arthur … just look after them for me.”
Novell’s eyes stung with tears. “In the back of my head,” he recalled later, “I said, ‘I’m losing Jim.’ ”
Novell’s phone calls produced results almost immediately. A private car was dispatched to meet Jim in front of the Sherry-Netherland. The driver had been instructed to bring along a wheelchair to carry Jim down to the lobby, but Jim—who had gotten fully dressed and cleaned up—insisted on taking the elevator down nineteen floors and walking out to the car himself, even pleasantly waving to the doormen as he crawled into the backseat beside Jane. The car sped for New York Hospital on East 68th Street, less than two miles away, but the driver, unfamiliar with the layout of the hospital, pulled up at the main entrance, instead of the emergency entrance tucked between two buildings around the corner. “We’ll just get out here,” Jim said—“Jim never wanted to put anybody out,” said Novell—and walked the half block to the emergency room where he slumped into a chair. As he was whisked away into the examination room, he raised a hand and waved weakly to Jane. “See you later,” he croaked, trying to smile. “I feel like I’m in good hands.” He was formally admitted into New York Hospital at 4:58 A.M., the morning of Tuesday, May 15.
At the time of his admission to New York Hospital, Jim’s blood pressure was normal and he wasn’t running a fever—but his heartbeat was irregular, and preliminary blood tests showed his kidneys were failing rapidly. At 6:00 A.M., Jane called Cheryl, who arrived to find Jim on a gurney with an oxygen mask strapped to his face, and held his hand as he waited to be examined by a team of critical care specialists. By 6:30, specialists had determined Jim was suffering from severe pneumonia and kidney failure and recommended he be moved immediately to the Intensive Care Unit. Shortly thereafter, he slipped into unconsciousness.
By 8:00 A.M., Jim could only breathe with the assistance of a breathing tube; by 10:00, doctors noted that he was not responding to any stimulation at all—“no movement, no response,” except to “deep pain.” The antibiotics being pumped into his system had little effect. In the five hours since entering the hospital, Jim’s body had almost completely shut down. He would never regain consciousness.
At One Seventeen, phones had been ringing all morning. Cheryl had phoned both Anne Kinney and David Lazer to let them know of Jim’s condition, and Lazer had sped from Long Island to the hospital, where he went into executive mode, briskly making phone calls from the pay phone outside Jim’s room and displaying the calm that had made him The Muppet Show’s prince regent. The first call was to Bernie Brillstein, waking the agent up in California to let him know what had happened. “I’m here at New York Hospital,” Lazer told Brillstein. “Jim just came in. I just came here. He may not make it.”
Brillstein was stunned. “You’re kidding.”
It fell to Anne Kinney, manning the phones at her desk outside Jim’s third-floor office at One Seventeen, to pass the word on to employees and the Muppet performers throughout the day—and their responses were much the same as Brillstein’s. “I couldn’t believe it,” said Dave Goelz. “Jim was so vital and indestructible.” “I lost it. I pretty much cried myself to sleep,” said Kevin Clash, who was so stunned he nearly wandered away from his apartment without wearing shoes. Steve Whitmire, notified in Atlanta by Frank Oz, found it “hard to even hear it.” Oz himself was typically blunt: “God, it was awful.”
And it was awful. Around noon, when physicians inserted a feeding tube into Jim’s stomach, a massive amount of blood was extracted, indicating that Jim was bleeding severely in his stomach and intestines. Then, at 12:55 P.M., he went into cardiac arrest. “It happened insanely fast,” said John Henson, who had walked to the hospital from One Seventeen. Doctors were able to revive him, but “they were saying he’d be a vegetable,” said John. “I went back to [One Seventeen] and just stared at the wall. I couldn’t believe it was happening.”
Throughout the late afternoon and evening, family and a few close friends came to stand vigil outside Jim’s room. After Jane, Cheryl, John, and David Lazer, Lisa, who had the farthest to go, was actually the next to arrive, having taken the first available flight from Los Angeles. All she could think about during her flight, she said later, was “that he would want to see his grandchildren. I kept repeating, ‘you want to see your grandchildren, you want to see your grandchildren,’ like a mantra.… But I never even spoke to him. He was already unconscious and on life support by the time I got to see him.” The flowers Jim had sent to celebrate her promotion were still fresh and colorful on her desk at Warner Brothers.
Heather, attending school at the Rhode Island School of Design, was making her way down from Providence and would arrive late in the evening. Brian, meanwhile, had been in England working—and despite scrambling to make arrangements to get to New York as soon as possible, he would arrive too late to see his father alive. Frank Oz had also come to camp in the hospital, as had Jerry Nelson, Michael Frith, and Kathy Mullen. Steve Whitmire and his wife, Melissa, who had taken the last flight from Atlanta that evening, would arrive shortly after midnight. All of them took turns sitting by Jim’s bed, holding his hand and talking to him.
Around 11:00 P.M., Jim’s condition worsened. H
is blood pressure plunged, requiring physicians to administer CPR. He then went into full cardiac arrest—his second heart attack in ten hours—though doctors managed to revive him yet again. His chest tube was replaced with a larger one, and a second tube was inserted in his left side to increase the drainage from his lungs. With his breathing dangerously weak, he was placed on a jet ventilator to increase his oxygen intake.
Finally, just after 1:00 on Wednesday morning, Jim’s blood pressure bottomed out; his heart had stopped beating. A medical team rushed to his bedside to administer CPR and inserted a chest tube, which immediately gushed enormous amounts of blood and fluid, indicating massive hemorrhaging in his chest and lungs. Doctors continued applying CPR without success, then used a defibrillator to try to shock his heart into starting. Jim’s body tensed, then sagged; the charge to the defibrillator was increased and tried again, three more times. Jim jerked sharply each time; more blood and fluid erupted through the tubes in his chest. Then he slumped back, and went limp.
Jim Henson died at 1:21 A.M. on Wednesday, May 16, 1990. He was fifty-three years old.
The official cause of death was septic shock due to group A streptococcus. Jim’s organs, particularly his lungs, were so infiltrated with toxin-spewing bacteria that his internal systems had collapsed. Physicians later speculated that had Jim checked into the hospital on Monday morning, perhaps even at the time he first noticed his heart beating too fast, the antibiotics might have saved him—or, perhaps not. In many cases, the toxins produced by streptococcus are so powerful that they begin deteriorating organs and tissue before patients show any outward sign of sickness. Doctors later determined that even at the time Jim checked into the hospital, an “overwhelming infection” had been coursing throughout his body for at least three days. “There had already been extensive damage done,” said Dr. David M. Gelmont, who had been the attending physician. “It just raced quickly through his body.”
The Henson family was summoned by doctors, who gently broke the news, then escorted the family into the room to see him. Jim “was so bloated, he didn’t even look like himself,” said Jane. John lay across his father’s body and hugged him. “I love you, Daddy,” he whispered, then left the room, sobbing uncontrollably. Heather, the last of the Henson children to arrive—and who “had wanted so much for Jim to get through it,” said Jane lovingly—was steered gently to Jim’s bedside by Jane, who put her mouth close to Heather’s ear. “Let him go,” Jane said softly. “Just say goodbye and let him go.”
Out in the waiting area, Oz quietly informed the others of what had happened, then he and Lazer disappeared to start making phone calls. It was hard to even cry, remembered Steve Whitmire. “A few tears were around,” he said, “but everyone was just stunned. We just couldn’t believe this had happened.” Jerry Nelson sat and tried to console John, who was staring at the carpet, crying and gasping uncontrollably. “He was really devastated,” said Nelson. “All the kids were.”
All night long and into the morning, word spread through the Henson organization. Kevin Clash remembered receiving a call at 5:00 A.M. giving him the news. Dave Goelz, who caught a plane from California after learning Jim was ill, called the hospital during his layover in Chicago. “A custodian answered,” said Goelz. “He said no one was around. That’s when I knew Jim had died.” Sesame Street performer Fran Brill heard the news that morning from a casting director as she waited her turn to audition for a voice-over. “My heart stopped,” she said.
By daybreak, performers and employees began trickling into the offices at One Seventeen. “I remember growing up, when there’s a loss everybody comes to the house and you eat and you just stay around,” said Clash. “The offices became a house.… I remember … doing nothing else but going over to [One Seventeen] and staying there until the afternoon or early evening and then going home—and doing that for five days. We couldn’t do anything else.” By late morning, every space at One Seventeen was packed with friends, colleagues, and co-workers, most of whom could do little more than try to comfort one another, hugging each other and dabbing their eyes with tissues as Muppets stared lifelessly from tables in the workshop. Jim’s third-floor office, however, sat respectfully empty. “Everybody was walking wounded,” said Cheryl later. “Everyone felt so close to my dad … everyone had a very intense, personal relationship with my father.” Later, a hand-drawn card was placed on the grand piano in the townhouse’s main library, a sympathy card from the Imagineers at Disney, who had loved playing in Jim’s world as much as he had in theirs. On the front, a despondent Kermit the Frog sat on a log in front of a blazing sunset, a discarded banjo behind him, his head in his hands; next to him sat Mickey Mouse, with a consoling arm draped around Kermit’s shoulders. No words were needed.
The Henson family had retreated to Jim’s apartment—dazed, shocked, and trying to rest. Several lawyers from the Henson’s legal team knocked on the apartment door, wanting to discuss the impact of Jim’s death on the still unsigned Disney deal—an expected, though ill-timed, interruption that the recently arrived Brian Henson dealt with by listening patiently and intently as the lawyers explained their concerns. “We were thrown into having to deal with the legal complexity before we had time to breathe much less mourn,” remembered Cheryl. “It was all devastating … [but Brian] was relatively clearheaded, and together with Lisa dedicated themselves to figuring it out.” The attorneys had one other bit of business to conduct as well, handing over a sealed envelope from the law firm of Kleinberg, Kaplan, Wolff & Cohen. There were no legal documents inside, only two letters addressed to the Henson children.
They were from Jim.
Dated March 2, 1986, they were letters he had written during a quick weekend visit to France while mixing audio for Labyrinth—the same weekend, in fact, when he had written the buoyant Muppet Voyager proposal for IBM Europe. Jim had filed the letters with his personal attorneys, and asked that they be delivered to his children in the event of his death. Now, suddenly—remarkably—in the middle of sadness and chaos, it seemed Jim was there again, calmly taking charge. “Today I am sitting here in the lovely room of La Colombe d’Or in St. Paul de Vence,” Jim had written, “with lovely thoughts about life … and thinking I should write this note sometime … also of death”:
I’m not at all afraid of the thought of death, and in many ways, look forward to it with much curiosity and interest. I’m looking forward to meeting up with some of my friends who’ve gone on ahead of me, and I’ll be waiting there to say hi to those of you [who] are still back [here].
Since I consider death a rather joyous step forward into the next stage of things, I’d like to lay out a few thoughts as to what might happen when I leave this place.
I suggest you first have a nice, friendly little service of some kind, hopefully using the talents of some of the good people who have worked with me over the years. It would be nice if Richard Hunt, if he’s still around, would talk and emcee the thing. It would be lovely if some of the people who sing would do a song or two, some of which should be quite happy and joyful. It would be nice if some of my close friends would say a few nice, happy words about how much we enjoyed doing this stuff together—and it would be good to have some religious person read a few quotes by some of the great teachers to remind us how this is all part of what is meant to be.
Incidentally, I’d love to have a Dixieland band play at this function and end with a rousing version of “Saints”…
Have a wonderful time in life, everybody. It feels strange writing this kind of thing while I’m still alive, but it wouldn’t be easy to do after I go.
With all my love to you all,
JIM (DAD)
(P.S. I suppose I should say a word about what happens to my old body. In truth, I don’t really care. Hopefully, make as little of it as possible. One way would be to cremate and then distribute the ashes somewhere pleasant.… Be sure not to waste money on an expensive casket or any of that garbage.)
Suitably directed and ins
pired by Jim’s own words, longtime producer and collaborator Martin Baker went to work coordinating a memorial service, set for Monday, May 21, that would comply with Jim’s wishes. The days immediately following Jim’s death were “a traumatic period, as you can imagine,” said Duncan Kenworthy. “[But] one of the things that kept us all going was the memorial service.… We had from Wednesday until Monday to pull it together.”
Everyone, it seemed, had an idea for the format and content of the memorial service. “All these people were coming,” remembered Jane, “and they all wanted to do things.” Planning the memorial, said Kenworthy, “was a wonderful microcosm of us. There we were, disagreeing in many ways, having very strong views, trying not to say, ‘What would Jim have done?’ ” Things suddenly fell together when Jane casually suggested that they “just let it happen like a show … a ‘Jim Show.’ ” “As soon as it was said that way,” said Jane, “then everybody knew what they were doing. Nobody had to wonder what their part was.”
The service, a “celebration of Jim Henson’s life in song and remembrances,” would be open to the public—a fitting decision, but one that was certain to ensure a large crowd. It was decided, then, that the memorial would be held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, a soaring Episcopal church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that could hold nearly five thousand. The service would be silly and sad and bright and reassuring—at Jim’s direction, no one was to wear black—and Jane and Martin Baker met regularly with eighty-nine-year-old Episcopal bishop Paul Moore to make certain that the church would be comfortable hosting such an unconventional ceremony. “Is this going to be all right in your church?” Jane asked respectfully. The thoughtful, liberal Moore merely smiled warmly. “Oh yes,” he told them.
Jim Henson: The Biography Page 56
