Jim Henson: The Biography
Page 58
Sometimes, said writer Jerry Juhl, Jim set that example by appreciating life’s absurdities. “Jim had a sense of humor that just sorted out life,” said Juhl. “And, you know, too much of life for most people is involved in picking what are really fairly petty things and turning them into deep tragedies and horrible melodramas. Jim always cut through that.” Even in business, “he could integrate play into the process,” said Dave Goelz. “As a parent, one of my goals is to see whether I can raise my children to survive in the world without losing that childlike innocence, trust, optimism, curiosity and decency. I am certain it is possible, because Jim was the living embodiment of it.” Indeed, it was that ridiculous optimism—that ability to look at life through a lens that seemed to bring out the brightest colors in nearly everything—that Sesame Street performer Fran Brill wanted to emulate in her own life as well. “Even today, many, many years later, if I’m in a difficult position, I say to myself, ‘How would Jim have handled this?’ ” said Brill. “I just felt like if I tried to handle things the way he did, it might be easier to get through life sometimes.”
While Jim’s positive demeanor was exceptional, his talent remains extraordinary, and his imagination explosive—sometimes literally. “He was a creatively restless individual always looking for something new,” said Lisa Henson. “Not just a new project, but a new way of achieving a project. He rarely repeated himself. It was not interesting to him to keep doing the same thing.” Brian Henson admired his father’s “mind-set”—a work ethic that valued both creativity and collaboration. “That’s probably what he taught me more than anything,” said Brian. “I learned from him to be very, very prepared and then very, very flexible—to know exactly what you’re going to do, until somebody has another idea … because that’s the way to work, you know.”
As longtime collaborator and Sesame Street head writer Jon Stone put it, “Jim didn’t think in terms of boundaries at all, the way all the rest of us do. There are always these fences we build around ourselves and our ideas. Jim seemed to have no fences.”
His energy and enthusiasm—his sheer joy in his work—were boundless as well. “I often tell people … ‘if you think it’s fun to watch these things,’ ” said Muppet designer Bonnie Erickson, “ ‘you should have been there making them.’ ” Jim’s excitement, said Minghella, was “so overpowering, you could just tell he was a man who had not lost an ounce of enthusiasm for anything he was doing.” Frank Oz thought it was more than just enthusiasm; he called Jim “an extraordinary appreciator”:
Many people see Jim as an extraordinary creator; I realize that I see Jim first as an appreciator. He appreciated so much. He loved London. He loved walking on the Heath.… He appreciated his family and his colleagues and his Muppet family. And he appreciated the performances and design of a puppet. He appreciated the art objects that he might buy. He appreciated the detail in a Persian rug. He appreciated … just beauty. I really don’t believe that Jim could have been such an extraordinary creator if he hadn’t been such an extraordinary appreciator.
Perhaps more than anything, however, it was that sense of purpose, that basic decency, that made Jim and his life and work so remarkable—and makes it just as remarkable today. “Underneath the zaniness, or perhaps standing next to it, there was a sense of decency that the characters had about the world and to each other,” said Jerry Juhl. “That’s one of the real legacies that Jim left. I think it’s one of the reasons he’s so loved today, because he could be a pop culture figure doing mass entertainment, and he could explore the edges of crazy, goofy comedy. But at the core, there was always a sense of social values and decency.” As creative consultant Alex
Rockwell remembered, “He often started from the position of, ‘Let’s do something that’s going to make the world a better place.’ … The work was always about fun and creativity and inventiveness, but he really cared in a genuine way that it also had a value system.”
Always, then, the work had to matter—because to Jim, the world mattered. “I know that it’s easier to portray a world that’s filled with cynicism and anger, where problems are solved with violence,” Jim once said. “What’s a whole lot tougher is to offer alternatives, to present other ways conflicts can be resolved, and to show that you can have a positive impact on your world. To do that, you have to put yourself out on a limb, take chances, and run the risk of being called a do-gooder.”
Jim was always willing to take that risk, thought Richard Hunt. “He wasn’t a saint, but he was as close as human beings get to it.” That had made Jim’s passing so much harder—and yet, said Hunt, “part of me feels … that Jim had done his work on earth.… He had done an amazing amount of work. He’d given an amazing amount of himself, and in turn to each person who was affected by him.”
In her New York apartment, Cheryl Henson still keeps a small photograph of her father, taken during his years in London while working on Labyrinth. In the photo, Jim is walking away from the camera, clutching a walking stick as he strides up a path toward Hampstead Heath—perhaps headed out to one of the Bunny Picnics he so adored. With a blanket tucked casually under one arm, he is relaxed and carefree, looking happily up the hill in front of him with no intention of looking back. “That’s how I think of my dad after he died,” said Cheryl. “It was time for him to go. He’s going off on his own.”
“We all have jobs,” said Richard Hunt, “and he’d done his. He’d done it well.” What Jim Henson did so well was always more than just Muppets. It was more than Fraggles or Gelflings or goblin kings. Like Jim himself, what Jim did was wonderfully complex, though not complicated—and elegant in its simplicity. “When I was young,” wrote Jim, “my ambition was to be one of the people who makes a difference in this world. My hope still is to leave this world a little bit better for my being here.”
And he did.
“Jimmy Henson” as an elementary school student in Leland, Mississippi, in 1946.
“I was a Mississippi Tom Sawyer,” Jim said.
(COURTESY OF HENSON FAMILY PROPERTIES)
Betty and Paul Henson, Sr., with sons Jim (center) and Paul Jr., circa 1940.
(COURTESY OF HENSON FAMILY PROPERTIES)
All in a day’s play: a young Jim—swaddled in a makeshift turban and robe—attempts to snake-charm a garden hose.
(COURTESY OF HENSON FAMILY PROPERTIES)
Jim credited family gatherings at the dinner table—like this one in 1956—with shaping his sense of humor. “There was so much laughter,” he recalled, “because everyone was always telling jokes and saying funny things.” From left: Jim’s aunts Attie and Bobby, Uncle Jinx (with back to camera), Jim’s grandmother “Dear,” Paul Sr., unidentified, Jim, and Betty Henson.
(COURTESY OF HENSON FAMILY PROPERTIES)
Jim was nineteen when his brother, Paul Henson, Jr., a navy ensign (shown at right in 1953), was killed in an automobile accident at age twenty-three. The effect on Jim, recalled Frank Oz, was profound. “He realized that he just didn’t have an infinite amount of time to do all the things he wanted to do.”
(COURTESY OF HENSON FAMILY PROPERTIES)
The birthplace of the Muppets: Jim in front of the Henson home on Beechwood Road in Hyattsville, Maryland, in 1956.
(COURTESY OF HENSON FAMILY PROPERTIES)
Jim’s sketches of Kermit and Sam, 1960.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. MUPPETS © DISNEY)
Jim touches up the paint on Kermit’s mouth. Made from Betty Henson’s milky-blue coat, with Ping-Pong balls for eyes, the eventual star of the Muppet realm was only an abstract thing, and not yet a frog.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. KERMIT THE FROG © DISNEY)
Jim and Jane Nebel—first his performing partner and later his wife—with Sam, Kermit, and Yorick. The enormously popular Sam and Friends earned Jim his first Emmy at the age of twenty-one.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. MUPPETS © DISNEY)
Newlyweds Jim and Jane Henson dance as Jim’s mo
ther plays the piano. Betty Henson had insisted her son shave off his new beard for the wedding.
(COURTESY OF HENSON FAMILY PROPERTIES. PHOTO: DEL ANKERS)
Jim on the day of his graduation from the University of Maryland in 1960. The enormous success of Sam and Friends made it possible for Jim to drive to the ceremony in his own Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud.
(COURTESY OF HENSON FAMILY PROPERTIES)
Family affair: Jim, adjusting Limbo, checks on Jane as she tends to both Sam and daughter Lisa, the first of the Hensons’ five children.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. MUPPETS © DISNEY. PHOTO: DEL ANKERS)
Jim—in a typical position—works from his Eames chair in the first Muppets, Inc., offices, located over a nightclub on East 53rd Street in New York in the early 1960s. “[Our] spaces never looked like offices,” said Muppet writer Jerry Juhl.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY)
The first three employees of Muppets, Inc. Left to right: performer/writer Jerry Juhl, performer Jerry Nelson, and Muppet designer/builder Don Sahlin.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. PHOTO: DEL ANKERS)
While a brilliant performer, Jim was equally as talented behind the camera—and spent much of the 1960s in the director’s chair, overseeing everything from ten-second commercials to hourlong television specials.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. PHOTO: DEL ANKERS)
Frank Oz was nineteen years old and just out of high school when he joined Muppets, Inc., in 1963 and was given the job of “right-handing” as Jim performed Rowlf the Dog on The Jimmy Dean Show. It was the beginning of one of the finest, and funniest, creative partnerships in entertainment.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. MUPPETS © DISNEY. PHOTO: DEL ANKERS)
Jim soars across the screen in his 1965 Academy Award–nominated short film Time Piece. “Back in the sixties … I thought of myself as an experimental filmmaker,” Jim said. “[Those films] didn’t have that commercial success, but that didn’t particularly frustrate me because I enjoyed it.”
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY)
Jim’s Muppets were pivotal to the success of Sesame Street, making the educational show an overnight sensation and an American institution. Jim was fiercely devoted to the show, and he and Frank Oz (shown here in 1969) would regularly perform Ernie and Bert together until Jim’s death.
(COURTESY OF SESAME WORKSHOP)
A manic Muppet monster devours a machine in one of Jim’s short films for IBM from the late 1960s. The monster would be defanged and used again as Sesame Street’s ravenous Cookie Monster.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. MUPPETS © DISNEY)
Jim with Sesame Street co-creator Joan Ganz Cooney in the 1980s.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. PHOTO: MATTHEW MAURO)
The Henson family in the late 1970s. Left to right: Cheryl, Jane, Brian, Jim (with Heather on shoulders), John, and Lisa.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. PHOTO: NANCY MORAN)
Jim at the editing table in 1972 as performer John Lovelady, designer Bonnie Erickson, builder Faz Fazakas, and designer Don Sahlin look on.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY)
Attorney Al Gottesman deftly negotiated the profit-sharing deal that divvied up the millions from Sesame Street merchandising between Henson Associates and Children’s Television Workshop. Gottesman became one of Jim’s most valued legal advisors.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. PHOTO: JOHN E. BARRETT)
Jim’s hand-drawn cover to one of his earliest proposals for The Muppet Show, from the late 1960s.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. MUPPETS © DISNEY)
Lord Lew Grade (second from right, with wife Kathie, David Lazer, and Jim) believed in Jim and the Muppets from the very beginning and ensured that Jim had the resources he needed to make The Muppet Show successful. With a budget of $125,000 per episode, it was one of the most expensive syndicated shows of its day.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY)
Jim’s beloved Kermit-green Lotus, a gift from Lord Grade.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. KERMIT THE FROG © DISNEY)
Writer Jerry Juhl was one of Jim’s most important and trusted creative collaborators. Starting in the 1960s, Juhl guided the Muppets from television to the movie screen and played a critical role in countless projects, including the development of Fraggle Rock.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY)
Jim and Jane at a formal dinner honoring Lord Grade in London. While their relationship had always been a true creative partnership, differing priorities—and vastly different communication styles—would eventually fracture their marriage.
(COURTESY OF HENSON FAMILY PROPERTIES)
Filming the Muppets was both a high- and low-tech creative endeavor. Above, Jim, always the gadget freak, performs Kermit remotely with the help of a waldo, while below, he performs on his back while being pushed on a rolling cart.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. KERMIT THE FROG © DISNEY)
The Dark Crystal (1982) was Jim’s most ambitious project to date, a richly designed universe requiring complicated and physically demanding puppetry. Here Jim and performer Kathy Mullen bend and squeeze themselves out of camerashot as they perform Jen and Kira, the film’s heroes.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. PHOTO: MURRAY CLOSE)
Jim and the cast of Fraggle Rock. Airing on HBO from 1983 to 1987, the show was the network’s first original series—the colorful ancestor to shows like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. PHOTO: JOHN E. BARRETT)
Creative director Michael Frith was one of Jim’s most versatile and brilliant collaborators, influencing everything from puppet design and publishing to Muppet Babies and Disney rides. He would play a key role in shaping the world of Fraggle Rock.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. PHOTO: STAR BLACK)
Jim with the intentionally monstrous cast of 1985’s Dreamchild, an outside project that helped launch the successful and highly respected Creature Shop in London.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY)
Jim loved performing the sage Cantus on the set of Fraggle Rock. “[Cantus] was great,” said one Fraggle writer, “because he was goofy and wise at the same time, kind of like Jim.”
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. PHOTO: FRED PHIPPS)
Jim on the set of Labyrinth with executive producer George Lucas in 1985. “We were very much alike,” said Lucas. “Independent, out of the spotlight, obsessed with our own films.”
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY)
Brian Froud (left) with Labyrinth writer (and Monty Python member) Terry Jones. Jim loved Froud’s bold artistic sense, which forged the look of both The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY)
Jim with David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly on the set of Labyrinth in 1985. The movie was, according to Jane, “absolutely the closest project to him,” and he was devastated by its failure at the box office.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. PHOTO: JOHN BROWN)
Agent Bernie Brillstein, Jim, and actor John Hurt, in full makeup, on the set of The Storyteller. Though low-rated, the sumptuously produced TV series was a critical hit and won Jim another Emmy.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY.)
Twenty-three-year-old Brian Henson performed the dog on The Storyteller, one of many projects in which Jim and the Henson children would perform or participate. “One of the best ways for us to be around him,” said daughter Cheryl, “was to work with him.”
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY.)
Happiness: Jim plays with breadsticks over dinner. “Jim really used his hands,” said Mary Ann Cleary. “They were very powerful and present … a puppeteer’s hands.”
(PHOTOS BY AND COURTESY OF MARY ANN CLEARY)
Jim on vacation with Mary Ann in France. It was his firs
t real relationship since his separation from Jane.
(PHOTO BY AND COURTESY OF MARY ANN CLEARY)
The major Muppet performers, on the steps of the circular staircase at One Seventeen in 1989. Clockwise from bottom center: Jim, Frank Oz, Dave Goelz, Richard Hunt, Steve Whitmire, and Jerry Nelson.
(COURTESY OF THE JIM HENSON COMPANY. PHOTO: RICHARD TERMINE)
For Barb and Madi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Every biographer has the unique privilege and responsibility of living with their subject—and their subject’s family, friends, colleagues, and co-workers—during the course of researching and writing about their life. It has been my great good fortune, then, as I wrote about a truly extraordinary life, to spend five years with some very remarkable people.