Jim Henson: The Biography (13 page)

To take over his performing duties on
Sam and Friends
, Jim engaged the services of a friend he had known since Northwestern High School, a fellow University of Maryland student named Bobby Payne. Payne, a quiet and somewhat shy young man, was awed by the supremely confident Jim. “
He already knew what he was wanting!” Payne said with amazement. Late that spring, Jim picked up Payne in his convertible and drove to WRC’s new studios on Nebraska Avenue in Northwest Washington to give Payne a crash course in the Muppet style of performing.

Payne quickly came to appreciate the sheer strength and stamina Jim brought to the job. Performing Sam, Payne recalled, could be a workout. “
He had this bar inside him that you could [use to shrug Sam’s shoulders],” said Payne. “It would kill you to do a whole number. He was made of plastic wood in his hands and head—he was just heavy!” But even as precise and as demanding as he could be, Jim was always patient and encouraging. “Jim more or less said, ‘You should be able to do anything,’ ” Payne said. “And so he really challenged me to try to do those things.”

In June 1958, then, with the Muppets in good hands—in addition to hiring Payne as a performer, he had left the general management of the Muppets in the capable care of Jane—Jim “
wandered over to Europe,” as he casually described it, with no real plan but to travel the continent and study painting. It would turn out to be a critical journey for Jim and his development as an artist—though not as the painter he had initially aspired to be.

Initially, Jim traveled
in Europe with Joe Irwin, who was more than happy to continue in the same aide-de-camp role as he had for their cross-country trip, snapping pictures of Jim as he stood in front of the Eiffel Tower, stretching himself as tall and dignified as he could get, or gleefully leaping onto railroad tracks in Germany to pretend to push a freight train. As a twenty-one-year-old on his first European adventure, Jim was a whirlwind of activity, weaving through museums in France, scrambling over rocks in Lucerne, and craning his neck at barmaids in Germany. Irwin, who had enlisted in the military, finally had to leave Jim in France after a few weeks to report for active duty. “
But I know the kind of adventures he had while in Paris,” Irwin said later, laughing. It was, as Irwin characterized it, “ ‘Sex on the Seine’ … I’m surprised he came back!”

For weeks, Jim simply roamed, attending the World’s Fair in Brussels, and gazing at paintings and sculpture in Switzerland, France, or Germany. But to his surprise, there was another art form Europeans enjoyed, and that they took just as seriously as painting or sculpture. “In Europe,” said Jim with amazement, “everyone goes to puppet shows.” As Joe Irwin recalled, Jim was particularly fascinated by the countless amateur Punch and Judy shows—and was even more intrigued with the reaction of the audiences, who hooted and hissed and actively engaged with the puppets, often throwing out story suggestions or having shouted conversations with the characters. It was one of the first times Jim had ever been an active audience member, and he “
absolutely marveled” at how completely an audience could get caught up in the performance. “[Audiences] were very involved,” said Irwin. “These puppets became live entertainers, [especially] to the children.”

Jim traveled more deliberately now, seeking out puppet shows of every kind, and talking with puppeteers, puppet makers, even audiences. What he saw was craftspeople who took real pride in their work, painting elaborate wooden heads and sewing beautiful cloth puppets. He saw puppet theaters and sets that rivaled opera houses, while others were equally as gorgeous in their stark minimalism. “
That was the first time I’d ever met any other puppeteers.… When I traveled around, I saw the work of a number of people,” Jim said. “
They were
very serious about their work. I thought that what they were doing was really interesting.”

It was a turning point. Until now, no matter how good or groundbreaking his own work might have been, Jim had always had Rudy Pugliese’s question burning in the back of his head:
Why are you wasting your time with those puppets?
Now he finally had his answer: he wasn’t. As he headed for home in August 1958 after six weeks abroad, he had made his decision. “
It was at that point I realized the puppetry was an art form, a valid way to do really interesting things,” Jim remarked. “I came back from that trip all fired up to do wonderful puppetry.” He also came back with a beard, a variation on the European-style Vandyke, making a brushy circle around his mouth and trimmed to a slight point. It was both fashionable and, in Jim’s opinion, functional, as it covered the acne scars that were always more visible to himself than to others.

It was as if those few weeks in Europe had opened a creative floodgate—for what followed would be a period of enormous experimentation and artistic growth as Jim pursued a wide variety of interests and began to play with other forms of media. Many projects would never make it beyond the idea phase, drawn into Jim’s sketchbooks with elaborate notes, while others would result in wonderful bits of animation or recordings that Jim would keep privately to himself, satisfied merely with the act of creating and imagining. He was reaching out, exploring new ways to tell stories and create worlds, the ideas coming almost faster than he could scribble down or carry out.

That autumn, Jim took no courses at the University of Maryland. Invigorated by both the puppetry and the literature of his European trip, he was determined to stage a European-style production of
Hansel and Gretel
, and spent the fall filling pages of his sketchbooks with set designs and rough story outlines. Jim’s pencil drawings for
Hansel and Gretel
alone justify his initial enthusiasm for a career in set design; his sketches of a haunted forest are alive with energy, filled with smiling trees that twist themselves into thorny, gnarled knots, and grimacing tree stumps with spooky, blank, jack-o’-lantern eyes. It’s just the kind of place in which a fairy tale should exist, and Jim clearly had a sense of the look and feel of the world in which his story would take place—the same design mentality he would bring to
The Dark Crystal
two decades later. Working with
Bobby Payne, Jim got as far as building several sets for
Hansel and Gretel
, as well as several puppets—including a witch with light-up eyes—but in the end Jim shelved the project, calling it “
ridiculously overcomplicated.” Still, the writing and design work had been good experience. Jim was becoming a storyteller.

Even without
Hansel and Gretel
, there was plenty to keep Jim busy. First and foremost, Jim returned to school full-time in 1959, determined to complete his degree. On the work end of things, during Jim’s absence, WRC had made the Muppets a regular part of
In Our Town
, a half-hour daily variety show airing at 1:00 each afternoon, giving the Muppets
three
regular spots in the daily lineup. Jim also arranged for more appearances on Jack Paar’s
Tonight Show
and continued to film commercials for Wilkins and other coffee companies at the rate of about one a week.

With a steady income and the Muppets increasingly in demand, Jim and Jane were ready to take their business to the next level. Moving beyond a mere business partnership, they decided to create their own company—and in 1958, Jim and Jane officially established Muppets, Inc. While Jim always described them as equal partners in the business, Jane would always refer to Jim as the boss. Jim replied that if he was, indeed, the boss, it was “
just a little bit.” In truth, it was more than just a little bit; Jim had drawn up the papers for Muppets, Inc. so that he owned 60 percent of the company to Jane’s 40.

But there was another relationship Jim wanted to make official as well. “
When he came back from Europe, he had it in his mind that we were supposed to get married,” Jane said later. “He said, ‘We’re going to do this with the puppets and then we’re going to get married.’ ”

The proposition wasn’t entirely out of the blue. In the four years the two of them had been working together, they had developed an ability to speak without talking, each almost intuitively understanding what the other was thinking. It made for great puppetry, and lately it had made for some interesting moments for Jim’s fiancée Anne Marie, and Jane’s fiancé, Bill. “
I remember an elevator ride at WRC one night, when Jim had gone up to get Anne Marie from school,” Jane said. “And we’re all [four] in the elevator … and Jim and I were like, ‘You know, we’re here and that’s important but those
other two people don’t need to be here.’ It was that kind of feeling about it. We had a kind of permanency about us.”

And so the engagements were broken off, and Jim and Jane had gone out a few times—dinner at a Mexican restaurant where Jim was more interested in the murals than the meal, going ice skating, or attending outdoor performances by the Kingston Trio or Harry Belafonte—but mostly, said Jane, “
they weren’t dates, they were working situations.” Their courtship was part of Jim’s life plan, the next logical step after forming Muppets, Inc. toward becoming Jim Henson. Jim and Jane’s relationship was based on passion—passion for art, for performance, and for each other—but it was more a business proposal than a marriage proposal. “It was like, ‘Do I have a choice in this?’ ” Jane recalled, laughing at first about their unusual courtship—but then grew more reflective about their complex thirty-year relationship. “Every marriage comes with an agreement, and our agreement was that we would support his work,” she said firmly. “So, in many ways, the work came first. That’s not necessarily a good agreement. This isn’t against Jim—I just think that the general agreement of the whole marriage and family thing was that the work was primary. Where that came from I’m not really sure. I guess it’s because Jim and I were working [when we] got married, but that wasn’t always a good agreement … and it really was not supposed to be questioned.

“I can say this about Jim and me,” she said finally. “He is totally a natural leader. And I am absolutely a follower. I really am. I’m pretty good at allowing things to happen when they’re supposed to rather than being a leader. But Jim was always a leader.
Always
.”

To those who knew of Jim’s penchant for “the cheerleader type,” the artsier Jane didn’t seem, on the face of it, to be Jim’s sort. But Joe Irwin, who knew them both, thought he understood. Jane had one thing to which Jim would always be attracted:
talent
. She was also warm and “
had an artistic bent,” Irwin explained, which Jim found compelling. But there was also, he thought, a mutual sexual attraction that Jim couldn’t deny. Jane was three years Jim’s senior, and older—and more experienced—than most girls Jim had dated. “She was mature,” Irwin said delicately, “and probably more adventurous.”

Jane couldn’t deny there was an intense intimacy there—that “permanency” that Jane had sensed during their elevator ride at WRC. “
We were very fond of being with each other,” Jane said. “There was a love there. Quite honestly, I can’t remember
falling
in love; it was more like a recognition of ‘Look, this is what’s been happening.’ ” It had been, as many would say later, admiration at first sight.

And so, on May 28, 1959, at Jane’s family home in Salisbury, Maryland, Jane Nebel and Jim Henson were married in a small ceremony presided over by the family minister, Jim’s Uncle Jinx, with Joe Irwin serving as Jim’s best man. (Irwin, in fact, had nearly missed the wedding, having run into bad weather during his flight into D.C.—but Jim had paid for a private plane to pick up his best man the moment he landed at National Airport to whisk him to Maryland’s Eastern Shore.) There was only one condition imposed on the match, and that had come from Betty Henson, who insisted her son shave off his new beard for the wedding. Jim dutifully obliged, putting the shearings in an envelope and mailing them to Jane just before the wedding with a playful note reading, “
From Samson to Delilah.” In celebration of the nuptials,
Sam and Friends
went on a short honeymoon hiatus—the Hensons themselves would make a quick honeymoon sprint to the beach at Delaware’s Rehoboth—with loyal
Post
reporter Lawrence Laurent tipping readers off to the cause of
Sam
’s brief absence from the WRC lineup.

T
he newlywed Hensons settled into a new home in the suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, buying a sprawling ranch on woodsy Nevis Road—not only the first home Jim would own, but the first time he had ever lived away from his parents—filled with modern furniture, purchased with Muppet money. In the basement, Jim set up the first Muppet workshop, a comfortable space crammed with cabinets and tables strewn with fabric, paints, foam, glue, and art supplies. Here Jim would come to scribble ideas in his sketchbooks and manage the affairs of Muppets, Inc., with a Siamese cat named George Washington curled at his feet.

He had another new toy in the workshop: a Bolex 16mm movie
camera—an ideal camera for an aspiring animator, as it had a side release button, which made it possible to film just a few frames at a time. Jim excitedly set to work creating what he called “animated paintings.” “
I started painting on a sheet of paper placed under the lens of the animation stand,” Jim recalled. “I would just paint a couple of strokes and take a frame or two of film, and I would be able to watch this painting evolve and move. From that time on I lost interest in easel painting as such because the movement concept was just so much more interesting. I was really very excited about it.” Jim would later put his animated paintings to notable use in many of
Sesame Street
’s colorful counting sequences.

Perhaps instilled with a new sense of self-confidence in his writing skills from his experience with
Hansel and Gretel
, Jim was beginning to write more original pieces for
Sam and Friends
at the rate of “
about two or three” a week, banging out his skits on a typewriter or scribbling in pencil on lined yellow notebook paper. He was also doing more of his own voices for his Muppets, experimenting to come up with just the right sound for each of
Sam
’s cast members. For Professor Madcliffe—the first character Jim would voice—Jim settled on a higher-pitched, manic game show host voice. Harry the Hipster was easier; Jim had this kind of character down pat, speaking in the same sort of gruff hepcat voice he would later give to Dr. Teeth. And perhaps appropriately, given his connection with the character, Kermit was closer to Jim’s own voice, though slightly more nasal and—in these early days, at least—with just a hint of a swampy Mississippi twang.