Jim Henson: The Biography (15 page)

While Jim may have been vowing in “Tick-Tock Sick” to slow down, that would have to wait—for he was now busier than ever.
Sam and Friends
was at the height of its popularity, and WRC was wisely using Sam prominently in its promotional materials for the channel’s evening lineup. “
Sam is back!” crowed WRC in a September 1960 ad in
The Washington Post
, as it announced a time change for its newscast, with Sam’s shocked face staring out at readers.

There were more appearances on the
Today
show—along with countless other appearances on nearly every other variety or talk show of the day—with Jim and Jane again piped in to Dave Garroway’s New York studio on a live feed from WRC in Washington. In one notable
Today
show appearance—in which Garroway introduced Jim and Jane as “two of the most interesting people ever”—Jim and Jane gave two particularly spirited performances. The first had Kermit and a vaguely-humanoid Muppet named Chicken Liver lip-synching to “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” with Jim as Kermit turning in a rollicking and very convincing banjo solo, while Jane enthusiastically performed Chicken Liver pounding away on an old piano. The next piece was one of their regular crowd-pleasers—Jim had a growing selection of proven Muppet performances he would use regularly—performing to Louis Prima and Keely Smith’s “That Old Black Magic,” with Kermit vamping it up in a dark wig and Sam miming to the lead vocal. It was another whopping success.

I
n early 1961, Jane learned she was pregnant with their second child. Jim was delighted—and he and Jane decided the time was right to make a difficult but crucial decision: following the birth of their next child, Jane would retire from performing. For now, she would remain an active performer for as long as she could—and would always stay involved with the company even as she devoted herself nearly full-time to the children. But with the Muppets showing no signs of waning in popularity—and Jim increasingly anxious to expand into other media—Jim was going to need help sooner rather than later.

That summer, Jim, one-year-old Lisa, and a very pregnant Jane made the trip to the Puppeteers of America convention in Asilomar, California, driving out this time in a much more comfortable but significantly less flashy station wagon. While Jim didn’t necessarily regard this as a recruiting trip, he was always interested in watching others perform and making contacts. His trip to the Detroit convention had sparked a professional friendship with Burr Tillstrom and led him to Bernie Brillstein. The journey to California, however, would mark the beginning of an even more extraordinary relationship.

Arriving at the convention, Jim immediately attached himself to
Mike Oznowicz and his wife, Frances, two talented performers he had met briefly at the Detroit convention in 1960. The Dutch-born Oznowicz had fled Nazi-occupied Europe with his family in the late 1930s, taking refuge first in North Africa and then England, where Frances bore two sons—her second, Frank Richard Oznowicz, would be born in Hereford, England, on May 25, 1944—before immigrating to the United States in 1951. Arriving in New York, Oznowicz spent his last dollar putting his pregnant wife and two sons safely on the train for their new home in Montana, where the family who had sponsored their immigration were waiting, then hitchhiked the rest of the way himself. After a short stay in Montana, the family moved to Oakland, California, living briefly in an attic until Mike found employment as a window dresser for women’s apparel stores. A lifelong puppetry enthusiast, Mike and his wife had become active members of the Puppeteers of America and were, in Jim’s opinion, “
marvelous, very outgoing” people and terrific performers.

Jim was just as intrigued by their son Frank, now a quietly intense teenager approaching his senior year in high school, and already a gifted performer of marionettes. But despite his talent, for the young Frank Oznowicz—he would later shorten it to Oz—puppetry was only a hobby, and an almost incidental one at that, placing a distant third behind girls and sports. “
I never wanted to be a puppeteer,” Oz said. Still, it was difficult to ignore puppetry in the Oznowicz home—“
Our house was like a salon for puppeteers and performers,” Oz said later—and by his own admission he had “latched on to” puppetry both as a way of pleasing his parents and to raise money for a planned trip to Europe.
At age fourteen, then, he had joined Lettie Schubert’s traveling Vagabond Puppets team at the Oakland Recreation Department, then performed regularly—and without pay—at Fairyland Amusement Park, where he struck up a friendship with a young man named Jerry Juhl, five years his senior, and an equally talented performer who had lately become a regular in the Oznowicz home “salon.”

Oz had come to the Asilomar convention mainly to perform with Juhl and another Vagabond puppeteer in a show Juhl had written called
The Witch Who Stole Thursday;
he also wanted to participate in a talent contest,
which, predictably, he won. While his parents
had met Jim in Detroit a year earlier, Oz knew nothing about him, though he was slightly familiar with the Muppets, thanks to the Wilkins and Wontkins commercials Jim had produced for the regional carbonated drink CalSo. Those ads had impressed him, Oz remembered, because “
they weren’t like anything else!” When he finally met Jim in person, Oz couldn’t help but be enchanted by the soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old who could suddenly become a manic force of nature once a puppet was placed in his hands. “
He was this very quiet, shy guy,” Oz said, “who did these absolutely fucking amazing puppets that were totally brand new and fresh, that had never been done before.”

Once in Jim’s presence, it was easy to get caught up in the excitement, and Oz—who admitted that puppetry was a good way for a self-described “
shy, self-effacing boy” to express himself—performed several short routines with his father, including a sketch called “
Sunday Painter,” in which a painter sets out to paint a picture of an uncooperative flower, which sags and rights itself, much to the painter’s frustration. Afterward, Jim pulled Oz aside to discuss the performance. “
He said, ‘The ending is weak!’ ” Oz recalled, still laughing at the comment five decades later. “That was very Jim. My ending was a bit arty, whereas Jim liked things to be blown up or eaten!”

Despite the ending, Jim was impressed enough with the young man’s skills to discuss with Mike and Frances Oznowicz the possibility of their son coming back east to join him at Muppets, Inc. But Oz was barely seventeen, and still in high school. “
He was really still at home and not ready to come east,” Jim remembered, “but we talked about it as an idea.” And with that idea, a seed had been planted—one that would grow and blossom into one of the finest, and funniest, creative and productive partnerships in entertainment.

Years later, Jim would admit that there were moments in his life when he felt that “
somebody or something” was guiding him. This felt like one of those moments—and he would later chalk up his lifelong partnership with Frank Oz to a fortunate bit of serendipity. “
I think it was an accident,” Jim said years later. “I don’t think I was consciously looking for somebody.” Instead, somebody or something had found them for each other. Oz might have agreed: it was only by chance that he had even been at the convention in the first
place. “
I never used to go to [puppetry conventions] ever … except for this one I went to when I was seventeen years old, and Jim happened to be there.”

For now, Oz would remain in California to finish high school. But Oz thought he knew someone else who might work well with Jim, and recommended Jim speak to his fellow Vagabond puppeteer, Jerry Juhl.

Juhl, unlike Oz,
did
want to be a puppeteer. Born Jerome Ravn Juhl in St. Paul, Minnesota, the twenty-one-year-old Juhl had been building and performing puppets since the age of eleven—and after moving to Menlo Park, California, had founded the Menlo Marionettes while still in high school. After graduating from San Jose State College with a degree in speech and drama, he had joined, then headed, the Vagabond Puppets—where he tapped the young Frank Oz as his assistant—and co-created and performed the puppet Pup on the local children’s television show
Sylvie and Pup
. With his thick glasses and neatly coiffed hair, Juhl looked more like an insurance salesman than a puppeteer. But behind the businesslike demeanor was a wit as rapier sharp as Jim’s, and the same sense of playful fun.

Juhl was familiar with the Muppets through their various television appearances, and found their unpredictable edge strangely fascinating. “
The Muppets already had a cult following,” Juhl said, “with a reputation for bizarre, slightly dangerous comedy.” Juhl was unprepared, then, for his first glimpse of the man responsible for such outlandish humor. “Jim seemed so utterly
normal
,” Juhl recalled. “He had driven across the country in a shiny new station wagon with his wife, Jane, and baby Lisa. They looked as average and suburban as actors in a Chevrolet commercial.”

Jim invited Juhl out to the parking lot where he had parked his station wagon with the large black box of Muppets in the back. In a scene that would have been familiar to Bernie Brillstein, Jim opened the box, took out his Muppets one by one, and began to perform. And like Brillstein, Juhl never forgot what he saw that afternoon:

Juhl was speechless. “
This guy was like a sailor who had studied the compass and found that there was a fifth direction in which one could sail.” There was no doubt in his mind as to his decision. “When he offered me a berth on that ship, I signed on,” making Juhl the first official full-time employee of Muppets, Inc.

S
hortly after returning to Maryland in August, Jane gave birth to their second child, Cheryl. The newly hired Jerry Juhl took over Jane’s performing duties on
Sam and Friends
, which was still one of WRC’s most popular programs after more than six years. Jim, however, was again growing tired of the five-minutes-twice-a-day routine of
Sam and Friends
. The show had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams—but Jim was dreaming even wilder now, and was looking for opportunities to try something new.

He would have his chance sooner than expected, thanks to a fortuitous invitation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture—an invitation so out of the blue that it may have come about, in part, through Paul Henson’s contacts inside the USDA. In mid-November 1961, the USDA would be hosting a weeklong U.S. Food Fair in Hamburg, Germany—part of the U.S. government’s effort to “
develop and expand the sale and use of U.S. foods and agriculture products and commodities” throughout Europe—and fair officials were wondering if Jim, and
Sam and Friends
, might be interested in providing entertainment at one of the pavilions.

Jim agreed to participate—but not with
Sam and Friends
. For Jim, this was the opportunity he had been looking for to try something different—and, better yet, it could be done far away from a home crowd that still expected Sam and Kermit to lip-synch to Stan Freberg records. He and Juhl set to work writing a number of skits that would allow them to showcase several new kinds of puppets, and even tapped the brilliant young beat comedian Del Close—whose
work Jim was likely familiar with through Close’s 1959 comedy record
How to Speak Hip
—to write a sketch for the show. If the Hamburg fair was a trial run for the next stage of Muppets, Inc., Jim was taking the opportunity seriously, diligently typing up a formal presentation for government officials, renewing his passport, and corresponding politely with USDA employees who were convinced they knew better than Jim what was funny. For Jim, it wasn’t just about being funny; it was also about gauging the audience’s response to new kinds of puppetry and performances and figuring out what worked and what didn’t. “
If … one or two of these bits either doesn’t live up to expectations, or doesn’t perform well with the audiences,” Jim assured his hosts, “I will withdraw that particular bit and double up one of the others.”

One of the first sketches presented in Hamburg was “The Drill Team,” featuring, as Jim explained, “
a rather ingenious set of mechanical puppets”—a military drill team made of wood, each with moving arms and painted, smiling faces, mounted to a rolling rack so the figures would move in unison. The piece—which mainly involved their commanding officer barking inarticulate orders as he put the drill team through their moves—was full of little surprises: the drill team fired guns that emitted smoke—usually just powder blown through a straw—and when at the end of the skit the team trained its fire on their captain, the figure’s nose lit up. But the audience responded with only polite enthusiasm. While Jim would haul the routine out from time to time over the next few years, he would eventually shelve it.

Much better received was “The Chef’s Salad,” an improv piece featuring Omar as an inattentive chef who crazily cuts up food—and everything else—as he prepares a salad. For the first time, Jim performed with a “live hand” puppet, in which the main puppeteer performs the puppet’s mouth and inserts his other hand—usually the left, since most right-handed puppeteers prefer to operate the character’s mouth with their dominant hand—into the puppet’s left glove hand. Meanwhile, a second performer, in this case Juhl, operates the puppet’s right hand. This setup requires a great deal of coordination to ensure the puppeteers work seamlessly—the right hand needs to know almost instinctively what the left hand is up to—but when done well, it allows the puppet to handle objects deftly and turn in a
much more believable performance. In this case, Jim and Juhl performed the character flawlessly, with Jim ranting in mock German as they hurled cheese and eggs into a bowl, blew Omar’s nose into a handkerchief—which was thrown in the bowl as well—then stirred the mix with gusto. Jim still couldn’t resist ending the sketch in true Muppet fashion—the concoction exploded in Omar’s face—and the crowd roared its approval. The piece would stay, and fifteen years later, Jim would use almost exactly the same setup—all the way down to the mock foreign dialect—for
The Muppet Show
’s Swedish Chef.