Jim Henson: The Biography (21 page)

While Limbo’s somewhat surreal style may have baffled fans expecting to see Rowlf, Jim was unapologetic about giving audiences something new. “
Good puppetry has a broad range,” Jim said. “It appeals to the children, the squares, and sophisticates.” So appealing were the Muppets, in fact, that in early 1966 Jim accepted an offer from the Ideal Toy Company to produce Rowlf and Kermit puppets, the first merchandising Jim had allowed since the Wilkins giveaways seven years earlier. Naturally, Jim produced the commercials for the toys, poking a little fun at himself by having two Kermit puppets plead with viewers to “buy us … [or] we’ll bite you in the leg.”

A
s the decade passed, Jim would let both his hair and his beard grow out and begin wearing soft suede or leather jackets with flowered shirts, looking very much the hippie many thought he was, despite
the fact that his age—he turned thirty in September 1966—put him at the edge of what the hippies themselves would derisively tag as “The Establishment.” But Jim, by his very nature, defied such easy labels. By 1967, certainly, he had attained a degree of financial success—though with four children, it would still be a while before he would approach the domain of the truly wealthy—with the attractive house in Greenwich and, in August, a brand-new Porsche Targa. “
He always had those fancy new cars,” recalled Lisa Henson. “But he also really, really liked things to be nice. He had fantastic taste, whether it was clothing, or homes, or furniture, whatever.” Jim’s style, in fact, was almost directly opposite Jane’s, who liked simpler things and would always feel somewhat “conflicted” about wealth or possessions.

But while Jim’s financial success may have made him look like one of the “squares or sophisticates,” by 1967—that acid-soaked, Day-Glo year of
Sgt. Pepper
when psychedelia went mainstream—Jim entered one of the most experimental and creative phases of his career, motivated largely by a desire to become something more than just Muppets. “
Except for
Jimmy Dean
, there were just commercials and guest spots on other people’s shows—and in the end these were frustrating because they provided no opportunity for character development,” said Jane. “The Muppets were pretty well liked by then. All of the big shows were ready to at least listen to our ideas, and when they had an opening they’d put us on. But nobody was prepared to give the Muppets a show of their own, and Jim began to feel maybe he should be looking in another direction.” Over the next three years, then, Jim would pursue a wide variety of projects in various media, very few of which involved a single puppet.

One of the most ambitious projects was not a television or movie-related project at all, but rather “
a new concept in total entertainment,” a themed nightclub Jim was calling Cyclia. “
The idea began during the first wave of psychedelia,” recalled Jane. “Jim went to see Jefferson Airplane and he was very intrigued with it—the light shows and the psychedelic graphics.” To provide his potential guests with “the entertainment experience of the future,” Jim envisioned that the walls, floor, and ceiling of his nightclub would be broken into faceted, crystal-like shapes onto which films would
be projected—completely immersing dancers in a sea of images, choreographed precisely to the volume and type of music being played. When the music was quiet, for example, there would be images of trees or water; when the music got loud, there would be traffic, machinery, and explosions. And once an hour, a woman in a white leotard would rise from a pedestal in the center of the floor to have film projected on her body as she danced. It would be, Jim proposed, a very fashionable place, with “
a definite prestige atmosphere, and as such [the cover charge] will not be inexpensive.”

While senses-soaking, high-tech themed nightclubs would become fashionable by the late 1970s, in 1967, Jim’s idea for Cyclia was clearly ahead of its time—so far ahead, in fact, that finding the necessary space, materials, and technology to make it happen was a major challenge. To take care of the legwork, Jim hired Barry Clark, an enthusiastic West Coaster who had experience managing musicians and clubs, and asked him to scout possible locations as well as potential investors. Meanwhile, Jim and the Muppet team would take care of the films that would be projected on Cyclia’s faceted surfaces and dancing girls.

Jim had been shooting film for Cyclia as early as 1965, dispatching
Frank Oz and Jerry Nelson to Shea Stadium in August to film the crowd screaming and reacting during the Beatles’ landmark concert. Other times, as they had with
Time Piece
, footage would be shot whenever there was a spare moment, filming city streets from the back of a motorcycle, or rain rippling through puddles as they stood on a corner on Broadway. “
I shot thousands and thousands of feet of sixteen-millimeter film for Cyclia,” recalled Oz. “It’s where I got the first experience that enabled me to become a movie director.” But “
you couldn’t shoot just random stuff,” continued Oz. “Jim was actually thinking thematically. Since there would be sixteen projectors showing images, they had to be thematically sound—like sixteen screens of people screaming at the Beatles.” In fact, Jim had thirteen themes in mind—including “Woods,” “Junk,” “City at Night” “India,” and “Nude”—all of which would then be edited together into an hour-long film called
Cataclysm
that would project constantly on walls and bodies throughout the evening.

For most of 1966, Jim was seriously considering purchasing and
converting ABZ Studios, a set of buildings at 266-268 East 78th Street in Manhattan, to house his club. Local zoning ordinances were a bit vague, allowing for a restaurant—though not “a cabaret”—and for music, “
as long as there were no more than three instruments used, excluding any brass instruments.” Despite the limitations, Jim was prepared to purchase the property, and its two mortgages, outright for $200,000—about $1 million today, and an astronomical sum for a company that could barely afford to keep five full-time employees on its payroll. However, when legal difficulties arose regarding the original owner’s certificate of occupancy, Jim formally rescinded his offer. “
Nearly bought ABZ,” he noted in his journal with a touch of regret.

Following the breakdown of the ABZ negotiations Jim looked at several other locations, including buildings at West 60th Street, just off Central Park, a site in Santa Monica, California, and a large vacant lot on Second Avenue in New York City, at the foot of the Queensboro Bridge, where Jim proposed building a geodesic dome or even dropping in an inflatable structure. None of these ambitious ideas, however, moved much beyond the discussion phase.

More promising, it seemed, was a joint venture agreement with the El Morocco club on Broadway to take over the famous club’s Garrison Room—but that, too, proved to be a dead end. “
We went to the El Morocco,” Oz said, “[and] Jim and I went to [the dance club] Electric Circus just to look at it … [but] it just wasn’t selling.” Still, Jim remained almost defiantly committed to the project, incorporating Cyclia Enterprises in the fall of 1967, running endless cost analyses, piecing together a rough cut of
Cataclysm
, and handing out fluorescent-colored brochures to potential backers. “
It could well be that he was toying with a dream,” said Jerry Juhl later, “[but he was] enjoying the process tremendously.” Oz agreed. “
Jim went where the excitement was.” Eventually, the nightclub idea was abandoned, though Cyclia Enterprises—perhaps a testament to Jim’s ridiculous optimism—would not be formally disbanded until 1970.

Even as he spent late evenings sketching Cyclia floor plans, painting concept art, or editing
Cataclysm
, Jim would still return home each night to Greenwich where he would join the family in the latest crafts or art project—and there was always some project spread out
at the Henson household, whether it was wooden boxes to be dabbed with acrylic paints or materials to construct custom dollhouses. “
You would think that he would be tired of making things by the time he came home at night, but it wasn’t the case,” said Lisa. “Even on weekends, he was still working on the art projects with us.” “
There was a lot of making things,” said Cheryl, “and there was a lot of respect for childhood.”

“
Jim loved to come home and be with the kids,” said Jane. “He’d just come up with all these different projects. If we were driving along and we saw high grass, Jim would say, ‘Oh! Let’s do a film with you coming in and out of the grass and popping up over the grasses!’ So we’d stop the car and out comes the Bolex [camera] and they’d do a film. In the spring, he would get photographs of little teeny ferns opening up. What was very basic to his work is that he was really in love with life. He was really intrigued with how all these little pieces of life worked and he was equally as intrigued with his children. He loved just watching them be children and doing the things they enjoyed doing.”

While the Henson children all knew their father worked with puppets, they were never encouraged to believe that any of the Muppet characters were living, breathing creatures. To Jim, puppets were merely one of the tools of his trade, a part of his act, to be thrown into a cabinet when they were worn out or no longer needed—an attitude he imparted to his children, who found more than
a few discarded Muppets in their toy boxes. “
He was very matter-of-fact about it,” said Lisa. “His attitude was, ‘None of this stuff is really precious—you can make it and then you can take it apart and make something else with it.’ He even had some of the old
Sam and Friends
Muppets lying around the house and they became rags because we played with them. Chicken Liver was a particular victim of our playing!” (In 2010, Chicken Liver would be rescued and restored and now resides in the Smithsonian Institution.)

All three school-age children had been enrolled briefly in the Whitby Montessori School, then the North Street School in Greenwich, before entering Mead School, where Jane became actively involved in the school’s dynamic art program. It was an activity that required even more of her already precious time but gave her “an
embracing environment,” recalled Cheryl, and a much needed creative outlet. To keep things in order at home, then, Jane had help from a savvy nanny named Lillian Soden, who would take over the household, usually on each Tuesday and Wednesday, to give Jim and Jane the chance to spend the evening together, heading into New York for dinner and a movie or music in a nightclub. Though she was only in the house briefly each week, Lillian’s presence was pervasive in the Henson household. In some ways, Lilly served for Lisa and Cheryl the same role that Dear—who passed away in August 1967—had for Jim, encouraging and inspiring the girls with her own particular skills and talents. “
There were times when Lilly just really held it all together in terms of her incredible cooking and her great values,” Cheryl said later. “Lilly was just amazing.” To Lisa, Lillian “
was like my surrogate grandmother. She taught me everything I know about etiquette, whether it’s sending thank-you notes or how to set the table. She was incredible.”

During the days, when he wasn’t working on Cyclia with Barry Clark, Jim was writing regularly with Jerry Juhl, pitching ideas for countless television series and specials almost constantly from 1967 through 1969. “
Jim and I would sit and think up anything, from hourlong [specials] down to five minute sketches for
The Ed Sullivan Show
,” said Juhl. The ideas were becoming wilder and more far out, with Juhl writing down the proposals nearly as fast as Jim could spin them. In April 1967, for example, Jim pitched
Moki
, a genderbending case of mistaken identity in which a long-haired, androgynous young man is mistaken for a female fashion model. Brillstein shopped the proposal, but the subject matter was too touchy, even to those who recognized the brilliance behind it. “
This guy Henson’s obviously got a nutty visual mind,” one potential director told Brillstein, “[but] this story scares the bejesus out of me. It’s not exactly dirty—it just ain’t quite clean … the guy is very talented and it’s a funny idea, but I guess I’m just old fashioned.”

Another innovative pitch was
Inside My Head
, which was basically a live-action version of the Limbo sketch in which a conversation between a man and woman is played out inside the man’s brain. Jim envisioned the brain as a set made up of “
strange electronic pulses and rhythms … a maze of fibers, membranes, and convoluted
openings” and the same kind of quick-cut montages Jim had used for Limbo. The visual representations for how the brain works, Jim explained earnestly, “would be based on all the known facts about the brain which are not only fascinating, but more amazing and wondrous than anything a science fiction writer would invent.” To his disappointment, as with
Moki
, no television network expressed interest in
Inside My Head
. And still there were a few Muppet-related proposals—all of which went nowhere—including the surrealistic
Adventures of the Snerf-Poof from Planet Snee
and the even more bizarre
Johnny Carson and the Muppet Machine
, which Jim illustrated in a style that could have been ripped from the trippy pages of the fledgling underground comix scene.

If Jim was having a hard time finding a network willing to take a chance on some of his wilder projects, he soon found a receptive audience at NBC, which had recently launched
NBC Experiment in Television
, a series that catered to the more avant-garde or experimental filmmakers. Hyping its specials as “Off the Beaten Path,” the hour-long
Experiment
ran without commercials on Sunday afternoons, spotlighting eclectic pieces like
A Coney Island of the Mind
, performed by students at the University of Southern California School of the Performing Arts, or
Movies in the Now Generation
, a collection of short student films hosted by George Plimpton.

For
Experiment
, Jim put aside dramatic and comedic pieces like
Moki
and
Inside My Head
, and proposed instead a documentary he called
A Collage of Today
“
to communicate the ideas of Youth in the forms they understand,” as Jim explained, “employing film and video media in new and exciting ways to best convey not only the substance, but the mood of the young.” With the okay from NBC on February 15 and a budget of $100,000, Jim sent Barry Clark—who was still enthusiastically but unsuccessfully pitching Cyclia—on a quick sprint to scout out college campuses and clubs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, and Omaha.