Jim Henson: The Biography (26 page)

In late 1969, Nelson was performing small acting roles and taking odd jobs while devoting himself nearly full-time to the needs of his nine-year-old daughter, Christine, who had cystic fibrosis. While attending a Christmas party that winter, he had seen
Sesame Street
playing on a television in another room. “
I forgot about the party and just sat and watched the rest of
Sesame Street
,” Nelson said. After Christmas, Nelson called Jim excitedly. “I told him I’d seen
Sesame Street
—and I was just flabbergasted and thought it was a really wonderful show. He asked me if I would be interested in a spring workshop that he was putting together to find people, because he needed a very large team for the [
Great
]
Santa Claus Switch
. So I said yes.”

For two weeks beginning June 15, 1970, Jim—along with Nelson and Oz—oversaw his first series of auditions for Muppet performers, a practice that would become a habit over the next twenty years. Jim was both pragmatic and idealistic about recruiting puppeteers. “
Puppetry is different, say, from making movies where you can just go out and hire people,” he explained. “In puppetry, you have to grow them yourself. You have to breed them. In other words, ours is very much a team effort.” He was also careful to point out that there was more to being a puppeteer than the ability to lip-synch a puppet. “
We look for a basic sense of performance, a sense of humor,” said Jim—and therefore Muppet auditions had a tendency to attract not just puppeteers, but also actors, mimes, impressionists, and voice actors. “You have to find people who put their whole performance into their hand,” Jim explained, “and that’s a very specific talent that a lot of performers don’t have. A lot of very funny performers will never be good puppeteers.”

One unlikely performer was a twenty-three-year-old actress and voice-over artist named Fran Brill, who responded to the call for
Muppet performers thinking she’d be hired merely to dub voices. Brill’s voice indeed caught Jim’s ear, “
but puppeteers do their own voices,” Brill said, “[so] I ended up doing the two-week workshop to learn the basics of puppetry.” Brill would prove to be a talented puppeteer—and it was fortunate for Jim he had found such a proficient female performer, for both Jim and Joan Cooney had been under fire from women’s organizations for a lack of female Muppets, and Muppet performers, on
Sesame Street
. “
That was very much criticized,” Cooney recalled. “We had a terrible time.”

Ultimately, hiring Brill turned out to be more than meeting a mere quota. “
She brought a sharpness” to the Muppets, said Oz, “a sense of craft.… She wasn’t always funny, but that didn’t matter. She knew our rhythms.” After performing in
The Great Santa Claus Switch
, Brill would cross over to
Sesame Street
, at first performing Ernie’s right hand, then working her way into characters of her own, including the forthright Prairie Dawn, a character she would perform for the next forty years. Jumping into the mix with Jim and the Muppet team, Brill said later, was “
analogous to a family of boys acquiring a female sibling. The family remained a ‘boys club’ but the dynamic changed when I as the younger ‘sister’ arrived.… I got kidded but I had to earn their respect. I had to keep up. It was challenging but an enormous amount of fun.”

The June workshop found another puppeteer who bounced perfectly to the Muppet beat. If Brill was more sharpness than spontaneity, then eighteen-year-old Richard Hunt was her polar opposite. A fan of the Muppets since their early appearances on
Ed Sullivan
, the gap-toothed, wild-haired, and openly gay Hunt was enthusiasm incarnate, with the gusto of a game show host, who was always grabbing a puppet to stick in someone’s face. “When I was eighteen,
Sesame Street
had just started, and I thought, ‘Oh, this might be a good way to do something,’ ” Hunt said. “I thought, ‘The Muppets are nuts!’ and I felt I would fit right into that.” Right from the beginning, Jim and the Muppet team knew they had found someone special. “
God, he was a comedic force,” said Oz. “His craft actually wasn’t great but he was such a force it just didn’t matter.”

The Great Santa Claus Switch
was Jim’s most ambitious Muppet-related project yet, utilizing nearly twenty performers and taxing the
Muppet workshop to produce rows and rows of elves and monsters—including several gigantic walkarounds—in a short amount of time. “
It was one of the most exhausting times I ever had,” said Muppet designer Caroly Wilcox. With the workshop crammed with designers, costumers, builders, and work-in-progress puppets, the team was practically falling over each other. Sahlin, nearing his wit’s end, could be found at his workbench loudly blaring classical music to soothe his fraying nerves.

With the bulk of the work on
Santa
complete, Jim began work that autumn on another set of number films for the second season of
Sesame Street
, this time romping in various kinds of media, including short live-action films, computer animation, stop motion, and the “moving paintings” Jim loved creating. “
He’d be in the back working for hours, until three in the morning,” Oz said, storyboarding, writing, painting, composing music, and editing with the same intensity as the baker films of a year ago. Among the pieces were two memorable stop motion films featuring the King of Eight and the Queen of Six, a computer animation featuring Limbo counting to ten, and
a beautiful short film in which two cats invade a tea party in a dollhouse. The primary prop for this particular film was something very close to Jim’s heart, for he had borrowed nine-year-old Cheryl’s dollhouse, a charming replica of their own Greenwich home that Jim had constructed to fit Cheryl and Lisa’s Madame Alexander dolls. “
My dad made the whole thing himself, which is a really big project,” Lisa recalled. “You can imagine how busy he is,” and yet he still found time “to make this entire dollhouse from scratch—and it’s beautiful.”

Jim also worked closely with writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak on two short animated pieces he had in mind for the numbers seven and nine. In September, Sendak sent Jim his storyboards and sketches. “
I like both a lot,” Sendak wrote Jim in his crabbed handwriting, “but won’t be hurt if you don’t.” There was little danger of that—the sketches Sendak sent over were just the kind of playful chaos Jim adored: one featured a collection of seven colorful monsters who terrorized a village, while the other showcased a group of nine pigs who dropped in on a birthday party for a boy named Bumble Arty. Jim coordinated the projects with relish, working closely
with the animators and editing the two pieces. The final films were exciting and vibrant, with deliciously dark undercurrents … and ultimately deemed inappropriate for young audiences due to the presence of cannons in one film and wine in the other. “
Yanked by the suits at CTW,” Jon Stone told Jim wistfully.

P
roduction on the second season of
Sesame Street
began in early September 1970. In the off-season, CTW had at last modified Oscar’s trash can to allow Spinney to perform right-handed—but there were several other changes, some more subtle than others, taking place on the street as well. “
Jim never considered anything to be ‘done,’ ” Spinney said—and in the past months, Kermit Love had slightly redesigned Big Bird, adding more feathers to the top of his head, which made him look less dimwitted, while Don Sahlin had tinkered a bit with the eye mechanisms to allow for more expressiveness. Spinney, and
Sesame Street
’s writers, had also gotten a better handle on the character, no longer playing him like a country bumpkin, but rather as a four-year-old—a preschooler in plumage. As originally envisioned by Jim and Jon Stone, Big Bird was intended to be “the representative of the audience.” At last, he truly was.

Oscar had undergone a facelift, too. Three months earlier, while preparing Big Bird and Oscar for an appearance on
The Flip Wilson Show
, Jim had taken the opportunity to rework the puppet, slightly altering the shape of the head and changing his color from radioactive orange to a mossy green. That was all news to CTW head Dave Connell, who didn’t see the revised Oscar until after the
Flip Wilson
taping, exploding “
What the hell is that?” But Jim wanted Oscar green. He would stay that way.

The only other disagreement regarding Oscar had to do with the character’s personality. Spinney was convinced Stone and the other writers had Oscar all wrong. “
He’s not a villain, not horrible,” Spinney insisted. “He fundamentally has got a heart of gold.” It was a thesis with which Jon Stone strongly disagreed. “
There’s no heart of gold,” Stone said. “The guy is a shit, right to the core.” It would remain a point of contention between Spinney and the writers for years, even as Oscar became more and more popular.

Jim and other members of the Muppet team would continue to perform characters on the street set from time to time, but for the most part Spinney was on his own, the lone representative of “Muppets West,” as Jim would affectionately call him. During the first season, Spinney had sometimes worked with Jim and the rest of the team on the Muppet inserts, performing right hands or the so-called Anything Muppets—Muppets that could be dressed with different eyes, noses, and hair as needed—but “
he didn’t really enjoy it,” said Jerry Nelson. “That sort of ensemble playing was not Caroll’s forte … and so eventually he stopped doing it.” In the opinion of Oz, Spinney lacked the aggressiveness to work within a group dynamic; his performing style was better suited for single character sequences.

Even without Spinney, with the addition of Nelson, Hunt, and Brill—and, at times, Jane Henson—the rest of the Muppet team was starting to hit its stride. The team would work Fridays at Reeves Teletape where, for the first time, Jim had his Muppet sets built up on stilts, elevating the sets more than six feet off the ground—a brilliant though obvious innovation that allowed puppeteers to perform standing up rather than on their knees or in rolling chairs. For the most part, the scripts for
Sesame Street
were written weeks in advance—“
they’re just handed to me,” Jim said—but before passing them to Jim, many sketches had been punched up by Jerry Juhl, still working dutifully from California to incorporate a bit of madness into the Muppet sketches being written by
Sesame Street
’s writing staff.

It wasn’t always easy. “
There was a big three-hole binder,” said Juhl. “It was the writers notebook that came from the educational consultants on the show with all the goals and things.” Many times, Juhl would think of something gloriously silly and worthy of the Muppets, “then ransack this notebook trying to find [an educational] justification for the piece!” Once Juhl’s Muppetized scripts arrived, the Muppet performers would do a quick read-through—while Jim delighted in telling reporters, with an absolutely straight face, that the Muppet team rehearsed for “
two weeks to a month,” in truth, he preferred a more spontaneous style of performing—then would pull their Muppets onto their arms, ready to roll tape.

Once tape began to roll, the real work—and the real fun—began. “
Jim was an extraordinarily serious, yet silly man,” said Brill. “He would encourage you to be as crazy as possible, because when you’re inhibited as a performer, you can’t be creative. Because he would be silly, everyone else would be silly.” Oz could be very serious, almost stern, as he prepared to perform—until the cameras came on, at which point he became a comedic virtuoso, creating characters and situations almost at will. There was always a playful irreverence for their craft, as if Oz—unlike Jim—had never really decided if this was something a grown man should do for a living. “
Ready to wiggle some dolls?” Oz would ask cheekily, as the performers settled into place.

Jim was also fortunate to have Jon Stone in the director’s seat, where he reveled in, and encouraged, the Muppet brand of silliness. For Stone, who spent all week writing segments or overseeing
Sesame Street
’s live actors, directing the Muppet inserts on Fridays was “
like a day off … that was my holiday.” A Yale-trained actor and dramatist, Stone preferred to direct from the studio floor rather than from the control booth, stroking his salt-and-pepper beard and grinning broadly as Jim and the puppeteers moved into place, then signaling the booth to start rolling tape by calling out “Rolleeoleeoleeyo!”—the cue to the performers it was time for action to begin. “
He loved the one-on-one aspect of directing,” Oz said. “Everything enhanced the spirit of the show.”

For Jim, that spirit—like that direct eye contact with his own children that had impressed David Lazer—mattered almost more than the message.
They remember what you are
, Jim had said. The Muppets, then, were Jim’s conversation with millions of children, spoken directly to them in a language they could understand: complete and utter silliness and abandon. And what about their parents who might be watching? Jim never doubted for a moment that it was their language, too. “
The most sophisticated people I know … inside, they are all children,” Jim said.

There were times, though, when even Juhl’s efforts weren’t enough to liven up an otherwise well-intentioned
Sesame Street
script. “
Often, the material that we were given was kind of dry,” said Jim, “but Frank and I would play with it and improvise and bring in
gags until it worked for us. Sometimes you can make a line funny just by having your character do a double take. But always we did this while staying true to the spirit of what we had been given in the first place.” The years Jim had spent in the company of joke writers on
The Jimmy Dean Show
had served him well—for Jim understood not only what was funny, but also how to take material provided by others and
make
it funny.

Jim and Oz could be particularly uproarious when performing Ernie and Bert, wildly tossing jokes back and forth and improvising in character. “
Performing the Ernie and Bert pieces with Frank has always been one of the great joys of doing the show,” Jim said. “It’s really a unique way of working in television, because … about half the time when Frank and I are working, we decide not to use the script. Instead, we’ll take the basic concepts of it, and if it has a punch line or two, we’ll circle around and hit those lines. But other than that, we’ll just talk the piece and so we’re really working spontaneously and just sort of playing off of each other. It’s a lot of fun.”