Jim Henson: The Biography (5 page)

It was easy to see where Betty Henson had gotten her sense of humor, for both Pop and Dear were funny, though in different ways. Where Dear tended toward the silly, Pop had a more “keen, subtle sense of humor.” But “he never laughed in ridicule,” Attie explained. “He didn’t think ridicule was funny at all.” In fact, Pop would never allow conversations to veer toward anything remotely unpleasant or disagreeable—a trait that would define Jim as well. “If the dinner conversation seemed to be getting out of hand,” recalled Paul Henson, “he’d get a
Reader’s Digest
and read to us!” Many times, Pop would come to the table with a joke or funny story already in mind, fully prepared if necessary to seize control of a wandering conversation or glum mood.

Things could get even livelier at the holidays when Attie and Bobby and their families were added to the mix. “
Fifteen or twenty people would be there, sitting around the dinner table,” Jim remembered, “and my grandparents would have stories to tell—usually stories from their childhood. They would tell a tale, and somebody would try to top it. I’ve always felt that these childhood experiences of my family sitting around the dinner table, making each other laugh, were my introduction to humor.” In fact, Jim’s own sense of humor was a heady mix of every kind of humor seated around the table—a touch of Dear’s laugh-out-loud sensibility, a bit of Paul’s quiet joy in storytelling, a dash of Betty’s twinkling delight in wordplay, then seasoned with Pop’s more subtle edge that always laughed
with
an audience, never
at
them.

But by 1949, there was something else that had perhaps an even
more pronounced effect on Jim. Always the gadget freak, there was a new device that had him absolutely fascinated. It was an obsession that would direct his focus, shape the artist he would become, and change the very course of his life.

It was a television. And Jim was going to make certain he “
drove ’em all crazy” until he had one.

Jim’s first Muppet, Pierre the French Rat
. (
photo credit 2.1
)

T
HE STORY OF TELEVISION BEGINS
—
LIKE ANY GOOD
A
MERICAN SUCCESS
story should—with a birth in a log cabin.

More precisely, it begins in
a log cabin near Beaver, Utah, where Philo Taylor Farnsworth—or Phil, as nearly everyone would call him—was born on August 19, 1906. A precocious child, everyone around him was certain Phil was a genius—and he didn’t disappoint. In 1919, at age thirteen, Phil invented a burglarproof ignition switch for automobiles, earning him an award from
Science and Invention
magazine. At seventeen, he entered Brigham Young University, specializing in chemistry and electronics. By age twenty, he was running his own business.

But it was an idea that came to him at age fourteen—allegedly with one of those remarkable
Eureka!
moments that are probably too good a story to be entirely true—that would ensure Phil a place in the pantheons of both popular culture and history. In 1920,
while tilling a potato field in a monotonous back and forth pattern with his horse-drawn plow, Phil imagined that an electron beam might scan an image in exactly the same way, moving across the image line-by-line.

He was right—and on September 7, 1927, in a makeshift laboratory in a San Francisco loft, Philo T. Farnsworth transmitted the world’s first electronic television image: a straight white line scratched into a piece of black-painted glass. When the glass slide was slowly rotated ninety degrees, so, too, did the image on the screen. “
There you are,” Farnsworth said with typical aplomb, “electronic television.”

Farnsworth would become increasingly irritated with his best-known invention over the next twenty years—he even
prohibited his own family from watching it—but his annoyance was definitely not shared by an eager viewing public. Even with little on television to watch in 1950, such scant fare had little effect on the public’s enthusiasm for the remarkable machine. As one historian later put it, “
the simultaneity of television overrode all defects; when people could see things happening far away, they couldn’t get over the wonder of it.”

For Jim Henson, that simultaneity was more than just exciting, it was practically magic. To the boy who had sat spellbound in the movie theater watching exotic tales of the Far East, this was like a genie’s sorcery. “
I loved the idea that what you saw was taking place somewhere else at the same time,” Jim recalled. “It was one of those absolutely wonderful things.” After watching television at a friend’s house in late 1949, Jim was convinced his family had to have a television set of their very own. Now.

There was one problem: as a relatively new and rare commodity—in 1948, there were an estimated 350,000 television sets in use, compared with 66 million radios—televisions were expensive. In 1950, a sixteen-inch black-and-white television—like
the boxy Admiral, with an “Automatic Picture Lock-In” guaranteed to “bring you steady, clear reception even in hard to reach areas”—would set a
family back $250, the equivalent of about $2,000 today. Fancier televisions with footed cabinets or, for the big money, those with a radio and record player built in, could run as much as $399, about $3,500 today.

Despite the costs, Jim was determined. “
I badgered my family into buying a set,” he later admitted somewhat sheepishly. “I absolutely
loved
television.” It was a battle of wills Paul Henson, Sr., had little chance of winning. In 1950, Jim Henson had his television. And he watched it. Religiously.

There were four television channels available in the Washington, D.C., area in 1950—not bad, considering that only two years earlier there were fewer than forty television stations broadcasting in only twenty-three cities nationally. In fact, by 1950, it was reported that people in the Baltimore-Washington area already spent
more time watching TV than listening to the radio. As stations played with the new technology and different formats, local shows came and went, some wildly experimental, some mundane, and most lasting only a few weeks before being pulled from the air, never to be heard of again. Jim watched them all, and as he did so, one thing quickly became clear: “
I immediately wanted to work in television.”

Doing exactly what, he wasn’t certain—but in the meantime, Jim soaked up all television had to offer, including the conventions and formats that he would lovingly parody later in life, and the technical tricks he would master, then reinvent. He was especially intrigued with variety shows, one of the staples of the early television era, many with ensemble casts featuring comedians, singers, orchestras, magicians—and all performed live, with comedy sketches, songs, monologues, and performances of every kind boomeranging off each other at a breakneck pace. And more often than not, presiding over the show was a host or emcee, who was usually just as much a part of the chaos around him despite his best efforts to keep things moving smoothly. It was a format Jim found irresistible.

In the evenings, for example, Jim found Milton Berle, whose madcap performances on
Texaco Star Theater
did much to popularize TV and make it a must-have gadget. Spinning the television dial over to
Your Show of Shows
, front man Sid Caesar could often be found careening wildly off-script, ad-libbing madly, dropping into
different voices and accents, even incoherent double-talk, all in the name of a laugh. But Caesar’s show was also home to some of the smartest comedy writers around—including Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks—giving Caesar solid material from which he could vamp and improvise. It was a smart show that didn’t mind looking silly—a kind of humor Jim could appreciate.

As inspired as Caesar’s performances could be, they were nothing, as far as Jim was concerned, compared to those of
Ernie Kovacs. More than just a master of deadpan comic delivery, Kovacs inherently understood the new TV medium like few others. Kovacs appreciated that it was the image on the TV screen that mattered the most, not what a live audience might see in studio—and he delighted in routines using visual tricks that only worked when seen on a television screen. Some involved bits of technical wizardry that Kovacs used to enhance sight gags, like superimposed or reversed images. But one of his best and most memorable tricks—in which items removed from a lunchbox seem to roll horizontally across a table and into someone’s lap—had a deftly simple solution: Kovacs sharply tilted the entire set, then tilted the camera at the same angle, making the on-screen image appear perfectly horizontal. Jim may have roared with laughter at the gag, but it also taught him an important, if obvious, lesson: look through the eyepiece and know exactly what your camera is seeing—because that’s your audience’s reality. It was a lesson Jim would come to appreciate, and apply masterfully, in only a few short years.

There were plenty of kids’ shows to watch as well
—Howdy Doody
, in fact, had been one of the very first shows broadcast on television nationally, starting in 1947. Young Marylanders could take their pick not only of
Howdy
, but also of shows like
Life with Snarky Parker
, a cowboy piece featuring the marionettes of Bil and Cora Baird, and
The Adventures of Lucky Pup
, with puppets by Morey Bunin. “
I don’t think I ever saw [
Snarky Parker
],” Jim admitted later—little surprise, considering he was well beyond the age group of its target audience. He did, however, remember seeing the Bairds perform their marionettes on other shows. “What I really knew of Bil and Cora Baird’s work was their variety show stuff,” Jim said. “They were doing a CBS morning show, in opposition to the
Today
show. They were just [performing to] novelty records and little tiny short bits and pieces.”

He was more familiar, however, with the work of a talented puppeteer whom he would later count as a friend: Burr Tillstrom, who performed the puppet stars of NBC’s enormously popular
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
. There were few people, in fact, who
weren’t
fans of Tillstrom’s work. Launched as a kids’ show in 1947,
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
had quickly attracted more adult fans than children—it counted among its admirers John Steinbeck, Orson Welles, and James Thurber—and by 1949 it had already been featured in
Life
magazine.

The brainchild of the Chicago-born Tillstrom,
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
featured two of Tillstrom’s puppets—the well-intentioned Kukla and the rakish dragon Ollie—interacting with the show’s sole human cast member, Fran Allison, a former schoolteacher with a quick wit and no small amount of charm. The real magic was in the genuine chemistry between Allison and her puppet costars as they bantered, conversed, sang, and laughed together—and all without a script, ad-libbing the entire show. Tillstrom’s artistry was so endearing, in fact, that when Tillstrom had an ill Kukla blow his nose on the curtain of his puppet theater, hundreds of concerned fans mailed in handkerchiefs.

But there was much more going on for Jim in 1950 than just television.
In March of that year,
The Christian Science Monitor
published one of the many cartoons he had submitted, a major source of pride for the thirteen-year-old Jim and his family—and especially to Dear, who had encouraged Jim with her own pencils, pens, and paints. The cartoon—credited to Jimmy Henson—shows two chefs pondering a large soup pot on a table in front of them. “Shall we toss it and call it salad?” asks one chef of the other, pointing down at the mess of ingredients, “or cook it and call it stew?” One chef is rail thin—almost looking as Jim himself would look in several years—while the other is plumper, his hat slightly crooked, setting up the study in contrasts that Jim always found hilarious and would use to great effect later in designing characters like Ernie and Bert or
The Muppet Show
’s Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker.

Cartoons and comics were, in fact, another important part of
Jim’s creative life. Like most young people, Jim would open the newspaper almost instinctively to the comics section each day. While
The Washington Post
contained plenty of comics, Jim preferred the selection offered in the Washington
Evening Star
for one reason: it carried Walt Kelly’s comic strip
Pogo
.