Jim Henson: The Biography (51 page)

Success had also made Jim somewhat more aware of himself and how he looked, and he had recently taken steps to add a bit of polish to his comfortable, bohemian look. While one of his favorite boutiques would always be Liberty of London, where he would purchase armloads of long-sleeve shirts in colorful florals and paisleys, Jim had finally allowed Lazer to talk him into investing in several bespoke suits, shirts, vests, trousers, and even custom-made boots from London’s best tailors in Savile Row, once spending over £1,000—about $6,000 today—on clothing. At six foot one, Jim was mostly arms and legs—his waist was a waiflike thirty inches—and custom clothing meant there would be no more exposed calves when he crossed his legs on television, or wrists poking from the end of a too-short shirt. Agent Bernie Brillstein, for one, thought Jim looked great in his “
beautiful suits” and was impressed to see him wearing ties. “
Strange
ties,” added the agent, “but ties.”

Brillstein was also pleased to see Jim “enjoying money—you know, in a nice way.” While Jim had always been fond of showy cars and luxurious vacations, he had lately begun to indulge in art, sculpture, antiques, and furniture, with a particular eye for bold craftsmanship—an expensive habit for which Lazer felt he was partly to blame. One afternoon as he and Jim were window-shopping in London, Jim spotted a beautiful piece of art in a store window. “
How much do you think that costs?” he asked Lazer excitedly, and the two spent several moments guessing the price. Finally, Lazer went inside to ask the owner, and learned the piece was available at an astronomical price. Jim arched an eyebrow quizzically at Lazer. “Should I?” he asked impishly. “Jim, if you like it, just do it,” said Lazer—and so Jim did, walking out of the store with the package tucked under his arm, beaming happily.

Lazer later said he “felt badly” that he had given Jim the approval he had seemed to be looking for to indulge himself more
freely. “I think I should
not
have encouraged him,” said Lazer. “He started … on a buying thing … he felt free.” Still, Jim was never entirely careless with his money; when he felt an expensive antique cabinet was overpriced, he quietly had the piece appraised and discovered it was worth less than half of the $19,000 asking price. Looking back, Lazer couldn’t bring himself to begrudge Jim’s buying sprees
too
much. “I’m so glad he did. He bought houses where he wanted. He lived where he wanted.… I’m glad he
lived
while he lived.”

J
im completed work on the fourth season of
The Muppet Show
in late February 1980, taping the final episode with guest Diana Ross, who charmed the entire Muppet crew by modestly asking “
Was that all right?” after every take. After only a two-week break—during which Jim worked almost constantly, jetting back to New York for several days and then dashing to Paris to promote
The Muppet Movie
—he reassembled the Muppet team back at Elstree to begin work on the fifth season. While
The Muppet Show
was, at that point, arguably the most watched show in the world, Jim had even higher hopes that the show would live on in perpetuity in reruns, thereby providing a steady revenue stream. “
The long range product for this show is down the road,” he had explained to
Time
magazine, “when it’s syndicated [in reruns].”

For that to happen, however, a show generally needed at least one hundred completed episodes that could be put into rotation; by the end of season four,
The Muppet Show
had only ninety-six. Season five, then, would be pivotal, for several reasons—not only would the show reach its critical one hundredth episode, but Jim had also privately decided that the fifth season would be its last. “
After five seasons, we’re doing other projects,” Jim told reporters. As the Muppet team set to work at ATV on the first few shows of season five, Jim was already conferring with Jack Rose and Jerry Juhl about the script for the second Muppet movie. And he wasn’t happy with it.

From the beginning, Jim knew he wanted his film to be a homage to early movie musicals, “
because I so enjoy those movies. I intended [the second Muppet movie] to have the fun and joy of those earlier
films.” He also knew he wanted Kermit to be a reporter-turned-detective who would have to compete with a rival for Miss Piggy’s affections—but typically, he was having a difficult time articulating the rest of his story, only vaguely directing that it be “
joyful” with a “positive attitude toward life,” and that it contain “several hilarious sequences [with] big laughs” as well as “some real emotions/relationships.” He thought there might be a big chase at the end, and he was certain the movie would end with all the Muppets floating down in “parachutes—everybody sings as they go down.”

With such vague directions, it was perhaps little wonder that what he got back from Rose and Juhl wasn’t what he thought he’d asked for. “
There are a great many problems with this draft,” he wrote testily of their script, confessing privately in his journal that things were “
not looking good.” Frustrated, he asked veteran television comedy writers Jay Tarses and Tom Patchett—who had written for Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett—to meet with him at his house on Downshire Hill to discuss them taking over the scripting duties. In the meantime, he asked fellow
Sesame Street
alum Joe Raposo to begin crafting songs—despite the fact that a plot hadn’t yet been confirmed—and hired choreographer Anita Mann for dance sequences that didn’t yet exist.

Fortunately, Patchett and Tarses worked quickly, and by early May 1980, Jim had a first draft he could work with, though one sticking point remained: the title. Patchett and Tarses had given their script the throwaway title
Muppet Mania
, but Jim decided to put the question to the Muppet staff, holding a contest to find the best name for the film. Among some of the more interesting or silly suggestions
—The Rocky Muppet Picture Show
,
A Froggy Day in London—
Jim found a handwritten submission from nineteen-year-old Lisa Henson, suggesting
The Great Muppetcapade
. Written in pencil next to it, as if rolling the words around in her mouth, she had scrawled “escapade? esc
pig
aide? caper?” and then scratched all three alternatives out. Jim circled
The Great Muppetcapade
and the crossed-out word
Caper
. Problem solved.
The Great Muppet Caper
it would be.

Lisa’s involvement was critical to another project as well, an “interactive movie” concept revolving around a story they were plotting
with Maurice Sendak and Jon Stone called “The Varied Adventures of Mischievous Miles.” During a trip to Hollywood to attend the Oscars—where Jim and Oz performed the Oscar-nominated “Rainbow Connection,” only to watch it lose the Best Song trophy to “It Goes like It Goes” from
Norma Rae
—Jim and Lisa met with Sherry Lansing at 20th Century Fox to pitch their ambitious idea: a film in which the audience would be asked at intervals to choose the direction of the story. The mechanics were cumbersome—based on choices made by the audience, seventy-two different variations of the film were possible—but Jim was confident he could make it work. “
We were really interested in nonlinear storytelling,” recalled Lisa. “The concept was you make a movie on a laser disc, and then a computer program would drive it to play different bits of the disc depending on what choice was made … but it wasn’t possible to do it on a commercial filmmaking level.” It would take another decade before the technology could catch up with Jim’s idea. “Really, where it all ended up was in video games,” said Lisa, “but we didn’t know that at the time.”

Jim would shelve the interactive movie concept, but work on
The Crystal
continued—and the more time Jim spent building his world in his head, the more he was convinced that the $13 million Grade had offered to finance the film wasn’t going to be enough. Grade was scheduled to attend the Cannes Film Festival in mid-May—and had generously offered to pay for Jim and Lazer to spend a few days at the festival as well—and it was here that Lazer planned to make an appeal directly to Grade to up their budget. “
Lord Grade’s office chartered a flight to take Jim and me to France,” recalled Lazer. “Two fabulous suites awaited us, a detailed itinerary, as well as a major dinner reservation … Jim was showered with praise and adoration.”

Very quickly, however, both Jim and Lazer came to see the dingy crust beneath Cannes’ glossy veneer, and Lazer began to lose his nerve about approaching Grade. “
I thought it [Cannes] was trashy,” said Lazer, “everyone hawking, selling their wares.” That first evening, they ran into Liza Minnelli, who invited them back to a yacht party—“[she] was crazy over Jim,” said Lazer. That, too, was another letdown—“people drinking and slobbering,” shuddered Lazer—and
he and Jim ducked out after midnight to walk along the docks on the way back to their hotel. Jim walked slowly and quietly, and Lazer worried that Jim was disappointed with their Cannes experience. Then he realized Jim wasn’t even paying attention to their surroundings; he was watching the moon on the water. “
[It] seemed to do a shimmer dance on the water just for him,” said Lazer. None of the glamour—or grunge—of Cannes seemed to impress or depress him at all. Instead, said Lazer, “he was mesmerized by the beauty, the serenity and the nurturing power of Nature.” With a new perspective, a reinvigorated Lazer strolled over to Grade’s suite the next morning and persuaded the mogul to increase his investment in
The Crystal
from $13 million to $25 million. “
That’s the money that really saved the film,” said Oz.

A trip to France had saved one of Jim’s worlds; a week later, a trip to Scotland would spawn a new one.

O
n May 24, 1980, Jim flew to Scotland at the invitation of Jocelyn Stevenson, one of Jim’s favorite editors and writers from the Children’s Television Workshop. Stevenson and Jim had gotten to know each other in the early 1970s when, as a young secretary for CTW, Stevenson had sloshed through a New York downpour to deliver some pages of
Sesame Street
magazine to Jim for approval. As the two of them talked, they learned they shared a similar commitment to the television medium and its potential for quality children’s entertainment. “
And he just said to me, ‘You’re really creative,’ ” said Stevenson. “It was a really big moment for me to have someone … see [me] that way. He was really huge in terms of his influence on me.”

Now, a decade later, Stevenson had asked Jim to serve as the godfather for her son and dispatched a private plane to pick up Jim, Jane, Cheryl, John, and Heather in London and ferry them to her husband’s family estate near Edinburgh, Scotland. When Stevenson’s brother-in-law Peter Orton learned Jim was attending the event, he pleaded with Stevenson to seat him near Jim at dinner. “
I want to talk with him about an idea I have,” said Orton cryptically. Stevenson obliged, and over dinner Orton—a savvy British television executive
who had done some international sales work for
Sesame Street
—enthusiastically pointed out to Jim that the worldwide success of both
Sesame Street
and
The Muppet Show
had opened up a unique opportunity. The time was right, said Orton, to produce a children’s show aimed specifically at the international market. Jim was intrigued. He would think about it. The seeds of
Fraggle Rock
had been sown.

R
eturning to London, Jim spent the next eleven weeks taping the last twelve episodes of
The Muppet Show
. The show had come a long way in five years; after the shaky first season when Brillstein had rifled through his client list in search of guest stars, Jim could now get almost any celebrity he wished. “Who excites you?” he would ask his children—and for sixteen-year-old Brian Henson, the answer was easy: Blondie’s alluring lead singer, Debbie Harry.
“I said, ‘She’ll be great!’ ” Brian said later, laughing. “And I was like, ‘Well, I don’t know if she’ll be
great
, but I
love
looking at her!’ ” Jim booked Harry for the first week in August, when Brian would be in London for summer break—and at the weekly dinner party that Jim always threw for each guest, Brian found himself sitting goopily next to the sultry singer. At one point, Harry excused herself, then strolled across the restaurant and sashayed up an open staircase toward the powder room. Every head turned. Jim looked at Brian and winked. “You were right,” he said, and grinned.

On Sunday, August 17, 1980,
The Muppet Show
team gathered in Rehearsal Room 7/8 for the final time. Jim would have no sad faces; it had been a happy five years at Elstree, and Jim wanted their last week to be a joyful one, bringing in dancer Gene Kelly as guest star for a week of singing and dancing. There would be only one small hint of the show’s end in the final episode: a running gag in which Scooter performs a Tarot card reading for Beauregard the janitor and incorrectly informs him the
world is coming to an end. As far as Jim was concerned, the world
wasn’t
ending; he had other projects to attend to, and
The Muppet Show
would live on in reruns.

Still, Jim appreciated that a milestone had been reached, and to mark the occasion he began the week by hosting a dinner party at
the White Elephant on Sunday evening, draping an arm warmly around Brillstein and ITC’s American executive Abe Mandell, both of whom had come from the States to celebrate
The Muppet Show
’s final week. Gene Kelly finished taping his sequences by Thursday, leaving Jim and the
Muppet Show
team to wrap things up on Friday the 22nd. That afternoon, as the Muppet performers completed the show’s final take—a sequence featuring Fozzie and Scooter dodging knives hurled by the myopic Signor Baffi—floor manager Richard Holloway called out, “Ladies and Gentlemen, that’s a final wrap!” and was hit in the face with a pie. It was an ending worthy of the Muppets themselves.

There was another party that evening, this time with Lord Grade in attendance, and Lazer handed Jim a pile of congratulatory telegrams that had come into the Muppet Suites over the past week. Despite the strike and their strict lights out policy, the last five years with the Muppet team had been fun for ATV’s British staff, and the electricians, cameramen, and lighting crew were genuinely sorry to see Jim and the Muppet team leave. “
All at Elstree hope the Muppets will return,” said one telegram. “A marvelous five years with marvelous people.” Jim appreciated the sentiments, even as he remained unsentimental. “
We finished our 120th
Muppet Show
this summer, and that wraps that up—we felt it was a good place to stop it,” he said plainly. “We certainly enjoyed it.… It was a nice show to do.”