Jim Henson: The Biography (65 page)

As he had done at the Sherry-Netherland, Jim tore down and rebuilt the interior of the Steamboat Road apartment, then called a professional—this time designer Connie Beale—to assist with the decorating. Like many of Jim’s most fulfilling projects, the work with Beale was a true collaboration. Where Beale’s tastes were more traditional, Jim leaned ethnic and international, and the resulting décor was an eclectic but tasteful merging of artistic temperaments. Jim loved spending the afternoon shopping with Beale, discussing
decorating over lunch, then buying handmade furniture from antiques stores or browsing for sculpture, fabrics, and art at Elements in Greenwich or Julie’s Gallery in New York. Jim filled his rooms with Windsor chairs, African masks, and Indonesian cabinets—but his favorite place in the apartment was the back room with its floor-to-ceiling windows, where he would sprawl on the sofa beneath a sculpture of herons, and watch the waves out in Smith Cove.

One thing Jim didn’t have in his apartment—either at Steamboat Road or the Sherry-Netherland—was memories. “
As much as he loved objects,” said Cheryl, “he didn’t care about holding on to things.” When Jim had moved out of the house in Bedford, then, he had left behind not only Jane, but nearly everything else—from furniture and floor coverings, to school report cards and souvenirs—and simply started over again, building a new life in a new apartment with new
everything
. Jane, meanwhile, after spending the past year living in Bedford with fifteen-year-old Heather, had decided to move into a house of her own, carefully packing up boxes of painted wooden toys and handmade Christmas ornaments and rearranging old furniture in her new house in Greenwich. Their new homes, as much as anything, symbolized their differing approaches to their relationship with each other as well as their perspectives on life in general: Jim was always looking forward, excited about new things and the future, while Jane carried the weight and obligations of the past. Perhaps tellingly, their homes in Greenwich were less than three miles apart; even legally separated, Jim and Jane could never be entirely removed from each other.

As Thanksgiving neared, Jim was in discussions with Brandon Tartikoff, the enthusiastic head of programming for NBC, to gauge the network’s interest in
The Storyteller
. The response was encouraging. “
[Tartikoff] loves it,” Jim told Kenworthy. “Or at least loves it enough to broadcast it in January so that he can find out if the
audience
loves it.” While a favorable reception from an audience might eventually assure the show a spot as a regular prime-time series, Jim wasn’t ready to call it a sure thing, especially with a series as unconventional as
The Storyteller
. And now that Tartikoff had opened the door, Jim wanted another series ready to pitch to NBC in the event
Storyteller
failed to take hold.

Jim was an enormous admirer of comedian Paul Reubens’s frantic Saturday morning
Pee-wee’s Playhouse
, which, apart from being funny, liberally combined live actors with playful chromakey effects and computer animation. “
I thought it was just terrific,” Jim had written to Reubens appreciatively after the show’s premiere in 1986. “We’ve been waiting for someone to come along and put a lot of this stuff together like you did.” Jim thought he could have even more fun with the technology than Reubens—and since early summer he had been kicking around an idea for a fast-paced, sketch-driven comedy called
IN-TV
that would utilize all the technology Jim had at his disposal—from computer graphics and chromakey to Muppets and animatronics—to poke fun at the medium of television itself.

At the heart of
IN-TV
was a clever concept: each week, a live guest star would get sucked into the television set and would have to work his way back out again, usually by moving from one bad television channel to another. It was a fun idea, giving Jim an opportunity to satirize the seemingly endless parade of upstart cable channels and lame public access shows that were common in the early days of cable. Jim had a number of new characters in mind, though not much else, but he was excited about it—and when Jim was excited about a project, no detail was too small for his attention. He designed the IN-TV logo himself, and brought in respected music producer Phil Ramone to collaborate on original songs for a new Muppet band. He was so pleased with how things were proceeding, in fact, that he presented Ramone with a thank-you gift—a $2,900, thirty-five-inch Mitsubishi television—along with a note thanking Ramone for his music and assuring the composer with typical optimism that “
we’re going to have great fun doing some wonderful television that should look good on this set.”

Jim spent the first part of December promoting
Labyrinth
overseas—like
The Dark Crystal
before it,
Labyrinth
would perform strongly in the international market—traveling with Heather and Mary Ann to Germany and London, where the British press swooned adoringly as Jim introduced the lumbering Ludo to Princess Diana at the royal premiere. There were more parties and premieres in Amsterdam, Madrid, Paris, and Copenhagen before they finally returned home just before Christmas. While the pre-holiday skiing in Vermont
was “great,” Christmas itself was a somber affair. Jim spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day silently helping Jane pack up the last of their belongings in the Bedford house—and all the boxes, of course, would go to Jane’s new place, not Jim’s. It was a “
broken-family Christmas,” said John Henson. “It was really devastating.”

T
he first two weeks of 1987 were spent rehearsing and preparing for the
IN-TV
pilot, which Jim was moving forward with despite some apprehensions about the show’s script, by
Mork and Mindy
scribe David Misch. While Jim could usually tell intuitively when a script wasn’t working, he didn’t always know
why
. Creative consultant Larry Mirkin—who Jim relied on to give him a straight read on scripts to help figure such things out—told Jim he thought the script was a disaster, “
consistently dark, victimized, and pessimistic,” and flat-out unfunny. Despite Mirkin’s misgivings, Jim and the Muppet performers spent three days taping Misch’s messy script anyway, which Jim eventually edited down into a ten-minute pitch reel and renamed
Inner Tube
. Bernie Brillstein was assigned the job of selling the show to NBC—or any other network for that matter—but found no takers. Frustrated, Jim would spend the better part of the year trying to figure out what to do with it.

While
Inner Tube
sputtered,
The Storyteller
—which finally made its debut on NBC on the evening of Saturday, January 31, 1987—was a qualified success. While it failed to crack even the top thirty in the ratings for the week,
The Storyteller
was an immediate critical hit—and, in fact, would go on to win the Emmy as the Outstanding Children’s Program. It would also earn Jim some of his best reviews in years. “
It’s time to stop thinking of him simply as the man who created the Muppets,” said an impressed
Hollywood Reporter
, finally conceding a point Jim had been trying to make for two decades. “
When a show arrives under the auspices of Jim Henson, we can be pretty sure we won’t be disappointed,” wrote Walter Goodman in
The New York Times
. “If it [
The Storyteller
] were turned into a series, that would be a real happy ending.”
USA Today
, meanwhile, hailed it as “
one of Jim Henson’s finest moments on TV.”

Jim was justifiably proud of
The Storyteller
, which he regarded
as something of an artistic higher calling. “
It is our responsibility to keep telling these tales—to tell them in a way that they teach and entertain and give meaning to our lives,” he said later. “This is not merely an obligation, it’s something we must do because we love doing it.” A delighted NBC offered to pick up
The Storyteller
as a weekly series, and Jim approached Anthony Minghella about writing new episodes. The inscrutable Minghella, who had initially been skeptical about his ability to write for the series, found himself caught up in Jim’s energy and enthusiasm. With Jim, said Minghella, “
it’s very hard to just visit. You tend to lose your return ticket when you go on the journey [with him]. I wrote the pilot and then discovered, of course, that it was a fascinating subject and the possibilities of it were enormous. [Jim] was absolutely right. There was a series there and, in fact, we could go on making it for the rest of our lives.”

Even with
The Storyteller
now fully in production—and the problematic
Inner Tube
on the back burner—Jim continued to develop and pitch one television series after another. One of them—
Puppetman
, a live-action sitcom about a group of puppeteers working on a daily children’s television show—actually made it as far as the pilot stage, though abysmal ratings doomed it from being picked up as a regular series. Others—like
Muppet Voyager
, still languishing in outline form in Jim’s desk drawer, or
Read My Lips
, a comedy series co-written by Muppet performer Richard Hunt about puppets who come to life after they’ve been put away for the night—never made it much beyond the written page. Jim had always kept a breakneck pace—multiple projects were the rule, rather than the exception—but lately some of the projects had a slight whiff of indifference to them, as if Jim were simply launching a handful of darts at a dartboard, hoping for any of them to hit. “
I think Jim felt … he was responsible [for us],” said Richard Hunt. “And he would go out of his way to keep creating new work so that these people had something to do.” And if Hunt or any of the Muppet performers or writers questioned the artistic merits of a project, Jim would simply fold his arms and sigh knowingly. “Richard, please,” he would say quietly. “I’m
trying
.”

And he
was
trying. Jim took seriously the management of his
company—and his nearly
150 employees—personally writing chatty quarterly reports to the entire staff, organizing company orientations, and even submitting himself and several managers to the Myers-Briggs test to identify their management styles. Jim’s Myers-Briggs results labeled him, to perhaps no one’s surprise, as an
idealist. As he made a list of his business objectives, Jim wrote near the top, “
work for common good of all mankind” and “use of technology and business for common good.” The “common good,” as he saw it, was “growth and development of children … sharing wealth … respect[ing] work—nature—environment.” But running the company was taking increasingly more and more of his time, draining his energy from the creative projects he considered his
real
work for the common good. “
I’ve never particularly wanted to have a large organization,” Jim confessed to one reporter. “The trick is to try to stay small enough to be creative but still be able to do all the projects we want to do—and not to get so big where you just spend your time managing people and trying to keep everybody working.” And
trying
.

At times, the pressures were more than he wanted to handle. He was easily frustrated with internal squabbles; Henson Associates’ legal department, in fact, could often be particularly exhausting. “
The lawyers would all fight with each other,” remembered Jane Henson, and then would call in Jim to resolve the dispute. Jim—who wouldn’t even argue with his own wife—refused to engage, and simply backed out of the room with his big hands up, palms out. “You resolve it,” he begged them. “I have to go to London.” And then, said Jane, “he’d just get on a plane and go,” whether he actually had business in London or not. “It was fight or flight,” said Jane, “and he’d choose flight.”

That summer, however, there really was business taking him overseas and away from the worries of the company. In July, Jim spent twenty days in Charleville-Mézières, France, teaching a puppetry workshop to twenty-one students—“
many of whom,” Jim wrote playfully, “will not speak English.” With Brian and Cheryl assisting, Jim strolled the classrooms at the Institut International de la Marionnette, teaching puppet building, Muppet-style performing, and going over the basics of lip-synching, singing “Frère Jacques” as
a roomful of students waved a sea of Muppets over their heads, staring intently at monitors.

From France, Jim returned to the familiar grounds of Elstree film studios in Borehamwood, where the Henson Organization—the British arm of Henson Associates—had taken over three soundstages, along with several offices in the studio’s centrally located John Maxwell Building, to film four new episodes of
The Storyteller
. After the successful premiere episode in January, Jim had been approached by a number of young directors interested in working on the show—“
It’s almost like the early days of
The Muppet Show
, when top stars would beg to be guests,” said producer Duncan Kenworthy—but after handing directing duties over to Steve Barron, Charles Sturridge, and Jon Amiel, Jim was itching to get back in the director’s chair himself. And once he was back within the comforts of Elstree, Jim took the helm of the episode “Soldier and Death,” an adaptation of a Russian folktale in which a soldier uses a magic sack to capture Death. Jim had a ball.

Financially, however,
The Storyteller
was barely keeping its head above water—while Jim was now financing the series with money from NBC and the independent British television company TVS,
The Storyteller
was running a deficit. So troublesome was the series to produce, in fact, that Jim and NBC had agreed that it would be impossible to produce as a weekly series; instead,
The Storyteller
would air on the network as a series of half-hour specials, shown on a sporadic basis. But that wasn’t really an ideal setup, either—and on August 22, Jim met with Brandon Tartikoff to suggest that installments of
The Storyteller
might be incorporated into a weekly themed anthology series Jim was proposing, called
The Jim Henson Hour
. Tartikoff liked the idea well enough that he asked Jim to prepare a proposal and a pitch reel—which NBC would pay for—that Tartikoff could then take back to the network brass.