Jim Henson: The Biography (8 page)

Afternoon
debuted on WRC on Monday, March 7, 1955—a significant date in that it not only marks the true beginning of Jim and Jane’s professional partnership, but also because of the following notice, which appeared under the “TV Highlights” section of
The Washington Post and Times Herald:

This is the first time the term
Muppets
appears in print, helpfully but incorrectly glossed by a copy editor at the
Post
, who applied the term to Jim and Jane rather than to the puppets. At age eighteen, Jim had already coined the term that would become his legacy, his own brand, as indelibly linked to his name as Microsoft with Bill Gates or, perhaps more appropriately, Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse.

Interestingly, Jim was already using the term
Muppet
as early as December 1954, while working for Joe Campbell at
Circle 4 Ranch
. After receiving two cowboy puppets he had asked Jim to build, Campbell scrawled out a receipt, using the back of a cue sheet for the December 18, 1954, installment of
Circle 4 Ranch
. The receipt granted Campbell, for the cost of one dollar, “
51% ownership of muppetts [
sic
] known as ‘Shorthorn’ and ‘Longhorn.’ ” Further, a number of acetate disc soundtracks prerecorded by Campbell for Jim’s puppets to perform to—some dating as far back as November 10, 1954—were labeled by studio engineers with stickers reading “Campbell Muppets” or “Circle 4 Muppets.” Clearly, then, the term
Muppets
—with or without an extraneous T—was already in use at that time.

“
It was really just a term we made up,” Jim admitted later. “For a long time I would tell people it was a combination of marionettes and puppets, but, basically, it was really just a word that we coined,” he added, pointing out correctly that, “we have done very few things connected with marionettes.”

Could something else have inspired the term, though? It’s possible that
muppet
was a play on the word
moppet
, a term for a small child. Dating back to the seventeenth century—and likely tracing its origins to the word
moppe
, a Middle English word for rag doll—the word was cutesy and archaic, even in 1955. But it was also a word Jim Henson, along with nearly every newspaper reader in Hyattsville, would have seen practically every day—for running on channel 5 each weekday from 6:00 to 7:00
P
.
M
. was
Hoppity Skippity with Moppet Movies
, a local children’s show that had been a fixture in the D.C. area since 1948. Given that it was broadcast during the dinner hour, it is likely that Jim was familiar with it. But whether Jim ever watched the show, he would certainly have seen its name as he scanned the television listings in the newspaper.

It takes no real stretch of the imagination, then, to picture Jim—perhaps trying to come up with a catchy name for the puppets he was handing over to Campbell—coming across the word
moppets
and, with a mere change of a vowel, almost magically blending the words
puppet
and
moppet
. Like
grackle
, it was one of those words that already sounded like it should mean something. Whether intentional or not, the association with the word
moppet
is serendipitous, as the childlike innocence of the Muppets would, to Jim, always be one of their most endearing qualities. “
As I try to zero in on what’s important for the Muppets,” Jim said years later, “I think it’s a sense of innocence, naiveté—you know, the experience of a simple person meeting life.”

The newly christened Muppets, as part of the
Afternoon
lineup, would be going out live over the air each day, and Jim and Jane were expected to come prepared with new pieces to perform. There was little time for rehearsals from one show to another, but Jim—as he would for the rest of his life—seemed to thrive on the spontaneous, seat-of-the-pants performing. According to host Mac McGarry, Jim was able to work out his routines “
just by sitting down and thinking for a few minutes.”

As its talented cast began to learn to play off of each other’s strengths,
Afternoon
quickly built a following.
Washington Post
reviewer Lawrence Laurent elegantly described the show as “
integrated chaos,” which seemed to be the kind of atmosphere in which Jim would flourish. But looking back, Jim wasn’t happy with what he
called his “little entertainment pieces,” which mostly involved having the Muppets lip-synch to novelty records. “
The work I did in those days is not stuff that I’m creatively very proud of,” Jim said later. “That stuff was really experimenting and it was just stuff that I did as a lark. I was going to college and so I was doing this and it was a way of working my way through school.”

Jim was so uncertain about his performance, in fact, that he approached a WRC reporter who was rumored to have an inside line with Kovach and asked “
in his stumbling unsure way” if the reporter could talk with Kovach about getting Jim a job with the floor crew. The reporter—or so the story goes—told Jim to stick with his Muppets and “get very rich.”

The
Afternoon
crew were dazzled not only by the Muppets, but by their quiet, unassuming creator. “
Jim Henson was a very nice young guy. Thoughtful. Obviously a genius in the making,” remembered host Mac McGarry. “Everybody loved his characters.… He subdued his own being and made his characters come to life. It was not too long on the show before I realized I was not talking to Jim Henson. These characters were there, independently. They have their own being.” But it was
Afternoon
producer-director Carl Degen who most neatly summed up the consensus around the studio: “
The kid is positively a genius,” Degen told
The Washington Post
. “He’s absolutely amazing.”

As Jane recalled, she and Jim were originally put on
Afternoon
“
to do spots for children. But we were college students amusing ourselves, and we did these wild things with the puppets, lip-synching to Stan Freberg records—like his takeoff on ‘Banana Boat’—and things like that.” The madcap recordings of Stan Freberg were, in fact, a favorite not only of Jim’s, but also of other performers and sometime puppeteers like Soupy Sales, who often used Freberg’s songs for his puppets Pookie and Hippie to clown to. Freberg had a sense of humor very similar to Jim’s, as both adored bad puns, non sequiturs, deadpan delivery of a punch line, and silly songs. But what made Freberg’s records especially useful was that his recordings were fully realized routines—three frantic minutes filled with jokes, sound effects, conversations, and commentary that made them perfect for several Muppets to lip-synch and perform to.

Other times, Jim would choose tamer and more straightforward
material, like contemporary songs, which made for routines that were often funnier than those using novelty records simply because Jim would make them so waggishly ridiculous—dressing characters in wigs, concluding the songs with an explosion, or having one creature devour another, just the kind of absurd ending Jim loved. “
We very often would take a song and do strange things to it … that nobody could understand,” Jim said. “I always enjoyed those!” Looking back, Jane, too, could only shrug and laugh. “
I guess it had a quality of abandon and nonsense and of being somewhat experimental,” she said.
Afternoon
’s music director Mel Clement—who remembered absolutely “
falling down” with laughter at the Muppet sketches—was impressed. “Those kids,” Clement said admiringly of Jim and Jane, “
knocked us all out.”

They were knocking out plenty of others, too. In the spring of 1955, after a little less than two months of performing on
Afternoon
, Jim and Jane were offered the chance to create their own five-minute show on WRC, in
a prime piece of TV real estate: 11:25
P
.
M
., the five-minute slot between the local evening news and the
Tonight
show with Steve Allen. “
A choice time slot,” Jane remarked.

It was indeed—one that Jim would make the most of. The Muppets were on their way.

Jim with the cast of
Sam and Friends,
1961
. (
photo credit 3.1
)

O
N
M
ONDAY
, M
AY
9, 1955,
NINE WEEKS TO THE DAY AFTER THE DEBUT
of
Afternoon
, Jim and Jane’s five-minute romp
Sam and Friends
premiered on WRC-TV. There was actually little fanfare; there was no brief mention in the “TV Highlights” section, as had marked
Afternoon
’s first appearance, only a single word inserted after the hyper-abbreviated TV listings for WRC’s 11:00
P
.
M
. news broadcast with anchorman Richard Harkness: “
Harkness; Wthr. Sports; Muppets.”

Despite its initial quiet appearance in the TV listings, there was nothing calm or serene about
Sam and Friends
. Unshackled from
Afternoon
’s variety show format, Jim and Jane were free to create
their own manic world for their Muppets, giving them their own slightly skewed reality. For their Muppet cast, Jim turned to the growing collection of Muppets he had built, many of which he had already been using on
Afternoon
. For his new show’s point man, Jim had decided on Sam, a bald, bulb-nosed human character, with knobby ears that stuck straight out from his head and wide-open eyes that gave him a perpetually surprised look. “
I made him originally to use with Phil Harris records,” Jim said, “but he proved the most popular Muppet of all. That gave us the idea for
Sam and Friends
.”

The “Friends” of
Sam and Friends
, however, were more abstract, hazily defined and colorfully named: Harry the Hipster, a snakelike beatnik in sunglasses; Yorick, a prune-colored, skull-like creature that was
id
incarnate; the beak-nosed Hank and Frank; the squashed-looking Mushmellon. Considerable thought had gone into both the concept of the show and the design of the Muppet cast. The title was no mere throwaway; there was actual method to the show’s madness. At its core,
Sam and Friends
was all about the quiet, amiable Sam making his way through life with the help of his Friends—“abstract companions” who egg him on, move him forward, and encourage him through their own loony behavior, even if that behavior was still nothing more than lip-synching to records. The Friends, while real to Sam and to viewers, explained Jane, “
are actually within him, within Sam.” A rather high-brow conceit for a show that got its biggest laughs from characters exploding, but it was typical Jim: even a five-minute comedy romp, no matter how absurd, had to mean
something
.

There was another abstract Muppet in Sam’s cast who, while still only relegated to mostly small parts—and usually getting devoured at the end—already had a special place in Jim’s heart. It was a puppet Jim had built while passing several long sad days tending to his grandfather Pop, who was
slowly dying of heart failure—a puppet that, even early on, Jim would always call his favorite.

It was a milky blue character named Kermit.

Maury Brown had always been frail—his daughters remember him demanding quiet in the house to ease his nerves—and in 1955, a doctor had insisted that he and Dear move from their two-story
home on Marion Street into a smaller, single-story apartment. The move had depressed Pop—“he intended to die in that house” on Marion Street, Attie said—and his health had deteriorated rapidly, as Pop grew increasingly senile even as his heart failed. Jim was shaken by the impending death of his grandfather—he had, after all, been partly named for him—but Jim would do as he always did in the face of grief: he would build and create. Foraging for any suitable materials, Jim settled on his mother’s old felt coat, and as he leaned over the table in the Hensons’ living room he sewed a simple puppet body, with a slightly pointed face, out of the faded turquoise material. For eyes, he simply glued two halves of a Ping-Pong ball—with slashed circles carefully inked in black on each—to the top of the head. That was it. From the simplest of materials—and, perhaps appropriately, from a determination to bring a bit of order from darkness—Kermit was born.