Jim Henson: The Biography (80 page)

Jim touches up the paint on Kermit’s mouth. Made from Betty Henson’s milky-blue coat, with Ping-Pong balls for eyes, the eventual star of the Muppet realm was only an abstract thing, and not yet a frog
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Jim and Jane Nebel—first his performing partner and later his wife—with Sam, Kermit, and Yorick. The enormously popular
Sam and Friends
earned Jim his first Emmy at the age of twenty-one
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Newlyweds Jim and Jane Henson dance as Jim’s mother plays the piano. Betty Henson had insisted her son shave off his new beard for the wedding
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Jim on the day of his graduation from the University of Maryland in 1960. The enormous success of
Sam and Friends
made it possible for Jim to drive to the ceremony in his own Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud
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Family affair: Jim, adjusting Limbo, checks on Jane as she tends to both Sam and daughter Lisa, the first of the Hensons’ five children
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Jim—in a typical position—works from his Eames chair in the first Muppets, Inc., offices, located over a nightclub on East 53rd Street in New York in the early 1960s. “[Our] spaces never looked like offices,” said Muppet writer Jerry Juhl
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The first three employees of Muppets, Inc. Left to right: performer/writer Jerry Juhl, performer Jerry Nelson, and Muppet designer/builder Don Sahlin
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While a brilliant performer, Jim was equally as talented behind the camera—and spent much of the 1960s in the director’s chair, overseeing everything from ten-second commercials to hourlong television specials
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Frank Oz was nineteen years old and just out of high school when he joined Muppets, Inc., in 1963 and was given the job of “right-handing” as Jim performed Rowlf the Dog on
The Jimmy Dean Show.
It was the beginning of one of the finest, and funniest, creative partnerships in entertainment
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Jim soars across the screen in his 1965 Academy Award–nominated short film
Time Piece.
“Back in the sixties … I thought of myself as an experimental filmmaker,” Jim said. “[Those films] didn’t have that commercial success, but that didn’t particularly frustrate me because I enjoyed it.”

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