Jim Henson: The Biography (9 page)

Those who knew Jim as a boy would often wonder if he had named his most famous creation after his childhood friend Kermit Scott. The answer—according to both Jim and Kermit Scott—was no. The name Kermit, while quirky, was by no means uncommon in 1955; President Theodore Roosevelt had named his second son Kermit in 1889, which made the name somewhat faddish in the first half of the twentieth century. To Jim, though, as with
grackle
or
Muppet
, it was all about the sound of the word; with its hard K, pressed M, and snapped T, the name Kermit was memorable and fairly funny.

As a relatively no-frills puppet, Kermit was the epitome of elegant simplicity, which made him that much more fun for Jim to play with. “
Kermit started out as a way of building, putting a mouth and covering over my hand,” Jim later explained. “There was nothing in Kermit outside of the piece of cardboard—it was originally cardboard—and the cloth shape that was his head. He’s one of the simplest kinds of puppet you can make, and he’s very flexible because of that … which gives him a range of expression. A lot of people build very stiff puppets—you can barely move the things—and you can get very little expression out of a character that you can barely move. Your hand has a lot of flexibility to it, and what you want to do is to build a puppet that can reflect all that flexibility.”

If Kermit was one of the most flexible of Muppets, one thing he
was not—at least not yet—was a frog. While it is nearly impossible for viewers today to watch Kermit on
Sam and Friends
and think of him as anything but a frog, viewers in 1955 saw him as simply another of the silly supporting cast. Oddly colored—“
milky turquoise” Jim called it—with padded oval feet, Kermit was still as vague a being as the fuzzy Mushmellon, or the wide-mouthed Moldy Hay. “I didn’t call him a frog,” Jim said. “All the characters in those days were abstract because that was part of the principle that I was working under, that you wanted abstract things.”

For Jim, that abstraction was also, in some ways, an exciting way of challenging his audience—of making them an active part of the performance. “
Those abstract characters I still feel are slightly more pure,” Jim later explained. “If you take a character and you call him a frog … you immediately give the audience a handle. You’re assisting the audience to understand; you’re giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don’t give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it’s almost more pure. It’s a cooler thing. It’s a difference of sort of warmth and cool.”

It wasn’t only their abstract quality that made Jim’s Muppets—and
Sam and Friends
—unlike anything on television. Until Jim and the Muppets, puppetry on TV had essentially looked like filmed puppet shows—on
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
, for instance, Burr Tillstrom performed his puppets while standing behind a puppet stage, poking his characters out underneath a gauzy curtain as he stood concealed behind the proscenium. Jim had sometimes performed in a similar manner on
Afternoon
, squatting down behind low walls or maneuvering puppets up through openings in sets when the show required the Muppets to interact with the human cast members. But that was really still just a puppet show on television, and not a puppet
television
show.

Like Ernie Kovacs before him, who understood that a mutual tilt of the camera and the set could playfully manipulate an audience’s perception, Jim, too, was intuitively aware that he could use the eye of the camera—and the four sides of a home viewer’s television screen—to create his own reality. Now that there was no need for his Muppets to coexist with live actors, Jim saw that no puppet theater was needed at all—that, in fact, the space between the four sides of
the TV screen
was
his puppet theater. Jim had learned Kovacs’s lesson well; namely, a television audience can only see what you choose for it to see. No walls were needed to conceal the puppeteer when he or she could kneel down just out of sight of the camera, giving the Muppets the entire viewing area in which to perform and exist.

But Jim understood that it went even deeper than that. Jim knew that for all its technical prowess, the television camera is, in a sense, blind. It has no peripheral vision, and it doesn’t get distracted by what’s taking place just beyond the range of its lens. All it sees is what is visible through the eyepiece, no more, no less—and Jim instinctively appreciated that if the eye of the camera defines your performance, then you’d better make certain you know exactly what the camera is seeing. The only way to do this, then, was to watch the performance on a television monitor.

At first, it was merely a matter of spot-checking their performance, making sure heads were out of sight and the Muppet was centered on a screen,
similar to a habit Burr Tillstrom had developed on
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
, where Tillstrom would often keep a TV placed off to one side to keep an eye on how his puppet theater looked on camera. Soon Jim and Jane had monitors placed in opposite corners of the studio, so no matter which way a performer was facing, a monitor was visible. Eventually, Jim had one small monitor placed on the floor directly in front of the performers, where he and Jane could closely scrutinize the performance from their knees. But Jim’s approach to the use of the monitor differed from Tillstrom’s in a significant way. For Tillstrom, the monitor was passive, merely relaying the performance, which remained confined by the puppet theater. But for Jim, the monitor
was
the puppet theater—as such, it
defined
the performance.

Moreover, using the monitor to watch themselves perform on screen made the show that much better. Unlike other television actors, who can’t see their own performance as it happens, “
you can actually see what you are doing as you do it,” Jim explained, “and have the opportunity to modify your performance for better effect.” It also allowed the puppeteer to share the viewing experience with the audience at home—a dynamic Jane found particularly thrilling. “
You’d perform but you’d also be the audience,” said Jane. “I think
that’s a big difference, because the people at home watching are seeing a very intimate, internal thing that’s happening with that performer.”

While the use of the monitor was a brilliant innovation, it required one real bit of mental gymnastics: since the performer is facing the camera, what he sees on the monitor in front of him is essentially his own image in reverse. So, while the performer might be moving a Muppet to his or her own left, on the television monitor, it moves to the right—a bit of reverse orientation that takes some getting used to. But for Jim, the effort was worth it to get the performance exactly right. “
After you go through working with the monitor for a particular period of time,” said Jim, “then it’s totally automatic and you never even think about it.”

Now that Jim had removed the need for a puppet theater—and, through the use of the monitor, given the performer the ability to watch and modify his performance—the Muppets themselves suddenly, almost magically, had a life of their own. In the eyes of the camera, it was as if they were simply actors being filmed. “
What Jim came to love right away was how convincing the reality is on a television screen,” Jane said. “It’s not like going from a [puppet] stage at all; the reality was extraordinary.” So long as Jim and Jane were careful to remain out of the shot, the Muppets could move freely anywhere in the viewing area, even approaching the camera—and the audience—for an intimate close-up, something that could
not
happen with a traditional puppet theater. This was something brand-new: it was puppetry made expressly for the medium of television, making TV’s strengths and weaknesses work for the performer.

For Jim, it had all been a matter of problem solving—and his relative inexperience in both puppetry and television allowed him to look for solutions that might not have occurred to more seasoned performers, even when, as in the case of the television monitor, that solution was lying in plain sight. “
Many of the things I’ve done in my life have basically been self-taught,” Jim admitted later. “I had never worked with puppets … and even when I began on television, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I’m sure this was a good thing, because I learned as I tackled each problem. I think if you study—if you learn too much of what others have done—you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.”

There was little danger of Jim doing that—he was already too far ahead of everybody else. Still, for all his success and innovation, Jim was always respectful of the work of his predecessors in television. The differences in their approaches both to puppetry and the television medium, were, he thought, simply generational—a matter of when you learned the craft and what media were available when you began performing. “
Burr Tillstrom and the Bairds had more to do with the beginning of puppetry on television than we did,” Jim explained. “But they had developed their art and style to a certain extent before hitting television.”

Jim’s puppets, however, were born in and made for the television generation—and as such, they had to look good on TV. “
We pretty much had a form and a shape by that time—a style,” Jim said of his early days on television, “and I think one of the advantages of not having any relationship to any other puppeteer was that it gave me a reason to put [the form and shapes of the Muppets] together myself for the needs of television.” Jim would have no marionette strings in the shot, or painted wooden heads frozen into perpetual grins, breaking the illusion. With the TV camera allowing for close-ups, Jim wanted his puppets to breathe with a life of their own, with working mouths and hands, capable of expression and personality. “
Very early on we discovered what you could do with the flexibility of the faces,” Jim said. “It was a question of combining that with what you could do with the hand in order to get the expressions to work. Most puppeteers at that time still worked with absolutely rigid faces, and generally no expression at all, because—before television—puppets were generally meant to be seen at a distance of fifteen to twenty feet,” he explained. “I think we were among the first to design puppets specifically for television, where you’re relating to the camera and working with what you can do with the face seen from very close.” “
[They were] puppets that didn’t look like puppets had
ever
looked,” recalled Muppet veteran Jerry Juhl. “It was the mobility of the faces, and the total abstraction of them.… They were just
mind-blowing
, certainly to puppeteers.”

While Sam was made of plastic wood—and was, in Jim’s hands, still remarkably expressive (so much so, in fact, that only three months after making his debut, Sam was named “
the most brilliant newcomer to the Washington scene” by the TV critic at
The Sunday
Star
)—puppets made of nonpliable materials would quickly become the exception. Instead, Jim discovered that foam rubber was an ideal material for sculpting puppet heads, which he could then cover with fabric, fleece, or whatever else might be on hand, whether it was pieces of carpet, yarn, twine, or his mother’s coat. This allowed for less clunky, more expressive puppets, giving the puppeteer the ability to turn in a performance—through the tilt of the puppet’s head, a slight elongation of the face, or a scrunching of the mouth—that made the character that much more alive.

Just as important, from his lifelong love of drawing and cartooning—and perhaps with the lessons of his poster for
Nine Girls
in mind—Jim intuitively understood the critical importance of the placement of a character’s eyes, as well as the location of the pupils in those eyes. Early on, Jim discovered that by almost imperceptibly crossing the eyes, he actually gave the eyes focus, giving his Muppets a look of keen attentiveness rather than a vacant stare.

As for the operation of a Muppet’s hands, in the early years, Jim manipulated his characters’ arms with long rods attached close to the Muppet’s wrist, a device that owed more to the old-style rod puppets than to marionettes. It was simple but effective—and it would be the template for the basic Muppet structure. Jim was not yet building “live hand” puppets in which he could move the mouth with his right hand and use his own left hand up inside the Muppet’s left hand—as he would with Muppets like Rowlf the Dog, or Ernie on
Sesame Street
—likely because with only him and Jane performing, they often needed to work with a Muppet on each arm.

But what work it was. Left on their own now, Jim and Jane put together a madcap four-minute show—the last minute was left to sponsors like Esskay meats—that was over much too quickly for D.C. audiences (“
It was so short that it was over as soon as it began!” was a typical lament). According to Jim, the name of the game on the early
Sam and Friends
was still pantomiming and lip-synching to comedy records and novelty songs, which Jim raided from the WRC music library or plumbed from his own extensive collection—
by his own count, he had over five hundred records. The lip-synching approach meant that Jim did not have to provide voices for any of his Muppets—something he was still nervous about doing—and it was
also, as Jim said, “
a way that one could do entertaining pieces rather safely and easily.”

Actually, it
wasn’t
always easy. Jim had worked hard to perfect his lip-synching technique, figuring out quickly that there was more to lip-synching than mere timing. Jane compared it to pushing the words out of the puppet’s mouth, rather than snapping the mouth open and closed, “
like catching flies”—a habit that often plagued even an experienced performer like Burr Tillstrom, who often opened and closed Ollie’s mouth with an audible
clack
. Jim would practice in front of a mirror, sometimes for hours, working to master little nuances, like moving the puppet slightly forward and down as it spoke, and opening the mouth by moving his thumb rather than his fingers, which looked more natural and less like the Muppet’s head was coming unhinged and flapping open backward.