Street Gang

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2008 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Michael Davis, 2008

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

“One of These Things” from
Sesame Street.
Words by Bruce Hart and Joe Raposo, music by Joe Raposo. Copyright © 1970 Instructional Children’s Music, Inc. Copyright renewed. Rights in the U.S.A. administered by Stage Harbor Publishing, Inc. Rights outside the U.S.A. administered by Instructional Children’s Music, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

“Somebody Come and Play,” words and music by Joe Raposo. Copyright © 1970 Jonico Music, Inc. Copyright renewed. Rights in the U.S.A. administered by Green Fox Music, Inc. Rights outside the U.S.A. administered by Jonico Music, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

Illustration credits appear on page 380.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Davis, Michael, date.
Street gang: the complete history of Sesame Street/by Michael Davis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-440-65875-4

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Prologue

J
oan Ganz Cooney walked toward the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street, lost in a fog of grief. Ahead were the crenelated parapets that crown the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a Gothic Revival glory on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Black limousines lined the curb-side, clogging the street, as NYPD officers waved their arms in a futile effort to get vehicles moving. The sidewalks were overrun by pedestrians, hundreds of them, all moving toward the cathedral steps. Cooney walked alongside mothers with toddlers clutching Ernie dolls, students playing hooky from school, executives in crisp suits, Midtown secretaries in heels, Latinas in scoop-necked tops, and bohemian types sporting jeans, running shoes, and long ponytails.

It was May 21, 1990, five days after Jim Henson, her friend and creative partner since 1969, had died at fifty-three from a runaway strep infection gone stubbornly, foolishly untreated. There was no other word to describe his passing other than
shocking,
and it was played just that way in the papers and on the nightly news. People who didn’t know him wept as if a favorite uncle had died, that subversive adult who sat with the adults at Thanksgiving but would have preferred dinner at the kids’ table. They came out in force for the public memorial, filling the vast, vaulted sanctuary, even more than the organizers of the event had anticipated. Some five thousand attendees filled the pews, standing in the antechambers and spilling into the aisles. The overflow was so great that people had simply dropped their backpacks, folded up their strollers, and sat on the hard stone floor.

Clustered row upon row near them were mourners bound by their years together working for and with the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), the nonprofit corporation Cooney helped build. Cooney took a seat next to Christopher Cerf, one of the founding fathers of
Sesame Street.

From the altar, the congregation was an impressionistic canvas, dappled with a profusion of spring green. That was to be expected. Just as teams, tribes, and nations have representative colors, Jim Henson owned Kermit green.

Cooney’s thoughts wandered to Kermit and the early days of
Sesame Street
. Reminders of that time were everywhere. Sitting nearby was Frank Oz, who in 1969—
Sesame
’s debut year—became a Henson protégé, having joined the Muppets right out of high school. For more than twenty years, Oz had been uptight Bert to Henson’s mischievous Ernie, the straight man of the odd-couple comedy duo. On
The Muppet Show
, their roles had reversed; Oz was outrageously pushy Miss Piggy to Henson’s pushed-to-the-brink Kermit.

At no time had Jim Henson’s disparate worlds collided quite as markedly as at this memorial. Over to one side was Henson’s friend Harry Belafonte. A humanitarian and artist, Belafonte had appeared on
The Muppet Show
, where he introduced “Turn the World Around,” a joyous, syncopated African folk melody that would be part of the day’s program.

Not far away was Lorne Michaels, who gave the Muppets a weekly showcase during the audacious first season (1975) of
Saturday Night Live
at a time when the ambitious Henson feared he might be trapped for eternity in children’s television. Henson’s talent manager, Bernie Brillstein, saw to it that that never happened. Brillstein, who signed John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, and Gilda Radner, was like a second father to Henson, a Jewish one.

In the late 1980s, Henson had separated from his wife, Jane, the mother of his five children. For most of his career, he had been more married to his work than to Jane, and a relationship that began when they met as students at the College Park campus of the University of Maryland withered. Henson was known to work around the clock in the studio when a production deadline loomed, and his travel schedule and list of business commitments would have seemed unreasonable to most. He seemed happier and more fulfilled away from home, but he craved time with his two sons and three daughters.

As a single man, Henson had had his pick of staggeringly beautiful companions. Daryl Hannah, who had flown in from California for the service on a private jet and now wept softly in a pew, had been one of them. Henson went through a Hollywood stage in his late forties and early fifties, shedding his signature bohemian wardrobe for goods from Rodeo Drive. His beard was neatly trimmed and his hair styled for an appearance he’d made with Kermit on the late-night
Arsenio Hall Show
, just twelve days before he died. Complaining of a sore throat in the greenroom that night, he was uncharacteristically flat and slow on the uptake during an interview segment. Henson used the occasion to plug an upcoming special shot at Disney World in Orlando and to introduce Clifford, a new Muppet musician working with Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, the house band from
The Muppet Show
. African American puppeteer Kevin Clash gave voice and performance to Clifford, he of the fuchsia dreadlocks, sunglasses, and vocal delivery that was distinctly urban contemporary. Clash was sensational, bantering with the black comic as the audience howled. Henson seemed to enjoy it as much as anyone, and he looked relieved to have Clash carry the load. It was Henson’s final televised interview.

Chris Cerf lost a dear friend and comic collaborator in Henson. Walking into the memorial, he was numb with grief, but being surrounded by his CTW colleagues was a comfort. Only months earlier,
Sesame Street
composer-arranger extraordinaire Joe Raposo had been laid to rest, dead at age fifty-one from complications of lymphoma.

Cerf composed tunes for
Sesame Street
as well, half-silly, half-sophisticated parody numbers. As the son of Bennett Cerf, the witty cofounder of Random House, Chris had used his book-world DNA to create the first paperback library of
Sesame Street
books. He was also sly and unpredictable, which made him a perfect fit for Henson’s extended family of mirth makers. Cerf provided many good times in
Sesame
’s freewheeling formative days, when an elaborate prank would reduce Henson to a puddle.

Cooney knew that everything about
Sesame Street
had been unalterably turned upside down the minute Jim Henson was declared dead at 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday, May 16.

In his final hour, he twice went into cardiac arrest, as the raging infection shut down his organs and left him struggling for air, surrounded by strangers. The cause of his death was Group A streptococcal pneumonia, an infection that probably started with that sore throat he complained about in Los Angeles the night of the
Arsenio
taping. A timely course of penicillin would have saved him, but he chose not to seek medical help until it was too late. Henson, whose mother was a practicing Christian Scientist, had considered calling in a faith healer, but, after hours of feverish decline, he finally acceded to be taken to the hospital. A plaintive call from Brillstein, phoning from Los Angeles, convinced him to leave his apartment at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in Manhattan. Instead of summoning an ambulance, Henson was transported by a car service ordered by Brillstein. Henson, whose organs were failing, walked to the lobby and got into the limo. Precious minutes were lost as the driver pulled up to a door at New York Hospital that was three-quarters of a block away from the emergency entrance. More time was lost when Henson sent the driver on his way, insisting he could walk to the ER. There was no arguing with him. For all his exceptional attributes, Henson was a willful, unyielding man who almost always got his way. This served him well in business, where he could wear people down.

Jim Henson was a genius, and not only for reinventing puppetry for the television age and for inspiring a raft of characters that make you smile just thinking about them. Henson was a genius businessman, as well. His only flaws might have been an inability to stay within budget for his feature-length films and his unwillingness to fire people when prudence would have suggested he should do so. He always found someone else to take that responsibility.