Street Gang (14 page)

 

Cooney’s first task at Carnegie was to begin writing a revised and expanded version of the feasibility study for potential funding sources to review. It was referred to as a sales document and would incorporate projections about the show’s content development, costs, and structure. Morrisett gave her three months to complete it, and mindful of his consultant’s other responsibilities at Carnegie, encouraged Cooney to hire a professional writer as an assistant.

Cooney convinced her former associate Linda Gottlieb to take the freelance assignment for about twelve hundred dollars. At Channel Thirteen they had adjoining desks, and Cooney knew Linda to be quick, smart, and loads of fun. That Gottlieb was a working mom raising two preschoolers was a big plus. “She and I spent hours on the phone at night and we met for lunch almost every day,” Cooney said. After a while, they were finishing each other’s sentences and playfully brainstorming. “She’d say, ‘I’ve got an idea,’ and I would say, ‘I’ve got an idea.’ ”

Gottlieb quickly condensed the feasibility study into an opening chapter for the new report. While doing so, she found herself agreeing with the observation that kids could not resist TV commercials. It was true at her home, just as it was for fathers Morrisett and Pifer.

At four years old, Sarah Morrisett had memorized an entire repertoire of TV jingles. The simple melodies, mostly written in bright major keys, were no harder to sing than a nursery rhyme. The more Sarah heard them, the better she was at repeating them, word for word.

It is not too far a stretch to say that Sarah’s mastery of jingles led to a central hypothesis of the great experiment that we know as
Sesame Street:
if television could successfully teach the words and music to advertisements, couldn’t it teach children more substantive material by co-opting the very elements that made ads so effective? In other words, if the neurotransmitters in their little brains could
snap, crackle, and pop
for a cereal commercial, couldn’t similar electrical activity be duplicated by teaching children the concepts of
over, around, under,
and
through
by using a song?

It was understood that young children were at times a captive audience in front of the tube. What led Cooney to a major conclusion in her report to the Carnegie Corporation was the acknowledgment that preschoolers were a
receptive
audience, as well as absorbent and attentive.

 

Whenever you hear “
Sesame Street
has been brought to you by the letter
T
and the number
8
,” think of Sarah Morrisett singing a jingle in her tutu.

Chapter Five

L
eland, Mississippi, had a bumper crop of cotton in 1936, the year Paul and Betty Henson welcomed a second son, James Maury, born in a hospital in nearby Greenville.

Paul Henson was a biologist for the U. S. Department of Agriculture, which operated a research station in Leland. Betty was a stay-at-home mother to the new baby and his older brother, Paul Jr. The second-born son was by nature shy and quietly inquisitive, a clever child who enjoyed the adoring attention of his maternal grandmother, known as “Dear,” while his mother doted on Paul Jr.
¹

A family photograph, taken when Jim Henson was perhaps ten, shows him kneeling in front of a coiled garden hose. He is wrapped in what appears to be a light blanket or bed sheet, with a makeshift turban atop his head. While tooting on a wooden flute, the boy is casting a hypnotic spell on the hose, convincingly propped off the grass to appear as a cobra. The young Jimmy Henson was already trying his hand at illusion and sight gags.
²

On sweltering summer days in Leland, Jimmy and a group of boys would meet at the Broad Street Bridge over Deer Creek, dangling their bare feet off the side or playing along the creek bend just beyond Leland Elementary School in a slightly downriver setting straight out of Mark Twain. “I was a Mississippi Tom Sawyer,” Henson once said. “I rarely wore shoes. It was an idyllic time. We had a beautiful big barn and we had a creek running in front of the house for fishing. I had a BB gun and I’d shoot at the water moccasins in the swamps just to wake them up.”
³

Every year, like magic, an evening chorus of peeps and croaks along the creek would announce the arrival of spring. At night, the boys would venture out with flashlights to spear bullfrogs with pronged poles, a ritual called frog gigging. After a successful amphibian hunt, someone would skin their slimy legs, dip them in egg yolk, dredge them through flour and bread crumbs, and deep-fry them.

Lelanders are righteously and emphatically certain that these experiences explain why Henson’s alter ego took the form of a frog. Like biological life itself, they say, the character rose from the primordial goop along the creek bank. They likewise claim that Henson’s boyhood friend, Kermit Scott, one of the bridge kids, provided the inspiration for the name. It’s a romanticized tale certainly worthy of Twain, but it is only as true as the citizens of Leland claim it to be, for a dig through the Henson archives reveals no clear confirmation of their contentions. Jim Henson is the only man who would know, and if anyone ever asked him, his best answer might have been
“Hmmmmmm.”

When Jimmy was in fifth grade, he left the swamps of Mississippi for the terra firma of suburban Hyattsville, Maryland, after his father accepted a government job in Washington. It was there, round about 1950, that the thirteen-year-old Jimmy made his international debut as a visual artist when a cartoon panel he illustrated and wrote appeared on a page in the
Christian Science Monitor
, the Boston-based daily newspaper. The primitively drawn gag features two chefs, one quite obese, standing before a pot with a protruding spoon. The openmouthed chef in the foreground, he of the slightly pendulous belly, asks, “Shall we toss it and call it a salad or cook it and call it a stew?”

It was also in that year that “I badgered my parents into buying a [TV] set,” Henson recalled. “I absolutely loved television. . . . I loved the idea that what you saw was taking place somewhere else at the same time.”
⁴

Among the programs Henson enjoyed most was
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
, an unscripted puppet show that originated in Chicago and aired week-nights on NBC. That it was topical and tart enough for adults while amusing enough for kids distinguished it as one of television’s first dinner-hour diversions for the entire family.

What the show offered was both old and new. Like a latter-day Americanized Punch and Judy, it played out on a classic mock proscenium stage, and it featured a recurring ensemble of familiar archetypes: a perplexed worrywart (Kukla), a blustery blowhard (Ollie), a haughty grand dame (Mme. Ooglepuss), and a Kentucky-fried Confederate (Colonel Cracky). Together, they constituted the Kuklapolitan Players, a troupe entirely manipulated and voiced by Burr Tillstrom, working unseen behind a scrim. Fran Allison, a winsome, willowy singer-actress, was front and center on the program, trading lines with the puppets. Extemporaneous and quick, she was comic foil and forgiving headmistress to Kukla and the bumptious Ollie, once described by
Time
magazine as “a one-toothed dragon whose preenings and posturings might have been conceived by Molière.”
⁵

His preoccupation with Kukla, Fran, and television led seventeen-year-old Jim Henson to the pages of the
Washington Post
on the morning of May 13, 1954. Someone had alerted him about a call for talent in that day’s paper, an item in Lawrence Laurent’s radio and television notes column. WTOP-TV personality Roy Meachum, the
Post
reported, “has started a search for youngsters twelve to fourteen years of age who can manipulate marionettes. Meachum has big plans, he says, and he wants to hear from any puppeteers he may have overlooked.”
⁶

Henson, who with the assistance of his school friend Russell Wall, had built a couple of cowboy puppets, Longhorn and Shorthorn, and another called Pierre the French Rat, hustled over to WTOP. Both were hired, and to their delight they saw this listing in the Saturday TV Highlights box in the June 19
Post
:

 

Alas, the joy was short-lived. A note in the Friday, June 25,
Evening Star
by “On the Air” columnist Harry MacArthur reported the imminent demise of
Junior Morning Show
. “Launched last Saturday, [it] will go back into drydock after tomorrow’s telecast. Reason: Discovery that the revision of the child labor law permitting children to appear on the stage here applies to [theater] and not televison. Three of the program’s participants were under fourteen and consequently could not get work permits. It will resume, says WTOP-TV program manager Tom Tausig, when suitable replacements of proper age, size, and weight can be found.”

The cancellation proved to be only a minor setback: in less than a year’s time, by the end of his second semester at the University of Maryland, Jim Henson would not only have his own daily television show in Washington, he would also meet his future wife and business partner, establish his own puppet repertory company (like Burr Tillstrom’s Kuklapolitans), and dream up his own Charlie McCarthy, a slightly snarky signature character who could say things Jim Henson (or Edgar Bergen) never would. Cut from a section of a discarded spring coat, Kermit became the unbuttoned Henson, a garment that became his altered ego.

One early evening in the spring of 1955, University of Maryland coed Jane Nebel was lingering over dinner with a friend when she caught a glimpse of the time. “Oh, dear,” she said. “We’re on the air.”

Jane was late, and not the kind of late like being delayed for a few extra minutes in traffic. This was late-for-your-own-wake late.

Time had just gotten away from Jane, as it often did. She smiled weakly and tried to reassure herself: “Jim won’t be upset or angry. He never is.”

Nebel was a senior at the College Park, Maryland, campus during the 1954-55 academic year when she met the man she would one day marry—Jim Henson, a shy, lanky freshman plagued by adolescent acne. The previous spring, Henson had graduated from Hyattsville’s new Northwestern High School, completed in 1952 and located just two miles south of the university campus. Nebel, from New York, had enrolled at Maryland in 1951.

Henson, who aspired to be a stage designer for theater and television, had declared a major in home economics, of all things. A puppetry teacher told him he would not have to take all the math and science required for a fine arts degree, and he’d be able to take more art courses if he switched over. Henson once explained, “The courses in advertising art, costume design, interior design—all of that stuff—were part of home ec.” Beyond the desired classes, there was a more primal motivation to switch majors. “I think there were six guys and five hundred girls [in the department]. . . . It was marvelous.”
⁷

Nebel had chosen the more academically rigorous requirements for a fine arts degree. Her father, Adabert Nebel, was a prominent astrologer who wrote under the pen name Dal Lee. In 1937, he became associate editor of
Astrology Guide
. A year later he was editor of
Your Personal Astrology
, another pulpy horoscope magazine.

After taking a puppetry class together, Henson asked Nebel if she would consider working with him at his after-school job. While other Maryland undergrads toiled at mind-numbing work-study assignments—scrubbing pots in the dining hall or licking envelopes in the bursar’s office—Henson was earning his pocket money as a freelance puppeteer at WRC, Washington’s NBC affiliate.

The exposure gained from appearing the previous summer on WTOP’s
Junior Morning Show
had proved beneficial. “The show only lasted a few weeks, but we were mentioned favorably in a couple of newspaper articles, so I took the puppets over to NBC and they started putting me on these little local shows,” Henson later said. “It was interesting and kind of fun to do—but I really wasn’t interested in puppetry then. When I was a kid, I never saw a puppet show, I never played with puppets or had any interest in them. It was just a means to an end. I did it to get on television.”
⁸

Henson was paid as little as five dollar per appearance for his work on Channel 4’s daytime shows, including
Circle 4 Ranch
with Cowboy Joe Campbell, and
Inga’s Angle,
a fifteen-minute food and fashion program featuring Norwegian-born model and newspaper columnist Inga Rundvold. In 1955, Inga was the lead-in for
Afternoon,
a live variety show with music from the Mel Clement Quartet and singers Jack Maggio and Tippi Stringer. Henson and Nebel worked together for the first time during appearances on
Afternoon
.

The program’s master of ceremonies was amiable studio announcer Mac McGarry, who at the time marveled to the local press about the improvisational abilities of his show’s nineteen-year-old puppeteer. “He comes up with material just by sitting down and thinking for a few minutes,” McGarry said back then.
Afternoon
’s producer-director Carl Degen was downright effusive: “The kid is positively a genius . . . absolutely amazing.”
⁹