Street Gang (16 page)

By then, the Hensons were earning a handsome living producing television commercials with the Muppets, a burgeoning business they had started two years earlier. In December of 1959, the
Christian Science Monitor
speculated that the couple had grossed a hundred thousand dollars that year. “Success obviously has not spoiled Mr. and Mrs. James Maury Henson, designers and animators of the television Muppets of
Sam and Friends
,” the article said. “Success has been swift . . . but money is not a topic they care to discuss. Jane Henson said, ‘Money cannot measure success or happiness.’ ”
¹⁸

In 1960 the Puppeteers of America annual convention was held in Detroit, to which the Hensons drove in a Rolls-Royce with a sunroof. Along for the ride was eight-week-old daughter Lisa, the first of five Henson children. The highlight of the trip was the chance to meet Burr Tillstrom. He and the Hensons hit it off famously. The story goes that Jim asked Tillstrom to drive the Rolls through the city, enabling him to pop Kermit up through the roof to say “Hi, ho, there” to the Motor City. Among those who witnessed this impromptu, one-car parade were California puppeteers Mike and Frances Oznowicz, whose high-school-age son, Frank, was showing as much aptitude in puppetry as Jim Henson had eight years prior. Henson met Frank at the 1961 Puppeteers convention in Fairmont, California, near Oakland. In a sense, it was the day that Ernie met Bert.

At the Fairmont gathering Henson approached witty writer-performer Jerry Juhl with an offer to replace Jane Henson on
Sam and Friends
. Jane was pregnant with their second child, daughter Cheryl, and wanted to retire from performing. The idea sat well with Jim.

Juhl, who had worked on a children’s show in San Jose, knew of the Muppets only by reputation, and did not know Henson at all. It wasn’t until Henson opened a black box from the tailgate of his new station wagon that Juhl became fully intrigued. “The things that he brought out of that box seemed to me to be like magical presences, like totems—but funnier,” he once said. “One after the other Jim pulled them out of the box, put them on his hand, and brought them to life. Who
was
this Henson guy? These things weren’t even puppets—not as I had ever seen or defined them. This guy was like a sailor who had studied the compass and found that there was a fifth direction in which one could sail. When he offered me a berth on the ship, I signed on.”
¹⁹

Sam and Friends
signed off in 1961, after winning a local Emmy for outstanding television entertainment. By then, the Muppets were making regular appearances on the
Today
show, and business operations had moved from Washington to New York City, where Henson and Juhl worked in cramped quarters in a three-room office on East fifty-third Street.
²⁰

The Muppets were by now appearing in commercials for a range of consumer goods that included Wilson Certified Meats, Ivory Snow, Gleem toothpaste, Royal Crown Cola, and Purina Dog Chow. The ads for Purina, the St. Louis-based pet foods giant, featured a flop-eared, self-deprecating, worldly wise mutt named Rowlf. Voiced by Jim Henson as the kind of guy who would listen to your troubles through the slats of the backyard fence, Rowlf was the first Muppet built by puppet designer Don Sahlin. Perhaps more than anyone who would work for the Muppets, Sahlin had an uncanny ability to intuit and decode Henson’s wishes. He transformed Henson’s rough sketches—virtually napkin scribbles—into fully realized characters. Beyond that, Sahlin was even zanier than the Muppets he worked on.

Six months after Sahlin’s arrival, high school grad Frank Oznowicz joined the Muppets. Before the decade was over, Frank Oz—as he would later be known—would become half of one of the greatest duos in comedy history, a master puppeteer, and, most important of all, Bert, Cookie Monster, and Grover, three characters for the ages on
Sesame Street
.

 

In 1965, Henson began filming commercials for La Choy, purveyors of canned, ready-to-eat Americanized Chinese food. For the campaign, Henson designed a lumbering, life-size dragon fully capable of locomotion. Counting the chef’s hat that he wore as a crown, the La Choy Dragon stood considerably taller than the actors hired to play against him. Operating from within the dragon, Frank Oz could swagger, flail its arms, shake its head, crane its neck, and, with the assistance of an aide with a blow-torch, breathe fire. One particularly boisterous commercial featured a Cub Scout and his mother at the supermarket.

 

The blond actress cast as the startled shopper was Jon Stone’s girlfriend, Beverley Owen.

Without knowing it, everyone on the set that day took one step closer to
Sesame Street.

Chapter Six

J
on Stone and Tom Whedon remained comrades-in-arms long after the drunken night they told off Bob Keeshan at the steak house.

As newly minted writing partners their first big break came when they met Fred Silverman, a CBS vice president fresh out of Syracuse University. At twenty-six, Silverman had been handed responsibility for children’s shows at CBS, under the network’s senior vice president for programming, Michael Dann. Still stinging from Newton Minow’s complaints about the paucity of quality television for children, Dann and Silverman were hurrying a series into production to placate the FCC. Their new
CBS Children’s Film Festival
, sponsored by Xerox, would showcase children’s films from around the world. Silverman needed capable hands to arrange for the films to be dubbed and edited and to write scripts and commercials for the hosts of the series. That Stone and Whedon had previously worked with puppets gave them an edge: Burr Tillstrom had already signed to host the series, along with Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.

Stone and Whedon signed on, commuting to Tillstrom’s hometown of Chicago, where the show’s inserts were produced at WBBM, the city’s landmark CBS affiliate. At first, the assignment was a delight. “Burr and Fran took us under their wings at once, showing us Burr’s beloved Chicago, dining us at the Pump Room (always at table one, the most visible one just outside the entrance), and telling us countless stories about the old days,” Stone said.

It’s worth a slight detour to share some of those tales, for they have an indirect bearing on the history of
Sesame Street
.

In 1936, the year Jim Henson was born, a slightly gap-toothed single man attended a Chicago performance of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, featuring Tamara Toumanova. Luminous, dark-haired Toumanova had joined the dance company at puberty and was now one of the internationally known “baby ballerinas” of the Ballets Russes, along with Irina Baronova and Tatiana Riabouchinska. For a spell in the 1930s, the three teens were the toast of Europe.

Toumanova’s performance left the Chicago audience members enraptured, none more so than Franklin Burr Tillstrom, the blue-eyed gentleman waiting—more than a bit nervously—to have a word with the dancer. Through luck and pluck, he had been invited to go backstage.

Tillstrom, an ardent bicyclist and swimmer, cut a fine athletic profile. In the parlance of the day, he was a swell guy, a stylishly dressed, neatly groomed, exquisitely polite, mostly happy fella who lived with his parents, Dr. Burt Tillstrom, a chiropodist, and his wife, Alice, in an apartment on Chicago’s North Side. Summers were spent at grandparents’ homes in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where, as youngsters, Burr and his brother, Dick, were encouraged to hike, sail, and explore. When Dr. Tillstrom joined the family on weekends, he would read classic children’s literature to his sons or spin fanciful tales of his own making during their walks in the woods.

Young Burr was precocious and theatrical. “As a child, I always tried to mimic performances and movies I saw with small figures, stuffed teddy bears, dolls, anything I could make move.”
¹
One day, while home sick, Burr staged a puppet show for the neighborhood children, using the windowsill of their ground-floor apartment as his stage. By fourteen, he had an entire act starring handcrafted marionettes he’d built at home. One of his first professional appearances was at a lawn party; he was paid $8.10 for a puppet performance of “Rip Van Winkle.”
²

After graduation from Chicago’s Senn High School, Tillstrom accepted a scholarship to the University of Chicago, from which, to the dismay of his parents, he dropped out after a year to pursue show business. After failing to get work as an actor or radio performer, Tillstrom took a job with the Chicago Park District. The city agency had started a puppet theater, with funding from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), President Roosevelt’s massive New Deal relief program to provide income to the unemployed. Along with the construction of some 650,000 miles of roads, 125,000 buildings, and 78,000 bridges, the WPA also allocated 7 percent of its funding to arts projects across the continent, putting writers, painters, and puppeteers back to work. While building characters for the puppet theater, Tillstrom carved a character with rosy cheeks, a red door-knob nose, upholstery-tack eyes, arched brows, and an oval mouth that, depending on the situation, could express astonishment, bewilderment, or bedevilment, or a mixture of the three. The puppet had the startled look of being sprung from a jack-in-the-box.

Until the night of the ballet, the puppet had no name. But then fate stepped in, wearing a tutu. As Tillstrom was ushered in to meet Miss Toumanova, the dancer was facing her dressing-room mirror. Tillstrom, suddenly knock-kneed, needed a drink. But Toumanova, whose mother accompanied her on tour, was chatty and charming around her handsome guest. While Toumanova primped at her dressing-room mirror, Tillstrom reached inside a green paper bag he was holding, dipped down, and, using a seat back as an impromptu stage, revealed the puppet sprite just over the dancer’s shoulder. “Ah, kukla,” she said, and sighed, with a slight tilt of the head. In Russian,
kukla
means “doll.”

Thus was christened the wise, worried, whiny, self-aware, slightly sarcastic, bald, blunt Kukla, a puppet who became a household name in 1940s and 1950s America—and Tillstrom’s right-hand man and second self. For laughs, Tillstrom began to take Kukla along to parties, allowing the puppet to sass friends in a way he never could. “Kukla was really smart with people. When I was too young or too ignorant to have an answer, Kukla took over.”
³

The party performances led to bookings at fairs, night clubs, and local theaters. To add an edge of satire and conflict, Tillstrom’s puppet repertory company—the Kuklapolitan Players—expanded with the addition of Madame Ophelia Ooglepuss, a delusional diva, and Ollie, the impetuous dragon with a leopard-skin neck.

In 1939, Tillstrom turned down a chance to tour Europe with his puppets, electing instead to take an offer to manage a marionette theater at Chicago’s Marshall Field and Company department store. Tillstrom gave Saturday morning performances at the landmark emporium, where the motto was: “Give the lady what she wants.”

When General Sarnoff’s latest electronic marvel, the television, arrived at Marshall Field’s in 1939, Tillstrom begged RCA and store management to add his puppets to a closed-circuit demonstration telecast. With urging from the audio and video engineers, who rather enjoyed Kukla’s hectoring, the bigwigs acquiesced, and the televised puppets proved to have surprising dimensionality, immediacy, and rapport with the hosts of the demo, well-known local radio personalities Garry Moore and Durwood Kirby.

The impromptu audition led RCA to invite Tillstrom and his troupe to demonstrate television at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. “Kukla and Ollie would be announced by a very straight announcer type,” Tillstrom said. “I used to get Kukla up to heckle [him]. . . . There were all sorts of lovely actresses and models, acting as hostesses to explain this new medium of television to the people. Eventually I began to use them [in the act].”
⁴
Tillstom might have been ready for prime time, but the outbreak of World War II slowed the development of the new medium almost to a halt.

After the war, as TV programming was slowly becoming available in Chicago, Captain Bill Eddy, director of station WBKB, approached Tillstrom to create an hour-long children’s TV show. As Max Wilk noted in 1976, there were some three thousand sets in Chicago, but most of them were in taverns and saloons. “They wanted television to be brought into the home and decided that the Kuklapolitans would be just the right choice for that. We were contracted to do thirteen weeks, Tillstrom said.”
⁵
The thought of delivering a daily block of live entertainment made Tillstrom shiver; he had no earthly idea what format the show should take or who should write for it.

“I’ll get you all the producers and writers you need,” Eddy said.

“What would I do with writers?” Tillstrom asked. “With my hands full of puppets, I couldn’t read a script if I had one.”

“Well, what
do
you need?” Eddy asked.