Street Gang (18 page)

Stone and Owen were unsure how to proceed, but they took the advice of Marvin Josephson, a powerful New York-based agent who suggested they find a way to cost Universal some cash. Stone recalled Josephson saying, “Money is at the core of everything in this business. Not art, not comedy, not fame. If you cost them money, they’ll be glad to see the last of you.”

A plan emerged. “Beverley made it known how unhappy she was, and this unhappiness began to manifest itself in bouts of physical illness, throwing up in the dressing room, being unable to get to the set on time, interrupting takes with spontaneous bouts of tears.”

After thirteen weeks, the part of Marilyn was recast, and Owen was back in New York. She married Stone in June 1966, and the couple moved to an A-frame in Vermont, where Stone split his time between working on the house and developing scripts.

Their daughter, Polly, was born the following November, a child whose little handprints were all over
Sesame Streeet.

Chapter Seven

C
hester and Margaret Spinney spent Christmas Day, 1933, awaiting the birth of their third child. What a blessing it would be for the baby to arrive on that most joyous of all days! But as the hours ticked by, with Margaret abed in the dining room of their home in Waltham, Massachusetts, the baby’s trip through the birth canal had stalled. Chester reassured Margaret that everything would be fine, but the delay was terribly unsettling for husband and wife, and for good reason.

In another room slept two Spinney sons: seventeen-month-old Donald and his four-year-old brother, David. On the night David was born in 1929, the doctor who was expected to perform the delivery opted to linger at a party, rather than sit waiting at the bedside of a woman who might take another twenty-four hours to deliver. Instead, he dispatched a midwife. Upon arrival, when the woman saw how far along things were, she tied Margaret’s legs together, hoping to hold back delivery until the doctor could appear. Within Margaret’s swollen belly, a presumably healthy boy was thrust into distress. The force of the baby’s skull ramming the pelvic bone left the child crippled for life with cerebral palsy.

That tragedy was what haunted the Spinneys on the Christmas Eve that Caroll Edwin Spinney—the man who would become the childlike Big Bird—was born.

 

Chester, a frugal and sometimes obstinate New Englander, made tiny screws at the Waltham watch factory, the town’s pride and major employer. His upbringing in Eastport, Maine, had been severe, thanks to a storybook-cruel stepmother and a Scots father with a volatile temper that was forever scarring Chester and his siblings.

Margaret’s childhood in Great Britain and Canada was, if anything, even worse. Born desperately poor in Bolton, England, she was taken in at age two by an aunt and uncle in Cornwall, an unkind couple who doted on their misbehaving son while mistreating their niece. Young Margaret was tormented by her rambunctious younger cousin Arthur. Once, while chasing her around the backyard with a stick, he speared her in the cheek with its whittled point. Not only did Margaret’s aunt refuse to tend to the puncture wound, she sent the young girl to bed without supper. Her justification for punishing the victim was “Arthur warned you to get out of the way. You didn’t listen.”

When Margaret was eight, the family boarded a ship bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia. Margaret was never to see her parents again, and she spent the remainder of her childhood as an unpaid scullery maid. She was forbidden to approach neighbors and was taken out of school in the ninth grade. The only Christmas celebration she ever attended was spoiled when her relations departed prematurely after Arthur threw a tantrum at the host’s home. Left under a lit Christmas tree was an unopened present for Margaret, but she did manage to grab a tiny pine bough and brought it home, fashioning decorations for it from tinfoil.

At seventeen, after the death of her uncle, Margaret moved to a boardinghouse in Concord, Massachusetts, with her aunt and cousin. She worked the day shift at the watch factory and took art classes at night, longing for the time when she could live independently. It soon came.

One day, while she was bathing at Walden Pond, a young man named Chester Spinney playfully splashed her, much to her annoyance, as it ruined her perm. Family lore has it that the first word Margaret said to her future husband was, “Fresh!”

When she first arrived in Concord, Margaret had signed up for art classes. Later, seeing an ad in the
Boston Globe
announcing an opening for a fashion illustrator at the newspaper, she immediately applied, but heard nothing. A few weeks later, a woman at the boardinghouse cavalierly delivered an old phone message. “By the way,” she said to Margaret, “Your boyfriend Roger called, Roger something from the
Boston Globe
.” Margaret ran for the telephone and dialed the newspaper.

“I thought you weren’t interested,” Roger said; the position had been filled. Margaret cursed the fates, and such an employment opportunity never came again. Margaret married Chester in 1925, then Donald and David came along, and a third son completed the family in the predawn hours of December 26, 1933. Caroll Spinney was never late for a Christmas celebration again.

The name choice was his mother’s, after she had decided against her initial choice, Douglas. “She cruelly named me Caroll, as in Christmas carol. I like it now, but [growing up] it was like being a boy named Sue.”
¹

Spinney’s life began at the Depression’s nadir, the year 150,000 onlookers at the U.S. Capitol gathered to witness President Roosevelt sworn in as president. When he was six or so, his mother began creating costumes and playthings for nursery school kids at the Green Acres School in Waltham, including a paisley elephant that fit over two children, back and front. It was during a fair at that school in 1940 that Caroll attended his first puppet show.

By second grade Spinney weighed only forty-two pounds and answered to the nickname Peewee. At that early age, he demonstrated artistic talent and was encouraged by his mother to follow his imagination without inhibition. He was a bit of a showman. His first paid gig came while performing under a proscenium-arched doorway at home, mimicking a song-and-dance routine from a Shirley Temple movie. “My cousin Caroll, who I was named after, applauded and gave me fifty cents,” Spinney said. “A fifty-cent piece looks
this
big when you are only four or five. It was the most money I’d ever seen in my life. It would have taken me to the movies five weeks in a row when I was a little older.”

In 1940, the Spinneys moved from industrial Waltham to a nine-room house on Main Street in Acton, purchased for sixteen hundred dollars. “It was a lovely country town with horse wagons pulling hay and a Baker electric automobile running around,” Spinney recalls. His father commuted the fifteen miles to the watch factory, even during the gas-rationing days of World War II. “Watches were considered crucial by the government, so he got more coupons than he needed,” Spinney said. “He sold them on the black market, as many people did in those days. Someone would say, ‘I have no way to get gas’ and my father would reply, ‘Here’s two coupons. Give me a dollar.’ ”

When Spinney was eight, he bought a monkey puppet for a nickel at a rummage sale in Acton. Then, as a Christmas gift, his mother fashioned a snake puppet for him from a length of green flannel stuffed with batting. With that, Spinney set about building a theater in his family’s barn from orange crates, boards, and logs. His first audience in the barn theater—a mix of adults and children—paid an admission of two cents. “I can’t imagine what I did with only the monkey and the snake to keep people entertained for half an hour. But as I recall, everyone left with smiles on their faces.”

For the following Christmas, his mother spent long hours in the local library researching the raucous, irreverent history of Punch and Judy. As a child, Margaret had seen a version of Punch and Judy performed in Black-pool, England, and she had introduced her youngest son to their violent slapstick. As a combination Christmas-birthday gift, Margaret built eight handmade replicas of the characters for Caroll, and, with the assistance of his older brother, Donald, a collapsible puppet stage. “Having that Punch and Judy show was the beginning of finally having a repertoire of shows,” Spinney said. “My mother wrote them all.” Like the radio actors he so admired, Spinney worked on comic voices, a talent that would expand as he matured. Naturally, his characters all had tinges of a Boston accent. If he was doing a ghost, it would sound like a ghoul from Gloucester.

When Spinney was in seventh grade, his English teacher paid him two dollars to bring his puppets to a child’s birthday party in Concord. The teacher agreed to turn script pages for him, but afterward chastised him for being unprofessional, telling him, “Don’t you ever give that show again without memorizing it.” It would not be the last time Spinney would be criticized for relying on a script. Other bookings followed, and by sixteen he was appearing regularly at churches, fraternal lodges, and private parties. “I had this desire to perform,” Spinney said. “The great thing about puppets is that you can be several characters at the same time, and they interact. When I’d hear the response from the audience, I’d say, ‘This is for me.’ I used to be accused of being a showoff on occasion, but I was very insecure. I never had any serious desire to be an actor, to be seen by the audience.”

 

One afternoon in 1947 Spinney sped through the streets of Acton on his bicycle. It was nearing 5:00 p.m. and he did not want to arrive late for the gathering at Dr. Forbes’s house. In his mind, he was breaking the sound barrier, thunderous booms trailing in his wake.

Spinney never lacked for imagination, due in part to his devotion to the theater-of-the-mind that was radio. He’d sit cross-legged on the floor and listen to Edgar Bergen and his wisecracking dummy, Charlie McCarthy; to George Burns and his daffy spouse, Gracie Allen; to
Blondie
and
Henry Aldrich
. Radio provided daily stimuli. “All [a character] would have to do is say, ‘Gee, Billy, look at that castle.
Whooo.
Why, it goes right up into the clouds,’ and I would see that castle,” Spinney said. “Later, when TV started, they couldn’t afford to build a castle that went up in the clouds. It would look crappy.” But in postwar Boston, a new era in home entertainment was dawning. “TV became big all of a sudden and radio was over,” Spinney said, with the tone of regret one might use to describe the loss of a best friend.

Spinney was twelve on that afternoon in ’47, a glorious time to be a pre-teen. The lean years were over, America was on the upswing, and there seemed to be an explosion of new things to see and think about in the Boston area, not the least of which was television. Back in 1940, Spinney had seen a demonstration of the technology at the New York World’s Fair, then in its extended second year. “There was a lady singing on this gray picture on a twelve-inch screen,” he recalled. “The box for the screen was huge, and I couldn’t quite understand it at first. ‘How come she’s in there and I’m seeing it right now?’ ” It seemed miraculous.

Seven years later, Dr. Forbes invited Spinney and some neighborhood friends to see a local television show on the physician’s newly purchased set, the first one in town. Spinney arrived just in time to see a few minutes of a children’s show on WBZ, Channel 4. “There was a guy with a swan puppet,” he recalled. “Swans are big in Boston, like the swan boats on Boston Common. But [the puppet] was like an oven mitt, and it was just flapping along. The guy did not know how to lip-synch.” The performance was underwhelming, and as Spinney rode home, he told himself that he could already do better than that guy, muttering, “If
he
could get a show . . .”

“I decided right then. That’s it, I’m going to be on television when I grow up,” Spinney said. “Even before that, I had thought that TV would be great for puppets, because puppet theaters were a lot like TV screens. I went home and said to my mom, ‘I saw television today.’ And she said, ‘What did you think?’ I said, ‘Well, it was great, but I’ve decided that someday I’m going to be on the
best
kids’ TV show.’ ”

The Spinneys became the second family in town to have TV, a shocking purchase for “the biggest tightwad in the world,” as Spinney described his father.“He always bragged about being Scotch and then went about proving it.

“The television had a seven-inch screen with a big bubble magnifier in front of it,” he said. “People would drive for miles around to see it. Sometimes there would be as many as thirty people trying to see that seven-inch screen. So we all had to sit in a triangle within the range of that bubble. People sat behind the couch, looking over people’s shoulders. But we had to watch what my father decided to watch. We could not change the station unless he wasn’t watching.”

Chester’s alpha-male lording over of the TV dial proved to be both obstinate and ignorant, Spinney recalled.“In 1950, when
I Love Lucy
came to TV, I said, ‘The kids are all talking about [this show]. We’ve got to watch it!’ My father said, ‘
I Love Lucy
? I don’t want a love movie. I wouldn’t like it with a name like that.’

“I said, ‘No, I
know
you’d like it, Dad. I know what you like and it’s funny.’ He said, ‘No, I wouldn’t!’ ”

Chester the grouch, the wary watchmaker, eventually welcomed the Ricardos into his living room when “finally the guys at work said, ‘Boy, is that show funny.’ Then he would tune in,” Spinney said.

 

Chester Spinney vowed that he would not contribute a single penny toward an art school education for his youngest son. “He didn’t want me to go to college,” Caroll Spinney said. “He wanted me to work in the watch factory.” As a high school student, Spinney had demonstrated a fine aptitude for drawing, as his mother had. But his father was unimpressed.

Spinney needed to raise $250 to cover tuition at the School of Practical Art. Coming up with it was difficult, he recalled. “If you got a job, you only made fifty-five cents an hour—if you were lucky.” So, with help from his father’s connections, he landed a position at the Waltham clock factory manufacturing axels for gears. As a machinist, he was a fine artist. “I remember running the lathe right through my thumb,” he said, an excruciating mishap. But he bandaged it up and returned to his post within a half hour, as nothing was going to get in the way of his determination to attend art school. “I managed to come up with the money,” he said.