“Puppetry,” he once said, “is a way of hiding.” At six foot three and perpetually bearded to cover acne scars, Henson was defined by bemusing and often baffling contradictions. He was shy by nature, yet his creations were explosively silly and spontaneous. Often reticent and contemplative, at times he eagerly played the Pied Piper, organizing one of New York’s most outrageous annual costume parties. He spoke of simple pleasures but had a taste for European casinos, coastal vacation homes, and four-star dining. He lived large but, as a proto-environmentalist, talked of protecting a small planet’s shrinking resources. He embraced and celebrated life exuberantly and spread acres of joy but suffered through at least one major depression after his fantasy film,
The Dark Crystal,
bombed at the box office and was dismissed by critics.
Henson was deeply unhappy and fatigued in the months leading up to his death. Many believed he sensed that he would not live to see grandchildren, pointing to a plan he had drawn up five years earlier for the public memorial service as evidence that he believed the end was near. It was included in letters left behind for each of his children, in which Henson indicated a burning curiosity about the afterlife and an eagerness to reconnect with the dead, and assured the children that he would be waiting for them “on the other side.” He also asked his survivors to bring everyone together for a few songs and stories, insisting that guests avoid wearing funereal black. As a son of the South and a jazz fancier, he requested that a New Orleans-style band play “When the Saints Go Marching In.” He requested that the proceedings be entertaining and light, hoping that friends and colleagues would provide laughter in large doses and silliness worthy of the Muppets.
Henson wrote the letter three years before he began working—without a contract—for The Walt Disney Company. Doing so, some believe, was the beginning of the end.
Disney CEO Michael D. Eisner waited for the proceedings to begin alongside Frank Wells, his No. 2 at the company. In the late 1980s, Eisner had been clever enough to see that Disney’s cast of classic characters aimed at the very young, such as Mickey Mouse and Goofy, were being slowly supplanted in children’s hearts by fresher, hipper icons. Eisner and Wells had pledged a huge pile of Disney dollars—a sum estimated to be between $100 million and $150 million—to purchase Henson’s production company and library of film and television properties. The price included ownership of the boisterous, satirical, and sometime sardonic puppet ensemble that had made
The Muppet Show
a worldwide sensation, but it did not—and would not—include the Muppets Henson had specifically created for
Sesame Street
.
Henson believed there was no entertainment company better suited than Disney to perpetuate such multidimensional characters as Miss Piggy, the porcine diva; Fozzie Bear, the clueless comic; and hectoring balcony critics Statler and Waldorf. Disney’s litigious history of protecting its characters is the stuff of Hollywood legend. Under Eisner, the company once sued the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences over an unauthorized Oscar appearance by an actress portraying Snow White.
Cooney knew Eisner to be cold, arrogant, and insistent when he was in pursuit of a creative property. She was not pleased with his predatory forays into
Sesame Street
. Her gut churned as she considered how miserable Eisner had made things for Henson in his final months. Henson’s gentle manner masked a steely shrewdness—you could not budge him if he didn’t want to be budged—but Eisner had been surprisingly relentless in the Henson campaign. Cooney—a courteous woman who had persuaded senators and top philanthropists to do her bidding, who had stared down cancer, and who was married to a private-equity mogul who could quite possibly arrange to buy the entire Disney company if push came to shove—was not intimidated by his tactics.
Cooney held Disney in high regard but regarded the company’s merchandising arms as competitors in the marketplace of character-licensed toys, games, and consumer goods. She was convinced that Eisner would not be satisfied until his deal with Henson was sweetened by ownership of the Sesame Muppets, which generated an estimated $15 million to $17 million annually in licensing and merchandising fees split between Sesame Workshop and Henson Associates, Inc. In 1969, Henson had waived his performance fee for
Sesame Street
in exchange for full ownership of his characters, agreeing later to split any revenue generated by them.
In time, both organizations depended on that revenue for survival. By 1990, CTW had long shed its dependence on government and philanthropic grants, gaining its financial independence by building and sustaining a formidable endowment. Henson Associates, notorious for going over budget on productions, stayed afloat thanks to the huge popularity of its characters and the public’s hunger for Muppet-licensed bed linens, apparel, computer games, action figures, books, CDs, and other products.
By 1989, after building his company from a husband-and-wife operation out of the trunk of his car into one of the world’s most recognized entertainment brands, Henson was eager to return to a simpler existence of creating and performing. Disney had offered a way to cash out, and a letter of intent, by which he would have sold his privately held company to the California-based entertainment and media colossus, was already signed.
But after months of legal process, during which Henson had commenced working for Disney without a consummated deal, lingering doubts began to plague him. As media analysts were hailing the merger-in-progress as “a business association made in entertainment heaven,” discord bubbled just beneath the surface at Disney Studios in Florida and California. Henson’s employees, accustomed to his benevolence, creative freedom, and camaraderie, were suffering massive culture shock in their day-to-day dealings within Disney’s rapacious negotiate-everything hierarchy. They referred to their new working environment as Mauschwitz.
Beyond that, Henson was beginning to chafe at provisions in the deal for his exclusive personal services and for the rights to any future characters he might create. These were not unreasonable demands from a company about to dump an armored carload of cash at his door. But regret clearly was setting in for a man who valued creative freedom and independence above all else. “Trapped” was the only word Cooney could use to describe how Henson felt, and she believed the whole situation was causing him immense grief and contributing to his lack of physical resistance. Henson felt that he would be Disney’s highly compensated but indentured servant for the rest of his life.
What the business-page pundits and entertainment insiders never quite sniffed out about the stalled marriage had its roots in Eisner’s covetous yen for the Sesame Muppets. Despite Henson’s refusals to discuss the matter, Eisner wouldn’t let up. Cooney recalled how early in the winter of 1990, Henson had invited her to attend what he described as a peace luncheon with Eisner, at which he wanted to put the matter to rest once and for all. She remembered how charming Eisner had been, how well the lunch was proceeding, until she looked over at Henson and saw that he had become upset over a stray remark of Eisner’s in which he discussed the Sesame Muppets as if he might own them. “There you go again,” Henson said to Eisner, blood rising up his neck. Cooney had never seen Henson that agitated.
It was that day that the dispute became bitterly personal. “It wasn’t about business anymore,” recalled Frank Oz, Henson’s longtime creative partner. “It was about what Jim believed in, the simplicity and purity of the characters. There was a bit of anger in him about this, and he was not an angry man.”
Henson believed that even though he owned the trademark to them, the
Sesame
characters really belonged to children, and he did not want those Muppets to be exploited. In his mind, they were in a special protected category and he was their caretaker. The thought of Eisner trying to hijack them bred no small amount of mistrust and ill will. “There was no way in hell that was going to happen,” recalled Oz.
According to Cooney, Henson came up with a plan in late winter and early spring of 1990, vowing to her that he would change all the paperwork necessary to ensure that ownership of the
Sesame Street
Muppets would be transferred to CTW upon his death. The split in licensing and merchandising would continue, but the trademark would rest with Cooney’s nonprofit corporation.
That Henson died before his intentions could be codified in a legally binding document was a bitter pill for Cooney to swallow. She knew that a time would come, very soon, when she would have to engage in a blink-first showdown with Eisner and the Disney machine over this issue. But today was not the day to dwell on that, no matter how the fear kept impinging on her mind.
Today was a day to remember and celebrate Jim.
Just then, the service began, not with an invocation but rather with the howling, growling strains of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, a Dixieland band flown in especially from New Orleans for the occasion—just the way Jim wanted. To the measured refrain of the old Negro spiritual “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” Jane Henson and her children led a twelve-minute processional as the dirge filled the cavernous holy space with the
blat
of a tuba, the
squawk
of a muted trumpet, the
squeal
of a clarinet. It was music meant to send the spirit of James Maury Henson soaring to that great good place.
Sesame Street
began as a flash of brilliance that struck like a bolt from the gods. Cooney was its mother of invention, while Lloyd N. Morrisett, a well-connected vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, was its financial godfather.
Sesame
’s moment of conception occurred at a dinner party at Cooney’s apartment, when Morrisett and his wife were discussing how their three-year-old daughter, Sarah, had become transfixed by television. She would sit in front of a test pattern at 6:30 a.m., waiting for the cartoons to appear at 7:00. It was the same thing millions of kids were doing all across the country, an image that confounded Cooney.
Within days of that dinner, Cooney, Morrisett, and three other contributors engaged in an outpouring of ideas on how to master the addictive qualities of television and do something good with them. “What if?” became their operative phrase. “What if you could create content for television that was both entertaining and instructive? What if it went down more like ice cream than spinach? What if we stopped complaining about the banality we are allowing our children to see and did something about it?”
Over the summer of 1967, Cooney would crisscross the country testing the idea of a daily show for preschoolers that would teach basic school-readiness concepts. With her confident and persuasive writing style, the former reporter, drew up a proposal that, with Morrisett’s skillful maneuvering and networking, secured a $1 million grant from Carnegie and millions more from the federal government, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Ford Foundation.
Then, with her funds secured, Cooney began to assemble her team, a talent roundup that would, after
Sesame
’s first season, result in three Emmys, a Peabody, and the cover of
Time.
Henson loped in to provide the missing alchemy in the summer of 1969. Test audiences of preschoolers in Philadelphia had rejected live-action sequences shot on a mock urban street, with trash cans on the curb and laundry hanging from tenement windows. But that was before Henson began sketching a bird puppet that would be so oversized that a six-foot-tall man, hiding within it, would be required to work its long neck and mouth with an outstretched arm. And that was before the idea arose to have a contrarian, ornery puppet pop up from inside one of those trash cans and provide a grouch’s view of everyday life. And that was before the idea arose to allow two best-friend puppets—one playful and upbeat, one overearnest and square—to provide comedy in the classic mode of Laurel and Hardy, Burns and Allen, Martin and Lewis. In the history of show business, there probably never was a straighter straight man than banana-yellow Bert, the paper clip collector and pigeon fancier.
It was Henson who helped the grandest and most ambitious experiment in children’s television find its legs. That those legs were yellow and attached to a curious eight-foot canary is not the oddest part of the story, by a long shot.
Henson’s touch helped definitively establish
Sesame Street’
s “delicate balance between fun and learning,” as he once described it. Cooney understood from the show’s earliest days, back before it became a brand of excellence here and around the globe, that using television to teach the alphabet and counting to twenty would have been a noble effort, but not nearly as much fun, without him. Henson’s influence also helped to create the two-tiered audience that was essential to
Sesame
’s vast and immediate appeal. Kids watched in rapture, but parents watched, too, often laughing to the winking references to pop culture, song parodies, and outrageous puns that came out of the mouths of the Muppets.
Henson was the key, but he wasn’t the only visionary among the early architects of
Sesame Street
. There was a whole gang of them, many of whom, curiously, had first names beginning with
J,
the letter that has acquired a near-mystical stature through the thirty-nine years the show has aired on PBS.
Besides Joan Cooney and Jim Henson there was the seductively handsome, multitalented Jon Stone, who as writer, director, and producer drew the cast and crew under his spell and established a creative atmosphere of risk and trust.
There was scriptwriter-composer-lyricist-poet Jeff Moss, a sometimes difficult but always passionate contributor to the show.
Finally, there was Joe Raposo, the musical prodigy who provided
Sesame Street
with its signature sound and sing-along melodies that endure to this day.