Street Gang (27 page)

 

Whenever the subject turned to the remarkable way things just seemed to work out in the formative years of
Sesame Street
, Joan Cooney liked to quote E. B. White. “White said, ‘If you’re going to be in New York, be prepared to be lucky,’ and we were always prepared,” Cooney said. “We took advantage of it when it came over the transom and we did careful planning so that we could use the luck when it happened. We were always prepared to be lucky.”

That she was able to lure Connell, Gibbon, and Stone back into the fold of children’s television was probably more attributable to her recruiting abilities than to karma, but it was her good fortune that they were open to her pitch and available. “Had I come to them before or after that golden moment, they might not have been,” Cooney said. “CTW has been a place where miracles have happened over and over again, and I count these hires among them.”

The three colleagues were wildly unalike, constitutionally and attitudinally. But they shared the essential quality of a hungry inquisitiveness, and each was humble enough to admit that he actually knew little about children, beyond what his better instincts told him. During their days working on
Captain Kangaroo,
they had relied on intuition, common sense, and the dictates of Bob Keeshan. Much more would be expected of them—required, in fact—as they shaped
Sesame Street
in the extraordinary fifteen months leading to its launch, a generous research and development period that no other children’s show had ever enjoyed.

“Quite by accident, we each drifted into our particular areas of interest,” said Stone, who assumed responsibility for the show’s writing, casting, and format, while Connell took charge of animation—in part because of his familiarity with that end of the entertainment industry in New York and California. Gibbon became the chief liaison between the production group and the educational community, largely because of his affinity for translating the arcane language of education research into plain English.

In concert with Cooney, research director Ed Palmer, advisory board chairman Gerry Lesser, and the production team all zeroed in on a simplified list of teaching goals for a show targeted at three- to five-year-olds. Reducing the number to only a handful came as a suggestion from Frank Pace, the CPB’s chairman of the board: “I’m going to give you a piece of advice. Select five things that you know you can teach and teach them. Don’t try to do more than that. Show you can do
something
before you try to do
everything
.”

Lesser agreed. “Let’s bet our asterisks on the most important things to teach,” he said, suggesting that the show should attempt to get children to learn how to recognize the twenty-six letters in the alphabet by their sound and shape and train them to recite the ABCs. The curriculum would also strive to teach viewers how to count from one to ten and likewise recognize each of those numbers by its sound and shape. “If anything, we undershot our goals in the first year,” Cooney recalled, “but Frank Pace’s advice was just what we needed to hear.”

 

Cooney’s mantra to the production team during the summer of ’68 was to create television that would be hip, fast, funny, and, whenever possible, tuneful in a way that reflected the times. “Music was relevant to the whole period,” Cooney said. She recalled thinking,
We can’t get the inner-city kids if we can’t reflect what’s going on
.
¹

Cooney’s frequent reference point for hip, fast, and funny television that summer was a wildly popular prime-time comedy hour that viewers in the age group two to six had been watching in droves since its series debut in January. “They were viewing it because their parents were,” Cooney said. “They didn’t get all the humor, but they got something.”

Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
first appeared as an NBC special on September 9, 1967. Slotted in the hour leading in to the Miss America finals from Atlantic City,
Laugh-In
was a long-shot attempt to draw a younger audience to watch TV on a Saturday night. In the mid-1960s, as the quake of counterculture rumbled underfoot, the Saturday prime-time lineup on all three networks was almost hopelessly square. The creaky schedules were geared to wives in flannel robes and husbands with pot bellies, each tipped back in the Barcalounger with the blue-gray flicker of
The Lawrence Welk Show
and
The Hollywood Palace
somewhere south of their feet.

Laugh-In
featured some of the oldest comedy conventions known to man—pratfalls, puns, blackouts, recurring gags, even
knock-knock
jokes. But it spun them around in such a dizzying satirical swirl that it made it all seem new again.
Laugh-In
loosened granny’s dentures with its rapid pace, cheeky satire, and pulsating beat. It made Grandpa’s eyes snap open at the sight of gyrating go-go girls, not the least of whom was a giggling blonde in a bikini and body paint whose biggest gig before this one had been working as a dancer at a family-style theater-in-the-round called Melodyland, just across the street from Disneyland. On the Sunday morning after the
Laugh-In
special aired, worshipers on church steps and the less devout in doughnut shops were talking more about Miss Goldie Hawn than Miss America.

NBC moved quickly to schedule
Laugh-In
as a midseason replacement, where it just as quickly became a white-hot hit, and where its rapid-fire pace and freshness proved to be a model for how
Sesame Street
would be directed and edited.

Second to
Laugh-In
in buzz that TV season was ABC’s
Batman
, a goofy, spoofy take on the Caped Crusader that draped the once shadowy crime fighter from Detective Comics in the exaggerated Pop Art funny-papers hues of the 1960s.
Batman
’s irreverence appealed to the
Sesame Street
production team, as did its ability to please two audiences simultaneously. Children saw it as a comic book come to life, complete with thought-balloon punctuation (
Pow!
). Adults enjoyed its camp sensibility, its visual references to the art of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, and its slinky villainesses. More than one adolescent boy caught cat-scratch fever from watching Julie Newmar as Catwoman, the feline femme fatale.

Both shows caused TV executives to reconsider what they thought they knew about the medium. For her part, Cooney understood the risk of trying to go head-to-head against big-budget network programs. She told columnist Sidney Fields of the New York
Daily News
that mounting a show for kids that could compete with the youthful programming suddenly appearing on commercial TV would be tricky. Combining the two, she said, was a possibility, “but the wedding was going to be big and expensive. We’d have to compete with the loud noise, mad music, and strong wine the kids were getting on commercial shows.” Plus, she added, “A half hour of
Batman
costs ninety thousand dollars.”
²

Nevertheless, she said, “I want [
Sesame Street
] to jump and move fast and feel and sound like 1969, because kids are turned on visually.”

She knew it was pointless to ignore the visual language of
Laugh-In
and
Batman
and other shows because, in that unique way television has of insinuating itself into the private worlds of its viewers, the programs had already struck a chord and become part of the lives of millions. As Cooney told a reporter from
Saturday Review
, “TV has become the new reality. Kids know more about
Batman
than they know about what is going on in their own homes.”
³

Jon Stone figured the odds of success for the preschool show would rise geometrically if he could hook adults into watching it with their children, as with
Batman
and
Laugh-In
. He could think of no better way to build that two-tiered audience than to enlist the aid of his bohemian buddy, Jim Henson. Whenever the Muppets appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
they simultaneously delighted kids and fractured adults.

In his memoir, Jon Stone wrote this about the efforts made by the production team to guarantee that Jim Henson was on board:

 

Henson’s comedy was once described by Muppet writer-performer Jerry Juhl as “affectionate anarchy,” a term that also could have been applied to the radio work of Edgar Bergen, Jack Benny, Bob and Ray, and Stan Freberg. Because Henson and Stone were children of radio’s golden age, in adulthood they both sought ways to provide contemporary families with a reason to sit around and be entertained, just as many once had in front of a full-throated Philco floor model.

As keepers of the flame, Stone and Henson drew upon countless radio conventions and vestiges of vaudeville in the show’s early years. Bert and Ernie—straight man and comic, target and provocateur—were descendants of Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis. And, as we shall see, the hilarious team of Chet O’Brien and his brother Snooks—identical-twin stage managers for
Sesame Street
—were a living link to vaudeville and the radio kings of comedy who conquered early television.

 

Connell, Gibbon, and Stone were so set on signing Jim Henson for their new show that they made a pact: “If we can’t get Henson,” they swore, “then we just won’t have puppets.”

“The name Jim Henson probably passed Jon’s lips first,” Cooney said. “I hadn’t remembered the name at first. I’d blanked it out, but then a lightbulb went on. When I was doing the study for Carnegie, my friend Edith Zornow called me and said, ‘Joan, I want you to come with me to the Johnny Victor theater to see a screening of the commercials done by a guy named Jim Henson.’ I went to the . . . theater and was on the floor. I couldn’t believe puppets could be so hip and funny.”

“When I realized who Jon was talking about—the puppeteer whose commercials made me fall over laughing—I was thrilled.”

It was Cooney who negotiated the first deal Henson made with CTW. His compensation request was modest by show-business standards, perhaps an accommodation made to a fledgling nonprofit enterprise. But Henson not only made sure that the trademark for any Muppets created for the show would remain with his company, he also insisted that any future revenues generated by the licensing and merchandising of those characters would be split between him and CTW.

By any reckoning, it was a win-win arrangement. The character revenues would fill Henson’s coffers for twenty years, providing a renewable and dependable flow of cash that proved essential to the stability of his entrepreneurial, unconventional company. For CTW, signing Henson was not only the single most important decision in
Sesame Street
history, it was also the keystone to success for the entire Workshop.

 

Not surprisingly, Cooney, the former network publicist, had definite ideas about whom she wanted handing CTW public relations. “It was hard to find substantive PR people in those days, but Bob Hatch, who had done great work for the Peace Corps,
was
substantive,” she said. “The heaviest-duty courtship I did for
Sesame Street
was of Bob Hatch.”

Hatch first learned about CTW from Terry Turner, a former colleague in the public information office of the Peace Corps. Hatch recalled that Turner said, “ ‘ I’ve got an interesting proposition for you,’ and he started telling me about the Workshop. I said, ‘That sounds like a really interesting idea, except for one thing. It’ll never fly.’ And he said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because nobody has ever heard of National Educational Television. They are going to have one helluva big job trying to get an audience, particularly of poor people . . . most of whom can’t even dial the station.’ ”

It was a valid point. For many viewers with old-model TV sets, tuning in to the weaker UHF frequencies—broadcast channels numbered above thirteen—required an additional antenna and considerable fuss. “Many of those stations were so small they were designated ‘BMS’ by A. C. Nielsen, which meant their viewership fell ‘below a minimum standard’ to be counted within the ratings,” Hatch said.

“[Terry] called me back about a week or so later and said, ‘Would you be interested in taking on the job?’ I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know that I would. I don’t even know what I’ll be doing next year.’ I had had a two-year leave of absence from Carl Byoir [a public relations agency], and I had spent an extra year at the Peace Corps. I was supposed to go back to Byoir the year before. They had offered me a couple of accounts . . . [but] both of them kind of left me cold, so I managed to finesse those and stay that one last year at the Peace Corps. But the Johnson administration was coming to a close and I really didn’t want to be around for what looked to be a Nixon administration. So I had . . . mentally packed my bags to leave at the end of the year.

“The next person I heard from . . . was Joan Cooney . . . [who] was down seeing the Office of Education in May or June of ’68. I remembered seeing the announcement of the Workshop in the
New York Times
a month or two before, and I was impressed by the kind of ink that she got right off the bat. It was obvious she knew where the levers were and how to pull them, and it was fun talking to her because she knew exactly what she wanted . . . I don’t think I have ever run into a would-be employer or client or anybody else who had a better sense of just exactly what was . . . needed. She had a unique notion for the Workshop. I think it may have been partly because of Tim’s experience working in the inner city, but also her own interest in reaching people in the inner city. She described something to me that I thought was going to be darn difficult, trying to put together an organization that could be sustained over a period of time in order to build an audience in the inner city.