Street Gang (28 page)

“I particularly remember another meeting with Joan in New York City at her place [near] Gramercy Park, where she and Tim had me up for dinner. They were very, very gracious. I walked into the place and Tim said, ‘Well, congratulations. I understand you’ve accepted.’ I said, ‘I have?’ Tim was always trying to rush the season. I had never met him before, but I liked him. I was drinking a lot then and so was he. We got along just fine.

“I finally said, ‘There’s a chance at the end of a year’s time that you won’t be refunded, and then you’re going to have to lay off a whole bunch of people, including me. Why don’t you hire an agency, like Byoir, the people I used to work for, then you’ve only hired for a year. People expect to be laid off, it’s no big deal. And besides, you’re going to need a lot of people in a hurry to make this happen, many, many more people than you could afford to hire or than you would have time to hire, so the agency makes sense. But I said, ‘You ought to feel safe about this. Why don’t we ask a couple of other PR agencies if they would also be interested?’ ”

Cooney contacted four agencies, with mixed success. “They were either going to give [the Workshop] their second team, or, in a couple of cases, they thought the Workshop would not pay its bills,” recalled Hatch.“That was even a concern at Byoir, ‘Can we collect on this?’ That was how wary anybody was of a project in public broadcasting. It was such an anonymous service at that point.

“I had had a lot of conversations with Joan that really didn’t focus on me. . . . I think she was just probing my interests to see if I could talk myself into it, which is ultimately what I did. By the time I decided to go to CTW, I
really
wanted to go there. And I had come to one of those advisory seminars, just looked in. I was very silent. I didn’t feel that I had any expertise that would add to what was happening, but I was fascinated by the people who were there and the kind of thought that was going into the preparation for this. . . . What Joan had in mind was really ideal.”

Hatch was seen at Byoir as something of a hero. “It isn’t often that you can come back to an organization like Byoir and bring your own account, so that worked out perfectly,” Hatch said. “The stars, the moon, and what have you were in alignment that year.”

Cooney had signed with Byoir in January 1969, getting the milk without owning the cow. “The fix was in,” she said. “I knew Hatch would be our man, based on the fact that [the agency] proposed a full-time person and I knew who the full-time person was going to be.”

 

Cooney was less certain who she wanted to hire to build awareness of the show in the inner city, but she knew she needed an outreach director who could quickly and effectively reach the target audience. For help, she called Jimmy Booker, a well-known and well-regarded black publicist. He, in turn, phoned Evelyn Payne Davis, the director of fund development for the New York Urban League.

“Jimmy said there was someone he wanted me to meet,” Davis said. “He didn’t say who or why, and I assumed it was a contact to raise money. He called for me . . . with a limousine, and I was thinking,
I wonder how much money I should ask for
?”

The car pulled up to the Bible Building at Sixty-first and Broadway. “Jimmy walked me inside, introduced me to Joan Cooney, and left. I had never heard about the Children’s Television Workshop, and Joan never mentioned anything about a job. We just talked about what I did, and I was thinking, ‘Okay, I have to assess this and then see what I’m going to hook them for.’ I didn’t know what she thought
I
thought we were talking about, and I didn’t know what she was talking about. We just had a nice conversation. We had a second meeting about two weeks later and that’s when she offered me a job. I was stunned; I wasn’t looking for one.”

Cooney explained the importance of a black audience. “My job,” said Davis, “would be to make sure we had black people watching. I remember [Cooney] said, ‘It’s a utilization job.’ And I said, ‘What is
utilization
?’ She used it in the context of television, and since I didn’t know anything about that, I didn’t know what she meant.”

“You mean getting the community involved and organizing it?” Davis asked.

“Yes,” Cooney said.

“Well, I know how to do
that
,” Davis said.

A week passed. “I called and said I thought I’d like to try it,” Davis said.

With that, the inner-city show had its first inner-city ambassador. She proved remarkable, unsinkable, and indispensable.

 

One of Jon Stone’s first assignments with Jim Henson was to prepare a “sales film,” a preview for a show that had yet to be developed. Joan Cooney’s intention was to hit the road with CTW’s new assistant director, Robert Davidson, visiting the top markets in the country to urge programming managers at public stations to pick up the show.
⁴
“I asked Jon and Jim to create something that had the Muppets talking about what we were going to do,” Cooney said. “I needed something representative and convincing, something that would move them to schedule the show at nine a.m. They wanted to put it on at eight because almost all of them were paid by local school boards to air educational programming from nine on. I went out to say to them, ‘You can’t put it on against
Captain Kangaroo
. We are not going to try to harm the only other decent, constructive show on the air for kids!’ ”

Because little content for the show had been completed by the time the sales piece was taped in January 1969—save for a few preliminary animation pieces—Stone’s task was the equivalent of producing a baby picture from an embryo. Complicating matters was that the show at that point had no name, no format, no setting. Still, Stone was certain of one thing: he wanted to move as far away from children’s show conventions as possible. There would be no Treasure House, no toymaker’s workshop, no enchanted castle, no dude ranch, no circus. To the underprivileged, the target audience, these settings seemed as foreign as the dark side of the moon.

A breakthrough idea eluded Stone until one night in late winter 1968, when a televised public service announcement provided a jolt of inspiration. The PSA opened with a printed message: “Send your kid to a ghetto this summer.” It then cut to a street scene in Harlem, where a black actor named Lincoln Kilpatrick narrated a mock travelogue of an inner-city neighborhood, touting its supposed amenities. “We have all kinds of facilities here,” he said, pointing out “pools” (fire hydrants gushing into gutters) and “ball fields” (a car-lined street where children played stickball), not to mention “field trips” (to fetid, trash-strewn lots), and “cozy camp cabins” (where black children slept three or four to a bed).

The actor pointedly asked, “You don’t want your kids to play
here
this summer? Then don’t expect
ours
to.”

The spot was shot in the spring of 1968 as part of a fifty-city campaign to provide opportunities for urban youngsters. Its final seconds included the lines “Give jobs. Give money. Give a damn.”
⁵

The ad’s unflinching realism provided “the answer,” Stone said. “For a preschool child in Harlem, the street is where the action is,” he said. “As often as not she is housebound all day while her mother works, and from the vantage point of her apartment, the sidewalk outside must look like Utopia. Outside there are kids hollering, jumping double Dutch, running through the open hydrants, playing stickball. Our set had to be an inner-city street, and more particularly it had to be a brownstone so the cast and kids could ‘stoop’ in the age-old New York tradition, sitting on the front steps and watching the world go by.”

As it happened, Stone was to meet the following day with his friend, set designer Charles Rosen, who took him on a studio tour of a feature film on which he was working. Stone marveled at the detail lavished on a part of the set meant to suggest a backstage room at a run-down jazz club. Scenic artists had created the illusion of decades of decay on wood that had only weeks before come off the lumberyard. Old phone numbers had been scratched into a wall next to a pay phone, and a light-switch plate had been rubbed up to appear so smudged by dirty hands, it could have been carbon-dated.

Stone decided—on the spot—that a movie-quality set was needed for the preschool show, “not a television set of canvas and cardboard.” Turing to Rosen he said, “I want it to be as real as this room, and I want
you
to design and build it.”

Within days, Rosen was scouting locations in and around Harlem, drawing and photographing details of neighborhoods not unlike the one depicted in the “give a damn” campaign ad. And so, the happy home where Bert and Ernie pop up from window ledges grew out of a stinging public service message that was anything but funny. And that iconic brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, the faux dwelling where untold thousands of scenes have been shot? That may well have been inspired by an apartment building Rosen sketched on Columbus Avenue.

 

Joan Cooney recalled the day Stone presented his vision of the gritty urban set. “Jon said I turned several shades paler than usual when he first talked to me about it.”

“I made an appointment to see her,” Stone recalled, “and I didn’t need to work up any enthusiasm. I was so sure that this was the right set, the right characters, the right situation that my thoughts just bubbled out. When I finished my pitch and sat there waiting for a response, Joan, God bless her, remained true to her laissez-faire approach to leadership. I recall she said something to the effect that we were the people she chose to create this program, and if this is how I saw it, so be it.”
⁶

The choice to build the show around a brownstone on an inner-city street was unprecedented, but an equally important decision remained unresolved through the winter of 1969 and into the early spring: As a date for a press conference neared—one in which the show’s premiere date would be announced—selecting an acceptable title for a show set in the inner city became a matter of urgency.

“We were just frantic for a title,” said Cooney. “Our press and publicity people were going nuts. How were they going to promote a show that had no name? Finally we said, ‘There is no more time.’ ”

In Stone’s characterization, “The name was set at the “eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute.”

It fell to executive producer Dave Connell to pressure the production staff—and other CTW employees—to resolve the issue. He asked each member of the CTW team to generate a list of twenty names. Using the brownstone as inspiration, Stone came up with a title that, with the benefit of hindsight, now seems pitch-perfect:
123 Avenue B
. That made the rounds for a few days, and it had its supporters among those who liked that it rhymed and referenced two of the show’s top goals, learning the alphabet and counting to ten.

But just as many argued that the title was precious and provincial. It sounded too much like a show tailored to New York viewers rather than to a national audience.
123 Avenue B
was discarded.

Among the remaining contenders was
Sesame Street,
a title that some found fanciful and alliterative. Others thought it missed the mark.

The contributor who threw
Sesame Street
into the mix was Virginia Schone, a CTW consultant who worked in a West Side day-care center in Manhattan. One day she turned the dilemma of finding a title over to the children at the center, explaining little more to them than that the show was going to be set on a neighborhood street. “Whether it was she or one of the kids who came up with it, I don’t know,” said Connell, “but she had a list of six or eight names, and one of them was
Sesame Street
.”

Connell, who had two sons and a daughter, immediately worried that some children would have difficulty pronouncing
Sesame.
“I remember an argument erupting,” he said. “Someone said a child losing his baby teeth might have trouble saying ‘
Theth-a-me Threet
.’ It seemed charming enough to me. Anyway, I put a memo out to the staff saying that if nobody came up with a better idea, as of Monday we were going to call the show
Sesame Street
. Everyone on the staff, I think, came in with the memo and said, ‘
Sesame Street
? Yuk!’ ”

Even beyond the walls of CTW the title was unpopular. Bob Davidson said, “I had calls from our advertising and PR agency saying, ‘You’re going to have a terrible time with that. Nobody is going to remember it. It’s got too many esses.’ ”

“I was very much against it,” said Stone. “I thought it was too cute and that it looked like it should be pronounced ‘
see-same
.’ It was an obscure word and the meaning was so far out, of ‘opening sesame’ and ‘opening doors.’ ”

Though there were protests and howls, no one managed to trump Virginia Schone’s title suggestion.

“Somehow we decided that
Sesame Street
was the least bad,” Cooney said.

 

Sam Gibbon, the Rhodes Scholar, once offered this profoundly apt observation about the origins of
Sesame Street
: “Alcohol probably was as responsible for its success as anything else.”

Indeed, the patriarchs of
Sesame Street
regularly and enthusiastically drank together after hours, sometimes at a tavern, other times at someone’s apartment. One regular haunt was the welcoming domicile of Tom Whedon, a gathering place for thirsty writers, musicians, and actors. “We would drift in sometime between six or seven and midnight, and it seems there were always eight or ten or fifteen of us exchanging views and jokes and ideas and sipping vodka and laughing till all hours,” Jon Stone said. “You could come early and leave late or come late and stay all night. People joined the group after the theater, whether performers or audience, and the constitution of the salon assemblage was constantly changing.”

Joe Raposo, a friend of Whedon’s from his undergraduate days at Harvard, would frequently drop in. At the time, Raposo and his diminutive drummer friend, Danny Epstein, were part of the house band for a daily show on Channel 5 in New York, hosted by Skitch Henderson.
⁷