Street Gang (30 page)

More subtle and contemplative was a film in which two young boys played in a sandbox, scooping and piling with their hands. Intercut with those scenes was footage of men at construction sites, digging, hauling, and dumping with backhoes and earthmovers. Done without narration, the soundtrack featured the heaving groans of the heavy machinery. It was abstract and understated, traits not always associated with a performer who reveled in chicken tossing and toy-cannon explosions.

The sand epic proved to be young Brian’s first
Sesame Street
cameo.
⁹
“I worked two full days on that, and throughout, my dad explained to me what it meant to be professional during a shoot. The following week he came to me in the kitchen as I was eating breakfast and said, ‘Here’s your paycheck for the work you just did. It’s fifty dollars.’ To a six-year-old, that was like ten thousand dollars. Then he took me to a bank in Greenwich, Connecticut, opened an account, had me deposit the check, and then handed me the bank book. In that moment he taught me how people earn a living and how the world works. I probably learned more from that experience than anything else in my life.”

 

Starting with Henson’s moonlighting days at the University of Maryland, there were always “monster” puppets on hand, goofy grotesqueries from the black lagoon region of the puppeteer’s brain. These obsessive and often omnivorous creatures tended to eat victims and, sometimes, everything else in sight. A prime example was the baggy sack puppet with googly eyes and shark’s teeth that performed on
The Ed Sullivan Show
on October 8, 1967. Component by component, it devoured a “modular system console,” a marvel of space-age engineering that the inquisitive creature with meaty paws thought good enough to eat. It was as if the audience that night was seeing a beta test of Cookie Monster.

Henson and his team fashioned a multihued taxonomy of creatures that emerged in
Sesame Street
’s first season. Inserted mostly for comic effect, these off-kilter puppets were generally more mirthful than menacing. While not under-the-bed monsters, they were far from benign. “From Day One,
Sesame Street
was destined to break as many rules as possible,” Jon Stone said. Jim’s monsters were
monsters
. They wrestled and bonked and body slammed and slugged and occasionally ate each other. I wrote a sketch for the first show wherein Kermit, sitting on a wall next to a large Styrofoam
W
, is lecturing on that letter. As he speaks, a monster enters and eats one arm of the
W
, rendering it into an
N
. Kermit nervously continues as the monster eats another section, turning the
N
into a
V
, and simultaneously inching closer to the frog. Kermit continues. The monster eats the
V
into an
I
. As the piece ends, Kermit is valiantly trying to continue his lecture and fend off the voracious monster, who has one of Kermit’s legs in his mouth right up to the thigh.”

 

Perhaps to no one’s surprise, given the gently irreverent and completely compatible style of humor preferred by Stone and Henson, their “sales film”—which was updated for a closed-circuit televised press conference held in May—made fine sport of CTW’s inability to find a title for the show.

In a multipart Muppet skit, a gathering of network “suits” are summoning what little executive brainpower they can muster.

 

It all ended with the first Muppet noting, “Hey. These kids can’t read or write, can they? Then how’s about we call the show . . . ‘Hey, Stupid!’ ”

Some eighty public stations around the country were hooked into the press conference to announce the title
Sesame Street
and provide a sneak peek at its content. Reaction was almost breathlessly exuberant, with a few exceptions.

In a May 7 news story headlined RICH TV PROGRAM SEEKS YOUNGEST, the
New York Times
explained, “
Sesame Street
is named to reflect the balance between fantasy and the real-life educational open-a-new-window need of preschool youngsters—particularly members of minority groups in the inner cores of big cities—that the show hopes to achieve.”

On the same day, the
Chicago Daily News
reported “A group of Muppets—puppets created by Jim Henson—will be springboards for much of the action on
Sesame Street
, a city street where the candy store and a building targeted for demolition are chief landmarks. The colorful fence of old doors surrounding the demolition site will be the symbolic gateway to many of the new worlds
Sesame Street
hopes to open to preschoolers.”

San Francisco Chronicle
TV critic Terrence O’ Flaherty spoke for the minority when he rejected what he saw of
Sesame Street
in a column dated August 28, 1970. “Twelve million youngsters are in jeopardy from foolish grotesqueries deeply larded with ungrammatical Madison Avenue jargon. If children learn from jargon, we are all in trouble.” He claimed the letter
J
stood for “junk, jargon, and jabberwocky.”

Chapter Twelve

Bert and Ernie were lying mute and prone in a mirrored rehearsal room when Jim Henson and Frank Oz picked them up for the first time. It would have been great if Ernie had immediately said, “Hey, Bert,” but it didn’t happen that way.

What did occur? What usually happens when the Muppet masters encounter a new arrival: they try it on and goof with it in front of a mirror, playing with different voices and attitudes. Muppets most often evolve in an organic way, in fits and starts. In some cases, it takes a year or more for the fully formed personality to bloom. And sometimes the puppets are test-driven, passed around from one Henson troupe member to another, in the hope of finding the perfect human-Muppet match.

For a few minutes on that rehearsal day in 1969, Jim Henson was performing Bert while Frank Oz was working Ernie. It was as if Bert Lahr (Cowardly Lion) and Jack Haley (Tin Woodsman) had swapped costumes on the MGM lot during the filming of
The Wizard of Oz.
It was, in other words, unthinkable.

As some point, the universe righted itself and Henson began ad libbing with Ernie. Around the room Jon Stone and his writers kibitzed and called out suggestions about what the characters might say or do. Oz turned the upright oblong yellow puppet with the unibrow into what CTW film coordinator Arlene Sherman once described as “everyone’s idea of a blind date”: a pigeon fancier and paperclip collector who marches around his apartment to John Philip Sousa recordings.

“Gradually a relationship emerged which reflected the real-life Jim-Frank relationship,” Stone said. “Jim was the instigator, the teaser, the cutup. Frank was the conservative, careful victim. But essential to the rapport was the affection and respect which these two men held for each other. Ernie and Bert are best friends; so it was with Jim and Frank.”

 

Ultramarine blue Grover was born looking at himself in a mirror, as was fitting for an exuberant, wiry, self-aware projection of four-year-old energy. Self-referential and prone to calling himself a “cute, furry little monster,” Grover was
Sesame Street’
s equivalent of a second-born child, the more carefree, confident, assertive sibling who aims to please. He recovers easily from stumbles, makes the best of situations, explores without inhibition, and plays well with others.

Grover’s personality sprang to life fully formed in that rehearsal room. “I recall Frank Oz holding the puppet that was to become Grover in front of the mirror,” Stone said. “The high, raspy voice fit immediately. The carefully precise diction fell into place. Then we played games with the names. I asked, ‘What do you think your name is?’ Grover would study himself in the mirror and try a few out. ‘Armand? Hector? Perhaps my name is Grover.’ ”

Grover felt right, and Grover it became. His personality gave Frank a release from the uptight Bert, and Frank reveled in the opportunity to have him rush up behind Kermit, wallop him on the back, and shout, “Hey, Froggy Babeeeee!”

 

Jon Stone had a penchant for procrastination and a tendency to take on too much. As a juggler of time, Stone occasionally took his eye off matters and got bopped on the head by a ball in motion.

Stone served as both a producer and head writer during the fifteen developmental months of
Sesame Street
, a massive task, to be sure. But he put off the critically important job of finding a cast until late spring, 1969, mere weeks before five test shows were going to be shot over a ten-day span. He hurriedly scheduled audition time in a studio, where a succession of actors was videotaped doing a comedy sketch, singing a song, and “selling” a curriculum point to the camera. Research director Ed Palmer would then take the videotaped auditions into the field, testing children’s reactions to the performers.

In even the best of situations, casting is fraught with challenges. “Picking cast members is a frightening thing,” Dave Connell once said. “It’s like picking a wife.”
¹
Stone made the process all the more difficult by simple avoidance.

In his memoir, he wrote, “I have no rational explanation for this flagrantly uncharacteristic deviance from our careful and precise management of every aspect of the show, but the fact is the casting was just completely haphazard. I didn’t employ a casting director to bring in the available talent to audition. I relied on the fact that I knew a lot of actors. And I could find the right people without help. The shows were cast in a ridiculously nepotistic manner.” Of course, “ridiculously nepotistic” would just as aptly describe the decisions that led to Stone’s hiring cronies Joe Raposo (music), Jim Henson (puppetry), and Charles Rosen (set design), all of whom found their way to
Sesame Street
through personal contacts and friendship.

Joan Cooney steered clear of the casting process, asking only that the four hosts be a mix of male and female, white and black, and that no character assume a lead role. So as auditioning began, Stone had a fairly specific set of characters in mind:

 

On a Saturday afternoon in mid-June 1948, nine-year-old Loretta Mae Moore was waving to passing cars from her family’s roadside stand outside Paw Paw, Michigan. Farmers in that town of thirty-five hundred not only grew the berries to slice atop Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, manufactured thirty-five miles away in Battle Creek, they also grew the Concord grapes that were trucked to a Welch’s juice plant in Lawton, the next town over.

The farm where Loretta and her two siblings were raised was unremarkable, except for the fact that their father, the proprietor, was black and held a day job to supplement the farm income. Verle Moore would tend the land by night, stringing lights at intervals on his property to provide enough illumination to run his tractor. “We were from the city and people thought we didn’t know what we were doing; they would come from miles around to watch this crazy black man driving around in the middle of the night farming,” said Loretta, who found her way to
Sesame Street
by way of Highway M-40 in southwestern Michigan.

Everyone in the family worked on the farm, including Loretta’s mother, who sold Mary Kay cosmetics as a side business. During World War II, Verle had been trained as an aircraft repairman, welding bombers. After the war, he took a welding job with Consumer Power, a local utility company while farming under the stars. The Moores hoped Loretta would attend college and get a teaching degree, but as a child she set her sights on show business. “Out in the field, I used to say, ‘Mama, I feel special,’ and my mother would say, ‘Oh, you’re special to us.’ And I’d say, ‘Mama, I feel like a
star
.’ And she’d look at me and say, ‘Star on that row of strawberries right over there. And then—when you put them in the bushel basket—you can be up at the farmer’s stand in front of the house, getting the cars to stop.’ ”