Street Gang (34 page)

One of the reasons Henson was looking outside his circle of puppeteers for someone to step into the role of Big Bird was that Frank Oz had had quite enough of working within the confining, sweaty apparatus that was the La Choy Dragon. Being inside Big Bird would be restrictive and physically challenging in that the puppeteer would need to work with one arm stretched out above him to operate the character’s head. In addition, Oz—who was already committed to doing Bert—was at the time as much a visual artist as a performing artist and wanted to preserve time away from the television studio to sculpt.

Over lunch Henson elaborated further on how the characters grew out of a need to inject the street scenes with vitality, humor, and fantasy.

At one point during the meal, Henson said, “We have a tradition at our company.”

“Oh, what is that?” Spinney replied.

“You won’t get paid very much,” Henson said.

Spinney, who was more than a bit crestfallen and still filled with anxiety about relocating to New York, said, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

On the ride home to Connecticut, Spinney was even more burdened with worry than he was on the way down to the interview.

Like so many performing artists before him and after, he would have to take several steps back financially for a shot at success in New York. He could remain in New England with his bird-in-hand gig on local television, or he could take a considerable cut in net income and become
the
Bird.

“Jim said I wouldn’t make much money, and then he went out and proved it,” said Spinney.

 

Sometimes in New York, the taxi driver hands the passenger a tip.

That’s what happened on the morning Spinney formally met Oscar the Grouch. A cab had picked him up for the ride over to an old RKO theater at Eighty-first Street and Broadway, a movie palace converted into a television studio. The first thing the cabbie said to him was, “Where to, Mac?” in a coarse, road-weary voice that sounded like he had gargled with Ajax. In the back seat, Spinney smiled and thought,
That’s it!

“On the way over to the studio I was asking myself,
What am I going to use for a voice for Oscar
? And then this driver, who was talking with a cigar out the side of his mouth and was wearing an old newsboy cap, starts complaining about Mayor Lindsay, who he says is ruining New York. I’ll leave out the colorful words, but as he was talking, I was taking it in. When I got out, I kept repeating ‘Where to, Mac?’ just as he said it. It was nothing like I had in my repertoire of voices. ‘Where to, Mac?’ ”

Entering the studio, Spinney sized up the Oscar puppet, a ghastly orange shag carpet of a character with a wide mouth shaped like a melon slice. It was a vintage Muppet, with no teeth or ears but with wooly caterpillar eyebrows. Oscar easily could have been yanked out of a trunk containing assorted oddities from Henson’s
Sam and Friends
years.

According to Stone, the original Oscar was envisioned as being considerably creepier. “The garbage can was a compromise,” he said. “We wanted Oscar in a manhole. Every once in a while, the cover would lift up and you’d see these little eyes looking at you. The camera would push in and the picture would dissolve through some vertical dripping tunnel. Tilting down into semidarkness, you’d see these scruffy things and water flowing by in the foreground. Something would come by and grab one of the scruffy things out of the water. The more Jim and I talked about it, the funnier we thought it was. But when we presented the idea, everyone went ‘What?’ So we compromised and settled for a puppet in a garbage can, which they weren’t wild about, either, but since we started with a wild idea, they bought it.”

Master puppet designer Don Sahlin built Oscar, but for reasons unknown, it appeared to be made for a left-handed puppeteer. It had a work glove sewn into it, and Spinney struggled to get Oscar on his right hand. “The thumb was on the wrong side,” he said, so Spinney reluctantly switched hands. “Left hands are much stupider than your right if you are right-handed,” he said. It was a bit of an awkward how-do-you-do.

Spinney walked over to the trash-can home and maneuvered himself into position under it. Jim Henson, awaiting the grouch’s coming-out party, gave Spinney a few extra moments to get settled, then knocked on Oscar’s galvanized home.

Out popped this annoyed, wide-eyed puppet, chastising the intruder who dared to disturb him. “Get away from my trash can!” Oscar warned, in the cab driver’s cadence and pitch.

“That’ll do nicely,” Henson said.

 

The trilateral production partnership of Dave Connell, Jon Stone, and Sam Gibbon served as Joan Cooney’s cabinet. Executive producer Connell was her buttoned-down, dry-witted Secretary of Planning and Coordination. Producer-head writer Stone, the passionate, theatrical high-creative, was Secretary of Series Development. Producer Sam Gibbon, the warmhearted, sometimes wary, intellectual, was Secretary of Education. Gibbon, in concert with Ed Palmer and Gerry Lesser, fused content and curriculum. Along with Stone, Gibbon was also available to studio-produce some shows.

Script development depended on continuous back-and-forth among the cabinet members. “A lot of it evolved out of Jon and me spending time pacing back and forth,” said Connell. “We would say, ‘What if we did this? What if we did that?’ It’s very hard to concretize what is a messy situation. You write something and it doesn’t work. You write something and it does. We certainly had curriculum to deal with. We had some sense of the characters, Mr. Hooper in the store . . . Big Bird as the child surrogate . . . live characters on the street. So Big Bird doesn’t know how to count to twenty. You can do a sketch about it. You had Oscar as the big kid’s grouch surrogate, who could dump on stuff. . . . Jon, as head writer, would look at a piece that someone had written, or even he had written, and know in his head what he would do in the studio to make it work. But when Sam Gibbon was studio-producing, he’d look at a piece of material and say, ‘This doesn’t work’ or ‘This could be better.’

“There would be conflicts. Sam would be constantly calling me, saying ‘Have you seen next week’s scripts?’

“I’d say, ‘Yes.’

“He’d say, ‘We’ve got real trouble here.’ And he was partly right. Sam would pound on the table and say, ‘We can make this better!’

“Jon would say, ‘Fine.’

“The way we ultimately ended up settling conflict, Sam and I would meet at night with the next week’s scripts. We would go through and edit them, with Sam paying attention to the curriculum and me paying attention to ‘Was it funny and does it work?’ It sounds more unpleasant than it was. I don’t recall Jon ever coming to me saying, ‘Why did that get changed?’

“One of the things we agonized over was how to do the first show. We really couldn’t figure out how to do it because it was going to be seen as a first show and reviewed as a first show. But it was only one of 130, and how much introducing can you do? Jon came back from Vermont one Monday with a brilliant idea, which was that Gordon would introduce a little girl who had just moved into the neighborhood. That way, you could introduce everything by means of this girl.

“It was absolutely perfect.”

 

The first taping of Muppet segments, referred to as inserts because they were to be slotted at various points into the show, occurred on Monday, September 29, at the Reeves Studio at Sixty-seventh Street and Columbus Avenue. Working from a Jon Stone script, Henson and Frank Oz—as Ernie and Bert—set up what would be a motif for episode 1: the letter
W
and the word
wash
. The scene also established Ernie’s compulsion for hygiene and fondness for bathing, with or without a rubber duckie.

From this moment forward and forevermore, Bert would be the straighter-than-straight man, Ernie the comic. It opened with Ernie rub-a-dub-dubbing in the tub:

 

Having put one over for the first time on ole buddy Bert, Ernie introduced his signature laugh, a slightly saliva-bathed
hee-hee-hee
that is reminiscent of the sound expectant parents practice at Lamaze class. That
hee-hee-hee
would become a comic calling card for a character that would reflect the sunnier aspects of Henson’s personality—the aspects that weren’t already projected onto Kermit.

 

Bert and Ernie actually made their national television debut on NBC, appearing on the Saturday night before the Monday-morning PBS premiere in a thirty-minute preview entitled
This Way to Sesame Street
. Underwritten by a fifty-thousand-dollar grant from Xerox, the sneak peek was written by Jon Stone and produced by CTW publicist Bob Hatch. “No one else had time to do it,” Hatch said.

The program, taped the day before it aired, began with an acknowledgment of the corporate sponsor. As Hatch recalled, “A little door opened and a Muppet came out and said, ‘This is brought to you from the folks at Xerox.’ That seemed harmless enough.”

But into the studio barged Gene Aleinikoff, a lawyer for NET, who shouted, “You can’t do that!” Aleinikoff, explained Hatch, “had been used to the limiting funding credits public television allowed in those days.” But there was no time for changes.

They were so up against the clock that they nearly forgot the show had to clear NBC’s Standards and Practices unit before it could air. “Censors for a
preschool show
?” Hatch asked in astonishment. When Hatch’s phone rang at eight on Friday night, the NBC censor said, “Loved it.”

The special aired on some one hundred NBC stations. On October 17, 1969,
Newsday
deemed it “a unique display of cooperation between commercial and noncommercial broadcasters. . . . Competitive considerations are being put aside momentarily at least to get the program designed to teach the Three R’s to twelve million preschoolers, to as many tots as possible.”
¹¹

The newspaper reported that in New York,
Sesame Street
would get a first airing each weekday on commercial station WPIX at 9:00 a.m. Channel Thirteen would air the same show at 11:30 a.m.

It seems Joan Cooney’s former boss, Jack Kiermeier, had struck again. “I had been unsuccessful in my efforts to persuade Jack to run the program earlier than 11:30 a.m.,” Cooney said. “He did not want to interrupt the station’s bloc of in-classroom programming, which ran from 9:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. and which brought the channel much-needed revenue from the school board.”

When Kiermeier held firm to his decision, Cooney convinced the union leadership of several New York locals to grant an exemption, allowing her nonunion show to air on WPIX.
¹²

Despite what she described as a “howl of protest from public TV people,” Cooney said the waiver “proved to be a godsend. WPIX had a much bigger audience than Thirteen, and it got the show into the inner city in New York immediately and at the right time of day.”

 

On the Sunday night before the
Sesame Street
premiere, Tim and Joan Cooney took in the movie
Funny Girl
at the Ziegfeld Theater, just to kill some time until the early edition of the
New York Times
rolled off the presses. “Watching Barbra Streisand bite her nails over Omar Sharif’s caddishness seemed better than staying home and biting my own nails while we waited for the
Times
review,” Cooney said.

A few days earlier, editors and reporters from New York’s daily newspapers and the newswire services had been invited to Sardi’s, the legendary celebrity watering hole, to screen the first episode of
Sesame Street
. A similar session for magazine journalists had been held two weeks prior.

The Cooneys walked to the Times building on West Forty-third Street and asked a delivery driver if the bulldog edition was already loaded in his truck. “No,” he said, and they went off to dinner. At 11:00 p.m. Tim bought the paper at a newsstand and hurried home with it.

George Gent’s review began as follows:

 

“I called Dave Connell and read him the piece,” Cooney said. “Then I called Bob Hatch and gave him the news. We all did the equivalent of high fives.”

For those who worked on its development, that
Sesame Street
had made it to air was a pinch-me experience. Never had the participants worked so hard—for so long—on a project, abandoning all other pursuits and placing personal considerations on hold. Never had so many disparate voices blended with such harmony, led by a woman who described herself as having no special talents beyond the ability to conduct. Never had so much cash been earmarked for an experiment that had no guarantee of success. Never had the inert box of tubes and wires that was television been tested in such a way. Never had the fortunes of indigent preschool children mattered so much.