Street Gang (37 page)

And then there was the not insignificant factor that Big Bird, Oscar, Bert, and Ernie were trademarked characters controlled by CTW but owned by Jim Henson. No deal to license and market them would happen without Henson’s buy-in.

For potential partners, precious little about dealing with CTW and Henson would be business as usual. CTW was a semipublicly endowed content provider. Its administration and staff were a patchwork quilt of highly educated elites, untested in the rough-and-tumble of commerce. While more experienced in business matters, Henson was but a service contractor to CTW, an essential but independent vendor. Their joint mission was to build and sustain an experimental television program targeted primarily to impoverished preschoolers but available to all. Its success hinged on whether an audience that couldn’t tie its shoes would tune in to a channel identified on the dial by a number beyond the target audience’s range of understanding.

Cooney, Morrisett, and their advisers wrestled with the legalities and proprieties of reaching out to business partners, concluding that any introductory product line would need to be transparently educational in nature and priced affordably. “Business goes where the money is—and our purpose is to go where it isn’t,” Cooney told
Variety
in the summer of 1970. “The multi-million-dollar companies know that their targets are in the great economic center of society, and they’ll grab what they can at either end of the consumer scale. They aim for the middle class. We’ve made
Sesame Street
for the poor people and the ghetto communities, although we wouldn’t discourage the more privileged from watching. . . . It’s not our purpose to make any child whose family wouldn’t buy [a book or record] for him to feel more deprived than he might be. . . . We want it to be at a price people in the ghetto can afford.”
¹⁹

CTW also vowed that tie-in products would not be advertised on
Sesame Street
or marketed directly to children. Cooney stressed restraint, prudence, and caution.

Some advisers were adamantly against any efforts toward licensing and merchandising. Among them was Gene Aleinikoff, general counsel for NET and a legal consultant to CTW. “Aleinikoff had a fit,” Cooney recalled. “He said, ‘It will never make over a million dollars and you will have commercialized yourself. It’s a whore’s way of doing things.’ ”

Producer Sam Gibbon feared that the pursuit of deals would be corrupting, a stain on an organization that was more a public trust.

Even Jim Henson initially seemed to resist plans to capitalize on the popularity of his creations. Bernie Brillstein recalled a tide-turning meeting in 1970. “Jim and Jane came to my house on a hot summer’s day. I was trying to convince them to merchandise the
Sesame Street
puppets, and it was like a knock-down, drag-out fight. Jim actually thought it was undignified to merchandise. But once I told him he would have complete creative control, and that the money would make his company financially independent, that’s all I had to do. Maybe some of the people around him didn’t want him to do it. But in my mind I think Jim really wanted to. I just had to give him the
reason
.”

 

Upon returning from Los Angeles, Henson asked to meet with Joan Cooney.

As Cooney recalled, “Jim Henson brought Jay Emmett with him. Jay was head of the Licensing Corporation of America. He was doing some licensing for the Muppets. Jim sat down and said, ‘You know nothing about this, and it is wrong for you to try to do it. Jay Emmett will handle the licensing of
Sesame Street
.’ And I said, ‘Jay Emmett is
not
going to go
near
it. This is one thing
Sesame Street
is going to control totally. What we will do and not do is going to be decided product by product, and we are going to approve everything. This is not a commercial enterprise as you understand commercial enterprises.’ I remember Jim saying, ‘But you don’t know anything about it, Joan.’ And I said, ‘But we’ll learn, Jim.’

“The first thing I did was call Jason Epstein at Random House. I wasn’t sure that he would remember me, but he picked up the telephone right away. I forgot that by then I was a famous person. After the
Sesame Street
publicity, who in New York publishing would not know who Joan Ganz Cooney was?
Sesame Street
represented a huge potential account for Random House.

“I said to him, ‘We have to start a nonbroadcast materials division, and I need someone like Jason Epstein to run it.’

“He said, ‘Well, I’m not your man, but let me come help you organize it, and we’ll talk about who might do it.’ ”

The first extension of the
Sesame Street
brand involved deals to publish series-related books that underscored and amplified the curriculum. Epstein recommended Christopher Cerf, the infectiously high-spirited, abundantly talented, merrily mischievous, idiosyncratic son of Bennett Cerf, cofounder of Random House, and his wife, Phyllis, an editor at the children’s imprint Beginner Books. Phyllis had famously edited the comic canon of author-illustrator Theodor Seuss Geisel, the wubbulous Dr. Seuss.

In word and deed, Geisel proved not only that laughter was the best medicine, but that in the right hands it could also provide pathways to learning. “Shortly after the Russians launched Sputnik, there was an article in
Life
magazine by John Hersey,” Cerf said. “That was about the time when everyone was asking why Ivan can read but Johnny can’t. Hersey suggested that one of the reasons was that reading primers used in the schools were so dull. And so he actually asked in print, why can’t someone like Dr. Seuss write a primer?”

That nudge led Geisel to write
The Cat in the Hat
, the vocabulary for which was suggested by Dr. Jeanne Stemlicht Chall, a tenacious Harvard School of Education researcher and phonics advocate. Christopher Cerf said Geisel’s collaboration with Chall “provided a model before
Sesame Street
of how top-notch educators and creative people can work together. “And,” he noted, “
The Cat in the Hat
is very much like
Sesame Street
in spirit. To me, Hersey asked a similar question to the one that led to
Sesame Street
: why does educational television have to have no creativity? Or, turned around, why does creative television have no education?”

Cooney was surprised that Random House would allow one of its talented young editors to leave the family so easily, considering how steeped he was in the company’s culture.

But Cerf, coeditor of the
Harvard Lampoon
during his days in Cambridge, had a splendid first year on the job, building a $900,000 business from nothing. As the business expanded to include toys, however, his lack of experience in management and brand building began to show. He asked to be reassigned from the business side to the creative side, and his request was granted before CTW had a firm idea of who should replace him.

CTW’s business inexperience was becomingly increasingly evident, too. “We needed a body, and Jim Drake walked in at the right time,” Cooney said. “I don’t know why we hired him; he hadn’t any experience. We went from plus $800,000 to minus $200,000 in a year. When he told me about the loss I called him in the next day and told him it wasn’t working out.”

 

Nineteen seventy wasn’t shaping up to be a great year for Emily Perl Kaplin. Divorced, childless, and out of work, she was a behind-the-scenes, TV industry gal Friday who had rarely faced unemployment before. Her experience ranged from the brilliantly wrought drama (doing research for George C. Scott’s
East Side, West Side
) to the hyperventilated game show
Supermarket Sweep
.

“I spent my weekends in the freezer counting pork chops and arranging fish on platters for
Supermarket Sweep
,” she recalled. “I’d poke their little eyes back in and put parsley around them. I’d line up sausages and whatever else the contestants were going to be bidding on. I did all kinds of crazy stuff, but I had never done a kid’s show.”

With time on her hands, she tuned in to
Sesame Street
one day to see for herself whether the breathless praise the series was receiving among her friends was justified. “They said how innovative it was,
blah, blah, blah.
So I turned it on . . . and immediately thought,
This is where I belong.
I just knew. I began watching it twice a day, admiring its edge, sophistication, and humor. Plus, its mandate to get to underprivileged kids . . . everything appealed to me socially and politically.”

Kaplin took a freelance assignment as talent coordinator for the Emmy Awards. “I was the person who was booking the people who say, ‘May I have the envelope, please.’ That was right around the time when I found out that the technicians on the studio floor for
Sesame Street
were the same guys that I’d worked with on
Supermarket Sweep,
including the camera guy, Frankie Biondo.

“So I wrangled an introduction to Lutrelle Horne,
²⁰
floor producer at that time, and I offered to do anything they needed. He thought I was bright, smart and had good experience, and sent me over to meet Jon Stone, who said ‘Bright . . . good experience,
da, da, da, da,
but we don’t need you. We’re fully staffed.’ So he sent me over to Ed Palmer because I had done research for
The Dick Cavett Show
and
East Side, West Side
. Lovely interview, but again, it was bright, experienced, fully staffed. So I went over to Editing because I had done some editing on a game show in California. Same result. I must have had about fourteen interviews.

“Simultaneously I was doing this job for the Emmys and
Sesame Street
was nominated up the gazoo for its first season. So half the time I was talking to Jon Stone saying, ‘Please, please hire me. Do you need someone to sweep the floors?’ with him saying, ‘Gee, we just don’t need anybody.’ The other half of the time I was talking to him about where he was going to sit and what he should wear and who’s going to give the acceptance speech if
Sesame Street
wins an Emmy. I was talking to him a couple of times a week over a nine-month period.

“I literally would have done anything, and finally I heard the Muppets needed somebody to sew puppets. So I went over to interview wearing a dress that I had made, carrying a patchwork quilt I had sewn, and some little dolls I’d made.” The job was filled, but the interviewer picked up on how much Kaplin wanted to work on the show. “Look,” she said, trying to be helpful. “The only thing they can’t find is writers. They’re desperate. It’s a very specific kind of writing: curriculum plus humor.”

She told Kaplin that Stone was holding a workshop to train writers. “So I called and asked Jon if I could attend and be taught how to write for
Sesame Street
. By this time we were on a first-name basis.

“He said, ‘Look, Em. You can’t afford to do this; you’ve been in the business for years. I’m taking students out of school, paying them three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches a week.’

“I said, ‘Put me on your writers workshop a couple of days a week, and then let me do production stuff the rest of the time. I don’t care what I make. Just teach me to do this.’”

Stone said, “All right. Write me an Ernie and Bert bit, and a Kermit one, too.”

Kaplin poured a surge of elation onto a short sheaf of typed pages. “I had never written anything before beyond an occasional letter to my mother.
Never
anything for television. But I was so motivated. And one hour later I was in front of Jon with the two bits. He was surprised to see me so fast, and said, ‘All right, I’ll call you tomorrow.’”

After an anxious night and morning, the phone finally rang. “Em, we read your two pieces with great care and we’ve decided we don’t want to put you on the writers workshop,” Stone said, pausing.

Kaplin recalled how her heart sank. “I thought,
Shit! What do I have to do to get on this show?
”

That’s when Stone said, “Your bits can go on just as they are. They don’t need a word changed. We want to put you on as a full-time writer immediately.”

Persistence had paid off. “A couple of weeks later I had the incredible, life-changing thrill of going into the studio and watching Jim Henson and Frank Oz performing my words.”

Kaplin remarried in 1972 and changed her name to Emily Perl Kingsley. She got the hang of writing for Kermit, the wry observer of foible and calamity. Throughout the ’70s, she and others on the writing staff capitalized on the frog’s ability to somehow rise above madness—while stationed squarely in the midst of it—by creating a journalistic guise for him. Donning a trench coat and fedora, Kermit, the intrepid correspondent for
Sesame Street News
, was dispatched to cover breaking stories involving fictional characters (the Invisible Man, wearing a straw hat), historical figures (Christopher Columbus pulling away from the dock in Spain, with the dock in tow), and classic fairy-tale protagonists, villains, and victims. He was on hand to cover emergency reconstructive surgery on Humpty Dumpty, hurricane-force winds puffed up by the Big, Bad Wolf, and a stalled uphill summit by a Jack without a Jill. (At the top of the bit, Kermit is caught by an open microphone confessing, “I’ve never understood why he goes
up
the hill to fetch a pail of water. Logically, water would be down at the bottom. . . .”)

 

The colossal wrestling match that was taking place between Mike Dann and his conscience ended on a Saturday in mid-June 1970 when the top CBS programming executive resigned to join a nonprofit corporation, leaving behind stock options and base pay estimated at $125,000 annually. He was poised to take a salary cut of nearly 75 percent. Writing in
Newsday
, Long Island’s literate morning tab, TV critic Marvin Kitman described the development as “the old riches-to-rags story.”
²¹

Dann’s departure from commercial TV was not completely unexpected. He had spoken often of “getting out and doing something for the betterment of the human race.”
²²
But on the Thursday before he quit—on Page One of
Variety
—he had denied any intention to leave CBS.
Variety
had it that “Mike Dann put the official quietus on reports he was giving up his post as program veepee at CBS by stating, ‘I’m safe and sound and not looking around.’ ”
²³