Street Gang (39 page)

 

It wasn’t just angry feminists that were challenging CTW. Evelyn Davis was ambushed by enraged Hispanic activists one morning in San Antonio, where the outreach director had hardly expected such a welcome when she and her staff arranged to meet with Hispanic leaders from across the country. Texas seemed a logical midpoint for the gathering, though the majority of participants were West Coast residents. “I kept asking the person who was working on it for me, ‘Are you sure there are no problems? What’s their agenda?’ ”

CTW had received a grant from the Department of Education to produce translations of
Sesame Street
in Spanish. As a provision of the award, the Workshop had to formally evaluate the program with the Hispanic community and plan for the following television season.

After being assured the meeting would pose no unforeseen challenges, Davis rounded up a large contingent of representatives from production, research, and outreach. All went cordially during an opening-night reception. “The CTW people said, ‘Oh, this is wonderful,’ ” Davis recalled. “But when we got to the meeting site the next morning at nine, the doors were locked! Someone came out and told me that they wanted to delay the meeting. They were going to caucus first, saying, ‘We don’t know each other very well. So we’d like to meet. We’ll call you when we’re ready.’

“I thought,
Okay, that seemed logical.
They were caucusing to get a common agenda among themselves. In those days, Puerto Ricans and Chicanos and all the different groups didn’t talk to each other that much. So in order to face the enemy, they needed a common voice. They had to straighten out a lot of stuff among themselves, which took all day. They wouldn’t let us in, all evening and all the next day. By the end of the second day they called me to say they wanted to speak to Joan Ganz Cooney.

“ ‘I’m representing her,’ I said.

“ ‘We’re not going to talk to you. We will only talk with her.’

“I said, ‘You’ll have to tell me what this is about.’

“Then they started making demands. They would not listen [and] they would not talk with me.

“ ‘You might as well go home,’ they said. ‘We’re not going to talk with anybody here.’

“They called the press in and I called Joan and Bob Hatch and told them what was developing. Hatch’s recommendation was that Joan shouldn’t talk to them. It became very incendiary, and the phone calls were flying back and forth. I would transmit their demands to Joan, and I’d get responses back from them, unacceptable, totally. It ended up in their demanding a meeting in New York at CTW’s expense to talk about their demands. Joan agreed to that.

“I told those making the demands that there wouldn’t have been a meeting if it hadn’t been for me. I was angry because they did not recognize that.

“ ‘What are you doing?’ I asked them. ‘I am trying to bring you in, and you’re shutting me out, acting like I’m the enemy.’ ”

The New York meeting in Cooney’s office was “a virtual sit-in,” she said. “They screamed and yelled a lot.”

The protests were not only legitimate—
Sesame Street
had made no initial effort to include an Hispanic character, human or otherwise—but they were timely.

“No agency in the government was focusing then on the needs of the bilingual community,” Davis said. “This was after the [civil rights movement] riots, so the question was ‘How are we going to keep the black folks quiet?’ The Latinos were saying, ‘Well, we didn’t riot and we have even less. We’re being totally left out and we are not going to be left out anymore.’
Sesame Street
was seen as something dear to all children. All segments of the population thought they needed to be represented, and that their children had needs that should be addressed. And since the money was initially federal, they thought they had a right to insist upon inclusion.

“CTW did become sensitive to those needs as a company after that, and try to adjust to them. The amount of noise made a difference. Sometimes that’s the only way to get someone’s attention.”

 

Within a few months after the launch of
Sesame Street
, Lloyd Morrisett called Joan Cooney. “Start talking about developing a reading program. You’ve got to do a second show.”

“I wanted to say, ‘Give me a break,’” Cooney recalled, “but Lloyd was right. We had to get going on something new while we had momentum.” Ever politically astute and savvy about the ebb and flow of federal funding, Morrisett took dead aim at a surefire topic: First Lady Patricia Nixon’s pet project, the Right to Read program. Morrisett lined up his contacts and connections, just as he had for
Sesame Street
.

“Sid Marland was by then Commissioner of Education, and then became undersecretary of HEW for education,” Cooney said. “Sid was a friend of Lloyd’s and became a friend of mine. So the government, via Sid Marland, said, ‘Fine, more money.’ ”

Some seven million dollars was ultimately raised for CTW’s reading project, bankrolled once again by the Carnegie and Ford foundations and the USOE. Under the guidance of top reading experts, a curriculum was researched and tested, and a content team, led by executive producer Dave Connell, producer Sam Gibbon, and associate producer Naomi Foner was convened.
²⁶
Foner worked alongside head writer Tom Whedon, whose son Joss later created television’s delectably demonic
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Fierce debate attended the curriculum seminars for the series, as academic advisers—including Harvard’s Jeanne Chall—argued the merits of using phonics to teach reading over the whole-word method. “We avoided a buzz saw of ideology by saying it was a
remedial
program, not a show to teach reading from the beginning. It was for viewers age seven to nine who were having trouble,” Cooney said. “That gave us maximum freedom.”

Lightning struck twice.
The Electric Company
, with a cast that included Bill Cosby, Rita Moreno, and Morgan Freeman, was an instant hit. “We were so scared the press would say, ‘It’s fine, but it’s not
Sesame Street
,’ ” recalled Cooney. “But nobody said that.”

Critics hailed the new show’s conceit of using sketch comedy to explore the rudiments of reading, with such recurring characters as Easy Reader (a rail-thin Freeman as a hipster who can’t resist reading), Otto the director (Moreno as a Hollywood tyrant who enjoyed punctuating things on the set with a riding crop), and Fargo North, Decoder (Skip Hinnant as a slightly dense detective who unscrambles text).

The soap opera parody,
Love of Chair
, always ended with the question, “And what about Naomi?” an oblique reference to the show’s associate producer.

“At the time, I found the show kind of tasteless,” Cooney said. “Some of the sketches worked and some were, as we say, kind of eggy. You sat there during a sketch and waited for the payoff, but the payoff wasn’t very good. I was used to sweet little
Sesame Street
, and not at all used to the sensibility of seven- to nine-year-olds. But Dave, Sam, and Naomi understood who it was for.”

So did Whedon. “Dave Connell was at first reluctant, but I convinced him that nothing is funnier to a nine-year-old boy than a guy in a gorilla suit,” Whedon said. Enter Paul the Gorilla, a student of language and an upright citizen. Paul provided ample evidence that Darwinism sometimes goes backward.

In time, Cooney came around to appreciate the ape shtick. “I now think
Electric Company
was more brilliant than
Sesame Street
in its way,” she says.

 

“By 1972, we had plenty of money for
Sesame Street
and then plenty of money for
Electric Company
,” Cooney said. “Sid Marland couldn’t have been more supportive. I remember calling his office one day. Their grant wasn’t due for a few weeks, and I left word that we would have to borrow a million dollars to make it through. There was a check the next day for one million dollars. He said to his people, ‘Why should they be paying interest on a loan? Let’s advance it.’ We were the darling of the federal government for a brief period of two or three years.

“But then the Nixon administration moved against public television. They wanted public television not to do public affairs. They were really trying to put it almost out of business. They wanted it to become local only. So PBS was in a chronic fight with the Nixon administration. I remember one of the Nixon hatchet men said to me, and I’ll never forget how he said it, ‘
This
president does not want any federally funded programming of any kind.’ They weren’t anti-
Sesame Street
. They were anti the principle.

“We were largely federally funded, which was very dangerous. You get into government spending deadlines, how much you can spend per night in a hotel, and so forth, if you are a hundred percent funded. I remember fourteen-hour days. I went home exhausted every night. I was sometimes woozy walking out. It wasn’t clear how we would make it through. We had almost no problems getting CTW started and getting
Sesame Street
and
Electric Company
on the air. Then, suddenly, we had enemies, all these powerful forces were against us and wanted to see us curbed. I couldn’t believe it. It disoriented me. The argument was, ‘Why don’t you put your shows into repeat? Your audience graduates.’ Unassailable. But we knew that every show that goes into repeats dies.

“On the other hand, by then we were a powerhouse in this country, and I had become an assault weapon. The potential of my having a press conference and explaining that the government would not support
Sesame Street
was always hanging over the government. Bob Hatch understood that. He had decided early to let the press build me up, saying, ‘If that’s what the press wants, we’ll make her strong enough so it’s very hard for the government to take her on.’ I did become a singular weapon in the 1970s, when we were under assault by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the government was trying to pull their funding out.

“You couldn’t understand what was going on and what the motives were. So Lloyd and I went to see Caspar Weinberger, who was secretary of HEW. He was not very forthcoming, and I think he was probably caught up in politics.

“So I went to see Barry Goldwater. He had known my family in Arizona. I told him that we would phase out federal funding, that we would do a six-year program where at some point
Electric Company
would go into repeats. CTW’s costs would slowly descend, and product income would rise. So that by 1980 or 1981 we would be free and clear. He did not take a note, and he did not have an aide in the room. He then wrote a letter to Weinberger saying exactly what I’d told him. He wrote:

 

“My father had been dead many years, but Goldwater did it ambiguously so you could think that he was still alive,” Cooney said. He said, in effect, ‘Give little Joanie Ganz anything she wants.’

“In addition to Barry’s letter, Caroline Charles, one of the really major women board members of PBS, got wind of what was happening and contacted Weinberger. At HEW they said, ‘Some old lady in San Francisco got in touch with Cap and that’s all there was to it.’ So Cappy then took Barry’s letter and our request and said, ‘We will do it their way.’ ”

CTW got its own line item in the federal budget, which enraged some supporters in Washington at the Office of Education and the hierarchy of PBS, but relieved tensions in New York for Cooney and Morrisett.

Chapter Fifteen

T
he first season of
Sesame Street
raised the curtain on a new kind of television program for kids, and by the mid-1970s, the show was in full flower, with a huge cast of creative, dedicated people working to continually tweak, adjust, and experiment. Over the course of the next ten years, the series became much more than its originators had ever hoped it could be.
Sesame Street
became an American institution.

In any city or town in America, you could see children with Ernie dolls riding along in their strollers. At local parks, toddlers wearing Bert T-shirts were shooting down the aluminum slide. Record stores featured the cast album. Turn on a prime-time special, and damn if it wasn’t Caroll Spinney as Big Bird, riffing with Bob Hope.

The show had critics aplenty, but the American people had spoken, and what they said was, “Me like Cookie!”

Followed, of course, by
“Umm num-num-num-num.”

The man who did the navigation through those early years was Jon Stone.

The show’s puppeteers, cameramen, and Teamsters thought of him as one of their own because his manner and work ethic were right out of Brooklyn. But when the situation required it, he could ditch his blue collar for a starched one and emerge as polished and well-mannered as any other graduate of Williams and Yale. Celebrities in the studio for guest appearances found him a welcoming and warm host, who invariably brought out the best in them.

Stone was to CTW what Orson Welles was to the Mercury Theatre on the Air in the 1930s. The future film auteur might have been surrounded by studio talent, including Mercury cofounder John Houseman, during his radio days, but it was Welles’s presence and bearing, his vision and vitality, that elevated the radio theater company’s performance to the level of art. So it was with Stone, who gave
Sesame Street
its soul.

Stone realized that in Jim Henson and Joe Raposo he had two grand masters as collaborators, men who were much celebrated—and handsomely compensated—for their contributions to
Sesame Street.
Stone, entirely unknown to the press and viewing public, was every bit their equal creatively. His influence on their work was as generous as it was anonymous. “Jon was the father of
Sesame Street,
the key for everything,” said Frank Oz. “He was the one in the control room laughing and guiding us along during all the playing around and rehearsing. Once in a while someone would say, ‘What are we teaching?’ And Jon would say, ‘Who cares? We’re having fun.’ What he meant was that imagination and fun is as valuable as anything else. Fucking around [in the studio] was the key to
Sesame Street.
It allowed for that affectionate anarchy that Jim reveled in.”