Street Gang (44 page)

“He was just this zany guy who was so much fun to be around,” said Ted May, a longtime director on
Sesame Street.
To May’s astonishment, Hunt would ignore his script during downtime between segments while others studied their upcoming lines. Hunt would continue reading the
New York Times
as the director counted down the seconds, dropping it with just enough time to grab his puppet and hit his mark. He’d pull it together and perform flawlessly.

Whenever children were on set, Hunt would seek them out. “Richard was wonderful to Jason,” said Emily Kingsley, mother of the child with Down syndrome. “They had a wonderful relationship.”

Muppet designer Bonnie Erickson said “Richard was the master of the grand gesture. There was not a single trip we took where he wasn’t the Pied Piper with every child on the plane. He would always try to sit next to them and get them to sing or he’d create a show, keeping everyone in stitches. I never saw anyone make friends faster than Richard.”

Hunt was extraordinarily generous. Regardless of the number of diners around the table, he would pick up the check and wave off objectors. With his first paycheck from Henson, he bought a color television for his parents and siblings, the family’s first set.

He could provide helpful assistance to colleagues, no easy trick around hypersensitive performers. Caroll Spinney credits Hunt with helping Big Bird become a more confident dancer. “Richard once said to me, ‘Pretend Big Bird thinks he’s the greatest dancer in the world, and just have him imitate what he thinks great dance is.’ ” When Spinney adopted that attitude for Big Bird, his struggles disappeared. “After that, I would say to choreographers, ‘Just show me what kind of dance you want, but don’t expect me to duplicate it,’ ” Spinney said. “Since then, Big Bird has danced onstage with the Rockettes at Radio City.”

While he had a fundamentally generous personality, Hunt was no angel. In fact, his mother, who adored him as much as he adored her, said, “Richard could be a son of a bitch.”

His critical comments often went unfiltered, but like insect bites, their sting never lasted long. He ran notoriously late, a venal sin in a business where time is money. And he could be downright nasty to people whom he didn’t feel like accepting.

“Richard hated me at the beginning,” said Marty Robinson, who, like Hunt, served a term as the hind end of Snuffleupagus. “To him, I was just some new asswipe kid, a Muppet geek who was wet behind the ears and a totally suspicious newcomer. He was a guy who had paid his dues, and he took exception to anyone coming in who might have been expecting anything more than what he got. If he didn’t accept you, he’d just torture you on the set. It was nothing under-handed. In fact, it was always open and out there, and always with a certain amount of humor. If you came to the show with any whiff of ego at all, with an attitude that you could be as funny as any of those other guys, he would tear you apart. People would say to themselves, ‘Hey, I’m a good puppeteer. Why am I doing right hands?’ And he would say, ‘Fuck you. I did right hands for eight years before they put a puppet on me. Do you want to do right hands for eight years?’ ” (The inglorious but necessary task of operating the rod that controls the arm of a character that is not being manipulated by the main performer is called “working the right hand.” It is a rite of passage aspiring Muppeteers must endure, the apprenticeship that will one day lead to a character of their own to perform.)

Then Robinson carefully observed Hunt for a year, at a distance. “Richard was expansive and a big guy. The crew adored him. They knew that when he stepped into the studio, somebody was going to be made fun of. No one was safe around Richard, including Jim. He didn’t edit his opinions, and I’m not sure that served him politically. He never let people think marvelous thoughts about themselves. He was always around to remind you where he came from. He always told Jim the truth, even when it was painful. Jim would be surrounded by people who were always saying, ‘Yah, great idea! Brilliant!’ Richard was the one who was saying, ‘What are you doing? Is this what you really want?’ He would call him on stuff, acting as devil’s advocate.”

Spinney recalled that Hunt, at times, “would tease Jim to the point where it was embarrassing. Jim would walk across the set, and Richard would say out loud in front of me, ‘Here comes that rich bastard millionaire. ’ I don’t know why he would say stuff like that. Sometimes my wife and I would look at him and say, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ”

A breakthrough in Robinson’s relationship with Hunt came after a year, when Hunt attended a performance of
Little Shop of Horrors,
the deliciously twisted stage adaptation of Roger Corman’s horror-comedy from 1960. Robinson, a puppet builder as well as performer, had created the outrageous man-eating plant Audrey II, the insatiable scene stealer of the off-Broadway musical. Robinson was the unseen manipulator behind Audrey II, which starts as a sprout and after devouring a number of human victims, grows more than two stories tall. In his
New York Times
review, Mel Gussow refers to Robinson’s creation as “a pistil-packing vampire.”
¹

“Richard loved musical theater,” Robinson said, “and when he learned that I was doing something that was totally separate from the Muppets, something that he totally appreciated, that was when I started to be okay. It helped that my girlfriend at the time was Ellen Greene, who was the star of
Little Shop
. He adored her, as we all did, and he and Ellen went on to become very close.”

During the period when Robinson was playing the front end of Snuffy, the writers created a puppy love-story line for him. It was art imitating life, as the puppeteer had as big a crush on Sonia Manzano as Snuffy did on Maria. “I was able to work out feelings through Snuffy,” Robinson said. “They wrote some really nice scripts about lovelorn Snuffy, and it wasn’t much of a stretch for me to play. We all had crushes on her.”

Robinson’s best-known hand-and-rod puppet arose out of desperation. “Telly was a minor character until Caroll Spinney got suddenly sick one day and couldn’t come in. Waiting for him, of course, was an entire Big Bird script to do, and we were all looking at each other like,
What do we do now
? It was like, ‘Hey, here’s an idea. Let’s give Telly something to do!’ ”

When puppeteer Brian Muehl perfomed Telly, he was a gruff-sounding, obsessive worrier, the mope Muppet. “Every monster has his mania, but Telly was a little too depressive and very hair trigger for me back then,” Robinson said. “He used to consider Oscar his best friend and, of course, Oscar just tortured him mercilessly, which put him on this spiraling ring of self-loathing that was a joy for Oscar to behold. It was a classically sick, sadistic, masochistic relationship, and I much prefer him in his present state. After I took him over in 1984 he evolved. He gained a lot more range in his reactions and he’s stronger. He can’t be destroyed quite so easily and has good friends. His main thing now is that he believes totally in whatever he’s into. And he can turn on a dime and that doesn’t belie what he was feeling before. He can go from great joy to great sorrow and it’s all totally genuine.”

Considering that most Muppets start out as bath mats with appliqués, it’s fairly miraculous that they seem to have more dimensionality to their personalities than do most human characters on television. That richness of characterization dates back to Jim and Jane Henson on their knees at WRC in Washington, back to the days when reception was fuzzy and the home screen color spectrum was gray, black, and white. They understood that viewers would suspend their sense of disbelief if they saw pieces of themselves in the characters. Forgetful Jones had a foible, and he was therefore funny and as recognizable as the elderly neighbor next door who always seemed surprised when the paper boy came to collect on Fridays. The Count had an obsessive need, and who doesn’t? Telly fretted, Oscar kvetched, Ernie teased, Bert was anal, and Grover, like most of us, was, if not always a superhero, certainly above average.

 

There was a brief period during which Cookie Monster had neither an obsession nor a permanent name.

What he did have was Muppet ancestors, Henson characters who bore a resemblance to the bottomless sack with googly eyes. The first Cookie look-alike was used in a 1966 TV ad for some crunchy snacks called Wheels, Crowns and Flutes. The spot never ran, and the snack-snatching puppet known as Wheel Stealer went into hibernation for a year. He reemerged first in an IBM training film entitled
The Coffee Break Machine
and then later on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, as a saw-toothed monster who is as curious as he is voracious. Instead of simply admiring a piece of scientific equipment that only a government technocrat could love, the monster decides to eat it, component by component. It isn’t until swallowing the “recorded analytic program readout” (which continues to drone on inside his belly) that we learn the machine is programmed to self-destruct. In the tradition of the Wilkens coffee commercials, the punch line is “
Kaboom!
”

The third incarnation of the character was the charm. In the weeks leading up to
Sesame Street
’s launch, as the production team was shooting segments at a furious clip, Jon Stone was handed a half-baked script. The premise was promising—a blue, baggy monster and his wife vie for cash and prizes on a quiz show—and though the sketch began well enough, it ended with a thud. “We read through it and Jim and Frank looked at me as if to say, ‘We’re supposed to perform
this
?’ ”

“Yes,” Stone said, sweeping his arm and turning his right palm up, as if to say, “It’s showtime, boys.” Stone knew that if he could improvise an ending, Henson and Oz would embellish it. And so, yet again, the resourcefulness of the man who had once typed a makeshift résumé on a Manhattan sidewalk was put to the test.

“My mind was racing,” Stone said. “In desperation I blurted, ‘Okay, here’s what we can do. The monster and his wife win the game like the script says. But when he gets the question right, the emcee will say, ‘Your prize is either two weeks in Hawaii, all expenses paid; a free car; a new house and twenty-five thousand in cash, or . . . a cookie!’

“Jim and Frank went along and we began taping. When the critical moment of decision arrived, they really got into it. The husband monster was tortured by the emcee’s offer. He looked at his wife and then to heaven for assistance and growled in his monstery voice, ‘Oh, boy. Tough choice.’ ”

Then, using what would become Cookie Monster’s Tarzan-in-the-jungle speech pattern, eliminating articles and substituting “me” for “I,” the husband turned to his spouse. “You probably want house and car. Right?”

“Well, yes, dear,” the wife patiently responded. “But you know how you like your cookies.”

Stone said, “The monster glowered for another moment, and you could almost hear the gears grinding in his shaggy head. Then he raised himself up to his full height and bellowed his decision: ‘Cookie!’ ”

At that moment “a star was born,” Stone said.

Well-behaved (if sometimes insistent) children got Cookie Monster immediately. After all, he was a lot like them. “All of his monomania . . . would not stop him from caring about someone else,” said Norman Stiles, a two-time
Sesame Street
head writer who began in 1973. “He’s not going to knock over anybody to get the cookie. He’s going to try to get around them to get the cookie. He’s going to beg for the cookie.”
²

Adults recognized in Cookie Monster their own single-minded quest to satisfy needs, the id in all its “me-me-me, now-now-now” urgency. (In fact, during one of the annual
Sesame Street
wrap parties, outrageous affairs all, the puppeteers introduced Nookie Monster, a distant relative whose incessant carnal cravings had nothing to do with snickerdoodles.)

 

Technically, Roosevelt Franklin’s skin was magenta, as anyone with a color television during the early years of
Sesame Street
could have told you.

But the innards of this Muppet—who had a wild explosion of Don King hair and often spoke in rhyme—was joyfully, exuberantly, indisputably black. Roosevelt was added for season two to answer criticism from some members of the black community that the Muppets of Sesame Street lacked soul, in the James Brown sense of the word. They also argued that any show directed at the inner-city would be negligent—and, perhaps, fraudulent—without a share of black humor, idioms, and vernacular.

And so, with a push from Matt Robinson, who created the character, a series of classroom scenes were fashioned around a child so clever and advanced that they named the school after him. Dialogue and song lyrics for Roosevelt, described in
Look
magazine as “a nitty-gritty black boy with a matriarchal mother and bullies on his block,” were distinctly, unmistakably, and unapologetically attuned to the street. In
Newsweek
’s 1970 cover story on
Sesame Street
, executive producer Dave Connell said Roosevelt Franklin is “certainly not a white kid hiding in black skin. We do black humor, just like Irish humor and Jewish humor. It would be patronizing not to do it.”
³

“Matt created a delightful group of black puppet children, led by a feisty, funny Roosevelt,” said Jon Stone. “His buddies had names like Sam Sound Brown and Hardhead Henry Harris and always referred to each other by their entire names. Matt had a great ear for the syntax and flow of black speech as well as a unique comedic gift, wrote most of the scripts for these sketches, and supplied the voice for Roosevelt.”

Each of the bits would open with a shot of the imposing school’s courtyard (which looked like a minimum security prison) and a student chorus singing, “Hail to thee, our alma-mamma, Roosevelt Franklin [at which point the horns chime in with a
dahdup duh-dah
] Elementary School!”

Spitballs and paper airplanes invariably greeted Roosevelt as he entered his classroom. In one pithy episode about household dangers, Roosevelt peeks into the frame as a classmate says, “Sumpin’ must be up.”