Street Gang (46 page)

No one ever begrudged him his musical talent, both as performer and composer, but certain of his colleagues often found him an arrogant, obsequious, petty, puffed-up braggart. “There was never enough love that one could bestow on Joe, in the eyes of Joe,” Cooney said.

If Olympic gold was handed out for name-dropping, Raposo would have spent half his life on the medal platform. His casual conversations would be peppered with references to starlets and statesmen, the important people of the world who were forever seeking his counsel and consideration.

Raposo once approached Chris Cerf with a dilemma: “I just don’t know what to do,” he said. “I’ve got a terrible decision to make.”

“What is it, Joe?” Cerf said.

“Two of my best friends are running against each other for president: Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. I just don’t know what to do.”

“Vote your conscience,” Cerf advised him.

To love Raposo was to accept his incessant need to impress. Cerf and Cooney accepted it as the gaudy foil wrapping around the gift of his friendship. Unlike some name-droppers who give the false impression they mingled with the glitterati, Raposo did actually know Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, and Walter Cronkite. “Joe was the first man to kiss me on the cheek,” recalled Cronkite.

It took even a strong stomach for show-business excess to tolerate Raposo at his worst. In collaborative endeavors, he was all first-person singular, self-absorbed, self-enamored, self-aggrandizing. His most enraging selfish acts invariably made their way upstream to Cooney’s desk, and she would have to soothe the wounded.

Raposo clashed with anyone who dared encroach upon his perceived turf. Chief among his targets was Jeff Moss, a
Captain Kangaroo
veteran who succeeded Jon Stone as head writer. Beyond script writing, the sometimes combustible Moss was a gifted poet, composer, and lyricist. Raposo, a Harvard graduate, perceived the Princeton-educated Moss as a rival and threat, and Moss did little to dissuade him.

The classic en garde moment between the two came on a day when Moss skipped into the studio with the lead sheet for a new song he had written for mischievous Ernie. Moss had previously written a perfectly delightful waltz for Oscar entitled “I Love Trash,” recorded with panache by Caroll Spinney and later included in the original
Sesame Street
cast album. (Raposo and Moss famously feuded over who would get the most songs featured on that album.)

Moss’s new tune, a little ditty entitled “Rubber Duckie,” gave Ernie the opportunity to sing the praises of his main squeeze, a yellow bath toy that often accompanied him on dry land.

Left behind by Moss in the music room for Raposo to orchestrate and score, Cooney’s “bandleader” finally got around to giving it a run-through on the piano. When he was done, Raposo reached for a pencil, said music coordinator and house band drummer Danny Epstein, scribbled something on the music, and headed off for parts unknown. Epstein picked up the composition to see that his boss had written “Ho-hum” across the top of the lead sheet. “It wasn’t exactly nasty,” he said. “There was some style to the insult, a certain classiness. After that, Joe and Jeff really went at it, banging each other over the head, but always in an Ivy League kind of way.”

Raposo fairly seethed with envy when “Rubber Duckie,” sung by Jim Henson in the 1920s
vo-do-de-o
style of Rudy Vallee, rocketed to No. 11 on the Billboard Top 40 chart in 1971. “He went nuts,” Epstein said.

The success of that song not only boosted Moss’s bank account but his standing as a songwriter. He went on to write a small library of songs for
Sesame Street
, including the evocative gem “I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon.” Moss’s lyrics, and his later books of children’s rhyme, beautifully reflected the interior life of children. Raposo’s could, as well, but too often his work was dashed off on the backs of envelopes while a taxi was delivering him to the studio. Some of Raposo’s lyrics had a hollow ring, which was rarely the case with Moss’s.

There was money to be made in songwriting, and Moss wasn’t the only contributor to the show who cashed in on such opportunities. Among the others were scriptwriters Tony Geiss and Norman Stiles, and multitasking Chris Cerf. Still, more than anyone, with the obvious exception of Jim Henson, Raposo got rich from
Sesame Street
. But unlike Henson, he always seemed to find a way to rub it in. One day, after receiving notification by mail of song royalties totaling five thousand dollars, Raposo marched around the CTW offices, waving the check for all to see, a scene that made Epstein bury his face in his hands.

Raposo was the fortunate beneficiary of an early strategic decision regarding the music rights to
Sesame Street
’s catalogue. Because Cooney and her advisers wanted to interest top composers and lyricists to write for the show, and because CTW was a nonprofit entity just finding its way financially, it was decided to allow songwriters to own their work.

“Prior to
Sesame Street
, no kids’ songs done on television ever realized much in the way of royalties,” explained CTW public relations vice president Bob Hatch. “So the producers thought,
Heck, if this will make Jeff and Joe write all the harder, let’s let them have it
, and they did well. But the Workshop got a lot of ink—and a lot of mileage—from the airplay of songs like ‘Rubber Duckie.’ It helped sustain the level of public interest in the show. That’s not exactly nothing.”

Raposo’s best-regarded song for
Sesame Street
has an air of intrigue around it. This much we know: it began when Jon Stone approached Raposo with a request. “We need a song for the frog,” he said. As he had many times, with many songwriters and many songs, Stone walked Raposo through the curriculum goal for the composition and made lyric suggestions. Only Stone and Raposo were in the room when the contemplative song for Kermit was mapped out, but members of Stone’s family and others close to him have insisted that it was presumptuous of Raposo to claim that he alone wrote “Bein’ Green.” The sheet music has always indicated “Words and Music by Joe Raposo,” and thus the enormous royalties generated by the song have always belonged to him. Jon Stone’s failure to call Raposo on claiming full credit kindled one of the worst marital disagreements Jon and Beverley Stone ever had.

Raposo’s second wife, the New York television personality Pat Collins, said he wrote the melody in a flurry, “running upstairs after dinner to our third-floor loft. I think he wrote the lyrics on the back of that week’s
TV Guide
.”

 

Raposo quickly arranged the song for the
Sesame Street
house band, and Jim Henson sang it in the wee hours of a recording session. Epstein said that Henson’s very first take was “magnificent,” but that an audio engineer’s error ruined the acetate for the track. “Jim didn’t blink,” Epstein said. “He just sang it and sang it until we had a take that came close to the original. But I’m telling you, as someone who heard it, the first take was the keeper.”

Kermit’s melancholy performance, a song as soliloquy, inspired an array of interpretations. Some heard it as a contemplation of racial difference. Some heard it as a plea for tolerance of difference, or a lament about the same. “It was taken as a civil rights song, but it wasn’t that,” said Cooney. “It wasn’t meant to be about black people. It was meant to be about people who are different in more ways than just race.”

Pat Collins, who would have known better than anyone, said the song was “simply about being comfortable in your own skin, being comfortable with who you are. There wasn’t a lot of thumb sucking involved. Joe just went off and wrote it. But over time, as is the case with many good songs and poems, people identify with it on different levels. Ray Charles once told Joe that he wished that he had written ‘Bein’ Green’ because it spoke to his experience.” Charles made “Bein’ Green” part of his repertoire.

While Collins has dismissed notions that the song was autobiographical—an attempt to explain what it felt like to be a Portuguese kid of modest means from Fall River, Massachusetts—she said that another of his
Sesame Street
songs, the sing-along simple “Somebody Come and Play,” came straight from Raposo’s childhood experience.

 

“Joe was an only child, and he never had enough playmates,” Collins said. “For the first six years in school, nearly all of his classmates were orphans. His parents sent him to the neighborhood Catholic school, which was right across the street from his house. They thought it was a good school, but it was primarily a church school for kids without parents. They couldn’t come over and play after school because they all had to go back to the orphanage at the end of the day. His parents were only too happy about that because it meant Joe would spend more time studying piano in the afternoon. His mother, the former Mary Victorine, nailed shut the window in the practice room so that he wouldn’t open the window and go out and try to play baseball with the other neighborhood kids. She and her husband, Joseph D. Raposo, saw a child who was gifted, and they were correct.”

“And so, I see ‘Somebody Come and Play’ not as a song of regret or self-pity,” said Collins, “but a song about an only child looking to toss the ball around before the sun goes down. It’s about begging for pals to hang out with, kind of saying ‘If this day goes by, maybe we won’t have another quite like it.’”

 

One Saturday, out of the blue, Jim Henson called Joan Cooney at home. Clearly agitated and sounding almost brokenhearted, Henson said, “You have ruined my life.”

This was strange, coming from a man who was enjoying heretofore record levels of personal prosperity, professional achievement, and spiritual fulfillment. “We had had disagreements,” Cooney said, but the tone in Henson’s voice was one she had not heard before. It seemed a mixture of exasperation, disillusionment, and fear.

Henson then asked a question for which there was no answer: “Why did you have to be so successful?”

The remark wasn’t meant as ironic flattery; he was being sincere. The question hung in the air a moment before he completed the thought. “I am now living my worst nightmare.”

As far back as the days of
Sam and Friends
, as Henson established the Muppet brand, he had insisted his satiric and anarchic puppetry was primarily meant for adults. While he did nothing to discourage children from watching, and they did so in droves, Henson’s subsequent television commercials and appearances on mass-audience shows such as
Today
and
Tonight
were written and performed with a sophistication and wit that often went right over the heads of children, just as the subtext of Burr Tillstrom’s
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
did in the 1950s.

Puppetry was a means to an end for Henson. His goal was to be on television, and then later, to conquer the movies. Prior to
Sesame Street
, Henson’s business was evolving just as he had imagined it might. Rowlf was trading quips with Jimmy Dean on the entertainer’s prime-time show on ABC, and Henson’s more abstract Muppets were frequently featured on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. But Henson would find it galling every time Sullivan would lead in to an appearance by saying “And now for the kiddies out there, Jim Henson’s Muppets . . .” He was grateful for the exposure, but the categorization defeated his marketing strategy. In his mind, he was not, and never would be, a children’s entertainer, though he embraced the idea of being a
family
entertainer. That was an important distinction, one that Sullivan—and others—could not appreciate. What Henson wanted to re-create for television with the Muppets was the experience from his childhood of listening with his parents and brother to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy on the radio.

Henson had an advantage and an insight that was lost on others, a vision that was the result of his European walkabout. It was there he did his de facto graduate work in the art and commerce of puppetry, visiting countries where the art is taken far more seriously than in the United States. He returned home determined to become America’s counterintuitive puppeteer, a satirist who reinvented an ancient art form for the television age. He would be Burr Tillstrom—and then some, discarding the mock proscenium stage and the puppet theater for a more direct presentation to the home. He would, to the best of his ability, eschew daytime television, seeking after-dark opportunities, whenever and however possible.

But then came the entreaty from Joan Cooney to join in the noble cause of educational television. Its appeal was undeniable to compassionate, color-blind Henson, whose own young children were enjoying advantages denied to the less fortunate. Henson, a suburban commuter in hippie’s clothing, poured bountiful energy into
Sesame Street
for its first few years, before backing away slightly to allow his company to manage the day-today dealings with production of the show.