Street Gang (47 page)

By 1972, after the initial shower of accolades, there were times when his involvement with the show began to feel like a trap. Having worked so persistently to establish a broader identity, here he was, being hailed as America’s most amusing babysitter. It felt hopeless at times to be reduced to that, and Henson began to resent
Sesame Street
at the same time he was grateful to it. By 1972, revenues were just beginning to flow in from
Sesame
’s licensed products, creating a reservoir of reserves. That cash enabled Henson Associates to grow from a boutique operation into a bona fide enterprise.

Still, there were days when Henson felt he had sold his soul, and it was on one of these despondent days that he picked up the phone to call his client and colleague.

Cooney can be a cool customer, in the best sense, and she became especially adept at handling uprisings among the oft-temperamental men under her employ in the early seventies. “They all submerged their egos for that first year and a half, before
Sesame Street
debuted, then all hell broke loose,” she said.

“Joan had this enormous magic and force of personality,” said David Britt, her chief lieutenant in the executive ranks through the mid-1990s. “She got these very strong characters to not only come to work for her but to work
together
. And most of them didn’t necessarily get along very well.”

Henson was the least of her problems, but on the day he called with what she described as a
cri de coeur
, he jumped right to the top of her priorities. It was only after Cooney had allowed him to vent that she responded. “It was a lengthy, anguished phone conversation, and I picked up a certain restlessness in his words. Together, we worked through whatever the problem was that prompted the call, and I have no memory of what that was, other than Jim was feeling trapped in preschool television. But I recognized he was someone who resisted entrapment and would want to fly away if caged. I said to him, ‘You are going to break out of this. Something is going to happen that will provide new opportunities for you. You need to have the patience and belief to see what I’m saying is true.’”

What she could not have known on that weekend day was that just streets away, in the darkened Henson Workshop, amid the bales of fabric and pull-out drawers of eyes and noses, were scribbles and doodles and documented daydreams about a prime-time variety show starring the Muppets. Henson had long hoped that he might interest the networks with such an idea, stowing away ideas for what would one day become the world’s most successful syndicated television series, a comedy colossus called
The Muppet Show
. After turning their backs on it, America’s three commercial television networks watched in awe as Henson’s half-hour series, informed by English music hall comedy and vaudeville, circled the globe.

Henson’s despair over being viewed as a children’s performer would never entirely dissipate, but Joan Cooney’s reassurance on a down day was just what he needed, and he relaxed.

“I said to Jim, ‘Whatever happens, we must stay together for the sake of the children,’” Cooney recalled.

“And we did.”

 

Tim and Joan Cooney did not have children, but during the final turbulent years of their marriage they acted as de facto foster parents to an inner-city black child.

In 1970, Tim was working for Fight Back, a civil rights organization that helped blacks find work in New York’s multi-billion-dollar construction industry. The group’s storefront headquarters was situated in a typical block in Harlem, a mix of apartment houses, churches, hair salons, corner bars, and the kind of neighborhood shop that featured a candy counter, stacks of daily newspapers, and, in some cases, a back room to bet on the numbers. Next door to Fight Back was such an emporium, operated by an enterprising black woman.

Often when Tim stopped by for a paper he would see the woman’s adorable six-year-old grandchild, Chauncey Raymond Gilbert. To everyone but his grandmother, he was known as Raymond. She monitored his welfare as best she could, as her reckless daughter was incapable of providing much stability to Raymond and his siblings.

Over time, Tim befriended Raymond. “He was so smart,” Cooney said. “Tim thought there was something exceptional about him, and they took a shine to each other.”

The Cooney apartment became a happy refuge for a little boy from troubled circumstances. While he could be a delight, Raymond was often a challenge. Trouble just seemed to follow him.

The Cooneys started taking him along on trips to their weekend home in West Hampton Beach. “Everybody was welcoming of this cute little kid, but he began to steal from the neighbors, pocketing money if it was left around,” Cooney said. “When he was about eight years old, I half kiddingly asked him, ‘Exactly when did your life in crime start?’ He thought for a second, and went, ‘
Mmmm
. I guess it was when I was four and stole from a grocery store.’ The way he said it was without feeling, as if he were describing a way to beat the system.

“Raymond cried easily if he got caught or if you scolded him, but otherwise I found him completely affectless,” Cooney said. “I saw this conscienceless side of Raymond.” The Cooneys hoped Raymond would become more responsible and rule abiding. “It was typical of Tim and me—and of a lot of other white liberals in the 1970s—that we thought we might make a difference, that a miracle might occur, that it was worth taking such a long shot on that particular kid.”

The Cooneys arranged to have Raymond enrolled at Saint Christopher’s-Jennie Clarkson, a well-regarded residential program for troubled children, located in suburban Westchester County. “Luckily I knew a psychiatrist for the school, and he got him in. It was a huge break because we couldn’t afford a private institution, and this was absolutely free and wonderful. It was a therapeutic situation but it was also an accredited school.”

After a year Raymond’s mother came back into the picture. “He was there [at the school] for at least a year and doing better when his mother decided she wanted all of her children to be with her. She was living in Las Vegas, having a child a year with different men.” Raymond withdrew from school and moved to Nevada.

“That was the beginning of the end of possibilities for him,” Cooney said.

“Tim always built defeat into whatever he was doing, and it was so typical of him that he would be drawn to a child like Raymond, someone you’d invest all that time in and get nowhere. Tim never would have found a promising child in Harlem that we
really
might have helped. It would always be someone that you weren’t going to win with.”

In the late 1970s, Raymond returned to New York, no less a stranger to difficulties than when he left. Tim warned Joan against seeing him, fearing she might be at risk. “That was fine with me, because by the time Raymond was seventeen or eighteen, he had already been in prison,” Cooney said. “Tim said that to kids like Raymond, prison was an initiation; you went to prison to enter the big time.”

Raymond dealt in stolen goods and became a recidivist, doing time at Riker’s Island and an upstate penitentiary. During his third prison stint, he obtained a college degree. “But he could not stay out of trouble,” Cooney said, “From the time he was a child he was surrounded by petty crime and dysfunction.”

Out of prison and back fencing goods, Chauncey Raymond Gilbert was shot dead on a New York street, well shy of his thirtieth birthday.

 

In the years leading up to the launch of
Sesame Street
—and the ascendancy of Joan Ganz Cooney—Tim Cooney had bolstered his wife’s confidence and made things happen for her with his connections and convincing charm. But as Joan evolved into a celebrated figure—almost a three-name brand like Mary Tyler Moore—Tim began to withdraw into alcoholism, depression, and rage. On the one hand, he was immensely proud of
Sesame Street
and was thrilled that it was assisting poor children. On the other, “It made him feel unimportant,” Joan Cooney said.“His tendencies toward self-destruction were made much worse by my success, although he loved what I was doing and would help me by reading over and editing press releases and speeches that I would give. He wanted the success for me, but he became less and less visible in his own mind.

“But Tim was never going to permit himself to succeed, no matter what had happened to me. I don’t know what would’ve happened had I not succeeded, except that we would’ve been living hand-to-mouth.”

At his wife’s insistence, Tim saw a specialist in alcoholism and went on Antabuse, the first medication approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treatment of the disease. The drug interferes with the normal metabolic processes of the body. When a person consumes alcohol, it metabolizes into acetaldehyde, the toxic substance that causes hangover symptoms. As the hours pass, the body oxidizes acetaldehyde into acetic acid, which is harmless. Antabuse stops the oxidation of acetaldehyde, resulting in a build-up of the substance that is five to ten times greater than what normally occurs when a person drinks. The result is a barrage of symptoms that can range from copious vomiting and throbbing headache to congestive heart failure.

Amazingly, Tim found a way around it. “Antabuse controlled Tim’s impulse drinking for eight or nine months, but then he secretly planned a drunk. He knew he could no longer just stop in a bar on impulse, and he knew he had to wait three or four days for the drug to pass out of his system.” It was almost as if he circled a date on a calendar when he would cave. “It was unbelievably hopeless,” Cooney said. “He just couldn’t give it up. His tragedy was that he had no desire to be sober and he never hit bottom. Alcohol really destroyed that part of his brain that might have saved him.”

When the Cooneys separated in 1975, Joan, recognizing that Tim had no visible means of support, instructed her lawyers to draw up an agreement that would provide food, shelter, and transportation for a man who hadn’t held a paid position in years. “I don’t know what would’ve happened had I not supported him,” Cooney said. “I guess he would’ve ended up in a homeless shelter. I did what I had to do. All I wanted was a peaceful end to the marriage. And I knew that wasn’t possible if I didn’t sign a document saying I’d support him for the rest of his life. And, in fact, that document provided for a weekend house for him. I signed a car and a garage over to him. I was borrowing five thousand dollars a month on a bank loan to live. Every night I was doing the arithmetic of how do I get through to the next month. But I was happy to give him whatever he wanted. He was kicked out of his apartment house at one point, and I just quickly paid the landlord for the damage he claimed had been done. I found a broker, got a new apartment, and moved him in fast. I never wanted any of this to be public. I didn’t want it in the papers that he’d been picked up on the streets as a homeless person. And it would’ve been newsworthy because he was a former city figure and my husband.”

Cooney hoped for a respite from the demands of her personal life, but that longed-for peace never came. In August 1975, nine months after separating from Tim, she spotted a tiny pulsating bead on the left side of her chest, above the breast. “The lump was up in the muscle, just a twitching little thing that was less than a centimeter. But I could see it in the mirror. I could be in a slip and see it. At the time I was seeing a doctor every six months because my mother had had breast cancer at fifty-seven. And I had my own history of benign tumors, for which I had several biopsies that required hospital stays. I found a surgeon I loved, and when I came up with this lump, I lightly said, ‘You’d say it’s benign, wouldn’t you?’ And he said, ‘No. I wouldn’t say that at all.’ I couldn’t believe this tiny thing could possibly be cancer or dangerous.” It was determined to be both.

“The doctor said chemo and radiation were too dangerous and that, being forty-five, I was too young to consider it. He said I could easily get leukemia by the time I was sixty or sixty-five, which a lot of people did. Susan Sontag and I were talking back then because we were both being operated on at about the same time. Her cancer was so widespread, she decided to go to Paris to see a doctor who was blasting women with chemotherapy. My doctor said, ‘He’s going to kill her.’ But that doctor saved her and she lived till she was seventy-one or seventy-two.

“I had a radical mastectomy, a ghastly operation for a very small cancer,” Cooney said, without a trace of bitterness or self-pity. “Nowadays it would be a lumpectomy, I would be on radiation, and it would be over.”

Her estranged husband took the news hard. “Tim was absolutely
there
for me,” Cooney said. “He came every morning and brought me the papers and asked me what needed to be done, going back to the apartment to feed the cats and the dog. It was the most decent and level he had ever been, even though he was quite jarred by my cancer. He needed me very badly in every way. He was sobered, as it were, by the thought that I might not live. I don’t think he was thinking,
Oh my God, I may lose my means of support
. It was more that I was suddenly a needy figure.

“When I came home after about ten days, my sister came to stay with me,” Cooney said. “Tim disappeared.”

During her convalescence, Jim Henson arrived one day with a filled Cookie Monster cookie jar. “What he said was so typical,” Cooney said. “I had asked him many times during the first five years of the show, ‘What if something happens to you? What happens to your company? What happens to us at CTW?’ And now here he was at my apartment, looking at me.

“You asked me what would happen, and then you go and do this,” Henson said with a slight smile. “What happens?”

“Nothing,” Cooney said. “I’m going to be fine.”

“I just remember that stark look he had,” Cooney said. “It was kind of like ‘You had the nerve to ask me and then pull this stunt.’”

“I had Bob Hatch put out a memo to the staff that I had been operated on [and] returned to work quickly. I was supposed to stay out several weeks, but I started coming back for half days very early on, maybe after ten days. I had one interest: showing that I wasn’t sick and that CTW wasn’t going to miss a beat. I needed to feel normal again, back in the saddle, but there was a lot of depression. Work saved me.”