Street Gang (49 page)

As a parent, Stone knew when to say no. He always kept a No. 2 pencil perched in his beard while at work in the studio. If a script met with his disapproval, he would extricate the pencil and then slash away at the pages, rewriting on the fly rather than allow a substandard tag line—called the “button”—to fall flat.

As a parent, Stone also knew when to say yes, allowing the puppeteers to extemporize and embellish comically when they knew they were on a roll. He created a studio environment where people were allowed to be their authentic selves, an almost homelike atmosphere that was welcomed by celebrity guests who came by for one episode and then wished they could stay for another. That the
Sesame Street
set has traditionally been completely informal is largely attributable to a man whose preferred style of dress included a fishing vest with pockets and vents everywhere.

As a parent to his daughters, Polly and Kate, Stone was nothing like his own father, a clinically cold obstetrician and medical faculty member at Yale who shipped his two sons off for the summer to a farm in New Hampshire. There was no denying Dr. Stone’s brilliance, either in the operating room or when he would retreat to his study to solve mathematical problems or to play classical music on the piano. “My grandfather was not a man who loved children,” said Kate Lucas, Jon’s youngest daughter. “He was very much an intellectual and liked quiet in the house.” Though he was wealthy, money was never spoken of in a household where appearances and proper manners mattered.

Jon was musical and athletic as a child, but he was also dyslexic. He struggled academically, and his father sent him to boarding school at thirteen, in the hope that it would shape him up.

He once shared a crushing story from those prep-school days with daughter Kate. “My grandfather only went to one of dad’s football games, and on that day Dad rushed the kicker and blocked a punt with his chest. He saw stars and got knocked over, but the first thing that entered his mind was that his father was there to see it. But my grandfather had gone out of the stadium to make a business call and missed it. The disappointment of that stayed with my dad his entire life.”

Family lore has it that Jon’s father was pleased when his son was admitted to Williams College in Massachusetts, but displeased with his choice of major. Few undergraduates during Stone’s four years at Williams declared music as a concentration.

One day years later, when Stone was completing his final year of graduate school at Yale Drama, his father was delivering twins across town in New Haven. As nurses bundled the first infant to emerge from the womb, Dr. Stone mentioned to colleagues in surgery that he was feeling peculiar. He stepped out into the hallway and fell dead from a massive coronary.

“My dad had a complicated childhood,” Kate said. “He adored his mother and she adored him, but he clearly knew his father preferred his brother over him. A lot of times that pattern of rejection can continue into the next generation. But my father was the complete opposite of his father in terms of the way he loved his children. Polly and I were so lucky growing up to have a dad who was so wise. You could pick up the phone and tell him any problem in the world. He would listen and give you wonderful advice. Over and over he told us that we were his world, which kids need to hear. He told us we could do whatever we wanted to do in the world, and encouraged us to follow our dreams.”

Without the slightest tinge of resentment, she said, “
Sesame Street
was his third daughter,” the vessel into which he poured so much of his essence. She speaks of the show the way a younger sister looks up to an older sibling. And she believes that what her father often said about
Sesame Street
is true: that Kate and Polly had as much to do with the success of the show as anyone else. They were
Sesame Street
’s in-house, on-demand focus group, and just by being kids they contributed innumerable ideas for skits and sketches, and in one instance, a triumphant holiday special in 1978,
Christmas Eve on Sesame Street
.

The program was a tuneful, tasteful, at times heart-tugging imagining of the hours leading up to Christmas, a day somewhat spoiled by Oscar’s rather sour and persistent skepticism about Santa Claus.

In a manner reminiscent of spiteful older children tormenting younger ones—the cynical neo-nonbelievers who pick on the faithful, who don’t deserve to have their fantasies shattered—Oscar taunts Big Bird, raising doubts that Santa will deliver presents to buildings that may have rooftop vents but not chimneys. Stone and his cowriter, Joe Bailey, wrote script pages that reflected a plausible dilemma for an urban child, acted out by worrisome, restless Big Bird, who goes missing on Christmas Eve. Like a preschool child who wanders off in a department store, Big Bird is oblivious to the worry he is causing by stationing himself on the rooftop of Gordon and Susan’s brownstone. As a snowstorm grows in intensity, Big Bird remains at his frigid post, on the lookout for Santa.

Panic sets in when word hits the street that Big Bird is gone. That’s when Maria, behaving as any frantic adult might, pulls Oscar out of his trash can—by the scruff of his little green neck. What transpires is a startling reprimand that sounds surprisingly lifelike.

 

Oscar, shamed, regretful, and suddenly resolute, goes off in search of Big Bird, after getting his comeuppance from Maria, the one adult on
Sesame Street
who gives as good as she gets. Before he trudges off, his feet sticking out of the bottom of the can, Oscar can’t resist one little tweak.

“Come on, hurry up, skinny,” he calls out to Maria. It is at that moment the script reminds us that the grouch is at his orneriest around those he cares for the most.

The script allows for another powerfully relatable moment, after Big Bird decides he’s had enough of waiting in the cold and comes downstairs to “warm up for a minute” at Gordon and Susan’s place. Gordon has been trying to soothe Patty, a scared child who had been playing with Big Bird and reported him missing. She runs to Big Bird’s side as he enters the foyer, giggling with joyous relief. That’s when the questions begin from the surrogate parents.

 

Gordon all but pushes Big Bird into his apartment, where gifts delivered from Santa are laid out under a tree decorated with baubles, tinsel, and candy canes. Not only did Santa arrive, he even left something for Cookie Monster.

The Christmas special features a second story line, borrowed affectionately from O. Henry. Ernie is trading in his rubber duckie to get a cigar box for old buddy Bert’s paper clip collection. Bert, in turn, is trading in his paper clips to Mr. Hooper for a pink soap dish for Ernie’s use as a bathtime perch for duckie. Mr. Hooper, recognizing sacrifice and devoted friendship when he sees it, returns the duck and the paper clip collection, wrapped as gifts to his good customers Bert and Ernie, who sing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

To watch that scene now, preserved on home video, is to be reminded how remarkably gifted were Jim Henson and Frank Oz, two real-life colleagues and friends, at playing puppetry’s Odd Couple. It is a tribute to their artistry that Bert and Ernie seem so emotionally valid and kinetic to the viewer, even though somewhere within the rational folds of the brain we know they are but extensions of shirtsleeves, two arts-and-crafts projects, “dollies to wiggle” as Stone used to say.

Any sentimentalist looking for a reason to test his or her tear ducts would do well to insert
Christmas Eve on Sesame Street
into the video player and replay Bert and Ernie’s rendition of a Christmas classic. It will remind the viewer that love and friendship are binding forces of the universe that transcend time and space. The relationship that existed between Henson and Oz, brothers, creative collaborators, and interlocking souls, was downright enviable. They shared something holy and fragile, illuminated by laughter and held tethered by trust. God blessed them; but Jon Stone, a mere mortal, brought out their best.

“If there was one project to put in a time capsule and send off to space, to let the Martians know what
Sesame Street
was like, it would be that Christmas special,” said Sonia Manzano. “Jon had a way of touching the exact pulse, the exact concerns of the child. He was not afraid.”

Dulcy Singer, who produced the special, said “It was Jon’s baby from the beginning. If you want to see his soul, watch
Christmas Eve on Sesame Street
.”

Stone’s now-adult children see aspects of their childhood in Vermont and New York reflected in the special. “When my sister and I were little, we would write a letter to Santa after dinner on Christmas Eve,” said schoolteacher Polly, an interior designer by avocation. “We’d leave the letters with cookies—and a glass of scotch—by the fireplace. One year I asked Santa what his favorite poem was. My sister asked him how he got down that skinny little chimney. So the idea for Big Bird’s dilemma in the special came from Kate, who was teeny at the time.

“The next morning came Dad’s response—or should I say Santa’s response—in a letter for each of us. To me he wrote, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, aba-ca-chu, I’ve got the flu.’

“To Kate he wrote, ‘Well, I suck in my gut and I point my toes and
whoosh
, down I go! Getting up is a different matter.’ ”

 

Paul Firstenberg was CTW’s executive vice president in 1978 when
Christmas Eve on Sesame Street
was produced. One of his more baffling decisions (which included selling off interests in cable television that would later be valued in the hundreds of millions) was to sign a deal that same year for
A Special Sesame Street Christmas
, with independent television producer Bob Banner. Banner, whose roots in variety television went back to the Garry Moore and Dinah Shore shows of the 1950s, had a track record of working with Henson and the Muppets from his days producing the prime-time
Jimmy Dean Show
. CBS bought the idea even though there was one in the works for PBS. When executive producer Singer questioned the wisdom of competing specials, Firstenberg said, “If we proceed with two shows, maybe one will make it to air.” Said Singer, “Can you imagine the mentality? He had a complete lack of understanding of the show.”

Firstenberg’s low-budget network special featured a bizarre lineup of creaky B-list talent, including cloying host Leslie Uggams and nearly exhumed entertainers Ethel Merman and Imogene Coca. All three had been early guest stars on
The Muppet Show,
before top-name talent began flocking to the syndicated show after its first season. Adding to the surreal mix of the Christmas special were guest appearances by Henry Fonda and that breakout boy soprano from the Jackson 5, Michael Jackson.

It was a painfully obtuse hour built around a shaky story line that cast Oscar as
Sesame Street
’s resident Scrooge. It was an hour trimmed in treacle and about as far afield from the educational objectives of
Sesame Street
as one could imagine.

It should be noted here that an honest appraisal of Jim Henson’s network television work with the Muppets must account for a good number of unworthy, unfunny, unbecoming, unwatchable appearances of which
A Special Sesame Street Christmas
was one. On balance, the good far outweighs the bad, and much of what Henson brought to television approached greatness. But his taste was not impeccable. He made plenty of television that
Muppet Show
balcony critics Statler and Waldorf would have booed off the stage, and quite rightly.

 

By November 1979, after
Sesame Street
had been broadcasting for a full decade, some nine million American children under the age of six were watching it every day. A study that had been reported the previous year indicated that 90 percent of children in low-income inner-city households regularly tuned in. Overall, four out of five households with children under six saw the show over a six-week period.

Writing in the
New York Times
, Fred M. Hechinger extolled
Sesame Street
’s virtues and cited its detractors upon its tenth birthday. “On its way to the top,
Sesame Street
was denounced by the Soviet Union as a tool of American cultural imperialism and by the British Broadcasting Corporation as an instrument of American hucksterism. It has been accused by American pedagogical critics of harmful side effects, ranging from shortening children’s attention span to causing epileptic fits.”
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