Street Gang (50 page)

That
Sesame Street
continued to be discussed so seriously was merely an indication that, after ten years, it still really mattered. And surviving ten years of television, a medium in which shows often don’t last ten weeks, was a significant achievement. By 1979, the first viewers of
Sesame Street
had already reached puberty.

Bert and Ernie, on the other hand, didn’t age a bit—or change out of their white turtleneck or striped polo very often. They just continued to needle and nag, talk to each other in bed, and feed their obsessions.

While the rest of America spent the next ten years looking inward, perhaps in vain,
Sesame Street
would spend the eighties turning outward, expanding its young viewers’ world. In its second decade on television, the real-life experiences of the writing staff, cast, and crew provided a foundation for the series.

To look back at that period is to appreciate the profound effect that life-cycle events had on the show, offstage and on. There was birth and death, love and loss, courtship and calamity, pleasure and pain, all from a little show whose aims at first were simply to test television’s ability to stimulate the brain. That it would also touch the heart was not its original intention, but as each year passed,
Sesame Street
became as much an emotional pathway for children as an intellectual one, and just in time. For this was the period when the children of baby boomers were riding in back of Chrysler minivans, with yellow BABY ON BOARD warnings slapped on the windows. Big Bird plush toys were along for the ride, belted in, naturally.

But by decade’s end, the family would need to make room for a squeaky-voiced Muppet monster whose incessant laugh would make many a driver grip the steering wheel.

 

A bizarre report crackled across the police radio airwaves in Nashville in the early hours of Friday, September 19, 1980. Dispatch was issuing an alert that an African American male had been spotted running in the Green Hills area of the city, buck naked except for a T-shirt.

It was Northern Calloway, fleeing from a brutal assault but seemingly unaware of it—or the trail of property damage he wreaked on Graybar Lane.

Calloway had randomly ransacked several homes. At one stop he destroyed a family’s collection of fine crystal; at another, he broke a lightbulb in his bare hand; at a third he snatched a book bag belonging to a first-grader. Along the way he hurled a rock through a car window, shattering it, and smashed a few headlights.

Calloway was delirious and agitated when police found him in a garage. “He was yelling and screaming,” said Metro Officer James D. Murphy. “We couldn’t talk to him. He said he was the CIA and to call [President] Jimmy Carter.”
³

Police learned that before the rampage, Calloway had been visiting a woman, a twenty-seven-year-old marketing director, at the Villager Condominiums on Hillsboro Road. During an appearance at the Nashville Performing Arts Center the previous week, Calloway had become smitten with Mary Stagaman.

Pursuing single or married white women he met on the road had become a habitual and daring sport for Calloway, but this escapade was tragically different. Calloway had snapped.

Police discovered that Stagaman had been battered about the skull and torso with an iron rod and was admitted to the intensive-care unit of Vanderbilt University Hospital, where she was treated for head injuries and broken ribs. She remained hospitalized for two months.

A
Nashville Banner
report quoted police as saying that “the beating was so severe, the iron rod was destroyed.”
⁴

Calloway recalled little of the night he was arrested and said he had no memory of beating Stagaman. He was admitted to a psychiatric facility in Nashville following the assault but was allowed to return to New York under a doctor’s supervision. Noted Nashville criminal attorney Lionel Barrett took on Calloway’s case.

In September 1981, a year after Calloway was charged with aggravated assault, the actor pled guilty by reason of insanity. District Attorney General Tom Shriver said that an agreement had been reached between the state and Barrett to bypass a grand jury indictment and to turn evidence over to a criminal court. The deal allowed the court to retain jurisdiction over Calloway’s psychiatric treatment if a jury found him not guilty by the insanity plea. Doctors called in by the state had already determined that Calloway was insane at the time of the attack and rampage on personal property.

During the intervening year, Calloway had received outpatient psychiatric care in New York and had returned to work on
Sesame Street
. Executive producer Dulcy Singer believed that with proper psychiatric treatment—and a promise that Calloway would conscientiously take his daily dosage of lithium—the actor could rejoin the cast.

For some reason, the incident in Tennessee was largely ignored by the mainstream press in New York and the supermarket tabloids. “I don’t why, but the story never gained any legs,” said CTW executive David V. B. Britt. “It wasn’t so much an institutional crisis for CTW as it was a crisis for the show.”

An understandable wariness shadowed Calloway upon his return to the set, especially among those who had detected volatility long before the assault in Nashville. “He always had an interesting gleam in his eye,” said publicist Bob Hatch. “The ability to raise hell was not far beneath the surface. I never saw it in action, but I knew that it was there. And he got away with as much as he did because he was so damn talented.”

The promise of his early years on
Sesame Street
diminished in the 1980s. “Lithium took Northern’s zest away, and he became heavily sedated and put on a great deal of weight,” Singer said. “Then I learned that he was doing cocaine—at the same time he was taking his maintenance drugs. At that time, Northern became totally unreliable. He couldn’t remember his lines at all, and we’d have to do a dozen takes for every scene he was in. I had called his psychiatrist any number of times in an attempt to tell him what was going on with his patient, but the doctor just totally dismissed it. The doctor felt he was protecting Northern, but I think stupidly.”

 

Shortly after appearing in the fifty-sixth annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, on November 25, 1982, Will Lee became ill and was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital. The seventy-four-year-old Lee, not one to miss the parade, had braved the cold to take his accustomed perch on the float.

Lee had been in fine shape that production season. He had taped a good number of segments in November and had been regaling everyone with tales from his days as a near-destitute actor in the 1930s, sharing a cold-water flat that by rights should have been condemned. He liked to discuss his days in Yiddish theater with the CTW research director, Dr. Lewis Bernstein, a gentle man and a gentleman. Because Bernstein wore a yarmulke atop his skull, Lee would rattle on in Yiddish. The researcher didn’t have the heart to interrupt him or disclose that he understood very little of the language.

Lee had played a range of roles in his theater career but had never found the level of popular success on the stage that he had in the television studio playing Mr. Hooper. At times, he would be put off when his fellow actors would extemporaneously wander beyond the script. His acting training—and his respect for writers—made it difficult for him to venture beyond what was there on the page. To that end, he would often run lines with his cast mates, helping them internalize the words that had been so thoughtfully crafted for them to interpret.

When cast and crew learned of his hospitalization, people drew in their breath. How could they tape episodes of
Sesame Street
without Mr. Hooper, the mainstay of the neighborhood? Since his first, somewhat enigmatic, appearance in episode 1, Mr. Hooper had become many things to many young children: a surrogate papa, pawpaw, pop-pop, gramps, and grand-daddy, not to forget
abuelo
,
dedushka
,
dziadek
,
grand-père
,
nonno
,
pappaus
,
yee-yee,
and
zeidy
. Mr. Hooper was the guy in the apron at the far side of the generation gap, his half-lens glasses slipping down his nose.

That his establishment carried his name was of no small significance. The quirky variety store, with its signature soda fountain, was a projection of Mr. Hooper’s personality onto an idealized social institution. Even children knew you couldn’t walk away from a local 7-Eleven with a newspaper under your arm and a Slurpee in one hand, promising the cashier, “I’ll be back to pay for it tomorrow.” But your credit was good with Mr. Hooper because not only did he know you, he knew your
mother
.

Will Lee played Mr. Hooper with such certainty and naturalness he made adults suspend their sense of disbelief. When celebrity guests would arrive at the
Sesame Street
set for a taping, they often would walk into Hooper’s store and look around, wishing they could buy something to bring home. Even people paid to engage in make-believe wanted to hold on to the illusion, and when they found the shelves lined with props, they left with the only thing in stock: mild disappointment.

Bob McGrath went to visit Lee in the hospital and was stunned to see how gravely ill his cast mate had become. “He was not passing water,” McGrath said, “and I told him that if he minded the doctors and urinated, I would make sure
Sesame Street
would be made possible by the letter
P
upon his return to the set.” That might have been the last line any actor fed Will Lee, a line as funny and smart as
Sesame Street
itself.

Lee suffered a fatal heart attack on December 7, 1982, at the Upper East Side hospital. A memorial service was held eight days later at the New York Shakespeare Festival Theater on Lafayette Street. He left behind a sister, Sophie Lubov, in Florida.

 

Lee’s sudden passing, which occurred toward the end of a production season, was no small issue for everyone associated with the show. In the months that followed, as another season was being written, the production team and research staff resolved that the part of Mr. Hooper would not be recast. Instead, the character—and, by extension, the actor who played him—would be memorialized on the show in an episode that would take on the tricky business of explaining death to a preschool audience.

It was left to head writer Norman Stiles to find an age-appropriate means to convey the finality of death without causing children undue fear or confusion. The result was a truly memorable episode, one of the show’s best.

To assist him in dealing with such a sensitive topic, research director Bernstein convened an advisory group of psychologists and religious leaders to provide guidance. “It’s what we call a curriculum bath,” Bernstein explained. “We bring in the experts to allow the writer to soak in expertise. We in Research bring in people to provide the information, and then the artistry of the writer takes over, as they integrate what they’ve heard.

“We ended up with an entire episode that dealt with the life cycle, about the naturalness of birth and death. The psychiatrists who advised us said that we needed to be mindful that children, like adults, need to find a sense of closure, even though they don’t yet know what the word
closure
means. We tried to make a show about beginnings and endings, leading to a segment that said Mr. Hooper had reached an end point.

“That death was a part of life was the lesson we needed to impart, but we had to sidestep religious matters, as best we could. So we decided that all religions deal in human memory, to one degree or another. We decided to say that while Mr. Hooper was not here anymore, we will always have that part of him that lives within the heart, that we have our love and that it will always stay.

“And at the same time, we wanted to establish that sometimes, for adults and children, expressing your feelings is hard to do.”

Stiles went to work, crafting a script that allowed Roscoe Orman, as father-figure Gordon, to lead the way. It was the first of several brilliant choices. The second was to enlist Richard Hunt, who, as Forgetful Jones, kicks off the first scene a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’, but for reasons he suddenly can’t remember.

By questioning him, Gordon not only helps Forgetful recall what factors led to his jubilant mood, but establishes the show’s conviction that talking about emotions can not only be helpful, but even entertaining. “Let’s see if we can figure it out,” Gordon says. “Let’s think real hard . . . about what was happening when you were feeling happy.”

Forgetful says, “The sun was shining . . . a breeze was blowing . . . and then the trees started swaying, sorta like dancin’, back and forth . . . and then my heart started a-beatin’ in time with the trees dancing,
ba boom-boom, ba boom-boom . . .
I started yellin’, ‘Well, all right,’ ’cause I was happy. Can you imagine me forgettin’ simple things that make me happy?”

Later, Big Bird forgets something that made him sad. The scene unfolds in the courtyard as Gordon, Susan, Bob, Maria, Luis, David, and Olivia are enjoying coffee, café style. “Hey, I’ve got a great idea,” Big Bird says to the audience. Why don’t we watch the grown-ups for a while?” Somewhat to his dismay, Big Bird sees that all they are doing is talking. “Well, I was hoping you were going to be doing something more interesting,” Big Bird says. “That’s okay. I can make even listening to you guys exciting. What I’m going to do is I’ll listen to what you are saying, and from what I hear I’ll try to guess what you’re talking about. And I’ll do all that while I’m balancing on one leg!”

The adults resume discussing Leandro, a son born to the Williams family, whom everyone seems to know. The baby—who may or may not resemble his father—will be coming with his parents to
Sesame Street
later in the day. Susan turns to Big Bird and says, “You should be able to guess by now. Put all the clues together. We were talking about the baby, we said what his name was, we said what he looked like, and we said that he and his mother were coming over here today.”