Street Gang (54 page)

Henson had generously given his colleagues a percentage on such projects as
Fraggle Rock,
the allegorical HBO series that used puppets to examine the symbiotic relationship between species. After Nelson had spent so many years working away from home on
The Muppet Show
and subsequent Muppet movies, his nest in Cape Cod, a cozy retreat near Provincetown, was beckoning him and his wife. The good life awaited, but Henson wanted to hear none of it.

“They’ll be wheeling us out of here,” Henson then said to Nelson with a laugh. “In my case, it’s getting closer to that.”

That comment would take on a haunting quality after Nelson and a group of colleagues returned to New York from Florida in the spring of 1990. David Rudman, a young puppeteer from Chicago who was new to the Muppets, remembered that Henson had looked ill and drained while they were shooting a Disney World ad in Orlando.

When the performers reunited in New York to loop the commercial, Henson failed to appear. That their leader would be a no-show was an extraordinary event, and the puppeteers waited around for hours. “Nobody knew where he was,” Rudman said.

Henson also failed to appear later that day at a party to promote a PBS special that would air the following night.

Back home in Chicago, Rudman was awakened by a late-night call from Richard Hunt, alerting him that something was seriously wrong with Henson. “Richard said he was on the way to the hospital and that he’d call me as soon as he learned anything more,” Rudman said. “Around 2:00 a.m., Kevin Clash called, saying, ‘Get back here to New York right away.’ ” Rudman took the first flight out of O’Hare and sped to the Henson Workshop, where his colleagues had begun gathering in the early morning hours. By then, Henson was gone.

“Everyone was walking around like zombies,” Rudman said. “We started talking about a memorial service right away. It helped everyone get focused.”

Joan Cooney was told of Henson’s death at dawn. She called Dulcy Singer around 7:00 a.m. “I was in a sleepy daze,” Singer said. “I didn’t know that Jim had been sick, so my first reaction was disbelief. Jim had been such a workaholic. So many times I’d seen him work with the flu. People told me he had toughed out a case of walking pneumonia the year before in London. He had the most powerful will, and I don’t think he listened to his body. He just went ahead and worked his way through illness.”

Later in the morning, Emily Kingsley was driving into Manhattan from Westchester County for a writers’ meeting at CTW when she heard a radio report of Henson’s death. “I almost drove off the road,” she said. “It turned out that all of us had heard the news on our way to work, and so, in a spooky way, we all experienced it together.”

Puppeteer Fran Brill was recording voice-overs at the Young & Rubicam advertising agency when a casting director broke the news. “For years, I couldn’t talk about that day,” she said. “But now I believe that if Jim somehow could have been informed about how he died, he would have said, ‘
Hmmmm.
Interesting.’ He would have just accepted it, taken it with a grain of salt, and not wondered about choices he had made along the way. He would not have said, ‘Gee, I wish I had gone to the doctor.’

“I remember once on the set I saw Jim’s back was wounded,” Brill continued. “I said, ‘Jim, you’re bleeding from the back,’ and he said, ‘It’s no big deal.’

“Jim just didn’t do the doctor thing.”

 

Bernie Brillstein’s eyes still glistened and his voice cracked with emotion when he talked about his client of thirty years. “I’m convinced Jim knew he was going to die,” Brillstein said, shaking his head. “Would a man of fifty-three—who felt he wasn’t going to die anytime soon—write out instructions for his
funeral
? Instructions that were meant to be read
aloud
? Not only did the letter he wrote to his kids mention who he wanted to speak at the memorial, he also indicated his preferences for the
entertainment.
” A little ruefully he added, “My bet is that Jim felt his kids would do it wrong, and he didn’t want to leave anything to chance.”

Other members of Henson’s corps of advisers were also mystified by the letter left behind.
Muppet Show
executive producer David Lazer said, “Jim copied me on that letter. It was a premonition and it spooked me. Why else would a man who was so vital, who loved life so much, who loved being happy and making others happy, write a letter that was so serious in intent? I had only heard him mention mortality twice in the years I had known him. We were flying to Los Angeles at a time when his son John was about to face a serious operation, but we had a deadline to meet. Jim turned to me and said, ‘If anything were to happen to any of my kids, I don’t know how I could handle it.’ That was a big statement from someone who never talked about mortality. The only other time was the letter.

“This was a man who loved having a good time at the gambling clubs in England. He threw
major
costume parties. This man loved fun and it showed up in his characters in their happy and innocent outlook. His values were not materialistic. Even though he liked to dress up and eat in nice places, he was one with the universe. He could look at a sunset and it would feed him. It was as if someone else got a million-dollar check. Jim was about harmony with people and in nature. There is a
reason
why the Muppets are different colors, shapes, and sizes. He never had a racist thought in his head. He celebrated everyone’s differences. Some of the characters are cranky, some are this, some are that, but they all are pals together. They stick together in adversity. That’s a lesson I learned from Jim just by being around him.”

Brillstein said, “Jim loved being Jim, and he could show it, especially during the later years out here in Los Angeles, with his Missoni sweaters and his flowing hair. Who would figure Jim Henson to be a guy who would rent a yacht? But I took him on a cruise one year and he took me the next, celebrating our twenty-fifth anniversary together. Jim had a love for aesthetic things, for beautiful things and beautiful women.”

In his office, Brillstein, who died in 2008, had a Muppet version of himself encased in glass, a one-of-a-kind gift from a man who would spend weeks working on a surprise for someone he held dear.

During the memorial service, Frank Oz provided a hard-to-top example. One Christmas season, Henson had approached Oz backstage during the season the Muppets were featured on
Saturday Night Live.
“It was just prior to dress rehearsal and the other guys had gone off to lunch. Jim and I were just hanging around the halls. He came up with a camera and Jim said in his quiet, enthusiastic way, ‘Frank, I need to go in a dressing room with you . . . and if you could take off all your clothes, I could take a picture of you naked.’

“I said, ‘
Whoa!
What?’

“And he said, ‘I really need to take a picture of you naked.’

“We discussed this for a while . . . and I said, ‘All right.’ So we went into the dressing room and I took off all my clothes, buck naked. Locked the door, of course. And he said, ‘Now pose. Put your hands over your genitals,’ which I was glad to do. He said, ‘Bend over [forward] and look into the camera in a state of shock,’ which was not difficult at that time. So I bent over and he took some photos of me. I got dressed and we did the show.”

Some days later Oz received a sculpted wall hanging that was entitled
Bert in Self-Contemplation.
It featured Bert with his arms holding a ledge filled with tiny toy Berts and photo miniatures of Henson Workshop employees. Henson had painted layers on the artwork, “like earth striations, which I gather were like the layers of Bert’s mind, his soul,” Oz said, “and within those layers he painted beautiful textures.” When he picked it up to admire it, Oz noticed that Bert’s pupils had been cut out, offering an invitation to look through, like a hole in a fence. “You look inside Bert’s brain . . . and there I am, naked,” Oz said. “I
knew
he had a good reason.”

Trust is the mortar of every lasting relationship; if Jim Henson had yours, there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do. Brillstein and Oz, two connoisseurs of funny, were Henson’s wing men.

Henson trusted Joan Cooney, as well. They exchanged truths and confidences with ease and reliably read each other’s moods. “Laughter permeated Jim’s work, and that which he adored most was his work with the Muppets,” Cooney explained. “This is not to say that Jim did not have his down moments and darker side. His darker side wasn’t readily apparent, but without it he would not have made his fantasy-adventure films
The Dark Crystal
and
Labyrinth.
Both did not do well at the box office and were critically panned.
⁴
Jim had a long fall after
Dark Crystal
failed to meet audience expectations. I can tell you that he was seriously depressed, and we were worried about him.”

Cooney said moviegoers sensed “a lack of sophistication” in Henson’s tackling of serious themes. “Jim had a very serious, earnest side, but there wasn’t much nuance there. The nuance was all in the comedy.”

 

The program for the Henson memorial was prepared in five days. Martin G. Baker, an Englishman who produced, coproduced, or executive produced
The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock,
and
The Jim Henson Hour,
coordinated the logistics. Duncan Kenworthy, vice president of production at Henson Associates and director of the London-based Henson Creature Shop, told the
Washington Post
in June 1990 that working on the two-and-a-half-hour memorial “was the most moving experience I’ve ever had. Someone said, ‘It’s the only memorial service I’d ever been to that you could take on the road.’ It was a wonderful microcosm of us. There we were, disagreeing in many ways, having very strong views, trying not to say, ‘What would Jim have done?’ There was a lot of disagreement, but in the end, we came up with a service that was a real achievement. That’s the best hope for the future—that you can have strong creative talents, and unanimity.”
⁵
“Martin Baker produced it as if he were producing any big show,” Craig Shemin recalled. Although the Henson family turned down CNN’s request to broadcast it live, the service was videotaped for posterity, in keeping with the meticulous and comprehensive regard the Jim Henson Company has for its history.
⁶

“The service was a spontaneous outpouring,” said Shemin. “Very little of it was scripted.” In preparation for it, clusters of employees assembled fabric butterflies on wands to hand out to attendees. The gesture was undertaken not only to honor the spirit of Henson’s more fanciful work but almost to provide a kind of “background” character for the scene. “Those type of butterflies had been used on many of Henson’s productions,” Shemin said. “Jim was forever working some character in the background. He was just as likely to have picked up a butterfly as anything else.”

Shemin, who handled guest relations for the six hundred to seven hundred invitees, said the feverish preparations proved a godsend, “Everyone was so numb, we all were looking for something to do.”

By the time the guests were escorted to the pews, Shemin realized he had no seat of his own. “But the florist who provided all the weekly arrangements for the Henson company and had done the flowers for the memorial service had put aside two folding chairs in a side closet.” Craig and the florist extended a row and sat together.

The Muppet performers were seated together for the memorial service—“house right,” recalled Fran Brill. Respecting Henson’s wishes, the puppeteers wore no black. Brill chose a purple and white dress.

The colleagues had worked through countless challenges before, but nothing approached having to muster their strength to get through this day. “There was a lot of emotion, a lot of embraces, a lot of Kleenex,” said Brill. “I cried from the beginning of the memorial to the end. I had never been inside St. John the Divine before, and the overwhelming majesty of the place—and the sight of the huge crowd that came to honor Jim, people who were strangers to him—moved me deeply. The enormity of Jim’s influence, how beloved a figure he was to so many people all over the world really hit me.

“At one point we all got up onstage to sing ‘The Rainbow Connection,’ and I just mouthed the words because I couldn’t stop crying. I remember being in awe of Louise Gold, a wonderful British puppeteer who had worked on
The Muppet Show,
who sang ‘Bring Him Home,’ that beautiful song from
Les Misérables.
She never lost her composure, I don’t know how she did it.

“And, of course, after many had spoken about Jim, there was a long silence, as if the next scheduled speaker had missed their cue,” Brill recalled. “But then there was a murmur in the body of the church and everyone began to realize that in the great distance behind the altar Big Bird was slowly walking toward us. As he walked, he looked left and right at the congregation, as if he was a bewildered child. It was exactly what a six-year-old would do. The murmur from the congregation grew and grew as more people saw him approaching. It took quite a while for him to get to the front. When he finally reached the spotlight he began to sing . . . and it was breathtaking.”

Big Bird was never so three-dimensional as he was that day in the cathedral, so crushingly wounded by loss but so brave. Just as he had for the taping of the episode on Mr. Hooper’s death, Caroll Spinney dug down deep and came up with a performance steeped in melancholy. As he began, Big Bird seemed slightly baffled and dazed at first, perhaps because the artist underneath all those yellow-dyed feathers was an artist who owed his livelihood to Jim Henson.

Being hired to perform Big Bird and Oscar had been the break of a lifetime. Although it took more than ten years of struggle for Spinney to be compensated at a level commensurate with his abilities and his characters’ renown—his salary was shamefully low by show-business standards—he did begin to thrive financially in the 1980s. But more than that, Spinney met and married the love of his life thanks to
Sesame Street.