Street Gang (56 page)

“I said, ‘No, I probably won’t.’

“I’m in Frank Sinatra’s car!” he said. Sinatra at the time had a mobile telephone installed in his limo, a luxury afforded few in the pre-cell-phone era. Raposo had dialed up Cerf when Sinatra stepped away. “You’re the first person I called,” he crowed.

“I was thrilled for him,” Cerf said, “but it turns out he had called everybody else, too. It was a very Joe Raposo moment.”

Joan Cooney once recalled receiving a postcard from Raposo. “He [had been] staying at one of Frank Sinatra’s villas in Palm Springs. On one side of the card was an aerial view of Sinatra’s estate, and he had circled one of the little houses and written ‘That’s my room.’ That was quintessentially Joe.”

Raposo contributed four tracks to Sinatra’s
Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back,
a 1973 comeback album that brought the singer out of a premature retirement. The project met with mixed reviews, and some critics dismissed Raposo’s “You Will Be My Music” and “There Used to Be a Ballpark” as schmaltz. For a time, Raposo was in Sinatra’s good graces, back when the crooner thought the composer was a
paisan,
not Portuguese.

There were tears aplenty when Raposo passed, and a lot of elbow nudging when all of the people behind those dropped names came forward to say they were honored to be his friend. Pat Collins has a theory about it. “Joe wasn’t bragging so much as he was sharing a kind of joy. He didn’t name-drop to impress the listener, but to remind himself that he was not in a waking dream. He actually knew the likes of Sinatra and Cronkite and Richard Rodgers, pretty heady company. He was like a kid who loved baseball who grew up to hang around with Hall of Famers. Joe did not fawn over the famous. It was his pleasure to be in the company of the truly gifted. It was his respect for that rare combination of innate talent, hard work, and perfectionism.”

Joan Cooney saw two sides of Raposo. “He could be the most difficult person imaginable with me,” she said. “Other times we were lovey-dovey and close. Everything would be going fine, and then he’d suddenly erupt over something, like some obscure publishing-rights item. He actually quit
Sesame Street
cold over a music-publishing rights issue, an esoteric thing that I didn’t even understand. After a few years, he wanted to come back, and so we made a date to meet for lunch at Twenty-one. I came into the restaurant a little bit early because of the sensitivity of the situation. The maître d’ asked, ‘Is your person here?’ and I said, ‘No, he isn’t here yet.’ Well, Joe had actually come in earlier and sat at a table in the back, instead of at one in the front where I could have seen him. I sat and he sat for forty-five minutes. Finally I told a waiter I was going to take a quick look round the tables because it did not compute to me that he would be late. You can imagine how awkward this was after this terrible rupture and separation. It haunts me to this day. Even though Joe came back to the Workshop, we were never close again.”

Yet Cooney remained a fan and is always quick to praise his portfolio of work for CTW, hundreds of compositions that brightened
Sesame Street
and
The Electric Company.
Yet for all of his success and accolades, Cooney believes Raposo was bedeviled by insecurity.

“There was not enough adoration in the world to meet Joe’s expectations,” Cooney said. “You couldn’t fill his needs. He had the weakest ego of any person I have ever known. It needed to be fed all of the time. He was an only child who was worshiped by his parents, and I always thought that resulted in ego strength. But sometimes it can be the opposite. He was jealous that Jim got so much attention after we went on the air, jealous that the Europeans and Latin Americans wanted adaptations done because the Muppets were such a sensation.

“And yet, Joe was a great genius,” Cooney said. “One way you can tell a true genius from a near genius is in their need to keep creating. With geniuses, the urge is unstoppable.”

 

To move forward in our story, we need to take a step back.

In early 1989, Jim Henson had invited Joan Cooney to lunch at a restaurant at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, where he kept an apartment. He had news to share.

“I want you to know that I am going to sell the company to Disney,” he said. “I want the kind of creative freedom that I’ll have there without the burden of fund-raising.”

Cooney, not at all shocked, told him how pleased she was for him. She then provided some news of her own, saying, “The timing is incredible, Jim. This is not known yet, but I will be stepping down in November as CEO of the Workshop.”

One could almost sense seismic plates shifting underfoot. “We were both talking about big life changes together,” Cooney said.

In August of that year, news of the sale created a crackle of excitement. Trumpeting a deal that executives described as “a business association made in family entertainment heaven,”
⁹
Disney announced that it had signed a letter of intent to purchase the Muppets, reportedly for $100 million to $150 million. As part of the deal, Henson agreed to a fifteen-year consulting role and a production pact that guaranteed his services to Disney exclusively.

It had made perfect sense to Cooney that Henson had decided to turn over the classic characters from
The Muppet Show
and the subsequent Muppet movies—along with the library of Henson television work, minus
Sesame Street
—to the Burbank, California-based entertainment conglomerate. (The deal did not include Henson’s production company and the core creative talent who worked in the United States and in the London offices of the Henson Creature Shop.) Jim Henson and Walt Disney had this in common: both were small-town boys who knew how to establish the characters they created and tap into the collective unconscious. Even without the colossal resources that were ultimately at Walt’s disposal, Henson had successfully propelled Kermit into an orbit few characters ever reach. Keeping him there for generations hence would be a business worry Henson would no longer have to shoulder if he sold to Disney. Plus, he could still be around for the fun part: providing Kermit’s voice, movements, and expressions as a paid performer.

“Jim was fine with turning over the classic Muppets to Disney because he was tired of running the company, tired of having to raise money for every project,” Cooney explained. “Plus, Disney was promising to back any movie project Jim wanted to do. That was huge.

“Jim didn’t run his company like a good businessman,” Cooney added. “He could never fire anybody, couldn’t accept any plan for downsizing that was drawn up for him by his advisers. Jim feared that he couldn’t face people afterward, so he just kept them on.” Beyond that, Henson’s movie projects had run notoriously over budget. Had it not been for the steady revenue streaming in from
Sesame Street
licensed products, the Jim Henson Company might have collapsed of its own weight.

In Henson’s proposed business model, the
Sesame Street
revenue would have continued to pump perhaps seventy million dollars annually into his company while remaining out of Disney’s reach.

It may have been naive for Henson to think that Disney would overlook that small matter. Any prospective buyer would have wanted all of the Muppets to be part of such a deal, and it didn’t take long before the executive team at CTW began to worry that with a swipe of the pen, Michael Eisner could catch Henson at a weak moment and “have his hand on our windpipe,” Cooney said. “At the time, CTW was doing better than Disney in reaching the preschool audience. If Disney could have convinced Jim to include the trademark to the
Sesame Street
characters, they easily could have limited our products on the shelves and tamped us down. They could have decided to do just about anything to us because their power would be so great.”

But from all indications, Henson insisted from the start of talks with Disney that the
Sesame Street
characters were off the table. Eisner, who could be charming and seductive, hoped he could soften Henson’s resolve, as Disney lawyers—over a year’s time—tried to answer messy questions over ownership of some of Henson’s fringe characters and older properties.

Henson also worked on “Here Come the Muppets,” a live stage show for the theme park.

At one of their final lunches together in 1990, Henson had tried to put Cooney’s mind at ease, assuring her of his intention to not only keep Eisner at bay but to change his will to allow for the
Sesame Street
trademarks to be transferred to CTW upon his death, on condition that his heirs would continue to receive the same cut he always had from licensing and merchandising deals. Cooney later said CTW would have agreed to those terms, in perpetuity.

It was at that time, Cooney said, that Henson had also unburdened himself about misgivings about going forward with the Disney deal. “What really caused him immense grief, and I think contributed to his lack of physical resistance was the contract provision dealing with his personal services. Jim would have been exclusively theirs for the rest of his life. He would be permitted to work on
Sesame Street
for two weeks a year, but that was it. Jim wanted to sign only a five-year deal for his personal services, not fifteen, and Disney said no. In fairness, Disney was about to pay him $150 million, and for what? But Jim was feeling like a caged bird, physically and personally trapped. He just wanted to fly away. You want to say that was what killed him.”

At one point, Eisner appeared to back away from his gambit to get Big Bird. Cooney and David Britt attended what was billed as “a peace lunch” at the Henson Workshop with Henson and Eisner. “In that period, Jim was on the phone with me almost daily about his concerns over the Muppets of
Sesame Street
,” Cooney said, “He said to me at one point, ‘If they don’t give this up, it’s a deal breaker.’ He told them that and they finally dropped it, or so it seemed.”

Cooney said Henson went into the initial discussions thinking “Eisner would be a male Joan Cooney.” But it wasn’t Eisner who was giving him headaches so much as it was the Disney lawyers. Before the peace lunch, Disney had asked Jim to ask us at CTW if we would agree to not build a theme park within a hundred miles of any Disney Park. [In 1980, CTW had opened Sesame Place, a theme park just north of Philadelphia that was populated later by walk-along
Sesame Street
characters.] Cooney immediately agreed to the stipulation. “That’s easy,” she said. “We weren’t about to put a park anywhere near a Disney attraction.”

Everyone was prepared to make nice at the peace lunch. “It was going so well,” Cooney said. “Michael was absolutely being just his most charming self. He can be so much fun, and so funny. But then, out of the blue, he said something that stopped Jim cold. David Britt and I completely missed it, but he made some reference to the
Sesame Street
Muppets. It may be that we were feeling so comfortable, so happy to be out of the deal, we didn’t catch it. But Jim turned to Michael and said, “You did it again!”

“Michael said, ‘I did what?’

“Jim said, ‘You mentioned
Sesame Street.
’

“Michael said, ‘Jim, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to.’

“But damage was done at that moment,” Cooney said, “and it remained a real issue with Jim deep down.”

 

“You kids get out of the way!” warned Joan Cooney, uncharacteristically livid. “I’ve got an elephant gun and I don’t want to hit anyone here.”

Cooney was confronting Cheryl Henson and her four siblings, heirs to a company their father built from his fertile imagination and decades of toil. Mere months after Jim Henson’s death, Michael Eisner and a squadron of lawyers were negotiating with Henson’s survivors in an attempt to close the deal that had been interrupted by catastrophe. Cooney’s metaphorical elephant gun was aimed square at the bridge of Eisner’s nose.

“The Henson children faced a really tough period after Jim died, and they were holding firm, absolutely committed to protecting what he wanted,” Cooney said. “We at CTW felt threatened and committed to doing everything we could to make sure the
Sesame Street
Muppets would never be included in a sale to Disney.”

Cooney had only her reputation as a truthful person to back up her assertion that Henson had disclosed a plan to transfer trademark of the Muppets he created expressly for
Sesame Street
to CTW upon his death. That his passing occurred only weeks after their conversation compounded an already difficult situation.

“No agreement had been signed, and Disney was doing its best to finish the deal,” Cooney said. “You have to remember that $150 million was still on the table, and now Disney no longer had Jim Henson’s services. So they went back to the old thing of ‘We want the
Sesame Street
Muppets as part of the deal.’ The Henson kids were unwilling to revisit that in any way, and that led to Disney’s attempt at a takeover of the Henson Company. I don’t know how they intended to do that, but their plan was to hold the contract hostage and break the will of the Henson children.”

Cooney, by that point, had had quite enough. She ruefully recalled the decisive moment, with a nod to a former adversary. “Nixon said that when you are dealing with an enemy, the enemy must believe you are a madman and not know what you are going to do next.”

She summoned David Britt and gave him instructions to call Eisner with the following message: if The Walt Disney Company continued with its takeover attempt, Children’s Television Workshop, a nonprofit institution, would be forced to seek immediate redress from the attorney general of the state of New York. With her sterling reputation and well-woven connections in government, Cooney would have been received by the attorney general the following day.

Mere hours passed, Cooney said, before she received a handwritten note from Eisner. “It was very short and to the point, saying that the Workshop was best prepared to control the Muppets of
Sesame Street.
He signed it and that was it. In effect, it was good-bye and good luck.