Street Gang (59 page)

Jim Thurman’s friendship with Dave Connell—“as close as a marriage,” said Jan Connell—had begun when they conspired on
Roger Ramjet,
the syndicated cartoon lampoon of air force flyboys and cold war jingoists that enjoys a second life now on DVD and YouTube clips. Thurman had also worked with Connell on
Sesame Street, The Electric Company
, and CTW’s vastly unappreciated math show for preteens,
Square One TV.

As a quintet, the two couples and Connell enjoyed the best of times together. Their same-time-next-year card game—with its extended cocktail hour—was so well established a calendar highlight that the Thurmans and the Gibbons made a pact to honor the date for the 1995 poker game, around Dave’s deathbed, resolving that it was better to laugh than to cry. They played Spike Jones music continuously, in the hope that Connell’s brain was still processing the sublime silliness of it all.

Weeks before, when Connell was slipping in and out of coma, Thurman sneaked a flask into his hospital room. “Dad was barely able to drink a little water. But in came Jim with scotch,” Jan said. “He looked at me, like for permission, and I shrugged, ‘Who cares if he has one at this point?’ Dad would dribble the water down his chin when the nurses tried to give it to him but every drop of scotch went down.”

Connell had first been diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1987 and underwent chemotherapy. The bladder was removed and he had seven decent years. Jan said, “One day he called me out of the blue and said, ‘I need to get to the hospital.’ They took a chest X-ray and saw he was full of tumors. My uncle said, ‘Who’s going to take care of him? You or me?’ I said, ‘Me,’ but I had no idea what it entailed. I went with him to every treatment, every transfusion, every hospitalization. I cooked and cleaned. But that’s when I really got to know him in a different way. If I hadn’t had the last three years with my dad, I might have had some regret. But nothing went unsaid.” Before he became too ill to continue, Connell had been at work on a memoir of his years in children’s television. When he stopped, Jan set up a camcorder and taped conversations with her father.

Alan Connell, a onetime producer for CBS News in New York, also grew closer to his father in adulthood.“Dad was there for the big things in life when we were kids, but I didn’t know him as a person, his likes and dislikes, until we were much older. He learned to water ski with me—in his forties. I feel lucky I had that opportunity.

“His advice to me when I got married was this: ‘I screwed it up, don’t you screw it up. You’ve got a great woman there.’ He realized he sacrificed a lot for his professional life. As a result of that, I have focused more on my personal life rather than my career.”

Jan said, “In those last years, we tried to get him to spend some money on himself, but he was financially anorexic. His pants were worn thin, and he had slippers with duct tape on them. The only material things that mattered to him were a nice home and a good car. His last one was a Lincoln.”

To the end, Connell had the executive producer mindset. “My dad was obsessive-compulsive and rigid,” she said. “He had to make sure everything was in its place and working the way it was supposed to. Everything was timed and scheduled: you got up at this time and read the paper from this time till that time.”

Connell even picked the appropriate moment to check out. “He died at Bloody Mary time,” Jan said. “Right at eleven forty-five.”

That Connell was not awarded a Lifetime Achievement Emmy is the academy’s disgrace. As it was, he was nominated for twenty Emmys and won five across a career that spanned five decades. There likely has never been anyone in the history of children’s television who has compiled a record of achievement equal to his, as executive producer of a string of enriching, progressive, and groundbreaking series:
Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Out to Lunch, Square One TV
, and
Mathnet.
He also was executive producer of CTW’s animated adaptation of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
And, yes, there are those 156 episodes of
Roger Ramjet,
too.

Later in the summer of ’95, a caravan of cars arrived at Sebago Lake, in the forest green mountainous region of Maine west of Portland. “That’s where dad was happiest,” Jan said. “and so we took him to Maine.”

Jim Thurman kissed Dave Connell’s ashes, “and then he threw them into the water,” Jan said. “Dad would have loved it.”

Connell, another
Sesame Street
patriarch to die of cancer, was only sixty-four when he passed on May 5, the morning after the poker game.

Thurman died in 2007 after a short illness. He was seventy-two.

 

Evelyn Payne Davis, the town crier of
Sesame Street,
died of lung cancer in the winter of 1997 at the age of seventy-five.

Though her name never ran on the credits and she won no Emmy statuettes, her influence on
Sesame Street
was profound. The show simply would not have been the initial success it was without her audacious promotion of the series in Harlem and in Appalachia, in churches and recreation halls, in the black press, and on small radio stations. She was unstoppable.

Beyond her work as a vice president at CTW, she organized voter registration drives as president of the New York Coalition of 100 Black Women and helped establish child-care centers in prisons, allowing inmates to work on educational goals with their visiting children. “Kids deserve to see their parents in a setting that doesn’t scare them,” she said. Davis was survived by a son and stepdaughter.

A neighbor who lived down the hall from her in Gramercy Park told the
New York Times
that the community outreach worker used to entertain neighbors while seated at the piano, imitating Billie Holiday. She also played one-string bass with a broom tied to an overturned washtub.

She could, whatever the circumstances, make people listen.

 

One day Jon Stone entered the studio in a daze. He had not been feeling well and had just returned from a visit to the doctor. Upon seeing writer Emily Kingsley, he turned to her and said, “I’ve got ALS, Em. Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

Kingsley hardly knew what to say, nor did anyone else once word spread that Stone had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive disease that disrupts nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. Although there can be some variance, the course the disease most often follows is a slow deterioration of muscle activity followed by paralysis and death. It is a miserable way to depart this earth, and Stone suffered no shortage of misery.

He continued to direct episodes of
Sesame Street
for as long as he could, first using a bicycle to get around the studio, then later a bright red motorized cart that had been Muppetized. As a token of their affection, the puppeteers commissioned a hand-tooled cane for his use, embellished with carvings of the Muppet characters.

Everyone in the studio vowed to keep his spirits up. One high point came on a day when a stagehand quietly wheeled Stone’s bike to safety, replacing it with a look-alike that was missing its wheels, chain, and seat. Stone was convinced his bike had been vandalized, and vowed revenge when the prank was revealed, amid howls of laughter.

There was a great moment with the cart, as well. “My dad took the cart everywhere,” said Polly Stone, who took care of her father in Manhattan until his last days. “It used to drive him nuts that people who knew him for years would see him in the cart and not comment on it, like somehow it was off-limits conversationally. But kids were fascinated by it. We were out in the park one July day, and there was a kid who stood right dead center in front of the cart. ‘Why you on that thing?’ he asked. Dad just looked at him, ‘When it’s warm and there’s no snow, I can’t use my reindeer.’ The kid’s eyes got wide and he totally disappeared.”

Stone’s emotions got the best of him as the disease progressed, and he made a terrible blunder one night in Oneonta, New York. At the time, Stone had been dating a professor of music business at the state university there, and she invited him in to guest lecture. He spoke frankly and pejoratively that night about his displeasure with the changes imposed on
Sesame Street,
disparaging the leadership at CTW for, essentially, dumbing down the show. Whether Stone realized that a reporter from a local newspaper was sitting in on the lecture is unclear, but the Associated Press picked up the reporter’s story and it landed on the desks of the very people Stone had just criticized.

“Polly and I know that our dad would have laid down his life for us,” said Kate Lucas. “That’s how much he cared. And I think that’s how much he cared about
Sesame Street.
He wasn’t going to say, ‘Well, we had twenty-five good years and at least we have those old shows.’ He was going to fight pretty hard, and it cost him. The reporter’s story blew things wide open. When CTW saw it, it was viewed as grounds for firing because there was a clause in his contract about upholding the values of the show. Dad had been such a troublemaker for them for not toeing the line, they were just looking for an excuse. But the people who were running the show on a day-to-day basis were still loyal to Dad, the puppeteers, the actors, the people behind the set, they all loved him. He was by then the grandfather of
Sesame Street.

“If they fired him, it would have terminated his health insurance, which was unthinkable to someone who is in that condition. Dad threatened to go to the press if they fired him, to talk to anyone who would listen. And so they came up with an ugly compromise where they kept Dad on salary, kept his position where he was paid very well, kept his health insurance, but banned him from being on the set. His directing days would be over. Dad never cared about money. If he had, he would never have stayed at
Sesame Street.
He had so many opportunities to leave through the years, to go off with Jim and Frank and make millions.”

Despite the rancor and the bitter departure, Joan Cooney kept in touch with Stone and agreed to deliver a tribute to him when he was honored by the ALS Foundation with a lifetime achievement award in October 1996. In accepting the award, Stone said, “When Lou Gehrig made his famous speech at Yankee Stadium, you know the one: ‘I am the luckiest man, luckiest man, luckiest man on the face of the earth, the face of the earth, the face of the earth.’ But when he did that, nobody heard him say he had the vaguest idea what amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was. That was July of 1939, and it’s now fifty-seven years later and still nobody has the vaguest idea. They have no idea how debilitating it is, how fast moving it is, how lethal it is. And when I mention to people I have this disorder, they nod their heads and assume that it’s some exotic strain of the Asian flu. It’s an unfamiliar disease. That’s why your contribution is so tremendously important, to raise the consciousness of people to this disease . . . to compete for research dollars with those giants among charities . . . with much more powerful public relations.

“I just have one last thought for the evening, and that is (and I don’t want to offend anybody with this) it seems to me that Lou Gehrig has really borne the cross of his disease now for fifty-seven years and deserves a rest. He was such a great athlete that he shouldn’t have a lousy, rotten, crummy disease like this named after him. So I propose tonight that we rename the damn thing Marv Throneberry disease.”

In his final year, Stone got to work on committing his life story to paper, told in 209 pages of funny, poignant, biting prose. Doing so enabled him to disgorge a lot of bile that had built up over what he felt was a dismantling of
Sesame Street.
He didn’t live long enough to see that the Around the Corner set was ultimately dismantled. Viewers soundly rejected the turning away from the core characters that had made the series so successful for so long. The only major character to survive the debacle was Zoe, and that was largely on the basis of Fran Brill’s talent shining through.

Frank Oz remembered a visit to Stone in his final months. “Jon and I would occasionally meet for breakfast when he was still well enough to go out in his scooter. But I could see him getting worse and worse. The next time he’d have an oxygen tank, and then the next time he couldn’t hold his fork. That, along with the bitterness of what happened to him at
Sesame Street
, was very, very difficult to take.”

Something quite wonderful happened as the end neared, though. Beverley Stone, long divorced from Jon, started coming to his apartment one night a week to give Polly a night off from watching over her father. “We used to watch
Mad About You
together and laugh,” she said. The Paul Reiser character reminded her of a young Jon; the Helen Hunt character reminded him of the young Beverley.

Stone was hospitalized on his final day. Beverley and Polly arrived with his memoir manuscript. “I’d planned on starting to read it the day before, but Polly told me he wanted some of it to get read when I got to the hospital. He hadn’t read it for a while. As we went along, I said, ‘Jon, wait a minute. It didn’t happen that way.
This
is how it happened.’ Then I turned the page to the chapter with a heading MISS RHEINGOLD. Jon looked at Polly and said, ‘Now we’re going to get it.’ ”

Jon Stone, the soul of
Sesame Street,
died on March 30, 1997. He was sixty-five.

A video shown at a memorial service included a lingering shot of an empty director’s chair with Stone’s name in script across the cloth back support.

 

Norman Stiles was relaxing at home on a weekend before Labor Day, 1998, when Jeff Moss phoned with a request: “He asked if I would be available to attend an upcoming meeting of the
Sesame Street
writers,” Stiles said.
¹⁸
At the time, Stiles wasn’t working on the series, “but I did not ask why he wanted me there. Jeff’s voice sounded strained and his breathing was labored.”

Moss said, “I’ll be speaking for half an hour, and I’d really like you to be there . . . at twelve thirty,
sharp.
” He was one to take appointment times seriously.