Street Gang (60 page)

Stiles assured his friend and colleague he’d be there—punctually.

It wasn’t the first time Moss had invited Stiles to a writers’ meeting without providing much explanation; it happened once before in 1969, when Stiles was vying for a staff writer’s position on the new series
Sesame Street.
¹⁹

“I had just concluded a one-month audition period during which I and another prospective writer named Tippy each wrote a script a week,” Stiles said. “I had been unemployed for over six months, with no other prospects, and I really wanted and needed the job. But only one of us was going to be hired. I didn’t know whether I had the job or not. I just assumed a decision hadn’t been made yet, or I would have been told. Silly me. I didn’t know Jeff yet. I didn’t know he preferred to use a kind of Jeff Moss code to have people
infer
things rather than use a direct, simple approach. Jeff began to talk about new plans for the
Sesame Street
season and what would be written first, the schedule, things like that. So when the meeting ended, I just had to ask, ‘Do I have the job?’ ”

“ ‘Do you see
Tippy
? ’ he asked. Jeff was a little impatient, though there was a twinkle in his eye when he said it.”

Years later, on that late summer day, Stiles sensed his days of pretending nothing was wrong with Moss were about to end. “I had known for about two years that he was ill, but I wasn’t supposed to know,” Stiles said. “Only a slight few knew the secret from the beginning. He had me fooled for the first few years, but as the symptoms became more obvious and consistent, it slowly began to dawn on me that maybe there was something more serious going on than he was letting on. I thought about asking him directly, but I didn’t. I respected Jeff’s decision not to tell me, and I really hoped, down deep, there was really nothing to tell. Then, a mutual friend confirmed my dark suspicions. She told me that Jeff was seriously ill. She couldn’t tell me exactly what was wrong with him, but the gist was that it was life threatening, and that I couldn’t say anything to Jeff, and I couldn’t tell anyone it was she who had told me. As a matter of fact, she said the whole conversation never happened.”

Moss could be stubborn, even with those he trusted and respected, including his pal Bernie Kruger, a noted oncologist. When Moss turned fifty, Dr. Kruger began urging him to get a colonoscopy, but he kept putting it off. By the time he did submit to the test, it was too late. The cancer in his colon, and resulting spread of the disease, required eleven operations and procedures. Only when his prognosis became grim, when he was confined to a wheelchair and on portable oxygen, did he decide to disclose his illness to the people he worked with for so long on
Sesame Street.
The day he did was one that shocked and saddened the denizens of One Lincoln Plaza.

In his prime, Moss was a force of nature, a wiry, strong, wild-haired, sometimes combustible, not always lovable, but dependably brilliant television writer, playwright, poet, composer, and onetime actor. (As an undergraduate at Princeton, Moss had performed in the fabled Triangle Club campus musicals.)

Moss flourished in the 1990s as he had at no other time in his life, and the upswing can be traced to a day in 1989 when Dr. Kruger set him up with Annie Boylan, a single mom who was seeking Mr. Perfect. Moss met his match in Boylan, a quirky, bighearted woman who had attended ten universities without completing a degree (thought to be an intercollegiate record).

Married once, to the actress Marian Hailey, and childless, Moss was open to a relationship.

“He took me out the day
before
Valentine’s Day,” Boylan said with a comedic pause. “It was Friday the thirteenth.”

Moss arrived with a single rose, which Boylan carried around with her for most of the evening, But at one stop, she lost track of it. For reasons she could not entirely explain to Moss, she was distraught over her carelessness.

“Jeff would not have known it, but my sister Annie was a major flower person, and she was so upset at losing the rose,” said Annie’s sister, Molly Boylan, a longtime
Sesame Street
staff writer who got her start in television after being mentored by Moss. “Somehow, she knew this guy was going to be important to her. I know, because back then she used to run all of her potential boyfriends by me for approval. She called me after that date to say how well it had gone and that she wanted me to meet him as soon as possible.”

The morning after the date, a messenger arrived at Annie Boylan’s door with a single red rose and a card. It read: ‘I think you dropped this.’ ”

Jeff and Annie married and in 1991 had a son, Alexander. Becoming a father to Alex—and stepfather to Jonathan—provided Moss a chance to be the kind of parent his father never was to him and his sister.

“Jeff did not grow up as the center of his household, although he was the golden boy, always at the top of his class, athletic and talented,” Annie Boylan said. “Jeff’s father was the actor Arnold Moss, a man with a huge ego. His mother, the actress Stella Reynolds, gave up performing to write for soap operas.” There was room for only one star in the Moss household.

“Jeff was up against his dad his whole life,” Annie Moss said. “His dad really never thought much of Jeff’s work on television because it was for children, and how important could it be if it was work meant only for
them
? The only time Jeff’s dad ever told him he loved him was when Jeff’s musical,
Double Feature
, opened on Broadway, because that was the world Arnold Moss knew. But Jeff told me that when his father said it that night, his immediate thought was ‘too little, too late.’ ”

Jeff Moss wrote the book, music, and lyrics for
Double Feature
, and it had the smell of a potential hit two years prior to its Broadway opening. Tommy Tune was its choreographer and Mike Nichols its director when the musical was being shaped in Connecticut in 1979. But Moss adamantly rejected Nichols’s ideas to improve the four-character play, and Nichols, whose credits included a number of successful stage productions as well as the films
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate
, and
Carnal Knowledge
, walked away from the project. Tune, no fool, followed Nichols out the door.

“Jeff would never back down, and he went toe-to-toe with Mike Nichols,” said his sister-in-law Molly Boylan. “But
Double Feature
had gotten great reviews in New Haven and everybody had high hopes for it. But [then theater critic] Frank Rich destroyed it with the meanest review I’ve ever read.”

Rich’s opening line in the
New York Times
of October 9, 1981, read: “You know a musical is in trouble when act 2 opens with a song asking ‘How’s It Gonna End?’ and you’re still waiting for the show to begin.”

With the closing of
Double Feature
, Moss matched Joe Raposo in 1986 and his Broadway disappointment,
Raggedy Ann: The Musical Adventure,
which closed after five performances. The two were the best of competitors.

Chris Cerf, who met Moss in 1964 on a miserable bus ride to Fort Dix to begin their army basic training, said the two composers once famously wrestled for position over a
Sesame Street
record album. “Jeff and Joe were determined one would not have any more songs than the other, but the producer decided the album was going to have an odd number of tracks. This was a
very
difficult problem to solve, but Jeff finally agreed that Joe could have more songs as long as Jeff’s name was in a box on the back of the cover. Jeff took a lot of ribbing to add things like that, and rightly so, but he was such a perfectionist and a brilliant writer of both lyrics and music, and he had such a sensitivity and pride about his work, you could forgive him. The word that comes to mind is
integrity.
He would never change anything just because it was easier to let it go or because he thought he could get an easy laugh or if maybe things would go better for him if he makes changes.”

What difficulties he may have caused were forgotten on the day in September 1998, when Moss arrived at Children’s Television Workshop at 12:30, sharp. “His coming to that meeting and, in a way, saying good-bye and letting us say good-bye, was one of the most generous things I’ve ever seen in a human being,” said Joan Cooney. “His generosity just took my breath away. He told us that he had been sick for five years, and he spoke so movingly about what his career at
Sesame Street
had meant to him and what we meant to him. When he finished, we stood and applauded for a long time. I wanted that to just go on forever, that moment.

“Then people got up and spoke spontaneously about what a privilege it had been for all of us to know him. And then we got to hug and kiss him and tell him how much we loved him. And then, a few days later, he was gone.”

On his last day on earth, Jeff Moss completed another song. “It was entitled ‘You and You and Me,’ said Annie Boylan. “He was so prolific, and he never stopped. I remember once saying to him that maybe there would be a time when we could retire to an island like St. John, and Jeff said, ‘Not on your life. I am going to keep working until they put me six feet under.’ And so he worked on the day he died.”

Moss died on September 24, 1998. He was fifty-six.

Ten years later, Princeton University announced a ranking of its twenty-six most elite graduates. Jeff Arnold Moss, Class of 1963, was listed, among F. Scott Fitzgerald, Woodrow Wilson, James Madison, John Foster Dulles, and Richard Feynman. An accompanying profile of him, written by journalist Todd S. Purdum (Princeton ’82), mentioned that Moss “racked up fourteen Emmys and an Academy Award nomination, and helped teach hundreds of millions of children worldwide a good bit about what it means to be human.”

 

One morning in 2002, Rosie O’Donnell was queued up at the Target checkout. “I looked like a wreck,” she recalled, just another mother making a trip to the store. “I had no makeup.”

Ahead in line was a toddler, facing his mother. Upon seeing O’Donnell, the child began to point and jabber. “Over and over he was saying, ‘Elmofreh, Elmo-freh,’ ” O’Donnell said. “The mother, a little mortified, starting shushing the child and reminding him it wasn’t polite to point and to not talk to strangers. But there was no stopping him, and the mother was having a hard time understanding what had gotten into him. I said to her, ‘Hey, it’s okay. He’s trying to let you know something.’ Then, to the child, O’Donnell said, ‘You’re right, honey. I’m Elmo’s friend from TV.’ ”

The shopper, a bit embarrassed, admitted, “Rosie, I wouldn’t have recognized you.”

“I know, but your two-year-old son did.”

Elmo’s appearances during the heyday of O’Donnell’s syndicated daytime talk show, which ran for 1,193 episodes from 1996 to 2002, were singularly responsible for his overtaking Big Bird as the signature character for
Sesame Street
and for the frenzied success of an interactive Christmas toy.

“I first came to know about Elmo through my niece,” O’Donnell said. “I’d go visit my sister and the TV would be tuned to
Sesame Street
for her little girl. I found myself watching along with her, because I loved the show from way back, but this new Elmo character was just so funny. A few years later they asked me to do a guest spot on
Sesame Street.
And, all of a sudden, there was this huge, handsome black man at my feet. I looked down at him and I went, “Are
you
Elmo?”

“Hi, I’m Kevin,” he said.

“Okay,” O’Donnell said. “First, you’re a genius. Second, I cannot believe you look like you do. I did not have that image of you at all.” (Clash says people often think he should be short, bald, and wearing glasses.)

“Kevin started improvising, just sitting there with me and I would forget that he was down below, you know? And I’m one of those people who can play pretend with a child for hours on end. So Kevin and I just clicked.”

For the Christmas season of 1996 Tyco launched an Elmo doll that was the culmination of years of microchip research and development in the toy industry. Embedded within it was sound-and-motion technology that could make Elmo seem to giggle when his tummy was tickled, leaving him shaking in a convulsion of laughter. “Oh boy, that tickles!” was Elmo’s big line.

“Tyco sent a Tickle Me Elmo to my home and another to the studio,” O’Donnell said. “Sure enough, my son, who was one and walking at the time, would grab it, fall on it, hug it, laugh with it. It was the cutest thing I ever saw, and so I started talking about it on the show.”

The rest was toy industry legend. Priced at $29.99, Tickle Me Elmo debuted in July with an expected sale of 400,000 units. But after Rosie’s plug, and subsequent appearances on the show by Clash and Elmo, the four factories in southern China manufacturing the doll were running at full capacity. Boeing 747s were shuttling between Asia and North America in the months leading to Christmas, troop transports ferrying Elmos by the tens of thousands. In excess of one million dolls were sold, but countless other sales went unfulfilled because supply never caught up with demand.

O’Donnell forged a friendship with Clash, working together on charity events and special appearances. “It’s like dancing with Baryshnikov to do acting with him,” she said. “You have to really be in the moment because he’s an amazing improvisational artist, a special skill not many have. People who you think would be great on talk shows, either because of their personalities or their image or their ability to be funny on a sitcom, often-times are not. It takes a special kind of skill to improvise and Kevin has it in overload.

“But the amazing part of it is to see kids around Kevin when he is doing Elmo. They will totally forget that he’s standing there. What he does is so innate. Every soul wants to play and make believe. The more you try and take it away from kids, the more they will pretend. From the beginning
Sesame Street
encouraged imagination and playfulness. It always felt like a show to me about freedom, and it has always spoken to children in a pure and truthful way. Children are children, rich or poor, and there is a language of truth that is innate to these tiny, undeveloped beings that they can hear.
Sesame Street
had respect for its audience and respect for itself. They never cut any corners and they stuck to their democratic ideals.”