Jim Henson: The Biography (12 page)

Despite their obvious personal chemistry, Jim and Jane’s relationship
remained collegial and strictly professional, likely to the confusion of friends who wondered how two people could work together so intimately, arms often tangled together overhead as they worked from their knees, and yet remain merely co-workers. In fact, both Jim and Jane were
involved with other people, with Jane engaged to Bill Schmittmann, a student from American University she had been dating since 1955, and Jim seeing Anne Marie Hood, a vivacious teaching student, three years younger—a “
cheerleader type,” said Jane flatly, “but a nice girl”—to whom he would be engaged later that year. For the moment, then, the only relationship Jim and Jane were interested in having with each other was a professional one—and they made it official in 1957, agreeing to become business partners and sealing their deal with a handshake.

Almost immediately, the new partners would have a remarkable opportunity. That summer, the Ver Standig advertising agency of Washington, D.C., had been approached by one of its clients, the John H. Wilkins Company, about producing a series of catchy ten-second spots for their coffee. The company wanted something innovative, memorable, and, if possible, funny. Helen Ver Standig, a fan of
Sam and Friends
, thought she knew exactly whom to call.

Wilkins (right) and Wontkins
. (
photo credit 4.1
)

T
HE
J
OHN
H. W
ILKINS
C
OMPANY WAS ONE OF
W
ASHINGTON’S SCRAPPIER
and more successful local businesses. John H. Wilkins, Sr., had started the firm in 1900 as a tiny specialty coffee shop in the downtown area, where one of his regulars had been the respected politician William Jennings Bryan, who was not only fond of the coffee, but was also known to scarf down any food left sitting out on open trays or half-empty plates. In 1917, Wilkins had gone into the coffee wholesale business, joined in 1921 by his son, John H. Wilkins, Jr. The younger Wilkins had taken over the company with the passing of his father in 1947, and by the 1950s, the firm was one of the most
successful businesses in the area, selling 11 million pounds of coffee annually, supplying two thirds of the coffee used in area hotels and restaurants, and over a quarter of that used in D.C. area homes—including the White House. “Use Wilkins coffee,” was Wilkins Jr.’s personal sales pitch and mantra, “it’s a wonderful way to start the day.”

Helen Ver Standig approached Jim to discuss a new advertising campaign for Wilkins, which would involve filming
fifteen ten-second coffee commercials, with an option to create more, based on demand. Jim would have only about eight seconds for each ad—the last two seconds were needed to show the product itself—so the ad would have to make the point quickly and effectively. There had been some skepticism about using puppets to sell coffee, but for Ver Standig, Jim was more than just Muppets. While she conceded that she thought the humor on
Sam and Friends
was “
really pretty corny,” she still felt there was something there, an edgy sensibility that she thought would make the Wilkins campaign memorable.

It was a challenge, but it didn’t take Jim long to accept the offer—and he already had an idea of how he would handle the project. “
We took a very different approach,” he explained. “We tried to sell things by making people laugh.” Unlike most commercials at the time, which simply showed a product and described it in voice-over, Jim wanted to make fun of advertising itself, using an over-the-top, mock-heavy-handed approach. For his commercials, then, Jim would take John Wilkins’s mantra and give it a Muppet twist. No longer would Wilkins coffee be merely a wonderful way to start the day; it would be, “Use Wilkins coffee … or else!”

In that “or else!” clause lay Jim’s particular expertise.

Jim set to work drawing out his ideas for the Wilkins project, storyboarding his spots in pencil on lined yellow paper. For the commercials, Jim created two new characters, the skinny, rounded, excitable Wilkins, who
will
drink Wilkins coffee, and the squatty, triangular, grumpy Wontkins, who
won’t
. It was the same Laurel and Hardy study in contrasting characters that Jim got such a kick out of—only this time, that conflicting dynamic was the defining premise of the commercials, all of which worked in the same way: Wilkins asks Wontkins to try Wilkins coffee, Wontkins refuses, so

Wilkins lets Wontkins have it. But it was the increasingly absurd and sometimes shocking forms of punishment that Wilkins would dish out that would make Jim’s Wilkins spots some of the most memorable, and successful, commercials of the era, with the skeptical Wontkins being clubbed, shot, egged, blown up, run over, stomped on, or decapitated for his refusal to sample Wilkins coffee.

In fact, it was almost
too
easy for Jim to come up with increasingly ridiculous scenarios for punishing Wontkins—for
Jim really
didn’t
like Wilkins coffee, or coffee of any kind for that matter. To Jim, the Wilkins commercials were a playful way of working out what it
would
take to get him to drink coffee—and the answer was: quite a lot. (Jim would, in fact, later politely gag down a sip of Wilkins coffee at a formal dinner at the Wilkinses’ home, much to the delight of Jane, who knew of his aversion to the stuff.) For the commercials, then, Jim would always perform the crotchety Wontkins, while Jane performed Wilkins, lip-synching the puppet to Jim’s prerecorded voice.

Jim’s early segments capitalized on his fondness for ending sketches with explosions—or, at least, on explosive variations. In one of the first spots Jim produced, Wilkins points a cannon at Wontkins and asks, “Okay, buddy, whattaya think of Wilkins coffee?” “I never tasted it,” Wontkins admits. Wilkins fires the cannon, blasting Wontkins off-screen, then turns the cannon toward the viewer. “Now what do
you
think of Wilkins?” he asks calmly. Quick cut to a shot of Wilkins coffee, commercial over, point made. In another, Wilkins and Wontkins stand at a microphone, as if aware they’re recording a commercial. “Care for a cup of Wilkins coffee?” asks Wilkins. “No, I don’t like coffee,” Wontkins growls—and a hand holding a pistol emerges from off-screen and shoots him pointblank. “This has been a public service!” Wilkins says to the viewer.

For Jim, this was an opportunity to gleefully indulge in near chaotic humor. And at only eight seconds, it all went by so quickly viewers hardly knew whether to shriek or laugh. As it turns out, they did
both
, exactly as Jim expected. In Wilkins and Wontkins, Jim had created the kind of silly and endearing characters that were already becoming his trademark—the kind of characters that could even let him get away with being a little dangerous. And as Jim had learned
from Walt Kelly’s
Pogo
, your audience was willing to let you be a little subversive when you were giving them something fun to look at and, more important, when they were being entertained.

The ads were enormously successful, sending sales of Wilkins coffee soaring by 25 percent, and winning for Jim and Jane—and the Ver Standig advertising firm—local awards for excellence in advertising. “
The commercials were an immediate hit and they made a big impact,” Jim recalled. “In terms of popularity of commercials in the Washington area, we were the number one, most popular commercial.” Many viewers, in fact, confessed that they were merely “
sitting through” afternoon westerns or quiz shows in hopes of catching the latest commercial.

The Wilkins Company was delighted—“
This is the biggest thing that has ever happened to Wilkins Coffee,” exclaimed John Wilkins—and for Helen Ver Standig, her confidence in Jim had been vindicated. “
He had the creative ability of being able to get his audience to identify emotionally with his Muppets,” she said. “Everybody in the morning feels like killing their husband or wife anyway.… People went mad for these puppets.” So mad, in fact, that they spawned the first bit of Muppet-related merchandise, a pair of Wilkins and Wontkins “Hand Muppets” that fans could get by sending in a dollar and “
the last inch of winding band on Wilkins Coffee.” Made of “soft but durable vinyl,”
more than 25,000 pairs of Wilkins and Wontkins puppets sold during the 1958 Christmas season. Despite the use of the Muppet name in the promotion, Jim and Jane saw none of the profits—which at the time didn’t bother them much. “
I’m sure it cost them more to make than they ever sold,” Jane said.

Jim and Jane would end up filming nearly 180 commercials for Wilkins coffee over the next several years—filmed mostly at Rodel Studios in Washington—coming up with new and more creative scenarios in which Wilkins could torment poor Wontkins. Some ads let Jim indulge in his delight for puns (“I shoulda saw this coming!” says a tied-up Wontkins as he inches toward a roaring buzz saw. “He always was a cutup!” Wilkins says, one-upping his partner for the punch line), play with nonsensical endings (Wontkins gets crushed by a falling Washington Monument), or indulge in good old-fashioned pie-in-the-face humor. Perhaps due to their obvious, almost
aggressive glee, there were surprisingly few complaints about their cartoonish violence—in fact, most viewers understood exactly what Jim was up to. “
The funniest thing we have seen in many a moon,” wrote one viewer. “[It] has a message that gets across to people in a most unusual way.”

Jim’s Wilkins commercials also caught the attention of other coffee companies across the eastern seaboard, who wanted the Muppets selling
their
coffee, too. “
[The commercials] got a lot of talk, and so then the advertising agency started syndicating them and they would sell them to a coffee company in Boston, another coffee company in New York,” Jim recalled. “We had up to about a dozen or so clients going at the same time,” Jim said, including Community Coffee of Louisiana, La Touraine Coffee of Boston, Nash’s Coffee of Minnesota, and even the carbonated drink CalSo in California. “At that point, I was making a lot of money,” Jim said. That was typical understatement—in 1958 and 1959, Nash’s Coffee alone would pay Jim a total of $20,000 (about $150,000 today) for eight commercials. But it was also a lot of work, as Jim preferred to reshoot old Wilkins commercials using the names of the other products. For the perfectionist Jim, it would have been cheating, for example, to dub in the five syllables of “La Touraine Coffee” over Wilkins mouthing the four syllables for “Wilkins Coffee.”

Apart from their phenomenal marketing and financial success, the Wilkins spots marked another kind of personal victory for Jim. “
That was almost the first voice stuff I did,” he noted proudly. Up until now, he had, by his own admission, done only “a couple of little tiny things” with voices on
Sam and Friends
. Now he was doing all his own voices, giving Wilkins, after a bit of experimentation, a slightly quavering voice pitched just a bit higher than his own, and Wontkins a gruff rasp, similar to the voice he would later use for Rowlf the Dog.

The Muppets were becoming wildly successful—in 1958,
Sam and Friends
would win an Emmy for Best Local Entertainment Program—and yet, Jim was still uncertain whether there was a future for him as a puppeteer. While the Muppets were still paying the bills—and, with their new foray into advertising, paying remarkably well—Jim was still looking toward
a future as a painter or as a set
designer, while Jane was hoping for a career in commercial art or fashion. In a profile of Jim in a 1958 issue of the University of Maryland’s
Old Line
magazine, Jim would only promise to “
continue with the Muppets as long as there is a demand for them.”

Privately, in fact, Jim was ready to quit
Sam and Friends
altogether. “
I decided to chuck it all and go off to be a painter,” Jim said. “I was an artist, you see, so I was going to take the shows off the air, just quit for a while.” Jim’s decision sent WRC executives scrambling for a way to keep their twenty-one-year-old ratings magnet on the payroll. “
The station prevailed upon me,” Jim said later, laughing. “They said, ‘Look, we’ll pay you money and you can put somebody else doing the show,’ and so I realized I can get money and at the same time be off painting.”