Jim Henson: The Biography (25 page)

There was nothing overly complicated about Oscar, however—he was a Muppet typical of Jim’s ferocious yet somehow nonthreatening monsters, originally an orange shag rug with a wide mouth and angry eyebrows. Oscar had been partly inspired by regular lunches at a seafood restaurant just around the corner from the Muppet workshop called
Oscar’s Salt of the Sea, where the grumbling, growling owner often reduced Jim and Jon Stone to fits of giggles. As initially envisioned by Jim and Stone, Oscar was supposed to be a grouch that lived in the sewers, accessible through a manhole cover. “
It would lift up and you’d see these little eyes looking at you, and you’d [go] down through the dripping water in the sewers [and] here would [be] these scruffy little things in half darkness that were picking things out of the water and eating them,” recalled Stone. It was an idea he and Jim found hilarious, but ultimately, “we decided that was too gross.” Oscar would live in a much more easily accessible—and far less gross—garbage can.

On Monday, September 29, 1969, Jim and Oz began filming their first set of Muppet inserts at Reeves Teletape at 67th and Broadway, just a short cab ride across Central Park. The first segment, written and directed by Stone, featured Ernie and Bert riffing on what would be one of the themes for
Sesame Street
’s first episode: the letter W and the word
wash
. The very first look preschoolers would have of Ernie and Bert, then, featured Ernie singing in the bathtub, asking an already annoyed Bert to toss a bar of soap “into Rosie.”

“I call my bathtub Rosie,” explained Ernie.

“Ernie, why do you call your bathtub Rosie?” asked Bert.

“Because every time I take a bath,” responded Ernie, “I leave a ring around Rosie!”—and then came what would quickly become a signature sound from the show, mimicked by countless four-year-olds across the nation to the exasperation of preschool teachers everywhere: Ernie’s trademark laugh, a rapid-fire series of guttural, slightly slurpy gunshots:
kkkkhi-kkkkkhi-kkkkkhi-kkkkhi-kkkkhi!
A star was born.

A little less than two weeks later, on Friday, October 10, Jim
went to the Teletape facility at 81st and Broadway—residing in an old RKO movie theater that had been converted for television—and strolled the recently completed
Sesame Street
set with Sahlin and Spinney, inspecting the various nooks where the Muppet performers would be kneeling, crouching, or lying as they worked. The area around Oscar’s trash can was immediately problematic: it had been constructed in such a way that the right-handed Spinney couldn’t wedge his arm into the trash can’s opening. Spinney would have to perform Oscar left-handed until the set could be adjusted. “
Left hands are much stupider than your right if you’re right handed,” Spinney explained. Still, Jim was anxious to see how Oscar would look on the set and asked Spinney to perform the character anyway, regardless of the difficult setup.

Even without the contorted trash can, Spinney was nervous about debuting Oscar in front of Jim. He had only just decided that morning on the voice he would use for the character—based on a gruff Bronx cabdriver who had driven Spinney to the studio and growled, “Where to, Mac?”—and had yet to find out if it met with Jim’s approval. “
I hoped I had the right voice,” Spinney said later. Jim waited patiently as Spinney pulled Oscar onto his left arm and twisted himself awkwardly behind the cutaway can. After a moment, Jim rapped on Oscar’s trash can; the lid banged open and the dingy orange Oscar emerged to glare at Jim. “Get away from my trash can!” Spinney snarled in his cabdriver’s voice.

Jim smiled and nodded appreciatively. “That’ll do fine.”

Beginning Monday, October 13, Jim would spend a few days on the
Sesame Street
set performing Kermit and Ernie, but for the most part the fall of 1969 was business as usual at Henson Associates, with continued appearances on variety shows and work on commercials. For Jim and his team,
Sesame Street
was, for the moment, just another assignment to add to the already lengthy list of projects Jim was either working on or had in development. In fact, when the first episode of
Sesame Street
aired nationally on November 10, it didn’t even merit mentioning in Jim’s private journal. That may have been due, in part, to a stinging review of the first two weeks’ worth of
Sesame Street
episodes by
New York Times
critic Jack Gould,
which Jim later admitted had bruised his feelings. In his review, Gould
sneeringly referred to the Muppets as “
stocking puppets” and thought them “distressingly bland.” “One yearns for Burr Tillstrom,” Gould concluded. It would not be the last time Gould would claw at Jim.

Still, Gould’s harsh review was decidedly in the minority—for it was clear almost immediately that Jim had helped create something extraordinary. In the October 31, 1969, issue of
Life
—which hit newsstands several weeks before the first episode of
Sesame Street
aired—Jim and the
Sesame Street
Muppets were featured in a full-page photo and story. In November, the
Washington, D.C., City Council approved a resolution renaming a local road “Sesame Street” for a week. By December, Big Bird was already making a featured appearance on
Ed Sullivan
, dancing with chorus girls in a piece by noted Broadway choreographer Pete Gennaro. That same month
Woman’s Day
featured sewing patterns readers could use to make their own Muppets—and then perform them to an original routine written by Jerry Juhl. “
It’s clever and witty and charming,” enthused the
Detroit Free Press
. “It’s integrated. It’s non-violent. It’s fun. It may even be educational.” Before the end of the year, even Jack Gould had to finally admit
Sesame Street
was “
an undisputed hit.” “
I didn’t know what success meant, but I knew we had it,” Joan Cooney said later.

Even with
Sesame Street
building momentum, Jim continued writing new pieces for variety show appearances. On November 30, he and Oz performed a musical skit on
The Ed Sullivan Show
using several new Muppets, including a crazy-haired puppet in sunglasses who would come to be known by the name of the song performed that evening, a bit of nonsensical scat by the Italian composer Piero Umiliani called “Mah Nà Mah Nà.” Jim had found the song in a location about as far away from
Sesame Street
as possible: a 1968 Italian sexploitation film called
Sweden: Heaven and Hell
, which premiered in New York in August 1969. Oz felt sure that he and Jim had probably both seen the film when it played at the Avco Embassy Theatre five minutes away from the Henson offices, but “
only Jim,” Oz said, laughing, “would have recognized its potential so quickly!”

As sung by Jim—with Oz performing two vaguely bovine backup singers known as Snowths—“Mahna Mahna” (as Jim would always
spell it) seemed custom-made for the Muppet brand of madness. Jim took great delight in playing with the four sides of the television screen, zipping his character in sideways, rushing the camera from upstage, or even backing in from downstage. It was an affectionate nod to the simpler days of
Sam and Friends
—while there was no explosion at the end, the sketch concluded with the puppets smashing into the camera, blacking it out—and the
Sullivan
crowd went wild, laughing and applauding spontaneously several times during the three-and-a-half-minute performance.

I
n early 1970, with
Sesame Street
officially a success, ABC-TV expressed interest in reviving a Muppet project that had been languishing, unaired, for nearly two years: a fairy tale satire called
Hey Cinderella!
that Jim had taped in the fall of 1968, using the basic outline of the failed Cinderella pilot he and Jon Stone had collaborated on back in 1965. Jim was delighted with ABC’s decision to pick up the hour-long special; he was hoping to make
Hey Cinderella!
the first in a regular series he was calling
Tales from Muppetland
, and set to work filming several short spots with Kermit that could be inserted into
Hey Cinderella!
just before each commercial. That seemingly innocuous decision would lead to unexpected headaches.

Following the April 10 airing of
Hey Cinderella!
, Jack Gould—the same critic who had already dismissed Jim’s work on
Sesame Street
as “distressingly bland”—took a swipe at Jim again, this time taking great umbrage with the use of Kermit in the filmed lead-ins to each commercial break. “
Apparently, the Children’s Television Workshop … is not adverse to cashing in when success strikes,” lamented Gould. “
Sesame Street
last night lost a little of its luster as Kermit broke the faith and became one more pitchman.”

That was too much for Jim. It didn’t seem to matter to Gould that although the production team included Jim and Jon Stone,
Hey Cinderella!
had absolutely no affiliation with CTW or
Sesame Street
. Further, Kermit was the furthest thing from a pitchman; Jim had been very careful not to show Kermit actually endorsing any products. Frustrated, Jim appealed to Gould in writing, trying, without much success, to set the record straight. “
For the past ten or twelve
years, approximately half my income has been derived from producing Muppet commercials,” Jim explained. “Since the advent of
Sesame Street
, and my own interest and concern for television … I have become a great deal more selective, and have turned down many lucrative offers that seemed to be trying to capitalize on
Sesame Street
.” Rightly pointing out that “it is my income from commercial TV that makes my participation in educational TV possible,” Jim assured the critic that he would continue “to work with a degree of integrity and responsibility to the children of the country.”

Commercials would remain Henson Associates’ primary source of revenue, at least for a while, but Gould’s criticism, however unfair, had stung. In August 1970, Jim refused to renew his contract to film additional commercials for the Frito-Lay company, citing both his time commitment to
Sesame Street
as well as Henson Associates’ “
extreme sensitivity to commercialization of the Muppet characters.” As he had assured Gould, Jim was indeed becoming more selective in the kinds of projects he took on, preferring to produce short sales or promotional films for internal use by companies rather than major advertising campaigns. In a sense, he was lying low.

One of the most successful of those internal campaigns was another series of short films with Rowlf for IBM. Working with IBM meant Jim could continue to work with David Lazer, who impressed Jim with his energy and enthusiasm. Jim and Lazer could sit talking for hours in Jim’s office or even huddled together in the editing room while Jim cut film or dubbed sound effects. Some evenings, Lisa or Cheryl—or sometimes both—would join Jim and Lazer in the workshop, giving Lazer the opportunity to observe Jim with his children—and Lazer immediately understood why Jim could so effortlessly produce segments for
Sesame Street
that resonated with children.

“
We were really checking the clocks to finish the edit,” Lazer said, “and either Cheryl or Lisa asked a question, and he turned around—and I was going crazy—and he turned around as calm as could be and gave her a straight, honest adult answer. And I learned a lesson then: he had such respect for his children.… They asked him a question, and he took the time to answer it.”

“
The attitude you have as a parent is what your kids will learn from more than what you tell them,” Jim said later. “They don’t remember
what you try to teach them. They remember what you
are
.” As Lazer had noticed, Jim valued the views of his children and, in fact, frequently asked for their opinions of his work, gauging their reactions to performances and asking questions. “
Jim was intrigued with his children,” said Jane. “They had a great sense of humor and so he immediately started using them to find out what was funny, what worked. He really respected their opinions.” Generally, if the children laughed, the routine stayed in. If they didn’t, ten-year-old Lisa was often the first to pipe up with a critique. “
Lisa has great taste,” Jim told
The Philadelphia Inquirer
. “She can tell you specifically if something is working, or if you’re doing a punch line above children’s heads. If she feels they won’t understand it, we make it simpler.”

With countless newspaper interviews and his Muppets peering out from the cover of
TV Guide
, Jim and the Muppets were quickly becoming the public face of
Sesame Street
. As such, his time was more and more in demand for participation in various education conferences, attending CTW seminars with Jane at the stately Arden House in Harriman, New York, or spending several days in Aspen at a symposium discussing education on television. Jim was continuing to feel boxed in by being thought of primarily as a children’s performer, and reminded readers in one interview after another that he considered his success on
Sesame Street
“
odd, because we’re really not kid oriented. About 95 percent of all the things I’ve ever done [have] been for adults.”

Jim was still working hard to get several non–Sesame
Street–
related Muppet projects off the ground, including a Christmas special that Jerry Juhl had been writing as far back as 1963, about Santa Claus being kidnapped and replaced by an impostor who plans to burgle homes around the world. Jim had been trying to sell the show for the last seven years, rewriting the script and pitching all the major networks—including a few in Canada—until finally, in June 1970, Ed Sullivan, long impressed with Jim and his appearances on his show, agreed to produce the script as the hour-long feature
The Great Santa Claus Switch
.

Once again, there were personnel issues. While Santa would be played by a live actor—Jim had suggested Zero Mostel and Phil Silvers,
before landing Art Carney—there would be countless new Muppet monsters and walkaround characters, which would require performers Jim didn’t have. Instead of scouting for talent at puppetry conventions, this time Jim decided to bring the potential talent to him by hosting a series of auditions at the Muppet workshop. Before a single session could be set up, however, Jim found his first performer in an old friend and colleague: Jerry Nelson.