Jim Henson: The Biography (27 page)

“
We respected the writers’ jokes and we knew we had to hit the educational aspect,” agreed Oz, “but we’d meander around all that.” Sometimes that meandering took them widely off-script, and Jim and Oz would get so wrapped up in their ad-libbing that Jim would break down into a fit of his high-pitched giggles, laughing until tears ran down his face. “
The best thing of all,” Oz said warmly, “was to watch Jim laugh until he cried.” Finally, as Jim and Oz composed themselves, someone would ask in mock professorial tones, “
And what are we teaching?”—to which Stone would playfully respond, “Who cares?” Educators and child psychologists might have scratched their heads trying to figure out how sneezing one’s nose off into a hanky could possibly be educational … and yet as Jim and Oz played it, somehow it was.

So completely had Jim and Oz wrapped themselves in Ernie and Bert that it was hard to imagine that it had taken a bit of experimenting before the two of them decided who would perform which character. “
I can’t imagine doing Bert now, because Bert has become so much a part of Frank,” Jim said later. In Jon Stone’s view, however, it should have been obvious all along. “
They’re Jim and Frank,” Stone said. “Their relationship
is
the relationship with Jim and
Frank. Jim just loved to play tricks on Frank … and Frank is Bert. Frank is very buttoned-up and uptight and compulsively neat, and Jim was just wild and off the walls and funny.” “
There are certainly elements of our own personalities in Bert and Ernie,” agreed Jim. “We play each other’s timing and we play off each other very well. And that’s what a good comedy team does.”

While Ernie and Bert—and therefore Jim and Oz—would come to be almost universally hailed as a comedic duo on the same upper stratum as Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, or Burns and Allen, Oz never really thought of Jim and himself as a comedy team. “
We were two people so in tune with each other that we didn’t have to say anything to communicate,” Oz said. “We’d get done with a take and we’d look at each other and we both knew without saying anything that we’d have to do it again, and we both knew why. That was the special bond we had.” They didn’t make comedy, said Oz; instead, “we created a kind of aliveness.” Whatever it was, “
it was a magical coming together of a couple of characters,” said Jon Stone. “Frank and Jim were yin and yang.… They were this inseparable couple. It was a beautiful love affair, in the best sense of the word.”

Besides Ernie, Jim was regularly performing Kermit for the
Sesame Street
inserts, though he had scaled back the frog’s appearances somewhat following Gould’s confusion over Kermit’s appearance in
Hey Cinderella!
The incident had left such a bad taste in his mouth, in fact, that Jim took Kermit off
Sesame Street
altogether for nearly a year. Trying to fill the void, the writers introduced Herbert Birdsfoot, a nice guy lecturer performed by Jerry Nelson, “
to be a kind of Kermit spokesperson,” said Stone. It was an experiment doomed to fail from the beginning. “It never really took off,” Stone said. “Trying to follow Kermit is like trying to follow Will Rogers.”

Actually, it was like trying to follow
Jim Henson—for the more Jim performed Kermit, the more the two of them seemed to become intertwined. While Jim always described Kermit as somewhat “snarkier” than himself—as Jim had discovered from Edgar Bergen, a puppet could say things that couldn’t be said by ordinary people—it was becoming harder to tell where the frog ended and Jim began. Over the past few years, Kermit had become a more rounded, more refined character. “
Kermit is the closest one to me,” Jim said later.
“He’s the easiest to talk with. He’s the
only one who can’t be worked by anybody else, only by me. See, Kermit is just a piece of cloth with a mouthpiece in it. The character is literally my hand.”

Jim’s other regular character was the excitable game show host Guy Smiley, a performance Joan Cooney always thought was Jim’s funniest. Whether he was hosting game show parodies like “Beat the Time” or “Here Is Your Life,” Guy was an amped-up version of Jim’s own personality, brimming with enthusiasm, rooting for contestants, and always convinced that whatever game they were playing was pretty much the greatest game ever. “
I live kind of within myself as a person, so my outlet has always been the Muppets; therefore, I tend to do sort of wildly extroverted characters,” said Jim. The only downside to performing Guy was that his higher-pitched, nearly shouted manic voice could be hard on Jim’s vocal cords; at times, Jim would finish taping Guy Smiley segments with his voice nearly ragged.

Oz had nearly the same problem performing a character who was one of Guy Smiley’s regular contestants, a furry blue monster with a rumbling voice who, like other characters Oz would perform, moved from being a face in the background to front stage, where he became a break-out star: Cookie Monster. The voice, Oz said, was “
an explosion of energy” that could “absolutely rip” his throat, and took some time for Oz to master without shredding his larynx.

Monsters had been a Muppet staple for nearly as long as there had been Muppets—Yorick had devoured Kermit on national television as early as 1956—making it all but inevitable that Jim would introduce monsters on
Sesame Street
. Oscar, despite his appearance, somehow seemed to defy the label
monster
—he was a
grouch
, which seemed to give him a status all his own. Cookie, on the other hand, was unapologetically a monster—but if educators were worried that Jim’s monsters would give preschoolers nightmares, Jim was already one step ahead of them, saliently explaining the educational aspects of his monsters even as he acknowledged educators’ concerns. “On
Sesame Street
, the monsters are kind of soft and cuddly and fuzzy, but for a three- or four-year-old child, they might be rather frightening things,” Jim said sympathetically. “At the same time, the child can get to know these monsters and understand that they are not
things to be frightened of. It’s a scary image, but the child can learn to handle it.”

Cookie could trace his roots back to a prototype built by Don Sahlin for a 1966 ad campaign for General Foods, when Jim had sketched three different monsters to each steal one of three shaped snacks called Wheels, Crowns, and Flutes. Cookie’s ancestor, the Wheel Stealer, was a fuzzy, twitchy, googly-eyed fanged monster who grabbed and gobbled handfuls of wheel-shaped chips. When General Foods opted not to use the ad, Jim recycled the Wheel Stealer for one of his IBM Coffee Breaks, where the monster devoured a talking coffee machine, then exploded—a sketch Jim enjoyed so much he recreated it for
The Ed Sullivan Show
in 1967. The monster was used again in 1969, this time with his fangs removed, for the Munchos potato chips commercials. That defanged version eventually made his way onto
Sesame Street
, where he first appeared among a crowd of monsters. At the end of Oz’s skillful right arm, Cookie—referred to in early publicity simply as “
Blue Monster”—slowly worked his way to the front of more and more inserts, devouring not just cookies, but salt shakers, telephones, and letters of the alphabet.

Another Oz-performed monster would become almost as synonymous with
Sesame Street
as Big Bird—and if Big Bird, as Jim and Jon Stone hoped, was the “representative of the audience,” then the fuzzy, lovable Grover was the audience’s devoted best friend. As with many of
Sesame Street
’s most memorable characters, it had taken some time before the character finally clicked. Like Cookie Monster, Grover had been simply one in a crowd of previously used monsters, having first appeared as a monster named Gleep in a 1967 Christmas sketch on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. In his first
Sesame Street
inserts, the still unnamed Grover was more monsterlike, with darker, matted fur and slightly sinister eyes.

By the second season, that would change. Part of the transition had to do with design—the monster was given a brighter, bluer fur, and wider eyes. But Oz had also begun to get a handle on the character, finally arriving at a name as he played with the puppet between takes, and developing a better understanding of Grover’s motivation, thanks to some help from his dog, a devoted mutt named Fred. Watching Fred romping buoyantly in the park one afternoon, Oz
said, “
I noticed the purity of the dog.” It was suddenly clear. “There’s a purity in Grover,” said Oz. “He wants to please.” Grover had arrived.

Finding a character to act as Grover’s primary foil fell largely to Jerry Nelson, who started on
Sesame Street
in 1970 just as he had on
The
Jimmy Dean Show
in 1965: performing right hands. As he began taking on more characters, Nelson developed the first major straight man for Grover with the eternally annoyed Mr. Johnson, a blue, round-headed Anything Muppet who seemed to constantly dine in restaurants where Grover served as his waiter, and received perpetually poor—though enthusiastic—service. Acting as a foil for Grover “
really enabled me to get a real feel for that kind of ongoing, day-to-day playing in an ensemble manner,” said Nelson. Nelson would become one of
Sesame Street
’s most versatile and valued puppeteers, performing Herbert Birdsfoot, Sherlock Hemlock, Herry Monster, and, by the fourth season, the number-loving vampire Count Von Count.

Nelson also served as the lead puppeteer on Snuffleupagus, one of Jim’s first two-man, full-body, walkaround Muppets, unveiled in 1971. “Jim
loved
complicated puppetry,” said Cooney, though Jim admitted that the success of Snuffy was largely through trial and error. “
Every time we built [a full-body Muppet], we would learn a lot about what to do and not to do next time,” said Jim—and Snuffy was a true feat of engineering, requiring two performers to work cooperatively beyond merely right and left hands. Such cooperation required enormous intuition between two performers, and Nelson quickly learned that he and Richard Hunt could communicate just as silently, and just as seamlessly, as Jim and Oz. Into the rear of Snuffy Hunt went. “
It wasn’t much fun for Richard,” Nelson admitted later, but their performance, all the way down to Snuffy’s dancing, was flawless. “Richard was good and gave him good movement,” said Nelson.

For Hunt, it was all an adventure. “
He was like a puppy … really bouncy and eager,” said Nelson. “So we had to sit on him a lot.” It didn’t seem to matter. Assigned largely right-hand (and tail-end) work and background Muppets, Hunt threw himself into any assignment with zeal and without complaint. Jim, too, quickly appreciated
Hunt’s ability to fall into sync with other performers, though Hunt admitted there was a bit of a trick to performing a right hand with Jim. “
I always used to do Jim’s right hand as Ernie,” Hunt said later, “and I would hold one of his belt loops with my left hand so that I was with him literally. Otherwise you’re being dragged along … by grabbing his belt loop, the minute he moves, I’m feeling him move—with the first real spasm of the first twitch, I just immediately move with him.”

Many of
Sesame Street
’s most memorable moments involved children interacting with the Muppets, a brilliant decision that was driven more by idleness on the part of the writers than inspiration—when bits were ad-libbed, no scriptwriting was necessary. (When children were on the set, Stone would call out “
blue sky!”—code that a child was present and performers and crew members should refrain from swearing.) Instead, said Stone, “
we’d give the puppeteer a concept or a problem … and have them just talk it over with the kids. And we found early on that certain puppeteers—Jerry, Frank, and Jim—were wonderful at it.” Even more surprising, said Stone, the team found that “as soon as the puppet goes up on somebody’s arm, the puppeteer ceases to exist.” Jim was delighted. “
I’m working with Ernie, [who] has no bottom half or legs or anything like that. He ends at the waist,” Jim explained. “Yet, the kids will look right at Ernie and me—this strange, bearded man—standing right there, talking for the puppet, and there’s no question the kids believe Ernie is a real personality.”

Jim was proud of his involvement with
Sesame Street
, and knew early on he was involved not only with something that could make a difference in the lives of children, but might also give his bruised-but-beloved television what he saw as a much needed sense of purpose. “
Family, school and television are the most important factors in raising children,” Jim remarked to
TV Guide
in 1970. “Of these, television has the least sense of responsibility.” Elsewhere, he complained candidly that “
TV is frustrating. It is an exciting art and communications form capable of contributing so much, but it just isn’t set up to do it. It’s geared to sell products—the whole reason for being against all other things which are neat and innovative.”

Still, if his hope for a higher calling for television was destined to
disappoint, Jim was committed to making his corner of television as bright as possible. “
Kids love to learn, and the learning should be exciting and fun,” he said. “That’s what we’re out to do.” Echoed Juhl, “
It’s why the show is a success. The show is obviously done to be entertaining and everybody has a wonderful time.” And no one, said Cheryl Henson, was having a more wonderful time than her father. “
He loved to perform with Frank and Jerry and all the puppeteers,” she said. “When we were little kids watching
Sesame Street
, we often felt as if my father was performing just for us—but I think that he was really just having a good time with his friends.”

As
Sesame Street
began its second season, it was clear the show had become a full-blown phenomenon, endlessly discussed and analyzed by everyone, including television critics, educators, psychiatrists, clergymen, physicians, and writers like George Plimpton, who confessed that his addiction to the show had “
destroyed God knows how much writing I could have done.” In November 1970, Big Bird appeared on the cover of
Time
, fronting an extensive article that discussed
Sesame Street
’s “
profusion of aims, [and] confusion of techniques,” then asked rhetorically, “how could such a show possibly succeed? Answer: spectacularly well.” Already the show was broadcast in fifty countries—though not yet England, where the BBC’s chief of children’s programming called the show “
nondemocratic and possibly dangerous for young Britons”—and was seen by seven million American children each day.