Jim Henson: The Biography (31 page)

In other pieces, there was a new sociopolitical edge Jim hadn’t shown with the Muppets before. Unlike Walt Kelly in
Pogo
, however, Jim was never comfortable aiming his satirical punches at individuals; instead, he took on higher concepts like technology, science, the generation gap, and, in one particularly biting piece, greed and the economy. That particular sketch—in which a giant, rolling face ingested stock funds and tax shelters—was one of Jim’s favorites; he had even gone so far as to have the Muppet builders construct a gigantic face, and took great delight in allowing reporters to take photographs of him being gobbled up by it. Ultimately, the show, as Jim saw it, was designed to “
present a series of contrasting moods and scale, showing the full range of what puppetry is capable of doing.” It was clearly something new and unique: a puppetry
tour de force
, cleverly written and ambitiously designed—so ambitious, in fact, that Jim was finding it increasingly hard to hold it together.

I
n early 1972, Jim was back in Toronto to oversee preliminary work for a new installment of
Tales from Muppetland
called
The Muppet Musicians of Bremen
, adapted from the Grimm fairy tale. Many of the Muppets in
Bremen
would have a slightly different look from puppets in previous specials, thanks to the addition of a new designer named Bonnie Erickson, whose sense of design was a bit more cartoony and less abstract than Sahlin’s. Where Sahlin designed and built in flat abstractions, sewing soft, malleable Muppets from fabric and stuffing, Erickson thought and worked in three-dimensional textures, carving Muppet heads out of enormous squares of polyurethane that could be easily mooshed and mashed and manipulated by performers to give the puppets a dynamic range of expression. Erickson’s most notable contribution to
Bremen
would be the malleable foam heads carved for its hillbilly villains, giving each a look so bizarrely lifelike that one Hollywood special effects artist asked Jim
how it had been done. “
He thought that we were applying the foam directly to people’s faces,” laughed Jim.

To give the foam heads a softer, fuzzier appearance, Jim had recently adopted a process called
flocking
, commonly used in lining the interior of jewelry boxes. Flocking involved coating the Muppet’s foam surface with an adhesive, then shaking fine synthetic fibers—the so-called
flock
—through a screen onto the glue. When an electrical charge was run through the wet, sticky surface—and for Muppet heads, this was usually done by sticking a pin into the puppet’s face and electrifying it—the flock would stand up perpendicularly and then set in place. It was flocking that gave the interior of jewelry boxes their velvety feel; when applied to the Muppets, it gave each puppet a fuzzy look. As an added benefit, it also caught the light in a manner Jim loved, lighting the puppet beautifully on television. From here on, the flocking of Muppet heads would become a regular practice, giving Muppets like Miss Piggy or Statler and Waldorf their soft, slightly stippled appearance.

Still, the process for designing and building Muppets was always the same. “
The character comes first,” Jim said, “then I do a bunch of sketches and one of those will have an essence of the character.” The workshop staff was small enough in 1971 that Jim was still able to oversee the development and building of nearly every Muppet himself. “
[Jim] was the art director,” said designer Caroly Wilcox, “so at least once a day he would make comments on how things were progressing.” Sometimes, Jim would hand the designers a piece of yellow paper with nothing more than a squiggle with eyes and ears. “It was fun to play with that,” said Wilcox, “the individual puppet builder designer had a lot more to put in.”

With a growing staff, increasing revenues from merchandising to manage, and more and more contracts and legal agreements crossing his desk, Jim decided it was time to bring in a full-time business manager and administrator to keep an eye on the fine print and the bottom line. In March, he hired Al Gottesman, an attorney with a bit of showbiz savvy—as a young man, he had served as a page for Sid Caesar’s
Your Show of Shows
—who had earlier impressed Jim with his level head and steady hand during the negotiations that produced the complex math formula that divvied up merchandising
revenues between Henson Associates and Children’s Television Workshop. That made Gottesman ideally suited for his first task: protecting the Muppets from copyright infringement.

The enormous success of
Sesame Street
had created a demand for Muppet merchandise that went beyond those officially licensed by Jim and CTW, which, in turn, had the unfortunate side effect of spawning an underground market of poorly made Muppet knock-offs. Public television stations, looking for gifts to give to donors, simply copied Muppet images onto watch faces; grocery stores, unable to hire the real Big Bird, threw together sloppy homemade costumes instead. “
[Jim] felt concerned about kids and the public being misled into believing that Big Bird looked the way some costumed Big Bird [did] in front of a supermarket,” said Gottesman. “It came from the integrity of the characters and of Jim.”

With work completed on
The Muppet Musicians of Bremen
in March—it would air in April to generally good reviews—Jim was filing away ideas for future installments of
Tales from Muppetland
, such as adaptations of
Aladdin
and
Jack and the Giant Killer
. He was also interested in adapting several books that were personally meaningful to him, including
The 13 Clocks
(“the one property I’ve wanted to do with the Muppets for twenty years,” Jim wrote) and Margery Williams’s sentimental
The Velveteen Rabbit
, which Jim briefly considered producing with Raymond Wagner at MGM Studios. None of these projects, however, would advance much further than his notebooks.

In late April, Jim took the family on a short vacation, this time making the relatively short drive from New York up to Cape Cod. As Jim flew kites in the brisk ocean air, the Henson children would chase along behind him, clambering up and down the sand dunes. When the inevitable snarl of kite string occurred, Brian Henson would patiently work apart the knots and roll the untangled string into a tight ball. “
I was very good,” Brian laughed. “I found it therapeutic … I don’t know why.… It was pretty chaotic at home. My brother was certainly quite chaotic.”

For some time now, seven-year-old John Henson had been behaving erratically and recklessly, roughly handling the Henson pets or suddenly locking his gaze on some invisible focal point; of greater
concern, he would sometimes pedal his bicycle madly in circles before wrecking intentionally. “
I was a strange kid,” John admitted later. Mostly, he was struggling with the frustrations of being severely dyslexic, though John attributed much of it to “an endless energy. If you look at the old home movies, everyone’s around and every once in a while you’d see this little blond blur just careen through the frame; that was me. I was just always going—and the faster the better.” At times, recalled Jane, Jim found his youngest son slightly frustrating. “
[He and John] certainly cared for each other very much but I think they had probably a harder time understanding each other.” Despite the bang-ups on his bike, John was convinced that he could never be badly hurt because a guardian angel was looking out for him—an idea that Jim found fascinating. Jim and Jane consulted doctors and sent John for testing, hoping to help him overcome some of his difficulties with dyslexia and looking for advice that might help ensure their dreamy son didn’t hurt himself.

Most likely it was John’s situation—as well as Jim’s own continued fascination with the brain—that fueled Jim’s interest in
The Affect Show
, a weekly program being developed by CTW with the New Age goal of “
increas[ing] a child’s psychological awareness of his own thoughts and feelings as well as his understanding of the thoughts and feelings of others.” Gathering in June at the Arden House in Harriman, New York—the same location where CTW had conducted many of its reading seminars—CTW’s cluster of child development specialists, psychologists, and educators excitedly discussed the potential for such a series, eventually suggesting that the show reflect “a family mood with characters, probably puppets, who encounter situations that call for different types of personality or emotions.” CTW agreed to hold another meeting in late July, “by which time it is hoped some rough pieces of program material might be produced for reactions from the group”—a thinly veiled appeal that was aimed clearly at Jim.

Jim was intrigued by the premise, jotting down on lined yellow paper ideas for several skits that he thought might illustrate higher psychological concepts, such as a “
character that always sees things in abstract symbols” or a “character that summarizes.” It was a show, he told producer Diana Birkenfield, that was “
meaningful”
and “ought to be done.” Birkenfield, however, was unimpressed. As Jim’s producer, it was her job to look for projects that would be good for Jim and for Henson Associates—and she didn’t think this was one of them.

Telling Jim no—especially when he was excited by an idea or project—was never an easy task. Over the years, only a few friends, acquaintances, and employees would ever really learn how to gently and diplomatically tell Jim if something was a bad idea or couldn’t be done. One of those who could, and did, was Frank Oz, who left diplomacy at the door when it came to giving Jim his opinion. “
I’d say to him, ‘this doesn’t fucking work!’ ” Oz said, laughing. “But if he felt strongly about something, it was tough to get him to back down. Anyone could say no to Jim, but you had to do it in a certain way, and you couldn’t argue too much. You had to know when to step back.”

Stepping back, however, was not Birkenfield’s style. A loyal and savvy producer with a sharp eye for quality, Birkenfield took her job as the first line of defense against unworthy projects almost personally. If she felt Jim was considering projects that were unworthy of his name or reputation, she would “
stand up to him and get angry at him and not talk to him for a while,” recalled Gottesman. “She was totally devoted to him and devoted to his work.”

In the case of CTW’s proposed
Affect Show
, Birkenfield put her thoughts on paper, pounding out a blistering memo warning Jim that the show was an ill-advised idea that would not only take up too much of his time, but move his career in the wrong direction. “
In my opinion,” she wrote, “[the] Muppets should be working toward making it independently” rather than tying themselves to CTW. Attaching the Muppets to yet another CTW project, she warned, was only fueling the limited perception of Jim as a children’s performer. “Adult TV has not been cracked, nor feature films, nor live presentation … [the] big thing that people can talk about … has yet to come.” Birkenfield thought the proposed Broadway show might be the turning point in Jim’s career—but only if he dedicated himself full-time to getting it done, rather than allowing himself to be distracted by projects like
The Affect Show
. “In the overall picture of what [Henson Associates] has done, is doing, and should be doing,”
she concluded, “I do not see your specific reasons for becoming involved with this series … [but] you make the decision … and let’s go.”

Birkenfield was right, and Jim knew it; after producing two admittedly “poor” sample pieces, he chose not to pursue the project, and the program never got off the ground. But that sort of aggressive approach grated on Jim. “
Diana was just a bit too relentless for Jim,” said Oz. “She would go after him.” Jim never got angry or upset; he never erupted or lost his temper; instead, he would get very quiet—“powerfully silent,” Oz called it—and he and Birkenfield likely spent several hours in icy silence at the Muppet offices until smoothing things over. The following year, at a meeting in California, there would be a similarly heated confrontation between Birkenfield and the outspoken Bernie Brillstein as Jim looked on in stony silence. “
Diana vs. Bernie,” Jim wrote wearily in his journal. Several months later, she and Jim would have a very frank and private conversation. “
Talked to Diana Birkenfield,” Jim wrote matter-of-factly in his journal, “—ended her employment.” Still, despite the difference in the communication styles, Jim admired and respected Birkenfield’s talents, and would bring her back to the company in the 1980s. “
These things were never personal,” said Oz.

Sesame Street
–related projects took up much of the summer, as Jim spent the end of July working on the
Bert & Ernie Sing-Along
record, and August taping
Sesame Street
inserts at Reeves. Still, Jim took time off in mid-August to head to Oakland for the annual Puppeteers of America conference—and in September, he and Jane spent more than a week in Europe attending the festival for UNIMA, the
Union Internationale de la Marionette
, an international organization “devoted to the cause of international friendship through the art of puppetry.” Jim had helped found the American branch of UNIMA in 1966, and in 1972 was serving as its American chairman. Jim was delighted with the opportunity to mingle with more than two thousand puppeteers from around the world, though perhaps the biggest thrill of the trip was meeting Russian puppeteer Sergei Obraztsov, whose book
My Profession
had been pivotal in helping Jim learn puppetry in 1954.

O
n October 21, amid a particulary hectic meeting and travel schedule—including a Los Angeles meeting to discuss the Broadway show with writer Larry Gelbart and musician Billy Goldenberg—Jim learned that his mother had died in Albuquerque. The precise cause of Betty’s death would remain a mystery; some thought she had simply pined away since Paul Jr.’s death more than fifteen years earlier. “
I think it’s fascinating that Jim and the whole family were content to live with that mystery,” said Lisa Henson. “It was the religion, partially, but also an acceptance of certain unanswered questions.” Jim flew immediately to New Mexico to be with his father—but a typically packed schedule demanded that he turn around less than twenty-four hours later to go to Los Angeles to tape a Perry Como Christmas special. He returned to Albuquerque on the morning of October 23 to oversee his mother’s funeral and spend several days tending to his father. Only Jane was with him; the children had been left in Bedford. “
My parents weren’t really big on funerals,” said Cheryl.