Jim Henson: The Biography (32 page)

Betty Henson’s death affected Jim perhaps more deeply than he let on to others. “
Mom passed on,” he confided privately in his journal, giving his mother three words more notice than he had given even to his beloved Dear after her death in 1967. In December, Jim immersed himself in Ruth Montgomery’s recently published book,
A World Beyond
, an “
account of life in the next stages of existence” that Montgomery had purportedly written while channeling a deceased psychic. Montgomery’s reassuring message—that death is only a step toward a new level of existence—was closely in tune with Jim’s own unique brand of spiritualism: a belief in a higher consciousness, a higher calling, and a higher, inherent order to the universe. It was a message brimming with hope for a son coping with the loss of a parent.

While afterimages of his Christian Science upbringing would remain part of his personal convictions, when it came down to it, Jim was more spiritual than religious, though he always remained “very respectful” of religion. “
My dad would never, ever be snippy about somebody else’s beliefs,” Cheryl said. If Jim had a guiding ethos, then, it was
optimism
—a faith that human beings lived their lives for a purpose, and everything would come out all right in the end. As Jim later wrote:

But Jim’s faith in the order of things—“
the innocence and the simple optimism,” said Jerry Juhl, that he “really loved”—also entailed a balance between darkness and light. “There was that dark side that he dealt with,” said Juhl, “and I think he kept searching into spirituality, looking for ways to synthesize what was happening, for ways to explain the dark side.” Jim felt “
very strongly” about reincarnation as one opportunity to balance the universe and atone for mistakes in this and past lives, said Richard Hunt—but added that Jim “wasn’t some looney spiritualist type character. He just would look into
everything
.”

Muppet performer Fran Brill, too, was impressed with Jim’s willingness to explore new ideas and new ways of thinking.

Ultimately, said Jim, “
I believe that life is basically a process of growth—that we go through many lives, choosing those situations and problems that we will learn through.” For now, that was enough.

As Jim coped with his mother’s death, there was a business-related problem to deal with as well. For nearly a year, Topper Toys—one of the busiest producers of
Sesame Street
–related merchandise—had been hemorrhaging money, due largely to an ill-advised decision to try to compete with the highly popular Barbie with a lower rent doll called Dawn. After posting nearly $10 million in losses, there was an “
awkward mess” between CTW and Topper over continued licensing rights to
Sesame Street
, with Henson Associates squarely in the middle. In sticky cases like this, the lawyers for both CTW and Henson Associates would usually appeal to Jim and Joan Cooney to try to resolve the matter personally. “
We’ve got to stay together for the children,” Cooney would earnestly say to Jim—which was usually all that was needed for her and Jim to resolve the matter quickly. In the case of the problematic Topper, the licensing agreement would be terminated in January 1973, with Ideal and Fisher-Price swooping in to pick up the merchandising opportunity.

J
ust after the New Year, Jim took the family to Stratton, Vermont, for his first try at skiing. Despite his prowess on the tennis court, Jim never considered himself much of an athlete; even his own family would giggle when Jim tried to do anything physical—when he once tried scuba diving, Lisa had nearly hyperventilated with laughter. (“
I looked underwater, and I saw him all lanky, with his arms and legs flailing, and I just died laughing!”) Nonetheless, he gamely accepted Jon Stone’s offer to join him at his Vermont home for a few days in
January to take some skiing lessons and try out some of Stratton’s gentler, sloping ski trails.

“
Like every other first-day skier, he spent a lot of time on his backside until he was absolutely covered with snow,” recalled Stone. “It was all over his clothes, in his beard, [and] in his hair.” At the end of the afternoon, Stone remembered waiting for Jim at the bottom of the mountain when he suddenly saw “this skinny snowman coming at me down that gentle little hill, standing straight up, arms straight out to the side, poles dangling. I remember telling him he looked like Christ of the Andes, and we both sat down in the snow, laughing.”

Jim loved learning to ski alongside his children. “
He really didn’t like to do something with the kids where he was already good at it, because he didn’t have the patience of them not knowing anything,” said Jane. “So his approach to skiing was, ‘I have never skiied, so I’m going to learn to ski with the kids.’ ” The kids loved it, too; part of the fun was having their father struggling and laughing right next to them. “
We were all about the same level,” said Brian, “which was fun.”

On their many regular return trips to Stratton, the family would rent a house near the mountain and ski all day in a group—except for Jane, who was often stranded back at the cabin taking care of Heather. Admittedly, spending all day skiing—or scuba diving or horseback riding—wasn’t Jane’s idea of a vacation. Just as Jane had simpler, earthier tastes in décor, so, too, were her tastes in vacations. She preferred casual, low-key family drives or visits to Cape Cod rather than the galloping, diving, rowdy vacations favored by Jim. “
[Driving] across country … that was more her style of thing,” said Lisa. “He liked a more active, kind of luxury trip … [while] my mom would stay home.”

Apart from his new pastime, Jim was taking an interest in the burgeoning environmental movement, participating in a spring 1973 ecology special called
Keep U.S. Beautiful
where he performed a musical number with monsters made from garbage—ancestors of
Fraggle Rock
’s Marjorie the Trash Heap. Typically, Jim downplayed his activism. “
I’m not an ecology nut, but I do have my own personal cause,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
. “People are messing up the
cities something awful.… The aim of the program is not to tell people what to do, but to bring the problem out into the open so that hopefully they will think twice before they dirty up the streets and the roads again.” In other words, there would be no heavy-handed messages; as he told his children time and time again,
They remember what you are
. The Muppets would lead by example.

Jim was continuing to hire new designers and builders for the Muppet workshop, bringing in two craftsmen who, in different ways, would have a lasting impact on the Muppets. The need for additional designers and builders was due partly to the recent reduction in Don Sahlin’s hours, a difficult but necessary decision prompted by Sahlin’s increasingly slow method of working. One new designer was the bespectacled and slightly eccentric Franz “Faz” Fazakas, a former employee of Bil Baird’s who could out-gadget and out-tinker even the versatile Sahlin. While Fazakas had performed some minor puppetry on
The Frog Prince
and
The Muppet Musicians of Bremen
, his real strength was in designing and inventing intricate mechanisms that gave Muppets more versatility. It was Fazakas, for example, who would improve the eye mechanisms on Big Bird and Sweetums, giving both characters a much broader range of emotions.

The other craftsman brought into the workshop was a brilliant, bearded, twenty-six-year-old Californian named Dave Goelz, who had a degree in industrial design and an almost instinctive sense for puppetry—though an often painful lack of confidence in his skills as a performer. Goelz, who had designed for John Deere and Hewlett-Packard, had seen the Muppets on
Ed Sullivan
and
Sesame Street
and became “
fascinated with the design process” he saw on-screen. After watching Oz perform at a show at Mills College in Oakland—Goelz later admitted he had stalked Oz “like an assassin,” meticulously watching the performance through a telephoto lens—Goelz was determined to get involved with the Muppets.

At Oz’s invitation, Goelz spent a week watching the Muppet performers taping
Sesame Street
inserts at Reeves Teletape, bringing with him a number of homemade puppets to show Jim. Unfortunately, Goelz had chosen to be on-set during the week Jim was in France for the UNIMA conference—but Bonnie Erickson, with an eye for design talent, was impressed enough by Goelz’s work to recommend
that Jim follow up with a phone call. Two conversations later, Goelz found himself in New York working at a bench in the Muppet workshop, sketching out designs and constructing elaborate puppets for Jim’s Broadway show. It was a task well suited for Goelz—but Jim would soon find a better way to utilize Goelz’s considerable talents by putting a puppet at the end of his arm.

With new designers, countless yards of fabric, mounds of fake fur, and bins bursting with noses, eyes, and mustaches, the Muppet workshop had quickly outgrown its space on the second floor of Henson Associates. During the spring of 1973, then, Jim had rented—then renovated—a much larger space just up the block at 201 East 67th Street for the sole purpose of relocating the workshop. Moving the workshop gave Jim the opportunity to spread his designers and builders out across a large space they had entirely to themselves, while also giving the business offices some much needed breathing room just down the street at 227.

I
n late May 1973, following an appearance with Kermit and Cookie Monster at the Emmy Awards, Jim took thirteen-year-old Lisa and twelve-year-old Cheryl on a vacation to London and Copenhagen. For nearly two weeks, Jim and his daughters relaxed at the stately Grosvenor House in London’s opulent Mayfair district, toured old castles in the English countryside, then traveled by boat across the North Sea to Copenhagen. Jim found the choppy waters oddly soothing, and would stand on deck with the girls endlessly watching the diving seagulls as the boat rocked in the waves. Jim’s interest in the foaming, softly churning water was, thought Cheryl, a reflection of his growing fascination with his own subconscious—a topic she and Jim discussed earnestly and that Cheryl had lately been exploring in her own poetry. “
I was starting to tap into that, to figure out that [water is] a great metaphor for the subconscious,” Cheryl recalled. “So I think that’s what he was interested in—because my father was very interested in dreaming and keeping dream diaries, and the subconscious.”

Perhaps Jim was also quietly trying to make sense of the disorder that had lately crept into his personal life. More and more, Jim
and Jane were living at increasingly different speeds. Partly, it was a matter of personalities. “
Dad was driving fast cars and zipping around the country roads in our town,” said Lisa, “while Mom had developed the habit of driving very slowly with a line of eight to ten cars behind her.” Even when walking the streets of New York, Jim and the older children would stroll at a rapid pace, leaving Jane half a block behind to walk more slowly with Heather and catch up at the next intersection. It was an apt metaphor for the current state of their always complex relationship.

Jim and Jane remained devoted to each other—they had built a company together, had five children, and still shared similar artistic sensibilities—but lately their differences in demeanor and temperament were becoming sharper and more accentuated. Jim was genuinely calm, almost stoic in his demeanor—“
I think … he was setting an example to instill in us [kids] more calmness and peacefulness,” said Lisa—while Jane, on the other hand, openly felt, discussed, and displayed her feelings. The contrasting ways in which each of them expressed their emotions, then, inherently bred conflict. “
He was so repressed and kind of internalized about [his] emotions,” recalled Lisa, “and my mother … is very articulate about emotions and really feels them. And if she gets sad she gets
very
sad; if she gets angry, she gets
very
angry. They didn’t mesh that way.”

That difference alone could often make communication difficult. Jim never liked confrontation anyway—he had subjected Diana Birkenfield to the silent treatment over a sharply worded memo—and if Jane became upset or emotional with him, Jim would simply tune her out, which made Jane that much more frustrated. It was a self-perpetuating cycle that was doomed to keep the two of them from openly communicating. “
His repressive silence would really make her angrier and would ramp her up,” said Lisa—and the more Jane wanted to hash things out, the quieter Jim got.