Jim Henson: The Biography (38 page)

Four days later, Jim and Mandell stood side by side at a cocktail party and press conference held at the posh “21” Club on West 52nd, where reporters had been told to come prepared “for a major announcement.” With Kermit on his arm and flashbulbs popping, Jim quietly reported the news of his deal with Grade—and was stunned when the room erupted into applause. Mandell touted the show as a
“network-budgeted, high quality series … designed as the perfect all-family vehicle,” while Jim reassured reporters that he would continue to perform on
Sesame Street
and make guest appearances on other shows “as the opportunities arise.” Kermit nodded at the end of Jim’s arm. “We’ll do anything for money,” said the frog.

At last, Jim had the opportunity to pursue his dream; and yet he was concerned that his new obligations—he would have to leave for London to begin production in May 1976—meant letting down Lorne Michaels. Brillstein was prepared to begin the messy formal process of getting Jim out of his contract with NBC, but Jim wanted to discuss the matter with Michaels personally. Michaels—who was already weathering increasingly heated calls from
SNL
’s writers to dump the Muppets from the show’s lineup altogether—could afford to be gracious and magnanimous, releasing Jim from his contract without penalty, even making clear that Jim had complete ownership of the characters he had created for SNL. “
I always figure people stay if they want to stay,” said Michaels diplomatically. “[The Muppets] had the opportunity to do their own show. You never stand in the way of somebody.” Jim—who also knew the Muppets’ days on
SNL
were numbered—was equally magnanimous in his praise of Michaels. “
I really respect Lorne,” he said later, “[and] at no time did I ever lose my respect for the show. I always liked what they were doing. We parted on very good terms.”

Well, mostly. Years later, Jim took great pleasure in displaying a copy of a postcard the Muppet team had sent from London to the cast of
Saturday Night Live
, pasting it to a piece of paper under block letters asking
WHERE ARE THE MUCKING FUPPETS?
“
Dear Gang,” the postcard read, “We’re having a wonderful time here in England. We’re doing our own show and it’s a big hit.”

Within a year, Jim and the Muppets would be the biggest act in England; in less than two years they would take the United States by storm. And before the decade was over,
The Muppet Show
would be the most popular show in the world.

Mucking Fuppets indeed.

The second season (1977–1978) cast of performers on
The Muppet Show.
Clockwise from bottom left: Dave Goelz, Jerry Nelson, Jim, Frank Oz, Richard Hunt, and Louise Gold
. (
photo credit 9.1
)

I
T MAY SEEM EXTRAORDINARY THAT A TELEVISION SERIES FEATURING A
gonzo daredevil who eats a tire to “Flight of the Bumblebee” would have appealed to a British lord—but Lord Lew Grade was an extraordinary man. Born Louis Winogradsky in Russia in 1906, Grade’s family immigrated to London’s East End in 1912, where he went to school and spent several years working in his father’s constantly struggling embroidery company. In 1926, Grade broke into show business, wowing British vaudeville audiences by frantically dancing the Charleston on narrow tabletops—a stunt worthy of the Great Gonzo himself.

When perpetually swollen knees ended his dancing career, Grade became a theatrical agent, landing bookings for A-listers like Judy Garland and Danny Kaye at venues like the Palladium or on British television variety shows. Unlike many agents who had cut their teeth on theater bookings, Grade was quick to embrace the new television medium, and in 1954—the same year seventeen-year-old Jim Henson was first performing with his Muppets on the
Junior Morning Show
in Washington, D.C.—Grade founded his own TV company, which eventually became the juggernaut, Associated Television, or ATV.

Grade himself was as familiar to British audiences as his booming network, frequently photographed at premieres emerging from his Rolls-Royce Phantom with smoke from one of his enormous cigars curling around his piebald head. A “
British Louis B. Mayer,” Oz called him, and the comparison was apt—for Grade was not only an old-fashioned showman, but a shrewd businessman as well. In fact, his offer to produce
The Muppet Show
had both fiscal and artistic benefits. ATV’s Elstree studios were sitting largely empty and unused in London, a red mark on ATV’s books. So with Jim committed to producing twenty-four episodes at Elstree—and with five CBS stations in the United States already obligated to pick up the series—
The Muppet Show
would ensure the lights stayed on at Elstree.

For Jim, the prospect of picking up and moving to London was no more daunting than the snap decision to move from D.C. to New York had been nearly fifteen years ago. After learning of the deal that would bring
The Muppet Show
to London, one of Jim’s first phone calls was to Jerry Juhl out in California to ask the writer if he would pack up and follow him out to England. Jim couldn’t offer Juhl the head writer job—one of the few conditions on which Grade and Mandell had insisted was that Jim hire an experienced television variety show writer as his lead writer. It was a slight that Jim knew would bruise Juhl’s feelings, and Jim—always one to avoid hurting feelings as much as he could—had written out a list of sympathetic talking points to use during his phone call. The approach worked, and Juhl, who had dutifully made the move from D.C. to New York with Jim in 1963, promised to join the Muppet team in London in 1976, where he would serve—for a while, grudgingly—under lead
writer Jack Burns, an experienced stand-up comic who, along with his partner, Avery Schreiber, was a veteran of perhaps as many variety shows as Jim.

In early November 1975, Jim began meeting regularly with Burns and Juhl in Los Angeles and New York to go over the dynamics and structure of the show—including nailing down the important but always problematic question of where, exactly, the show would be taking place. As Juhl remembered it, after several days of “
talking around ideas” they finally settled on a “show-within-a-show” format, in which the Muppets would be working each week to put on a vaudeville show in an old theater, with action taking place both onstage and backstage. It was a format, said Juhl, that “
[none] of us were convinced … was gonna work.”

Jim, however, liked it—and with some help from Bernie Brillstein, who set the writers up in an office near the Beverly Wilshire, Burns and Juhl began hammering out scripts for the first few episodes, which Jim was planning to put before the cameras at Elstree in January 1976, only a few short weeks away. In early December, Jim flew to London with Brillstein and David Lazer to look over the facilities at Elstree and prepare a number of offices and workspaces that had been set aside by the studios specifically for Henson Associates—including an area for a fully functional Muppet workshop where puppets could be designed, built, and repaired on site, rather than in the workshop in New York at least a day’s flight away. Satisfied, Jim came home for Christmas and a bit of skiing in Vermont. On January 11, 1976, he returned to London to begin work on the first two episodes of
The Muppet Show
.

Although Jim had an agreement in place that guaranteed him twenty-four episodes for the first season, much was riding on the first two episodes of the show, which were essentially considered pilots for the new series. While Brillstein had five local CBS stations on the hook to broadcast the series, there was no guarantee the show would be picked up beyond those five. What was needed, then, were one or two strong episodes that either Brillstein or Abe Mandell at ITC could circulate to promote and sell the series. More than anything, the first two episodes were Jim’s chance to spot-check his new format, get a feel for several new characters—namely Fozzie Bear,
Gonzo, and Scooter—and show his new partners at ATV what he could do.

One of the first real challenges, however, was finding guest stars. As a syndicated show targeted at the pre-prime-time access hour—and a puppet show at that
—The Muppet Show
had at the outset what many booking agents likely regarded as two strikes against it. Appearing outside of prime time, their client would already likely have a smaller viewing audience; worse, in syndication—still viewed as the wasteland of television—they might have no audience at all. Further, the pay wasn’t great; most of the budget for
The Muppet Show
was wrapped up in design and production, which didn’t leave a lot left over to entice guests. Most would be paid a flat rate of $3,500 for their appearance—“
very, very little money,” said Lazer.

It was left largely up to Brillstein to make the pitch and appeal to clients and agents. For the first two shows—and much of the first season, in fact—Brillstein dug into his personal Rolodex and called in a few favors, courting and finally landing dancer Juliet Prowse for the first show and actress Connie Stevens for the second. “
The first … guests were … friends of mine who did favors,” said Brillstein. “We couldn’t get anyone else.… They did the show for me.” Taping for both episodes went quickly—each show was filmed in less than a week—and on February 14, Jim returned to the United States to screen the two pilots with Abe Mandell and ITC executives in New York.

Things didn’t go well.
“We got a blood bath,” said Lazer flatly. “They hated them.” In Mandell’s opinion, the pilots were “too British” and exactly what Grade didn’t want.
“Grade had told us, ‘Don’t be British,’ ” said Oz, and even Juhl admitted the shows “
were all wrong.” Most likely, the two episodes were just too talky, with an overly long opening credit sequence that Jim wisely cut down. Regardless, said Lazer, “
Jim was pissed at them!” Jim stalked out of the screening in silence and started walking with Lazer back toward the Muppet offices when, after only a few blocks, he suddenly started laughing. The tension was broken, and Lazer pulled Jim into the bar at the Drake Hotel where the two commiserated over Bloody Marys at eleven in the morning. “
It’s not the end of the world,” Jim reassuringly told Lazer between sips, and resolved to go back and re-edit the
show, and even refilm several Muppet sequences. Jim “was hurt … his guts are on the screen,” said Lazer. But Mandell had also picked up on what Lazer thought was a larger problem with the pilots. “In truth, the characters hadn’t gelled then,” said Lazer. “Character voices weren’t good. And so we went back, rehuddled, and did it again.”

Jim had taken a risk in building
The Muppet Show
around an entirely new cast of Muppet characters. There was a chance that viewers who knew the Muppets largely through
Sesame Street
might tune in to
The Muppet Show
expecting to see familiar faces and, seeing none, would tune out and never come back. Trying to manage such expectations, Jim had brought in Ernie and Bert for an appearance in the second episode, as if to reassure
Sesame Street
fans that they were peeking into the windows of the right house, even if they didn’t recognize most of the other occupants. Jim also put an established character at the head of the show, wisely placing the reliable Kermit the Frog in the eye of the Muppet hurricane.

If there was a problem with any of the characters in the pilot episodes, however, it was with the one envisioned as Kermit’s sidekick: the joke-telling, ear-wiggling, much abused stand-up comic Fozzie Bear. “
We knew we wanted to have a stand up comedian,” said Jim. “We had in mind a Red Skelton–type of character that was a bundle of anxieties off stage and a gung ho story teller up front.” Unfortunately, in the early episodes, “
Fozzie was a disaster,” said Juhl. “We said … ‘this is a bad comedian,’ and so we put him onstage and let him be bad … and it was embarrassing.” Worse, the razzing Fozzie received at the hands of the curmudgeonly Statler and Waldorf, heckling from the balcony, only made the character seem more pathetic, rather than funnier. “
Fozzie did help make Statler and Waldorf because he was good to heckle,” said Juhl, “but what we did to him in those first few shows was terrible. We just humiliated the poor guy.”