Jim Henson: The Biography (42 page)

Even the very proper English crew at ATV grew to love working for Jim and with the Muppets—especially after Jim came to understand and appreciate the quirks of working with a British crew. Tea time was strictly observed—a tradition Jim found charming and willingly embraced. The canteen at Elstree was also equipped with a fully stocked bar, where some of the British crew would polish off one or two shandies during lunch before returning to the studio floor in what one insider diplomatically described as a “more relaxed” state. It was a custom Jim neither questioned nor complained about, as long as the work got done.

If there was anything distinctly British that would plague Jim during his five years at Elstree, however, it was the British union’s strict requirement that the studio lights at Elstree be turned off at exactly 8:00
P
.
M
. Unlike American or Canadian studios, where filming could continue into the early hours of the morning until the work was completed, British studios stationed union representatives on the set at all times to ensure work ended promptly at the required hour.
“We could be in the middle of a number,” said Lazer, “and it was
‘Lights out!’
and [they’d] walk off.” Consequently, if the Muppet team was still filming after 7:30, Jim would assign a crew member to watch the clock, calling out after each take the minutes remaining before eight. As the clock ticked, either Jim or Lazer would negotiate for additional time—which, if granted, would be parsimoniously doled out in five-minute increments. By Lazer’s account,
the Muppet team was left standing in the dark “probably ten times”—enough, he said, “to make you crazy.”

F
ilming the Muppet-only segments usually took two days—especially if the union’s lights-out policy had left them unable to finish the first day on time—and for Jim, Thursday was often the busiest day of the week, though not because of filming. Mostly, he was in meetings, discussing upcoming shows or music or scripts, meeting with set builders, or in the workshop checking on the progress of any new puppets—and
“once [the meetings] started,” said Juhl, “they didn’t stop.” Meetings would continue over lunch—“we have to eat anyway,” Jim would say with a shrug—either at Signor Baffi’s, an Italian restaurant across the street with famously slow service, or back in the Muppet Suite where trays of lukewarm grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches and even warmer bottles of beer would be delivered from the canteen and lined up on the side tables. No matter how many meetings he attended during the day, Jim could almost always concentrate intently on the task in front of him, getting down to business so quickly that Burns, Juhl, and the writing team often couldn’t turn the pages of their scripts fast enough to keep up.

Still, there were days when Jim was so pressed for time that he couldn’t always prepare for meetings. He was reluctant to let on that he was unprepared—more than anyone in the room, he understood the consequences of wasted time—and with every head in the room turned toward him, he would quietly eat his sandwich and flip through the pages of his script. And suddenly, said Juhl, “he’d start improvising this piece of material … it was blowing jazz. He would start free-associating.” At times like this, no idea was too outrageous, whether it was penguins singing “Lullaby of Broadway,” a killer lamb attacking the Muppet newsman, or a Chopped Liver monster antagonizing the cast of the “Pigs in Space” sketch. “He’d just start calling for things, and people would start writing them down,” said Juhl, “and the whole show … was done that way.” Only Jim could make such madness seem so routine. “He had,” said Juhl, in perhaps the most apt description of Jim, “a whim of steel.”

Even with the meeting over, there would usually be someone trying to talk with Jim during his walk to the elevator and the forty-five-second elevator ride down three floors. As Jim walked toward the studio floor—and he never rushed, but would simply walk at a rapid clip, taking long loping strides—members of the Muppet staff would walk backward in front of him, trying to finish their conversations before Jim ducked into Studio D.

When filming finished that evening, Jim would attend more meetings—often with Lew Grade or Muppet staff from the New York workshop—in his office in the Muppet Suite, or over dinner, finally wrapping up at midnight. He would return to Elstree early Friday morning to review edits with his directors—including the insertion of two additional minutes of material for the U.K. version of the show, since British television had fewer commercials—and spend time in the Muppet workshop. At the end of the day, he and Lazer would discuss next week’s show over dinner. “My work schedule here is extremely full,” Jim wrote in his private diary. “Work days usually start when I get up and go late into the evenings—shooting days end at 8 PM and often I’m meeting someone for dinner—business mostly. I go to ATV virtually every day … weekends I drop by the editing and sound dubbing.”

And so it would go, twenty-four weeks a year. It was a grinding, grueling schedule—and Jim loved every minute of it. “
One of Jim’s real talents was that he had the ability not to take most things more seriously than they deserved,” said Juhl. “And that means that most things are pretty funny. I think that’s what got him through the kind of schedule he had.… While he was doing it, he always knew that it was just a Muppet show. And he could keep things in that kind of perspective.”

It was more than just keeping things in perspective; Jim just flat-out loved to work. As he confided in his diary:

Still, Jim’s ideas of vacations and “loafing around” were becoming more and more ambitious with his increasing success. That first summer in London, Jim flew his family and several members of the Muppet team—including the boisterous Richard Hunt—to Athens, where Jim had reserved a boat and crew for a week’s worth of cruising the Greek islands. Jim found even his extraordinary patience quickly tested by the ship’s bullheaded Greek captain, who refused to bow to any of Jim’s polite requests to put up the sails and visit certain islands, and instead went chugging slowly around with the diesel engine belching purple smoke. Brian Henson remembered his dad being frustrated, yet refusing to put his foot down.
“Oh well,” Jim would say with a shrug. “That’s what it is.”

Other times, Jim would make short sprints to Europe with one or more of the kids, taking sixteen-year-old Lisa and Brian with him to Paris in early August of 1976 to sightsee and visit the French abstract puppeteer Philippe Genty, or traveling to Morocco for five days with Lisa, Cheryl, and Brian. Those trips, said Brian, were “fantastic.” Looking back, said Cheryl, she could see that her father perhaps felt “
a little bit burdened” with family and that the trips were his way of “keeping it all together.” “He wanted everyone to be happy,” said Cheryl, “he wanted everyone to be included, and I think he really also was making an effort to be a family man.”

J
im completed work on the first half of
The Muppet Show
’s first season on August 13, 1976. With the first fifteen episodes complete, he returned to New York on August 16, and went immediately into the studio to spend a week working on Muppet inserts for
Sesame Street
, for which Jim and the Muppet team had been awarded two more Emmys over the summer. Three weeks later, the promotional tour for
The Muppet Show
was in high gear, with Jim crisscrossing the country to appear on
Merv Griffin, Dinah Shore
, and
The Tonight Show
, and chatting amiably over the phone with reporters in
St. Louis, Cleveland, and San Diego. Already there was a buzz of excited anticipation; before even a single episode had aired anywhere in the United States,
Backstage
was already lauding it as “
one of the fastest selling half-hour series” of all time.

Indeed, Brillstein and Mandell had worked hard to sell the series, showing the two pilot episodes to any station programmer who would listen, and aggressively promoting the series at the 1976 conference for the National Association of Television Program Executives. “
Seeing was believing,” Mandell said later. “The station executives were genuinely entertained.” After that,
The Muppet Show
had picked up stations at an almost exponential rate, growing quickly from the initial five CBS O&Os in late 1975, to 112 stations by May 1976, including 87 of the top 100 markets in the United States.
By the beginning of the 1976 television season in September,
The Muppet Show
had been picked up by a record 162 U.S. television stations—making it available for viewing in a staggering 94.6 percent of American households—as well as in a wide number of international markets, including Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Taiwan.

The first episode of
The Muppet Show
went on the air in New York on channel 2 at 7:30
P
.
M
. on Monday, September 20, 1976. With a batch of fifteen shows to choose from, most stations chose to start with the episode featuring Rita Moreno—a strong episode featuring a notable moment when Moreno performed “Fever” with Animal backing (and interrupting) her on drums. Local reviewers were enthusiastic—“
If you have a child, or ever were one,” wrote the
Chicago Tribune
, “you ought to watch,” while the
Louisville Times
raved simply, “Long Live the Muppets!”—but though it was widely watched, the show wasn’t an immediate hit. More typical was the review in
Variety
, which liked the first episode, but found the humor rather ho-hum, astutely noting that the material “
bore more of the [head writer] Jack Burns touch … than the wry, whimsical Henson type of humor fans are more familiar with.”

Jim wasn’t concerned. “
We are well on our way to a smashing success,” Jack Burns had written to Jim in a private memo at the end of July, and Jim was inclined to agree—though he didn’t always agree with
everything
Burns wanted to do with the show. Jim had
scuttled a suggestion from Burns that the writers play up catch-phrases and specific quirks to help viewers more quickly differentiate between characters—that was trying too hard, in Jim’s opinion—and would ignore Burns’s objections to refilming the show’s opening credits. While Jim and Burns respected each other, friction between the two was increasing. Besides serving as head writer, the strong-willed Burns was also serving as a producer during the first season—and that, said Lazer, “
was hard for Jim … Jim needs to be in
the
role.” Burns would eventually be fired by Bernie Brillstein, after Jim complained tactfully to the agent that Burns “
gives me a stomachache.” But “
it was never personal,” said Oz, and Jim would continue to collaborate with Burns on other projects over the next decade.

Jim flew back to London on September 23—turning forty years old on the airplane as it crossed the Atlantic overnight—and returned to work at Elstree to shoot the final nine episodes of
The Muppet Show
’s first season, working nonstop right up until the day before Thanksgiving. Two days later, he was back in New York in time to oversee the company Christmas party at the upscale Rainbow Room at 30 Rockefeller Center before spending a quiet New Year’s Eve with the family in Ahoskie, North Carolina. All in all, it had been a good year.

N
ineteen seventy-seven began with Jim working on what would become one of his best-loved projects, a musical Christmas special based on Russell and Lillian Hoban’s 1971 children’s book
Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas
. Jim was an early fan of the book, featuring Emmet and his widowed mother, each of whom sets out to win a talent show’s $50 prize—and gamble each other’s most prized possessions in the process—so each can buy the other a Christmas present. Jim had successfully snagged the rights from the Hobans and in 1976 assigned Jerry Juhl the task of adapting the story for an hour-long special. Juhl completed his first draft by fall, turning in an inspiring, fully realized treatment on November 1. As he and Jim worked their way through several drafts of a script, Jim would keep most of Juhl’s outline intact.

Emmet
would also require several original songs—and given the
importance of the songs to the story, Jim had opted to go after an established pop tunesmith who shared his own quirky, Tin Pan Alley tastes. Songwriter Paul Williams—who had penned the Top 10 hits “An Old Fashioned Love Song” for Three Dog Night and “We’ve Only Just Begun” for the Carpenters—had come to London in June 1976 to appear as a guest star on
The Muppet Show
, and he and Jim had gotten on so well they agreed to find another project on which to collaborate. Jim thought
Emmet
was a good fit for their combined sensibilities—and after reviewing Juhl’s treatment, Jim had tried to connect with Williams in person, narrowly missing him in California five days before Christmas. Just after the New Year, however, Jim finally caught up with Williams and explained the project to him over dinner in Los Angeles. “
It felt like the warmest, funniest thing to tune in to,” said Williams. “Something in me lit up when I was exposed to anything Jim Henson did. So when they asked me to come over, I was really happy to do it.”

At the same time, Jim had the New York workshop creating an entirely new cast of Muppets—based largely on the Hoban drawings—and designing and building not only some of their most picturesque sets, but also some of the first radio-controlled puppets. It was a project both designer Don Sahlin and technowizard Faz Fazakas devoured, building puppets of different sizes with different functions, and creating an ingenious device—based on a remote-control system developed by NASA engineers—in which a puppet’s mouth could be manipulated remotely by a radio control device resembling an electronic mitten. Jim’s favorite, though, was a mechanized Emmet who could actually row and steer a boat in the water. Jim couldn’t keep his hands off of it. “
Oh, I
love
this thing!” he would say as he leapt for the controls.