Jim Henson: The Biography (47 page)

Generally, Jim’s philosophy was “simple is good”—though Jim’s definition of
simple
could swing wildly. For the scenes in
The Muppet Movie
in which Kermit rides a bicycle, the simple marionette control system—used reliably on
The Muppets Valentine Show
five years earlier—was deemed unconvincing, and was scrapped in favor of a combined marionette and radio control mechanism. Perhaps more notably, in a scene in which Animal ingests one of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew’s InstaGrow pills and erupts, larger than life, through the top of a building, Jim had insisted on having a gigantic Animal puppet head built, which Oz could manipulate, rather than using the regular-sized puppet on a miniature set. “
We always used to kid Jim that after telling everybody ‘simple is good,’ he would turn around and try to produce the most complicated work in the world,” said Juhl, “and just about wipe out all of us—him most of all—in the process.”

The performers were genuinely excited by the prospect of working with many of the twenty-four celebrities making cameo appearances in the film, including Orson Welles (playing “Lew Lord,” a nod to Lord Lew Grade), Mel Brooks, Bob Hope, Madeline Kahn, and Richard Pryor. The real thrill for the Muppet crew, however, was working with one—or maybe it was two—of Jim’s boyhood idols, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. At the behest of his daughter, Candice, Bergen had been a guest on
The Muppet Show
during its second season, where his presence alone had been nothing short of An Event. For puppeteers, Bergen was their Elvis, the one who had made their craft cool and who had inspired many of them in their chosen career. “
Everybody was eagerly awaiting him,” said Lazer. “I never saw our puppeteers or Jim or Frank in such awe.” Watching Bergen perform, said Juhl, was like going “
right back to our childhoods.
It was wonderful.… And then, of course, the relationship between him and Jim was very special.” Jim and Bergen working together, said Juhl, was “like passing on the mantle” from Bergen to Jim and the next generation of puppeteers.

Bergen wasn’t well during the shooting of
The Muppet Movie
, but happily made a cameo appearance with Charlie McCarthy as judges at a beauty pageant won by Miss Piggy. It was the last footage that would ever be shot of Bergen, who died on September 30, 1978, at seventy-five. Jim spoke fondly of Bergen at his funeral that fall—“
We take up where he left off, and we thank him for leaving this delightful legacy of love and humor and whimsy”—and would dedicate
The Muppet Movie
to Bergen’s memory. Later, Bergen’s widow, Frances, and daughter, Candice, presented Jim with a framed photograph of Bergen and Charlie engraved, “Dear Jim—Keep the Magic Alive.”

As if to confirm Bergen’s faith, in mid-September,
The Muppet Show
—nominated for five Emmy Awards in its second season—took home the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy-Variety or Music Series. “
Received EMMY,” Jim wrote in his journal, drawing a bold box around the four capital letters, and he, Lazer, Oz, and Goelz accepted the trophies on behalf of the team, beaming proudly in black tie. If the size of its viewing audience hadn’t made the case already, the Muppets were now officially the best thing on television.

The Emmy excitement carried over onto the movie set where, as was their habit, the Muppet performers remained in character between takes—and Frawley more than once caught himself issuing directions to Kermit and Miss Piggy, rather than Jim or Oz, as he squinted through the camera eyepiece. Disagreements were minor and, for the most part, usually artistic in nature. At one point, Jim and Oz had gotten into a slight dustup regarding
The Muppet Movie
’s villain, a smarmy Colonel Sanders–wannabe named Doc Hopper, who aggressively pursues Kermit as the mascot for his chain of fast food frog legs restaurants. Jim was convinced that, deep down, Hopper wasn’t a bad guy and that somewhere along the way, Hopper should be redeemed. “
Even the most worldly of our characters is innocent,” Jim had once said. “Our villains are innocent, really—and it’s that innocence, I think, that is our connection to the
audience.” While that was likely true in most cases, Oz—who was nearly as cynical as Jim was idealistic—didn’t take long to consider his response. “
Bullshit,” he said. Hopper would remain unredeemed.

That character point, however, was small compared to what was, quite literally, one of the biggest problems in the movie: personnel. For
The Muppet Movie
’s musical finale, Jim planned to feature more than 250 Muppet characters, representing nearly every puppet available in the New York and London Muppet workshops. When filming large crowds of Muppets on television—such as the theater audience of
The Muppet Show
—Jim had usually peppered the set with a number of motionless puppet extras, propped up in the background on wire frames or stuffed with wadding, to fill the spaces while the puppeteers performed around them. On the big screen, however, there would be no unmoving extras allowed; Jim wanted every one of his 250 puppets moving and singing, which would require a considerably higher number of hands than the core group of Muppet performers could provide.

Undeterred, Jim put out a casting call through the Los Angeles Guild of the Puppeteers of America, and managed to wrangle nearly 150 performers to supplement the Muppet team, Henson family, and film crew. Puppeteers reporting to CBS Studio Center’s Stage 15—including director John Landis and a young Disney animator named Tim Burton—were handed one, sometimes two Muppets to perform, and given a number that corresponded to a chalked spot on the floor of an enormous pit, seventeen feet across and six feet deep, that had been constructed on the soundstage. Each performer found his or her appropriate space on the floor of the pit, and when Frawley called out “Muppets up!” up came a sea of colorful Muppets—including King Ploobis from
Saturday Night Live
, several characters from
Sesame Street
, and the entire River Bottom Nightmare Band from
Emmet Otter
—making up the largest puppet cast ever assembled on film.

By late October, most of the film work for
The Muppet Movie
was complete. That left Jim just enough time to return to London to tape six more installments of
The Muppet Show
before Christmas, including an exceptional episode guest-starring singer and activist Harry Belafonte. As a longtime admirer of Belafonte—Jim and Jane
had attended one of his performances in Washington, D.C., on one of their early dates—Jim had worked hard to woo the showman, offering him significant creative input, and taking time off during the shooting of
The Muppet Movie
to meet with him personally. Belafonte, too, wanted his appearance to be exceptional, and proposed to Jim that the show might provide an opportunity “
to take a look at the lore and history of other worlds, other places.” In early November, Belafonte and the Muppet team created one of
The Muppet Show
’s most remarkable and memorable moments, a lively five minutes of song and dance to Belafonte’s “Turn the World Around,” celebrating the oneness of everything. Belafonte later referred to his
Muppet Show
experience as “
sheer joy,” and would remain friendly with Jim for the rest of his life.

W
ith four episodes still to be completed for
The Muppet Show
’s third season in late 1978, Jim opted to spend the holidays back in the United States, throwing a Christmas party for the Muppet crew at the posh Player’s Club in Manhattan, performing with Joe Raposo at a White House children’s party, then skiing for several days in Vermont before heading back to London with Jane and Lisa just after the first of the year. During the previous fall, Jim had moved out of the flat in Frognal Gardens and was looking for a more permanent residence in the Hampstead area. In the meantime, at the urging of actor James Coburn, who had made a cameo appearance in
The Muppet Movie
, Jim moved into a house in Holly Village—a “
darling little castle,” Jane called it—owned by Coburn and girlfriend Lynsey de Paul. The Hensons stayed only long enough for Jim to wrap up the four remaining
Muppet Show
episodes—but before leaving in early February, he and Jane scouted several nearby properties as potential homes, eventually submitting a contract for a Victorian-era place in Church Row. To Jim’s disappointment and slight confusion, he would lose the house to another bidder at the last minute, but vowed to keep looking.

Back in New York, however, Jim had successfully sealed the deal on a new headquarters for Henson Associates, a beautiful 1929 double townhouse at 117 East 69th Street in Manhattan. Jim had purchased
the five-story building for $600,000 in November 1978, but zoning issues had slowed the renovation of the space for several months. For one thing, Jim wanted to substantially reconfigure the basement and first floor to create a spacious, bi-level Muppet workshop, with several skylights letting natural light into what would normally have been an underground area. “
I want to have a place for a creative nucleus,” wrote Jim—and once the zoning issues for such an ambitious remodeling were cleared, no detail was too small for Jim to lavish with care and attention. Colorful photo murals were installed in waiting areas and on landings. The Henson Associates logo—a large, lowercase HA, with an exclamation point at the end—was inlaid in brass into the marble floor of the main hall. Furniture was handcrafted, drapes were made from tie-dyed canvas or Chinese silks, and walls were painted in bright reds or warm beiges, with gold-toned trim and molding. It was a place as sprawling as Jim, as quirky as his sense of humor, and as colorful as one of his printed shirts. “
I didn’t want a pretentious space or one with a feeling of opulence,” said Jim. “Instead, I wanted a happy, functioning space with character and warmth.”

For many, though, the most memorable feature was the gleaming spiral staircase that ran up through the center of the townhouse, circling toward a large stained-glass skylight dubbed “The View from the Lily Pad,” meant to reflect what Kermit might see peering up through the trees from the swamp. The staircase was both the spine and the heart of the organization—all offices and conference rooms on each floor radiated off the stairs, and Jim came to regard the open stairwell as a kind of vertical telephone, leaning over the railing from his third-floor office to call to staff on the floors above or below. The staircase, he thought, broke down the “stratification” of being located on different floors—and more often than not, Jim would hold his meetings while standing on the stairs, leaning against the curved railing with his arms folded, nodding and listening.

Formally opening the new Muppet headquarters—or One Seventeen, as it would be casually called, in deference to its street address—was only one part of a busy spring. Jim was in full publicity mode, trying to generate a buzz of anticipation for
The Muppet Movie
, scheduled for release in the coming summer. He had
quickly put into production a variety show called
The Muppets Go Hollywood
—essentially an hour-long promotion for the upcoming movie—which had taken all of four weeks to write, rehearse, and tape. In April, the Muppets hosted
The Tonight Show
, and Jim had even arranged for Kermit to make a brief appearance at the end of a Cheerios commercial to remind viewers of the film. That particular bit of self-promotion had raised the hackles of Joan Cooney, who warned Jim—in a scolding reminiscent of the one administered by TV critic Jack Gould regarding Kermit’s appearance as a pitchman during
Hey Cinderella!
—that using Kermit in television advertising “
could cause us embarrassment [at CTW].” Jim assured Cooney that Kermit’s appearance was related solely to the promotion of
The Muppet Movie
and could not in any way be construed as
Sesame Street
–related advertising. Cooney seemed less than convinced, but let the matter drop.

Jim returned to London in late April to begin work on season four of
The Muppet Show
. Mindful that much of his time in the coming year would be occupied with promoting
The Muppet Movie
, Jim worked at a breakneck pace, taping six episodes in less than a month. Some days, he got no sleep at all—and yet, to the amazement of those around him, never seemed to lose his ability to focus intently on a task or keep a level head. While crew members and production assistants were
“running around screaming” and wondering how all the work could possibly get done, Jim was “wandering around in the middle of it all, perfectly calm, perfectly content,” said Juhl. “If
The Muppet Show
had a basketball team, the score would always be Frog 99, Chaos 98.”

As always, even with the hectic pace, Jim thrived on the work.
“I love my work and because I enjoy it, it doesn’t really feel like work,” he said. “Thus I spend most of my time working.” His ethic was contagious—“
You had to try to keep up with the guy—it seemed only fair,” remarked Jerry Juhl—but many of the longest-serving Muppet performers also came to understand that Jim’s devotion to his work came at a personal cost. “
For such a giving, generous, nonstop creative person, Jim really didn’t have any friends,” said Richard Hunt. “He was friends with the guys he worked with.… But I think he was so much involved in his work that it didn’t help [or]
allow him the time or the luxury of developing true, deep friendships.”

Juhl thought he understood. “
It isn’t that Jim didn’t have friends,” he said, “it was just that … there was no separation of life and work for Jim.… He knew very few people who weren’t involved in his projects or involved in his business. And usually what socializing he did almost inevitably he did with people who he was working on projects with.” Hunt, who had spent as much time as anyone socializing with Jim outside work, admitted that some of the most meaningful and memorable times spent with Jim were those private moments on the set. Jim and Hunt would often spend hours crammed shoulder to shoulder in a tiny space as they performed Statler and Waldorf heckling from their box seats—“
and that’s when we would have these talks,” said Hunt. As the rest of the crew worked on the stage floor below, Jim and Hunt were in near isolation “in this little enclosed thing with curtains shut, and in a little booth together. We would talk about our families, and our hopes and desires and politics.” “
[Jim] was very close to us all,” said Juhl. “He just conducted his life in a different way than most people did. He just couldn’t understand about this whole thing called
work
, and why people didn’t like it, and why people thought there was something wrong with working.”