Jim Henson: The Biography (48 page)

In the spring of 1979, Jane Henson—who had
long
accepted that work was Jim’s first priority—joined Jim in London, moving into a large, white-fronted Georgian-style townhouse they had recently purchased together on Downshire Hill, just a short walk from Hampstead Heath. It was “
a great house,” said Jane fondly, with a formal music room and plenty of space for gatherings, though its backyard looked into the offices and down onto the impound lot of a police station. She and Cheryl, John, and Heather would live with Jim in London for a year—Lisa and Brian would stay in the United States to attend school—and while Cheryl worked in the Muppet workshop, John and Heather were enrolled in the American Community School in London, allowing Jim to punctuate his busy workweek with family walks on Hampstead Heath and side trips to the countryside. As Jim and Jane wrapped up the paperwork to purchase the Downshire Hill house, Jim also closed the deal on a former
postage sorting facility just across the street at 1B, intending to use it as a workshop for the more realistic puppets and scenery needed for
The Crystal
, which was still in the planning stages.

On May 31, 1979,
The Muppet Movie
made its world premiere at the Leicester Square Theatre in London, at a glittering event attended by British pop stars and Princess Anne. Jim showed up with Jane and John, along with his stepmother, Bobby, all grinning broadly as flashbulbs crackled around them. “
Great evening,” Jim remarked in his journal with typical understatement. As the movie’s opening scene played in the darkened theater, with the camera gliding down through the clouds to find Kermit playing banjo in the swamp, fourteen-year-old John Henson burst into tears. “
I cried in the opening,” said John later. “I still do.… [It was] just so powerful.”

Between the new house in Hampstead, the hardworking Muppet workshop at Elstree and now
The Muppet Movie
making its premiere in a London theater, many of the employees in the New York office of Henson Associates were beginning to wonder whether Jim’s priorities had shifted to the upstart London division. In truth, they probably had. With
The Muppet Show
still based at Elstree and the newly purchased Downshire Hill workshop gearing up to take on work for
The Crystal
, London had become home for Jim’s television and film production—and “
everything follows production,” said Lazer. Meanwhile, the New York office had evolved into the
de facto
business arm of the organization. Gone were the days when Jim could make almost every major decision personally. “
He’d been used to running a very small company where that was part of his job,” said Al Gottesman, “but he soon came to realize that he had to trust other people with some of those decisions.” Long used to Jim’s direct input on almost every major decision, the New York staff was now trying to adjust to its new long-distance relationship.

“
Al [Gottesman] was in New York running the … licensing, publishing and administration and everything,” said Lazer; meanwhile, the London crew was working directly with Jim on television and film projects, building props and performing puppets. While there was still plenty of creative work to be done in licensing and publishing in New York—led largely by the versatile Michael Frith—many
felt that if there was any real fun to be had in the organization, it was going to be had in London with Jim. “There was no one here [in New York] to say ‘you did a good job’ … to praise them and to make them feel part of the whole—part of Jim,” said Lazer. “Because they all wanted to be part of Jim’s work and needed Jim’s
attaboys
.”

Wherever Jim was, then, tended to feel special and needed, while wherever he
wasn’t
tended to feel neglected—and more often than not, where he
wasn’t
was New York. Frank Oz, who had seen Jim’s frustration with the New York–London dynamic, only had so much patience with that kind of neediness. “
Sure, the more Jim was in New York, the nicer it was for them,” said Oz with a hint of annoyance. “But he had overhead. He had to work. And that meant he had to be in London.”

Jim tried his best to soothe any bruised feelings—in his view, everyone at Henson Associates, whether they were puppeteers or accountants, was creative and valuable. “
We are primarily a company of creative people, whose art we are helping to bring to the world,” he explained—and while art may have been the heart of the organization, it was money and merchandising that kept the blood pumping. “We recognize that business enables art ‘to happen,’ and that business plays an essential role in communicating art to a broad audience,” he said. “As both artists and businesspersons, we understand the value of both worlds, and so we bring them together in a way that facilitates the realization of our artistic vision.”

Compounding the problem—if you could call it that—was that as the company became more successful, it required even more employees in New York, working in more divisions—personnel, finance, office management—to keep things running. “
It seems that I’m bigger now than I thought I would be,” Jim told a reporter from
The New York Times
, estimating that his staff numbered “between 40 and 50.” Actually, by the summer of 1979, he had seventy-one employees, including eleven puppeteers and thirty designers and builders—and the more employees there were, the less time and attention Jim could bestow on each one. Yet, each “
wanted to be part of the family, part of the team,” said Lazer. “People needed his approval. Even
I
did.” Consequently, anyone who had spoken personally
with Jim—who had gotten a moment of the one-on-one interaction so many of them craved—tended to lord it over other staffers. That could make things touchy for Gottesman as he tried to manage the New York office in Jim’s own low-key style. “
Jim was not preoccupied by office organization charts, so he would call and speak to whomever he wished,” said Gottesman. “So there was a little of that tension … the person at a meeting who had the most clout at that moment would be the person who said, ‘I just spoke to Jim.’ ”

Whether he liked it or not, with his sweet, soft-spoken demeanor and casual dress, Jim was regarded by his employees as something more than just the boss; they saw him as a friend or even as a father figure. “
He could
not
handle it,” Lazer said. “That was a heavy responsibility, because he wasn’t a daddy.” Yet while Jim may not have wanted to be a father figure, he still couldn’t help but feel a sense of paternal obligation to his employees and performers—some of whom, like Hunt and Whitmire, had joined the organization while still in their teens. “
I think Jim felt … that we have a responsibility to each other,” said Richard Hunt. “He took it very seriously, his responsibilities toward his employees. When he couldn’t help them and he had to let people go, it was devastating.” Lazer told Jim he had to change the way he viewed his employees.
“Stop calling this company a
family
,” Lazer said. “Call it a
team
, because you can fire team members. You can’t fire family.” That was still easier said than done, especially when it came to employees who really did feel like family—like Richard Hunt.

One evening, while attending a dinner party in London, Hunt had openly bad-mouthed a
Muppet Show
guest star, which caught the ear of a journalist who promptly splattered Hunt’s remarks all over London. Lazer was incensed. “It was a major thing … Jim was furious,” said Lazer, “[because] all of the [goodwill] we had built up all this time with our image and our stars … could be lost.” While responsibility for firing or discipline generally fell to Lazer, playing bad cop to Jim’s good cop, for serious offenses like this—where Jim’s own reputation was at stake—Lazer felt Jim was obligated to get involved. In this case, Lazer planned to call Hunt into his office in the Muppet Suite where he intended to bawl out the puppeteer, then
turn him over to Jim in the adjoining office for a formal reprimand. With Jim listening from just behind his office door, “I got Richard in,” said Lazer, “and I wiped him out.” Hunt began sobbing uncontrollably. “I’m sorry, Richard,” Lazer said sternly, “but you have to face Jim now.” Hunt had barely pushed open the door to Jim’s office when Jim rushed over and wrapped him up in a bear hug. “He just couldn’t do it,” said Lazer. “He couldn’t handle confrontations at all.”

The New York office would feel a little less neglected in June, when Jim returned to the city, partly to oversee the opening of an exhibit called
The Art of the Muppets
at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, but mostly so he and Oz could promote
The Muppet Movie
. Lord Grade was marketing the film aggressively, pumping $6 million into publicity—if the film bombed, joked Jim, “
we’ll all lose our shirts”—and Jim and Oz were ferried from one interview to another with Kermit and Miss Piggy on their arms, gamely bantering with reporters. Most questions now were directed at Miss Piggy, who had clearly surpassed Kermit in popularity. Though Oz would usually deftly turn the discussion back to Jim and Kermit, it had become clear, even to Jim, that the Pig had taken on a life of her own. “
Piggy’s become a phenomenon in the last few years and I think when we introduced her we had no idea she’d take off like she has,” said Jim. “It’s a personality that Frank Oz has created that people somehow identify with and either love or hate.”

The Muppet Movie
opened in the United States on June 22, 1979—but Jim was already back in production on
The Muppet Show
in London and thus attended neither the New York nor the Los Angeles premieres, simply noting in his journal that the reception was “
Great!” The critics loved it—typical was the review from the eminent film critic Vincent Canby, writing in
The New York Times
, who hailed Jim for successfully blending “
unbridled amiability … [with] intelligence and wit.” Meanwhile, audiences made it one of the most profitable films of the decade,
grossing over $65 million in its initial release—not a bad return on Grade’s initial $8 million investment.

Its success wasn’t surprising; as Canby had noted, the film had both heart and brains—and like
The Muppet Show
, its appeal cut across age groups.
The Muppet Movie
was an affectionate nod to old Hollywood, with running gags and barroom brawls, dance numbers
and slow-motion romantic montages, as well as mad scientists, thrown pies, and characters who winked knowingly at the camera. At its center, it was also a buddy movie, a tip of the hat to the Bob Hope–Bing Crosby
Road
pictures, with Kermit and Fozzie encountering each Muppet character—and adding them to their growing entourage—as they drove across the country to Hollywood. Along the way, Kermit dodges Doc Hopper and his plans for turning Kermit into a frog legs pitchman, before finally landing a Hollywood contract—a moment, said director Frawley proudly, “
that brings tears to your eyes.”

In a way,
The Muppet Movie
was also Jim’s story—for Juhl had cleverly embedded elements of Jim’s own life and personality into the plot. “
I guess you could say that mine has been somewhat of a fairytale story,” admitted Jim. “It’s been a long career with a steady and slow increase in fame and prosperity. It has really been very gratifying with no real surprises.” Like Kermit, Jim had left the swamps of Mississippi for the glitter of television and film, had put together his own “
clan of whackos” to work with, and had struggled to break away from the clutches of the advertising business, which didn’t want to see him leave. Kermit’s motivation in heading for Hollywood wasn’t so far removed from Jim’s own outlook, either—rather than solely seeking fame and fortune, Kermit sees it as an opportunity to entertain and “make millions of people happy.” Finally, in the film’s climactic scene—a
High Noon–type
showdown between Kermit and Doc Hopper—Kermit delivers a defiant monologue that so clearly defined Jim’s own personal code that Juhl could have lifted it verbatim from any of his countless conversations with Jim over the last two decades:

For agent Bernie Brillstein, there was never any doubt that he was seeing Jim’s story on-screen. “
Kermit was Jim,” said Brillstein plainly. “Jim believed in the entire world.”

Plot aside, everyone, it seemed, was impressed at how convincingly
Jim had integrated the Muppets into the real world. “
I’m in particular awe of the techniques by which these hand puppets are made to walk, run, sing and play musical instruments,” wrote Canby. “As do the other actors in the movie, we very quickly come to accept the Muppets as real people.” Jim cheerfully explained that making the Muppets seem real involved “
trying to fool the audience into thinking they’re living in a whole world and that there’s a whole reality to the world. And so it’s a kind of game that we play with the audience.” Richard Hunt, however, was less elegant in his explanation. “
The reason those characters are appealing is because we’re good actors,” insisted Hunt. But even that, wrote
Chicago Sun-Times
film critic Roger Ebert, was more than he wanted to know. “
If you can figure out how they were able to show Kermit pedaling across the screen,” wrote Ebert, “then you are less a romantic than I am: I prefer to believe he did it himself.”

With his creations moving with a seeming life of their own on the big screen,
comparisons with Walt Disney were again inevitable—and now, perhaps, apt. But Jim was still having none of it. “
I’m slightly uncomfortable with all the people who want to say things like that about me, because I like Disney, but I don’t ever particularly want to do what he did,” said Jim. “He built this great, huge empire. I’m not particularly inclined to do that. You get that large a thing going and I’m not sure that the quality of the work can be maintained.” He also continued to dismiss questions about the Muppets’ net worth. “
It’s important to me that the audience doesn’t think of us in terms of figures,” he told
Time
magazine. “I don’t want people looking at the Muppets and thinking ‘How much are they worth?’ It’s just not us. It could be destructive.”