Jim Henson: The Biography (67 page)

Still, it wasn’t like Jim to complain; he was pleased to at last have a spot secured in the NBC lineup, and for now that was enough. Now he had a year to “pull it all together.” Doing so, however, would prove tougher to do than Jim had ever imagined.

Jim and the Muppet cast of the ill-fated
Jim Henson Hour
(1989). “Most things didn’t work on that show,” said Jerry Juhl. “It was a huge frustration and a great sadness.”
(
photo credit 14.1
)

A
S
1988
BEGAN
, J
IM PUT HIS WRITERS TO WORK BRAINSTORMING AND
writing short pieces to fill the first half hour of the newly reformatted
Jim Henson Hour
. “
[I was] in a meeting with NBC yesterday,” Jim told his team in late January, “[and] they seemed to be quite happy with the direction this is all going.” At the moment, however, even Jim wasn’t quite sure what direction that might be. Jim still believed the
Lead-Free TV
concept was an ideal format for satirizing cable television, but the writing remained a problem—he had already rejected a similar concept called
Pirate TV
for being too “
nasty.” He also insisted that the Muppet segments be somewhat
educational, and proposed skits in which the Muppets somehow explained the federal debt, the ozone, or the legislative process.

Coming up with features for the second half hour was a bit easier, and a lot more fun. Besides
The Storyteller
, Jim was thinking about an origin storytelling of the discovery of Fraggle Rock called
The Saga of Fraggle Rock
. There was also
Inside John
, another variation on Jim’s Limbo concept, in which the various parts of a seventeen-year-old boy’s brain try to wrest control of him throughout a typical day. And then there were proposed stories of enchanted bowling balls, extraterrestrial mailmen, and adaptations of Madeleine L’Engle’s science fiction novel
A Wrinkle in Time
or the works of A. A. Milne, as well as an ambitious outline for a show called
ASTRO G.N.E.W.T.S
. that blended puppets with animation, computer graphics, and video effects. All would be false starts, but ideas, as always, were never a problem.

And then there was the question of the “home base” for the series, the room or set from which Jim would host the show. Figuring out where a show was located was always a problem for Jim; he had misfired with the vague sets in his two early
Muppet Show
pilots before finally getting it right on
The Muppet Show
itself.
The Jim Henson Hour
’s pitch reel had been set in a
faux
Muppet workshop—still the best idea—but he wasn’t happy with the look or feel of that, either; he wanted something more dynamic and high-tech—and ideally, he wanted something computer-generated.

Typically, even as he struggled to find some sort of structure for
The Jim Henson Hour
—which, given its current amorphous state, should probably have been his priority—Jim had decided to speed up production on yet another project, a film based on Roald Dahl’s 1983 children’s book
The Witches
, which Jim had decided to executive-produce. It was a project he’d had simmering on the back burner, under the watchful eye of Duncan Kenworthy, for more than a year—and it had been a problem almost from day one, due largely to the involvement of the highly irritable, seventy-one-year-old Dahl. Jim and Dahl had gotten off to a bad start, with Henson Associates’ and Dahl’s lawyers squabbling over the costs of optioning the book for film. “
I don’t like this,” Dahl had sulked to Jim. “If there is going to be any ill-feeling, I would rather the film was not made.” Jim had
done his best to smooth things over, promising the writer that while there
had
been some problems with financing, it was
“for very valid reasons, and it shouldn’t become personal.” “It is one of my favorite projects in a long time,” Jim assured Dahl, “and I’m going to try very hard to produce a film which we can all be proud of.”

The Witches
would be another opportunity for Jim to rally the Creature Shop into action—always one of his favorite sandboxes in which to play. To direct, Jim had lined up Nicolas Roeg, the edgy and somewhat unpredictable English director of eclectic films like
The Man Who Fell to Earth
. Jim had initially recruited Roeg as a director for
The Storyteller
before offering him
The Witches
—a job Roeg was delighted to accept—but Roeg, too, would eventually become antagonistic, caught between Jim’s and Dahl’s creative whirlwinds and grousing about executive interference. Dahl was also unimpressed with Roeg. “
I will tell you I was devastated when I learned you were not directing it yourself,” Dahl wrote to Jim.

Pricklier than Dahl or Roeg, however, were the witches themselves. Wiccans across the country—already smarting over Dahl’s book for what they considered its negative portrayal of witches—admonished Jim in a letter-writing campaign when they learned he was adapting the book for the big screen. Jim tried to appease their concerns, but only got caught up arguing semantics over the terms “black magic” or “evil witch” with the head of the Witches’ League for Public Awareness, based in Salem, Massachusetts. Finally, Jim simply pleaded for patience. “
While I am not an advocate of any one religion, I feel close to many of the concepts of the Wicca way of thinking,” he wrote, “and for these reasons, I will try not to do anything that will harm any of you.”

By late January, Jim had an agreement for
The Witches
in place with Lorimar, where Bernie Brillstein had recently been installed as CEO of the film division, and in early February had dinner with Anjelica Huston and secured her as his leading lady—a decision, for once, that Dahl was happy with. He would not stay happy for long.

At the same time, Jim had his own unhappy news to deal with:
The Storyteller
was doomed. After three installments, the show remained a critical darling, but a ratings disaster—and NBC’s confidence in the show was rapidly eroding. After some discussion with
the network, Jim decided to hold on to the two unaired episodes of the series, and scrapped plans to expand
The Storyteller
into one-hour installments. “
NBC is worried about the appeal of the show,” Jim wrote in a memo to the entire Henson Associates staff. “I am not worried about this, but I don’t mind dropping the [planned one-hour episodes] at this point. We’ll do something else instead.” Despite the best face, he was more disappointed than he let on. “
I think they’re the best television shows ever made,” he confided to
The Washington Post
.

While he understood NBC’s impatience—gone were the days when a series like
The Muppet Show
could be given breathing room to find its way—he was certain there was still a place for television shows that took their time and rewarded patient viewers with high production values and top-notch storytelling. Jim, in fact, was among the first to realize that cable television—with its niche channels and willing, paying audience—was an ideal market for original, made-for-cable films. “
When the cable is hooked up to enough homes,” mused Jim, “then we’ll be able to make films just for the video and the cable market. Certainly, that will come.” But, he hastened to add, without high-definition picture quality and the capability to show films in a widescreen format, it was still “so much more interesting” to work on feature films. Once again, Jim had seen the potential in a new technology, even if the technology itself hadn’t yet caught up with his plans for it.

Even with NBC’s lack of faith, Jim still had enough confidence in
The Storyteller
to put into production the remaining four episodes NBC had approved, with the intention of marketing them internationally and using them for
The Jim Henson Hour
. In late February, he went back to Elstree to spend a week directing an installment of
The Storyteller
called “The Heartless Giant,” a bittersweet story of friendship—and betrayal—in which a young prince frees an imprisoned, heartless giant, then becomes his servant to help him find his missing heart. “
I love working on this show,” Jim told his staff—and he also loved the underlying morality of the old folktales, which fell directly in line with his own views of the common good. “
In broad strokes,” explained Jim, “the message I try to bring across is the positives of life and a positive attitude toward the goodness of mankind.”

A
fter completing his episode of
The Storyteller
, Jim headed for France to meet with Jerry Juhl and Larry Mirkin and have a frank conversation about
The Jim Henson Hour
—and to spend a few days with Mary Ann at the swank L’Hôtel in Paris.

The daytime hours were for work. Juhl and the writing team—mainly Mirkin and Jocelyn Stevenson—were still frustrated by the dilemma NBC had created by insisting on jumbling together all four elements of Jim’s initial proposal. Juhl thought he understood what NBC was getting at—“
The Disney Hour
[
sic
] consisted of a lot of things Walt Disney thought were worthy of him and his audience [and] that’s what this is,” explained Juhl—but the scattered format remained a problem. Jim was confident they could hold the fragments of the show together by putting Kermit—the reliable eye of the Muppet hurricane—in a television control room, overseeing things much as he had done on
The Muppet Show
. On the technical side, Jim thought hiring a regular director to preside over the look and feel of the series might also give the show a more cohesive structure, and picked through a list of suggestions that included Sam Raimi—whom Lisa Henson was dating at the time—and Brad Bird before finally deciding on former
Muppet Show
director Peter Harris. Jim pronounced himself “delighted” with the involvement of Harris. “
I’m feeling quite good about the show,” Jim said.

The rest of the time in Paris was devoted to romping with Mary Ann, goofily posing for pictures for each other, gazing at the scenery (“
Isn’t this a
romantic
view?” Jim would say dreamily), and frolicking in bed in their exclusive Parisian hotel. Jim loved being giddily in love—and now, in Mary Ann, it seemed he had found a sexual warmth and an intimacy that he had long been missing. Nineteen years Jim’s junior, Mary Ann made him feel younger and more vibrant—and some thought Jim had intentionally sought out such reassurance. Turning fifty had been hard for him—and now at fifty-one, he was starting to feel his age. His feet, already aching from the years of standing to perform, had grown increasingly stiff and sore—finding the most comfortable shoe had lately become something of a Grail-type quest. His teeth also bothered him constantly, and, more upsetting, he’d developed a slight tremor in his hands—an affliction that had also plagued his father, but which was particularly worrisome for a puppeteer.

Mary Ann, then, was just the kind of willing partner he wanted and needed in his adventures, both inside the bedroom and beyond. Mary Ann dove eagerly into Jim’s noisy exploits right along with him, whether it was swimming, yachting, horseback riding, or taking the kind of long hikes Jim loved. For her part, Mary Ann would later take him to his first nude beach in Palm Beach—an experience, she said, that made Jim almost giddy with joy—indulge his tastes for caviar and
kir
, or tease him gently about his hair, encouraging him to brush it back from his forehead or wear it in a tight ponytail.

“
I think he was very much in love,” said Richard Hunt. “Jim was a romancer.… It wasn’t just some fling.” Heather Henson—who perhaps more than any of the Henson children had observed firsthand her parents’ relationship and Jim’s dating habits—thought Mary Ann was good for her father as well. “
I was really quite fond of her,” said Heather. “By the time Mary Ann came around, I was actually happy to have him seeing someone stable.” It was Jim’s first real relationship since his legal separation from Jane, and while he had always enjoyed the company and the aesthetics of beautiful women, he was now in a committed relationship with one … or at least as committed as Jim could be. “
I don’t think he ever wanted to marry anybody else,” said Brian Henson. “Besides,” he added, “if you’re not divorced from your last wife, you can never get married again.”