Jim Henson: The Biography (77 page)

T
he Henson family had retreated to Jim’s apartment—dazed, shocked, and trying to rest. Several lawyers from the Henson’s legal team knocked on the apartment door, wanting to discuss the impact of Jim’s death on the still unsigned Disney deal—an expected, though ill-timed, interruption that the recently arrived Brian Henson dealt with by listening patiently and intently as the lawyers explained their concerns. “We were thrown into having to deal with the legal complexity before we had time to breathe much less mourn,” remembered Cheryl. “It was all devastating … [but Brian] was relatively clearheaded, and together with Lisa dedicated themselves to figuring it out.” The attorneys had one other bit of business to conduct as well, handing over a sealed envelope from the law firm of Kleinberg, Kaplan, Wolff & Cohen. There were no legal documents inside, only two letters addressed to the Henson children.

They were from Jim.

Dated March 2, 1986, they were letters he had written during a quick weekend visit to France while mixing audio for
Labyrinth
—the same weekend, in fact, when he had written the buoyant
Muppet Voyager
proposal for IBM Europe. Jim had filed the letters with his personal
attorneys, and asked that they be delivered to his children in the event of his death. Now, suddenly—remarkably—in the middle of sadness and chaos, it seemed Jim was there again, calmly taking charge. “
Today I am sitting here in the lovely room of La Colombe d’Or in St. Paul de Vence,” Jim had written, “with lovely thoughts about life … and thinking I should write this note sometime … also of death”:

Suitably directed and inspired by Jim’s own words, longtime producer and collaborator Martin Baker went to work coordinating a memorial service, set for Monday, May 21, that would comply with Jim’s wishes. The days immediately following Jim’s death were “
a traumatic period, as you can imagine,” said Duncan Kenworthy. “[But] one of the things that kept us all going was the memorial service.… We had from Wednesday until Monday to pull it together.”

Everyone, it seemed, had an idea for the format and content of the memorial service. “
All these people were coming,” remembered Jane, “and they all wanted to do things.” Planning the memorial, said Kenworthy, “
was a wonderful microcosm of
us
. There we were, disagreeing in many ways, having very strong views, trying not to say, ‘What would Jim have done?’ ” Things suddenly fell together when Jane casually suggested that they
“just let it happen like a show … a ‘Jim Show.’ ” “As soon as it was said that way,” said Jane, “then everybody knew what they were doing. Nobody had to wonder what their part was.”

The service, a “celebration of Jim Henson’s life in song and remembrances,” would be open to the public—a fitting decision, but one that was certain to ensure a large crowd. It was decided, then, that the memorial would be held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, a soaring Episcopal church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that could hold nearly five thousand. The service would be silly and sad and bright and reassuring—at Jim’s direction, no one was to wear black—and Jane and Martin Baker met regularly with eighty-nine-year-old Episcopal bishop Paul Moore to make certain that the church would be comfortable hosting such an unconventional ceremony. “Is this going to be all right in your church?” Jane asked respectfully. The thoughtful, liberal Moore merely smiled warmly. “Oh yes,” he told them.

M
onday, May 21, dawned dreary and rainy in New York City. As it neared the memorial service’s noon starting time, a light drizzle was
still falling; the sidewalk outside the cathedral was dotted with puddles that children in yellow rain slickers splashed through as their parents led them up the steps and into the cathedral’s enormous nave. As each guest entered, they were handed a long wand—actually a puppeteer’s arm rod—with a bright foam butterfly attached at the end, one of the thousands put together by the Muppet Workshop over the last three days.

Inside, photos of Jim and his various creations looked down from the walls and the back of the altar; at Jane’s insistence, the cathedral was filled with brightly colored flowers. As expected, the place was packed nearly full—so full, in fact, that many parents sat with their children in the main aisle, their arms wrapped around stuffed Ernies or Big Birds. “I would think all the people who work for me should be invited,” Jim had specified in one of his letters, “plus my relatives, friends, lovers, etc.” And so they were—Novell took particular delight in seating several of Jim’s girlfriends together in the same row—plus so many others. George Lucas sat among the Muppet performers and staff, as did Disney chiefs Frank Wells and Michael Eisner. (“
[Eisner] was crushed,” said Brillstein, who had flown to New York with the Disney CEO.) Joan Ganz Cooney—who said she had felt “wasted” in the days following Jim’s death—sat nearby as well, along with most of the writers and performers from
Sesame Street
.

It was the theme to
Sesame Street
, in fact, that the audience would hear first, followed by “Rainbow Connection,” played on the cathedral’s enormous pipe organ. The family came in next, trailing behind the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, playing a slow traditional New Orleans dirge—you could take Jim out of the South, but you could never entirely take the South out of Jim. As Jim had requested, Richard Hunt—already showing symptoms of the HIV virus that would take his life less than two years later—acted as an informal emcee, opening the memorial by reading aloud from some of the countless letters that had poured into One Seventeen over the last five days. “
That was just amazing,” said Kevin Clash. “Letters from a truck driver and a little boy in Ohio or the president. It was amazing … just amazing.”

There were plenty of other amazing moments over the next two
and a half hours. Louise Gold, in the big voice that the Muppet performers loved, sang “Bring Him Home,” the song from
Les Misérables
that Jim adored—a feat that still had Fran Brill in awe decades later. “
I remember admiring Louise Gold so much for getting up and singing that beautiful song,” said Brill, “and thinking, ‘How did she do that?’ ” Gold’s serenity also impressed Jerry Nelson as the two of them sang the hymnlike “Where the River Meets the Sea,” from
Emmet Otter
. “
I remember coming close to breaking on that,” said Nelson. “Louise held me together there with it.” Harry Belafonte performed “Turn the World Around,” the same song he had performed so memorably on
The Muppet Show
more than a decade earlier. As if on cue, the moment Belafonte’s song ended, sunlight came streaming in through the big stained-glass windows. Foam butterflies danced and fluttered in the colored light inside the cathedral. There was an audible gasp. It was “
a sight I’ll never forget,” said one audience member.

As Jim had asked, friends said “a few nice, happy words about how much we enjoyed doing this stuff together.” Jerry Juhl warmly recalled how “
Jim taught us many things: to save the planet, be kind to each other, praise God, and be silly. That’s how I’ll remember him—as a man who was balanced effortlessly and gracefully between the sacred and the silly.” Frank Oz spoke of the joy in making Jim laugh, and of the love and care Jim had put into making and giving him an elaborate Christmas gift. Oz understood “
the generosity of [Jim’s] time to do this when he was so busy.… I think that’s when I knew that he loved me and I loved him.” Breaking down, Oz left the stage in tears.

After Oz’s speech, a lone piano played a long, melodious introduction to “Bein’ Green.” Then, from the rear of the church, came Caroll Spinney as Big Bird, wearing a Kermit-green bow tie, lumbering slowly up through the audience to the central stage, where he tearfully sang Joe Raposo’s heartfelt song. “
Somehow,” said Spinney later, “I managed to do it without crying.” As the final chord faded, Big Bird looked skyward. “
Thank you, Kermit,” he said. (Brillstein, who was the next speaker, brightened the moment when he ad-libbed, “
Jim told me, ‘Never follow the Bird!’ ”)

Perhaps predictably, one of the most remarkable moments involved
the Muppet performers—Oz, Nelson, Goelz, Hunt, Whitmire, and Clash—singing, hugging, crying, and laughing as they worked their way through a long medley of some of Jim’s favorite songs. Most were the old vaudeville tunes or the songs of
Pogo
or A. A. Milne—“Lydia, the Tattooed Lady,” “Cottleston Pie,” “Halfway Down the Stairs”—that Jim and his family had sung around the Henson family piano and had eventually found their way into
The Muppet Show
. The six performers sat on stools, without puppets, until the very end, when Richard Hunt slid Scooter onto his right arm and began singing the opening bars of “Just One Person,” from the 1975 musical
Snoopy
, a song the group had first performed on
The Muppet Show
in 1977. It was a song Jim loved, with a simple message that seemed to sum up his own joy in collaboration:

At the second verse, Hunt was joined by Nelson performing Gobo, his character from
Fraggle Rock
—then, on the third verse, with Whitmire, performing Wembley. As the piano swelled into the final verse, Clash joined with Elmo, and Oz with Fozzie Bear—and suddenly the stage was full of Muppet performers, standing beneath a large photograph of Jim as they waved their characters in the air and sang:

Standing amid the sea of her fellow performers, Fran Brill, with her Prairie Dawn Muppet from
Sesame Street
on her arm, was so overcome with emotion she could barely perform.
“I know I couldn’t
sing,” she said later. “I think my mouth tried to move, but I was just crying so much I could not sing.” It didn’t matter; the audience was already on its feet, cheering and crying.

Finally, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band leapt into a rousing performance of “When the Saints Go Marching In”—just as Jim had asked—and “
we all marched out of the cathedral smiling, singing, crying,” said Caroll Spinney. Jim’s “nice, friendly little service” had been, as
Life
magazine put it, “
an epic and almost unbearably moving event.”

Six weeks later, on July 2, 1990, a similar memorial service was held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, where
Fraggle Rock
writer Jocelyn Stevenson delivered one of the day’s most poignant, elegant, and memorable speeches:

Jim was not interred at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, nor at St. Paul’s Cathedral—these were memorials, not funerals. In fact, his body wasn’t there at all. Four days after his death, Jim’s body—as he had specified—was cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery crematory in Ardsley, New York. (His death certificate, to his likely delight, listed his occupation as “
Creator, Producer.”) His ashes were stored in an urn and put in the care of John Henson, perhaps the most spiritual or ethereal of the Henson children, who then spent more than a year trying to determine the most appropriate place to scatter the ashes. In one of his letters to the children, Jim had suggested “a pretty river or freshly plowed field or the ocean,” adding that “the
thought of burial in a pretty place also appeals to me.” The more he thought about it, then, the more John thought he finally knew the place.