Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (8 page)

Walt Disney’s wife once described herself to a
Time
reporter as a “mouse widow.”
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In this sense, there were surely Muppet widows and orphans. Henson’s son Brian said the children often visited Henson at work:

He always had such a ball when he was at work, and that was one reason why we would love to go and visit him. And also, we were always welcome at work. No matter how young we were, we would hang around the shooting studio, and then the workshop, and even go to meetings and stuff, and be playing in the corner, and he was always fine with that.

One could imagine that another reason to visit Henson at work was that he was always there. A 1999 CNN profile compared interviews on the subject:

Cheryl Henson: When we were growing up, we weren’t very aware of my father being famous. That—there was much more of a sense that he was always more involved in his work, and he loved what he did, and always brought us into what he was doing.

Brian Henson: … He was also a very gentle and caring father. I remember even when he would work, sort of, endless hours, he’d pretty much always come home every night at some point to, like, tuck us in.

Jane Henson: Whether or not he came home every night to tuck them in, I don’t know. He certainly enjoyed being with them when he could. If they remember it as every night, that’s nice, isn’t it? I don’t think it was every night.
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Henson gave what he could. Brian remembered him carving a turkey using the same voice he would later use for Link Hogthrob.
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In his
Red Book
journal, family trips are often accompanied by the word “lovely.”
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In the early days, Henson’s family and work were one; Jane would puppeteer with a bassinet next to her. When it became more difficult, Henson spent the whole month of July in 1971 on a western driving trip with the kids, visiting Muppets writer Jerry Juhl and stopping at Disneyland.
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Henson loved his family. But it’s not exactly the American dream—with picket fences or even simple cohabitation. This is not the work-life balance I’d want. I wouldn’t want my husband to be a Henson, or to have to be that husband. It seems at the very least
difficult
to keep a family together in this line of work, and it seems to work best when the family
joins in
.

In Henson’s TV movie
Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas
, Emmet and his Ma both give up their family stability for the dream of making music. Ma hocks Emmet’s tool chest, which he uses to do odd jobs, so that she can buy dress fabric to look good singing on stage. Emmet takes Ma’s washtub, which she uses to do laundry, and puts a hole in it, turning it into an upright bass. They both believe they can win the talent contest, and once they do, they’ll buy a gift for the other—a piano and a guitar. Both believe that music will
save
the family and provide for it.

Ma’s friend points out how Ma’s dream is jeopardizing her son’s livelihood. “What if you
don’t
win, Alice?” Ma shoots back without a beat: “
Got
to win. Why, Emmet’s got to have a new guitar this Christmas.” After the initial O. Henry tragedy, though, there is a touching victory. By performing
together
, Ma, Emmett, and his friends get a job at the hotel inn. The pay is “regular” and Ma says, “I sure enjoyed my first night’s work.”

Imagine that,
enjoying
one’s work. But to
get
that, they had to give up stability of the other kind of work. For artists, like entrepreneurs, it seems, it’s all or nothing—frequently poverty or riches—but a traditional middle-class life it’s not.

This may look like sacrifice, and maybe it is, but remember what Henson said:

I sincerely believe in what I do, and get pleasure from it. I feel very fortunate because I can do what I love to do.
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The thing that makes sacrifice worthwhile is that you
believe
in it. Walt Disney once said that a certain spirit prevailed at his studio. “I can see it in the guys,” he said, “They have a feeling that it isn’t a racket.”
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WHAT DRIVES ART
PLAYFUL AMBITION

In
The Muppet Movie
, Kermit points out the similarities between himself and Doc Hopper, the fast-food magnate. Owning the most successful restaurant chain in the country is Hopper’s dream. “I have a dream, too,” Kermit tells him, “But it’s about singing and dancing and making people happy.”

Henson was a very driven man. In 1956, his older brother Paul died as a result of a car accident. Jane Henson recalled the effects of Paul’s death on Henson, who was nineteen:

They did things a lot together, and I think that he also felt that his parents had lost a lot by losing Paul. So I think that he felt he wanted to accomplish a lot because of that, but also because he always wanted to accomplish a lot.
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In Henson’s journal, he used great emotion when discussing his work. “Met Trevor Jones—Loved him.”
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“Begin shooting The Great Muppet Caper!”
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Career ambitions and life goals for Henson were one and the same. It was a rare moment when Henson was unsure of his destiny. But they do exist, and they are quite telling. In fact, it is likely that these moments of doubt cemented his resolve in the long run.

The first great moment of uncertainty came in 1958. After four years of
Sam and Friends
, the sudden death of his brother, and finishing college, Henson no longer wanted to do TV puppet shows. He wanted something more:

I decided that what I really wanted to do was go off and paint. I was an artist, you see, so I was going to take the shows off the air—just quit for a while. The station prevailed upon me; they said, “Look, we’ll pay you money and you can put somebody else doing the show.”
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Michael Davis called this a “walkabout” in
Street Gang
—Henson traveled in Europe for two months that summer, visiting Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, and England, to ponder the question of what he should do next. He had enough money. He didn’t even have to work anymore. What was
worth
doing? Surprisingly, he decided to do
more
TV puppetry—he returned and did three more years of
Sam and Friends
. What exactly had happened in Europe?

On his walkabout, Henson sketched French village streets and visited the World’s Fair in Belgium.
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It gave him perspective on his career. He remembered:

I saw that puppetry was truly an art form in Europe. It was something that could be done artistically, with creativity. Back home, there weren’t all that many puppeteers, but in Europe they are everywhere and everybody goes to puppet shows. It’s an integral part of their lives and that was nice to see.
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Henson came back to the states, joined the Puppeteers of America, attended its festivals, and even became its president. Something had clicked for him—connecting what he had been doing with what he could achieve in the future.

In
The Muppet Movie
, when Kermit doubts himself in the desert, his inner voice reminds him: “I was wrong when I said I never promised anyone. I promised
me
.” Joseph Campbell noted the way many mythic heroes “refuse the call” before ultimately accepting their destiny, and it has become cliché in films, yet clearly Henson had an epiphany in Europe. When he returned to his show, he had a new, ambitious idea about what puppetry on TV
could
be.

Years later, after the commercial disappointment of
Labyrinth
, Henson had another moment of doubt, recalled by his son Brian:

It was the first time I ever saw him not want to work was during that period. There was a few months there that he didn’t want to work. He wanted to travel, and stop, and think, and reflect a little.
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Some of the most mature Henson work came after this reflective period—
A Muppet Family Christmas
and
The Storyteller
, two enduring classics. It is refreshing to know that even someone as driven and ambitious as Henson had his moments of self-doubt, and to know that when he did, he didn’t try to work against the doubt—he explored it. Perhaps that is the secret to his impressive resolve. In the
Fraggle Rock
episode “The Secret of Convincing John,” Wembley learns that John’s power stems from his “wembling” or second-guessing—after seeing things from all angles, he can be sure he has made the right decision. Self-doubt leads to self-knowledge, and these moments of contemplation likely allowed Henson to say, “I sincerely believe in what I do.”

Apart from these moments of doubt, Jim Henson always seemed to
know
his destiny. He even said so:

A driver was talking to me today asking, “Did you ever in your wildest dreams think you would have success like this?” The honest answer to this, which I do occasionally admit, is that yes, I’ve always known I would be very successful in anything I decided to do—and it turned out to be puppetry.
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To have a certainty in one’s purpose is crucial, to feel that one is doing—as crazy as it sounds—exactly what one is meant to do. Muppeteer Caroll Spinney said the same thing: “People ask me, ‘Are you surprised with the way your life has turned out?’ No. I’m not surprised at all. I always believed that I would be doing this.”
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I don’t think that anyone can be certain of one’s purpose without getting lost in the desert and facing self-doubt.

When Kermit says, “I promised
me
,” in
The Muppet Movie
, out there under the endless stars, he is expressing his dream, his faith, and his doubt. When he sings, “Have you been half asleep, and have you heard voices? I’ve heard them calling my name. Is this the sweet sound that called the young sailors? The voice might be one and the same,” Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher’s lyrics seem to express the same feeling of
destiny
that Henson felt.

Doc Hopper and Kermit are two sides of the same coin—both driven by an inner ambition, but Kermit’s ambition seems to be a silly one, a childish or Fragglish ambition, sharing a laugh with friends, portraying a hopeful vision of humanity, inspiring change in the next generation without hurting anyone today. It’s hard to put into words what Henson’s dream
was
, exactly, but we know he was driven to see it realized.

And perhaps this is why “workaholic” doesn’t exactly suit Henson. Jim Henson was atypically ambitious. A career like his takes a kind of devotion to play—one that is dead serious. Henson made play a kind of
duty
. Most of us do not grow up learning to operate this way. We are not taught that there are many kinds of work. Usually, we do not have artist parents. Few of us even have entrepreneur parents. Yet Jim Henson was a third parent to many of us. He subtly ingrained in us a strong capacity for laboring under a dream.

The Fraggles sing a song called “Workin’”:

Wake up in the morning.
Get yourself to work.
Fraggles never fool around.
Fraggles never shirk.
Their duty’s always waiting.
And duty must be done.
There’s Ping-Pong games that must be played
and songs that must be sung.
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Henson seemed to have an unstoppable
drive
to make art. Part of achieving one’s dreams rests in the feeling of duty to them. Yet, many artists are driven and still get stuck. What if Henson was just
lucky
?

Henson was most certainly lucky. He was thirty-one in 1967—the perfect age to take advantage of that year’s incredible cultural revolution. Because he was
over
thirty, he was taken seriously enough to sell TV shows. Because he was
only
thirty, he still “got” what the youth culture was doing. Even luckier, television—his chosen medium—was still an emerging technology. TV turned eighteen when he turned eighteen, which meant both were amenable to experimentation. While still in high school, Henson found himself in precisely the right time and the right place to change television history.

With all Henson’s luck, it can give you the sense that
you’ll
never make it. It’s too late for most of us. We’re too old. We didn’t have early success and we missed our shot. I don’t have six years to practice on TV—I don’t have my own show. I am too busy working for a living. There are many advantages I just don’t have.

Malcolm Gladwell states this argument very effectively in
Outliers
. Gladwell’s “10,000-Hour Rule” is both an argument for serving your craft and a justification for why most people can’t. Ten thousand hours is the ungodly amount of time it takes to become a genius at something. The Beatles, Gladwell writes, did their ten thousand hours in Hamburg strip clubs, performing “for 270 nights in just over a year and a half.”
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According to John Lennon, “In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.”
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Pete Best said, “We played seven nights a week.”
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Beatles biographer Philip Norman wrote, “They weren’t disciplined onstage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”
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The formula seems to work for anyone. Gladwell tells us a study of elite violinists found they had each practiced for ten thousand hours.
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A founding father of the Internet, Bill Joy coded in a computer lab for ten thousand hours.
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Bill Gates hacked around in computer club for more than ten thousand hours.
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It’s empowering to think that hours of practice is all it takes to become a genius, but Gladwell notes that many disadvantaged people can’t
afford
to spend ten thousand hours:

Ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time. It’s all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you’re a young adult. You have to have parents who encourage and support you. You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won’t be time left in the day to practice enough.
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As a comment on the institutions of society, Gladwell’s point is incredibly persuasive, but perhaps not on the level of
individuals
. Gladwell notes on his website that he doesn’t mean to go as far as saying “success is something outside of an individual’s control.”
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“But I do think,” he says, “that we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with.”
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Gladwell is entirely right that our systems should be fairer, and that class advantages play a part in the success of all of history’s great men and women.

However, like Gladwell, I am a storyteller who is very interested in the way stories shape our lives. From that perspective, I believe it is possible for the individual to
will
the ten thousand hours
into existence
. Where might they come from? Well, some of them might already have happened.

In the 1972 TV special
The Muppet Musicians of Bremen
, a group of four animals escape from their terrible masters to become traveling musicians. Their masters embody every specter of the “bad boss.” In a montage, you see them illustrated like a Bosch drawing of sin—one shows anger and poor communication, another sloth and gluttony, another is pathologically fearful and anxious, and the last is miserly and averse to work. The plight of their poor animals isn’t so different from many of us today who are stuck in a job with a bad boss or, more generally, stuck in a life we didn’t choose.

And when the animals escape, they don’t immediately see it as a windfall. Leroy, the donkey, is nearly shot by his owner and just barely gets away. When he does, he has a heavy wagon tied to his back and a big tuba hung around his neck, the loot from the boss’s robbery. The boss had cursed, “This junk ain’t worth nothin’!” and so that is what Leroy believes. Chased from his home, Leroy finds himself alone in the world, pulling junk that ain’t worth nothing. He doesn’t seem very lucky at all. But he
can
be.

Enter the frog.

Leroy laments his condition to Kermit, who happens to be sitting on a fence. “I’m on the road to nowhere,” he says. “I gave ol’ Mordecai eighteen years of hard work, and what do I have to show for it?”

Kermit points at the wagon.

“It’s mighty hard pullin’.” The wagon, he thinks, is nothing but a burden.

Kermit tells him he also has a tuba.

“You mean this big kinda twisty funnel thing? I don’t even know what it’s fer!”

“Oh, it’s fer music!”

“Music? How do you play?”

Kermit teaches Leroy to play, and with stars in his eyes, Leroy sees a better future—as a traveling musician. “They’ll just love me all to crazy!” he fantasizes. He changes his tune:

I’m on the road to somewhere.
Got my tuba all with me.
I’m on the road to somewhere.
It’s a lovely place to be.
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Henson could have viewed his
Sam and Friends
work as a burden. In fact, when he left for Europe, he did. He had to create all the sets, puppets, and props himself. He had to write and perform sponsor promos. He had to hire people to help, and he had to do it daily, even when he didn’t feel like it. After a while, he probably felt trapped, locked in. But his problem wasn’t his life up until then—it was not knowing what his life had been
fer
. Or rather, for.

Everything that had happened before Henson’s 1958 walkabout had been building to something. Henson had been learning to be a boss, he had been cultivating an intense work ethic, and he had developed a home-grown aesthetic. Henson’s shoestring budget resulted in Kermit being fashioned out of fabric from his mother’s old coat,
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and that in turn spawned the look of a thousand Muppets. His work in commercials led both to a healthy workshop budget and eventually to
Sesame Street
, whose producers were trying to use the power of commercials to teach. It couldn’t be predicted from the outset, but each part led to the next part, and eventually it added up to staggering success when Henson started to see the shape it might take.

Henson may not have chosen his career up until 1958, but he was able to turn burdens into strengths. “Take what you got and fly with it,” Henson said.
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Most of us simply don’t know what we’ve got.

Rethink the wagon—your experiences that hold you back. The wagon might have been the last thing Leroy wanted, but he ends up pulling it the whole movie. He uses it to cart his new friends around, the fellow musicians that round out his band. Without them and their harmonies, he probably couldn’t be a traveling musician. Likewise, Henson may not have wanted to be an employer, an adman, or even a children’s entertainer, but these skills he turned into something truly beautiful—a career in art and a lasting place in history.

For our own lives, to counter the pessimism of Gladwell’s ten thousand hours, we can look for individuals who turned burdens into advantages with a little art. Cheryl Strayed’s career took flight when she converted her painful childhood into a kick-ass, no-nonsense voice for the column “Dear Sugar.” She infused her advice with anger and shocked the world by openly talking about her sexual abuse and its effects, and strangely enough, that’s when the world started to celebrate her work. She started to sell mugs bearing her slogan W
RITE
L
IKE A
M
OTHERFUCKER
, had two bestsellers, and is an inspiration for anyone who writes.

When used correctly, anything can be turned into music—anything can make us dance. At some point, we can see that what holds us back can also be a power—and it is at that point that we—like the Musicians of Bremen—sing the blues. Of course, it’s hard to compare Henson’s work to the blues since he was admittedly such a positive person:

I know I drive some people crazy with what seems to be ridiculous optimism, but it has always worked out for me.
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At his own funeral, Henson requested a Dixieland band play “When the Saints Go Marching In” at a jolly, swinging pace. It is good to sing the blues, but perhaps it’s even better to dance your cares away.

WHAT HAVE YOU
ALREADY
PRACTICED?
PRACTICE IT
MORE

Ten thousand hours, Gladwell says, is an unthinkable amount—too much for most of us. However, the hours don’t have to be early or the result of random privilege. The first part of your ten thousand hours might have been forced on you—tedious piano lessons, a job with children that makes you hate kids, a history of colic. But the rest of the ten thousand hours you need to force on yourself, once you understand the power of your burden: a path to parody songs, artful puppetry, or imaginative writing. To everything, they say, there is a season. You don’t have to be at the right place at the right time. You have to know what
your
time and place is good for. What ambitious story could you turn your life
into
? You can’t start over. You have to use only what’s in the toolbox—and make art out of it.

The thing is, Henson didn’t grow up wanting to be a puppeteer.“It’s surely not a career path that one would plan,” he once said. “You wouldn’t decide to become a puppeteer.”
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Puppetry, for Henson, was a means to an end. It was the raw material of his past, and he used it to create a job that didn’t yet exist—the “Jim Henson” job—now cemented in history.

Part of the game of art is taking what
is
, playing with it, and seeing what
could be
. Henson became quite good at knowing “what it’s fer.” He wrote:

When I was a child, my mother’s family would gather at my grandmother’s house. Fifteen or twenty people would be there, sitting around the dinner table, and my grandparents would have stories to tell—usually stories from their childhood. They would tell a tale and somebody would try to top it. I’ve always felt that these childhood experiences of my family sitting around the dinner table, making each other laugh, were my introduction to humor.
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Henson saw where his humor came from and where it could take him. But was it Henson’s
family
that made him lucky, or was it Henson’s
outlook
that made him see them that way? If he had bemoaned his “unserious” upbringing his whole life, then where would he be? To say that Henson was lucky implies something else, something emotionally worse, and that is that you and I are
not
lucky. Not
as
lucky. That’s simply not true, because what I want to become, and what he became, are completely different destinations.

Think of all the ways you are unlucky. How might you play them like a tuba? As Kermit said, “Blow good and hard into the small end there.” Play with it a bit, and try to figure out: what’s it
fer
? We are
all
lucky for something. The trick is in knowing how you are
uniquely
lucky, and in turning that gift into something others can appreciate.

HOW TO
MAKE YOUR OWN LUCK
(HAVE A WORKSHOP IN YOUR BASEMENT OR GARAGE)

Much of success may be luck, but many people live their lives in such a tentative state that they never even roll the dice. Play and experimentation loosens our grip on life and allows for more chance luck to surprise us. The law of averages says that some of it will be
good
luck. But not if you don’t play.

One way to allow surprises to happen in your career is to bring your work home with you, to let your work take over your life, to let it
become
your life. When Jim and Jane Henson were newlyweds, they bought a house together. On the lower level, they set up a puppet-building workshop.
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Later, Henson set up an animation camera and experimented with stop motion there. Disney also took his work home with him, setting up his first studio in his parents’ garage, “roughly fifteen feet square,”
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according to Neal Gabler. Creating a workspace in your home makes a space in your future for breakthroughs and epiphanies to exist—late night and early morning. It also just plain old means you’ll work more.

Caroll Spinney wrote, “Someone once said ‘the harder you work the more luck you’ll get’ and I’ve found that to be true.”
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In Henson’s career, this was also the case. The things that look like luck—the Incorporated Television Company producer writing to Henson out of nowhere to propose a Muppets show, for example—are the result of hard work. In reality, though Abe Mandell may have just “happened” to catch a Muppets special on TV and sent a letter, the show he saw was a pilot made by Henson for the purpose of pitching it to every American network.
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The ITC producer, like the magic elves, just seemed to appear, but Henson had to cut out the leather first. Behind Henson’s stroke of luck lies a graveyard of TV pilots that were not picked up—countless TV specials made for exposure, a second job in commercials, and a twenty-year history of experimenting in television. Henson had worked
hard
for that luck.

To get your art to the level it needs to be, you must devote yourself for many years, doing work for its own sake. Take some time to think about your destiny. What is your true ambition? What could you do for the rest of your life that wouldn’t be “a racket”? If you are not sure about what you were meant to do, set aside some time to think about it, so that you may become sure. What were you meant to do?