Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  Jim enlisted the help of friend and fellow drama club member Russell Wall, and together they built what we can fairly call the ancestors to the Muppets in the living room of Jim’s home on Beechwood Road. While it is likely that Jim and Wall built at least two puppets, one for each to perform, we only know that one was a puppet called Pierre the Rat, based on a cartoon Jim had drawn for Hyattsville High School’s student publication Wildcat Scratches. Pierre was a small, skinny hand puppet with a rat head carved of plastic wood, wearing sunglasses and a beret with a white-tipped plastic cigarette glued to a hinged mouth—primitive, but an impressive first effort. Equipped with their new puppets, Jim and Wall headed over to WTOP studios in D.C. and auditioned.

  They got the job.

  In early June 1954, shortly after Jim’s graduation from Northwestern High School, Jim and Russell Wall made the short drive to WTOP television studios to begin several days of frantic rehearsals before the Junior Morning Show’s debut the following week. Days later, inside one of WTOP’s cramped studios, a voice called for silence, a camera whirred silently to life, and an indicator light glowed dully, signaling that the Junior Morning Show was now on the air. Just like that, seventeen-year-old Jim Henson was finally in television.

  There was only one problem. While Jim and Russell Wall were each of legal working age, three of their fellow puppeteers were not. On June 25, the Evening Star reported that the Junior Morning Show would be canceled after only three weeks for violating child labor laws. “Three of the program’s participants were under fourteen,” the Star tut-tutted, “and consequently could not get work permits.”

  For a moment, it appeared Jim’s television career might be over before it had even begun. But despite his relative inexperience as a puppeteer, Jim had already impressed Roy Meachum, who generously continued to scout for work for Jim and Russell Wall on WTOP. Meachum even landed them a spot on his own Saturday show, where their puppets lip-synched to records. However, Meachum’s Saturday show was also doomed, running only through August.

  At that point, Jim was just beginning to attend classes at the University of Maryland, and perhaps considered the demise of the Saturday show as a blessing in disguise—with Saturday canned, he was free to concentrate on his studies and learn all he could about television design and production. This, with his brief appearances on WTOP, might, in time, lead to a different opportunity in television—one that hopefully didn’t involve puppets. “It was interesting and kind of fun to do,” Jim later said, “but I wasn’t really interested in puppetry then.”

  But whether Jim thought he might be done with television for the moment, he was too good—too talented—for television to be done with him. Unknown to Jim, during one of his Saturday appearances, his performance had caught the eye of James Kovach, a program director from the local NBC affiliate, WRC-TV. Kovach had come to the WTOP studio with the hope of luring the versatile Meachum from channel 9 over to the higher-rated channel 4, but had also liked what he had seen of Meachum’s young puppeteer. Meachum declined Kovach’s offer to jump ship—but weeks later, with Saturday facing cancellation and Jim facing unemployment, Meachum phoned Kovach and enthusiastically encouraged him to find a place for Jim over at NBC.

  The offer was unexpected, and seemingly out of nowhere—and Jim jumped at it, though he was still put through a brief audition before Kovach formally offered him the job. “I took the puppets over to NBC,” Jim recalled, “and they started putting me on these little local shows,” mostly performing in short segments alongside WRC in-house talent like Mike Hunnicutt, a jovial former radio personality with a loopy sense of humor. Hunnicutt would stammer and giggle his way through sketches in a manner much like Red Skelton, and Jim adored him, often hanging around to watch the host banter with technicians long after the cameras went dark.

  Another show to feature Jim’s puppetry—though he had been hired first as a set designer—was a weekend children’s show called Circle 4 Ranch, hosted by Joe Campbell, a singing cowboy who told stories of frontier heroes and folklore between snippets of old westerns. When the show was lengthened from thirty minutes to a full hour in the fall of 1954, Campbell was anxious to fill the additional time with skits and songs, and thought it might be interesting to add puppets to chat with, in the same way Buffalo Bob Smith interacted with his marionette costars on NBC’s powerhouse kids’ show Howdy Doody. That suggestion sparked an idea in Circle 4 director and producer Bob Porter, who introduced to Campbell the “scrawny teenager” laboring in set design Porter had seen performing puppets with other WRC personalities. “The three of us had lunch and decided how to proceed,” Campbell recalled. “Jim agreed to make some puppets that I had in mind.” Campbell provided Jim with a drawing of two cowboys he called Longhorn and Shorthorn, which he asked Jim to build and perform for the show. Sadly, Campbell’s show would only last another six months—yet Campbell would soon come to play an important, somewhat controversial, and largely unknown role in the creation of the Muppets.

  By his own account, Jim would work solo for the next eight months—Russell Wall, as far as anyone could remember, left the area after graduation—making random appearances on various NBC shows as needed, usually lip-synching his puppets to records. In the meantime, he was attending the University of Maryland full-time, while still living at home, less than two miles from campus. With Paul Henson, Sr., as a role model, as well as the active enthusiasm for knowledge shown by his extended family, education—or perhaps more particularly, learning—was something that would always be important to Jim, and he took school seriously, maintaining a B average. He continued his active involvement in drama and theater, again discovering that he preferred the technical aspects and the behind-the-scenes maneuverings to the onstage performing. “I was very interested in theatre, mostly in stage design,” Jim said. “I did a little bit of acting [in] the first year of college and then fairly soon thereafter I settled into the backstage scenery.”

  For most of his college career, then, Jim would design and build sets. He would serve as the University Theater’s publicity director for several years, and just as he had for Northwestern’s drama department, he designed and printed posters for student drama productions and other university events. He would, in fact, turn his talent for silkscreen posters into a side business, running a print shop out of the university’s student union building.

  He also quickly became aware that the university’s college of fine arts wasn’t where he wanted to be. “My first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theater design, stage design or television design,” Jim said later. “But at that particular college, the advertising, art, costume design, interior design, layout—all of that stuff was part of Home Economics, for some strange reason.… And puppetry was a course that was given there that was also in Home Economics.”

  The Home Economics department—or Practical Arts, as it came to be called—was no haven for aspiring homemakers, as it was so often derisively described. Instead, it housed a wide variety of art and education programs, including several commercial art courses coveted by those wanting to be advertising executives. As Jim soon discovered, there was another reason, more prurient than academic, to switch to Home Economics. “[My] puppetry teacher said, you switch over to Home Economics, you don’t have to take all of the math and sciences that you do in Fine Arts, so you can take more art courses,” Jim recalled. “So I switched over to Home Economics on that basis and also ended up in classes [where] I think there were about six guys and 500 girls. Oh, it was marvelous!”

  One of those five hundred girls was a twenty-year-old art and education major named Jane Nebel, now in the first semester of her senior year. Artsy and talented and with a dry sense of humor as edgy as Jim’s was playful, Jane was versatile in arts and crafts—and, as Jim would soon discover, a capable puppeteer.

  Born in St. Albans, Queens, on June 16, 1934, Jane was the third and youngest child of Winifred and Adalbert Nebel, an insurance salesman with an
interest in astrology. Shortly after Jane was born, however, Adalbert—who, as Jane remembered, always “had a bit of a temper”—abruptly quit his job at the insurance company and found himself without work at the height of the Depression. Jane’s practical-minded mother—who had been perfectly happy living as the wife of an insurance man—firmly reminded her husband of their mortgage and three children and insisted Adalbert find work immediately, despite the hard economic conditions that made jobs scarce.

  Dutifully, Adalbert took odd jobs, selling cosmetics and stocking candy machines, while taking astrology classes in the evenings. Money continued to be scarce, but Adalbert would always manage to earn one reprieve after another from the family’s softhearted landlord by displaying a remarkable flair for the dramatic that his daughter would inherit. After learning the landlord was on his way over to collect the rent, Adalbert would meticulously place Jane on her mother’s lap and dress her brother in his finest clothes, brushing the boy’s hair until it shone. He would then answer the door, making certain to open it far enough to allow the landlord to see Mrs. Nebel and the children, looking every inch the picture-perfect storybook family—and quite impossible for the sympathetic landlord to eject into the street over back rent.

  Eventually, Adalbert became experienced enough at astrology to earn his living as an astrologer, adopting the professional persona of Dal Lee and becoming well known as the editor of the popular and highly successful publications Astrology Guide and Your Personal Astrology. As Dal Lee, Adalbert loved writing the editorials for his magazines, his two-finger typing clattering away loudly at all hours of the night. To Jane, awakened by the noise, it was one of the most reassuring sounds in the world. “I could depend on going downstairs at two in the morning and having a good talk with him,” she said. Jane adored their conversations, and while she never became a strong believer in astrology, she did come to appreciate their shared stubborn streak and wickedly skeptical sense of humor. Listen to what people have to say, Adalbert told his daughter, even if what they’re saying may not be true.

  As a teenager, Jane moved to Salisbury, Maryland, in the state’s Eastern Shore region, but spent the next several years more than three hundred miles away in a boarding school in Lexington, Virginia. While Jane referred to her own grades as “not so great,” with her Maryland residency they were sound enough for admittance to the University of Maryland in 1951. Enrolling as a practical art major, Jane had initially chosen the arts and crafts program under the Home Economics department, then moved to the College of Education to become an art education major. As part of that particular curriculum, students were still required to take classes from the arts and crafts program—including puppetry.

  The puppetry course at the University of Maryland was a new addition to the Home Economics curriculum—so new, in fact, that the university hadn’t yet hired a teacher who could be said to be a proficient puppeteer. Instead, the job had fallen to Ed Longley, a young teacher out of New York’s Columbia University. At the time of his hiring, the university had informed Longley—a master silversmith who taught jewelry making—that teaching the new puppetry course would be a condition of his employment in the Home Economics department. “He was a very good guy,” Jane said, “but he didn’t know puppetry.” As a result, Longley was still feeling his way in the fall of 1954, working with a class composed mostly of seniors—and mostly women—none of whom had ever taken a puppetry course, but who were now using the class to complete their coursework before graduation and looking to Longley for guidance.

  Guidance they would get—but not necessarily from Longley.

  Heads turned when Jim Henson entered Longley’s classroom in the autumn of 1954. He walked, Jane remembered, “like Abe Lincoln,” flat-footed with long strides. And while the fashionably short pea coat he wore that winter made his legs look longer and lankier than usual, it wasn’t his height that raised eyebrows; it was his youth. “Most of us had known each other for quite a few years,” Jane said. And to a class full of seasoned seniors, a freshman, barely eighteen years old, was regarded as little more than an interloper. Yet Jim carried himself with confidence; he had grown up just down the road from the university, making this essentially home territory. Further, while Jim had been performing puppets on television for less than a year, that was still more practical puppetry experience than anyone, including Longley, could claim. In no time at all, recalled Jane, “Jim took over the class.”

  For one of the major projects that semester, Longley divided his class into two groups and asked them to write, perform, and build all the puppets and props for two shows, one using hand puppets, and the other using marionettes. While Jim was in the hand puppet group, he eagerly suggested the marionette group adapt a favorite story of his, James Thurber’s fairy tale The 13 Clocks, about a wily prince who, with the help of a clever, enigmatic character called the Golux, outwits the coldhearted duke for the hand of the duke’s daughter. In his own group, Jim eagerly wrote the script and oversaw the puppet building and set design. Jane remembers being “totally impressed” with the way Jim worked. “He’d just look at the situation, and look at what he thought needed to be done,” said Jane, “and he’d just do it.” On the day of the show, Jane performed the role of the Golux in the marionette group, giving a performance so nimble that Jim was impressed. So impressed, in fact, that Jim decided to ask for her assistance.

  In early 1955, WRC program director James Kovach and director Carl Degen were putting together a new variety program called Afternoon that would air daily at 2:15 on WRC. “Back in those days in television,” Jim said, “most local stations had a midday show for housewives that had a series of things. It was like a variety show for midday.” Kovach had at the helm two reliable personalities; besides Mac McGarry, a bespectacled local disc jockey and television announcer getting his first real on-camera break, there was also an enthusiastic twenty-one-year-old American University student named Willard Scott, feeling his way years before finding fame on the Today show. But Kovach wanted something new and different to add to the mix, and recommended to Degen that they hire Jim to join the Afternoon lineup. As Jim later described it, “They would have a cooking segment, they’d have news, they’d have a local combo, and they’d do fashion shows with models, so it was a fairly large operation—and we were part of that.”

  Afternoon debuted on WRC on Monday, March 7, 1955—a significant date in that it not only marks the true beginning of Jim and Jane’s professional partnership, but also because of the following notice, which appeared under the “TV Highlights” section of The Washington Post and Times Herald:

  2:15 P.M.—Afternoon: A new variety program features Mac McGarry and Willard Scott as co-hosts; fashion information from Inga; music by Mel Clement Quartet; vocals by Jack Maggio; and special features by the Muppets, who are puppeteers.

  This is the first time the term Muppets appears in print, helpfully but incorrectly glossed by a copy editor at the Post, who applied the term to Jim and Jane rather than to the puppets. At age eighteen, Jim had already coined the term that would become his legacy, his own brand, as indelibly linked to his name as Microsoft with Bill Gates or, perhaps more appropriately, Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse.

  Interestingly, Jim was already using the term Muppet as early as December 1954, while working for Joe Campbell at Circle 4 Ranch. After receiving two cowboy puppets he had asked Jim to build, Campbell scrawled out a receipt, using the back of a cue sheet for the December 18, 1954, installment of Circle 4 Ranch. The receipt granted Campbell, for the cost of one dollar, “51% ownership of muppetts [sic] known as ‘Shorthorn’ and ‘Longhorn.’ ” Further, a number of acetate disc soundtracks prerecorded by Campbell for Jim’s puppets to perform to—some dating as far back as November 10, 1954—were labeled by studio engineers with stickers reading “Campbell Muppets” or “Circle 4 Muppets.” Clearly, then, the term Muppets—with or without an extraneous T—was already in use at that time.

  “It was really just a term we ma
de up,” Jim admitted later. “For a long time I would tell people it was a combination of marionettes and puppets, but, basically, it was really just a word that we coined,” he added, pointing out correctly that, “we have done very few things connected with marionettes.”

  Could something else have inspired the term, though? It’s possible that muppet was a play on the word moppet, a term for a small child. Dating back to the seventeenth century—and likely tracing its origins to the word moppe, a Middle English word for rag doll—the word was cutesy and archaic, even in 1955. But it was also a word Jim Henson, along with nearly every newspaper reader in Hyattsville, would have seen practically every day—for running on channel 5 each weekday from 6:00 to 7:00 P.M. was Hoppity Skippity with Moppet Movies, a local children’s show that had been a fixture in the D.C. area since 1948. Given that it was broadcast during the dinner hour, it is likely that Jim was familiar with it. But whether Jim ever watched the show, he would certainly have seen its name as he scanned the television listings in the newspaper.

  It takes no real stretch of the imagination, then, to picture Jim—perhaps trying to come up with a catchy name for the puppets he was handing over to Campbell—coming across the word moppets and, with a mere change of a vowel, almost magically blending the words puppet and moppet. Like grackle, it was one of those words that already sounded like it should mean something. Whether intentional or not, the association with the word moppet is serendipitous, as the childlike innocence of the Muppets would, to Jim, always be one of their most endearing qualities. “As I try to zero in on what’s important for the Muppets,” Jim said years later, “I think it’s a sense of innocence, naiveté—you know, the experience of a simple person meeting life.”