Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  And so, on May 28, 1959, at Jane’s family home in Salisbury, Maryland, Jane Nebel and Jim Henson were married in a small ceremony presided over by the family minister, Jim’s Uncle Jinx, with Joe Irwin serving as Jim’s best man. (Irwin, in fact, had nearly missed the wedding, having run into bad weather during his flight into D.C.—but Jim had paid for a private plane to pick up his best man the moment he landed at National Airport to whisk him to Maryland’s Eastern Shore.) There was only one condition imposed on the match, and that had come from Betty Henson, who insisted her son shave off his new beard for the wedding. Jim dutifully obliged, putting the shearings in an envelope and mailing them to Jane just before the wedding with a playful note reading, “From Samson to Delilah.” In celebration of the nuptials, Sam and Friends went on a short honeymoon hiatus—the Hensons themselves would make a quick honeymoon sprint to the beach at Delaware’s Rehoboth—with loyal Post reporter Lawrence Laurent tipping readers off to the cause of Sam’s brief absence from the WRC lineup.

  The newlywed Hensons settled into a new home in the suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, buying a sprawling ranch on woodsy Nevis Road—not only the first home Jim would own, but the first time he had ever lived away from his parents—filled with modern furniture, purchased with Muppet money. In the basement, Jim set up the first Muppet workshop, a comfortable space crammed with cabinets and tables strewn with fabric, paints, foam, glue, and art supplies. Here Jim would come to scribble ideas in his sketchbooks and manage the affairs of Muppets, Inc., with a Siamese cat named George Washington curled at his feet.

  He had another new toy in the workshop: a Bolex 16mm movie camera—an ideal camera for an aspiring animator, as it had a side release button, which made it possible to film just a few frames at a time. Jim excitedly set to work creating what he called “animated paintings.” “I started painting on a sheet of paper placed under the lens of the animation stand,” Jim recalled. “I would just paint a couple of strokes and take a frame or two of film, and I would be able to watch this painting evolve and move. From that time on I lost interest in easel painting as such because the movement concept was just so much more interesting. I was really very excited about it.” Jim would later put his animated paintings to notable use in many of Sesame Street’s colorful counting sequences.

  Perhaps instilled with a new sense of self-confidence in his writing skills from his experience with Hansel and Gretel, Jim was beginning to write more original pieces for Sam and Friends at the rate of “about two or three” a week, banging out his skits on a typewriter or scribbling in pencil on lined yellow notebook paper. He was also doing more of his own voices for his Muppets, experimenting to come up with just the right sound for each of Sam’s cast members. For Professor Madcliffe—the first character Jim would voice—Jim settled on a higher-pitched, manic game show host voice. Harry the Hipster was easier; Jim had this kind of character down pat, speaking in the same sort of gruff hepcat voice he would later give to Dr. Teeth. And perhaps appropriately, given his connection with the character, Kermit was closer to Jim’s own voice, though slightly more nasal and—in these early days, at least—with just a hint of a swampy Mississippi twang.

  When performing his own sketches, Jim would drive to WRC early to record all of his voices, music, and sound effects to tape, which he and Jane—and sometimes Bobby Payne—would then edit and revise, creating a four-and-a-half-minute soundtrack for their performance. For the rest of the afternoon, they would listen to the track over and over, memorizing the vocals and sound effects to ensure they could lip-synch the Muppets seamlessly to Jim’s own voices. For her part, Jane would remain the silent partner, though that had not necessarily been her decision. “Jim never had me do voices,” Jane said later, with only a hint of regret. “I don’t think it was my choice, I think it was Jim’s. That probably was a disappointment, but in the long run it was fine, because I didn’t really want to be doing that [for a living].”

  One of the earliest Sam and Friends episodes Jim wrote was “Powder Burn,” a pun-filled parody of TV’s Gunsmoke that could have been lifted directly from Stan Freberg or the pages of the new MAD magazine, filled with the kind of winking puns, clever plays on words, and silly names that Jim loved—the “stage coach” everyone is expecting at noon, for example, turns out to be a drama teacher, played enthusiastically by Jim with Professor Madcliffe. Another sketch poked fun at Meet the Press, satirizing the news show with a bit of Pogo-esque political commentary on organized crime. Television parodies were always fun for Jim—he particularly enjoyed lampooning game shows, a habit that would continue on Sesame Street.

  One of Jim’s most ambitious pieces, however, was a skit he called “Visual Thinking,” a sketch that reflected Jim’s growing mastery of the television medium, his love of animation, and his increasing fascination with the workings of the mind and imagination. As the sketch opens, Kermit tells Harry he’s learning to visualize his thoughts—and to make the point, he says the letter Q, then looks up to watch as the letter writes itself in the air over his head. “You’re a beginner,” responds Harry. “I’m an old hand at this stuff. Watch!”—and on cue, an animated stopwatch appears over Harry’s head. As the skit progresses, Harry talks about music—as musical notes dot themselves across the screen—then scats for a bit, creating animated scribbles that Harry erases by scatting backward. But when Harry scats again—and then can’t recall what he said well enough to say it backward—more and more scrawls make their way across the screen, eventually whiting out the entire space as Kermit calls weakly for help. In his script for the piece, Jim was careful to indicate where on the screen all the effects were located, as well as their length of time down to the fraction of a second, ensuring he could have his characters respond perfectly to the on-screen animation. The bit worked perfectly, and Jim would keep it in the routine for several years—and it, too, would show up in a slightly modified form on Sesame Street.

  It was obvious to anyone watching Sam and Friends that Jim and Jane were having fun—so much fun, in fact, that their enormous success was almost incidental to them. Interviewing the Hensons for The Christian Science Monitor in late 1959, reporter Ursula Keller speculated that Jane and Jim had earned over $100,000 in 1959—nearly three quarters of a million dollars today, and an enormous sum for a young man not yet even in his mid-twenties. But Jane bristled at such talk. “Money cannot measure success or happiness,” she told Keller matter-of-factly. Those who knew the young couple at the time weren’t surprised by their attitude toward the material. “My impression of [Jim] and his wife was that they were totally unspoiled by their success,” one friend remarked. “He was just so simple, so unspoiled. They were so unimpressed with themselves.”

  That’s not to say Jim didn’t have his moments of flashy, well-deserved pride. In May 1960, he graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in home economics. At this point in his career, a college degree was probably not a requirement for life after graduation, but Jim clearly valued education, and had returned to school after his extended absence, completing his degree in six years. Jim was rightly very proud of the accomplishment, and attended his graduation driving a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud he had purchased used for a dizzying $5,000. But there was something else even more wonderful that spring—something he was even prouder of: in early May, Jane had given birth to their first child, Lisa Marie Henson.

  Two months after graduation, with eight-week-old Lisa in tow, Jim and Jane piled into the Rolls-Royce and drove to Detroit to attend the 1960 Puppeteers of America convention. The decision to make a thousand-mile round-trip drive with an infant says much about Jim’s newly realized commitment to his chosen profession. He had immersed himself in the company of puppeteers while in Europe, but lacking Europe’s widespread devotion to the craft in the United States, Jim was going to have to actively seek out those who shared his passion. That meant joining the Puppeteers of America, an organization founded in 1936 to, among other things, “encourage and promote puppetry
as a means of communication, an extension of human expression, and as a performing Art.” That was just the sort of enthusiasm Jim could get behind.

  The convention turned out to be everything Jim hoped it would be, with performances of every type of puppetry and the opportunity to talk with every kind of puppeteer. He even struck up a friendship with the one puppeteer with whom he probably had the most in common, fellow TV performer Burr Tillstrom, who was attending the convention with his talented puppet builder, Don Sahlin. Besides puppetry, Tillstrom and Jim had other interests in common, too—both had a background in Christian Science—but even with their different approaches to humor—where Tillstrom was pensive, Jim was explosive—Tillstrom would turn out to have the same impish streak as Jim. One afternoon, with only a little prodding from Tillstrom, the two puppeteers drove through the streets of Detroit in Jim’s Rolls-Royce, with Jim enthusiastically working Kermit through the car’s sunroof while Tillstrom drove, barely able to contain his laughter. Jane—who admits to hiding in the backseat—could only shake her head in mock disbelief. “What with the Rolls and the new baby,” she said later, “we made quite an impression—without particularly intending to.” It was clear to Tillstrom he had a comrade in arms, just as silly, and just as talented, as he was.

  It was through Tillstrom that Jim would make the acquaintance of another gentleman who shared their devilish sense of humor—although by his own admission, gentleman was probably not the right term to describe twenty-nine-year-old talent agent Bernie Brillstein. Player was more like it.

  The son of Russian Jewish immigrants and nephew of a vaudevillian, the streetwise, ambitious Brillstein had leapfrogged his way up the ladder at the renowned William Morris Agency, moving in five short years from the mailroom to the publicity department to the head of the commercial office. A bear of a man with a large libido and an even bigger taste for talent, Brillstein was also a master of the art of the deal. He was accustomed to working hard for his clients and determined never to take no for an answer. Brillstein would eventually become one of the most powerful and respected agents, managers, and producers in show business, with an A-list roster of celebrity clients, including, it seemed, nearly the entire cast of Saturday Night Live.

  In 1960, however, as head of William Morris’s commercial office, his job was recruiting and representing talent for television commercials. Brillstein, an early fan of television, quickly put to rest the showbiz aphorism that television commercials were for has-beens or the hard up, assembling a stable of top-tier clients like Zsa Zsa Gabor, Harpo Marx … and Burr Tillstrom. At the Detroit puppetry convention, Jim mentioned to Tillstrom that he, too, was looking for an agent—that it was becoming increasingly difficult to secure bookings on the variety show circuit, and that an agent was the best way to get a foot in the door. Sometime later, Tillstrom phoned Brillstein in New York and asked if he would do him a favor and meet with a puppeteer friend of his.

  Brillstein groaned. “Burr, give me a break, will ya please?” the agent said. “I love you … but you’re one in a million. I’m into nightclub comedians and comedy. I don’t really want to handle puppeteers.”

  Tillstrom was persistent. “Bernie, this guy’s something special, and he’s a really nice guy.”

  “I didn’t want to,” Brillstein said later, “but I said okay.”

  Jim diligently made the trip to New York where he was waved into Brillstein’s office—and Brillstein would never forget his first impression of twenty-three-year-old Jim Henson. “In walked this guy who looked like a cross between Abe Lincoln and Jesus,” Brillstein recalled. “He was so gentle and unpretentious that he never spoke above a whisper.” Jim had brought with him a box of Muppets and proceeded to put on a show for Brillstein. “It was magic,” Brillstein said forty years later, still amazed at the performance:

  When Jim performed, I understood it. I got it.… I don’t know what I saw in him, but I saw something. I realize that at first, before we became close friends, Jim appealed to my perverse sense of humor. Sesame Street, which was still a few years off, was for kids, but Henson was not a kids’ act. He was hip and slightly dark. He had cute little creations—and he liked to blow them up.

  Shortly after Jim left the office, Brillstein’s phone rang. “Bernie,” his boss asked from the other end, “have you heard of Jim Henson and the Muppets?” Brillstein roared with laughter. “Heard of him?” Brillstein howled. “I just signed him!” (While Brillstein liked to claim that the two of them never entered into a formal agreement, doing business solely on the strength of a handshake, the two did, in fact, sign a contract.)

  That summer, the Muppets made their first appearance on Dave Garroway’s Today show, with Jim and Jane broadcasting on a live feed from WRC studios while Garroway chatted with them from New York. Jim was still an enormous fan of variety shows like Today and had performed on enough of them by now that he felt certain he could write and produce a variety show of his own—one that would allow him to develop his own characters, write longer sketches, and indulge in a bit of chaos every once in a while. He was also certain that the Muppets could keep a viewer’s attention for longer than just five-minute segments. As Jim saw it, the Muppets could more than hold their own for a full half hour—they could even headline their own show. It was a dream Jim would pursue for more than fifteen years.

  With this in mind, Jim began sketching ideas for a Muppet variety show he called Zoocus—a melding of zoo and circus—developing characters that reflected his own interests and sense of humor. There was Carburetor Jones, a streamlined Muppet with flying hair who shared Jim’s love of cars, and a character known simply as the Cat, who personified Jim’s interest in jazz culture and shared Harry the Hipster’s beatnik syntax. And then there was a favorite character type of Jim’s: the stuffed shirt academic who doesn’t get the joke. “Acts as oracle to whom others ask questions,” Jim wrote of a character called the Philosopher. “Quotes quotes, usually wrong or inappropriate, doesn’t know anything practical.”

  Elements of Zoocus would show up later on The Muppet Show, with Dr. Teeth as a hipper descendant of the Cat, and Sam the Eagle channeling the Philosopher in his plea for higher culture. Just as interesting, even in 1960, Jim had a clear vision of the stage design that, in many ways, directly influenced the set he designed for The Muppet Show in 1976. Already there were the kinds of colonnades through which the Muppets would appear in The Muppet Show’s opening credits, and a wall of windows of varying heights where humans could interact with puppets.

  Zoocus would never move beyond the pages of Jim’s notebooks, most likely due to a lack of time to pursue the project. Time, in fact, was on Jim’s mind more and more—the ticking clock, that feeling of disappearing time, that had seemed to haunt Jim immediately following his brother’s death, was suddenly ticking again. Still performing two, sometimes three shows a day, making live appearances, and now with his responsibilities as a husband and new father, there were days when Jim likely wondered if there would ever be time enough to do all the things he wanted to do—time enough to turn the ideas into reality. Typically, Jim took his own inner strife and turned it into art.

  In late 1959, Jim had mentioned in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor that he had been thinking about starting a recording company. In 1960, perhaps as a dry run, Jim recorded a single for Signature Records featuring two songs he had written, “Tick-Tock Sick” and “The Countryside.” Both allowed Jim to indulge his love of jazz and comedy records—and “Tick-Tock Sick” in particular gave Jim an opportunity to playfully comment on his own busy state of mind in busy 1960.

  Jim performed “Tick-Tock Sick” in a whispery, hepcat style reminiscent of a beatnik poet at an open mike in a coffeehouse, singing over a walking bass line and the sound of a steadily ticking clock. The song starts off as a celebration of the sound of a ticking grandfather clock, but becomes a more sinister set of “calculated clickings” as more and more clocks measure out the days with their ticking. Finally, an
alarm clock clangs loudly, and Jim chucks it out the window, then cathartically smashes the rest of his clocks, vowing never to let the rhythm of his life be determined by the ticking and ringing of clocks. For the twenty-three-year-old Jim, while time could never be truly conquered, it could at least be controlled by slowing down, getting away from deadlines from time to time, and savoring the simpler things. It was advice he would strive to live by—successfully, for the most part—for the rest of his life.

  While Jim may have been vowing in “Tick-Tock Sick” to slow down, that would have to wait—for he was now busier than ever. Sam and Friends was at the height of its popularity, and WRC was wisely using Sam prominently in its promotional materials for the channel’s evening lineup. “Sam is back!” crowed WRC in a September 1960 ad in The Washington Post, as it announced a time change for its newscast, with Sam’s shocked face staring out at readers.

  There were more appearances on the Today show—along with countless other appearances on nearly every other variety or talk show of the day—with Jim and Jane again piped in to Dave Garroway’s New York studio on a live feed from WRC in Washington. In one notable Today show appearance—in which Garroway introduced Jim and Jane as “two of the most interesting people ever”—Jim and Jane gave two particularly spirited performances. The first had Kermit and a vaguely-humanoid Muppet named Chicken Liver lip-synching to “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” with Jim as Kermit turning in a rollicking and very convincing banjo solo, while Jane enthusiastically performed Chicken Liver pounding away on an old piano. The next piece was one of their regular crowd-pleasers—Jim had a growing selection of proven Muppet performances he would use regularly—performing to Louis Prima and Keely Smith’s “That Old Black Magic,” with Kermit vamping it up in a dark wig and Sam miming to the lead vocal. It was another whopping success.