Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  But Brillstein was persistent. “Here’s what you have to do,” he told Jim. “First of all, you have to do it for the fans, for the kids. Second of all, you’ll have complete control of it, and you control the quality. Third of all, if it works like I think it’s gonna work, you will be financially independent and you can use the money for your own independence and creativity and no one will ever tell you what to do again.”

  With Brillstein’s enthusiastic advice still ringing in his ears, Jim met with Joan Cooney to discuss the possibilities of merchandising Sesame Street. Jim brought with him Jay Emmett, head of the Licensing Corporation of America, which had managed marketing for organizations like the National Football League and handled the merchandising of Superman and Batman for National Publications. It was Jim’s intention to have Emmett independently coordinate all the Sesame Street–related marketing—meaning he would be an employee of neither Henson Associates nor CTW. Cooney, however, had other ideas.

  “I said no,” said Cooney, who wanted merchandising controlled inside CTW, “and Jim and I had one of our little tiffs.… Jim could actually do no wrong for me, and I think that was true for him with me. I very seldom said no to him.” But in this, Cooney stood firm—and Jim eventually agreed that merchandising for Sesame Street would be managed at CTW, in a new division headed by twenty-nine-year-old Christopher Cerf, a former senior editor at Random House. The basic agreement that Jim and CTW had negotiated in 1969—in which Jim would continue to retain ownership of his characters, and split any merchandise-related profits with CTW—would remain in place. The mechanics of that agreement, however—including exactly how those profits would be split—was another matter.

  Both Jim and CTW agreed that quality and value should drive the product. “Our bottom line consideration,” stressed Jim, “is to stay cost conscious and make sure the product remains a good value.” On CTW’s end, any contract Cerf negotiated required that merchandise “receive the widest possible distribution” and be “available at the lowest possible prices.” Further, Jim’s approval would be required for any Sesame Street products that used Muppet images—which was practically everything.

  The first Sesame Street merchandise Jim and CTW agreed to allow—mostly puppets, books, Colorforms, and puzzles—shipped in the fall of 1971 from Random House, Western Publishing, and Topper Toys. Topper in particular had lobbied hard for the merchandising rights, adding 110,000 square feet to its plant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to meet anticipated demand, allocating $400,000 to marketing, and paying an advance to CTW of $250,000. In the first year alone, Topper estimated it had generated more than $5 million in Sesame Street–related sales, splitting its profits evenly with CTW.

  When it came to profit sharing between CTW and Jim, however, things were less well defined. For the first few years, it was a complicated math problem, as lawyers from Henson Associates and CTW huddled almost weekly to argue over whether a product had “more Muppets or more educational value” and then divided the royalties accordingly. Eventually, the two companies negotiated an agreement that outlined broadly defined categories—music, puppets, stuffed animals—with preset percentages for each company, a structure that remained in place for thirty years.

  The money began to flow faster and deeper than anyone anticipated. Western Publishing’s The Monster at the End of This Book, for instance, featuring Grover in a story written by Jon Stone, sold more than two million copies within a year, with Henson Associates being paid a “designer’s percentage” for the use of Grover. By Jim’s own estimate, Sesame Street’s Muppet merchandising had earned nearly $10 million by the mid-1970s.

  As was his habit, Jim invested most of the money back in the company. While Jim’s percentage from the profits would never be enough to put the company on autopilot, it was sufficient enough for him to start investing in what he jokingly called “research and development,” gradually adding new performers and Muppet designers. The revenue would also provide Jim, as Brillstein had predicted, with the freedom to pursue other projects without worrying about whether they would immediately be profitable. “Jim was incredibly proud of Sesame Street and very protective of it,” said Jerry Juhl. “[But] once that show was established, he suddenly found himself being called Mr. Children’s Television. He was perfectly happy to accept that—but he really wanted to do something else.”

  “His means of expression were always more than just one thing,” said Oz. “He went with the flow, allowed it to happen to him, and then would diversify along the way.… He enjoyed Sesame Street, but he was always doing new things.” At the moment, however, no one knew exactly what this particular new thing was. And neither, really, did Jim.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BIG IDEAS

  1970–1973

  Jim gives a rooftop performance of the gigantic Boss Man Muppet. Trying to shake his image as a children’s performer, Jim tried for years to stage an elaborate all-puppet Broadway show, with increasingly larger and more complicated puppets. (photo credit 7.1)

  THE WEEK BEFORE THANKSGIVING 1970, JIM FLEW TO LOS ANGELES with Frank Oz and Don Sahlin to tape several short segments with Laugh-In ingenue Goldie Hawn for her first solo television special, Pure Goldie. “We can do anything you like,” Jim had helpfully told Hawn’s producer, but the Muppet moments would be brief—Hawn had crammed her hour-long special with five other supportive guest stars jockeying for time. And yet, the Muppet appearance would be memorable, for it was the first time non–Sesame Street viewers would have the opportunity to hear Kermit perform a song that had quickly grown close to Jim’s heart and, within a few years, would be well on its way to becoming a standard.

  During the months they were taping Sesame Street, director Jon Stone and composer Joe Raposo would meet each week at a bar just across the street from CTW headquarters, where the two would discuss the music needed for upcoming episodes. “I’d sit there, and I would give [Joe] just a list of tunes I needed music to,” Stone said. Halfway through Sesame Street’s first season, Stone sat down across from the tunesmith and laid down a requirement for the coming week: “We need a song for a frog.” From that seemingly simple request came one of Raposo’s most endearing tunes: “Bein’ Green,” an anthem for tolerance and self-acceptance that seemed tailor-made as a hymn for the new decade, still struggling with the turbulent civil rights reform, political skepticism, and sputtering idealism that had marked the end of the 1960s. Given the cynicism of the era, then, what makes Raposo’s tune so remarkable—especially as sung by Jim—is its sheer sincerity, never cloying or overly sentimental.

  Jim had first performed the song for a March 1970 episode of Sesame Street, in a quiet moment featuring Kermit sitting alone in a darkened forest. Raposo’s lyrics, while slow and sweet, had a deceptively complex, syncopated structure, at times requiring a bit of verbal gymnastics to make some of the longer phrases fit the music:

  It’s not easy being green—

  It seems you blend in with so many other ordinary things.

  And people tend to pass you over ’cause you’re

  Not standing out like flashy sparkles in the water,

  Or stars in the sky.

  In the first take for Sesame Street, Jim was still feeling his way around the song, half singing and half talking his way through it, at times arriving at the end of the lines slightly ahead of the music. The performance was heartfelt, but Jim would make a better pass at the song for the Sesame Street record later that year, turning in a slightly more upbeat, better-structured performance. As time went on and as Jim performed the song more and more, he would figure out how to get the most from it, slowing it down slightly to give it a more humble, introspective feel, which made the turn into the final verses one of quiet celebration. It was the song’s resolution in the last verse, said Cheryl Henson, that truly fit her father best:

  When green is all there is to be,

  It could make you wonder why.

  But why wonder? Why wonder?

  I am green—and it�
�ll do fine. It’s beautiful,

  And I think it’s what I want to be.

  Jim immediately appreciated the universal appeal of the song—Frank Sinatra had already recorded it for his 1971 album Sinatra & Company—and suggested Kermit sing the tune with Hawn. As it turned out, Kermit—and the Muppets—provided the only notable moments in an otherwise flat hour. Hawn wasn’t surprised at all by the chemistry critics had noticed between her and Kermit. “I really found it so difficult not to believe the Muppets were real,” she said. “They came alive to me and I guess I related to them. It’s amazing. Kermit is a ball of string and felt, yet there is life in that.”

  That Thanksgiving, Jim and his family celebrated the holiday with his parents in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Paul and Betty Henson had moved after Paul’s retirement from the Department of Agriculture. Jim was worried about the effect mandatory retirement might have on his father—“one day he was working, and the next day he had nothing to do,” Jim said sadly—while Betty, meanwhile, was struggling with health issues. In the minds of many, including Jim, the death of Paul Jr. nearly fifteen years earlier had had a corrosive effect on her physical and mental well-being; she was no longer the smiling hostess remembered by Jim’s friends and cousins. Concerned for the health of both his parents, Jim would make an extra effort to visit them regularly, often permitting the Henson children to remain with their grandparents in New Mexico for several weeks at a time.

  As Christmas approached, Jim returned to the editing room to put the final touches on The Great Santa Claus Switch, which was finally scheduled to air on Sunday, December 20. Jim was cutting it close; he was working on the final mix all the way into Saturday the 19th, and was finally pulled from the editing room to celebrate the arrival of an early Christmas present: his fifth and final child, a baby girl he and Jane named Heather. Jim raced to the hospital to visit Jane and his new daughter, passing a walkie-talkie to the rest of the Henson children in the parking lot so they could speak with their parents—and their new sister—as they waved from the hospital window.

  The airing of The Great Santa Claus Switch in December 1970 marked the end of a seven-year effort to bring the show to television—and while the show would never become the holiday standard Jim had hoped, the reaction from critics was warm, even enthusiastic, calling it a “delightful visual treat for the kids … which had adult appeal as well.” Reviewers were particularly fascinated with two new gigantic walkaround Muppets Jim had created for the show, a team of fuzzy monsters named Thog and Thig. “It was their show, no mistaking it,” enthused one critic, while Variety noted, “Henson deserves credit for the new Muppets he devised, especially dullard Uglies Thig and Thog.”

  Jim was particularly pleased with the lovable Thog, and would spend the next few years grooming the character for stardom, pushing him out in front of several live shows and television appearances. But Santa Claus Switch’s most lasting character wouldn’t be Thog, but rather one of its nearly anonymous smaller monsters, a purple, hooked-nose creature named Snarl, who lived in a cigar box. Five years later, the same Muppet would be recycled and slightly remodeled as The Muppet Show’s stunt-loving Gonzo. Just as significantly, the sidekick monsters in Santa Claus Switch were referred to as “frackles”—a word Jerry Juhl would come back to more than a decade later as Muppet writers tried to come up with a name for a new species of Muppet characters.

  Jim spent most of the spring of 1971 working on The Frog Prince, another installment of the Tales from Muppetland series he had started with Hey Cinderella! It was a project Jim was committed to producing quickly, though with Sesame Street taking up much of his time, completing the script had taken longer than he and Juhl had hoped. “Time is slipping away,” wrote producer John T. Ross, who had agreed to co-produce with Diana Birkenfield, “and we don’t have a fortune to work with.” By March, however, with the script approved, Jim was making regular trips from New York to Toronto to oversee the construction of several platformed sets at Robert Lawrence Studios. These were slightly different from the elevated backgrounds of Sesame Street in that entire sets were elevated on struts, where they could be pulled apart and moved around, giving performers and Muppets the freedom to move easily in and out of them.

  In late March, three days after completing work on the second season of Sesame Street, Jim spent nine days directing and performing in The Frog Prince, a relatively faithful adaptation of the classic fairy tale. Unlike the heavily populated Great Santa Claus Switch, which had exhausted the Muppet workshop, Frog Prince relied on a smaller cast, including Kermit and a number of pre-existing Muppets, such as King Goshposh, Taminella Grinderfall, and Featherstone from Tales of the Tinkerdee. Jim also introduced several new characters, including two who would become Muppet regulars, Robin the frog and Sweetums the ogre, an enormous walkaround puppet with working eyes and a gigantic, floppy bulldog mouth.

  In the seven months since Jim’s last visit to Toronto to film Santa Claus Switch, Sesame Street had become an enormous hit in Canada—and when word got out that the Muppets would be filming at Robert Lawrence Studios, Ross was flooded with requests from fans asking if they could come to the studios to watch. “We just can’t get into that, we don’t have the room,” an exasperated Ross told the Toronto Telegram.

  Jim worked quickly, often directing from his knees with the Goshposh costume still pulled over his head. Other times, as his performers rehearsed, Jim would stand slightly off to the side in one of his colorful silk shirts, arms folded, laughing and hmmmming supportively. Jim was willing to rehearse a scene for as long as it took to get it right—and once he was ready, he would roll tape as long as needed. Finally, he would simply say “Lovely”—a sure sign to the Muppet performers that he had what he wanted.

  With editing completed in early April, The Frog Prince aired barely a month later, premiering on CBS on May 11. The production was slick, with strong performances, good songs by Juhl and Joe Raposo, and a clever script—and critics were rightly impressed. “Jim Henson’s Muppets are so humorously conceived, we’ve become terribly fond of them,” said the New York Daily News, while Variety lauded the show for having “both kid and adult appeal,” a sentiment echoed by The Christian Science Monitor. “Jim Henson’s Muppets are so good,” said the Monitor, “they may actually justify the cliche ‘for children and adults alike.’ ”

  Reading his reviews, Jim likely breathed a sigh of relief: in the media, at least, he was beginning to be seen as more than just a children’s entertainer—but that didn’t mean he had to stop continually explaining himself. “Good, solid entertainment is funny for young and old,” he patiently told one reporter. “There is a tendency to think of children’s entertainment versus adult entertainment. It’s possible to have an identical level for both.” Still, he admitted it was difficult to convince adults that puppetry wasn’t just kids’ stuff. “People don’t tend to like [puppets],” Jim said. “They turn off at the idea, but that’s because puppets are generally not well done.”

  That summer, he would have the chance to show just what puppets were capable of in perhaps the most adult venue of all: throbbing, glittering Las Vegas. In May 1971, Jim spent several days in Las Vegas meeting with the vivacious Nancy Sinatra, who was hoping the Muppets could help her make her mark with a show of her own in a town already conquered by her famous father. Jim was excited about the idea of performing in a live show in a large venue—and the location Sinatra had chosen was huge indeed: the newly opened Hilton International, at that time the largest hotel in the world and featuring a showroom that seated more than 1,500. A room that size would require larger puppets, which could be more easily seen than regular-sized Muppets. With that in mind, Jim had set to work putting together new puppets and a new show designed specifically for a sizable Vegas audience in an equally sizable room.

  It was hard work. Each evening, Jim, Oz, and Jerry Nelson would rehearse until nearly 2:00 A.M., then return to their hotel rooms, exhausted, to sleep until noon. Once the novelty o
f hitting the casinos or the spas wore off, Jim grew restless during the day and called Jerry Juhl in California to beg for his company—a request Juhl was happy to oblige. “Jim was going crazy,” said Juhl. “The days stretched before him endlessly.” With the sun scorching down on them, Jim and Juhl would sit poolside at the Hilton, tinkering with the enigmatic Tale of Sand screenplay they had begun in the early 1960s or bouncing ideas off each other for further Tales from Muppetland specials.

  Sinatra’s show, which opened on a baking hot June 8, was acclaimed by critics as “big, busy, colorful, exciting and highly entertaining.” But it was the Muppets—jostling for time alongside Frank Sinatra, Jr., and the flamboyant boxer Sugar Ray Robinson—who most reviewers agreed “brought down the house.” “We tried to put together material we thought would work in terms of large movement and color,” explained Jim. “There is that whole feeling of brotherhood and kindness and gentleness beneath it all but the idea here is to entertain.”

  The Muppets were given the plum position of opening the show, launching into the popular “Mahna Mahna” routine, featuring oversized versions of the Muppets he had used on The Ed Sullivan Show. Between musical numbers and sketches, Jim also took the opportunity to unveil one of his most ambitious puppets yet: a two-story, vaguely insectoid figure that appeared to be made of giant pipe cleaners, who danced and sang to the Luther Dixon and Al Smith blues tune “Big Boss Man.” The character—which Jim would forever refer to simply as “Boss Man”—was essentially a gigantic rod puppet that Jim strapped himself into, standing onstage visibly harnessed to the puppet as he danced it around the set—a peek behind the puppetry process that one reviewer found “jarring.”

  Jim was delighted with the Vegas show and with the experience of performing live again. Yet although the Sinatra show was hailed as family entertainment, appealing to more than just the preschool set, Jim was still finding it hard to escape from the shadow of Sesame Street and had to continually steer reporters away from talking solely about his work for CTW. “I don’t particularly like people to think that is all we do,” he told one reporter somewhat impatiently. “We have always worked in the realm of adults. Maybe that’s why we are here [in Vegas].”