Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  Well, mostly. Years later, Jim took great pleasure in displaying a copy of a postcard the Muppet team had sent from London to the cast of Saturday Night Live, pasting it to a piece of paper under block letters asking WHERE ARE THE MUCKING FUPPETS? “Dear Gang,” the postcard read, “We’re having a wonderful time here in England. We’re doing our own show and it’s a big hit.”

  Within a year, Jim and the Muppets would be the biggest act in England; in less than two years they would take the United States by storm. And before the decade was over, The Muppet Show would be the most popular show in the world.

  Mucking Fuppets indeed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  MUPPETMANIA

  1975–1977

  The second season (1977–1978) cast of performers on The Muppet Show. Clockwise from bottom left: Dave Goelz, Jerry Nelson, Jim, Frank Oz, Richard Hunt, and Louise Gold. (photo credit 9.1)

  IT MAY SEEM EXTRAORDINARY THAT A TELEVISION SERIES FEATURING A gonzo daredevil who eats a tire to “Flight of the Bumblebee” would have appealed to a British lord—but Lord Lew Grade was an extraordinary man. Born Louis Winogradsky in Russia in 1906, Grade’s family immigrated to London’s East End in 1912, where he went to school and spent several years working in his father’s constantly struggling embroidery company. In 1926, Grade broke into show business, wowing British vaudeville audiences by frantically dancing the Charleston on narrow tabletops—a stunt worthy of the Great Gonzo himself.

  When perpetually swollen knees ended his dancing career, Grade became a theatrical agent, landing bookings for A-listers like Judy Garland and Danny Kaye at venues like the Palladium or on British television variety shows. Unlike many agents who had cut their teeth on theater bookings, Grade was quick to embrace the new television medium, and in 1954—the same year seventeen-year-old Jim Henson was first performing with his Muppets on the Junior Morning Show in Washington, D.C.—Grade founded his own TV company, which eventually became the juggernaut, Associated Television, or ATV.

  Grade himself was as familiar to British audiences as his booming network, frequently photographed at premieres emerging from his Rolls-Royce Phantom with smoke from one of his enormous cigars curling around his piebald head. A “British Louis B. Mayer,” Oz called him, and the comparison was apt—for Grade was not only an old-fashioned showman, but a shrewd businessman as well. In fact, his offer to produce The Muppet Show had both fiscal and artistic benefits. ATV’s Elstree studios were sitting largely empty and unused in London, a red mark on ATV’s books. So with Jim committed to producing twenty-four episodes at Elstree—and with five CBS stations in the United States already obligated to pick up the series—The Muppet Show would ensure the lights stayed on at Elstree.

  For Jim, the prospect of picking up and moving to London was no more daunting than the snap decision to move from D.C. to New York had been nearly fifteen years ago. After learning of the deal that would bring The Muppet Show to London, one of Jim’s first phone calls was to Jerry Juhl out in California to ask the writer if he would pack up and follow him out to England. Jim couldn’t offer Juhl the head writer job—one of the few conditions on which Grade and Mandell had insisted was that Jim hire an experienced television variety show writer as his lead writer. It was a slight that Jim knew would bruise Juhl’s feelings, and Jim—always one to avoid hurting feelings as much as he could—had written out a list of sympathetic talking points to use during his phone call. The approach worked, and Juhl, who had dutifully made the move from D.C. to New York with Jim in 1963, promised to join the Muppet team in London in 1976, where he would serve—for a while, grudgingly—under lead writer Jack Burns, an experienced stand-up comic who, along with his partner, Avery Schreiber, was a veteran of perhaps as many variety shows as Jim.

  In early November 1975, Jim began meeting regularly with Burns and Juhl in Los Angeles and New York to go over the dynamics and structure of the show—including nailing down the important but always problematic question of where, exactly, the show would be taking place. As Juhl remembered it, after several days of “talking around ideas” they finally settled on a “show-within-a-show” format, in which the Muppets would be working each week to put on a vaudeville show in an old theater, with action taking place both onstage and backstage. It was a format, said Juhl, that “[none] of us were convinced … was gonna work.”

  Jim, however, liked it—and with some help from Bernie Brillstein, who set the writers up in an office near the Beverly Wilshire, Burns and Juhl began hammering out scripts for the first few episodes, which Jim was planning to put before the cameras at Elstree in January 1976, only a few short weeks away. In early December, Jim flew to London with Brillstein and David Lazer to look over the facilities at Elstree and prepare a number of offices and workspaces that had been set aside by the studios specifically for Henson Associates—including an area for a fully functional Muppet workshop where puppets could be designed, built, and repaired on site, rather than in the workshop in New York at least a day’s flight away. Satisfied, Jim came home for Christmas and a bit of skiing in Vermont. On January 11, 1976, he returned to London to begin work on the first two episodes of The Muppet Show.

  Although Jim had an agreement in place that guaranteed him twenty-four episodes for the first season, much was riding on the first two episodes of the show, which were essentially considered pilots for the new series. While Brillstein had five local CBS stations on the hook to broadcast the series, there was no guarantee the show would be picked up beyond those five. What was needed, then, were one or two strong episodes that either Brillstein or Abe Mandell at ITC could circulate to promote and sell the series. More than anything, the first two episodes were Jim’s chance to spot-check his new format, get a feel for several new characters—namely Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, and Scooter—and show his new partners at ATV what he could do.

  One of the first real challenges, however, was finding guest stars. As a syndicated show targeted at the pre-prime-time access hour—and a puppet show at that—The Muppet Show had at the outset what many booking agents likely regarded as two strikes against it. Appearing outside of prime time, their client would already likely have a smaller viewing audience; worse, in syndication—still viewed as the wasteland of television—they might have no audience at all. Further, the pay wasn’t great; most of the budget for The Muppet Show was wrapped up in design and production, which didn’t leave a lot left over to entice guests. Most would be paid a flat rate of $3,500 for their appearance—“very, very little money,” said Lazer.

  It was left largely up to Brillstein to make the pitch and appeal to clients and agents. For the first two shows—and much of the first season, in fact—Brillstein dug into his personal Rolodex and called in a few favors, courting and finally landing dancer Juliet Prowse for the first show and actress Connie Stevens for the second. “The first … guests were … friends of mine who did favors,” said Brillstein. “We couldn’t get anyone else.… They did the show for me.” Taping for both episodes went quickly—each show was filmed in less than a week—and on February 14, Jim returned to the United States to screen the two pilots with Abe Mandell and ITC executives in New York.

  Things didn’t go well. “We got a blood bath,” said Lazer flatly. “They hated them.” In Mandell’s opinion, the pilots were “too British” and exactly what Grade didn’t want. “Grade had told us, ‘Don’t be British,’ ” said Oz, and even Juhl admitted the shows “were all wrong.” Most likely, the two episodes were just too talky, with an overly long opening credit sequence that Jim wisely cut down. Regardless, said Lazer, “Jim was pissed at them!” Jim stalked out of the screening in silence and started walking with Lazer back toward the Muppet offices when, after only a few blocks, he suddenly started laughing. The tension was broken, and Lazer pulled Jim into the bar at the Drake Hotel where the two commiserated over Bloody Marys at eleven in the morning. “It’s not the end of the world,” Jim reassuringly told Lazer between sips, and resolved to go back and re-edit the show, and ev
en refilm several Muppet sequences. Jim “was hurt … his guts are on the screen,” said Lazer. But Mandell had also picked up on what Lazer thought was a larger problem with the pilots. “In truth, the characters hadn’t gelled then,” said Lazer. “Character voices weren’t good. And so we went back, rehuddled, and did it again.”

  Jim had taken a risk in building The Muppet Show around an entirely new cast of Muppet characters. There was a chance that viewers who knew the Muppets largely through Sesame Street might tune in to The Muppet Show expecting to see familiar faces and, seeing none, would tune out and never come back. Trying to manage such expectations, Jim had brought in Ernie and Bert for an appearance in the second episode, as if to reassure Sesame Street fans that they were peeking into the windows of the right house, even if they didn’t recognize most of the other occupants. Jim also put an established character at the head of the show, wisely placing the reliable Kermit the Frog in the eye of the Muppet hurricane.

  If there was a problem with any of the characters in the pilot episodes, however, it was with the one envisioned as Kermit’s sidekick: the joke-telling, ear-wiggling, much abused stand-up comic Fozzie Bear. “We knew we wanted to have a stand up comedian,” said Jim. “We had in mind a Red Skelton–type of character that was a bundle of anxieties off stage and a gung ho story teller up front.” Unfortunately, in the early episodes, “Fozzie was a disaster,” said Juhl. “We said … ‘this is a bad comedian,’ and so we put him onstage and let him be bad … and it was embarrassing.” Worse, the razzing Fozzie received at the hands of the curmudgeonly Statler and Waldorf, heckling from the balcony, only made the character seem more pathetic, rather than funnier. “Fozzie did help make Statler and Waldorf because he was good to heckle,” said Juhl, “but what we did to him in those first few shows was terrible. We just humiliated the poor guy.”

  Fozzie was intended to be Oz’s main character, and the perfectionist Oz was frustrated that he couldn’t get a handle on the bear. “Frank was dying, because he knew it was bad and didn’t know what to do with it,” said Juhl. Jim promised to keep tinkering with the puppet to see if perhaps a change in design might spark something, similar to the way in which the slight change in Big Bird’s eyes and plumage had helped Caroll Spinney get a firm hold on that character’s core personality. Juhl, meanwhile, blamed himself and the writing team for the character’s rough start. Writing scripts in California for a show produced in London, said Juhl, was like “working in a vacuum. There was no interplay with the performers, there was no sense of fun and excitement.… Jim and I knew there was a possibility that we would just start over again in London.” For Juhl, that interaction with the Muppet performers was crucial to the creative process. Once he was on the ground in London, watching rehearsals and working among the performers, Juhl thought he might finally “find that bear as a character.”

  In the meantime, he and Burns would keep producing scripts and sketches as quickly as they could, in the hope that once the Muppet team relocated to London in May to begin producing shows in earnest, there would be enough material available to produce one show per week. Until then, Jim still had plenty to do that spring, taping inserts for Sesame Street, traveling with the family to Hawaii and Japan, and making a few more appearances on Saturday Night Live. Jim convinced SNL’s writers to let him script one of the Muppets’ final appearances on the show, turning in a clever, and uncredited, script in which the Muppets finally realize they’re puppets and pack themselves away in a trunk—a nice bit of closure for SNL’s problematic puppets.

  Jim left for England on May 5, 1976, taking his time by traveling on the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2 with Jane, Jack Burns, and several Muppet performers. London would be Jim’s home for six months of the year now, so he had made arrangements to move into a flat in Harley Gardens, in the fashionable Kensington district. Jane would remain with Jim in London for only a few weeks, helping him settle in and decorate his flat before returning to New York. The Muppet performers, meanwhile, were scattered around central London in hotels or flats that Jim had helped them find and, in some cases, had negotiated an affordable rent. Each year, in fact, Jim would send each Muppet performer a brief questionnaire, asking where in London they wanted to live and what kind of accommodations they needed (most asked for a “real shower”), and would then make the appropriate arrangements. “[Jim was] accused of spoiling everyone,” laughed Lazer.

  Not that any of them were going to be spending much time in their flats anyway. During each season of The Muppet Show’s five-year run, Jim would produce one show each week for twelve weeks—usually from early May until late July or August—then, after a brief break, shoot the remaining twelve episodes of the season from September through November. Such a schedule meant that on almost any given day, the Muppet team could be working on at least three shows at one time—filming the current episode, doing editing and postproduction on the previous week’s show, and writing and building sets for upcoming episodes.

  Fortunately, Grade was committed to providing Jim with everything he needed to produce The Muppet Show without ever having to set foot outside of ATV’s Elstree studio complex. In fact, the facilities at Elstree were some of the best in the United Kingdom—fifteen acres of stages, editing rooms, warehouses, and offices, all professionally laid out, splendidly equipped, and superbly maintained solely for television production. At the center of the compound were four massive studios, and Jim and the Muppets had been assigned Studio D, perhaps the best of the four. It was immediately adjacent to an editing area and the closest to Elstree’s main office building, an L-shaped, six-story, glass-fronted structure called the Neptune House, a tip of the hat to Neptune Studios, which had constructed the first film studio at Elstree back in 1914. Grade had set aside part of the third floor of the Neptune House for Henson Associates, giving Jim a place to set up offices for himself and Lazer, as well as conference areas and rooms for Juhl and the writing team—“The Muppet Suite,” as Jim would call it.

  For most of the 1960s, the cavernous Studio D at Elstree had been the home to the popular Morecambe and Wise variety show, filmed in front of a live studio audience of about 350 people, sitting in a raised, auditorium-like seating area along one wall. Normally, the spacious rooms under the seats were used for storing large equipment—but Jim had other plans for the space, and cleared them out to make room for a Muppet workshop, just steps away from the studio floor. “We were setting up with this room that had nothing in it but a bunch of black cases that we brought over,” said Bonnie Erickson, who had been assigned by Jim the task of setting up and overseeing the Elstree workshop. Erickson had converted the cramped but cozy space into a veritable Muppet factory, pushing in workbenches and tables and lining the walls with makeshift metal shelves sagging under the weight of boxes filled with costumes, fur, feathers, and eyes. Here Muppets could be quickly built, repaired, clothed, or modified without the need for materials from New York or even the costume or prop shop at Elstree. “We prided ourselves on the fact that nobody from the set shop or from the costuming took any time away from the shooting schedule, because we knew how valuable that time was,” said Erickson.

  Time was indeed a precious commodity, for Jim and the Muppet team were working at a breakneck pace. A typical work week began at 10:00 A.M. on Sunday, when the Muppet team—writers, performers, builders, and musicians—would gather in Elstree’s Rehearsal Room 7/8 on the fourth floor of the Neptune House for the first read-through of the script with the guest star. It was Jim’s policy that guest stars would be treated well, and therefore it only made sense that they be placed in the care of the suave, smooth-talking Lazer, who made sure guests were ferried around London in style—often in Lew Grade’s own limousine—and stayed in first-rate hotels. Especially in that critical first season, when Jim felt the guest stars were “slightly sticking their necks out” working on an untested show for not much money, he wanted as few surprises for them as possible. For that reason, Lazer would often go to the guest’s ho
tel the night before the read-through to personally deliver the script and address any questions or concerns.

  At the read-through, the crew sat facing each other at long Formica-topped tables pushed into a loose rectangle, reading the script aloud and in character, with Burns or Juhl reading out the scripted stage directions. Folding himself into one of the rehearsal room’s hard plastic shell chairs, Jim would scribble notes on his script as he read aloud his parts—sliding easily into the characters of Kermit or Dr. Teeth or the Muppet Newsman—and noting where additional puppets might be needed to fill in a crowd scene, or where an ad-libbed line worked better. Juhl, long used to watching Jim and Oz “talk around” a Sesame Street script, actively encouraged ad-libbing among the Muppet performers, as he thought such spontaneity gave him additional insights into the characters that made them that much more interesting to write. “Let’s leave that in,” Juhl would say excitedly as he scratched out the old line in his script and replaced it with the ad-lib.

  Once the read-through was finished, the performers and musicians would head for what they called “The Music Hall,” which was actually just the far end of the rehearsal room where a Bosendorfer piano, painted battleship gray, squatted among a scattering of chairs. Here they would rehearse any songs for the coming week, enthusiastically performing their own routines or practicing harmonies as they backed up the guest star. While Jim could barely read treble clef and only tinkle at the piano—and often joked that he could barely sing—his passion more than made up for his lack of technique. During rehearsals, Jim would always sing with gusto, gleefully announcing a key change by calling out “Modulate!”—a habit that so amused Frank Oz that he would incorporate it into the personality of the unconventional Muppet musician Marvin Suggs.