Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  Fortunately for Jim, Lord Grade was much the same way—and when Jim approached the ATV chief in late 1977 to discuss the possibility of financing a Muppet movie, he found Grade remarkably receptive. Grade, said Bernie Brillstein, “was the only one who understood” Jim’s conviction that the Muppets could work on the big screen, and listened and nodded enthusiastically as Jim made his pitch. It wasn’t until Jim mentioned the budget he had in mind that Grade finally arched an eyebrow. At a time when most Disney movies were budgeted at just over a million dollars, Jim was asking for $8 million for his film. As always, Jim’s “whim of steel” was tough to resist. “Lew Grade, being a true gentleman, went ahead with it,” said Brillstein admiringly.

  What Grade didn’t know was that Jim already had in the planning stages not just one movie, but two—and typically, Jim would juggle both projects at once. Even as he set to work on a rough story outline for The Muppet Movie with Muppet Show writer Jack Burns, Jim had already been talking for months with British fantasy artist Brian Froud about collaborating on some sort of yet-to-be-determined fantasy film. While The Muppet Movie would be the priority, the fantasy film would be Jim’s pet project, a creative sandbox where he hoped to build and play and extend puppetry beyond the Muppets.

  It had started with a drawing. “I saw Brian Froud’s work in a couple of books, and I loved what he did,” said Jim. Froud—a puckish, bespectacled Englishman with a mop of curly hair—didn’t so much draw as he conjured, sketching out beautiful, ethereal worlds populated by trolls and fairies and elves and ogres, all penciled in a highly detailed, sumptuous style with a vaguely Victorian shimmer. Froud honestly believed in fairies, and it showed; his work was brimming with mood and atmosphere, and Jim was enchanted with Froud’s vision—he had been particularly taken with a drawing of a young adventurer gazing up into a waterfall cascading over a carved troll—and couldn’t wait to start bringing his drawings to life. “The thought of being able to take those designs and convert them into three dimensions,” Jim said, “was really exciting.”

  Even before meeting Jim, Froud was already considering doing some sort of project featuring tangible versions of his illustrations, and puppetry seemed the ideal art form to bring his visions to life. Jim had brought Froud to the Muppet workshop at Elstree over the summer so he could see how the Muppet builders worked, and Froud had been immediately intrigued by the Land of Gortch puppets performed on Saturday Night Live, with their mossy bodies and glistening taxidermy eyes. It was enough to convince Froud that Jim was his man. “Make deal with Brian Froud to do great film,” Jim wrote excitedly in his journal in August 1977. The enthusiastic agreement that would eventually spawn The Dark Crystal was in place.

  Things would begin to take a bit of shape in early 1978, when Jim and Froud began an extended series of morning meetings in New York to try to determine what their movie would be about. “I’m very enthused,” wrote Jim in his diary. Rather than trying to develop a story first—never Jim’s strongest suit—he was more interested in fleshing out the underlying concept, as well as the look and feel of the world and the characters inhabiting it. He found a willing collaborator in Froud, who filled the backgrounds of his art with intriguing, often unnoticed, details. “When I talked to Brian about the possibility of handing him the whole conceptual side of the project—so that he would be responsible for the look of all the characters and sets, the whole world—I think he found that a delightful challenge.” That approach, while artistically satisfying, still didn’t result in much beyond a vague description of “a pantheistic world in which mountains sang to one another and forests were alive.”

  With that sort of worldview, then, it was perhaps fitting that it was a snowstorm that finally nudged Jim into drafting the first rough story outline for the film. In early February, as Jim and sixteen-year-old Cheryl were preparing to leave for London on the Concorde, a massive snowstorm dumped two feet of snow on New York, stranding the two of them at John F. Kennedy Airport. “I was trying to figure out how I could find a few days to work on [the story outline],” Jim recalled later, “and there it was!” He and Cheryl checked into the Howard Johnson’s motel next to the airport and spent two days writing. “I really had a delightful time working on the concept—and talking it over with Cheryl,” wrote Jim in his diary, “and it all jelled during that time, so that I’m quite happy with the way it has begun taking shape.” It was only a skeleton of a story, but he and Cheryl had fleshed out some of the basic plot elements, including the central idea “for the evil characters to be a split from the good characters.” “All kinds of things came together,” wrote Jim. They had even come up with a name for the film: The Crystal. It was a good start.

  Jim finally made it to London by Valentine’s Day, commuting from his flat in Frognal Gardens to the workshop at Elstree in a brand-new Kermit-green Lotus with a license plate reading KERMIT, a gift to him from Lord Grade to celebrate their success. “I love it!” Jim wrote excitedly in his diary. “I’ve always enjoyed cars—and I enjoy being in love with my car.” It was lean and low-slung, and Jim “looked like he belonged in that car,” said Lazer. “He loved it.”

  In New York, builders were at work on a new full-body walkaround Muppet for Sesame Street, a large shaggy dog named Barkley, while in London, production was ramping up for the third season of The Muppet Show. The success of The Muppet Show had meant more than just fame or high ratings; it also meant the workshop at Elstree was becoming a destination, almost a kind of Mecca, for Muppet fans. “Unlike other TV studios, [ATV is] all quite open,” said Muppet Show director Peter Harris, “and we’ve had parents bringing their kids in to watch it all happening.” Tours of Studio D and the Muppet workshop became so popular, in fact, that Jim had to put up a sign in the workshop politely asking visitors not to “fondle, molest, handle, touch or tweak” any of the two hundred Muppets hanging neatly on pegs around the room (“They hate being tweaked,” joked Jim). On any given day, there could be several different versions of Kermit being clothed or repaired on workbenches, which led more than one tourist to ask which puppet was the real Kermit. “They’re all the real one,” Jim would grin in response.

  While he tolerated visitors to the set, producer David Lazer would wince when tourists began taking photos of Muppets hanging lifelessly on the studio walls. He didn’t like for people to see the puppets looking, as he called it, “dead.” That never bothered Jim, who could still toss a Muppet on a bench or the floor as easily as he had tossed members of the Sam and Friends cast into the Henson toy boxes. Caroll Spinney remembered being shocked when Jim once pulled Ernie off his arm and casually cast the character aside. Spinney scooped up the discarded puppet, cradled it in his arms and assured Ernie that Jim “hadn’t meant” to do it. When Spinney explained to Jim that he always apologized to a dropped puppet, Jim could only smile; to Jim, they were simply tools of their craft. “I’m not sentimental about them,” he told Spinney.

  In the past year, workshop staff had grown from twelve designers and builders to more than twenty, split between New York and London. The London workshop was now overseen by Amy van Gilder, a vivacious designer and builder who had been assigned the post following the departure of Bonnie Erickson, who left to form her own company. It had been an emotional farewell for Erickson. “I cried; Jim didn’t,” she said later, laughing. For Jim, it was just the natural progression of things—people came, people went. “This is what you need to do,” he told her, “and we’re not going to lose touch.” They never did. “Jim always said that you are where you are because that’s where you need to be,” said Erickson, “and if you need to move on, you will move on.… He was not worried that people went off to do their own thing because he knew that other people were coming in. He felt it was really important to have fresh, new ideas.”

  The new year would bring another loss that was more heartbreaking. On February 20, forty-nine-year-old Don Sahlin was found dead in his ransacked New York City apartment. Police never determined if Sahlin had
been the victim of a crime; instead, the cause of death was listed as fatty liver—but either conclusion was puzzling. Muppet builders had long grown used to Sahlin’s habit of leaving the Muppet workshop each day at 4:30 and climbing into a cab at the end of the block, then enigmatically returning to the workshop hours later. When asked where he went, Sahlin would only insist it was a personal matter. “Don was extremely private,” said Dave Goelz. “He was always claiming [health issues], but it seemed like a joke.”

  Lazer, who had taken the call from Sahlin’s family in the Muppet Suite, delivered the news to Jim as gently as he could. “He just stared at me,” said Lazer. “His jaw dropped, his mouth just opened, and he stared.” As the news spread through the Muppet organization, everyone seemed to naturally gravitate toward the workshop that Sahlin had called home. Oz remembered Jim and the Muppet team lingering in the workshop in stunned silence. “I was standing there crying, I was really angry,” said Oz. But Jim didn’t cry. Lazer thought perhaps Jim didn’t want to be seen crying in front of staff—“He thought maybe showing feelings was like a weakness at times,” offered Lazer—but that wasn’t it, either.

  Oz—who knew Jim perhaps better than anyone—understood. “Jim said, ‘It’s okay, we’ll see Don again,’ ” said Oz, “and he really believed it.” It was yet another facet of Jim’s self-proclaimed ridiculous optimism. “In some ways, he didn’t allow himself to not be an optimist,” said Jane—and Jim took comfort in the firm belief that, somehow or other, whether on another plane of existence or perhaps in another life, he and Sahlin would work and play together once more. “I’m sure he will go on and do many more things,” Jim wrote of Sahlin in the days following his death, “and I’m sure we will be together again sometime—for there is certainly a loving and creative bond between us.” Four days later, Jim, Lazer, Oz, and Goelz took the Concorde from London to New York to attend Sahlin’s funeral, returning to London that same evening. Shortly thereafter, Jim would honor Sahlin by dedicating one of the memorial benches in Hampstead Heath to the Muppet builder’s memory. Life would go on, but Sahlin’s death, said Oz, “was a huge, massive impact for us personally and professionally.”

  Production on The Muppet Show’s third season began in London in early April. The Muppet cast had expanded again, with the addition of the characters like the boomerang-fish-throwing Lew Zealand—performed by Nelson in what he called his “Frankie Fontaine voice”—and the earnest Beauregard the janitor, a character Goelz loved, but whose passive nature frustrated Muppet writers. With the Muppet cast growing, Jim had also decided to hire additional performers—and late in the second season had brought in a young English actress named Louise Gold, who had interviewed with Jim at the encouragement of her agent, who thought her dynamic voice might make up for her initial lack of puppetry skills. He was right, though Gold always joked that she had been hired mainly because, at five foot nine, she was one of the few women tall enough to perform alongside the taller male performers. Nevertheless, Gold took to puppetry quickly, performing right hands with Jim before moving on to characters of her own before the season was over, including Annie Sue, Miss Piggy’s adoring—and aspiring—rival with the big singing voice.

  Like Fran Brill on Sesame Street, Gold had immediately fit in with the Muppet Show performers. “Everyone here’s lovely,” she told the British newspapers, admitting that “puppeteering is a very difficult craft to do really well.” Her major strength as a performer—and one of her most endearing traits—was an ability to see almost anything, including herself, as slightly silly, an outlook she shared with Jim. “She was just out there and ready to make fun of herself,” said Brian Henson, “and she was adorable.”

  Another new performer, hired just before work began on the third season, was an eighteen-year-old puppeteer and Muppet enthusiast from Atlanta named Steve Whitmire, who, at the urging of Caroll Spinney, had boldly cold-called the New York Muppet workshop and landed an audition. As it turned out, Jane Henson had been on her way south to inspect the Kermit the Frog balloon being constructed for the 1977 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and offered to meet Whitmire at the Atlanta airport for an audition and interview. Whitmire showed up with a cardboard footlocker full of puppets he had performed on Atlanta television—reminiscent of Jim, who had lugged black boxes of Muppets from one job to another—but “there really was no place [to talk],” recalled Jane, “so we sat down in a little café kind of place, and he pulled out a puppet.”

  With diners and coffee drinkers looking on, Whitmire and his puppet began chatting with several delighted children seated nearby. “I was just so impressed with the way he handled the situation,” said Jane, who recommended that Jim personally interview the young puppeteer. Jane’s instincts—as usual—were right, and after a brief interview with Jim, Whitmire was hired and dispatched to London to join The Muppet Show team in the spring of 1978. Like Gold, he would spend time performing right hands and background puppets before being given recurring characters like Miss Piggy’s dog, Foo Foo, and Rizzo the Rat.

  Jim believed that puppetry—especially the Muppet brand of puppetry—required the same kind of serious time and training that great actors devoted to their craft. “Muppet operators must be good actors, good technicians, preferably good singers … and occasionally good dancers. It’s like being a television star by proxy.” Jim was committed to the idea of his performers learning by doing, serving apprenticeships of right hands and background characters, then being handed more and more responsibilities and visible roles as their skills improved. “One thing about being a puppeteer is it really takes a long time to learn how to do it,” said Jim. “And people who join us, you usually have to do it for about a year before the puppetry gets sort of good enough to be able to handle major parts.” Ultimately, said Jim, “I like working collaboratively with people. I have a terrific group of people who work with me, and I think of the work that we do as ‘our’ work.”

  By the third season of The Muppet Show, however, more and more of the media’s hurricane was revolving around the show’s break-out star—Miss Piggy—and, consequently, on her performer, Frank Oz. Oz claimed he scarcely noticed the attention lavished on Piggy—“I had other characters to do, after all,” he said coyly—and Jim, too, seemed unfazed, generously praising Oz as “probably the person most responsible for the Muppets being funny.” But for some Muppet performers, long used to the collegial atmosphere Jim encouraged on the set, it was tough to see one puppeteer promoted above the rest.

  Richard Hunt, who had worked alongside Jim and Oz for eight years, admitted to hurt feelings. Both Oz and Jim, he thought, were “distancing themselves” from the rest of the performers as the Muppets grew in popularity. “It was very hard on us,” said Hunt, “especially Jerry [Nelson, who] was very equal with them” as a performer on Sesame Street. At one point, Nelson had even confronted Jim at a party, demanding to know why he wasn’t being used more—a question Jim left hanging in the air. (Lazer later said it was because Nelson—at times emotionally ragged and admittedly drinking too much while coping with the challenges of raising a child with cystic fibrosis—had a tendency to “freeze a little bit.”) For his own part, said Hunt, “I knew I was a great supporting player … but Jim and Frank had separated themselves and that in turn was at the expense of some of the others.” Still, Hunt tried to be diplomatic. “Jim owned the company, and Frank was an essential.… You can’t focus on everyone.”

  Oz understood the bruised feelings. “I was the workhorse, the go-to guy,” he said. “I would say to Jim, ‘You’ve got to give stuff to the other guys!’ I worked really hard—Jim and I worked hard—but I sometimes felt I was getting all the work, and I know the other guys did, too.” Performances aside, there were other divisive differences as well. For one thing, Oz had the additional perk of receiving a “creative consultant” credit on The Muppet Show, which meant, as Oz described it, “I didn’t write, but I got to sit in on all the writing sessions and meetings and didn’t get thrown out.
And I would let them know when I thought something didn’t work.” That was putting it mildly. “He would sit right with the writers … and he would just slash line after line to condense it,” said Lazer, “and the writers resented it, but they knew it was for their own good, too, because if the character was great, they were great.”

  In many respects, the elevation of Oz was due to Lazer, who made the decision to provide Oz with his own dressing room, as well as with his own separate performance credit, tagging “and Frank Oz” at the end of the alphabetical list of Muppet performers in The Muppet Show’s closing credits. “The other people resented it,” Lazer admitted later, but he never regretted the decision. Oz was responsible for too many of the major Muppet characters, and Lazer “wanted to give Frank this kind of respect.” Hunt may have rolled his eyes, but he eventually came to understand that treating Oz with a certain level of respect didn’t mean Jim didn’t value the rest of his team. “There’s a sub-level that makes you think that, ‘Well, these are the important ones, and we’re just here,’ ” Hunt said later. “It took me years to realize the untruth of that.”

  Ultimately, thought Lazer, the dynamics between the Muppet performers were much like the dynamics between the Muppets themselves. “[The Muppets] may be fighting with one another and have interpersonal problems, but they were always united in their support of one another,” said Lazer. “And this is what Jim does. There’s always a little hell going on, because everyone’s vying for Jim’s attention. But somehow, when he pulled it together, we’d support one another and we’d go on.”

  And go on they did, sprinting through a frantic spring schedule in which they completed eight episodes of The Muppet Show in six weeks. As the show entered its third season, the Muppets were more popular than ever, and ITC’s Abe Mandell gleefully reported that The Muppet Show had now been sold in 106 countries, with a total audience of 235 million (a number Henson Associates willingly circulated, even as some privately joked that Mandell would soon be claiming a viewership larger than the world’s population). It could even be seen by millions of viewers inside the Soviet sphere, including Hungary and Romania, where the show ran with subtitles, and East Germany, which dubbed the episodes in the native language (“I hope they manage to make the jokes funny,” Jim said nervously. “A language gap is always a problem.”) “[It’s] almost certainly the most popular television entertainment now being produced on Earth,” declared Time magazine matter-of-factly, and called Jim “the rarest of creatures in the imitative and adaptive world of entertainment: an originator.” To others, he was, quite simply, “the new Walt Disney.” Jim would likely have argued that he wasn’t—at least not yet. Disney had conquered film, then moved into television. Jim had conquered TV, but had yet to make the leap onto the big screen. But now, with work on the first half of the third season of The Muppet Show completed in mid-May, Jim’s march toward the movie screen wouldn’t take much longer.