Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  Mary Ann wasn’t bothered by Jim’s lack of interest in marriage, but she was annoyed by his desire to keep their relationship from becoming public. Despite admitting to the press that he and Jane were separated, Jim was still reluctant to have his relationship with Mary Ann out in the open. While Jim loved taking Mary Ann on exotic vacations—boat cruises in Italy, glamorous hotels in Paris, romantic sprints to England—she soon came to realize that Jim was deliberately keeping her out of sight. Whether Jim liked it or not, his efforts made little difference; Henson Associates was already a hotbed of gossip about her—and it didn’t help that in the past year Mary Ann had been promoted into production, a move that led to some snickering and hard feelings about the cause of her ascent within the company. “I found Mary Ann kind of calculating,” said one longtime Henson employee, while another thought “she was an aggressive person, out for herself.”

  The gossip alone might have been bearable, but by refusing to carry out an open relationship, Jim was hedging his bets—as if by not admitting he was with Mary Ann, he was free to discreetly play the field. To some extent that was true; after he escorted the willowy actress Daryl Hannah to one of his opulent masked balls—where the two of them dressed as Beauty and the Beast—gossip columnists had assumed they were linked romantically. There was actually nothing romantic there—Jim had gotten to know Hannah and her sister Page, and considered them friends—but he had no intention of correcting such a misperception, telling his publicist that “it’s great for my reputation!” It was all more than Mary Ann could stomach—and that summer, she angrily left Jim, and the company, to move back to her hometown in Florida.

  For one of the few times in his life, Jim responded to and fully engaged in a conflict—something he had always been loath to do, whether it was with Jane or with Henson Associates attorneys. “It was hard on him,” said Richard Hunt, “but it was also good for him.” Against the counsel of David Lazer, Jim wrote Mary Ann long, apologetic letters, trying to explain himself. He warned that he still considered their relationship to be no one’s business, but promised he would no longer write or call and would let their separation remain permanent if she so chose. Perhaps to his surprise, baring his soul—engaging in the conflict—had an effect: he and Mary Ann reconciled, and now that she was no longer an employee of the company, or living in New York, Jim was less reticent about being seen openly with her. While the crisis had been averted, Jim and Mary Ann’s relationship would continue to wind its way through smoldering hot peaks and frigid valleys over the next two years.

  In April 1988, Jim headed for Norway to oversee production on The Witches, ready to go before the cameras despite being bogged down by budget problems and creative spats. Like Labyrinth, the script for The Witches—by director Nic Roeg’s frequent collaborator, Allan Scott—had been tinkered with and revised until the very last moment, with Jim still passing notes to producer Mark Shivas (mainly about use of words like “bitchy” and “pooper scooper”) in the weeks leading up to the April 12 filming date. The larger problems, however, were still with Roald Dahl, whose griping and threats about the script would continue well up until the film’s release.

  Early on, Dahl had complained to Duncan Kenworthy that he was not being kept sufficiently in the loop about the development of Scott’s script. “I do think it would be courteous if you kept me informed,” Dahl wrote Kenworthy. “You would surely rather have me on your side than against you.” Thus rebuked, Kenworthy shipped off a copy of the script to Dahl, who immediately wrote back with his comments—mostly unhelpful remarks like “AWFUL” and “STUPID AND USELESS”—and insisted, in black ink scrawled across the bottom of the page, that someone “PL[EASE] SHOW TO JIM H.”

  Jim, who was at that time swamped with work on The Witches and The Jim Henson Hour, unintentionally—and unwisely—left Dahl to stew. He was much more engaged with what was going on in the Creature Shop, where designers were working not only on craggy witches, but on one of their toughest assignments yet: lifelike mice. As the central plot of The Witches involved turning children—including the main character—into mice, it was critical that the Creature Shop figure out how to design a mouse that could act. The solution was to build mice in three different scales: one a remote-controlled mouse built close to actual size, which couldn’t do much more than scurry; another three times larger, crammed with enough mechanics to give it lifelike movements in long shots; and finally, one about the size of a small hand puppet, with fully functional legs, ears, whiskers, mouth, and face that could be performed in close-ups. Jim loved working with his “Mouse Unit,” even as they struggled to get the fur looking just right at each of the different sizes. “Things have been a little bumpy,” he admitted.

  Things would get even bumpier as filming went on, thanks mainly to the dyspeptic Dahl, who hit the ceiling when he learned that the script being filmed had tampered with the ending of his original story. In Dahl’s book, the young hero remains a mouse, happy in the knowledge that, as a mouse, he will likely die in less than ten years. Scott, however, had written a more upbeat ending in which the main character was changed back to normal by a sorceress—and Dahl was apoplectic. Frustrated by Jim’s lack of response to his earlier letters, Dahl fired off a missive to Roeg instead, complaining that such an ending was “OBVIOUS. It is also TRITE.” In his original story, explained Dahl, “the boy is happy as a mouse. He tells us so.” Dahl further admonished Roeg for “tampering with a very successful plot.… I may not know as much about making films as you, but I know a hell of a lot about plot and about how to end a story.… Your ending is wrong.” Dahl was informed that Jim had asked for both versions of the ending to be filmed, so he might determine which one worked better in the context of the film—a stipulation that only made Dahl angrier.

  The Witches was quickly becoming a nightmare. Dahl was incensed, Roeg felt compromised, and Jim was caught in the middle, trying hard to respect and manage the artistic views of both the writer of the source material and his film’s director. The budget continued to be a problem, too, though Jim had managed to convince Warner Brothers—which was in the process of acquiring Lorimar—to take a more active role in the film’s production. “It is essential that they are enthusiastic about it,” Jim wrote in an internal memo, and noted only half jokingly that it helped having his oldest daughter working as an executive at Warner Brothers.

  All of those problems with The Witches would screech to a sudden insignificance on an evening in late April, when twenty-three-year-old John Henson, driving at a speed of nearly one hundred miles per hour, flipped his Toyota truck on the Bruckner Expressway in the Bronx. John was thrown out the driver’s window, bounced over a concrete median—tearing muscles and badly injuring his legs in the process—and landed on his back in oncoming traffic. Jim, who had been in London editing The Storyteller with David Lazer when he learned of the accident, shakily booked the first available flight to New York. The trip seemed to take an eternity, and Jim was visibly distraught. “David, I don’t know what I would do if something happened to one of my kids,” he confessed during the flight. “I would have to go first.” Lazer, who had watched Jim with his children since the mid-1960s, understood Jim’s anguish. “He gave the kids undivided love,” Lazer said later. “He was crazy about them—each one individually.… They must have felt it.” For John Henson—who would recover from his injuries—there was never any doubt. “I just felt that he was an amazing dad,” said John later. “Whether he was physically there or not, I felt like he was always there.”

  Lately, too, it seemed he was always in the offices at One Seventeen, presiding over personnel compensation committees, strategic planning sessions, and attending one budget presentation after another. For the most part, the company was on secure ground, with money coming in from multiple sources. Since buying back The Muppet Show from Holmes à Court, Jim had negotiated a deal with Ted Turner to show both The Muppet Show and Fraggle Rock exclusively on his WTBS and TNT cable channels for four years�
�an agreement that netted Henson Associates more than $20 million—and he was still hoping to develop the lofty Muppet Voyager concept with Turner’s backing as well. Merchandising from Sesame Street was always reliable, as was revenue from almost any Muppet Babies–related product. A series of direct-to-video Muppet projects also continued to roll out at a steady pace, including the popular Play-A-Long series in which young viewers were encouraged to sing, tell jokes, or draw with the help of the Muppets (one video showed Jim teaching viewers how to skip stones on a lake in Central Park—a skill he was grinningly proud of, as he could skip a stone a long way). Finally, there was a series of videos in the works based on tales from Mother Goose, helmed by twenty-five-year-old Brian Henson, making his directorial debut for Henson Associates.

  More discouraging, however, were the reports from the countless “management consultants” who had been hired to look at the structure of the organization. “I think we are going to see some real positive changes in the way I—and we—run the company,” Jim optimistically told his staff. He knew his own weaknesses as a manager and administrator. “I tend to avoid confrontation and I tend to push and see only the good aspects of a particular thing,” Jim said later. “I’m a very human person.” He gamely continued to hold teambuilding events, regular company meetings, and staff retreats, but the management structure seemed irreparably broken. While the air of collegiality he instilled on a movie or television set might produce wonderful results on the screen, as a business practice it tended to leave holes in the chain of command. Decisions couldn’t be made, because no one wanted to be in charge. As a result, more and more decisions would get pushed up to Jim, who would simply delegate them back down the line to management.

  No project would be more emblematic of Henson Associates’ broken decision-making process than The Jim Henson Hour, which Jim was preparing to put before the cameras at the end of July. For perhaps the first time, the disarray had crept into a creative project. “It was frustrating because we just didn’t have the time and we were trying to do a lot,” said writer Larry Mirkin. “We were very stretched just in terms of trying to be on top of everything.” Mirkin and Jerry Juhl were still struggling with the scripts, trying to find an internal structure for the show, but “it was so difficult,” said Juhl. “Jim had so many ideas … so many things he wanted to do. He was given the opportunity of doing this show and he wasn’t content with doing one show. He wanted to do more than one television series.” Despite Juhl’s misgivings, Jim was confident the show would work. He was certain of it.

  Money, it seemed, was no object. The computer-generated opening credits—a beautiful opening shot of a gryphon contemplating a crystal ball, followed by a sequence with Muppets, boats, books, and fish swirling in a computer-generated maelstrom—cost nearly half a million dollars to produce, an enormous amount that exceeded the total budget of many half-hour television shows at the time. It had also eaten up a great deal of time to put together and edit. “This is great,” Mirkin conveyed to Jim after watching the credits, “but I’m worried about the remaining twenty-two minutes.” Jim merely shrugged and grinned. “Look,” he told Mirkin happily, “nobody’s ever done this before.” For Jim, that was almost always enough.

  While Jim had filmed the pitch reel for The Jim Henson Hour with himself as the host, he was skeptical about appearing on camera for the show itself. “I always prefer to be slightly behind camera,” he said. He hoped Kermit would serve as the host for the series, providing continuity between skits and sequences. But Brandon Tartikoff wanted Jim out in front—the series had his name on it, after all, and his presence would give the series a consistency. “It seemed the logical thing for this type of show,” Jim conceded later—and in mid-July, at the urging of publicist Arthur Novell, Jim was put in the hands of a voice coach and a professional hairstylist. His hair, now a silvery gray, was blown dry and swept back, his beard neatly trimmed along the curve of his jawline. He would have to learn to speak louder, and to keep his hands away from his face, where he was used to curling his long fingers around his mouth as he spoke.

  More problematic, he also had to learn to stand comfortably, without folding his arms or fidgeting. Peering at Jim through the lens of the camera, director Peter Harris thought he looked “stiff” and asked that he be given someone or something to interact with. For no other reason “except [that it] was kind of wonderful,” the Thought Lion—a beautiful, enormous, fully functional, white animatronic lion, which had been sitting in the corner of the Creature Shop since its use in an episode of The Storyteller—was brought in to serve as Jim’s mostly silent sidekick. “There was no reason for it at all” except for “innocence and optimism,” said Juhl, but it gave Jim something to talk to—without folding his arms—and he liked it.

  Over six days in late July and early August, Jim taped a rough cut of the pilot episode of The Jim Henson Hour, shooting several segments with vocalist Bobby McFerrin—whose international break-out hit “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was still several months from release—as well as a number of short Muppet sketches. For nearly a month, he would cut and edit the various pieces together before finally shipping it off for Tartikoff to look at. Even then, Jim still wasn’t entirely happy, and pleaded with Tartikoff to view it as “a work in progress.” He knew it still seemed randomly pieced together, a problem he thought could be solved by “establish[ing] a type of theme for each half hour.” And while he made clear that the writers and performers were “still getting a sense of the characters and how they should interact,” he also admitted that several characters and sketches hadn’t worked at all, and would be cut from the final show. (Frank Oz, who often seemed to develop characters at will, was still pursuing a directing career and was increasingly unavailable.) Ultimately, Jim told Tartikoff, “whenever possible, The Jim Henson Hour should be breaking new ground.” He would continue to recut it, even as he continued filming new episodes in late September and early October.

  At the same time, Jim had in production a number of specials he was hoping could be incorporated into the second half of The Jim Henson Hour. The most important was a celebration of Sesame Street, which would be marking its twentieth anniversary in 1989. Jim had been trying for years to produce a Sesame Street special—a decade earlier, he had unsuccessfully proposed a behind-the-scenes documentary—but now, with Joan Cooney’s approval, he finally had a one-hour retrospective under way. For Jim, working on the special was a pleasant reminder not only of Sesame Street’s growing and lasting impact, but it also gave him an opportunity to reflect on the show that had made the Muppets a household word. Every six months or so, Jim and the Muppet performers still regularly made time—usually about a week each year—to perform their inserts for Sesame Street. And they still loved it. “[It’s] still so much fun to do,” he told Cooney. “The show, from the beginning, was a good idea. It’s been a delightful thing to be a part of for all these twenty years … and I think it will be around in another twenty years. I’ll be sitting in my rocking chair, and I’ll still be doing Ernie.”

  He was having just as much fun working and performing on another special, a “Damon Runyon with dogs” film noir parody called Dog City, which had been in development for over a year. With expressive Muppet dogs inspired in part by C. M. Coolidge’s painting Dogs Playing Poker, and elaborate, detailed sets, Dog City had some of the highest production values of any Muppet production—“I just love it,” said Jim. So much, in fact, that he took his time directing it, lingering on the Toronto set for more than eighteen days—about twice as long as usual—bumping several other production companies who were waiting for studio time. Whether he was performing Dog City’s main villain, or staging elaborate puppet car chases, gun-fights, and billiard games, Jim just didn’t want the fun to stop. “He was just having such a wonderful time,” said Juhl. “It was the kind of puppetry stuff that nobody had ever done before, and Jim did it.”

  Jim spent late 1988 reviewing the first rough edits of The Witches, screening
it with test audiences in London and Los Angeles, and making careful notes for director Nic Roeg on where he could trim down scenes Jim thought were too frightening. Jim still hadn’t decided on the ending, however, merely noting in his journal that the film “need[ed] work”—Dahl would have to wait. He also visited with Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas’s groundbreaking special effects company, to discuss special effects for The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made, which he was determined to put into production in 1989. Meanwhile, he was continuing to stitch together a number of installments of The Jim Henson Hour, and sent another episode to Tartikoff for review over the Christmas holidays. The new shows, thought Jim, were “looking good,” and Tartikoff seemed pleased—yet Jim couldn’t get a commitment from NBC on when the series would premiere. Initially, the network had told Jim to prepare for a January 1989 start, but had then delayed the series until March, and then finally decided on April.

  It was frustrating, but “given the extra time,” Jim said later, “we took it”—and spent much of it in a computer lab at Pacific Data Images (PDI) in San Francisco. Jim was still fascinated with the possibilities of computer animation; in the mid-1980s, he had tried to develop a television special on computers with Chris Cerf, and had explored the possibilities of creating a computer-generated Kermit. For several years, then, Jim had been studying ways to develop a kind of virtual puppet, a computer-generated figure that could be manipulated by a performer in real time and interact with live actors and puppets. Now the technology had finally caught up with the idea—and with the help of PDI, Jim had set up a system wherein a waldo, which usually remotely controlled an animatronic figure, was wired instead into a computer to control a low-resolution computer-generated image.