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a natural sweetness, a reassuring patience, and a willingness to indulge silliness—and the resulting interaction could be pure magic.
sometimes the cleverest solutions to a problem were also the simplest—and usually lying in plain sight, provided you could see a thing differently.
showed that you could get away with being a little dangerous, provocative, or just plain deep if you did it with a smile on your face and remembered that entertainment always came first. When done right, it’s possible to be silly and subversive at the same time.
“As I try to zero in on what’s important for the Muppets,” Jim said years later, “I think it’s a sense of innocence, naiveté—you know, the experience of a simple person meeting life.”
it was typical Jim: even a five-minute comedy romp, no matter how absurd, had to mean something.
the Muppets could move freely anywhere in the viewing area, even approaching the camera—and the audience—for an intimate close-up, something that could not happen with a traditional puppet theater. This was something brand-new: it was puppetry made expressly for the medium of television, making TV’s strengths and weaknesses work for the performer.
For Jim, it had all been a matter of problem solving—and his relative inexperience in both puppetry and television allowed him to look for solutions that might not have occurred to more seasoned performers, even when, as in the case of the television monitor, that solution was lying in plain sight.
you learn too much of what others have done—you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.”
Jim would channel his sorrow into silliness, his anxiety into art.
as Jim had learned from Walt Kelly’s Pogo, your audience was willing to let you be a little subversive when you were giving them something fun to look at and, more important, when they were being entertained.
Many projects would never make it beyond the idea phase, drawn into Jim’s sketchbooks with elaborate notes, while others would result in wonderful bits of animation or recordings that Jim would keep privately to himself, satisfied merely with the act of creating and imagining.
taught me a long time ago, don’t sell what you create.”
Our] spaces never looked like offices,” Juhl said. “We did it up as a kind of lovely, pleasant living room.”
the Muppets’ brand of “affectionate anarchy,” as Oz said later.
“Good puppetry has a broad range,” Jim said. “It appeals to the children, the squares, and sophisticates.”
“There was a lot of making things,” said Cheryl, “and there was a lot of respect for childhood.”
What was very basic to his work is that he was really in love with life. He was really intrigued with how all these little pieces of life worked and he was equally as intrigued with his children. He loved just watching them be children and doing the things they enjoyed doing.”
“His attitude was, ‘None of this stuff is really precious—you can make it and then you can take it apart and make something else with it.’
If The Cube, or even Youth 68, left critics and audiences baffled, Jim didn’t mind a bit; he was pursuing his own interests, regardless of success—and
the father of four children under the age of ten, he had spent countless evenings painting, gluing, talking with and listening to his own kids—and had come to appreciate just how perceptive, interesting, and receptive an audience of children could be.
“Jim never just wanted to chat. If he said he wanted to talk about something, it meant that he wanted to do it.”
“The attitude you have as a parent is what your kids will learn from more than what you tell them,” Jim said later. “They don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.” As Lazer had noticed, Jim valued the views of his children and, in fact, frequently asked for their opinions of his work, gauging their reactions to performances and asking questions. “Jim was intrigued with his children,” said Jane. “They had a great sense of humor and so he immediately started using them to find out what was funny, what worked. He really respected their opinions.”
“Jim was an extraordinarily serious, yet silly man,” said Brill. “He would encourage you to be as crazy as possible, because when you’re inhibited as a performer, you can’t be creative. Because he would be silly, everyone else would be silly.” Oz could be very serious, almost stern, as he prepared to perform—until the cameras came on, at which point he became a comedic virtuoso, creating characters and situations almost at will. There was always a playful irreverence for their craft, as if Oz—unlike Jim—had never really decided if this was something a grown man should do for a living. “Ready
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“The most sophisticated people I know … inside, they are all children,” Jim said.
his hope for a higher calling for television was destined to disappoint, Jim was committed to making his corner of television as bright as possible. “Kids love to learn, and the learning should be exciting and fun,” he said. “That’s what we’re out to do.”
“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.”
feel it does what it does and even is a bit weakened if you know what it is doing. At its best, it is talking to a deeper part of you, and if you know that it’s doing that, or you become aware of it, you lessen the ability to go straight in.”
“We loved the idea of Rowlf sitting there on a huge podium, and then it collapses and you see Jim and me performing him,” Oz said. “We loved the idea of being seen. That was one thing I loved about Jim—he was never precious with the puppets.” This progressive attitude toward puppetry was well ahead of its time; forty years later, puppeteers would routinely be visible to audiences as they performed their characters onstage in shows like The Lion King and Avenue Q. In 1971, however, such an approach challenged nearly every expectation American audiences had for a puppet show.
“Perhaps one thing that has helped me in achieving my goals is that I sincerely believe in what I do, and get great pleasure from it,” said Jim.
To Lazer, Jim was more than just Muppets; he was a creative force, on a par with Walt Disney, whose name epitomized a high caliber of entertainment that transcended any particular medium. “We had to work on Jim’s image, for his own sake first,” said Lazer, “and then let the world know this man has such character.”
Afterward, Jim sympathetically pulled him aside. “It’s not the same, is it?” he said. “Oh no,” said Lazer. “It’s better.” Jim was delighted with that sort of response.
“He was the hardest-working person I’ve ever met in my life,” said Dave Goelz.
Brillstein waited for Jim to inquire about the details, certain he would ask how much they were getting per episode. But Jim didn’t—and his response made the crusty Brillstein smile even twenty years later: “I love you,” Jim said.
“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.”
Gonzo—and Goelz—had finally gotten excited about something—and “when you got excited,” discovered Goelz, “it was good.”
“Everything was play for him,” said Juhl. “Work was play. That was the thing that we all plainly understood.” Agreed Oz, “Jim wasn’t a workaholic. Our job was playing.” For Jim that meant encouraging the team—from the Muppet performers to the lighting crew—to ad-lib or interject ideas, and maintaining an overall atmosphere of collegiality in which everyone’s performance and opinion was valued. “We know each other so well that we can kind of bounce off each other when we’re working together,” explained Jim. “This working relationship … has a kind of marvelous chemistry to it, and I think it’s
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“He had,” said Juhl, in perhaps the most apt description of Jim, “a whim of steel.”
“One of Jim’s real talents was that he had the ability not to take most things more seriously than they deserved,” said Juhl. “And that means that most things are pretty funny. I think that’s what got him through the kind of schedule he had.… While he was doing it, he always knew that it was just a Muppet show. And he could keep things in that kind of perspective.”
“Jim was a dreamer,” said Jerry Juhl, and yet “he was pragmatic enough to make the dream happen.”
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.”
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.”
“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.”
Generally, Jim’s philosophy was “simple is good”—though Jim’s definition of simple could swing wildly.
“We always used to kid Jim that after telling everybody ‘simple is good,’ he would turn around and try to produce the most complicated work in the world,” said Juhl, “and just about wipe out all of us—him most of all—in the process.”
“Even the most worldly of our characters is innocent,” Jim had once said. “Our villains are innocent, really—and it’s that innocence, I think, that is our connection to the audience.” While that was likely true in most cases, Oz—who was nearly as cynical as Jim was idealistic—didn’t take long to consider his response. “Bullshit,” he said. Hopper would remain unredeemed.
117 East 69th
For one thing, Jim wanted to substantially reconfigure the basement and first floor to create a spacious, bi-level Muppet workshop, with several skylights letting natural light into what would normally have been an underground area. “I want to have a place for a creative nucleus,” wrote Jim—and once the zoning issues for such an ambitious remodeling were cleared, no detail was too small for Jim to lavish with care and attention. Colorful photo murals were installed in waiting areas and on landings. The Henson Associates logo—a large, lowercase HA, with an exclamation point at the end—was
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many of the longest-serving Muppet performers also came to understand that Jim’s devotion to his work came at a personal cost. “For such a giving, generous, nonstop creative person, Jim really didn’t have any friends,” said Richard Hunt. “He was friends with the guys he worked with.… But I think he was so much involved in his work that it didn’t help [or] allow him the time or the luxury of developing true, deep friendships.”
“He just conducted his life in a different way than most people did. He just couldn’t understand about this whole thing called work, and why people didn’t like it, and why people thought there was something wrong with working.”
“We are primarily a company of creative people, whose art we are helping to bring to the world,” he explained—and while art may have been the heart of the organization, it was money and merchandising that kept the blood pumping. “We recognize that business enables art ‘to happen,’ and that business plays an essential role in communicating art to a broad audience,” he said. “As both artists and businesspersons, we understand the value of both worlds, and so we bring them together in a way that facilitates the realization of our artistic vision.”
