Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

Jim, too, was intuitively aware that he could use the eye of the camera—and the four sides of a home viewer’s television screen—to create his own reality. Now that there was no need for his Muppets to coexist with live actors, Jim saw that no puppet theater was needed at all—that, in fact, the space between the four sides of the TV screen was his puppet theater. Jim had learned Kovacs’s lesson well; namely, a television audience can only see what you choose for it to see. No walls were needed to conceal the puppeteer when he or she could kneel down just out of sight of the camera, giving the Muppets the entire viewing area in which to perform and exist.

But for Jim, the monitor was the puppet theater—as such, it defined the performance.

So long as Jim and Jane were careful to remain out of the shot, 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.

“[They were] puppets that didn’t look like puppets had ever looked,” recalled Muppet veteran Jerry Juhl. “It was the mobility of the faces, and the total abstraction of them.… They were just mind-blowing, certainly to puppeteers.”

Jim’s optimism and enthusiasm for life, even in the face of hardship or sadness, would remain one of his most endearing and inspiring qualities.

For his commercials, then, Jim would take John Wilkins’s mantra and give it a Muppet twist. No longer would Wilkins coffee be merely a wonderful way to start the day; it would be, “Use Wilkins coffee … or else!”

And 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.

Jane had one thing to which Jim would always be attracted: talent.

“In walked this guy who looked like a cross between Abe Lincoln and Jesus,” Brillstein recalled. “He was so gentle and unpretentious that he never spoke above a whisper.”

When Jim performed, I understood it. I got it.… I don’t know what I saw in him, but I saw something. I realize that at first, before we became close friends, Jim appealed to my perverse sense of humor. Sesame Street, which was still a few years off, was for kids, but Henson was not a kids’ act. He was hip and slightly dark. He had cute little creations—and he liked to blow them up.

“He was this very quiet, shy guy,” Oz said, “who did these absolutely fucking amazing puppets that were totally brand new and fresh, that had never been done before.”

“This guy was like a sailor who had studied the compass and found that there was a fifth direction in which one could sail.” There was no doubt in his mind as to his decision. “When he offered me a berth on that ship, I signed on,” making Juhl the first official full-time employee of Muppets, Inc.

“For puppeteers, [watching the Muppets] was just absolutely startling,” Juhl said. “[They were] puppets that didn’t look like puppets had ever looked. It was just phenomenal.… It was the mobility of the faces, and the total abstraction of them.”

Sahlin—a talented marionettist and puppeteer who had also created special effects for films like Tom Thumb and The Time Machine—had a remarkable ability to translate Jim’s sketches into three dimensions, a bit of artistic symbiosis Jim appreciated. “I would generally do a little scribble on a scrap of paper, which Don would regard with a certain reverence as being the ‘essence’ which he was working toward,” said Jim. “Don had a very simple way of working—reducing all nonessential things and honing in on what was important.”

In particular, Sahlin understood—as did Jim—that the placement of the eyes was critical. “That single decision seemed to finalize the character more than anything else,” Jim said later. Part of the trick was to pay careful attention to an area Sahlin came to call “The Magic Triangle”—the zone defined by the relative position of the character’s eyes to its nose and mouth. So important were the eyes, in fact, that Sahlin would always ask that Jim be present when he placed any character’s eyes. “He always wanted me there, to make sure it was right for both of us, making sure the eyes had a point of focus,” Jim said. “Because without that, you had no character.”

Impressed, Jim quickly hired Sahlin as the Muppets’ chief designer and puppet builder, where his sense of expressive abstraction—as well as his ability to sew an almost invisible seam that came to be known as “the Henson Stitch”—would define the look of the Muppets for more than a decade. Indeed, it was Sahlin, Jim said, who “had more to do with the basic style that people think of as the Muppets than anybody else.”

The performance was so convincing, in fact, that Jim would often catch the cue card man holding up cards for Rowlf to read, while other times the microphone boom operator would swing the microphone over Rowlf’s head, forgetting that Jim was actually speaking on a miked headset behind the low wall.

“Part of what makes the Muppets work,” said Oz, “is that we do lots and lots and lots of takes until we get it right.”

“I was nervous about it, but Jim said, ‘you’ll be fine,’ which he always said when one of us had to do something crazy!” As the cameras rolled, a match was touched to Wontkins from below, and the puppet suddenly erupted into a flaming ball of blue and white, dripping and splattering burning cold flame down on Oz, scorching the hair on his arm. Oz plunged his arm—and the still burning Wontkins—into a bucket of water. “Hmmm,” said Jim as Wontkins and Oz smoldered. “Let’s do it again.”

while he had been hired as a performer, it didn’t take long for Juhl to realize that with Oz around, he had “some pretty high-powered” competition for performance time. Consequently, said Juhl, “I thought I’d better do something else if I’m going to make a living here.… We were getting more and more things that needed script material so I just sort of drifted slowly over to become a writer.” As it turned out, writing was Juhl’s true forte.

may have looked like an avant-garde haiku, but to Jim it all made sense—which was more than the rest of the team could say. “We didn’t know what was going on,” Oz said later. “I didn’t know what the hell the movie was.”

That was life with the Muppets: a kind of fearless craziness that pervaded nearly every aspect of the business.

In April 1967, for example, Jim pitched Moki, a genderbending case of mistaken identity in which a long-haired, androgynous young man is mistaken for a female fashion model. Brillstein shopped the proposal, but the subject matter was too touchy, even to those who recognized the brilliance behind it.

including the surrealistic Adventures of the Snerf-Poof from Planet Snee

One viewer—a Mr. Dionne from California, who likely didn’t consider himself part of the “lower strata”—fired off an angry, rambling letter, complaining haughtily that “the most disciplined attention I could give [The Cube] was a belch from the grave of Marcus Aurelius, occasioned, I might add, by the dead weight of its own dust caving in on itself.” Two weeks later came Jim’s one-sentence response: Dear Mr. Dionne: What the fuck are you talking about? Yours truly, JIM HENSON

It was uncharacteristic of Jim to swear—his strongest epithet was usually “Oh, for heaven’s sake!”—but that was the difference, Lisa Henson explained, between “work Jim” and “home Jim.” “That isn’t something in our lives he would say,” agreed Jane, “but he would certainly talk that way to Frank!”

“I THINK THERE WAS A KIND OF COLLECTIVE GENIUS ABOUT THE CORE group that created Sesame Street,” Children’s Television Workshop co-founder Joan Ganz Cooney once remarked, “but there was only one real genius in our midst, and that was Jim.”

One of his thoughts was “to have a character that the child could live through,” a Muppet who was representative of the audience. “Big Bird, in theory, is himself a child,” said Jim, “and we wanted to make this great big silly awkward creature that would make the same kind of dumb mistakes that kids make.” To make things even more interesting, Jim and Stone decided on another character that was nearly the antithesis of the wide-eyed, innocent Big Bird: a cynical, complaining grouch named Oscar. “Oscar is there because we didn’t want a bland kiddie show,” said Stone. “We didn’t want to let it get too sweet.”

There was nothing overly complicated about Oscar, however—he was a Muppet typical of Jim’s ferocious yet somehow nonthreatening monsters, originally an orange shag rug with a wide mouth and angry eyebrows. Oscar had been partly inspired by regular lunches at a seafood restaurant just around the corner from the Muppet workshop called Oscar’s Salt of the Sea, where the grumbling, growling owner often reduced Jim and Jon Stone to fits of giggles.

“We were really checking the clocks to finish the edit,” Lazer said, “and either Cheryl or Lisa asked a question, and he turned around—and I was going crazy—and he turned around as calm as could be and gave her a straight, honest adult answer. And I learned a lesson then: he had such respect for his children.… They asked him a question, and he took the time to answer 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.”

He was also careful to point out that there was more to being a puppeteer than the ability to lip-synch a puppet. “We look for a basic sense of performance, a sense of humor,” said Jim—and therefore Muppet auditions had a tendency to attract not just puppeteers, but also actors, mimes, impressionists, and voice actors. “You have to find people who put their whole performance into their hand,” Jim explained, “and that’s a very specific talent that a lot of performers don’t have. A lot of very funny performers will never be good puppeteers.”

fan of the Muppets since their early appearances on Ed Sullivan, the gap-toothed, wild-haired, and openly gay Hunt was enthusiasm incarnate, with the gusto of a game show host, who was always grabbing a puppet to stick in someone’s face.

‘Oh, this might be a good way to do something,’ ” Hunt said. “I thought, ‘The Muppets are nuts!’ and I felt I would fit right into that.” Right from the beginning, Jim and the Muppet team knew they had found someone special. “God, he was a comedic force,” said Oz.

The only other disagreement regarding Oscar had to do with the character’s personality. Spinney was convinced Stone and the other writers had Oscar all wrong. “He’s not a villain, not horrible,” Spinney insisted. “He fundamentally has got a heart of gold.” It was a thesis with which Jon Stone strongly disagreed. “There’s no heart of gold,” Stone said. “The guy is a shit, right to the core.” It would remain a point of contention between Spinney and the writers for years, even as Oscar became more and more popular.

“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.”

The Muppets, then, were Jim’s conversation with millions of children, spoken directly to them in a language they could understand: complete and utter silliness and abandon.

“The most sophisticated people I know … inside, they are all children,” Jim said.

pitched giggles, laughing until tears ran down his face. “The best thing of all,” Oz said warmly, “was to watch Jim laugh until he cried.”

While Ernie and Bert—and therefore Jim and Oz—would come to be almost universally hailed as a comedic duo on the same upper stratum as Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, or Burns and Allen, Oz never really thought of Jim and himself as a comedy team. “We were two people so in tune with each other that we didn’t have to say anything to communicate,” Oz said. “We’d get done with a take and we’d look at each other and we both knew without saying anything that we’d have to do it again, and we both knew why. That was the special bond we had.” They didn’t make comedy, said Oz; instead, “we created a kind of aliveness.”

for the more Jim performed Kermit, the more the two of them seemed to become intertwined. While Jim always described Kermit as somewhat “snarkier” than himself—as Jim had discovered from Edgar Bergen, a puppet could say things that couldn’t be said by ordinary people—it was becoming harder to tell where the frog ended and Jim began.

“Kermit is the closest one to me,” Jim said later. “He’s the easiest to talk with. He’s the only one who can’t be worked by anybody else, only by me. See, Kermit is just a piece of cloth with a mouthpiece in it. The character is literally my hand.”

“I live kind of within myself as a person, so my outlet has always been the Muppets; therefore, I tend to do sort of wildly extroverted characters,” said Jim.

Oscar, despite his appearance, somehow seemed to defy the label monster—he was a grouch, which seemed to give him a status all his own.

But Oz had also begun to get a handle on the character, finally arriving at a name as he played with the puppet between takes, and developing a better understanding of Grover’s motivation, thanks to some help from his dog, a devoted mutt named Fred. Watching Fred romping buoyantly in the park one afternoon, Oz said, “I noticed the purity of the dog.” It was suddenly clear. “There’s a purity in Grover,” said Oz. “He wants to please.” Grover had arrived.

(When children were on the set, Stone would call out “blue sky!”—code that a child was present and performers and crew members should refrain from swearing.)

Even more surprising, said Stone, the team found that “as soon as the puppet goes up on somebody’s arm, the puppeteer ceases to exist.” Jim was delighted. “I’m working with Ernie, [who] has no bottom half or legs or anything like that. He ends at the waist,” Jim explained. “Yet, the kids will look right at Ernie and me—this strange, bearded man—standing right there, talking for the puppet, and there’s no question the kids believe Ernie is a real personality.”

“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.

“He loved to take a chair out into the garden and sit quietly, away from the hustle and bustle of the home, and just be,” said Cheryl. “He needed to find quiet time to hear himself.”

Frankly, I’m a lot more comfortable if I’m wearing a puppet.”