Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

“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.

Unlike Walt Kelly in Pogo, however, Jim was never comfortable aiming his satirical punches at individuals; instead, he took on higher concepts like technology, science, the generation gap, and, in one particularly biting piece, greed and the economy.

Telling Jim no—especially when he was excited by an idea or project—was never an easy task. Over the years, only a few friends, acquaintances, and employees would ever really learn how to gently and diplomatically tell Jim if something was a bad idea or couldn’t be done. One of those who could, and did, was Frank Oz, who left diplomacy at the door when it came to giving Jim his opinion. “I’d say to him, ‘this doesn’t fucking work!’ ” Oz said, laughing.

If Jim had a guiding ethos, then, it was optimism—a faith that human beings lived their lives for a purpose, and everything would come out all right in the end.

Ultimately, said Jim, “I believe that life is basically a process of growth—that we go through many lives, choosing those situations and problems that we will learn through.”

Jim loved learning to ski alongside his children. “He really didn’t like to do something with the kids where he was already good at it, because he didn’t have the patience of them not knowing anything,” said Jane. “So his approach to skiing was, ‘I have never skied, so I’m going to learn to ski with the kids.’ ” The kids loved it, too; part of the fun was having their father struggling and laughing right next to them. “We were all about the same level,” said Brian, “which was fun.”

In other words, there would be no heavy-handed messages; as he told his children time and time again, They remember what you are. The Muppets would lead by example.

While Fazakas had performed some minor puppetry on The Frog Prince and The Muppet Musicians of Bremen, his real strength was in designing and inventing intricate mechanisms that gave Muppets more versatility. It was Fazakas, for example, who would improve the eye mechanisms on Big Bird and Sweetums, giving both characters a much broader range of emotions.

“That’s Jim Henson,” said Brillstein. “He was grand in this strange, quiet way. His love was unbounded.” Jim’s faith in his fellow man was unbounded, too.

“My car was broken into and things were stolen,” Jim told his family, speaking in the voice he would always use for his most self-important characters, “but I realize I have a very wonderful life, I have plenty of money, and whoever it was who stole my wallet needs it more than me, so I find it in my heart to forgive them.”

“I used to ride with him a lot,” said Brian Henson. “And he would drive to work trying to make a chicken sandwich in mock Swedish or make a turkey casserole in mock Swedish. It was the most ridiculous thing you had ever seen, and people at traffic lights used to stop and sort of look at him a little crazy.”

Despite their widening differences, Jim still relied on Jane for emotional support and professional perspective; when it came to assessing Muppet performances, her instincts were almost always dead-on.

Jim, while he might enjoy a glass of wine or two from time to time—and maybe, said Nelson, “a little grass”—rarely ingested anything more potent than aspirin. He had, however, tried LSD exactly once—and, if asked, would probably confess that it had been something of a disappointment.

If Jim’s experiment with drugs had been a failure, one thing was clear: Jim didn’t need chemicals to take his mind to new worlds; his mind was already there.

During rehearsals, Jim would always sing with gusto, gleefully announcing a key change by calling out “Modulate!”—a

For Juhl, the former Muppet performer, it was character and motivation that mattered more than puns or vaudeville-style jokes—a predilection Jim and the puppeteers appreciated. “What he always seemed to do best was to watch … us develop our characters and then write along those lines,” said Hunt. In the writing room, however, Jim was adamant that “these puppets are not just characters up there telling jokes. If you just stand there and tell jokes,” he continued, “the whole thing will die. The humor only holds if there’s visual interaction between the characters.”

Kermit was more than a mere straight man; he was the sun around which the entire Muppet solar system revolved. “He relates to the other characters on many different levels,” said Juhl. “More important, they have to relate to him. Without Kermit, they don’t work. Nothing could happen without him. The other characters do not have what it takes to hold things together.”

Mostly, Jim saw both himself and Kermit as the steady eye of the Muppet Show hurricane, the center around which the storm wildly raged and revolved—though steady didn’t necessarily mean staid. “Me not crazy?” Kermit once exclaimed. “I hired the others!” Jim, too, often saw himself as the ringleader of a group whose members unapologetically referred to themselves as “a bunch of goddamn lunatics!”

“Rowlf could have been one of the stars of the show if only we could have had him interacting on a regular basis with Kermit and Piggy,” said Juhl. “But from a practical point of view, it just wasn’t possible.” (“Poor Rowlf,” Jane said with a sigh.)

“She’s sensuous and she’s been hurt a lot,” said Oz. “She loves the frog—my God how she covets that little green body!—but the frog doesn’t love her.”

Hunt didn’t immerse himself in characters; Hunt played them, taking great relish in putting on voices and performing in broad gestures, the same way children delight in putting on a neighborhood circus.

Scooter’s moderate pestering of Kermit and others wasn’t that far removed from Hunt, either. “I was a pain in the ass!” said Hunt, though Jim would generally allow Hunt to hover and chatter over his shoulder for a while before finally saying in mock frustration, “Richard, shut up and go away!”

Jim’s faith in Goelz, and Gonzo, had paid off. “As I got confidence, he got confidence,” said Goelz of Gonzo.

Instead, Nelson would become the team’s invaluable utility player, making even minor or one-note characters, like Lew Zealand, Crazy Harry, or Uncle Deadly, memorable, while his gravelly singing voice would establish the Electric Mayhem’s bass player Floyd as the epitome of Muppet cool. Nelson’s performance mentality was halfway between Oz’s and Hunt’s; each character, explained Nelson, “is an aspect of my own personality. The Muppets are roles I assume, rather than puppets I manipulate.”

When first-season guest Ethel Merman struggled slightly with a feathery costume during a complicated sketch, Lazer approached the singer between takes to offer his assistance. Merman shooed him away. “Listen,” she said, “you tell that Jim Henson that if he wants me to wear a feather up my ass, I’ll do it for him!”

Most of the budget for The Muppet Show, in fact, went into sets, which had to be carefully designed and constructed so that the Muppets could interact seamlessly with the human guest star.

Watching the performance from the booth, director Peter Harris would notice Jim’s head in a shot and would call out, “Sorry, Jim, we have to go again”—and Kermit, rather than Jim, would turn to the camera and respond. “In the end you just talk to Kermit,” said Harris. “It’s a very weird experience.”

Richard Hunt, the always willing master of ceremonies, was in everybody’s face—and no one, not even the guest star, was off-limits. “If he was driving to work and he passed the limo with the guest in it, he would roll down the window and … just yell and go crazy,” said Goelz fondly. “All the guests who went away from the show remembered Jim and Frank and Richard Hunt—and that was because Richard’s personality was so big.”

But the best moments, as nearly everyone agreed, were when Jim laughed. “He laughed until he cried,” said Oz. “It didn’t matter if we were taping or prerecording for a TV show or a record, we would just end up cracking each other up. He had to wrangle us, yes, but other times he was the instigator.”

“The combination of Jim and Frank was just magical,” added Goelz. “Jim had this light playful side, and Frank had the underpinnings, the drama, the backstory, the depth of character—and the two just meshed perfectly.” For Richard Hunt, it was like watching “the 70s and 80s Laurel and Hardy.… It was hysterical.”

And yet, when Oz wasn’t performing, he was “this very intimidating figure,” said Brian Henson. “He really was kind of like Sam the Eagle—he was dark and brooding and if Frank was coming down the hall, you got out of the way!” Juhl remembered Oz as “incredibly moody” during those years. “Frank has this incredible thing,” said Juhl. “He is quite clearly the best puppeteer in the world, and he fights it.”

“One of Jim’s real talents was that he had the ability not to take most things more seriously than they deserved,” said Juhl.

It was even reported in the Daily Express that the entire staff of the Russian embassy in London would gather around the embassy’s lone TV to watch the show, peering in on Kermit and the Muppets at a time when most Western television shows were prohibited in the Soviet Union.

As was his habit with any Muppet-related Sesame Street merchandise, Jim took it upon himself to act as his own quality control, personally authorizing the licenses for any Muppet products himself, signing off on puzzles, jack-in-the-boxes, and T-shirts, but rejecting other products with artwork or materials he considered “shabby.” “I feel I owe it to the many people who think of the Muppets as personal friends to keep the standards high,” Jim explained. “The most common comment people make [is] that Kermit … and all the other Muppets seem to be real people. That is very gratifying to me, but it also means I have a big responsibility.… After all, they’ve become real people to me, too, and I like them too much to let anyone take advantage of them.”

Despite being an ocean away from his family, Jim was an intensely devoted father—and every night, almost without fail, he would call Bedford at 6:00 P.M. New York time, so he could speak to each of the Henson children before he went to bed at midnight. “There was no question that he was totally part of our lives and our scene,” said Jane, “even though he wasn’t physically there.”

Whichever child happened to be in London with him, said Lazer, “was his absolute favorite at that moment. [He had] total focus and concentration on that child.”

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.

Hunt, who had spent as much time as anyone socializing with Jim outside work, admitted that some of the most meaningful and memorable times spent with Jim were those private moments on the set. Jim and Hunt would often spend hours crammed shoulder to shoulder in a tiny space as they performed Statler and Waldorf heckling from their box seats—“and that’s when we would have these talks,” said Hunt. As the rest of the crew worked on the stage floor below, Jim and Hunt were in near isolation “in this little enclosed thing with curtains shut, and in a little booth together. We would talk about our families, and our hopes and desires and politics.”

Freeborn and his team continued to tinker with Yoda, but when Oz showed up at the soundstage at Elstree for the first day of filming in August 1979, the puppet, said Oz bluntly, was still “really fuckin’ heavy.”

The following September, Christine Nelson would die of complications from cystic fibrosis at age twenty-two. Jim attended the service, his presence quietly reassuring Nelson—but Jim’s actions always spoke louder than any words. Several years earlier, when Henson Associates’ insurance provider had notified Jim that it would no longer be paying all of Christine’s medical expenses, Jim had insisted that Henson Associates change insurance companies to ensure her costs would continue to be fully covered. Nelson had gone to Jim’s office and tearfully thanked him in person, nearly choking on emotion. “Jerry,” said Jim, smiling, “that’s what insurance companies are for.”

Partly, it had to do with finding the right chemistry between the five main characters, consisting of four distinctive character types—the athlete, the artist, the worrywart, and the indecisive one—revolving around a steady central character. It was the Pogo formula all over again, an approach that Jim’s fellow Pogo fans Frith and Juhl said was intentional. “We said, ‘All right, we’re going to have five characters … each of whom is a different wedge of the pie,’ ” said Frith. “But when you put them all together, you get the whole pie.”

“Dark Crystal was a $25 million R&D project for Fraggle Rock,” said Michael Frith, “because all that stuff that we invented for Dark Crystal I rolled right into Fraggle Rock.”

Intrigued, Gosteleradio added both Fraggle Rock and The Muppet Show to its fall broadcast schedule, making them the first Western television series to air on Soviet television. It was groundbreaking, goodwill television—or, as Jim called it with typical understatement, “a very nice project.”

The foundation, then, was Jim’s effort to encourage such originality—and in the first year alone, the foundation awarded $25,000 in grants to performers and organizations, including $7,500 to a young puppeteer named Julie Taymor, who would later win a Tony Award for her groundbreaking puppetized version of the musical The Lion King on Broadway.

To Jim’s surprise, lucrative offers came in from companies wanting to produce items targeted specifically toward families with infants and toddlers, including Procter & Gamble, which wanted the Muppet Babies to help sell Pampers diapers. Jim arched an eyebrow coyly. “You’re going to let kids shit on my name?” he asked in mock annoyance—then agreed to the deal.

Jim wanted Muppet Babies to examine how different creative approaches could all solve the same problem—by “trying many different approaches, trying something no one has ever tried before, and not being satisfied with the way it’s always been.”

It would also spawn a cringe-inducing sub-industry of Your Favorite Characters as Children! cartoons like Flintstone Kids and A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, none of which had quite the spark of Muppet Babies—probably because they didn’t aspire to Jim’s lofty objectives.

“We just talked,” said Jane. “There was no discussion of broken marriage or anything like that. We were just there together.” None of the Henson children was surprised Jim had asked Jane to stay with him. “He and Mom were always just really fond of each other,” said Brian Henson. Agreed Cheryl, “she was his best friend for so much of his life. He loved her and wanted her to be happy. He just couldn’t make her happy himself.… Of course it is complicated; life is.”

Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It’s a good life, enjoy it. Love, JIM

“Jim inspired people to be better than they thought they could be,” said Bernie Brillstein warmly, “and more creative, more daring, more outrageous, and ultimately more successful. And he did it all without raising his voice.”