Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

Paul Henson came from a line of similarly sturdy and clear-minded men who sought neither to offend nor agitate, a trait that Paul’s famous son would inherit as well—and, in fact, Jim Henson would always be very proud of his father’s rugged, even-tempered Midwestern lineage.

when deep in thought, Jim would hmmm quietly as he considered a question or comment—and colleagues would learn to gauge Jim’s mood from the length or tenor of a particular hmmm.

When pressed, Jim would name the blackbird as his favorite, not only for its spunky personality, but also because he delighted in the sound of the bird’s less formal name: the grackle. It was the sort of deliciously sharp-sounding nonsensical word that Jim loved—a meaningless word that just sounded like it meant something.

“Over the years, I’ve evolved my own set of beliefs and attitudes—as we all have—I feel work for me,”

“I don’t feel particularly comfortable telling others how to think or live. There are people who know more about these things than I do.”

“A child’s use of imagination and fantasy blends into his use of creativity,”

The trick, he said, was to “try out whole new directions. There are many ways of doing something. Look for what no one has tried before.”

sometimes the cleverest solutions to a problem were also the simplest—and usually lying in plain sight, provided y...

“I think he knew he was extraordinary. But it was in a quiet way where he just quietly knew that he knew things.”

As Jim would discover, there was a kind of magic, a wonderful kind of freedom, involved in letting a character at the end of your arm give voice to sentiments one might not feel comfortable expressing while wearing the guise of, as Jim called them, “ordinary people.”

that always laughed with an audience, never at them.

by 1950, it was reported that people in the Baltimore-Washington area already spent more time watching TV than listening to the radio.

look through the eyepiece and know exactly what your camera is seeing—because that’s your audience’s reality.

done right, you can have it both ways. You can entertain younger audiences while still playing to adult viewers—a practice that would make Jim’s contributions to Sesame Street so powerful and memorable.

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...

As Jane recalled, she and Jim were originally put on Afternoon “to do spots for children. But we were college students amusing ourselves, and we did these wild things with the puppets, lip-synching to Stan Freberg records—like his takeoff on ‘Banana Boat’—and things like that.” The madcap recordings of Stan Freberg were, in fact, a favorite not only of Jim’s, but also of other performers and sometime puppeteers like Soupy Sales, who often used Freberg’s songs for his puppets Pookie and Hippie to clown to. Freberg had a sense of humor very similar to Jim’s, as both adored bad puns, non sequiturs, deadpan delivery of a punch line, and silly songs. But what made Freberg’s records especially useful was that his recordings were fully realized routines—three frantic minutes filled with jokes, sound effects, conversations, and commentary that made them perfect for several Muppets to lip-synch and perform to.

Foraging for any suitable materials, Jim settled on his mother’s old felt coat, and as he leaned over the table in the Hensons’ living room he sewed a simple puppet body, with a slightly pointed face, out of the faded turquoise material. For eyes, he simply glued two halves of a Ping-Pong ball—with slashed circles carefully inked in black on each—to the top of the head. That was it. From the simplest of materials—and, perhaps appropriately, from a determination to bring a bit of order from darkness—Kermit was born.

“Kermit started out as a way of building, putting a mouth and covering over my hand,” Jim later explained. “There was nothing in Kermit outside of the piece of cardboard—it was originally cardboard—and the cloth shape that was his head. He’s one of the simplest kinds of puppet you can make, and he’s very flexible because of that … which gives him a range of expression. A lot of people build very stiff puppets—you can barely move the things—and you can get very little expression out of a character that you can barely move. Your hand has a lot of flexibility to it, and what you want to do is to build a puppet that can reflect all that flexibility.”

Oddly colored—“milky turquoise” Jim called it—with padded oval feet, Kermit was still as vague a being as the fuzzy Mushmellon, or the wide-mouthed Moldy Hay. “I didn’t call him a frog,” Jim said. “All the characters in those days were abstract because that was part of the principle that I was working under, that you wanted abstract things.”

All it sees is what is visible through the eyepiece, no more, no less—and Jim instinctively appreciated that if the eye of the camera defines your performance, then you’d better make certain you know exactly what the camera is seeing. The only way to do this, then, was to watch the performance on a television monitor.

“What Jim came to love right away was how convincing the reality is on a television screen,” Jane said. “It’s not like going from a [puppet] stage at all; the reality was extraordinary.”

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.

“Many of the things I’ve done in my life have basically been self-taught,” Jim admitted later. “I had never worked with puppets … and even when I began on television, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I’m sure this was a good thing, because I learned as I tackled each problem. I think if you study—if you learn too much of what others have done—you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.”

There would always be, said Jane, a touch of “sublime, sweet melancholy” in Jim’s work.

“I believe that we form our own lives, that we create our own reality, and that everything works out for the best,” Jim said later. “I know I drive some people crazy with what seems to be ridiculous optimism, but it has always worked out for me.”

Jim took great delight in stopping when anything caught his attention, which was just as likely to be an oddly worded sign as it was an unusually gnarled tree.

Stan Freberg, in fact, admitted he had been irritated when he learned his records were being used without attribution or recompense, and went storming down to WRC in April 1957 to issue a personal cease and desist. Once he had the opportunity to actually see Jim and Jane perform, however, Freberg melted—and shortly thereafter sent the two an enthusiastic telegram with his blessings. “I take it all back,” gushed Freberg. “This is one of the greatest acts I have ever seen [and I] am honored to let you use my records for ever and longer.”

“In the early days of the Muppets, we had two endings,” Jim said. “Either one creature ate the other, or both of them blew up.… I’ve always been particular to things eating other things!”