Jim Henson: The Biography (33 page)

Perhaps in the same search for peace, Jim was also continuing to actively explore other New Age concepts that fascinated him, enrolling in a Transcendental Meditation class and reading intensely about reincarnation, alternative existences, and parallel lives. “
I think my father was
very
intrigued by this idea of the parallel life,” said Cheryl, “and whether that parallel life
is
the dream world, or that
parallel life is literally a parallel life—like maybe with a girlfriend or maybe with some other life other than the one you happen to be living where there are … five kids and your wife who you don’t communicate with.… I think my dad was intrigued by that notion.”

And then in June 1973, things got even thornier: Jane discussed with Jim what he came to call her “
declaration of independence,” writing the phrase in his journal in all capital letters, a sure sign that she had gotten his attention. Whether it was frustration over being marooned in the suburbs with five children while Jim worked in the city all hours of the day and night, sadness over her marginalization as a partner in the business she had helped create, or disappointment that Jim seemed more interested in spending time with the Muppet performers than with her, Jane had clearly had enough; she was no longer inclined to go quietly along. “
I think probably in the long run both of us wanted to do things our own way,” said Jane.

“
I probably just kept things inside for so long until [I said] ‘Hey, look, I have a life, too. It’s just not about you and your career. It’s about me, too,’ ” said Jane. “He just assumed that I was either interested in what the children were doing, or I was interested in what
he
was doing, and that was what wives do.… The problem, really, was that we just didn’t usually talk about these things.” Indeed, even as Jane had laid things out, Jim still refused to engage. Apart from his all-caps note in his journals, Jim responded to Jane’s declaration with silence. He’d let Jane keep doing the talking—and that would only deepen the chasm between them.

Despite their increasingly different speeds, Jim and Jane would continue to do the things married couples do—indeed, Jane was always “
fiercely loyal” to Jim, noted Cheryl, “even when she was mad at him”—putting on her best face as they traveled to the Emmy Awards together, attended conferences, and even celebrated their anniversary each year. But Jim and Jane continued to move at different speeds, and as time went on and the children grew, their emotional distance—like that span of sidewalk between them as they walked the streets of New York—would only widen.

Things were much more firm in Jim’s professional life—at least at the moment. For much of 1973, Jim was aggressively pitching his Broadway show to several television networks, trying to gauge their
interest in filming the live stage show for a television special he was now calling
An Evening with the Muppets
. Jim was so certain the live show would come together that he had already reserved Alice Tully Hall for three weeks starting in June 1975, with an option for a fourth. Jim estimated the show he was envisioning would cost roughly $350,000 to open, then $35,000 per week after that—and in his pitch to ABC, he even proposed to share the profits from the show with the network in exchange for their backing, sweetening the deal by recalculating the start-up costs at a discounted $275,000.

Making things even more attractive for investors, Jim had recently secured the services of writer Larry Gelbart—a good fit, as the two shared similar comedic sensibilities and a fondness for variety shows. He had also reached an agreement with Pat Birch, the Tony-nominated choreographer for
Grease
, to assist with directing and staging, and had piqued the interest of Emanuel Azenberg, who had overseen several of Neil Simon’s plays, about taking on the role of producer. For the music, Jim had contracted with a San Francisco organization called Imagination, Inc., putting them to work almost immediately on the hymnal music for the subversive “Religious Piece.” Everything seemed to be going smoothly—until all of a sudden it wasn’t.

Jim’s major creative catch, Larry Gelbart, suddenly found the bulk of his time taken up by a new television show he had helped develop for CBS called
M*A*S*H
, which would win Gelbart an Emmy the following year. “
Gelbart out of B’way,” Jim wrote gloomily in his journal, though there would be no hard feelings, as Gelbart would helpfully provide Jim with other contacts as he tried to hold the show together. Next, the collaboration with Imagination, Inc. for music turned into a creative mismatch, and Jim released the company from its obligations in late spring 1973, bruising the ego of Imagination, Inc.’s Walt Kraemer. “
You’re a better artist than you are a client,” Kraemer wrote to Jim. “I admittedly gave little thought to how we were ever going to work nose-to-face on a project of this scope.… I have no hard feelings because I am still proud of the work we did.”

Jim tried to put the best face on things, assuring investors that he had either Joe Raposo or Billy Goldenberg lined up to provide the
music, and brought in Marshall Brickman, who had co-written
Sleeper
with Woody Allen, to help write additional material. The ever-loyal Jerry Juhl also vowed to stand by, ready to draft new Muppet sketches whenever Jim might ask. But despite Jim’s best efforts—and his unwavering belief in the strength of the show—the project was disintegrating quickly. Jim would reluctantly shelve the show by autumn 1973, though for the rest of his life he would never entirely let go of the idea of putting together an elaborately produced live stage production.

With the prospects of the stage show fading, Jim redoubled his efforts to interest networks in several new television specials. Most were Muppet holiday-related specials—Halloween, Thanksgiving, New Year’s Eve—but there were also the usual fascinating non-Muppet-related proposals, including the creepy,
Twilight Zone
–ish
The Monsters Inside Jason’s Brain
, another variation on Jim’s fascination with illusion and reality, and
The Island
, an artsy piece proposing to tell the same story from four different points of view.

Jim’s method for pitching Muppet projects required both enthusiasm and stamina. As he had done when wooing Jerry Juhl and Bernie Brillstein a decade earlier, Jim preferred to pitch by doing, and would not only describe the show but also perform Muppet skits for pin-striped network executives, many of whom sat by blank-faced as Jim, Oz, and Nelson chattered back and forth, often with puppets on each arm. It was a process Oz found excruciating. “
We would carry these big, heavy motherfuckin’ black boxes in cabs to go across town to try to sell the show to network executives,” Oz said, his voice rising at the memory even forty years later. “We’d perform it, and someone would say, ‘That’s great! Bob’—or some other fuckin’ guy—’has to see this!’ So then we’d do it some more.” The problem, said Oz, was that no matter how many times they performed, they never seemed to have the person in the room who could actually approve a project.

Eventually, however, Jim found a particularly perceptive audience in a young network executive at ABC named Michael Eisner, who listened closely, laughed appreciatively, and—unlike many of the executives who had so frustrated Oz—could actually green-light a project. And as Jim and his team packed up their boxes to leave,
Eisner gave them the go-ahead for a Muppet-related pilot. At last, Jim had yes for an answer—and now that he had ABC on board to produce a pilot, Jim was certain a weekly Muppet television show was a sure thing.

He would be wrong.

Jim’s Land of Gortch cast from the first season of
Saturday Night Live.
Left to right: King Ploobis, Wisss, the Mighty Favog, Scred, Queen Peuta, and Vazh
. SNL
’s human cast members hated giving up on-screen time for the Gortch sketches almost as much as
SNL
’s writers loathed writing them
. (
photo credit 8.1
)

“T
HE TIME IS RIGHT FOR A VARIETY SHOW HOSTED BY DOGS, FROGS AND
monsters,” wrote Jim in his first official pitch for a Muppet-based television show. In the late 1960s, after nearly a decade of appearances on other people’s variety shows, Jim was convinced the Muppets could more than hold their own for thirty minutes each week—and in the summer of 1969, he had prepared his first formal proposal, packaging it under a hand-lettered, full-color cover page, announcing “T
HE
M
UPPET
S
HOW
[—] a concept for a half hour P
RIME
T
IME
B
IG
B
UDGET
S
HOW
S
TARRING
T
HE
M
UPPETS.
”

Even in its earliest stages, Jim knew precisely the audience he
wanted for
The Muppet Show
. “The show is aimed at the adult or young-adult audience—but it is a show for the whole family,” he wrote. “The humor and writing will be adult, but children always enjoy the puppets, and the show will present nothing in bad taste to offend kids.” He was also certain of the format. The show would be “a loose assemblage of bits and pieces,” wrote Jim, “incorporating a guest star each week who does musical numbers with and without the Muppets, comedy bits with some of the puppet characters, etc.” While Jim was proposing Danny Kaye as a first guest, he was also willing to forgo the idea of a guest star altogether, offering to host the show himself “in a low-key, unperformer way
a la
Ernie Kovacs.”

Jim’s first draft was heavily influenced by the variety shows of
the time, which relied on set pieces and recurring characters, in the same vein as
Laugh-In
’s “joke wall” or “Here Comes the Judge” skits. Jim, then, proposed a number of regular segments—which he helpfully illustrated with full-color cartoons—including Kermit as a late night talk show host named Jackie Kavson, presiding over panel discussions that erupted into fistfights, and a skit featuring a prissy “critic at large” named Elmont Fidge who reviewed books and films with bawdy titles like
The Orgy Next Door
. Some of these bits, explained Jim somewhat clumsily, “have a satiric point of view, but they often exist only for the sake of pure comedy entertainment.”

Jim would tinker with his proposal over the next few years, describing shows built around guest stars like Paul McCartney or Stan Freberg, drafting detailed budget spreadsheets (Jim thought episodes would cost roughly $32,350 to produce—a number far below the $125,000 he would eventually spend on each installment of
The Muppet Show
) and elaborating at length on why the Muppets were uniquely suited for a show of their own. “
Puppets are fortunate—they can do and say things a live performer wouldn’t touch with a stick,” Jim explained. Later, he would enthusiastically—though not very helpfully—gush, “The Muppets, more than any other puppets, are more real than the real thing.” Ultimately, Jim’s early
Muppet Show
proposals were more passion than polish—but once Jim opened his black boxes and began performing his way through Muppet skits he had only described on paper, his vision was clear, his enthusiasm infectious. In his April 1973 meeting with Jim, it had
been impossible for Michael Eisner to say no. With Eisner’s approval, ABC would back a pilot for a weekly Muppet series.

Now that he had ABC’s support, Jim sat down in July to discuss ideas with Jerry Juhl, television writer Jerry Ross, and former
Jimmy Dean
scribe Will Glickman. Jim had his mind set on a Muppet Valentine’s Day show—yet another one of the holiday-themed specials he had been pitching for the last two years—and met with his writers regularly throughout the fall of 1973 to review early drafts of the script. By early September, Jim had even landed an A-list guest, twenty-eight-year-old actress and singer Mia Farrow, who willingly agreed to serve as the Muppets’ very first human costar. Things were moving quickly—and yet, typically, Jim was juggling several other obligations, making it difficult for him to get his pilot before the cameras as quickly as he wanted.