Jim Henson: The Biography (35 page)

Another new character, too, could also trace its origins almost as far back as
Zoocus
. In Jim’s outline for
The Muppet Nonsense Show
was a regular skit featuring a frazzled foreign chef who “
create[s] new dishes—with subtitles in various languages.… In the end, the dish explodes, walks away in disgust, or even eats him.” At the USDA show in Hamburg in the early 1960s, Jim and Jerry Juhl had performed
Sam and Friends
’ Omar as a live hand puppet creating a messy chef’s salad as he ranted in mock German—a bit Jim loved, but had kept out of his repertoire for nearly a decade. Now he would bring it back, though for the
Nonsense Show
, the Chef, and his mock language, would be Swedish. Jim initially named the character
Jarnvagskorsning
, a Swedish word that translated roughly as “railway crossing,” then decided that the name, while funny, was too hard to remember or pronounce. In his earliest appearances, then, Jim would refer to the character as “The Swedish Meatball,” and then simply as

“The Swedish Chef.”

Despite the relative simplicity of the puppet—it was essentially a head with two empty sleeves through which a second performer could insert both hands—the Swedish Chef was one of the last Muppets completed before filming on the pilot began in December 1974. It had been only a few months since ABC had approved the pilot, and in that time Jim had been in motion almost constantly, overseeing the writing duties with Marshall Brickman—his collaborator on the unrealized Broadway show—and
Sesame Street
writers Jon Stone and Norman Stiles, as well as visiting the workshop every day to check on Muppet production.

There was a quick break in September for Jim to celebrate the Muppet team winning its first Emmy for their work on
Sesame Street
—a major accomplishment to be sure, though Jim was typically low-key about it, grinning somewhat stiffly in his tuxedo as he accepted the award along with Oz, Nelson, Spinney, Hunt, and Brill. Three weeks later, Jim and the Muppet team took nearly a week to travel to London for an appearance on
The Herb Alpert Show
, dancing two enormous Boss Men Muppets to Alpert’s “Spanish Flea.” But the rest of the time, “
[he] was in the office every day, and he was always either upstairs or he’d come down and work the shop,” recalled Bonnie Erickson. “Even to the end … Jim came in and worked on the Swedish Chef and I sort of finished for him.”

Jim’s work extended beyond the office and workshop; in preparation for his performance as the Swedish Chef, Jim was even working in his car, practicing his mock Swedish during his daily drives from Bedford into New York City. Jim had installed a cassette deck in his Jaguar on which he could both play and record tapes, and each day he would listen to a cassette prepared for him by writer Marshall Brickman—who could bring Jim and Oz to tears with his ability to mock foreign languages—instructing him on how to speak mock Swedish. After listening to Brickman’s tape, Jim would then record himself—speaking into a full-sized microphone he had clipped to the dashboard—and play back his performance, trying to get it right. “
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.”

In mid-December, Jim spent six days taping his second pilot—which he was now cheekily calling
The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence
in an almost cathartic defiance of his kids’ stuff reputation—bringing in ten puppeteers, including Jane and several designers from the workshop, to perform more than seventy Muppets. Unlike the more deliberately paced and sweeter
Valentine Show
, the snappier, snarkier
Sex and Violence
bounced itself around a number of running gags, ranging from the homespun to the slightly surreal. Notably,
Sex and Violence
also marked the debut of a number of characters who would later move into the upper tiers of the Muppet pantheon. Besides Dr. Teeth and the Swedish Chef, Jim introduced the rest of the Electric Mayhem Band—the lanky bassist Floyd, the laid-back guitarist Janice, the silent, sax-playing Zoot, and the wild drummer Animal—as well as Sam the Eagle (“
who represents the older establishment values,” wrote Jim) and the curmudgeonly Statler and Waldorf, grumbling from oversized chairs in a parlor as a grandfather clock ticked loudly in the background. A prototype of Miss Piggy was even there, too, a carryover from the Herb Alpert special taped in London earlier that fall, and used here as a supporting member in the movie parody “Return to Beneath the Planet of the Pigs.” “
These are all characters that the audience will get to know and love—or hate—over a period of time,” wrote Jim.

While Jim didn’t necessarily have any characters to hate, he did have one to yawn at—a milquetoast, vaguely amphibious character named Nigel who, unfortunately, Jim had placed in the role of emcee. “
He’s a lot like me,” said Jim, though apart from the voice, that really wasn’t the case. Nigel was an admitted “middle of the road” character, but lacked any real personality—a failing that was especially obvious when the blasé Nigel was played up against Oz’s Sam the Eagle or Nelson’s Floyd. Kermit, meanwhile, had again been relegated to the background cast, appearing only in a dance sequence. According to co-writer Jon Stone, the decision to bench Kermit had been deliberate on Jim’s part. “
Jim wanted to get out of performing a little bit,” said Stone. “At Jim’s request, we did not use Kermit, because he wanted to establish somebody else to be able to do it on a day-to-day basis and free him up to do his daydreaming and fantasizing and all that other stuff he did.” Regardless, the decision
to put Nigel at the helm was a mistake—one that Jim would come to appreciate only after it was too late to remedy.

J
im completed the first edit of
Sex and Violence
during the first week of 1975 and sent a rough cut to network executives for review. As he waited for the network’s response, Jim went skiing with the family in Vermont, then drove to Washington to accommodate a distinguished request: the Smithsonian Institution was preparing an exhibit for the upcoming Bicentennial, and had asked if Jim would donate the original Ernie and Bert Muppets. Jim was proud to oblige—and the two Muppets proved so popular that what was originally to be a four-year stay turned into a nearly fifteen-year residency for the Muppet duo. At the conclusion of the “We the People” exhibit in 1980, the museum wrote to Jim begging to keep Ernie and Bert a little while longer. A longtime fan of the museum—he would even propose an after-school special called
Kermit at the Smithsonian
—Jim was happy to gratify the request. The Muppets would remain on display for another ten years.

Jim had scheduled another family vacation at the Snowmass resort in Aspen, Colorado, in early February, but dutifully scrapped his plans after receiving an unexpected phone call from director Blake Edwards, who wanted Jim to “
come over [to London] for lunch” to discuss his participation in another television special with Julie Andrews, Edwards’s wife. Jim flew to London early on February 8, arriving just in time for the promised lunch. He later admitted to being awed by the courteous manner in which Edwards and Andrews received him, dispatching a limo to pick him up at the airport, then bringing him to their home for lunch and tea. Andrews also promised to make up for Jim’s canceled Snowmass trip by arranging a ski vacation for the Hensons in Gstaad, Switzerland. “I … was just knocked out by the whole experience,” Jim admitted later. He would make certain to treat his own guests with a similar courtesy once he had a show of his own.

After agreeing to participate in Andrews’s upcoming special, Jim flew back to New York to corral his family for the Gstaad ski trip—but his schedule over the past few weeks had been grueling, and he
was exhausted. As he drove home, he fell asleep at the wheel of his Jaguar, smashing it against a guardrail when he missed the exit ramp for Bedford. Fortunately, he walked away unhurt—and a few days later he and his family departed for Gstaad.

Jim’s family returned from Switzerland without him, as he de-toured back through London to spend several days taping Muppet segments for the Julie Andrews special. After wrapping on March 6, Jim flew back to New York to make his final edits on
Sex and Violence
. Work on the Julie Andrews special had put him behind schedule; he now had less than two weeks to complete editing before ABC aired the show—and he had run into a minor problem.

After reviewing a rough cut of the pilot in early January, ABC executives had written Jim with a number of suggested changes. Early on, Jim had run into trouble over the title
Sex and Violence
for his pilot, as nervous network officials had surveyed potential viewers and fretted to Jim about their findings. In particular, they were concerned about the title for the special, which, they found, had “
produced substantial negative reaction.” But Jim wouldn’t budge. Besides the obvious nose thumbing at his squeaky clean reputation, Jim thought the title was just plain
funny
, and that anyone complaining didn’t get the joke. “
My 14-year-old daughter Lisa saw it, and throughout the show she kept asking ‘Where’s the sex?’ ” Jim explained somewhat incredulously. “As for violence, there probably wasn’t enough to fill a thirty second spot announcement for
Kung Fu
.… The special’s title … was a humorous hook. While the show depicted some of the current attitudes toward sex and violence, our purpose was to poke fun at them.” While he would eventually agree to make several other changes the network had suggested—removing a brief sequence where he appeared on camera to introduce the show, for instance, and shortening Dr. Teeth’s musical number—the title would stay.

Overall, he was pleased with the final version—“
freak city!” he laughingly called it—and he was anxious to hear what viewers and reviewers thought. Diligently, Jim made the rounds with the press to promote the show in the days leading up to its debut. He was chatting about puppetry and television in a much more thoughtful and relaxed manner than in the past; at other times, he tried almost too
hard to make the case for puppets as art. “
Puppets are by their very nature symbolic, so any time you use them, you’re doing something symbolically,” he told one interviewer pensively. “An audience will go away with their own message. But this is not a ‘messagey’ show,” he added quickly, “it’s a fun show.”

And still, he continued to stress his credentials as an adult entertainer. “
A lot of our work has always been adult-oriented, so we’ll be working a lot with those aspects of the Muppets,” he explained to
The Hollywood Reporter
. “Through this pilot, we hope to be able to demonstrate that puppetry can be very solid adult entertainment.” Privately, in fact, Jim felt he was already pulling his comedic punches, after toning down some of his jokes out of deference to his reputation as a children’s entertainer. “
He had lots of changes which were necessary, I think, in order to achieve the success he had,” said Richard Hunt. “[With the] Muppets … there was a sense of that perverted humor.… And he backed off that.”

Reviews of
Sex and Violence
were uneven, though Jim was likely relieved to see
Variety
call it “
zippy” and “good fun for children and adults who are on the in.” But rather than relying solely on newspaper reviews to determine whether he had succeeded, Jim had commissioned his own viewer survey, polling homes in New Jersey, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and West Virginia. Perhaps Jim was hoping to use the viewer comments as leverage in his negotiations with ABC for an ongoing series; if so, he was surely disappointed. “
There was a mixed reaction with regard to the material,” the survey reported. “A number of people felt that some of it was not funny. Some thought it was too far out.”

Whatever it was, ABC executives decided it hadn’t worked; there would be no weekly Muppet series, at least not on ABC. But Jim was typically resolute; if ABC wasn’t interested, he’d try someplace else. “
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. Even the showbiz-hardened Bernie Brillstein could get caught up in that kind of dogged determination. “
We thought it was gonna be great, we knew it was,” Brillstein said. And yet, one door after another was closed in his face. The response, said Brillstein, was always the same: “We don’t do puppets at night.” “
Puppets are funny
things,” Jim said later. “They seem to win the hearts of both small and grown-up kids, but the networks have never been eager to buy it.”

Still, Jim felt he was getting close; it was just a matter, he thought, of patience and personnel. At the moment, there was a noticeable hole in the administrative structure at Henson Associates following the uncomfortable but amicable departure of Diana Birkenfield in February 1974—and for over a year now, Jim had been without a full-time producer to assist in the development and management of his projects. Although he had the devoted Brillstein looking out for him on both coasts, Jim knew he needed a producer inside Henson Associates who could help him steer his dreams of a weekly Muppet show out of choppy waters and into the safe port of prime-time television. He needed someone who knew and understood the media, was savvy in business, and, ideally, shared his sense of humor and low-key management style—who could, as Al Gottesman put it, “
translat[e] Jim’s philosophy and essential ethic about work and the quality of what he wants to produce” into the actual practice of helping to run a business.

The more he thought about it, the more Jim thought he knew exactly who he needed. As he prepared to travel to Burbank in March 1975 for an appearance on
The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson, he placed a call to David Lazer, the dynamic IBM executive with whom Jim was still making short films, and asked to meet him at the Beverly Wilshire hotel. Jim suggested the two of them attend the Carson taping together, then discuss a bit of business over lunch the next day.