There is a wondrous Muppet workshop at HA! headquarters in Manhattan, where clever trolls build anything from a talking avocado to a dancing camel, or, more routinely, replacement figures for Fozzie Bear and Kermit (a crisis, still not entirely resolved, developed recently when the manufacturer of the green cloth of which Kermit is made went out of business). But the most critical element of what the viewer sees is not cloth or polyurethane. It is character: each of the most successful Muppets has grown, slowly and organically, from exaggerated fragments of its operator's character. Kermit is not Jim Henson, but he is a fascinating piece of Henson. He is the smartest of the Muppets, and he runs things as firmly as it is possible to run an explosion in a mattress factory. Like Henson, he is the absolute boss in all matters artistic and financial. Kermit is, in addition, a lovable, absolutely decent fellow. Henson's employees agree with complete unanimity that Henson is that sort of boss. He had no plan to make The Muppet Show M.C. a self-portrait, but when he used an other puppet, Nigel the Bandleader, in the role in an early version of the show; the character did not jell; and Kermit, who had been in and out of Henson's skits for 20 years or so, got the job.
Mel Brooks, who is an impassioned Muppet fan, says that "the message they telegraph is 'The meek shall inherit the earth.'" Mostly this is true. Kermit is meek; he is thankful for each day during which the sky does not fall. Gonzo is meek, and Rowlf tinkles the ivories with a dogged smile. Fozzie Bear is a Teddy. Except for Animal, who wrestles alligators when he is let off his chain, the only alarming character in Muppet society is Miss Piggy, she of the iron fists in the lavender gloves. "She wants everyone to treat her like a lady, and if they don't, she'll cut them in half," says Muppeteer Frank Oz, 34. He, should know, since it is his right arm that wriggles Miss Piggy through her black-belt coquetries.
When The Muppet Show began, Miss Piggy was a nobody, a mere member of the porker chorus. In less than three years, by a dazzling combination of talent, beauty and physical violence--when batting her eyelashes doesn't bring surrender, she lashes out with a karate chop--she has be come a star. Her finest moments now may be when she plays the ingéneu role in the show's arrestingly torpid "Pigs in Space" series, a send-up that is funny because it assumes, correctly, that the viewer is very bored by astronauts. Aboard the space ship Swinetrek, she is every bit as lard-witted as Captain Link Hogthrob and the sinister Dr. Strangepork, and she is greedy for her rightful attention.
She is also greedy for Kermit, and once, under the pretext of doing a wedding skit, she managed to maneuver him in front of a fully loaded preacher (he escaped the pit of matrimony by the desperate stratagem of summoning Lew Zealand, who had been hanging around backstage waiting for his lucky break, to bring on those tacky and awful boomerang fish). Miss Piggy has a wandering eye, however, and if the week's guest star happens to be a good-looking man, she latches onto him. After dancing the stirring pas de deux from Swine Lake with Rudolph Nureyev, she stalked the poor fellow into a steam bath and drove him forth with his towel askew. "She's lusty," says Oz. He feels that at heart she is true to Kermit. "She loves that little frog. She wants her frog and her career. She's torn, like everyone else." Oz is conceded to be, after Henson, the most gifted of the Muppet performers. He taught Miss Piggy all she knows, and he plays Fozzie Bear, Animal, Sam the pompous American Eagle and, on Sesame Street, Bert and Cookie Monster. Holding his naked right hand in the air, Oz demonstrates the basics of Muppet acting. "You can do proud": his hand sways and struts upward. "Sad": the hand, with its closed fingers forward, as a Muppet's mouth might be, droops at the wrist and the fingers float downward. "Confusion": the hand pauses, looks one way, looks another, pauses, seems to be glancing over its shoulder.
One morning on the set of The Muppet Movie, Oz stood among the camera cables, waiting to do a shot with Henson/Kermit. He considered Miss Piggy's psyche: "She's had her consciousness raised, but she still likes diamonds. She's a very '50s lady, and that's part of the problem." As he talked, his hand slipped into its working position inside Miss Piggy, who was due on-camera. She twisted this way and that, looking for Kermit, eager to get on with the movie.
After a take, as Director Jim Frawley (Kid Blue) yelled, "Cut!" Miss Piggy patted Kermit on his little green, behind. Kermit, who is not comfortable with bawdiness, swatted at her hand and jumped aside. Miss Piggy then complained teasingly about "the man who is always following me around," referring to Oz, and coyly peeked under the green flap at the bottom of Kermit's costume, exposing Jim Henson's arm. "Oh, you've got one too!" she said. It was the kind of off-camera byplay that goes on more or less constantly.
