Henson has little time for brooding, even about money. After a few days of business talks in New York, he packed his winter clothes and a new tube of toothpaste and flew to London, where, according to his contract with Grade, the TV series must be taped. Within hours of his arrival, shooting had started. Several of the pig Muppets had started an offcamera fight but had been quelled. Guest Star Harry Belafonte had overcome his initial queasiness at working with shaggy short people and had sung The Banana Boat Song with spirit, even though Captain Link Hogthrob pigged one of the bananas.
In New York City, Costumer Calista Hendrickson worked on a purple chiffon dress for Miss Piggy to use, in one of the fall shows in which she dances cheek-to-cheek with Danny Kaye, she began to talk about what puppets mean to people, and that reminded her of the first time the Muppet crew met Edgar Bergen, who was the guest star on one of their early shows. "When he walked into our studio in London, they all gathered around him like children. And then the box was brought in, Charlie's box, and they all sank to the floor and sat in a circle around it. And then Bergen opened the box and Charlie came out and said hello and introduced himself around. He met Fozzie, and the two of them went on and on, all adlibbed. No one moved an inch." Later, in Hollywood, Bergen did a cameo appearance in The Muppet Movie, and a few weeks later he died. "One of the stagehands on the movie couldn't understand why everybody was so affected by Bergen's death. 'You'd think Charlie McCarthy had died,' he said. One of the puppeteers whirled around and said, 'But he did! Don't you see? And so did Mortimer Snerd! And if Henson goes, Kermit goes!
Kermit is alive and well, and Charlie and Mortimer were, after all, only puppets. If the world were a wholly rational place, their claims on it would be small. But the fact is they do make claims, and strong ones. Kermit, rueful and dithered, frees a part of our own natures so absurd and defenseless that we would never let a human actor hold it in his hands. This freedom is wonderful, but there is a price. What these puppets mean to the millions of people who have watched them is almost embarrassing to express, because the feeling they evoke is nothing less than love.
The Man Behind the Frog
Jim Henson's Christmas present last year from Muppeteer Dave Goelz was a diver's weight belt, which Goelz called a "metabolic equalizer." The idea was that Henson, suitably ballasted, might slow down. That seems not to have happened as Henson ricochets off New York on his way from Los Angeles to London, he spins out titles for the 50 or so Muppet books he has decreed: Miss Piggy's Foolproof 14-Day Diet, The Swedish Chef on How to Cook a Chicken.
His style is not frenzied--he is notably calm, in fact--but it is unusually intense. It suits a man widely deferred to as a wizard, but it would not do, say, for a renowned comic performer, a wisecracking green frog. And the curious truth about this gaunt, bearded, rather ascetic-looking craftsman, as he admits, is that "my nature is not particularly witty." He is funny only with Kermit on his arm, and the same thing seems to be true of Frank Oz and the other Muppet people.
Puppetry released something in Henson that had not been noticeable before. During his senior year at a Maryland high school, he heard that a local TV station was looking for puppeteers. He knew nothing about puppets, but television fascinated him. He and a friend sewed together a rat puppet that looked French and was called Pierre and a couple of cowboys. They were put to work on The Junior Morning Show, which ran for three weeks and then sank without a Variety trace. Henson's career was moving, however, with an ease and certainty that now seem almost eerie: a nearby NBC station hired Pierre and friends to help out on a cartoon show. By this time Henson was attending the University of Maryland, where he found a coin puppeteering. One of his fellow students was a New York girl named Jane Nebel, and when Henson's TV job expanded to include an afternoon variety show, she signed on to help. By the end of the semester, they had two five-minute nighttime spots. Their star puppet was a bald-headed, popeyed fellow named Sam. He didn't talk, but clowned around while
they played novelty records. Sometimes Sam was funny and sometimes he was dreadful, and viewers generally didn't know the difference. Says Jane: "It was local television."
