For someone my age, the Muppets have always just been around, an integral part of the cultural fabric of America. It could at times be hard to conceive of a time before Kermit and Miss Piggy, except of course for the fact that even as a little kid I knew the name of the man who was responsible for all of it. Jim Henson is rightly synonymous with his creations, even, as this comprehensive account of his life demonstrates, he was and wanted to be so much more.
Though author Brian Jay Jones goes the conventional route and takes the reader all the way back to the beginning, even beyond Jim Henson’s birth to the stories of his grandparents and parents, the book rushes through these elements to get to the work. Henson got his start early. A television obsessive, he found his way to puppetry by chance when a local TV station gave the insistent kid looking for a job on a children’s show. Jim taught himself puppetry at first, and by the time he landed in a course on the subject at the University of Maryland, he found that he was more knowledgeable and experienced than his professor.
It was while he was still in college that Jim started producing his own material involving puppets. His show Sam & Friends was so popular in the D.C. market that the station ceded time from the local news for his puppet antics. A local coffee took notice and hired him to make their commercials, which became hits for their zany, often violent humor. From there he started making appearances on talk shows and variety shows, all through the 1960s. And of course, in 1969 he entered into a partnership with the Children’s Television Workshop, creating the many memorable puppet characters on Sesame Street and performing Ernie alongside his friend and collaborator Frank Oz as Bert.
As Jones chronicles, Henson loved Sesame Street but thought there was a danger that he and his creatures would be pigeonholed as just being for children. Jim believed in puppetry as a serious art form, and he spent years trying to convince the major studios and television networks that he was right. A misconceived first attempt saw the Muppets become part of the first season of Saturday Night Live, but eventually, thanks to the intercession of British investors, Henson got a chance to show that the Muppets were for all ages. The Muppet Show became one of the most popular TV shows around the world, eventually leading to three movies and an empire.
Henson is a compelling figure in Jones’s telling. He’s a mass of contradictions. He’s soft-spoken and gentle, yet loves flashy sports cars and expensive works of art. He constantly stresses the importance of artistic merit over money, yet becomes massively rich and buys homes all over the world. Those looking for “dirt” on Henson will find some typical stuff for a powerful 20th century man. Henson was not a great husband to his wife Jane, though she speaks of him with real warmth despite their eventual separation. His habit of dating his own employees has not aged well, to be sure. But the reverence with which the other Muppet performers and Henson employees speak of their boss overwhelms any negatives. Their devastation at his absurdly early passing at just fifty-three years old is beautifully rendered by Jones, who gives the reader a real sense of where Jim Henson was heading at the time of his death, and how much the rest of us have missed out on because of it.