Jim Henson The biography

Review by New York Times Review

IT'S NOT EASY being a puppeteer. Consider the opening sequence of 1979's "The Muppet Movie," in which Kermit the Frog performed "The Rainbow Connection," the follow-up to his breakout number, "Bein' Green." Kermit strummed his banjo while perched on a log in the middle of a swamp. The set had been carefully constructed on a studio back lot, but even fake swamps have real water. This required Jim Henson, Kermit's creator and performer, to execute the complicated sequence submerged. As Kermit crooned, Henson lurked beneath the surface of the ersatz bayou, his lanky frame folded into a custom-made diving bell, his oxygen pumped in through a tube. To make his frog sing, the puppeteer had to become amphibious. The physicality of Henson's art seems that much more astounding in our C.G.I.-enabled age. Out of cloth and thread, Henson created a world of characters as rich and diverse as our own. There's Rowlf, the amiable, piano-playing hound, who was the first of Henson's Muppets to become a star, bantering with Jimmy Dean on his show in the 1960s. There's Miss Piggy, the Muppets' femme fatale, who speaks crude French, practices karate and, in "The Great Muppet Caper," performed the first synchronized swimming number in puppet history. There's the Swedish chef, whose pseudo-Scandinavian ravings delight Americans and drive Swedes nuts. (They think he sounds Norwegian.) Henson died in 1990, at the age of 53, from a virulent infection. Yet more than two decades later, his influence has hardly waned. After a successful reboot in 2011, the Muppet movie franchise is back, with a new, star-studded installment due in the spring. Despite incursions by Dora, Blue, and Phineas and Ferb, there is no displacing Big Bird, Grover and the Count from America's playrooms. (Henson teamed up with the Children's Television Workshop to create "Sesame Street" in 1969. That's 44 years of teaching children to count!) After the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, The New Yorker set its cover illustration not in a Greenwich Village bar but in a Sesame Street walk-up. PBS may protest that puppets don't have sex lives, but Bert and Ernie remain one of America's most prominent same-sex couples. In his new biography, Brian Jay Jones tells the story of how Henson turned a quaint art form into an entertainment empire that, at the time of his death, the Walt Disney Company was negotiating to buy for $150 million. Jones had excellent access, and took full advantage of it, interviewing Henson's relatives (including his wife, Jane, who died in 2013) as well as his many collaborators, from fellow puppeteer Frank Oz (the voice of Bert - Henson was Ernie) to George Lucas, executive producer of Henson's 1986 fantasy film "Labyrinth." He dwelled in the vast Muppet archive and pored over Henson's diary. The result is an exhaustive work that is never exhausting, a credit both to Jones's brisk style and to Henson's exceptional life. Henson was born in 1936 and grew up mostly in the Maryland suburbs. His father worked for the Agriculture Department as an agronomist, but his maternal grandmother was artistically inclined and taught her grandson to draw and sew. Her pupil was a preternatural talent, a born entertainer with a boundless imagination and the work ethic of the Doozers, Fraggle Rock's always-on-the-clock construction crew. By the time Henson earned his degree from the University of Maryland (in home economics, which offered a puppetry course), he was making his own puppets and performing on the local NBC affiliate. He was earning enough money to drive to graduation in a newly purchased Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. Jones is especially sharp in his account of these early successes. Henson understood that television presented an opportunity to reinvent the art of puppetry. The new medium allowed for intimate closeup shots and thus called for more expressive puppets. As Jones notes, Kermit, the most beloved of Henson's creations, is also one of the simplest: little more than a halved Ping-Pong ball and a swatch of green cloth that Henson could scrunch into convincing expressions of joy, melancholy and exasperation. Henson understood television's potential because he was raised on it. The variety shows of Milton Berle, Sid Caesar and Ernie Kovacs shaped his sense of humor, and Henson nodded to them in his own productions: He set "The Muppet Show," his Emmy-award winning TV series, backstage at a variety show, with a borscht belt bear and a diva pig jockeying for stage time. Like much of his work, the show was animated by what Frank Oz called "affectionate anarchy" - puppets shooting themselves out of cannons, puppets eating their drum sets. Henson smuggled song, dance and slapstick back into the mainstream by cutting oldfashioned corniness with a touch of crazy. Jones sees in Henson not just a visionary entertainer, but also a canny business mind: a Lee Iacocca of felt. Though he lacked a C.E.O.'s steeliness - he hated conflict and couldn't bear to fire people - Henson was uncompromising when it came to realizing his latest idea, whether it was a Christmas special about an otter jug band or a feature film about a babystealing goblin king with a fondness for very tight pants. Henson possessed what one colleague called a "whim of steel." He also had foresight. In the early years, Henson financed his creative pursuits with advertising work, but insisted on retaining ownership of his creations, a move that would benefit him both financially and creatively. While working on a campaign for Frito-Lay, he produced a spot starring a monster who maniacally devoured the company's new Munchos potato chips. A few months later, after a switch from salty to sweet snacks, Cookie Monster was born. He would prove far more valuable on public television than he'd ever been in commercials, as the success of "Sesame Street" drove its young fans to gobble up licensed merchandise, from plush toys to records. In 1970, "Rubber Duckie," sung by Henson in the voice of Ernie, hit No. 16 on the Billboard charts. As strong as Jones is on Henson's career, the man himself often remains out of sight, crouched just below the frame. Jones, whose previous book was a biography of Washington Irving that speculated the author might have been homosexual, here prefers not to delve too deeply into his subject's love life. His account of Henson's complicated marriage to Jane Henson, a talented puppeteer in her own right, is more tactful than insightful. (The Hensons separated in 1983, inaugurating a period in which many women "seemed to know their way around Jim's kitchen," as one girlfriend gently puts it) Jones carefully catalogs Henson's luxury cars (among them a "Kermit-green" Lotus) and lavish vacations, but is less fastidious in his efforts to find the man beneath the Muppet, too often falling back on rosecolored remembrances from friends and family that would make Oscar the Grouch retreat to his trash can. Then again, any biographer might have struggled to locate the divide between Henson and his work, as he drew no such distinction himself. "Everything was play for him," Jerry Juhl, the head writer on "The Muppet Show," tells Jones. "Work was play." Henson seems to have been most himself with a puppet on his hand. One "Muppet Show" director noted that when he'd offer Henson notes after a take, it was often the frog, not the man, who would reply. "In the end," he said, "you just talk to Kermit." Out of cloth and thread, Henson created a world of characters as rich and diverse as our own. JOHN SWANSBURG is the editorial director of Slate.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 8, 2013]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* It's still a shock 23 years later: the irrepressible creator of the Muppets dead at 53. No one embraced life and creativity with more optimism and enthusiasm than Jim Henson. The first to write a complete biography of Henson, Jones spoke at length with people close to Henson personally and professionally, and his lucid style, wide-angle perspective, and deep immersion in Henson's exuberantly innovative approach to puppets, television, and film make for a thoroughly compelling read. A tall, confident gadget freak from Mississippi and Maryland, with a zany sense of humor, Henson inherited his grandmother's versatile artistic gifts and wanted to work in television the minute he saw it. When a job as a TV puppeteer opened up in 1955, Henson, a freshman in college who knew nothing about puppets, leaped at the chance, teaming up with intrepid artist Jane Nebel. Henson coined the name Muppets; he and Jane married, had five talented children, and worked feverishly, arriving at Sesame Street in 1969, where Kermit, Henson's alter ego, and the rest of the now-classic Muppets began their benevolent, rambunctious rule. Right up until Henson's sudden death in 1990, he and his stellar collaborators, including Frank Oz, continually broke new ground. With verve and insight, Jones illuminates the full scope of Henson's genius, phenomenal productivity, complex private life, zeal to do good, and astronomical influence.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The Sesame Street auteur who made the Muppets into a global entertainment and merchandising juggernaut seems almost as winsome as his cute, furry creations in this adulatory biography. Jones (Washington Irving: An American Original) styles Henson as a polite and soft-spoken but charismatic figure whose "faith in his fellow man was unbounded," and whose defining characteristics were "staggering" generosity and an unerring instinct for "playing nice." The worst sins the author can dredge up are affordable penchants for fast cars and gambling and some affairs after Henson separated from his wife. Jones makes a meatier, though overstated, case for Henson as a genius-he soft pedals the fact that Henson's non-Muppet projects usually bombed-who revolutionized puppetry with televisual mise-en-scene; flexible, expressive, close-up-ready faces; and edgy humor that often climaxed in explosions or Muppet cannibalism. The book's most engrossing passages explore the extraordinary technical demands of creating naturalistic puppet spectacles in the age before computer graphics: "performing" a Muppet was an intricate, almost contortionistic dance of two puppeteers crammed into a single sleeve, and one swampy movie scene required Henson to manipulate a banjo-playing Kermit the Frog while sealed in a diving bell. Jones presents a rather bland show-biz saga, but with a fascinating making-of documentary woven in. Photos. Agent: Jonathan Lyons, Lyons Literary. (Sept. 24) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Jones chronicles Jim Henson's life, starting with a look at how Henson's teenage fascination with the television industry in the early 1950s propelled him into an enduring journey through the art of puppetry, and on a larger scale, a venue to share his love, imagination, and humor with the world. In 1955, he created local TV segments with his wife, Jane Nebal, which showcased their unique puppets and comedic sense that was partial to things being eaten or blown up. The first of Henson's many television commercials, in which several of the Muppet characters were developed, ran in 1957. Attending Puppeteers of America conventions, Henson and Nebal met future collaborators including Frank Oz, who would go on to become half of what many consider to be one of the great comedic duos: Bert and Ernie. All the while, Henson created and ran a company built on teamwork, laughter, and abundant creativity. His life was a steady stream of projects including Sesame Street, the first season of Saturday Night Live, The Muppet Show, and The Muppet Movie. VERDICT Jones's (Washington Irving) biography, which draws on interviews with Henson's family, friends, and colleagues as well as company and family archives, brings to light a spirit of love, warmth, wit, and so much more. It makes an enjoyable companion to Karen Falk's Imagination Illustrated: The Jim Henson Journal. [See Prepub Alert, 4/1/13; see Q&A with the author on p. 72.]-Lani Smith, Ohone Coll. Lib., Fremont, CA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Biographer Jones (Washington Irving: An American Original, 2007) relies on strict chronology to tell the life of Muppets creator Jim Henson (19361990). With the cooperation of the Henson family, the author portrays his subject as not only innovative, but also mostly upbeat and pleasant to work with. Since the Muppets are mostly feel-good creations and Henson was mostly a feel-good guy, the biographical narrative sometimes lacks tension. That is a minor shortcoming, however. Jones is masterful at explaining how Henson grew up to become a daring puppeteer and scriptwriter, how he managed to attract so much remarkable talent to his side, and how his stressful business relationship with the Disney Company might have aggravated the bacterial infection that weakened the normally healthy Henson, who died at age 53 while trying to negotiate the planned Disney purchase of the franchise. (Note: While there was speculation at the time of his death that the Disney negotiations had a detrimental effect on Henson's health, there is no medical proof that this was the case.) Jones does not ignore Henson's separation from his wife/creative partner, nor his extramarital affair with a much younger woman, but the downside of Henson's personality is not Jones' primary focus. In an era of pathography, this biography stands out as positive. The writing is clear throughout, and the chronological approach allows Jones to clearly demonstrate cause and effect. Forced to become a businessman to manage what became an unexpectedly large empire, Henson often struggled with the portion of his days that felt noncreative. Jones continually shows that Henson left the world a better place, which serves as the book's theme. The author ably shows many reasons why Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and many other Henson creations are recognizable more than two decades after his death. A solid biography that can be enjoyed by readers of more than one generation.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter One The Delta 1936-­1949 Deer Creek winds casually, almost lazily, through the muggy lowlands in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Its point of origin--near the little town of Scott, in Bolivar County--lies roughly ninety miles north of its terminal point at the Yazoo River three counties away. But Deer Creek takes its time getting there, looping and whorl­ing back and forth in a two-hundred-mile-long amble, looking like a child's cursive scrawled across the map. The town of Leland, Mississippi, straddles Deer Creek just as it twists into one of its first tight hairpin turns, about ten miles east of Greenville. Established before the Civil War, the sleepy settlement, sprawled out across several former plantations, had taken advantage of fertile soil and regular steamboat traffic on Deer Creek to become one of the wealthiest in the Delta region. In the 1880s came the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad, along with an influx of grocers and landlords and innkeepers--but even with the growing ­merchant class and increasing gentrification, it was still land that mattered most in Leland, and in the Mississippi Delta. In 1904, then, the state legislature called for the creation of an agricultural experiment station in the Delta region, preferably "at a point where experiments with the soil of the hills as well as the Delta can be made." That point turned out to be two hundred acres of land hugging Deer Creek, in the village of Stoneville, putting the state's new Delta Branch Experiment Station just north of--and practically butted up against--Leland. By 1918, the facility in Stoneville was housing researchers and their families from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, carrying out research on crops, soil, and animal production for the federal government; by 1930, its findings on animal feed and insect control were particularly welcome to planters and sharecroppers doing their best to scratch out a living from the swampy Delta soil during the Great Depression. Paul Ransom Henson--Jim Henson's father--was neither a planter nor a sharecropper. Nor had he come to the Delta region to work a family farm during the Depression or satisfy a random pang of wanderlust. Paul Henson was a practical man, and he had come to Leland in 1931 with his new wife, Betty, for a practical reason: he had accepted a government post at the Delta Branch Experiment Station in Stoneville. Paul Henson came from a line of similarly sturdy and clear-minded men who sought neither to offend nor agitate, a trait that Paul's famous son would inherit as well--and, in fact, Jim Henson would always be very proud of his father's rugged, even-tempered Midwestern lineage. On one side of his father's family were the Dolton and Barnes lines--good-natured, nonconfrontational, and accommodating almost to a fault--while on the other were the Hensons--practical, rugged, and imperturbable. One of Jim's favorite family stories involved his great-great-grandfather, a strongly pro-Northern farmer named Richmond Dolton who, during the Civil War, had been living in a small Missouri town in which most of the residents were Southern sympa­thizers. Rather than offend the Confederate sensibilities of his neighbors, the amiable Dolton simply swapped his farm--in a typically equitable and businesslike exchange--for a similar one in a town in Kansas where the residents shared his own Union tendencies. The move would come to be particularly appreciated by Dolton's teenage daughter, Aramentia, though for reasons more prurient than political--for it was here in Kansas that Aramentia Dolton met Ransom Aaron Barnes, a New Jersey native who had settled in the area. In 1869, she and Barnes were married; less than a year later, they would have a daughter, Effie Carrie Barnes--Paul Henson's mother. On the Henson side, Jim could trace his pedigree back to colonial-era farmers in North Carolina whose descendants had slowly pushed west with the expanding American frontier, setting up farms and raising families in Kentucky and Kansas. One of those descendants was Jim's paternal grandfather, a sturdy Kansas farmer named Albert Gordon Henson, who, in 1889, had married Richmond Dolton's levelheaded granddaughter, Effie Carrie Barnes. After an ambitious though unsuccessful effort to stake a claim during the Cherokee Strip land run--where he had rumbled into the dusty Oklahoma countryside in a mule-drawn buckboard--Albert and Effie would eventually settle in Lincoln County, just east of Oklahoma City. It was here that Paul Ransom Henson--the name Ransom was borrowed from Effie's father, Ransom Aaron Barnes--would be born in 1904, the youngest of Albert and Effie's nine children. Each morning, Paul Henson would be awakened at first light to do his chores and walk the half mile to school, a one-room building crammed with fifty children and presided over by two teachers. While Albert Henson never had much formal schooling, he was determined to make education a priority for the children in the Henson household. With that sort of parental encouragement, Paul graduated from high school in 1924 at age nineteen, and immediately headed for Iowa State College--now Iowa State University, a school recognized then, as now, for the quality of its agricultural programs. Over the next four years, Paul was a member of the agriculture-oriented Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity, participated on the Farm Crops Judging Team (the team would place third nationally in 1927), and even discovered a knack for performance as a member of the Dramatic Club. In July 1928, he received his BS in Farm Crops and Soils, completing a thesis on the hybridization of soybeans. Following graduation, Paul began work on his master's degree at the University of Maryland, enrolling in courses covering plant physics, biochemistry, genetics, statistics, agronomy, and soil technology. One afternoon, while eating his lunch, he caught sight of an attractive young woman walking toward the campus restaurant--when pressed, he would later admit his eyes had been drawn mainly to her legs--and was determined to win an introduction. The legs, as it turned out, belonged to Elizabeth Brown--Betty, as everyone called her--the twenty-one-year-old secretary to Harry Patterson, dean of the College of Agriculture. Elizabeth Marcella Brown was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Maryland, but had lived in Memphis and New Orleans long enough to pick up both the lilting accent and genteel demeanor of a Southern belle. The accent and the manners were fitting, for Betty had a refined, distinctly Southern, and generally artistic pedigree. In fact, it was through Betty's side of the family that Jim Henson could trace his artistic ability, in a straight and colorful line running through his mother and grandmother back to his maternal great-grandfather, a talented Civil War-­era mapmaker named Oscar. Oscar Hinrichs--a swaggering Prussian who had immigrated to the United States in 1837 at the age of two--began working as a cartographer for the United States Coast Survey at age twenty-one, reporting directly to Alexander Dallas Bache, head of the survey and a great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin. When the Civil War began in 1860, Oscar enthusiastically enlisted with the Confederacy--even smuggling himself into the South with the help of Confederate sympathizers in Maryland--and loaned his valuable mapmaking skills to the Southern cause even as he survived battles at Antietam, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness. After the war, Oscar married Marylander Mary Stanley--whose father had helped him sneak into the Confederacy--and moved to New York City. Over the next ten years, Mary bore Oscar six children, including one daughter, Sarah--Betty Brown's mother, and Jim Henson's grandmother. It was Sarah who inherited Oscar Hinrichs's innate artistic streak, and she would learn not only how to paint and draw, but also how to sew, carve, and use hand tools--talents that Jim Henson would wield just as skillfully two generations later as he sketched, carved, and sewed his earliest Muppets. The Hinrichs family eventually settled in Washington, where Oscar unhappily bounced between jobs, convinced employers were discriminating against him because of his service to the Confederacy. Compounding his misery, Mary became ill with uterine cancer and died in 1891 at the age of fifty-two. Less than a year later, a grief-stricken Oscar Hinrichs took his own life, leaving an orphaned fourteen-year-old Sarah to tend to two younger brothers. Dutifully, Sarah dropped out of the art school into which she had just been accepted and moved with her brothers into a Washington boardinghouse. For the rest of their lives, neither Sarah nor her siblings openly discussed Oscar Hinrichs's sad demise--a penchant for maintaining a respectful silence about unhappy circumstances that her grandson Jim Henson would also share. In 1902, twenty-four-year-old Sarah Hinrichs was introduced to Maury Brown, a lanky, thirty-four-year-old clerk and stenographer for Southern Railway. Born in Kentucky on the day after Christmas in 1868, Maury Heady Brown--Jim Henson's grandfather--was a self-made man with a rugged Southern determination. Raised by a single mother who was totally deaf, Brown had run away from home at age ten and learned to use the telegraph, supporting himself by reporting horse-racing scores for a Lexington racetrack. A voracious reader and quick learner, he next taught himself typewriting and shorthand, eventually becoming so proficient at both that he was hired as the full-time private secretary to the president of Southern Railway. When he met Sarah Hinrichs in the winter of 1902, Brown fell in love immediately--and on their second date, as they ice skated on the frozen Potomac River, Maury Brown presented Sarah Hinrichs with an armful of red roses and asked for her hand. While the newspapers in 1903 may have noted the marriage of Maury and Sarah Brown, to each other--and to the rest of the family--they would always be "Pop" and "Dear." For the next few years, Pop and Dear bounced around with the Southern Railway, landing briefly in Missouri, Washington, Memphis, and New Orleans, and all while raising three daughters, Mary Agnes, Elizabeth, and Barbara--better known as Attie, Betty, and Bobby. Perhaps because they moved around so often, the Browns were an exceptionally close and good-natured family. "I just thought we had the happiest home that ever was," Bobby said later. "And I remember what a shock it was when I would go to other people's houses to sleep over and found out that all families weren't as fun and nice to each other as ours!" At some point in his youth, Maury Brown embraced Christian Science, a relatively new faith that had been formally established in 1879. Consequently, the daughters were all brought up as Christian Scientists, though moderate in their practice, likely through the influence of Dear. While the daughters might forgo most medical care in favor of prayer or homeopathic treatments--as a girl, Betty was dunked in alternating hot and cold water baths to combat a case of whooping cough--more serious injuries were almost always attended to by physicians. When Attie was badly hurt in a car accident one winter, the family immediately called for a doctor--and far from being concerned about compromising her faith, Attie remembered being more embarrassed that the doctor had to cut away her long underwear to set her broken leg. Eventually, the Browns returned to the D.C. area for good, living first in a "perfectly awful" place near the railroad tracks in Hyattsville, Maryland--the house would shake violently as trains roared past--before settling into the much quieter Marion Street in 1923. Attie and Betty were expected to help pay the mortgage each month, and shortly after high school both found work as secretaries--Attie at an express company, and Betty at the nearby University of Maryland, where she, and her legs, soon caught the eye of Paul Henson. Paul would woo Betty for the better part of two years, studying genetics and plant biology at the university during the week and attending regular tennis parties hosted by the Browns on weekends--and Paul quickly came to adore not just Betty, but the entire Brown family. It was easy to see why; Dear and Pop were devoted to each other, while the girls, both then and later, had distinct, almost Dickensian, personalities. Attie was the serious and straitlaced one and became a devoted Episcopalian. Betty was considered practical and no-nonsense, though she could show flashes of a slightly silly sense of humor, while Bobby was the happy-go-lucky one who worked to ensure that everything was "upbeat all the time." All three, too, were excellent tennis players, having been taught to play at a young age by their dashing Uncle Fritz Hinrichs, who also taught the girls to dance. Attie later admitted she "could've cared less" about tennis, but the parties kept the Browns in the center of a wide social circle, and their names on the society pages of The Washington Post. Excerpted from Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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