Memoirs of a Muppets Writer: (You mean somebody actually writes that stuff?) (13 page)

We arrived in South Hampton the morning of Saturday, May 14, 1977. And South Hampton was in the middle of a dock strike.

In the 1940s and 50s, before trans-Atlantic air service became common, American celebrities sailed to Europe on the great liners. Their arrival at South Hampton was always a big deal and a staple of Pathe News, which ran in movie theaters. Not infrequently, the port would suffer longshoremen strikes, providing news film of celebrities pushing their own mounds of luggage off the dock by themselves. I have a vivid, romantic memory of Marilyn Monroe, in a sweater, hobble skirt and mules, pushing a dolly piled high with her matching luggage as the striking British dock workers looked on stoically.

Well, in 1977, England was in strike mode again. We arrived in the middle of the classic South Hampton longshoremen strike. The pier looked the same as when Marilyn swivelled down it 25 years before. I’d swear the same dock wallopers with the same tweed hats and dangling cigarette butts hadn’t moved in a quarter of a century, either.

The union rule was that only passengers were allowed to carry anything off the dock. Most grumbled as they lugged their baggage down the pier. But we, Muppets, in addition to our personal luggage, also had five tons of Muppet materials, puppets, props, wardrobe, etc., in the hold of the ship.

Now only we could unload it from the dock. The same hand trucks and dollies that were available to Marilyn in 1953 were now made available to us. All of our guys grabbed dollies and hand trucks to move this five ton pile of boxes off the dock. Jim and I took a two-man dolly.

To handle our five tons of Muppet freight, A.T.V. Studios had sent a lorry with a crew. What made it so surreal was that the studio had also sent a fleet of those wonderful Daimler Princess limousines to take us to London. The cars were piloted by very professional chauffeurs dressed in grey, brass buttoned uniforms with white gloves. But all these guys were restricted to the outside of Customs and Immigration.

So out on the dock, Jim and I would heft a load of boxes onto the dolly and then push it slowly through Immigration and Customs. Like most reprobates, I’ve had a few jobs that involved moving freight, so I fell into my freight-moving pattern. But as soon as we got the load through the door, a brigade of these very British, very solicitous chauffeurs would rush to us saying, “Oh, Guv’nor, allow me to take that.”

They would take immediate control of our carts, push them over to the van, briskly unload them and return them to us with a tip of the hat. It was a bizarre introduction to England to start off transforming from a stevedore with a hand truck into a chauffeured “Guv’nor” and back again within a few hundred feet.

Chapter 22

London 1977

W
e arrived in London at midday and checked into the Sloane Square Hotel. 1977, it turned out, was the Silver Anniversary of the coronation of Her Majesty, Elizabeth II. All of England was in the midst of a year long celebration, which meant that hotel rooms were at a premium.

We were told that our rooms at the Sloane were reserved for 12 days and that was it. We could not extend our reservations. We had exactly 12 days to find an apartment and move into it. (During our stay we heard what sounded like muffled gun shots and were told that some Arab guests had taken umbrage to the 12-day reservation rule.)

Most of our crew had worked in London the season before and had made living arrangements for this season at the end of last season. But the Hinkleys and I were first timers. So, when we weren’t writing the TV show 10 hours a day, we were frantically chasing around London with real estate agents looking for places to live. I was just looking for a flat. But the Hinkleys, with two kids, needed a house!

Of course, the premium on hotel rooms also extended to flats. It seemed like everyone in London with a flat was renting it out for outrageous amounts of money. And by mid-May, most of them were gone. To make it more difficult, I knew nothing of the geography of London. I had only been there once before on vacation in 1969. I had no idea of good and bad neighborhoods or where anything was located.

London is also a very confusing city. Even life-long Londoners keep an A to Z(ed), the city’s street atlas, on their dashboards. London streets change names every few blocks. In certain areas street names are repeated. You can have a Lenox Street, Lenox Road, Lenox Gardens, Lenox Muse and Lenox Close (whatever a
close
is), all in one small area. Added to that, there isn’t a straight street in the whole town except Brompton Road, which is the old Roman Road north to Sheffield.

Don Hinkley, said it was the most confusing city he had ever inhabited. He claimed it was the only city in the world where you couldn’t walk around the block. “I tried it last week.”, he told me. “And, I wound up in Scotland.”

So for several days, I flew around town with a series of estate agents looking at flats. One was a South African woman, with whom I got into a conversation about how reserved the Brits are. “Yes.”, she told me. “But as soon as there is a little bit of sunshine, they’ll strip down to their knickers and lie in it.”

Sure enough, one day in Green Park, the overcast parted and brilliant sunlight appeared. Instantly men and women stripped down to their underwear and lay down to bask in it until the overcast returned about ten minutes later.

My expense allowance was $500 a week. When I first heard that in New York it sounded like a fortune. This was 1977. I thought, “Gee, I know it rains a lot in London, but I always wanted a penthouse.” And, “Maybe there would be enough left over to rent a Jaguar.” For a while I even entertained the idea of hiring a real English butler.

But as my 12-day hotel reservation dwindled and I was forced to shoehorn my flat searches around long work days, reality set in. I was being shown dark, dank, cellar studios where you wouldn’t commit suicide - you’d be too embarrassed to have the body discovered there. These places were renting for $800 a month and up. If the original tenants were paying more than $100 a month, they were being robbed blind. I finally settled on a flat in a 1950s hi-rise building opposite Regents Park. The rent was $1,300 a month.

It had light and a view of the Park, which was quite lovely. But it was still the strangest place I’ve ever lived. The building was a giant semi-circle to insure every flat had a view of the Park, rather like a seaside resort hotel. Glassed in walkways radiated like spokes from the street, through the semi-circle, to each of the building’s five entrances. So, coming home always felt a little bit like flying to Cleveland.

The flat had started out as a one bedroom, with a living room and kitchen. However, they had turned the kitchen into a second bedroom, which featured a kitchen sink as part of its decor. A galley kitchen had been hacked out of the entry hall.

Its most distinctive feature was its attempt to create a sunken living room. Someone had installed a ten-inch high box in the middle of the living room doorway. So, to enter the living room, you had to step up and then step down.

A photographer friend of mine camped out with me for a few months and he must have fallen over it at least once a day, usually while carrying cases of very expensive photographic equipment.

Moving to London was real culture shock. To begin with, I had spent the past four years hibernating in my New York apartment, churning out
Sesame Street
scripts. Since my wife was constantly on the road shooting documentaries, I pretty much lived on Chinese, deli and pizza, all delivered. So, even getting outside into New York City was a rare occasion. Now I was not only in a different city but a different country as well.

The first thing I discovered was how wrong Winston Churchill was when he described the U.S. and England as, “Two great countries separated by a common language.”

There’s nothing common about our languages! It was a full two weeks before I understood everything that was said to me. And, when my wife came through town, I actually had to translate for her.

For a while, I suffered from a paranoid delusion that the English put on that accent just to put on us Yanks. I had this fantasy that when we Yanks weren’t around, the Brits talk just like people in Chicago or Canarsie. But, thanks to my time in London, I can now understand anyone from anywhere in the English-speaking world … except the Scots.

Then, of course, there was the London weather. They say in London you can experience all four seasons of the year in one day. What they don’t tell you is that 23½ hours of that day are winter. Evenings in June, I would come home to my $1,300.00 a month flat and turn on the gas stove to warm the place up, just the way I did when I was broke and living in a $75.00 a month studio on Beacon Hill.

Richard Hunt used to make the point of how rare sunlight is in England by asking a group of five or six Brits which way was North. Inevitably, they all would point in different directions.

The BBC-TV daily weather reports were all depressingly the same:
overcast
with
occasional bright spots
- the bright spots being those brief moments when the clouds parted, the sunlight appeared, and the above-mentioned Londoners stripped down to their skivies in a vain attempt to get tan.

Additionally, the weather reports gave the temperatures in Celsius, a perfectly logical measurement system which, like the metric system, made no sense at all to me. In order to translate Celsius into good ol’ American Fahrenheit, I had to get out the calculator, feed the Celsius temperature into it, multiply by nine, divide by three, and add 32.

Once I figured out what the real temperature would be, I still wasn’t out of the woods. The usual BBC weather graphic was an outline of England with the day’s high temperatures on the appropriate places on the map. However, the map lacked any other geographical information,
including cities.
So, since I had no idea where London was located in the country of England, I still had no idea what the temperature would be that day. Eventually, I just gave up and assumed it would be overcast with occasional bright spots.

I also wasn’t prepared for London humidity. Since it was May when we left, I only packed two sweaters. But, I needed a sweater every day in London. At the end of the first week, I rinsed the first sweater out and laid it on a towel to dry. The second week I wore the second sweater every day. At the end of the second week, I rinsed out the second sweater. That’s when I discovered I now had two wet sweaters. On the third week, I broke down and bought a half dozen sweaters, an electric heater the size of a two-car garage, and a sheepskin jacket that we still refer to as my English summer coat.

The English, of course, are impervious to weather - stiff upper lip and all that. Many homes do not have central heating. The Brits prefer to lug an electric heater from room to room all winter long.

Even heat doesn’t bother them. I’ve met Brits on vacation in the Caribbean who didn’t think they got their money’s worth unless they went home with a second degree sun burn.

Jerry Juhl told me that in 1976 London suffered from a very rare heat wave. Jerry was having lunch with some people in a restaurant, and since air-conditioning was practically unknown in England, the temperature in the restaurant was in the high 90s (Fahrenheit). Jerry asked the maitre’d if they could take off their suit jackets. “That just isn’t done here.”, was the reply.

A few minutes later, there was a cacophonous crash as a waiter, carrying a large tray of food, passed out from heat prostration. Jerry then asked again if they could remove their jackets. An exasperated maitre’d reluctantly agreed.

In England, 1977 was also the Year Of The Strike. And the unions seemed to be trying to outdo each other. Mornings in London, I would turn on the radio, much the way you would in the States to get baseball scores. But in London, I did it to see who was on strike today. Some days there would be no milk, some days no newspapers. Auto workers were striking because they didn’t have clean coveralls.

The electrical workers made their unhappiness known by indiscriminately cutting the power to large sections of the country. They only did this at night because cutting power in the day time could shut down factories and put fellow union members out of work. So, it was not unusual, while driving home after work, to suddenly have the street lamps, traffic signals and all the surrounding buildings go dark.