Memoirs of a Muppets Writer: (You mean somebody actually writes that stuff?) (2 page)

“Sorry, sir. We can’t help you.”, the pleasant voice with the West Indian lilt replied on the other end.

“Why not?”

“The airport is closed, sir.” “Closed!?”

“Yes, sir. You know, locks on the door, gates chained up. That sort of thing.”

The Antiguan airport was not the hub of international travel of, say, O’Hare in Chicago. I confirmed our reservations to New York for the following Tuesday night and called Jim back.

“Tuesday night is the earliest I can get to New York, unless you want to send a plane for me.”, I reported.

“Wednesday morning will be fine.”

That night, my wife and I had a first class dinner to celebrate the fact that I was again gainfully employed.

We returned to New York on Tuesday night. When we got home, our apartment sitter had left a note saying that I was expected at a breakfast meeting the next day with Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl,
The Muppet Show
head writer, at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue.

Wednesday came with temperatures in the mid-20s. After three weeks in the Caribbean, it felt like the Arctic Circle. I dressed in slacks and my warmest turtleneck sweater against the cold. At that time I owned a three-quarter length sheepskin coat with a long, curly, dark brown lambskin lining and cuffs. I put that on over the turtleneck.

I arrived at the hotel and met Jim and Jerry in the lobby. As we were about to enter the dining room, the maitre’d told me that I wouldn’t be admitted because I wasn’t wearing a jacket. I asked the coat check attendant for a waiter’s jacket, which was usually the solution to that problem. But I was told they didn’t have any.

“Well, you’ll just have to wear your coat.”, Jim said with an impish grin.

So, the three of us entered the dining room and took a table. The room was full of well dressed, high-powered executives taking “power breakfasts,” and here was I, soaked in sweat, trying unsuccessfully to keep my lambskin cuffs out of the eggs benedict.

Attempting to look professional, I took out a pad and pencil and muttered something about taking notes.

“Well. We have to give him something to write down.”, Jim said to Jerry, thoroughly enjoying my discomfort.

“We’ll be going to Los Angeles in about a week. Can you make that?” I assured Jim that I could. “And, we’ll be sailing for England on the QE-2 on May 8th. Okay?”

I’ve often been asked how we wound up producing
The Muppet Show
in England in the first place. In 1975, there was no cable TV and only three American television networks: ABC; CBS; and NBC. Incredible as it sounds, all three of them turned down the show after seeing the pilot. Puppets, they believed, were only for children.

In Europe, it was just the opposite. Europeans were used to sophisticated puppetry. In the 17
^th
, 18
^th
and 19
^th
centuries, Punch and Judy were used for political satire. After the traditional opening lines, the puppeteer was free to do whatever he liked. So, Punch and Judy regularly ridiculed regents and governments. Sometimes they were the only political criticism allowed. After all, a king could behead a political opponent, but he’d look pretty silly beheading a puppet.

I’ve also seen European puppet productions that featured singing and dancing body parts. I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure out exactly which body parts they were.

So, it was Lord Lew Grade, the flamboyant British impresario, who believed in and backed
The Muppet Show.
Lord Grade owned A.T.V. Studios outside of London. So, that’s where the show was produced. Lord Grade also secured a spot for The Muppet Show on English television, where it was as big, if not a bigger, hit than it was in the United States.

At the start of the show’s premier season, 1976, the Muppet gang went to England on the QE-2, mostly because Jim and his wife, Jane, wanted to take a sea voyage. The only way that Jim, who was always pressed for time, could do it, was to take the company with him. It was becoming a tradition for the Muppets to sail to England on the Elizabeth at the start of every new season.

Jim, Jerry and I finished breakfast and left the Regency’s dining room. In the lobby, Jim excused himself to do a press interview and Jerry and I agreed to continue our conversation in his room. He and I were standing at the elevators and Jim was striding quickly on his long legs toward the door on the other side of the lobby when suddenly I had a realization.

“Hey, Jim!”, I shouted across the lobby, “Who do I talk to about money!?”

“Al Gottesman!”, Jim yelled back before disappearing out the door.

Jerry and I went up to his room to continue our conversation. I had known Jerry through the Muppet pieces he contributed to
Sesame Street.
But I had never met him in person. So, this was the start of a friendship that lasted until his untimely death in 2005.

That afternoon, I called the Muppet offices to set up an appointment with Al Gottesman, who was the head of the Muppet legal department. “Sorry, I was told, “Mr. Gottesman just left for a two-week Caribbean vacation.”

So, for the next two weeks I reveled in the fact that I was going to write the hottest show on television, while at the same time not knowing how long the job would last or how much money I would be making. Life with the Muppets was like that sometimes.

Chapter 2

First, A Little Background

I
t was the best of times. It was the best of times. To begin with, it was all a marvelous fluke. At thirty years of age, I got to run away and join the circus. The adventure lasted for 20 years. And, the only adverse effect was an acute case of Muppetitis, an incurable disease caused by overexposure to Muppets in close quarters. Its most serious symptom is an uncontrollable urge to speak in strange voices at inopportune times.

Maybe it had something to do with being born on April Fool’s Day (minutes old and a joke already!). That’s as good an explanation as any, because I certainly never saw myself as the literary type. I’m not even sure if writing for the Muppets actually qualifies me as a true member of the
literati.
I was not one of those kids who was reading Chaucer and Shakespeare under the covers with a flashlight. My undercover flashlight reading ran more to Marvel Comics and the occasional
Playboy.

Neither did I come from a literary family. Both my parents came from the immigrant ghetto of early 20
^th
Century Hell’s Kitchen. My father was an Irish-American saloon keeper who left school in the eighth grade to go to work when his parents died. My mother, the
intelligencia of
the family, had a high school degree. The closest my family ever got to the
literati
were the sports writers my father hung out with at the track. I could imagine myself many things: jet pilot; cowboy; fireman; Archbishop of Boston; but never a writer.

Nor did I grow up in a literary atmosphere. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, but grew up in Boston. Not the Beacon Hill, Symphony Orchestra, Harvard’s-across-the-River, Cabots and Lodges Boston. I grew up in the shot-and-a-beer, “How about them Bruins” Boston.

My first memories are of living in a small, two room, hotel suite in Boston’s notorious tenderloin known as the
Combat
Zone. The Brigham Hotel was located directly over the Silver Dollar Bar. The Silver Dollar, then known worldwide as The Poor
Man’s Stork Club,
was one of, if not, the world’s biggest saloons. The main room boasted the longest bar in the world: 130 feet.

Behind the main room was a good sized night club called, The Blue Room. The Blue Room required jackets and ties. Ladies had to be escorted. It had an orchestra, dance floor and full kitchen. It attracted Boston’s elite. The Silver Dollar Bar catered to every class: upper; middle; lower; and no.

Since my father owned both the Brigham Hotel and the Silver Dollar Bar, life was like a never-ending performance of Guys and
Dolls.
My world was filled with bartenders, waiters, waitresses, chefs, musicians, horse players, cops, saloon keepers, and the occasional wise guy.

The most read document in my universe was the
Morning Telegraph.
I thought sitting at a bar all day, handicapping horses, was a respectable way to make a living. I even knew a few guys who did make a living at it.

Until I went to boarding school at five and a half, and saw another kid, I thought I was a midget. That’s because my father had hired a midget bartender, called, (naturally) “Charlie McCarthy.” He did it just to see the expression on patrons faces when, after a couple of drinks an ethereal voice would ask, “How about another?” Then two hands would appear from behind the bar, take the empty glass and replace it with a full one.

I couldn’t understand why Charlie was allowed to stay up late, smoke Chesterfields, drink rye and play the horses. I wasn’t.

The boarding school, Saint Joseph’s Academy in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, run by the Sisters of Charity from Halifax, Nova Scotia, was a bit of a change from the Silver Dollar Bar. For one thing, there were real kids, not midgets. There were about 30 of us five-and-a-half and six-year-olds, sitting around on steamer trunks full of underwear with our names sewn into the waistbands. This may sound strange to you. But we didn’t know anything else. We just figured when you were five and a half, you shipped out.

In retrospect, my eight years at Saint Joseph’s may have stimulated my sense of creativity. Since we were a large group of boys who ate, slept, washed, and studied together, and usually walked everywhere two abreast in line, it was easy enough for us to create fantasies about being recruits in an army camp or the crew of a battleship. Some of them lasted for days.

After Saint Joseph’s, I went to Boston College High School. There, the Jesuits taught me History, Theology, Math, English, Latin and Ancient Greek, all under pain of death and/or dismemberment.

As you might imagine, my mother and father were not the type of parents to whom you announced one day, “I’ve made a career decision: I’m going to dedicate my life to writing funny things for frogs and pigs to say to children.”

My father, the Irish saloon keeper, had told me, for as long as I could remember, “Go to law school. Go to law school. Go to law school!”

When I finally asked him, “Why?”, he told me, “Look, you go to law school. You graduate. You pass the bar. Then we bribe someone and make you a judge. That’s a lifetime job, and all you have to worry about is where the ‘juice’ is coming from.” This actually made perfect sense in 1950s Boston, where corruption was right up there with banking and fishing as a major municipal industry.

Next to the priesthood, my mother, an Italian-American housewife, thought that Nirvana was a civil service job with a pension after 30 years of clerking in the Department of Motor Vehicles.

But then fate lent a well-manicured hand. In college, I joined the campus newspaper, but not because of any burning literary bent. My girlfriend at the time was on the newspaper staff and we used the newspaper office for day time trysts between classes.

We were getting strange looks when we came out of the office together. So, she decided I should join the newspaper staff to protect whatever was left of her reputation.

She was really good looking, so I ran right down to the newspaper and volunteered. But it wasn’t until my first newspaper meeting that I realized people actually wrote stuff in the newspaper office, and soon, I was expected to do likewise.

At the meeting, the paper’s editor explained that they always needed fillers to finish out the last three inches of a column. Having always had a quick mouth, but no love for composition or spelling, I figured the easiest thing I could write was a humor column that could be cut to fill out the bottom three inches of the short columns. Without thinking, I suggested we call it,
Bailey’s Three Inches
, an inopportune idea which supplied the college’s sororities with endless entertainment for the rest of the semester. We finally just called it, J.B.

It was then that I discovered how naive I really was to think I could just write comedy. When the great actor, Edmund Booth, was dying, a friend asked if dying was hard. “No.”, replied Booth. “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” I quickly discovered how right he was. Mostly, I plagiarized material from
Tonight
Show monologs and cleaned up
Playboy
Party Jokes. Mercifully, all copies of J.B. were suspiciously destroyed years ago.

In February 1962, the middle of my sophomore year, due to a family crisis, college and I parted ways by mutual consent. (In truth, it was probably a little more mutual on their part.)

Part of my mustering out of college was an exit interview with my student advisor. He asked me if I had any thoughts of my future. I told him my master plan was to get a job, probably pumping gas, save my money all winter, and in the spring, buy a motorcycle, ride it to Sausalito, and chase girls.

I had never been to Sausalito but I liked the sound of it, and I understood there were a lot of girls there to be chased. (Eventually, I did motorcycle to Sausalito 30 years later. There were still plenty of girls to chase. But my wife, who is usually pretty broad-minded about my motorcycle escapades, drew the line on that one.)

My advisor brought up my newspaper column and a little satire I had written on the
Sophomore
English Lit. reading list called,
Death of an
Enemy
of Major Barbara’s
Ghosts in
the Rye.
He said I had a flare for writing and suggested that I try to get a job writing advertising. Having read Sloan Wilson’s, The
Man in the Grey Flannel Suit,
my only impression of advertising at the time was martinis, wall-to-wall carpeting and girls. So, it seemed like a pretty good alternative to pumping gas through the long Massachusetts winter.

(The only other talent I had exhibited so far was tending bar. Since that’s done standing up, and writing is done sitting down, my career decision was easy. Although, as I’ve often said, I met a better class of people tending bar.)

I put to gether a portfolio of my college columns and some ads I had created for my high school year book. Then, I ran a newspaper ad next to the advertising column of the Boston Globe which read: