Free Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones

Phil Harris records,” Jim said, “but he proved the most popular Muppet of all. That gave us the idea for
Sam and Friends
.”
    The “Friends” of
Sam and Friends
, however, were more abstract, hazily defined and colorfully named: Harry the Hipster, a snakelike beatnik in sunglasses; Yorick, a prune-colored, skull-like creature that was
id
incarnate; the beak-nosed Hank and Frank; the squashed-looking Mushmellon. Considerable thought had gone into both the concept of the show and the design of the Muppet cast. The title was no mere throwaway; there was actual method to the show’s madness. At its core,
Sam and Friends
was all about the quiet, amiable Sam making his way through life with the help of his Friends—“abstract companions” who egg him on, move him forward, and encourage him through their own loony behavior, even if that behavior was still nothing more than lip-synching to records. The Friends, while real to Sam and to viewers, explained Jane, “are actually within him, within Sam.” A rather high-brow conceit for a show that got its biggest laughs from characters exploding, but it was typical Jim: even a five-minute comedy romp, no matter how absurd, had to mean
something
.
    There was another abstract Muppet in Sam’s cast who, while still only relegated to mostly small parts—and usually getting devoured at the end—already had a special place in Jim’s heart. It was a puppet Jim had built while passing several long sad days tending to his grandfather Pop, who wasslowly dying of heart failure—a puppet that, even early on, Jim would always call his favorite.
    It was a milky blue character named Kermit.
    Maury Brown had always been frail—his daughters remember him demanding quiet in the house to ease his nerves—and in 1955, a doctor had insisted that he and Dear move from their two-storyhome on Marion Street into a smaller, single-story apartment. The move had depressed Pop—“he intended to die in that house” on Marion Street, Attie said—and his health had deteriorated rapidly, as Pop grew increasingly senile even as his heart failed. Jim was shaken by the impending death of his grandfather—he had, after all, been partly named for him—but Jim would do as he always did in the face of grief: he would build and create. Foraging for any suitable materials, Jim settled on his mother’s old felt coat, and as he leaned over the table in the Hensons’ living room he sewed a simple puppet body, with a slightly pointed face, out of the faded turquoise material. For eyes, he simply glued two halves of a Ping-Pong ball—with slashed circles carefully inked in black on each—to the top of the head. That was it. From the simplest of materials—and, perhaps appropriately, from a determination to bring a bit of order from darkness—Kermit was born.
    Those who knew Jim as a boy would often wonder if he had named his most famous creation after his childhood friend Kermit Scott. The answer—according to both Jim and Kermit Scott—was no. The name Kermit, while quirky, was by no means uncommon in 1955; President Theodore Roosevelt had named his second son Kermit in 1889, which made the name somewhat faddish in the first half of the twentieth century. To Jim, though, as with
grackle
or
Muppet
, it was all about the sound of the word; with its hard K, pressed M, and snapped T, the name Kermit was memorable and fairly funny.
    As a relatively no-frills puppet, Kermit was the epitome of elegant simplicity, which made him that much more fun for Jim to play with. “Kermit started out as a way of building, putting a mouth and covering over my hand,” Jim later explained. “There was nothing in Kermit outside of the piece of cardboard—it was originally cardboard—and the cloth shape that was his head. He’s one of the simplest kinds of puppet you can make, and he’s very flexible because of that … which gives him a range of expression. A lot of people build very stiff puppets—you can barely