Street Wise
Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street
By Michael Davis
Viking, 384 pages, $27.95
The story of how a group of high-minded New York liberals created the most celebrated franchise in the history of children’s television is long and complicated. But at its core, it comes down to this: Sesame Street’s primary competitor, Captain Kangaroo—the man himself— could be a shockingly nasty piece of work.
A fiery Irishman who liked his Johnny Walker Black early and often, the Captain—a/k/a Bob Keeshan—crudely denigrated his writers’ work in public, fired staff on impulse, and paid skinflint wages. Were it not for his backstage tyranny, his skilled directing team might never have bolted CBS en masse for an even lower-paying gig at an untested public-television show starring a green frog.
But as we learn from Michael Davis’s Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, the new neighborhood wasn’t always such a happy place either. Joe Raposo, the musical prodigy who created the Sesame Street theme, “Bein’ Green,” “One of These Things,”and countless other classics, was a desperately insecure braggart who would circle the studio waving fat royalty checks in the faces of impoverished co-workers. David Connell and other founding Sesame Street producers were workplace womanizers and AWOL husbands. Northern Calloway—known to Sesame Street viewers in the 1970s and 1980s as “David”—was a cocaine-addicted neurotic who managed to keep his job entertaining children even after police officers caught him rampaging naked through suburban Memphis.
The list goes on. Read Street Gang and it becomes impossible to watch Big Bird through innocent eyes again.
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The road to Sesame Street began, writes Davis, 43 years ago, in the Irvington, New York household of Lloyd Morrisett, a well-connected, Yale-trained social scientist who then worked as an executive at the Carnegie Foundation. On weekends, his three-year-old daughter Sarah would wake up before her parents, open up the wooden doors of the family’s cabinet-style TV set, stretch out on the floor, and patiently watch the black-and-white American Indian until programming began at 7 A.M. Marveling at his daughter’s obsession, Morrisett decided the same medium could bring salvation to America’s underclass. A traditional Carnegie-sponsored education program reached just a few hundred families. With a television show aimed at poor pre-school children, he reasoned, a single broadcast could help millions.
By 1966, children’s television was already a well-developed genre. But with the exception of Captain Kangaroo, it was divided into two mostly unwatchable categories: (1) gimmicky Howdy Doody-style shows that embedded shameless Krusty the Klown-style pitches for toys and breakfast cereals straight into their scripts (“When you’re going to the store, you help [Mother] find the brand-new Wheaties box. I know you will!”); and (2) earnest, locally produced “classroom of the air” programs, which taught the ABCs and 123s but did little to hold a child’s attention. The project that would eventually be known as Sesame Street—the name was chosen at the last minute—had a mandate to bridge entertainment and education.
Beyond that, Sesame Street’s developers—like Morrisett, white, upper-middle-class liberals inspired by the civil-rights movement—wanted a show with a look and sound that appealed to what they imagined was their core audience: urban, underprivileged children. The set was a deliberately gritty urban brownstone—a far cry from the canvas-and-cardboard toymaker’s workshops, dude ranches, treehouses, and castles that were then staples of children’s shows. In a move that seems obvious now but was radical in the 60s, the cast was populated by a racially diverse cross section of acting talent. (When Sesame Street first aired in 1969, a year after the assassination of Martin Luther King, it was banned in Mississippi by the State Commission for Educational Television.)
What truly made Sesame Street a blockbuster hit, however, wasn’t the casting or set design but rather a shy, acne-scarred puppeteer from Mississippi named Jim Henson. As the showwas originally conceived, his Muppets weren’t supposed to star in the main narratives. Instead, the plan called for them to inhabit their own subterranean milieu, with only sporadic Fraggle Rock-style contact with the human residents above. But when the street scenes drew yawns from focus groups of young children, the decision was made to bring the creatures up from under the pavement.
Crucially, Henson’s menagerie ran the personality gamut from wide-eyed child surrogates like Big Bird and Grover to more obsessional, antisocial specimens like Cookie Monster, Count von Count, and particularly Oscar the Grouch, a huge risk the likes of whom children’s TV had never seen. With their impeccable voice acting and sly cultural references, Sesame Street’s puppeteers—Frank Oz (Bert, Grover, Cookie Monster) and Henson (Kermit, Ernie)—created Vaudevillian straightman-and-comic sketches that could be appreciated as much by parents as children.
Sesame Street continued to break new ground in the 1970s and 80s, airing episodes dealing with breastfeeding, marriage, and even—following the real-life passing of actor Will Lee, known to the world as Mr. Hooper—death. But in the 1990s, political correctness and marketing considerations began to stifle the show’s creative edge. In one infamous case, the Sesame Street research department nixed a sketch in which a Muppet impersonated a chicken. Such role-playing was deemed racist, the monster equivalent of wearing blackface.
A turning point, Davis argues, came with the 1993 introduction of Zoe, an orange female Muppet designed by Sesame Street’ssales group specifically to answer feminist complaints about the Muppets’ male tilt and (into the bargain) to compete with Barney the Dinosaur on toystore shelves. Zoe indeed went on to become a money-making superstar. But 40 years after Bert and Ernie first started bickering, it’s hard to see what selling plush toys has to do with educating America’s underclass.
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Formative influence that Sesame Street has been on so many of us, it is a subject of great interest, and one might have expected the oddities associated with its creation to make for a lively read. Yet at many points, getting through Street Gang feels like a chore. The basic problem is that the magic of a classic song or sketch from the show doesn’t convey well to the printed page. Davis, a longtime columnist at TV Guide, doesn’t help matters by focusing so heavily on his main source, Sesame Workshop founder Joan Ganz Cooney. While aside from Henson no one was more instrumental to the success of Sesame Street, Cooney was essentially an administrator and fund-raiser, not a director or artist. Watching Sesame Street through her eyes is a lot like watching a football game from the owner’s boardroom.
Moreover, Street Gang turns out not quite to be the “complete history” that its subtitle promises. The first twelve chapters—more than half the book—focus on the (often mundane) organizational and fund-raising work that pre-dated Sesame Street’s inaugural episode. By Chapter 17, we’ve already fast-forwarded well into the 1980s, and major players in the show have started to die off. Indeed, the last 50 pages of this surprisingly depressing book read like a catalog of disease and death—including a lengthy description of writer Jon Stone’s struggle with Lou Gehrig’s Disease and of Jim Henson’s funeral. In short, Davis enjoys writing about beginnings and endings, but he is less taken with the stuff in between. Which is too bad—because that is exactly what most of us who grew up with Sesame Street love and remember.
What makes this book worth reading, ultimately, are the fascinating, often dark back-stories of Sesame Street’s creators. We learn, for instance, that Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer who breathed sunny life into Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, was the troubled son of a Canadian scullery maid. Kevin Clash, the world-famous African-American voice behind Elmo, was asked to step down from the leading role in his high school’s 1976 production of Guys and Dolls because the mother of the female lead didn’t want her daughter kissing a black man on stage. (He kept the part.) Cooney herself, it turns out, brought Sesame Street into the world even as she dealt with a violently alcoholic husband who hurled plates around their apartment.
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And then there was Henson, an impenetrable workaholic who seems to have prophesied his own entirely preventable death at the age of fifty. Despite all the lavish praise he earned for Sesame Street, the show never brought him lasting happiness. “You have ruined my life,” he told Cooney during one particularly depressive phase: Sesame Street, Henson lamented, had typecast him as a children’s entertainer—and thereby thwarted his grandiose artistic ambitions.
You read about quite a few ruined lives by the time you’ve finished Street Gang, in fact. The creators of Sesame Street—like Captain Kangaroo and other children’s entertainers—are such lionized figures in our culture that one naturally assumes them to be somehow magically immune from the disappointments and traumas that befall the rest of us. Only once an author such as Davis brushes aside decades’ worth of sentimental gauze do we realize that the felt-and-plastic saints of our toddler years had ordinary human hearts.
