If Bert and Ernie adored him, Big Bird (and the man inside him) was less enamored. Stone was at times cruel and punishing to Caroll Spinney, whose preference was to read over his lines on the morning of taping rather than commit them to memory overnight. Stone attributed this practice to laziness and unprofessionalism, Spinney to a desire to approach material fresh.¹ Spinney, by nature sensitive and always eager to avoid conflict (not unlike Big Bird himself ), was often victimized by Stone. When Stone would strike, Spinney would respond by walking in circles, wounded and perplexed.

Stone’s superiors, with one notable exception, found him at times to be a grating, unpleasant, defensive, unyielding, superior pain. He mostly felt the same way about them. He was capable of carrying grudges, ridiculing those who dared challenge his authority, refusing to suffer fools gladly.

That he could also be lovable, tender, brilliantly funny, tireless, resourceful, imaginative, and instinctive rounded out the edges of an emotionally complex and moody man, without whom there would not have been Sesame Street as we know it. Stone’s supervision of the show defined his professional life and determined his legacy. That Sesame Street flourished during its adolescence, blossoming in the period from its tenth anniversary in 1979 to its twentieth in 1989, can be attributed to Stone’s dedication to its content and to nurturing its spirit. Talent came and went in that ten-year span, but Stone—and his handpicked No. 2, Dulcy Singer—provided the constancy, the good taste, the adventuresome reach, and the great good humor that not only kept the show alive but thriving.

As a parent, Stone knew when to say no. He always kept a No. 2 pencil perched in his beard while at work in the studio. If a script met with his disapproval, he would extricate the pencil and then slash away at the pages, rewriting on the fly rather than allow a substandard tag line—called the “button”—to fall flat.

As a parent, Stone also knew when to say yes, allowing the puppeteers to extemporize and embellish comically when they knew they were on a roll. He created a studio environment where people were allowed to be their authentic selves, an almost homelike atmosphere that was welcomed by celebrity guests who came by for one episode and then wished they could stay for another. That the Sesame Street set has traditionally been completely informal is largely attributable to a man whose preferred style of dress included a fishing vest with pockets and vents everywhere.

As a parent to his daughters, Polly and Kate, Stone was nothing like his own father, a clinically cold obstetrician and medical faculty member at Yale who shipped his two sons off for the summer to a farm in New Hampshire. There was no denying Dr. Stone’s brilliance, either in the operating room or when he would retreat to his study to solve mathematical problems or to play classical music on the piano. “My grandfather was not a man who loved children,” said Kate Lucas, Jon’s youngest daughter. “He was very much an intellectual and liked quiet in the house.” Though he was wealthy, money was never spoken of in a household where appearances and proper manners mattered.

Jon was musical and athletic as a child, but he was also dyslexic. He struggled academically, and his father sent him to boarding school at thirteen, in the hope that it would shape him up.

He once shared a crushing story from those prep-school days with daughter Kate. “My grandfather only went to one of dad’s football games, and on that day Dad rushed the kicker and blocked a punt with his chest. He saw stars and got knocked over, but the first thing that entered his mind was that his father was there to see it. But my grandfather had gone out of the stadium to make a business call and missed it. The disappointment of that stayed with my dad his entire life.”

Family lore has it that Jon’s father was pleased when his son was admitted to Williams College in Massachusetts, but displeased with his choice of major. Few undergraduates during Stone’s four years at Williams declared music as a concentration.

One day years later, when Stone was completing his final year of graduate school at Yale Drama, his father was delivering twins across town in New Haven. As nurses bundled the first infant to emerge from the womb, Dr. Stone mentioned to colleagues in surgery that he was feeling peculiar. He stepped out into the hallway and fell dead from a massive coronary.

“My dad had a complicated childhood,” Kate said. “He adored his mother and she adored him, but he clearly knew his father preferred his brother over him. A lot of times that pattern of rejection can continue into the next generation. But my father was the complete opposite of his father in terms of the way he loved his children. Polly and I were so lucky growing up to have a dad who was so wise. You could pick up the phone and tell him any problem in the world. He would listen and give you wonderful advice. Over and over he told us that we were his world, which kids need to hear. He told us we could do whatever we wanted to do in the world, and encouraged us to follow our dreams.”

Without the slightest tinge of resentment, she said, “Sesame Street was his third daughter,” the vessel into which he poured so much of his essence. She speaks of the show the way a younger sister looks up to an older sibling. And she believes that what her father often said about Sesame Street is true: that Kate and Polly had as much to do with the success of the show as anyone else. They were Sesame Street’s in-house, on-demand focus group, and just by being kids they contributed innumerable ideas for skits and sketches, and in one instance, a triumphant holiday special in 1978, Christmas Eve on Sesame Street.

The program was a tuneful, tasteful, at times heart-tugging imagining of the hours leading up to Christmas, a day somewhat spoiled by Oscar’s rather sour and persistent skepticism about Santa Claus.

In a manner reminiscent of spiteful older children tormenting younger ones—the cynical neo-nonbelievers who pick on the faithful, who don’t deserve to have their fantasies shattered—Oscar taunts Big Bird, raising doubts that Santa will deliver presents to buildings that may have rooftop vents but not chimneys. Stone and his cowriter, Joe Bailey, wrote script pages that reflected a plausible dilemma for an urban child, acted out by worrisome, restless Big Bird, who goes missing on Christmas Eve. Like a preschool child who wanders off in a department store, Big Bird is oblivious to the worry he is causing by stationing himself on the rooftop of Gordon and Susan’s brownstone. As a snowstorm grows in intensity, Big Bird remains at his frigid post, on the lookout for Santa.

Panic sets in when word hits the street that Big Bird is gone. That’s when Maria, behaving as any frantic adult might, pulls Oscar out of his trash can—by the scruff of his little green neck. What transpires is a startling reprimand that sounds surprisingly lifelike.

Oscar, shamed, regretful, and suddenly resolute, goes off in search of Big Bird, after getting his comeuppance from Maria, the one adult on Sesame Street who gives as good as she gets. Before he trudges off, his feet sticking out of the bottom of the can, Oscar can’t resist one little tweak.

“Come on, hurry up, skinny,” he calls out to Maria. It is at that moment the script reminds us that the grouch is at his orneriest around those he cares for the most.

The script allows for another powerfully relatable moment, after Big Bird decides he’s had enough of waiting in the cold and comes downstairs to “warm up for a minute” at Gordon and Susan’s place. Gordon has been trying to soothe Patty, a scared child who had been playing with Big Bird and reported him missing. She runs to Big Bird’s side as he enters the foyer, giggling with joyous relief. That’s when the questions begin from the surrogate parents.

Gordon all but pushes Big Bird into his apartment, where gifts delivered from Santa are laid out under a tree decorated with baubles, tinsel, and candy canes. Not only did Santa arrive, he even left something for Cookie Monster.

The Christmas special features a second story line, borrowed affectionately from O. Henry. Ernie is trading in his rubber duckie to get a cigar box for old buddy Bert’s paper clip collection. Bert, in turn, is trading in his paper clips to Mr. Hooper for a pink soap dish for Ernie’s use as a bathtime perch for duckie. Mr. Hooper, recognizing sacrifice and devoted friendship when he sees it, returns the duck and the paper clip collection, wrapped as gifts to his good customers Bert and Ernie, who sing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

To watch that scene now, preserved on home video, is to be reminded how remarkably gifted were Jim Henson and Frank Oz, two real-life colleagues and friends, at playing puppetry’s Odd Couple. It is a tribute to their artistry that Bert and Ernie seem so emotionally valid and kinetic to the viewer, even though somewhere within the rational folds of the brain we know they are but extensions of shirtsleeves, two arts-and-crafts projects, “dollies to wiggle” as Stone used to say.

Any sentimentalist looking for a reason to test his or her tear ducts would do well to insert Christmas Eve on Sesame Street into the video player and replay Bert and Ernie’s rendition of a Christmas classic. It will remind the viewer that love and friendship are binding forces of the universe that transcend time and space. The relationship that existed between Henson and Oz, brothers, creative collaborators, and interlocking souls, was downright enviable. They shared something holy and fragile, illuminated by laughter and held tethered by trust. God blessed them; but Jon Stone, a mere mortal, brought out their best.

“If there was one project to put in a time capsule and send off to space, to let the Martians know what Sesame Street was like, it would be that Christmas special,” said Sonia Manzano. “Jon had a way of touching the exact pulse, the exact concerns of the child. He was not afraid.”

Dulcy Singer, who produced the special, said “It was Jon’s baby from the beginning. If you want to see his soul, watch Christmas Eve on Sesame Street.”

Stone’s now-adult children see aspects of their childhood in Vermont and New York reflected in the special. “When my sister and I were little, we would write a letter to Santa after dinner on Christmas Eve,” said schoolteacher Polly, an interior designer by avocation. “We’d leave the letters with cookies—and a glass of scotch—by the fireplace. One year I asked Santa what his favorite poem was. My sister asked him how he got down that skinny little chimney. So the idea for Big Bird’s dilemma in the special came from Kate, who was teeny at the time.

“The next morning came Dad’s response—or should I say Santa’s response—in a letter for each of us. To me he wrote, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, aba-ca-chu, I’ve got the flu.’

“To Kate he wrote, ‘Well, I suck in my gut and I point my toes and whoosh, down I go! Getting up is a different matter.’ ”

Firstenberg’s low-budget network special featured a bizarre lineup of creaky B-list talent, including cloying host Leslie Uggams and nearly exhumed entertainers Ethel Merman and Imogene Coca. All three had been early guest stars on The Muppet Show, before top-name talent began flocking to the syndicated show after its first season. Adding to the surreal mix of the Christmas special were guest appearances by Henry Fonda and that breakout boy soprano from the Jackson 5, Michael Jackson.

It was a painfully obtuse hour built around a shaky story line that cast Oscar as Sesame Street’s resident Scrooge. It was an hour trimmed in treacle and about as far afield from the educational objectives of Sesame Street as one could imagine.

It should be noted here that an honest appraisal of Jim Henson’s network television work with the Muppets must account for a good number of unworthy, unfunny, unbecoming, unwatchable appearances of which A Special Sesame Street Christmas was one. On balance, the good far outweighs the bad, and much of what Henson brought to television approached greatness. But his taste was not impeccable. He made plenty of television that Muppet Show balcony critics Statler and Waldorf would have booed off the stage, and quite rightly.

Writing in the New York Times, Fred M. Hechinger extolled Sesame Street’s virtues and cited its detractors upon its tenth birthday. “On its way to the top, Sesame Street was denounced by the Soviet Union as a tool of American cultural imperialism and by the British Broadcasting Corporation as an instrument of American hucksterism. It has been accused by American pedagogical critics of harmful side effects, ranging from shortening children’s attention span to causing epileptic fits.”²

That Sesame Street continued to be discussed so seriously was merely an indication that, after ten years, it still really mattered. And surviving ten years of television, a medium in which shows often don’t last ten weeks, was a significant achievement. By 1979, the first viewers of Sesame Street had already reached puberty.

Bert and Ernie, on the other hand, didn’t age a bit—or change out of their white turtleneck or striped polo very often. They just continued to needle and nag, talk to each other in bed, and feed their obsessions.

While the rest of America spent the next ten years looking inward, perhaps in vain, Sesame Street would spend the eighties turning outward, expanding its young viewers’ world. In its second decade on television, the real-life experiences of the writing staff, cast, and crew provided a foundation for the series.

To look back at that period is to appreciate the profound effect that life-cycle events had on the show, offstage and on. There was birth and death, love and loss, courtship and calamity, pleasure and pain, all from a little show whose aims at first were simply to test television’s ability to stimulate the brain. That it would also touch the heart was not its original intention, but as each year passed, Sesame Street became as much an emotional pathway for children as an intellectual one, and just in time. For this was the period when the children of baby boomers were riding in back of Chrysler minivans, with yellow BABY ON BOARD warnings slapped on the windows. Big Bird plush toys were along for the ride, belted in, naturally.

But by decade’s end, the family would need to make room for a squeaky-voiced Muppet monster whose incessant laugh would make many a driver grip the steering wheel.

It was Northern Calloway, fleeing from a brutal assault but seemingly unaware of it—or the trail of property damage he wreaked on Graybar Lane.

Calloway had randomly ransacked several homes. At one stop he destroyed a family’s collection of fine crystal; at another, he broke a lightbulb in his bare hand; at a third he snatched a book bag belonging to a first-grader. Along the way he hurled a rock through a car window, shattering it, and smashed a few headlights.

Calloway was delirious and agitated when police found him in a garage. “He was yelling and screaming,” said Metro Officer James D. Murphy. “We couldn’t talk to him. He said he was the CIA and to call [President] Jimmy Carter.”³

Police learned that before the rampage, Calloway had been visiting a woman, a twenty-seven-year-old marketing director, at the Villager Condominiums on Hillsboro Road. During an appearance at the Nashville Performing Arts Center the previous week, Calloway had become smitten with Mary Stagaman.

Pursuing single or married white women he met on the road had become a habitual and daring sport for Calloway, but this escapade was tragically different. Calloway had snapped.

Police discovered that Stagaman had been battered about the skull and torso with an iron rod and was admitted to the intensive-care unit of Vanderbilt University Hospital, where she was treated for head injuries and broken ribs. She remained hospitalized for two months.

A Nashville Banner report quoted police as saying that “the beating was so severe, the iron rod was destroyed.”⁴

Calloway recalled little of the night he was arrested and said he had no memory of beating Stagaman. He was admitted to a psychiatric facility in Nashville following the assault but was allowed to return to New York under a doctor’s supervision. Noted Nashville criminal attorney Lionel Barrett took on Calloway’s case.

In September 1981, a year after Calloway was charged with aggravated assault, the actor pled guilty by reason of insanity. District Attorney General Tom Shriver said that an agreement had been reached between the state and Barrett to bypass a grand jury indictment and to turn evidence over to a criminal court. The deal allowed the court to retain jurisdiction over Calloway’s psychiatric treatment if a jury found him not guilty by the insanity plea. Doctors called in by the state had already determined that Calloway was insane at the time of the attack and rampage on personal property.

During the intervening year, Calloway had received outpatient psychiatric care in New York and had returned to work on Sesame Street. Executive producer Dulcy Singer believed that with proper psychiatric treatment—and a promise that Calloway would conscientiously take his daily dosage of lithium—the actor could rejoin the cast.

For some reason, the incident in Tennessee was largely ignored by the mainstream press in New York and the supermarket tabloids. “I don’t why, but the story never gained any legs,” said CTW executive David V. B. Britt. “It wasn’t so much an institutional crisis for CTW as it was a crisis for the show.”

An understandable wariness shadowed Calloway upon his return to the set, especially among those who had detected volatility long before the assault in Nashville. “He always had an interesting gleam in his eye,” said publicist Bob Hatch. “The ability to raise hell was not far beneath the surface. I never saw it in action, but I knew that it was there. And he got away with as much as he did because he was so damn talented.”

The promise of his early years on Sesame Street diminished in the 1980s. “Lithium took Northern’s zest away, and he became heavily sedated and put on a great deal of weight,” Singer said. “Then I learned that he was doing cocaine—at the same time he was taking his maintenance drugs. At that time, Northern became totally unreliable. He couldn’t remember his lines at all, and we’d have to do a dozen takes for every scene he was in. I had called his psychiatrist any number of times in an attempt to tell him what was going on with his patient, but the doctor just totally dismissed it. The doctor felt he was protecting Northern, but I think stupidly.”

Lee had been in fine shape that production season. He had taped a good number of segments in November and had been regaling everyone with tales from his days as a near-destitute actor in the 1930s, sharing a cold-water flat that by rights should have been condemned. He liked to discuss his days in Yiddish theater with the CTW research director, Dr. Lewis Bernstein, a gentle man and a gentleman. Because Bernstein wore a yarmulke atop his skull, Lee would rattle on in Yiddish. The researcher didn’t have the heart to interrupt him or disclose that he understood very little of the language.

Lee had played a range of roles in his theater career but had never found the level of popular success on the stage that he had in the television studio playing Mr. Hooper. At times, he would be put off when his fellow actors would extemporaneously wander beyond the script. His acting training—and his respect for writers—made it difficult for him to venture beyond what was there on the page. To that end, he would often run lines with his cast mates, helping them internalize the words that had been so thoughtfully crafted for them to interpret.

When cast and crew learned of his hospitalization, people drew in their breath. How could they tape episodes of Sesame Street without Mr. Hooper, the mainstay of the neighborhood? Since his first, somewhat enigmatic, appearance in episode 1, Mr. Hooper had become many things to many young children: a surrogate papa, pawpaw, pop-pop, gramps, and grand-daddy, not to forget abuelo, dedushka, dziadek, grand-père, nonno, pappaus, yee-yee, and zeidy. Mr. Hooper was the guy in the apron at the far side of the generation gap, his half-lens glasses slipping down his nose.

That his establishment carried his name was of no small significance. The quirky variety store, with its signature soda fountain, was a projection of Mr. Hooper’s personality onto an idealized social institution. Even children knew you couldn’t walk away from a local 7-Eleven with a newspaper under your arm and a Slurpee in one hand, promising the cashier, “I’ll be back to pay for it tomorrow.” But your credit was good with Mr. Hooper because not only did he know you, he knew your mother.

Will Lee played Mr. Hooper with such certainty and naturalness he made adults suspend their sense of disbelief. When celebrity guests would arrive at the Sesame Street set for a taping, they often would walk into Hooper’s store and look around, wishing they could buy something to bring home. Even people paid to engage in make-believe wanted to hold on to the illusion, and when they found the shelves lined with props, they left with the only thing in stock: mild disappointment.

Bob McGrath went to visit Lee in the hospital and was stunned to see how gravely ill his cast mate had become. “He was not passing water,” McGrath said, “and I told him that if he minded the doctors and urinated, I would make sure Sesame Street would be made possible by the letter P upon his return to the set.” That might have been the last line any actor fed Will Lee, a line as funny and smart as Sesame Street itself.

Lee suffered a fatal heart attack on December 7, 1982, at the Upper East Side hospital. A memorial service was held eight days later at the New York Shakespeare Festival Theater on Lafayette Street. He left behind a sister, Sophie Lubov, in Florida.

It was left to head writer Norman Stiles to find an age-appropriate means to convey the finality of death without causing children undue fear or confusion. The result was a truly memorable episode, one of the show’s best.

To assist him in dealing with such a sensitive topic, research director Bernstein convened an advisory group of psychologists and religious leaders to provide guidance. “It’s what we call a curriculum bath,” Bernstein explained. “We bring in the experts to allow the writer to soak in expertise. We in Research bring in people to provide the information, and then the artistry of the writer takes over, as they integrate what they’ve heard.

“We ended up with an entire episode that dealt with the life cycle, about the naturalness of birth and death. The psychiatrists who advised us said that we needed to be mindful that children, like adults, need to find a sense of closure, even though they don’t yet know what the word closure means. We tried to make a show about beginnings and endings, leading to a segment that said Mr. Hooper had reached an end point.

“That death was a part of life was the lesson we needed to impart, but we had to sidestep religious matters, as best we could. So we decided that all religions deal in human memory, to one degree or another. We decided to say that while Mr. Hooper was not here anymore, we will always have that part of him that lives within the heart, that we have our love and that it will always stay.

“And at the same time, we wanted to establish that sometimes, for adults and children, expressing your feelings is hard to do.”

Stiles went to work, crafting a script that allowed Roscoe Orman, as father-figure Gordon, to lead the way. It was the first of several brilliant choices. The second was to enlist Richard Hunt, who, as Forgetful Jones, kicks off the first scene a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’, but for reasons he suddenly can’t remember.

By questioning him, Gordon not only helps Forgetful recall what factors led to his jubilant mood, but establishes the show’s conviction that talking about emotions can not only be helpful, but even entertaining. “Let’s see if we can figure it out,” Gordon says. “Let’s think real hard . . . about what was happening when you were feeling happy.”

Forgetful says, “The sun was shining . . . a breeze was blowing . . . and then the trees started swaying, sorta like dancin’, back and forth . . . and then my heart started a-beatin’ in time with the trees dancing, ba boom-boom, ba boom-boom . . . I started yellin’, ‘Well, all right,’ ’cause I was happy. Can you imagine me forgettin’ simple things that make me happy?”

Later, Big Bird forgets something that made him sad. The scene unfolds in the courtyard as Gordon, Susan, Bob, Maria, Luis, David, and Olivia are enjoying coffee, café style. “Hey, I’ve got a great idea,” Big Bird says to the audience. Why don’t we watch the grown-ups for a while?” Somewhat to his dismay, Big Bird sees that all they are doing is talking. “Well, I was hoping you were going to be doing something more interesting,” Big Bird says. “That’s okay. I can make even listening to you guys exciting. What I’m going to do is I’ll listen to what you are saying, and from what I hear I’ll try to guess what you’re talking about. And I’ll do all that while I’m balancing on one leg!”

The adults resume discussing Leandro, a son born to the Williams family, whom everyone seems to know. The baby—who may or may not resemble his father—will be coming with his parents to Sesame Street later in the day. Susan turns to Big Bird and says, “You should be able to guess by now. Put all the clues together. We were talking about the baby, we said what his name was, we said what he looked like, and we said that he and his mother were coming over here today.”

Big Bird says, “Right, right. You’re talking about Mrs. Williams and her baby named Leandro and that she’s coming here today. What are you going to talk about now?”

“Well, how about politics?” David asks.

“Hey,” Big Bird says. “Not even standing on one leg could make that interesting.”

“He’s got a point,” Maria says.

The segment establishes a truism of communal life: that sometimes kids can figure out what adults are saying, even when they seem uninterested.

After two brief inserts we return to the courtyard, where the adults are now discussing a female political candidate. David assures us that she is against “big spending, big business, and inflation. She says when she gets into office there will be enough money for government, social programs, and the space program.”

Bob says, “Hey, it sounds great. What’s her name?”

“Alice in Wonderland,” Gordon answers.

Big Bird arrives with surprises, and from here we need to examine every word:

“When we finished that scene there wasn’t one of us whose face wasn’t streaked with tears,” Caroll Spinney said. “Jon Stone said, ‘Let’s do another take, just in case,’ but there was nothing wrong with that take. It was perfect.”

Comically curmudgeon cameraman Frankie Biondo was left uncharacteristically speechless. “It was really, really sad, and really, really touching,” he said, for once not kidding.

The episode aired on Thanksgiving 1983, a year after Will Lee’s final appearance in the Macy’s parade. It was scheduled on that holiday to allow maximum exposure for families at home.

It was a landmark broadcast, Sesame Street’s most noble and affecting hour, and a bravura performance by Caroll Spinney, who arrived at the studio for the day of taping knowing his lines cold. Jon Stone, directing that day, could not have asked for more. Prompted by Singer, Stone had called Spinney the night before, just to make sure the puppeteer was preparing.

There had been a time, long before, that Spinney had failed to arrive at the studio with some illustrations Stone had expected. “I just got overwhelmed and busy,” Spinney said, “but Jon was furious, and he never forgave me. From that point forward, in his eyes I was unreliable.”

Spinney himself drew the caricatures that Big Bird handed out to the cast members during the segment on Mr. Hooper’s death. In a final scene, Big Bird has the drawing he did of Mr. Hooper, now framed, just above his nest on Sesame Street. The camera lingers on the drawing for a second before Luis comes knocking to ask Big Bird if he would like to see the Williams baby.

Big Bird gets the last line, closure, as it were. “You know, the one thing is about new babies, one day they’re not here and the next day, here they are!”

By the way: Sesame Street came to us that day sponsored by the letter J, as in Jeff, Jim, Joan, Joe, and Jon, and by the number 5.

In 1985, Elmo was but a bit player among the Muppets, just one of the background characters the Henson puppeteers refer to as AMs, short for Anything Muppets. Essentially they are like naked mannequins waiting to be dressed for the department store window, or Mr. Potato Head before the eyes, nose, and assorted appendages are added. Whenever a need arises for a onetime-use character—or a gaggle of anonymous puppets for a crowd scene—Henson’s backstage “Muppet wranglers” reach into a trunk and grab AMs. They’re the Muppet equivalent of a chorus line. And just as it can happen in musical theater, when a director spots a pretty face, sometimes Anything Muppets are plucked from the pack. So it was with Elmo, who may have stood out simply for being an arresting shade of cherry lollipop red.

Lost in the mists of time is which production member said, “Let’s write something for it.” In fact, even how Elmo came to be named is no longer known.

But this much we do know: puppeteer Brian Muehl performed Elmo three or four times, using a sweet, whispery voice for the character. It did not stick.

Soon after, Muehl, a veteran of the Swiss pantomime group ensemble Mummenschanz, left the Muppets to pursue acting and writing. When he departed, his characters were divvied up. Marty Robinson got Telly; Barkley the dog went to a young gymnast; newcomer Kevin Clash got Dr. Nobel Price; and Richard Hunt inherited Elmo. Hunt, who gravitated to more flamboyant, theatrical characters and avoided cute ones, took an immediate dislike to Elmo.

“Richard loved opera and partying,” said Clash, “and he often came in with a hangover. With an aching head, he would give away parts to the young puppeteers, literally throwing them at us. Richard saved his energy for the hipper, more established characters, and he just hated doing Elmo. Norman Stiles, our head writer, would say in disgust, “What is Richard doing with that character?”

Legend has it that Hunt entered the Muppet greenroom one day, holding Elmo upside down by his rod, as if he were carrying a dead buzzard by its claw. “I was the only puppeteer there,” Clash recalled. “Richard said, ‘You know what? Have you got a voice for this?’ ” With that, Hunt sent Elmo flying across the room.

That flight, not unlike Lindbergh’s, proved life altering for Clash, who had wanted nothing more from the age of nine than to be a featured performer for Jim Henson’s Muppets.

Kevin was one of four children born to George and Gladys Clash. George, himself by nature a quiet man, was a welder for the Reynolds Metals Company and a neighborhood handyman. Gladys ran an in-home child-care center in their two-bedroom, one-bath house at 17 Pittsburgh Avenue. “There were always children around who weren’t my brothers and sisters,” Clash said with a laugh. “Kids just gravitated to my parents.”

Like his father, Kevin could draw and illustrate with uncommon flair. “I really didn’t get interested in reading until I discovered TV Guide,” he said. “Chapter books at school seemed so long to me, and I hated to get called on during reading, but I really was interested in reading about celebrities in TV Guide, and I really enjoyed TV as a child.”

His favorite program was the CBS Children’s Film Festival, the showcase of international films that was hosted by Kukla, Fran, and Ollie and written by Jon Stone and Tom Whedon. “I remember seeing The Red Balloon for the first time on that series, and loving it,” he said. Sesame Street did not debut until Clash was nine, but he watched it along with the day-care kids at home. Like many older boys who passed by the screen as their younger siblings watched, Clash found Maria “sexy and attractive. I liked her even more when she wasn’t around that David.”

Clash was twelve when he built a finger puppet named Mondey, who resembled Mickey Mouse. “I wanted, in some ways, to go into this fantasy world because of my shyness,” he said. “When my mother would send me to buy bread, and I saw a person walking toward me, I’d duck and find another way to get to the store.”

In early adolescence he built a wisecracking puppet inspired by a school friend named Tony Bartee. The puppet, who took on the name Bartee, had egg-shaped L’Eggs panty hose containers for eyes and a wig that had belonged to Clash’s grandmother. “The more he made, the better he got,” said Gladys, a loquacious and animated nurturer.

Gladys took plenty of criticism from neighbors who were forever questioning why her teenage boy was staying indoors by the Singer sewing machine while the other kids in the neighborhood were out playing. “My parents never put a negative twist on [my interest in puppets],” Clash said. “They never persuaded me to go out and play sports if I chose not to. Peers teased me, but when I got into high school and was doing variety shows and heckling them, it was completely different.”⁵

George paid little heed to what anyone but his wife had to say, and she always had plenty. The day-care mother was only too happy to have Kevin entertain the kids, not that that was anyone’s business. Sometimes when a tot with soggy drawers had no other change of clothes, she’d slip the trousers off a puppet and onto the child.

George built Kevin’s first puppet stage and carted his son around to Baltimore-area performances. Kevin’s first paid gig, at thirteen, was at a neighborhood recreation hall. He earned $2.35. He gradually built a reputation as a capable performer, but sometimes he gave away candy to ensure a full house.

By age sixteen, when he was a sophomore at Dundalk High School, he was being paid twenty dollars for a half-hour performance at a church-hall social or at a private home for a birthday party, and thirty-five dollars for the full-hour show. Kevin invested a portion of the proceeds toward purchases at hobby shops and fabric stores, accumulating storage containers filled with fur, felt, and foam rubber.

In the years before Baltimore’s decaying waterfront was transformed by the shops and promenades of the urban makeover known as Harbor Place, Kevin would entertain on downtown streets, using his array of handmade puppets to lip-synch to recordings played on a portable tape machine. Mama and son skunks would sing Helen Reddy’s “You and Me Against the World.” He’d spin a tune by Earth, Wind & Fire and have two puppets dance the Bump or he’d bring out a firefly character to sing Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” Throughout, Bartee, whose skin was made from orange terrycloth, would banter with passersby. “Like my hair?” he would ask, before yanking off the wig. “Here. You can have it.”⁶

Clash once told his hometown morning newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, that Bartee “can tell people off, especially the cool dudes. He won’t get hurt, and I won’t get hurt, either. He’s the one person—I mean thing—who can get away with it.”⁷

Kevin’s confidence grew, and when he was in tenth grade, appearing at the Dundalk Heritage Festival, he was spotted by Stu Kerr, a peripatetic television personality and weather forecaster in Baltimore who had been host of local children’s programs and a slew of cheaply produced studio shows like Dialing for Dollars. Coincidentally, Kerr and Bob Keeshan were friends, dating back to their days together as postwar pages at NBC Television in New York. Keeshan would occasionally book Kerr on Captain Kangaroo to play Scoop, a scatterbrained newsman.

At the time he met Clash, Kerr was developing Caboose, a new railroad-themed kids’ show, in which the host would play a train conductor. He invited Clash to come along for the ride, and over the next two years the young puppeteer learned to perform on the job, unknowingly replicating the same technique Henson developed at WRC in the 1950s.

But when he began getting roles in musical theater productions at predominantly white Dundalk High School, things changed.

Clash’s pleasing baritone was developing a round richness by age sixteen. During the winter of his junior year, he snagged the role of Sky Masterson, the romantic lead in a spring musical staging of Guys and Dolls. In his 2006 memoir,⁸ Clash recalled his sense of triumph in landing the part that Marlon Brando had in the 1955 film adaptation. “I was floating on air,” Clash said. “This was a dream role—to have some great acting scenes and perform show-stopping songs like ‘Luck Be a Lady’ and ‘My Time of Day.’ I was also especially pleased that Sky’s love interest, Sarah, was going to be played by a girl who was a friend of mine. Vanessa and I were in music and drama classes together, and she was bright and talented, with a remarkable voice.”

The exhilaration was short-lived, thanks to a phone call Kevin received a few days after the cast list was posted outside the high school’s music room and rehearsals had begun. Dundalk High has traditionally drawn its student body from a largely blue-collar swath of southwestern Baltimore County. Racial tensions were always under the surface, and a cafeteria melee that broke out between whites and blacks at the school made headlines in Baltimore in the 1970s. “It may have had more to do with drugs than race,” said Clash, who was given a ride home that day by the school’s drama teacher after the students were sent home at midday.

On Father’s Day, 2006, Kevin, Gladys, and George Clash sat around an outdoor patio table in suburban Baltimore County. Theirs is a family that values respect and tolerance, hard work and sacrifice, laughter, and gratitude for every blessing. Though Gladys had a framed photograph of Angela Davis atop the family’s RCA television set, she was hardly a black-power militant in the sixties. But she was prideful, as was her husband, and they raised their children to be comfortable in their skin and to stand second to no one.

That explains why a sadness—and a cool, residual anger—still crosses their faces when they recall what happened when the handsome star of their household, the shy child who mustered his courage to perform without his puppets, picked up the receiver on that day in 1976.

On the line was Vanessa, the student chosen to play Sister Sarah, the Salvation Army missionary who parries with inveterate gambler Sky in Guys and Dolls. After nervously stumbling over small talk, Clash’s cast mate lowered the boom. “You know, in the musical you and I have to kiss . . . We can’t do that.”

Vanessa’s mother, coaxing in the background, prompted her to ask Kevin to step down from the role. Clash’s heart sank at the bold attempt to undo a decision that wasn’t hers to manipulate: “What she was really saying was, ‘We can’t kiss in front of everyone at school because you are black and I am white.’ ”

Gladys, too, was listening nearby. “When my mom heard ‘step down,’ she went off, pouring words into my ear,” Clash said. “I could barely take in everything she was saying, but I knew that the fury in her was coming out.” It was up to Kevin to clarify things. “I told her I was not the one with the problem, she was,” he said.

Gladys wanted Vanessa to put her mother on, but the parent refused. “I wanted to remind her that this was not about loving her daughter or Kevin coming for dinner like Sidney Poitier in that movie. This was about acting,” she said. “Kevin could have been asked to kiss a block of wood, but the situation was that he was playing a part that required the leading man to kiss the leading lady.”

Vanessa, who eventually gave up the part to take a role in the chorus, apologized months later. The role of Sarah was taken up by an African American, a student who already had a crush on Clash. “She had no problem with the kiss scene,” Clash said.

Gladys Clash and Stu Kerr were the adults who figured most prominently in Clash’s development as a performer, but there was a third.

Clash first came to know of Kermit Love after watching an episode of Call It Macaroni, a syndicated children’s program that won a George Foster Peabody award for Westinghouse Broadcasting in 1975. Narrated by children, the documentary series explored extraordinary occupations, like that of Love, a costume designer and marionette maker.

To Clash, the fully bearded Love seemed like a modern-day wizard, and he was determined to meet him. Gladys, not one to be deterred, began calling the local station in Baltimore that aired the monthly show, asking for a contact name and number for Love. To no one’s surprise, she not only got through to him but convinced Love to meet with Kevin during an upcoming school trip to New York. He did, and a lifelong bond was formed.

Not long afterward, Kerr began to talk up his young puppeteer find to Bob Keeshan, who saw a tape of Clash at a children’s convention in New York. While still in high school, Clash took a meeting with the executives at Captain Kangaroo.

“He was kind of young, but we saw genius right away,” Keeshan told Newsday in 1998. “He was always a great puppeteer and actually an incredible craftsman.” Keeshan sent two emissaries to Baltimore to investigate the menagerie of eighty-nine puppets Clash had built, which were crammed onto plastic shelves in his parents’ bedroom. The producer and writer chose five puppets for the show, and Clash began to make frequent appearances during the final two, barely seen, seasons of Captain Kangaroo on CBS. Almost cruelly, the network scheduled it at 6:00 a.m., allowing the show to wither and die at an hour when its viewers were either barely awake or still asleep.

In addition to doing puppetry, Clash played a college student on Kangaroo. “It was the worst costume,” he said. “Penny loafers and an argyle vest. It was pretty embarrassing.”

Said Keeshan, “We would see how really difficult it was for him to get out from behind the puppets, how he hated to be on camera himself. What’s magic about him is how he just becomes so incredibly reverse of what he is in real life when he gets behind a puppet. [With a puppet] he’s outgoing and funny as can be, and outrageous. Without the puppet, he’s just a nice laid-back young man.”

Clash was determined to join the Muppets, and Love was just as determined to help him. When a call went out for extras to work the Sesame Street float in the 1979 Macy’s parade, he recommended Clash. The nineteen-year-old arose in the middle of the night in Baltimore to get to New York in time to perform Cookie Monster, waving to the throngs along Broadway. As the parade dispersed in late morning, he hopped a southbound train back to Thanksgiving dinner in Maryland, exhilarated at having met Jim Henson, however briefly.

For a dizzying spell of time, Clash worked twenty-one-hour days in New York, juggling responsibilities for Kangaroo and Love’s syndicated children’s show The Great Space Coaster.

“I would do Great Space Coaster in the morning, then from 2:00 p.m. to like 6:00 p.m., I would do the Captain, and then from 6:00 p.m. to midnight I would prerecord Great Space Coaster, and then from midnight to 6:00 a.m. I was building puppets for the Captain. Then I would have to go in at 8:30 in the morning. Fortunately I was young and healthy.”⁹

It was right around that time that he got a call from Jane Henson. “Jim, Frank, and Jerry were in London doing The Muppet Show, and they needed puppeteers for Sesame Street,” Clash said. They had a special assignment in mind for the six-foot, 180-pound, athletically built puppeteer: the hind end of Snuffleupagus.

“Both Jerry and Richard Hunt had done that job, and it just tore their backs up,” Clash said. “It was my turn, I guess.”

Clash also performed an array of characters, without much distinction, until Hunt literally tossed Elmo into his arms. As Hunt walked away, Clash began experimenting with a falsetto voice that he had used from time to time. “But I really didn’t find Elmo’s soul until I took a trip home to Baltimore, back to the kids in my mother’s care. That’s where I found his innocence, his positiveness, and his sweetness.”

Unbeknownst to O’Reilly, Jon Stone had seen her two years before on Broadway, playing a teenage drifter in David Rabe’s Hurlyburly.

“My agent said, ‘We need to get something on your résumé other than the roles you’ve been doing,’ and I reluctantly agreed to go,” she recalled. “A bunch of girls were there, and I did the compare-and-despair thing, sitting around thinking Why am I here? I was in jeans and T-shirt and felt completely as though I didn’t fit in, building walls around myself to hide my insecurities and prejudgments. Then, about two seconds from leaving, they called me in.”

Stone and Lisa Simon were there, as was Marty Robinson, performing with Telly. Though there was a script, the emphasis was on improv, and O’Reilly quickly got into the spirit of the Muppet interplay.

“Jon struck me as a ghetto Santa Claus, and I liked him immediately,” Bartlett said. She got the part, arriving at the studio prepared to play one of Gordon’s students named Gina. She gets lost on the way to a science project meeting on the roof of 123 Sesame Street. The script called for her to get directions from a pair of Honkers, the brightly hued, slightly crazed creatures who communicate only through trumpetlike protrusions growing out of the tops of their heads.

“Everyone in the studio but me was clued in that Marty Robinson and Kevin Clash were going to put me through a kind of fraternity initiation,” she said. “They tortured me while we were shooting, pulling at my knapsack, honking away in my ear, high-fiving each other. They were just trying to see how I would react, but I’m a New Yorker, and I’d been through a lot worse harassment than that. Growing up in Brooklyn helped.”

Gina became a recurring role. “At first she was this feisty, kooky, kind of tough, innocent kid, a questioning type who was hyper and a bit confused,” she said. “I was all over the place with her, nervous and jittery. But she had a spunky spark to her that they liked.”

It was only after the actress was working on Sesame Street for a while that she shared this childhood memory with her cast mates: when she was four, Alison and her big sister Holly stood bundled up along Central Park West watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. A home movie shows her wide-eyed and shivery, in a fur coat and muff. But it also shows fate stepping in. “All of a sudden, you see the Sesame Street float come into view in the movie, and then Will Lee and Northern Calloway hop off the float and come toward us to shake our hands.”

Dulcy Singer had compassion for him and did what she could, but from the mid-1980s on, Calloway was becoming less and less a part of Sesame Street. A low point came in the 1987 production year, when a story line was developed for Maria and Luis that would lead to a wedding on Sesame Street, a first for the show. In real life, then thirty-seven-year-old Sonia Manzano had recently married, and the idea of thirtysomething Maria falling in love with Luis, a tenderhearted Hispanic man she had gotten to know and trust over time, appealed to the producers and writers. As TV relationships go, the match was more than plausible.

But the news of this development was devastating to Calloway, who had for so long played David as Maria’s boyfriend. He thought that if any character should marry Maria, it should be his. But it was never a serious consideration. “It was my idea to do the marriage and I played it cautious,” Singer said. “I thought it would be better to do it with Luis because I didn’t want to open up another kettle of fish. It was enough to get a wedding on the show and have a family without opening ourselves to more difficulties. And I thought it would be a good and helpful thing to show a stable Latino family.”

Singer turned to Jeff Moss to script the wedding episode and provide the words and music, a decision that led to another of Sesame Street’s finest hours. Once again, Jon Stone directed.

Intense, tenacious Moss turned in an operetta that was as romantic as it was revealing, seven melodious minutes of soliloquy in song and spare dialogue that played out on the brownstone’s rooftop deck, with a silhouette skyline as backdrop. It simultaneously reviewed and expanded the back stories of Luis and Maria, briefly introducing the bride’s mother and the groom’s proud father, seated in the open-air congregation. Among the other attendees were Gordon, Susan, Mr. McIntosh (stage manager Chet O’Brien), Gina, David, Bert, Ernie, the two-headed monsters, the Count, Cookie Monster, Oscar (in a shmutzed tuxedo), Telly, and Big Bird, who whispers “You look beautiful,” as Maria enters in an off-the-shoulder white gown (with just a hint of cleavage).

A Hispanic priest addresses the bride and groom and explains marriage in terms simple enough for preschoolers to comprehend yet elegant enough for adults to appreciate.

“When two people get married, what they do is make a promise to each other,” he says. “Luis and Maria are making a promise today, a promise to share their lives together, a promise to help one another and care for each other and love each other for the rest of their lives. They are celebrating this promise in front of you, the people they love most, their friends and their families.”

The service dissolves and up comes an intro, a segue to lyrics that touch on the inner dialogue of the participants: the beaming groom (“Look at her. Isn’t she wonderful?”), the bride with a late case of cold feet (“It’s altogether possible I’ve made a major error. My hands are cold, my forehead’s hot. It’s either love or terror”), the equally jittery little red ring bearer (“Don’t drop the rings, Elmo. Please, Elmo, don’t drop the rings”), the heart-heavy ex-boyfriend (“Isn’t it funny? I’ve seen her each day of my life. Now she’s becoming . . . become Luis’s new wife. I’m not used to thinking of her as anyone’s wife”), the wistful bachelor and best man, Bob, turning to maid of honor Linda (“Sometimes I wonder how I would feel being married. If I were married, would it be to someone like you?”), the longtime girlfriend, Linda, dreamily responding in sign language through a video thought balloon (“Sometimes I wonder how I would feel being married. I wonder if you wonder, too. I wish I knew”), the newly adoptive parents Gordon and Susan with junior attendant Miles (“Look at him. Isn’t he wonderful?”).

Luis and Maria exchange vows and rings, and the priest concludes, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

From the back row, Big Bird blurts out “Yay!” and Gina closes his beak to allow the bride and groom to kiss.

Just as the Mr. Hooper memorial had been writer Norman Stiles’s masterpiece, the wedding episode was Jeff Moss’s.¹⁰

Together, they are the poles that held up the canvas tent that was Sesame Street in the 1980s, a reflection of the sometimes silly, sometimes sad, always surprising, relentlessly spinning cyclical circus of life.