FROM THE VAULT: An Interview With Jerry Nelson (Patreon)

Conducted ~12/1998

While trying to come up with the best way to describe the late Jerry Nelson, I turn inevitably to the words multi-talented and multi-faceted - both illustrative of the numerous talents, and characters, contained within him. From his humble roots in Oklahoma to his literal hand in creating cultural icons (The Count von Count, Floyd Pepper, Gobo Fraggle, Robin, Emmet Otter, Lew Zealand, Crazy Harry, Herry Monster… The list goes on and on…), Jerry accomplished much in his long and distinguished career. Although you (mostly) didn’t ever see him, you knew and appreciated it when he was there.

I’ve long been a fan of the Muppets, and being the inquisitive person I am, I researched exactly who the people were that worked to bring the Muppets to life – those wild men and women known collectively as the Muppet performers.

Through the still-newish medium of the internet, I had begun a correspondence with Jerry Nelson, and when the back-to-back filming of Elmo In Grouchland and Muppets From Space brought him to my almost literal backyard, I arranged to have a lengthy sit-down interview with him.

It was also through Jerry that I was able to hang around the set for months on end (effectively sacrificing my college career – an anecdote for another time) and meet the other Muppet performers.

Jerry became a good friend over the years (we also shared a birthday (July 10), which led to me helping pull off a big surprise party for his 65th, 25 years ago), and his life’s work contributed nothing but joy to both children and adults for generations. I hope you’ll understand why doing this interview was so important to me, and I hope you enjoy it…

If you enjoy this interview, and aren't already, please take a moment to BECOME A PATRON.…

KEN PLUME: Tell me a little bit about your background…

JERRY NELSON: I was born in Oklahoma in 1934. I lived there with my mom until I was about 6, then we moved to Washington, D. C. and I grew up in that area.

PLUME: Was it a job related move?

NELSON: Yeah, as a kid it was my job to go to school. It was during the war. My mom and dad were divorced, and she took a job with the Navy Department, so we moved there for that. I spent summers with my grandparents in Tulsa, and the rest of the time I lived in D.C.

PLUME: So you were 6 when you moved to Washington…

NELSON: Well, I was probably 7 or 8. I know I was already in school. I remember about three schools in Oklahoma. One would have been a kindergarten, one would have been a first grade, and the other one would probably have also been first grade or the beginning of second grade. I know when I started school in Washington I was in the second grade. The reason I remember one of the places in Oklahoma was because is was a one-room schoolhouse. I was in a class room with all age kids and the teacher would move around, kind of like an arena. That was a good learning experience early on.

PLUME: Going to Washington schools must have been quite a shock after that…

NELSON: Yeah, going to Washington was a big change in my life. It was a big school. The first school I went to in Washington, I had to wait after school because my cousin went to the high school next door, and I used to wait in the playground so we could go home together. We had to go by public transit that involved a streetcar and a transfer to a bus. It was fairly complicated travel for a second grader.

During those days we’d listen to radio. That’s probably where I became fascinated by voices and accents. I would hear names and think, “Oh, that’s the same guy that does this other voice on that other show.” That was probably where I became interested in the fact that you could regulate your voice and do different characters.

PLUME: How cliché was it that families would gather around the radio and listen, whereas today you have every member of the family going to their rooms to watch their own TVs…

NELSON: Radio was more of a family thing, although in my family when we watched TV we would do that together as well. I suppose today everyone has their own TV or computer or whatever they’re interested in and it certainly seems more fragmented. Society is more fragmented. People, rather than staying with their nuclear family, tend to adopt families who are more in tune with them.

One of the major things that Jim saw with puppets, and Bill Baird also, was that they weren’t just a children’s entertainment, that they could also entertain and educate adults as well. Jim was the one who really connected in this struggle with The Muppet Show, but it took the success of a children’s show to enable that. People who had never seen The Muppet Show used to ask me, “What is that?” and I used to say it was an entertainment program for children of all ages. That’s the way I always thought of it, because there were different levels that appeal to different intellects, different age groups. The jokes were there for very young minds, but the jokes were also there for the older audience. That’s the interesting thing about Sesame Street. Young children would watch it over and over again and they’d watch the same show at the end of the week. When they first started, at the end of the week, they’d run the full week’s programs and children would watch them all over again. Nowadays, kids will do that with videos so that they know it by heart. They have minds that are busy looking at other things. They’ll watch the storyline, then they’ll watch a character, then they’ll watch the background. Eventually life comes along to distract us.

PLUME: Sesame Street is on what, its third generation now?

NELSON: At least. That was the interesting part. When kids were 6 or 7, they’d go, “Aw, I don’t watch that stuff anymore. I’m too old for that. That’s a children’s show.” Then somewhere in their teens they’d start watching it again, and then in college they’d start watching it again. It has a perennial quality to it.

PLUME: Nothing is really too dated, either.

NELSON: No, not really. You can look at some of the haircuts, maybe that would date it, but not the themes or the humor.

PLUME: What were your interests in school?

NELSON: By the time I got to high school, I was interested in country music and at some point in school, I don’t know how it happened, I got involved in a school play. It was fascinating and a lot of fun. As a youngster, my mom had put me in some group that traveled and did shows for Jaycees and Lions Clubs called Juvenile Review that a guy had put together. We did shows like Tom Sawyer and Hellzapoppin, Jr., which was basically tried-and-true vaudeville routines. We also sang on the radio in the Washington area. After that, I didn’t do much until the play in high school, and I thought, “I find this interesting.” I stayed with the idea of being an actor after that. For a while I thought radio and television were good. Throughout high school my musical tastes developed… I still like country, but now I like jazz and classical music as well. I realize music has shades for various moods and you’re not restricted. I stopped playing guitar when I was focused on jazz and thought, “Well, I can’t play jazz.” At some point, maybe in the 60’s movement came about, I started playing again because I thought, “Oh, I can play that.” In terms of acting, that was put on hold when I went into the Army. I was in the Army for two years and went to Japan.

PLUME: Was this right after high school?

NELSON: About a year afterwards. This was at the tail end of the Korean conflict, so I got the GI Bill and was able to go to school. I went to school for about a year and a half and thought, “Well, I’m not really doing anything here. If it’s acting I want to do, I should be in New York studying acting.” I felt like the thing to do was forget about school and pursue acting.

PLUME: When year was this around?

NELSON: I got back from the military in ’56 and went to school from ’56-’57, moved to New York in ’58, and stayed there for a couple of years.

PLUME: How big a transition was it to just move to New York?

NELSON: Well, there were other things like life going on. I don’t know if I should get into that aspect of my life. My own sense of responsibility also came into play… The things you do that you think you should do and it turns out they’re mistakes, so you just forge ahead. That’s the way life is. You have to say, “That was a mistake,” and move on. I think all of these things, especially for a performer, are fulfilling in a different way, because that’s one more unique experience you have that you then can relate to something and go, “Ah, I know what that is.” It becomes a reference for other things. New York is a great place for studying people. There are great characters in New York. The old New York cab driver hardly exists anymore, but it used to be that most of them were philosophers in their own right. It was always quite a trip to take a cab ride in New York, but now it’s not so much anymore. I struggled along in New York, and I did some acting in early, early TV shows like The Defenders and Naked City… Just little walk-ons. I did have a speaking role in The Defenders. I did a couple of commercials… I think one was a roll-on deodorant. At some point I went back to Washington, D.C. My at-the-time wife worked for a private key club in New York. She was basically the breadwinner at that time… I was working as a waiter, but I wasn’t making that much money. They wanted her to work in their Washington club, and that would be more money, so we moved. I got a job at the Arena Stage in Washington as a first season apprentice, and worked a season there. That was a great experience to work with people like Phil Bosco who was one of those actors who everyone saw and went “Oh, that guy.” You don’t know the names, but great character actors. Then I got a chance to go up to Gateway Playhouse on Long Island, and I did my second season apprenticeship there and got my Equity card as a result of that. It seemed like it took me forever, but I was warned by a very good acting teacher I had at one point, Logan Ramsey, who said, “You know, when you go to New York, it’s going to take you five years just to start and get any work at all. Not to make a living, just to get any work at all.” And he was right. It takes a long time. Like the joke I heard the other day:

“What do you do?”

“I’m an actor.”

“Oh yeah? What restaurant?”

At one point, my step-daughter told my wife, “I want to be an actress,” and my wife’s reply was, “Oh great. Just what we need… Another waitress.”

Getting my Equity card was, I guess, a turning point, because at some point I was looking for work and doing a few small things in New York, when somebody told me that this puppeteer, Bill Baird, was looking for somebody to fill out his company for a New England tour. They said, “You do a lot of voices and stuff. You ought to go see about it.” I hadn’t had any real puppet experience at that time. I think maybe when I was twelve I had seen a marionette when we went to Oklahoma to spend Christmas with my grandparents. It was a little jointed one with screw eyes. It was a clown, I think. And I had a policeman. The policeman had a billy club, and the clown had a pole which he could kick up from his foot onto his hand and then toss it into the air and balance it on his nose, just by a series of strings. From those, I got the idea of how a puppet works… You try to make it real. That was my puppet experience . I didn’t do any character, voice or story. When I went to see Bill, I was wearing cowboy boots, and I think that helped a lot, because Bill was from the west. He had an aluminum traveling stage set up, which was basically just pipes with clamps, with about a 31-inch between the front and back bridge and about a six foot drop to the floor. He said, “Have you ever done puppets before?” and I said, “Oh, sure.” So when people ask me how I got into puppetry, I say I lied and wore cowboy boots.

Bill had given me this character that was one of the goons from the either the show Davey Jones’ Locker or Man In The Moon. The Goon had a trench coat, a slouch hat, and a machine gun. It was a bigger marionette than I had worked with, and definitely had a bigger, more precise control. So I took my boots off and climbed up the stage and he said to step across. He asked if I was okay and I said “yeah” so he said, “Okay, get familiar with it. I’ve got something to do. Call me when you feel comfortable and I’ll come have a look.” So he went off to do his thing, so I just got familiar with it. When you’re high up in the air, you have to be comfortable moving across the gap with no trepidation. I got familiar with the character, and eventually I guess he got tired of waiting for me to call, so he came over and sat on some steps and said, “Well, are you ready?” I didn’t miss a beat… I just pointed the gun at him with this character and said, “Listen here, Baird… The mob thinks this kid Nelson’s all right. They wants you should give them a job, okay? Think about it very carefully.”

PLUME: So that clinched the job right there…

NELSON: I think it probably did. He told me to walk across the stage, turn around, and walk back, and I did. He said, “Hang ‘im up and come on downstairs.” He took me downstairs and said, “We found our other puppeteer.”

So I went on the New England tour, and I was also part of the show in the Chrysler Pavilion at the World’s Fair. It had a section with dancing girls…

PLUME: Like a can-can?

NELSON: Yeah. There was also a black-light portion with a scarf and steering wheel that had a song that they cut out called Soft Shoulders and Dangerous Curves. It was a fun show to work, and working at the World’s Fair for 2 seasons – May to September. We had an hour off in between shows, so we’d go over to the Lowenbrau place across the street for some Weinerschnitzel, Lowenbrau, and mashed potatoes, or over to the Korean pavilion and have something else. There was great dining there.

Immediately after the World’s Fair, in 1965, Bobby Payne, who worked on the show with me, asked me, “Do you know who the Muppets are?” I said, “Yeah,” because I had been a page at WRC – NBC’s affiliate in Washington – after I got out of the military and before I went to school. At the same time, Jane and Jim were doing Sam & Friends. So Bobby said, “They’ve moved to New York. I think you ought to go see Jim. I think you guys would get along.”

PLUME: Did you speak to him at all when you were a page?

NELSON: When I was working there, I used to walk across delivering mail and I’d see him setting up and rehearsing something, but no contact. So I went to see Jim after speaking with Bobby, and it turned out that, at that time, Frank Oz had been drafted. Jim was doing Rowlf the Dog on The Jimmy Dean Show. Jim did the puppet and Frank did the right hand. Jim told me to go home and make a tape and do some voices for him, so I did. I went home and made a tape with some character voices and brought it back to him. One of them was (in Kermit voice) kinda like this, and he said, “Oh, you can’t do that voice.” Then he tried me out with puppets. So I took over Frank’s position as the right hand, and it turned out – and this is kind of a funny addendum to the story – I was sitting at the desk in the Muppet office the day that Frank was inducted. So I’m sitting there thinking, “Wow. This is a great job. A great place to work.” On 53rd Street they had a studio, a whole building, above a bar/restaurant called Chuck’s Composite. It was a place where a lot of models hung out. It was a very trendy place.

So I’m sitting at the desk thinking, “This is great,” and Frank walked in the door. My jaw dropped. Frank said the expression on my face was one of total dread. He said, “Don’t worry. They didn’t take me, but I’m going to go to England and visit some relatives.” Which he did. So I worked the rest of The Jimmy Dean Show until it went off the air. Then we went on the road with Jimmy Dean. We went to quite a few cities, and most of the appearances were in arena stages, so Jerry Juhl, Don Sahlin, and myself had built a puppet stage that we could carry and hang all the props in. Something that we could carry down these long aisles and get set up in the dark, so Rowlf would be there when the lights came up, and Jimmy would go, “Oh!” and we’d do our little bit, and then the lights would go out and we’d pick up our little stage in the dark and find our way out.

PLUME: I’ve never heard of that stage show…

NELSON: We did other stage shows as well. Frank came back, and although we mostly did a lot of commercials, occasionally we did a variety show.

PLUME: This was around, what, ’67?

NELSON: Well, Frank came back in ’66, and up till ’66 we did a lot of work, and then it kinda tailed off, and Jim said, “Well, I don’t have enough work for all of us, and you’re the last one to have joined, so I’m going to have to let you go.” So I went back to work for Bill Baird, and occasionally Jim would call me up and say, “Are you able to do an Ed Sullivan,” and I would check with Bill to make sure it was okay – he always said, “Yeah, sure.” He liked Jim a lot and respected his work. So from then until ’68 I would work on and off with Jim. He did a lot of projects that I didn’t work with him on, but I did a lot of the variety shows. I went out to LA in ’69 and stayed there for 8 or 9 months at the same time they were doing Sesame Street. I couldn’t do anything out there, and I still wasn’t a puppeteer in my mind, I was an actor. Nothing much happened out there, and my daughter from my first marriage became very ill, so I went back to New York to be with her. While I was there, I saw Sesame Street, and I was just overwhelmed… I was floored. I went to a Christmas party at the end of ’69 and I saw it and thought, “What’s that.” Someone said, “Oh, it’s Sesame Street,” and when I saw it was the Muppets I went , “Wow.” So I called Jim and said I’d like to come over and say hello, so we made an appointment. I told him how much I loved the show and what a great show it was and how I liked the work he was doing. He asked me what I was doing, and I think at that time

I had just started to work for Aniforms, which was a company run by one of the Bunnen brothers. Their puppets were outlines and black light manipulated by rods, and the company would go out and do trade shows. So Jim asked me if I thought I would be free to do a workshop. He said, “I’m putting together a workshop in June for something we want to do this summer.” It was The Great Santa Claus Switch for Ed Sullivan. So I said, “Okay.” There were quite a few people in that workshop: Fran Brill, Richard Hunt, Danny Seagram, and a lot of other people who eventually worked for Jim started out in that workshop. John Lovelady might have been in that one. Santa Claus Switch used a lot of puppeteers, so a lot of them got work out of this. We did that show in the summer of 1970, and afterwards Jim asked me if I would like to be involved in Sesame Street. So I started working regularly on Sesame Street.

PLUME: What roles did you start out with?

NELSON: I don’t think I had any roles. Background stuff… Letters, right hands.

PLUME: Richard started at the same time, didn’t he?

NELSON: No, Richard came in about a year or two later. At least a year later. I think I did Herbert Birdsfoot that same year. I think the Count came along in ’72 or ’73, but I’m not positive about that. It was Norman Stiles, one of the writers, idea. All the writers used to come up and watch the show, because they’d get a lot of ideas watching us work. That’s the way the two-headed monster came about… It was Richard and I clowning around. Norman told me he was writing this piece with this new character who’s called the Count… He’s a vampire, but not a real vampire… He just has a jones for numbers. He obsessed with counting things. So I went, “Oh, cool,” and I went to Jim and said, “You know, Norman’s writing this new character called the Count.” Jim said, “Let me hear it.” So I went (in Count voice), “Yes, I would love to do it!” and Jim said, “Yes, you can do it.”

PLUME: So it was that easy…

NELSON: Even up through the years, we would all try out for stuff… “Let me hear you do that character.” We wouldn’t always do that, but if it was a major piece of work, we wanted to make sure everything would work together.

PLUME: And the opposite would happen, where he’d just assign characters, right?

NELSON: Often he would just say, “We’re doing this piece and I’d like you to do this.” It wasn’t always one way or always another way. It’s like Jim wouldn’t always stick with one music guy… He liked to use different ones. Joe Raposo would write something, and then for the next show he might go to Jeff Moss. He did that so the music wouldn’t always sound the same.

PLUME: Now, were you always working on Sesame at this time, or were there side projects in-between?

NELSON: Throughout Sesame, and this gets us back to the adult things, Jim wanted to do an adult show… Something that would appeal to all age groups. We did specials… One was a Valentine’s special with Mia Farrow. That was where we tried to mold something. Then we did something called Sex and Violence. That one had even more of the form of what would become The Muppet Show. Jim started taking that around to people, and he showed it to everybody. Eventually, CBS said, “We’re willing to give you half the money.” So Jim had to find the other half somewhere. Somehow, he got it to Lew Grade. When Lew saw it, he loved it. He said, “I’ll put up the other part of the money, provided you do it in my facility.” That’ll do two things,” he said, “That’ll get your people busy, and it’ll keep my people busy.” Lew Grade was great at that… The art of taking money out of one pocket, giving it to you, then taking it back with the other hand and putting it in the other pocket. That’s big business, man. Thank God for him. He was one of the true showman. He and his brother.

PLUME: Very British and reserved…

NELSON: They used to be hoofers, he and his brother. So we started The Muppet Show in ’76. We had gone to England before to do other things… We had done a Herb Albert special, a couple of Julie Andrews shows. We did the Julie Andrews show, then we did Julie Andrews visits Sesame Street.” They built the street over there. Back to The Muppet Show… In the first season, I did the first two episodes, and we did those in February or March, just to see if everything would work out. Then they went back in the summer to start the rest of the season. I went to Jim and I said, “You know, I want to do the show. I want to work on the show.” My daughter had cystic fibrosis, and I spent summers with her. Those were good growth periods for her. Winters are very hard on CF children. Infections in the lung were one of the things she had to deal with in her short life. I said, “I want to go on, I want to work on the show, but I really think I have to spend this time with Christine.” And he said, “All right.” As a consequence, I had to give up characters like Statler, whom I had done in Sex and Violence and one other show…

PLUME: The Valentine Special?

NELSON: Possibly. I haven’t seen the Valentine show since it originally aired. The only thing I remember really well is me as Thog dancing with Mia singing “Real Live Girl.” I remember we did Statler and Waldorf in an old gentlemen’s club. Very stodgy, and there was a big clock in the back going “Tick… Tock…” At some point in the bit, it stopped, and they looked at each other wondering if it was them or the clock. They remain great characters, and Richard went on to do a superb, wonderful job with Statler. So as a consequence, upon returning to England, I became a utility man. I did a lot of the one-off characters. I had some pretty good, fun characters to play. I loved playing Uncle Deadly…

PLUME: And Floyd carried through…

NELSON: Floyd was mine through the whole thing. I loved Floyd. I loved Pops, the doorman, who came along in the later years. He was a funny, cantankerous old guy, which is what I can be very easily without trying too hard. Just ask my wife. The Muppet Show was a great experience. If you can imagine working with the people you admired, who were or were becoming star performers. If, for example, you had told me when I was a kid going to Saturday matinees to see Roy Rogers… If some seer had walked up to me and said, “Son, someday you will work with that man,.” I would have thought he was the craziest man in the world. And it happened that I not only worked with him, I sang a song with him.

PLUME: I wanted to ask you, what was the transition like to the short-lived Saturday Night Live gig?

NELSON: That was short-lived mainly because we were starting to do The Muppet Show. We started doing SNL, then we left and went to England.

PLUME: So it wasn’t that you were pushed out of the show…

NELSON: No, although they would have pushed us out if they could have. I think the only reason we were on the show – because I don’t think Lorne Michaels ever really wanted us on the show — was probably because we were part of the deal. We all had the same manager.

PLUME: The skits still hold up. They weren’t unfunny…

NELSON: No, I think the problem was that those guys would get together at the beginning of the week. They had a big board where they would tack their stuff up and start working out routines, and somebody would be assigned to write for us.

PLUME: So it was a chore…

NELSON: That wasn’t the worst part. I think that would have been all right. If it had just been that. But what would happen was that then on Thursday, they would bring it over to Muppets – the writers and maybe a director – and we would rewrite it. Then they would try another writer. We went through just about every writer on the show, and I think it became a chore for them. I don’t think it was a happy marriage from either point of view, except I loved it. One of my favorite moments was with Scred and Lily Tomlin singing “I Got You Babe.” And the reason that worked out okay was because I said, “Well, I’m going to go there from the beginning.” I went over on Monday and went to all the meetings and rehearsals, and was there for the whole week and worked on it and reworked it. I went through a little bit of what they went through.

PLUME: Did they seem to appreciate it?

NELSON: I think they did. John Belushi always hated the puppets. He just hated them with a passion. He would have been just as happy if we had fallen in a big hole. I think part of it was that it wasn’t part of what he thought the show was… And it wasn’t. We were doing skits and they were trying to make them topical, and they did. They did one revolving around marital aids, which I performed with the girl who played Peuta while Jim and Frank were doing something in England. They were away. So the writers wrote this thing and we did it. Jane Henson was not happy. Jane said, “But that’s not Muppets,” and I said, “This is a different show. This is real adult comedy. This isn’t kids, and if kids are staying up and watching this, they’re in trouble already.”

Again, the main problem was that we were never really a part of the show. We were like a tacked on thing that they resented. I guess rightly so, but we only did twelve. One of the shows that really worked well was one that Chevy wrote. It was one where he came into the storage room and all the characters were in a box.

PLUME: How difficult was it to perform live?

NELSON: Ahh, it wasn’t that difficult.

PLUME: Now, like with the skit with Lily, was that done on a side set, or could the audience see you?

NELSON: No, they could see me. I dressed in black, and I think I had a hood on. You know, one of the things that made that so good was that I was very focused. I was studying Tai Chi at the time and I was very heavily into it. I went through as much of the form as I knew and meditated several times on the Saturday that we did that, and on the break my daughter came. Richard, my daughter and I went out to get a bite to eat, and as we were walking back we passed a florist. I went and I bought a rose. I kept it hidden through the whole bit with Lily, and I gave it to her right at the very end, and it totally caught her off guard because we never rehearsed it… It was just totally spontaneous to her. Her voice caught… It was a very real moment. I thought it was one of my best performances of anything I’ve ever done, because I felt really focused.

PLUME: I thought Scred was one of your best character performances…

NELSON: I always loved that character. I felt a great kinship with Scred, and he may resurface in the Ubergonzo in the film. It won’t be Scred, but it will be his essence.

PLUME: So it was a mutual split with SNL, and that’s when you moved on to The Muppet Show.

NELSON: Right, that’s when we went to England and began The Muppet Show full force.

PLUME: And you returned to The Muppet Show around episode 9…

NELSON: Yeah, it would be around 9. I missed 9 weeks in the summer and then rejoined in September. When we came back to the States at the end of that first season, we went straight into The Muppet Movie, which we did in LA.

PLUME: When did the success of the show actually hit? Was it the middle of the first season, or the end of the first season?

NELSON: Actually, it took longer. It was second season, when we got back to England. I had just done “Halfway Down the Stairs,” and when we got back to England, it was on the pop charts… “Top of the Pops.” I believe it got up to seven. It was even on jukeboxes. So the English picked up on the show right away, but it took a lot longer in the states, probably because it was syndicated. People knew the Muppets from Sesame Street, but I don’t think there was a great furor here like there was in England.

PLUME: Did the movie come up unexpectedly, or was there knowledge that it was in the works?

NELSON: I’m sure the film was in Jim’s head for some time. I know he wanted to make movies. The movie was there in order to “catch the wave.” It was the right time to do it. The subsequent movies were that way as well. By the time The Muppet Show was over, that’s when they moved on to Dark Crystal.

PLUME: And that’s when people fractured, some going of to Sesame Street, some to Fraggle Rock…

NELSON: Yeah, Fraggle Rock didn’t start right away. Fraggle went from ’82 – ’86, I believe, so there was a two year interim. Dark Crystal happened in that interim, as well as Great Muppet Caper. Definitely while the studios, Elstree, were still there. I believe they’re gone now.

PLUME: Who was your favorite guest to work with on The Muppet Show?

NELSON: It’s hard, because there were so many wonderful guests. Roy (Rogers) and Dale (Evans) stick out in my mind, because they were like your grandparents. You just wanted to go snuggle up to them. In the same light, when Spike Milligan was there for a day and a half, because we didn’t get through all of his stuff in a day, I think I laughed the whole time. My stomach ached after he was gone. A day and a half of laughing constantly.

PLUME: What was it like working with Peter Sellers?

NELSON: Peter Sellers was wonderful. That’s another standout in my mind. Often times they would fete the guests – take him out to dinner or something. Sometimes it would just be Dave Lazer and Jim or Jerry Juhl. Dave Lazer was almost always a part of that, because he was the great schmoozer. He has infinite charm. Richard, Dave Goelz and I were included in the dinner with Peter Sellers. I went to dinner with Jonathan Winters also. Those were the moments I remember more than the show, even, because it was more of a personal thing.

PLUME: As opposed to working with them in a scene on a professional level…

NELSON: They’re just pros to work with. You couldn’t ask for anyone better. All of these people were the tops. Working with Dizzy Gillespie was so much fun. I got to sing a scat song with Dizzy. It just blew me away. People ask me all the time who would be my favorite, and it is impossible to pick one. There’s so many of them that were so wonderful.

PLUME: Any that were difficult to relate to?

NELSON: (Laughing) Yeah, but I don’t want to go there…

PLUME: Were there any stars that they tried to get but it never happened?

NELSON: They tried their best to get the Beatles, Paul was willing to do it, but we had to hire the whole band… When he was with Wings. It was too big time. We just didn’t have the money. I think George would have done it, but they kept trying to negotiate with Paul.

PLUME: I would think Ringo would have done it in a heartbeat…

NELSON: Ringo probably would have to. If they had asked me, I would have said, “Hey! Get them! Don’t dicker… Get the ones who are ready to commit.”

PLUME: The Muppet Show did have a way of getting a whole lot of people to appear that you wouldn’t expect to go on a show like that…

NELSON: This is true. The wonderful part about that, too, was that they got people like Gilda, and people like Wally Bogue – who nobody ever heard of, but Jim loved. Wally worked that show for years in Disneyland, and nobody knew him. I remember the first time I went to Disneyland, I went with Jim. Jim took me there. He said, “You’ve got to see this guy!” He was so excited about seeing Wally Bogue. Wally made me laugh the whole time I was there, and it was great having him on the show. Same with Senor Wences. A guy who had sort-of a heyday in Ed Sullivan times, but a lot of young people wouldn’t have known who he was. These performers who were like this, Jim loved them. He wanted other people to see these people.

PLUME: Like a showcase vehicle.

NELSON: It was indeed. When Senor Wences came for our read-through that we had on Sundays, he did his show for all of us. We were all like little kids sitting there watching him it. It was so wonderful.

PLUME: How many times did you encounter him while doing Sullivan appearances?

NELSON: Never. Jim may have, because certainly Jim did more shows than I did. I didn’t do all of those shows. You know who I did encounter there, as an addendum since he died recently, was Flip Wilson. Either the first or second time I did the Ed Sullivan Show, I see this guy, and he’s pacing back and forth. You can tell he’s nervous, so I said, “What’s up, man?” He said, “Aw, I’m a standby comic.” “What’s that mean?” He said, “Well, if they have time or someone gets sick or something happens, then I get to go on.” I said, “Oh wow, man…” He said, “Yeah, it’s a drag.” As it turned out, he did not get to go on that night. He did eventually make appearances.

PLUME: And when he got his own show, he provided a showcase to the Muppets in the early ’70’s…

NELSON: Yeah. He was a great performer and a funny guy. I remember him very fondly.

PLUME: Did you ever do any of the Flip Wilson appearances?

NELSON: I don’t think so. I don’t think I had any characters then. I may have had Herry Monster fairly early on, because they thought, “Well, you don’t have a monster. Let’s give you a monster.” I think that’s one of the first characters I did, other than Herbert Birdsfoot.

PLUME: And Richard joined the show in ’72, right?

NELSON: I believe so, but I’m not positive about that. He would come in once in awhile and do things. In the early days, occasionally they would need someone else, and even Jane would come in and do a right hand. Fran Brill was there for a little while, and then she decided she wanted to pursue her acting career, which she did. Then she rejoined the company again.

PLUME: Jumping ahead a bit, and back to what sidetracked chronology we’ve been following, what are your thoughts on Fraggle Rock?

NELSON: That was the first time Jim really kind-of walked away, although he participated, especially at the beginning, it was the first time he left it basically to others. I think he knew by then that everyone had the same concerns as him that the work was quality work.

PLUME: Was there an audition process for the characters, or did he approach you and say, “I want you to perform Gobo?”

NELSON: I think we all auditioned for those characters. I think when I read it, I said I’d rather do Boober, and Jim said, “No, I want you to do Gobo because he’s the one that holds everyone together.”

PLUME: Fraggle Rock strikes me as a show that stands up well to the test of time, even more so than The Muppet Show.

NELSON: I think it definitely does. It’s about relationships. It’s not always as funny as The Muppet Show, even though there are a lot of funny moments.

PLUME: It also strikes me as a more musical series than even Sesame Street…

NELSON: Oh definitely. I think so too. That’s another amazing thing… Dennis Lee and Phil Balsam as a team. Just the amount of work they did…

PLUME: And the range…

NELSON: It’s so vast. I remember Phil telling me, “Oh, I write five songs a day. A lot of them are terrible, but I sit down and write five songs a day. Sometimes one of ’em is real good.” That’s the kind of dedication and determination all of the crew and everybody had. Focus is probably the key word that comes into play with everything that anybody endeavors to do in life. Fraggle Rock, I think, was the culmination of team effort in terms of putting it together. All of us think it would be so great if we could find another project like that.

PLUME: What do you see as the strong points of the show?

NELSON: Everything. The story. The overall scope and concept of the show. The interrelationship of the characters.

PLUME: It was a very self-contained world…

NELSON: And yet, in the last show, where they meet Doc and Sprocket, it’s such a joyful moment…

PLUME: And poignant…

NELSON: Yeah. We all cried when we watched it, and we probably cried when we did it. It was a very moving thing, for a lot of reasons. It was real in some ways… A very final thing, yet it was the hope of a beginning.

PLUME: It was a mutual agreement for the show to end when it did, right?

NELSON: Well no, it wasn’t. What happened was that the show was a co-production between CBC and HBO. HBO, at that time, felt that they were over-extended an needed to cut back, and Fraggle Rock was one of the places where they did that. CBC would have been perfectly happy keeping it, and, in fact, they tried to find some other way to carry on with it. Another season would have been ideal.

PLUME: It had the performances and momentum to carry on…

NELSON: It certainly did. With The Muppet Show, I believe the writers felt that they had covered it all. That they had done it all, and were moving into the territory where Sesame is now, where they just plug characters into sketches… “Oh, we haven’t done this with Ernie yet. We haven’t done this with Tell yet.”

PLUME: Plug and play…

NELSON: Yeah.

PLUME: So after Fraggle Rock came the segue into the Jim Henson Hour…

NELSON: Yeah. That was the next big project. I’m not sure why that project didn’t work. I thought it was a good show. It may have been that it was too much to see something like The Storyteller, and then the Muppets. The other shows that we did within that framework, like Dog City, were wonderful. The atmosphere in that show was fantastic. So were the others, like Cloud Forest.

PLUME: I do want to ask you, before we wrap up, how you would describe your relationship with Richard.

NELSON: Richard came into the company when he was pretty young, and I kind-of took Richard under my wing, when he first came in, since Frank and Jim were sort-of a team and I was like a straight man or foil that worked off their characters. So when Richard came in, we got to the point where we would work really well together. When one of us would start to go somewhere, the other would know what was happening. We played well together. Like with the Two-Headed Monster. We were just goofing around on the set one day, without a puppet even, and one of the writers was there and said, “What’s that you’re doing?” And we said, “One monster with two heads!” And they decided to do that. We had a lot of characters that worked together, like Floyd and Janice. We were good friends. When we had someplace to go, we would travel together. He was always so late that it used to drive me crazy. Eventually I’d say, “If you’re there, I’ll see you at the plane. If you’re not, I’ll see you where we’re going.” Richard and I were like what Steve and Dave are now. You find somebody you work well with, and have that rapport with. I knew all of Richard’s family – his sisters and brother – and we’d spend time together.

PLUME: When did Richard find out he was ill?

NELSON: I’m not sure exactly when. Once I got married, we didn’t hang out as much, and he did other shows, like Faffner Hall, so he was away in England. When he told me about it was about two years before he died.

PLUME: So it was after Jim passed away…

NELSON: Yeah.

PLUME: And he had a “Going Away Party” for himself, right?

NELSON: That was held downstairs in a meeting hall at St. John the Divine. It was a big crowd. Everyone from the company, all of his friends…

PLUME: How festive was it?

NELSON: It was pretty festive. By that time, the effects of AIDS were really zapping his energy, but he gave a show, essentially, with his brother and sisters. His family used to do that as kids. Richard was always the director and told them what to do, and they did it. “Here girls, you’re going to sing a song. Now sing it.” I did something with a puppet, but I can’t even remember which puppet or what I did. I guess I’ve blocked it out…

PLUME: Was it similar to what you did at Jim’s funeral?

NELSON: This was a thing with Richard and the puppet, but I can’t really remember what it was we said or did. The company had a whole separate memorial. There was another memorial held after he passed away, which was also held at St. John the Divine, but in the Chapel. The company had a going away party, but by that time, Richard was in a wheelchair. The company put together a Richard Hunt puppet montage of bits that Richard had done. They showed that, and everyone hugged him and kissed him and told them they loved him.

PLUME: It’s ironic that, after Richard’s passing, you took up the character of Statler again. The only character I can see not returning is Scooter…

NELSON: Yeah, that was very much Richard. When Richard joined, he was such a bouncy little puppy. We had to squelch him all the time. He was totally just exuberance gone mad. Just bouncing all over the place. It would be nice to see Janice too, and I’m sure someone will eventually pick it up. It’s a lovely character. He made her such a gal.

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