Flying cookies: Kevin Clash (left) and David Rudman are the men behind Sesame Street’s Elmo and the Cookie Monster.
JULES TAHAN
There are two bags in the corner of the photographer’s studio. In one there’s a ball of foam about the size of a grapefruit covered in bright-red synthetic fur, a collection of ping-pong ball eyes, a small torso and a gangle of loose limbs. In the other, the same assortment of stuff, but with a bigger clump of fur, this time a familiar shade of blue.
Nothing more than fabric and polystyrene really.
But these bags, and their highly flammable contents, are having an effect on all present. Before they’ve even been picked up and animated by hand, two of the most famous puppets ever created, Elmo and Cookie Monster, are actually animating the room. There’s extra colour in the faces, a twinkling in the eye of The Weekly Review team; words such as “starstruck” and “nervous” are being whispered about the set as it’s prepared for its furry guests and their friends. We’re not quite on Sesame Street, that fabled place implanted deep in our subconscious, but we’re closer than we’ve ever been. The 1970s-style television and dining-room furniture is only intensifying the flashbacks.
The terrific irony here is that it’s meant to be the other way around; humans are meant to bring puppets to life, giving them personality and flushed cheeks and nervous twitches. Today the reverse is happening.
“Being a bit starstruck is a normal reaction to the puppets,” Australian puppeteer Fiona Gentle says soothingly, as we wait for the Sesame Street entourage to arrive. “Even my heart melts when I see their faces. Your childhood flashes before your eyes: the sketches, the moments that you remember.”
Gentle has the challenging task of working Cookie Monster’s arms on this jaunt around Australia as the Sesame Street people promote their 42nd season. For a puppeteer, putting her hand into the original Cookie Monster puppet is like “putting on the Queen’s crown. These are big hands to fill!
“Puppets also appeal to the child in the adult. Every adult that I’ve seen around these guys is attracted to and almost hypnotised by the puppets. Not one person has had the issue of talking to the puppeteer, or even really acknowledging that there’s a person down there. They’re just completely drawn into the personality of Elmo or Cookie.”
What drew two of America’s greatest puppeteers, Kevin Clash, originator of Elmo, and current Cookie Monster David “Rud” Rudman, to puppets in the first place was the opportunity to “bring objects to life”.
“A lot of celebrities feel as though they haven’t become a star until they’ve been on Sesame Street or The Muppet Show. And when they come in, the celebrity drops right off them.”
Clash cut the black fur lining out of his father’s winter coat and created a monkey called Mundi. At 10, Rudman built amazing sculptures out of things he found around the house but then would put them on the shelf and “really wish that they would move”. “Instead of having it just sit there I thought that I’d love to see it actually come to life,” Rudman says. “I used to figure out ways to move the mouth, move the eyes. Then around that time, I started to see the Muppets on TV and I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do’.”
Clash built his own puppets too, learning to sew on his mother’s machine and marvelling at the late Jim Henson’s handiwork on The Muppet Show. “There were no seams on his puppets,” Clash says. “I later learned this was called ‘the Henson stitch’, which is nearly invisible to the camera.”
Rudman and Clash provide the current Sesame Street cast with a connection to the founding fathers of TV puppeteering, Frank Oz (Miss Piggy, Animal) and Jim Henson (Kermit the Frog and Ernie). Henson died in 1990.
But they are from vastly different worlds. Clash grew up in “Chocolate City”, Baltimore, a public-housing estate. When Sesame Street began in 1969, he saw a neighbourhood he recognised: “It was the first network kids’ program to show white kids and black kids and Latino kids all together.”
At the age of nine, his life had found a singular purpose. His friends shot hoops; Clash built puppets.
When he was given his first major break on The Muppet Show playing Cookie Monster in the 1979 Macy Thanksgiving Parade, Clash was encouraged by Frank Oz to approach Henson directly. Oz told him: “He doesn’t have any black puppeteers, you’ve got to tell him what you do.” Henson knew talent when he saw it and, after a few false starts, Clash and Henson joined forces.
Meanwhile, Rudman, who studied fine art and drama at college after Henson refused to hire him full time until he’d finished his degree, is from the northern suburbs of Chicago, where it’s “not normal” to pursue a career as an artist. “My friends from school are now mostly in business,” he says.
Their contexts as young men differed, and so did their results with the ladies. Rudman played football as well as with puppets and “always had girlfriends”. Clash was a wincingly shy “nerd”, who was teased by high-school jocks for “playing with dolls” and “would only write to girls in my yearbooks”.
Clash’s fortunes turned around sharply when his puppets began to appear on a local television program alongside Stu Kerr, a popular children’s show host. He was touted in the yearbook a year later as “most likely to end up a millionaire”.
What both aspiring puppeteers had in common was interest from Henson and supportive parents.
“It’s simple,” Clash says. “Support from family keeps you in art.” Clash’s mother, Gladys, remains his biggest fan. “Kevin holds a light to Elmo,” she says of the permanently 3½-year-old character Clash inherited when he came up with his high-powered helium squeak of a voice. “He’s most comfortable in his skin when he’s Elmo.”
The other profound similarity between the men, who are enjoying a rare opportunity to hear each other’s story – “usually it’s all about the characters, not us, and the rest of the time we’re too busy living our career to talk about it”, Clash says – is their practically ego-less approach to performance.
While Rudman and Clash have spoken spiritedly, often over each other, throughout the interview, on this they are in total accord and almost say in unison: “We are very happy being behind the scenes and letting the characters come through.”
Both men become a little rheumy at the point they’re asked if they remember the first time they met Henson.
Clash, whose baby face belies his 51 years, remembers a “down-to-earth, cool guy who always wanted to know where you were at”. Rudman, looking about 35 of his 48 years, was so overwhelmed by their first meeting that it’s more of a blur than a memory. When he began to relax and find his own game he observed a “quiet, brilliant and approachable genius” around whom “upstaging was always welcome”.
“Jim opened that up for us,” Clash says. “He never stopped us playing around on set. He had no ego to say, ‘I’m the director, I’m Kermit and you’re the sound guy’. Anyone who was on a Jim Henson set was welcome to collaborate. If you’re the guy holding the boom mike and you have an idea, throw it out. Everyone loved going to work, everyone loved being a part of it and that’s what made the show great. It all came from Jim.”
Rudman agrees and sums it up: “His message, every day, was play, have a good time, play off of each other.”
It’s a message that played out earlier in the day when, during the photo shoot, Rudman decided to shake things up. Literally. It was about the 80th shot of the pair watching TV with their puppets clasped to the couch behind them.
Rudman was holding a plate of Anzac biscuits in preparation for the Cookie Monster Aussie bickie taste test and Clash was whooping with laughter. “Last shot,” was the call. In an impressive flick of the wrist, Rudman managed to get every single Anzac on the plate airborne in a perfect cookie constellation above their heads. Click.
The shot is perfect. Crisp. Amazing. Every single biscuit fills the neutral space as if it’s been Photoshopped. Rudman looking straight ahead, Clash’s mouth open wide in wonder and behind the scenes the crew in shock: wow.
What would Henson have thought of the spontaneous toss?
“He would have loved that shot,” Clash says. Rudman continues: “That would have been right up his alley. What I loved about Jim was the way he would find the simplicity of something like that. It would put him on the floor more than technology or electronics or anything.
Interviewing Clash and Rudman is as fun as it sounds. But the bags are still sitting there in the corner and the brief from the editor, to do a cookie taste test with Elmo and Cookie Monster, not Clash and Rudman, remains unfulfilled.
“That’s cool man, we’ll get the puppets,” Rudman says, leaning over to pull out Cookie Monster. Heart rate, increased. Palms, sweating. “Go easy on me,” I say. “I may freak out.”
“That’s normal for anyone who grew up with Sesame Street,” Clash says, reaching his hand into the bag to get Elmo.
“A lot of celebrities feel as though they haven’t become a star until they’ve been on Sesame Street or The Muppet Show. And when they come in, the celebrity drops right off them.”
And then, as his hands disappears into Elmo, I too disappear into a former version of myself; a smaller, blonder, bespectacled one. I don’t look at Clash or Rudman once as I interview Elmo and Cookie about cookies, our country and life itself. The transcript isn’t much good; it’s more of a childlike stream of consciousness, but the experience is one I’m unlikely to forget.
Why? Fiona Gentle says it best: “Puppets are truthful. They can never be anything but themselves, so they encourage you to be honest too. There’s an essential truth about it; there’s no duplicity.”
The Aussie Bickie Taste Test
Tim Tams
Cookie Monster
Me so surprised by the restaurants and the bakeries here in Australia. Food, terrific and then, me discovered ... Tim Tams! Me thinking about moving here. It almost perfect cookie. It chocolatey, crunchy. Me mouth watering. Me drooling.
Elmo
Elmo not obsessed with Tim Tams like Cookie, but me really like the chocolatey goodness.
ANZACS
Cookie Monster
Crunchy and delicious. Not too sweet, but good crunch.
Elmo
I like the oats, they’re really, really nice. I’m tasting some honey, and I love honey.