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Chicago Tribune
November 14, 1989, Tuesday
Mellow yellow
The brain of Big Bird talks about his 20-year love affair with a famous character
By Robert E. Sullivan Jr.,
Here's a guy whose television show plays in 80 countries, a guy who has conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic, starred in a couple of movies, won Emmy Awards, and performed alongside Bob Hope, Itzhak Perlman, Stevie Wonder, Kathleen Turner and Nancy Reagan.
But unlike most famous actors walking down the street in New York, Caroll Spinney rarely gets stopped for an autograph.
About the closest he came to being noticed was a couple of weeks back when a friend caught him flipping through a copy of Playboy at a neighborhood newsstand and said, "Hey I didn't know Big Bird read those kinds of magazines." Spinney, who says he was only looking at the articles, got a little defensive. "I'm not Big Bird," he shouted. "I'm Caroll Spinney."
Big Bird doesn't read the New York Post, either. After all, he's only 6 years old and more interested in worms than anything else. But the other morning, while the human cast of "Sesame Street" was taping this fall's episodes, there sat Big Bird, legs crossed, reading about Gen. Noriega in the days before the White House knew anything about any Panamanian coup.
To be more specific, Big Bird's yellow-and-orange legs were crossed and relaxed, while the upper body of Caroll Spinney, half-moon reading glasses in place under a bowl of silver hair, sat reading the Post.
Then, on cue, and with the deftness that only 20 years of getting in and out of a giant bird puppet can bring, Spinney became the whole Big Bird - the 20-year-old 6-year-old - whom America's preschoolers voted the person they would most like to have as their teacher (George Bush came in last).
Big Bird, as curious and awkward as ever, walks up to the window of Luis and Maria's fix-it shop, right next to Mr. Hooper's old store and just down the street from Oscar's can. "Something tells me that it's a good day to see what the grownups are up to," says Big Bird in that unmistakable high and naive voice.
A couple of minutes later, the Bird, as he is known to those close to his nest, turns toward a stage assistant; his eyes roll up, his mouth drops open, and he lists forward, looking like he's about to throw up.
The attendant puts one hand in the Bird's mouth and the other on his tail feathers, and out comes the 5-feet 10-inch Spinney, content to be back in his chair with Noriega and the trial of Jim Bakker.
Life inside the Bird during the last 20 years has been tough at times. So tough that Spinney likes to keep his scenes around the 10- or 15-minute mark. Fatigue can cause a droopy neck. Big Bird isn't just a suit - it's a puppet, requiring a human arm to reach up and work its old-fashioned mouth.
Sure, Spinney straps a miniature video monitor to his chest and speaks with a hidden microphone, but working the Bird is just a more complicated version of working your average puppet from behind a stage. He simply carries the stage on his person.
Which goes to prove that Caroll Spinney is first and foremost a puppeteer. "This is my 47th year as a puppeteer," says the 52-year-old Spinney, sitting down to a bacon cheeseburger (medium, hold the pickle, hold the worms) in an Irish bar and grill across the street from the Children's Television Workshop's midtown studios. He began his career hours after witnessing his first puppet show at F. Lee Bailey's mother's Waltham, Mass., day school.
"I said that's it!" he remembers, and went home to Acton - where, with a monkey puppet and a stuffed flannel snake, Spinney brought in 36 cents on his first show. By the time he was 12, Spinney was working birthday parties. Years later puppet profits were putting him through art school in Boston.
Then came the Korean War. Which branch of the service did the future Mr. Bird choose? The Air Force, naturally, but he never learned to fly. "I started taking lessons and became convinced I was going to crash into another plane," he says. "They'd say, 'Do you see the plane we're on the collision course with?' and I'd say, 'No.' "
Spinney spent his spare time working a puppet called Rascal Rabbit at a Nevada TV station. His mother couldn't bear the thought of her son parading around on TV with such a simple-looking puppet, so she sent him a dragon with a mouth. It was there, in the desert and glitz of Las Vegas, that Spinney fell in love with mouthed puppets.
Success from failure
After the Air Force transferred him to Germany, he returned to school in Boston, graduated, and drew animated commercials (one for Narragansett beer) until landing a serious puppet job on Bozo the Clown, playing Grandma Nellie, Mr. Lion, and Flip Flop the Dancing Rag Doll.
Nine years later, in 1968, Spinney starred at a Salt Lake City puppet festival that went technically awry. "My character, Picklepuss," he says, "in his struggles to save the day, ended up being funnier than my material."
So much funnier that Jim Henson, master of the Muppets, invited him to New York to walk around in a suit of yellow feathers.
Twenty years of riding a bike to work in the morning. Twenty years of commuting 153 miles out to Connecticut on the weekends. Twenty years' worth of "Sesame Street" episodes brought to us, in the parlance of the Street, by every letter from A to Z. Besides the fact that his arm sometimes gets a little sore, holding a beak high up over his head the way he does, Spinney has few regrets. But like most men stuck inside one-suit jobs, he has his dreams.
"My ultimate goal - and I've still never given up on that - is to have a comic strip," he says. "Frankly, I feel very successful with this, but if I had gone into comic strips I think I'd be more famous than this. I believe with all my heart that I would have a famous one like Charlie Brown. Maybe I could be wrong, but anyway I feel that I could have."
Still, Spinney digs the hype: "I must say the excitement of show business has won out with me." And when he looks around him, he has got to feel good. Hey, the guy who plays the rear end of the Snufflelupagus doesn't even get air holes.
"Big Bird came from a sketch that Jim had made," says Spinney, who looks more like one of Santa's hipper elves than a television star. "He is much better looking now than the way Jim initially drew him. He was really ugly the first year. He was awful. He was hideous. He had no feathers above his eyes and he looked like he didn't have a brain in his head." Since 1969, Spinney's gone through four costumes. "Not bad for 20 years," he says.
Puppeteers get no respect
Nowadays, there are a few extra Big Bird heads, but Spinney doesn't use them. They're not exactly right, and the outfit means a lot to him. There was the time he bumped into a Bird imposter, whose homemade red-and-white cardboard beak really set Spinney off.
"What the **** difference does it make to you?" the store manager asked. "I play Big Bird," Spinney said, sounding more like the other character he has played for 20 years - Big Bird's alter ego Oscar the Grouch. "The **** you do!" the manager said. Puppeteers, it seems, get no respect.
Except from kids. When he breaks into the Bird's voice in a restaurant, little heads turn. Throwing Oscar the Grouch's voice in a garbage can breaks up an ice cream line. Spinney (a.k.a. Oscar) regularly signs for registered mail that contains only trash. Mothers write him about their kids buying plastic garbage cans in which they watch the show.
Once he called a hospital to talk to a little boy who was dying, whose father had written to the only person who could make his son happy anymore - Big Bird.
"I got him on the phone," Spinney remembers, falling into the voice of the Bird, "and I said, 'Hello Joey, this is Big Bird.' He says, 'Really? Is it really Big Bird?' And I said, 'Yes, it is, and I just though I'd call you 'cause I heard you've had lots of trouble, but you're such a brave, good boy.' You know? What do you say? I put Oscar on, and then finally I said, 'Well, I'd better let you go, but it was really nice talking to you.' He said, 'Thank you for calling me, Big Bird.' "
An hour later the boy died. His father wrote to say that the last thing Joey did was to smile and call Big Bird his friend.
These are the kinds of things that make Spinney realize the success of his character. Although he may seem a little goofy about it sometimes, he hasn't gone overboard. He did burst into tears and go a little nuts once when a bunch of ROTC guys ripped off a couple of thousand feathers to wear on their military caps while he was on break, but he was able to gather himself together and, with the help of Kermit Love, one of the Bird's designers, sewed on the eyeballs and glued back some feathers.
"Suddenly, I felt as if the Bird was my little boy," he remembers, managing to put aside the fact that feathers go for about 75 cents each. "I couldn't believe they had hurt him. He's just a friendly, huge little guy."
A real nice person
That's the nice thing about Caroll Spinney: he's just a storyteller from New England, a puppeteer who, despite the glamor of his puppet, likes his tales simple and hates things nasty or unreal. Nancy Reagan, for example, really ticked him off with her Marie Antionette attitude at the White House Easter-egg hunt. "She was absolutely rude." he says. "She was offensive. She was unbelievable."
Big Bird, on the other hand, is pretty real - a simple little big guy. Spinney says he'll stay under the feathers until he can't hold his hand up over his head anymore (he lifts the occasional dumbell) or until they ask him to leave (not a chance). He doesn't have a contract but Jim Henson told him a long time ago that the job was his for life.
Besides, it's what he has always wanted to do, and being one of the world's most famous puppets is a pretty good puppet to be. "Life," as Caroll Spinney puts it, "is so good as a bird."
November 14, 1989, Tuesday
Mellow yellow
The brain of Big Bird talks about his 20-year love affair with a famous character
By Robert E. Sullivan Jr.,
Here's a guy whose television show plays in 80 countries, a guy who has conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic, starred in a couple of movies, won Emmy Awards, and performed alongside Bob Hope, Itzhak Perlman, Stevie Wonder, Kathleen Turner and Nancy Reagan.
But unlike most famous actors walking down the street in New York, Caroll Spinney rarely gets stopped for an autograph.
About the closest he came to being noticed was a couple of weeks back when a friend caught him flipping through a copy of Playboy at a neighborhood newsstand and said, "Hey I didn't know Big Bird read those kinds of magazines." Spinney, who says he was only looking at the articles, got a little defensive. "I'm not Big Bird," he shouted. "I'm Caroll Spinney."
Big Bird doesn't read the New York Post, either. After all, he's only 6 years old and more interested in worms than anything else. But the other morning, while the human cast of "Sesame Street" was taping this fall's episodes, there sat Big Bird, legs crossed, reading about Gen. Noriega in the days before the White House knew anything about any Panamanian coup.
To be more specific, Big Bird's yellow-and-orange legs were crossed and relaxed, while the upper body of Caroll Spinney, half-moon reading glasses in place under a bowl of silver hair, sat reading the Post.
Then, on cue, and with the deftness that only 20 years of getting in and out of a giant bird puppet can bring, Spinney became the whole Big Bird - the 20-year-old 6-year-old - whom America's preschoolers voted the person they would most like to have as their teacher (George Bush came in last).
Big Bird, as curious and awkward as ever, walks up to the window of Luis and Maria's fix-it shop, right next to Mr. Hooper's old store and just down the street from Oscar's can. "Something tells me that it's a good day to see what the grownups are up to," says Big Bird in that unmistakable high and naive voice.
A couple of minutes later, the Bird, as he is known to those close to his nest, turns toward a stage assistant; his eyes roll up, his mouth drops open, and he lists forward, looking like he's about to throw up.
The attendant puts one hand in the Bird's mouth and the other on his tail feathers, and out comes the 5-feet 10-inch Spinney, content to be back in his chair with Noriega and the trial of Jim Bakker.
Life inside the Bird during the last 20 years has been tough at times. So tough that Spinney likes to keep his scenes around the 10- or 15-minute mark. Fatigue can cause a droopy neck. Big Bird isn't just a suit - it's a puppet, requiring a human arm to reach up and work its old-fashioned mouth.
Sure, Spinney straps a miniature video monitor to his chest and speaks with a hidden microphone, but working the Bird is just a more complicated version of working your average puppet from behind a stage. He simply carries the stage on his person.
Which goes to prove that Caroll Spinney is first and foremost a puppeteer. "This is my 47th year as a puppeteer," says the 52-year-old Spinney, sitting down to a bacon cheeseburger (medium, hold the pickle, hold the worms) in an Irish bar and grill across the street from the Children's Television Workshop's midtown studios. He began his career hours after witnessing his first puppet show at F. Lee Bailey's mother's Waltham, Mass., day school.
"I said that's it!" he remembers, and went home to Acton - where, with a monkey puppet and a stuffed flannel snake, Spinney brought in 36 cents on his first show. By the time he was 12, Spinney was working birthday parties. Years later puppet profits were putting him through art school in Boston.
Then came the Korean War. Which branch of the service did the future Mr. Bird choose? The Air Force, naturally, but he never learned to fly. "I started taking lessons and became convinced I was going to crash into another plane," he says. "They'd say, 'Do you see the plane we're on the collision course with?' and I'd say, 'No.' "
Spinney spent his spare time working a puppet called Rascal Rabbit at a Nevada TV station. His mother couldn't bear the thought of her son parading around on TV with such a simple-looking puppet, so she sent him a dragon with a mouth. It was there, in the desert and glitz of Las Vegas, that Spinney fell in love with mouthed puppets.
Success from failure
After the Air Force transferred him to Germany, he returned to school in Boston, graduated, and drew animated commercials (one for Narragansett beer) until landing a serious puppet job on Bozo the Clown, playing Grandma Nellie, Mr. Lion, and Flip Flop the Dancing Rag Doll.
Nine years later, in 1968, Spinney starred at a Salt Lake City puppet festival that went technically awry. "My character, Picklepuss," he says, "in his struggles to save the day, ended up being funnier than my material."
So much funnier that Jim Henson, master of the Muppets, invited him to New York to walk around in a suit of yellow feathers.
Twenty years of riding a bike to work in the morning. Twenty years of commuting 153 miles out to Connecticut on the weekends. Twenty years' worth of "Sesame Street" episodes brought to us, in the parlance of the Street, by every letter from A to Z. Besides the fact that his arm sometimes gets a little sore, holding a beak high up over his head the way he does, Spinney has few regrets. But like most men stuck inside one-suit jobs, he has his dreams.
"My ultimate goal - and I've still never given up on that - is to have a comic strip," he says. "Frankly, I feel very successful with this, but if I had gone into comic strips I think I'd be more famous than this. I believe with all my heart that I would have a famous one like Charlie Brown. Maybe I could be wrong, but anyway I feel that I could have."
Still, Spinney digs the hype: "I must say the excitement of show business has won out with me." And when he looks around him, he has got to feel good. Hey, the guy who plays the rear end of the Snufflelupagus doesn't even get air holes.
"Big Bird came from a sketch that Jim had made," says Spinney, who looks more like one of Santa's hipper elves than a television star. "He is much better looking now than the way Jim initially drew him. He was really ugly the first year. He was awful. He was hideous. He had no feathers above his eyes and he looked like he didn't have a brain in his head." Since 1969, Spinney's gone through four costumes. "Not bad for 20 years," he says.
Puppeteers get no respect
Nowadays, there are a few extra Big Bird heads, but Spinney doesn't use them. They're not exactly right, and the outfit means a lot to him. There was the time he bumped into a Bird imposter, whose homemade red-and-white cardboard beak really set Spinney off.
"What the **** difference does it make to you?" the store manager asked. "I play Big Bird," Spinney said, sounding more like the other character he has played for 20 years - Big Bird's alter ego Oscar the Grouch. "The **** you do!" the manager said. Puppeteers, it seems, get no respect.
Except from kids. When he breaks into the Bird's voice in a restaurant, little heads turn. Throwing Oscar the Grouch's voice in a garbage can breaks up an ice cream line. Spinney (a.k.a. Oscar) regularly signs for registered mail that contains only trash. Mothers write him about their kids buying plastic garbage cans in which they watch the show.
Once he called a hospital to talk to a little boy who was dying, whose father had written to the only person who could make his son happy anymore - Big Bird.
"I got him on the phone," Spinney remembers, falling into the voice of the Bird, "and I said, 'Hello Joey, this is Big Bird.' He says, 'Really? Is it really Big Bird?' And I said, 'Yes, it is, and I just though I'd call you 'cause I heard you've had lots of trouble, but you're such a brave, good boy.' You know? What do you say? I put Oscar on, and then finally I said, 'Well, I'd better let you go, but it was really nice talking to you.' He said, 'Thank you for calling me, Big Bird.' "
An hour later the boy died. His father wrote to say that the last thing Joey did was to smile and call Big Bird his friend.
These are the kinds of things that make Spinney realize the success of his character. Although he may seem a little goofy about it sometimes, he hasn't gone overboard. He did burst into tears and go a little nuts once when a bunch of ROTC guys ripped off a couple of thousand feathers to wear on their military caps while he was on break, but he was able to gather himself together and, with the help of Kermit Love, one of the Bird's designers, sewed on the eyeballs and glued back some feathers.
"Suddenly, I felt as if the Bird was my little boy," he remembers, managing to put aside the fact that feathers go for about 75 cents each. "I couldn't believe they had hurt him. He's just a friendly, huge little guy."
A real nice person
That's the nice thing about Caroll Spinney: he's just a storyteller from New England, a puppeteer who, despite the glamor of his puppet, likes his tales simple and hates things nasty or unreal. Nancy Reagan, for example, really ticked him off with her Marie Antionette attitude at the White House Easter-egg hunt. "She was absolutely rude." he says. "She was offensive. She was unbelievable."
Big Bird, on the other hand, is pretty real - a simple little big guy. Spinney says he'll stay under the feathers until he can't hold his hand up over his head anymore (he lifts the occasional dumbell) or until they ask him to leave (not a chance). He doesn't have a contract but Jim Henson told him a long time ago that the job was his for life.
Besides, it's what he has always wanted to do, and being one of the world's most famous puppets is a pretty good puppet to be. "Life," as Caroll Spinney puts it, "is so good as a bird."
