The puppeteer who helped bring the Muppets to life was also a bereaved queer man searching for love

The following is an excerpt from “Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography“ by Jessica Max Stein (Rutgers University Press).

By summer 1985, [Richard] Hunt and his boyfriend Kenneth “Nelson” Bird fought constantly, with Hunt riled up and railing against Bird’s maddening implacable calm. Hunt felt betrayed by Bird’s trips to the baths, afraid that they were both in danger. The couple seemed about to split, with Bird on his way out.

In an attempt to rekindle their romance, in late June Hunt took Bird back to Italy, where they had had such an idyllic time. First, they went to the gorgeous cliffside village of Positano, then busy, beautiful Rome; but in Rome they cut the trip short. The pollution in the city made it hard for Bird to breathe, Hunt told Stuart Fischer upon their hasty return, a story that immediately raised his friend’s suspicions – especially since Fischer worked as an attending physician in the emergency room of Cabrini Medical Center, and had seen many similar cases. “I said, ‘Was the pollution bad for you?’ and he said no. I said, ‘How can one person have bad pollution and the other one doesn’t?’” Fischer recalls. “That’s when I knew that something was wrong.”  

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Hunt dragged Bird along to his own checkup with Dr. Robert (“Bobby”) Friedman; the doctor took one look at the ashen-faced Bird and ordered him straight to the hospital. Fischer received the pair when they came into Cabrini, ran an X-ray and determined that Bird had pneumocystis pneumonia. Bird was admitted immediately.

Later that night, Hunt and Fischer walked out to Stuyvesant Square Park, where Hunt collapsed on a bench and cried. He cried not just for losing Nelson but for the distance that had grown up like a wall between them, their inability to connect as they once had. And he cried for himself – knowing what this might portend.   

But even as Hunt feared for Bird’s life and for his own, he ran the roost at Little Muppet Monsters, a new Saturday morning program which began filming in July.

Little Muppet Monsters had Muppet Babies to thank for its existence. Given the cutesy cartoon’s wild popularity, it seemed a sure thing to expand the Muppets’ Saturday morning presence to a full hour with a companion program. But while CBS wanted more animated Muppets, Henson wanted to bring live-action puppetry to the Saturday crowd, so they settled on the awkward compromise of half and half. The new show would feature both puppet and cartoon versions of the Muppet characters, often back to back. While the rest of the Muppet troupe was in England filming Henson’s fantasy film Labyrinth, Hunt kept the home fires burning. As Performance Director, Hunt basically ran the puppet half of Little Muppet Monsters. He oversaw the puppeteers, assigning roles, setting up shots and doling out suggestions and advice, while also playing one of the three leads.

After a day’s work and a late dinner, Hunt usually drove downtown to visit Bird at Cabrini. In typical Hunt fashion, he used his charm and his acting chops to simply rise above the rules. Arriving around nine at night, well after visiting hours, “I would bring a good shirt and tie, and I’d walk through the emergency room, and they’d think I was a doctor…. They’d say, ‘Evening, Doctor.’”

On August 16^th, the night before his 34^th birthday, Hunt came to visit Bird at Cabrini as usual – but immediately sensed that something was different. “I walked in on the night he died and I knew he would,” Hunt said. “So I stayed through the night. And sat with him. He was half-conscious and then he came back to consciousness in the middle of the night. I told him how much he meant to me and he’d brought me to life and he didn’t take his eyes off me, reached out. It was the moment of my life. I said, ‘You know what tomorrow is, don’t you?’ This poor guy. He said, ‘It’s your birthday.’ I said, ‘I’m gonna be here and I don’t want you to give me no trouble.’ It was very important. It’s a very strong part of me. And it’s when he died.”

Bird’s death was like a line drawn across Hunt’s life. Afterwards, he was never quite the same. To some, Bird’s death permanently dimmed Hunt’s usual ebullience, particularly after he cleared out Bird’s apartment and found all his vials of medication unopened.  “After that, the childlike Richard disappeared,” says Fischer. “There was always a cloud over his head.” And yet to others, Bird’s death only magnified Hunt’s carpe diem attitude. “From the first time I met him, he lived very much like I’m on borrowed time,” says Hunt’s friend Jesper Haynes. “When Nelson died he realized that this could possibly happen to him too, so he was like, I’m going to really live while I can.”

Hunt brought this uplifting energy especially to the set. At the wrap party for Little Muppet Monsters, the outtake reel from the summer of filming was “all Richard,” says performer David Rudman. “It was Richard being hilarious after every take, or the take would screw up and Richard would say something funny.” Though other aspects of Hunt’s life were in turmoil, one would hardly know it from his daily antics at work.    

Hunt kept his eye on the ratings that fall as Little Muppet Monsters took its place – right behind Muppet Babies – in the CBS Saturday morning lineup. The show suffered from an identity crisis, a weird hybrid that never quite cohered. Cartoon viewers tuned out during the live-action segments, while the animation alienated Muppet fans, especially the ersatz voices.

CBS wasn’t overly attached to Little Muppet Monsters; when Marvel was late delivering the animation for the fourth episode, CBS aired another Muppet Babies instead – and the ratings soared. Soon the network jettisoned the new project entirely. Though Hunt and his colleagues had filmed material for a full season of 13 episodes, only the first three ever aired. Disappointed, Hunt later described Little Muppet Monsters as “this failed show that didn’t work”. 

Though no one could replace Bird, Hunt kept trying. Unfortunately, many of the men Hunt spent time with appreciated his largesse more than his large heart. One chiseled blond from New Jersey even borrowed Hunt’s precious Checker cab – and wrecked it. “He got really depressed,” says close friend and fellow performer Jerry Nelson. “These guys were taking advantage of him. I said, ‘Why are you hanging out with people that’ll do this to you?’ And he said, ‘I just want somebody to love.’”