The Untold Story of Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop: How a Puppet Star Changed TV Forever (EXCLUSIVE)
A new documentary shows that the woman behind Lamb Chop was more than just a puppeteer
Shari Lewis is one of the most beloved children’s entertainers of all time, and Lamb Chop, her signature puppet creation, has won over the hearts of countless kids in multiple generations. Lewis rose to fame in the ’50s and ’60s, going from guest appearances to having her own shows featuring Lamb Chop and other puppets. After a lull in her career, she made an impressive comeback with Lamb Chop’s Play-Along in the ’90s, and since her passing at 65 in 1998, her singular creativity and talent has never been replaced.
Now, Lewis is the subject of the fascinating new documentary Shari & Lamb Chop, which draws on a wealth of archival footage (including gems like her performing a full show with Lamb Chop in Japanese and appearing with Lamb Chop on Playboy After Dark, to name just a few) and interviews to show just how much of a trailblazer she was. Before Mr. Rogers and Jim Henson, Lewis was using her gifts to create funny, sensitive and enduring children’s programming, and she was one of the few women working in the field of puppetry and ventriloquism.
With Shari & Lamb Chop now playing in theaters and available On Demand on September 2, director Lisa D’Apolito sat down with Woman’s World to discuss Shari Lewis’ life and legacy.
Woman’s World: What inspired you to make this documentary?
Lisa D’Apolito: I was looking for an inspiring female character. I had done Love, Gilda, a documentary about Gilda Radner, and she was an unsung hero, so I was looking for someone like that. I had a whole list of people, and Shari wasn’t actually on the list. A producer who knew what I was looking for came to me and talked about her, and I was like, “Shari Lewis! Oh, my God, I love Lamb Chop.” I remembered Lamb Chop, but I didn’t know much about Shari. I started researching her, and I realized she was not who I imagined her to be, because you just think of her as a puppeteer and a children’s performer, but she’s so much more than that.
WW: Did you grow up with Lamb Chop?
LD: I didn’t grow up with her. I was in between, because I was too young for her shows in the ’60s and too old for her shows in the ’90s. I always knew of Shari and Lamb Chop from their appearances on Hollywood Squares and variety shows and talk shows, and I’d always be excited to see Lamb Chop.
WW: What was your research process for the documentary like?
LD: I love archives. You find so many things in the archive that people can’t tell you. I’m always on a mission for archival material. I was lucky to get a lot of it from Shari’s personal library, which was at David Copperfield’s storehouse. We had a ton of stuff from there, but then I went and researched and talked to her friends and family members and asked if they had anything. I got some really great personal stuff of hers.
She was friends with Mr. Rogers, and we found some letters between the two of them. I had also seen on IMDb that she was on Playboy After Dark, and I had to really search to find that. I knew that had to be in the film, because who would’ve expected Shari to be on that show?
We also have some clips from her very first show, Facts N’Fun, which had been considered a lost show. That was in 1953, before Lamb Chop, back when she had dummies. It was in David Copperfield’s archives. Nothing was ever marked, so I had to view everything and see what was in there. That was a great find.
WW: How did Shari’s archive end up at David Copperfield’s storehouse?
LD: Shari’s father, Abraham Hurwitz, was both a professor of math at Yeshiva University in New York City and a magician known as “Peter Pan the Magic Man,” and David was part of the young magicians club that Abe founded. He always had respect for Abe, and he and Shari were friends at one point. I don’t know how her archives ended up there, but somehow they did, and we were very lucky to be able to take a truck full of stuff and go through it.
WW: How did Shari’s background influence her work?
LD: One of the things that drew me to the story was reading the obituary for her father. In his spare time, he taught children who were struggling how to do magic. Her mother was a music teacher, so she had magic and music. In their household, there were always a lot of vaudeville people. Shari was taught everything, from puppeteering to dancing to singing. Her father was a friend of J.W. Cooper, who was a very successful African American vaudevillian ventriloquist at that time, and he taught Shari how to be a ventriloquist. She could’ve been successful in anything, but that was what she most connected to.
Growing in a Jewish-Italian neighborhood in New York City, she was immersed in the culture. She did a lot of early performances at bar mitzvahs and Jewish centers, and her cultural background was very important to her. She was one of the first people to do Hanukkah and Passover specials. She hadn’t seen anything like that on television before, and she had already done Bible stories. She was, like, “If I’m doing Bible stories, I’m ready for Hanukkah and Passover stories too.”
WW: Shari’s daughter, Mallory, is featured in the documentary. She worked a lot with her mom and has been carrying on her legacy, so what was it like collaborating with her?
LD: I never had the opportunity to meet Shari, so through Mallory I could recreate her and have a real portrait of Shari that showed the good and the bad. I could go to Mallory at any time and ask her, “What was your mother doing here?” or “Who was her friend here?” She introduced me to all of her friends and family that I interviewed in the film. Doing a documentary, people are very protective of the person that they love, and they don’t necessarily trust the person making the film. I think because Mallory trusted me, Shari’s friends and family also trusted me
WW: In the ’50s and ’60s, there weren’t many female puppeteers. How do you see Shari’s impact as a trailblazing woman in television?
LD: Working with my editor on the story, we started going through things and seeing that Shari was speaking through her puppets. We were hoping to tell the story not just to show how talented she was, but to also have examples of her expressing herself through the puppets, because she was saying things that women at the time couldn’t really say. In the ’60s, when Lamb Chop says she wants to be president but she can’t because she’s a girl, Shari couldn’t go and say, “It’s time for a female president,” but Lamb Chop could.
Shari was around in the very early days of television. She was on in the late ’50s, and when she had The Shari Lewis Show in 1960, she was the producer. She was like Lucille Ball, in the sense that she was always in charge of her career. She worked for herself for her whole life, so she’s always been a trailblazer in terms of creating that space in the world. I think that was really hard. As her friends and family told me, even though she was a big star in 1961, she couldn’t get her own credit card, because women could only get credit cards through their husbands. She was really working hard and nothing was ever going to stop her.
WW: What were the most interesting things you learned about Shari in making this documentary?
LD: I love the personal stories. I loved learning about her relationship with her husband and how he got into the New Age world. I could see that Shari was struggling in her personal life with her relationship, and that was something I had never heard of before.
I didn’t know that Shari used her puppets to express herself outside of her performances. We got these archival interviews with her husband, where he talked about how this one puppet, Mr. Bearly, would let him have these conversations with Shari. We also found Charlie Horse and Shari on a television show talking about divorce. That wasn’t anything that Shari would ever talk about on a show, and she wouldn’t have her puppets talk about it, but obviously this was at the same time that she was going through these problems with her husband, and he was either in the audience or watching it at home, so it’s an interesting way in.
I also discovered the enormous respect that ventriloquists had for her. I didn’t realize just how challenging it is to be able to do two characters at the same time and sing while not moving your lips. When I talked to ventriloquists, they talked about her technique and how it’s probably the best there is. I don’t know if there’s anybody else who could do two characters and sing and do what she did. That was one of the things that was amazing to me.
I learned that Shari was always writing and pitching TV shows, and one of my biggest regrets is that we didn’t include her writing an episode for the original Star Trek series in the film. Somehow, nobody mentioned it and it didn’t quite fit into the storytelling. The reason she wrote that episode was so that she could play the main character, and her intention was to write and star in it. She wrote it and it came to fruition, but she didn’t get to play the part.
WW: How did Lamb Chop come to be, and why does this puppet have such staying power?
LD: There are all kinds of different stories about how Lamb Chop came to be. There was a puppet maker in New York who actually made Lamb Chop, and Shari had that puppet for a while. She had hundreds of puppets when she was young. At that point, she was performing with ventriloquist dummies, and when she went on Captain Kangaroo they wanted a puppet that was more simple, so she brought up Lamb Chop. It was magical, because Lamb Chop is really just a sock with eyelashes. Throughout her career, Shari tried other puppets, but nothing quite lived up to Lamb Chop.
I think the simplicity of Lamb Chop is what appeals to people, and Shari’s message was to believe in yourself and be the best version of yourself. She really believed in children and advocated for them, and she even went before Congress several times and fought for non-commercial television. The things she did on her shows still hold up, and her relationship with the audience was pretty strong. She just loved what she was doing, and when performers love their work, it shows.
WW: What was the biggest challenge you encountered in making this documentary?
LD: Shari was on all the time. She was very guarded in her interviews. She didn’t leave behind any diaries or audio tapes or things like that. It was hard to figure out who the real Shari Lewis was underneath all the performances and find her vulnerability. We came to realize that a lot of her vulnerability came through her puppets, like when Lamb Chop would say, “They’re not here to see you; they’re here to see me.” She did that on several different occasions, like when people would ask her Lamb Chop how old she was. She would always deflect.
WW: Shari had a major comeback in the ’90s. How did you go about structuring this narrative?
LD: Her comeback story was one of the things that drew me in. She was so famous in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and then she was sort of in oblivion. She never fully went away, but then in the ’90s, when she was in her 60s, she got her own show, and in those episodes, she was doing splits and dancing around. It’s such a great story, because she was an older woman doing the show and loving it, and it was everything she ever wanted. It’s a story of resilience and fighting ageism. The fact that Shari was on a show in her 60s is pretty amazing.
During those years in between, anytime something wasn’t working for her, she kept trying new things. She hung in there and started doing home videos with Lamb Chop, and then it turned into the ’90s show, and it was huge. She was always competitive with herself. Her philosophy was that if you worked hard at something, you would achieve it.
Conversation
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