Signing off
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LA Weekly - 1997
This is Steve Lowery's cover article from the 1997 August 29 issue of LA Weekly, 'Signing off: KCRW's Joe Frank pulls the plug on a 20-year career'
"Joe Frank is Off the Air"
When he first started doing the shows on WBAI in New York, the assembled actors would stare as he stammered through improv sessions, his hands shaking when they weren't shoveling Valium. He was desperate for this to work, convinced he was incapable of doing anything else - understandable, since he couldn't walk or talk as a young child, couldn't learn as a student, couldn't find his place as an adult. As if that wasn't enough pressure, he fancied the shows rising up and out on radio waves to meet his dead father, the father he barely knew and whose image and memory had been removed from his home with all the subtlety that once distinguished Soviet power shifts.
"He had this need to get it right," says Arthur Miller, the actor, not the playwright. "There was this palpable anxiety about him, and that really drove things. But I'd look at this guy, and he's sweating and, you know, nearly convulsing, and I'd think, 'He's nuts. This guy is never going to last.'"
Joe Frank lasted for 20 years, producing the most brilliant, groundbreaking and undefinable radio drama/comedy/art around. His hourlong shows were a hodgepodge of formats: monologues by Frank, faux panel discussions, or vivid scenes and odd stories played by his actors, who weren't always actors and who never seemed to be acting. The results were stunning, irresistible and discomforting - surreal juxtapositions of the bizarre and the ordinary, the autobiographical and the absurd, the hilarious and the horrific. A show such as "A Call in the Night," for example, contains somber recollections of Frank's childhood - himself in a wheelchair, his stepfather portrayed as a clown - followed by a slapstick skit in a Chinese restaurant worthy of Your Show of Shows. Or there's "Pilot," the story of an aviator in an unnamed country beset by unnamed rebels. He recounts the savage beatings he endured at the hands of his mother, while an English companion complains, "You know, the shame of this revolution is what they've done to the tennis court."
Joe as a child Joe as a child with parents
In "The Other Side," a man conducts a sadistic experiment to subliminally convince a child that his mother is dead and his father doesn't love him. Later, a supposed panel of experts discusses hostage fashion and chemical weapons that grow hair on the enemy, thereby weighing them down. That's followed by a three-minute Frank monologue about the nature of existence, in which he gravely instructs, "God is closer than the vein in your neck." After that comes another expert discussion, on X-ray vision and the problem it poses for young boys who see through their mothers' clothing.
On every show, Frank worked at a fever pitch, pushed by the belief that because he started his vocation late in life - his mid-30s - the rest of his days were best spent trying to catch up. In the years of doing his program, the last 11 from KCRW in Santa Monica, he worked nearly uninterrupted, stopping only to temporarily flame out from too many ideas and not enough sleep.
But he always came back. Until now. A few weeks ago, Joe Frank, whom Harry Shearer once likened to a fist coming through a speaker, decided he would no longer work in radio. His announced final production for KCRW was a live appearance on August 23 during a pledge drive. The station will begin a weekly retrospective of his work Saturday, August 30, called Joe Frank: A Selection.
"That's it. I'm done," he said quickly during a conversation several weeks ago, the way someone excuses himself from a card game. Then he repeated it and repeated it again the next day and that night, repeating it as though he hadn't really meant it the time before, but now, after thinking about it, he was sure. For two decades, radio hasn't just been enough for Frank, it's been everything. The line that separated his life from his art disappeared long ago.
"I don't consider my life to be successful," he said. "I consider my work to be successful."
The work explored the life, sometimes specific people and events, sometimes nagging questions. What some dismissed as crazy, Frank saw as spiritual. To him, everything led inexorably to the big questions.
"I think faith and God are dominant in my work. I've always thought of my programs as prayers. They may not seem that way, but to me they're my conversation with whatever you want to call it about the condition that exists here, spiritually and physically.
"I'm asking how it could be this way. I know that people have a tendency to dismiss these shows as wacky. But I'm not crazy. I know what I'm doing with these shows. They are me."
He edited obsessively, constantly searching for the perfect music, the perfect line or segue, sometimes mixing the second half-hour of shows while the first half-hour was playing. He never took vacations, rarely went out. Sound engineers had to force him to stop working and eat.
"He'd work 14, 16 hours without thinking about it. A lot of times what he really needed was someone to babysit him," says Theo Mondle, a former Frank sound engineer who now plays keyboards for Beck. "'Joe, you need to eat.' 'Joe, you need to go home and sleep.' But he never stopped doing the shows. Even when he was recording one, you could see that in his mind he was already developing another show."
Everything, every relationship, every funny story told by a friend, every notion that came into his head while driving, was possible material.
"We'd be talking on the phone, talking about my life or some observation, and then I'd get this feeling," says Lester Nafzger, a regular on Frank's show. "I'd say, 'You're taping this right now, aren't you?' He'd laugh - but, of course, he was."
The shows won him a Peabody award, a Guggenheim grant and other honors, as well as a following that included the rabid - the lobby squatters - and the famous. Francis Ford Coppola wanted to make an HBO series with him. Beck listened and encouraged him to get into live performance. Film directors Michael Mann and Ivan Reitman each have made plans to develop Frank shows. Hollywood stars begged him to use them on his programs, though they were almost always turned down because Frank was convinced they couldn't shoulder the load. So there's a lot he leaves behind and, it turns out, precious little to take with him. a He's not remotely wealthy, having made a measly $30,000 a year for his shows, along with an occasional grant, out of which he's had to pay his troupe. He's not married and has no children and no close family except for an 87-year-old mother who lives in Florida and refuses to move to California because she doesn't want to uproot her cat.
As far as moving on to other creative pursuits, well, he's written one book, a short-story collection called The Queen of Puerto Rico, and hated the experience. Movies, television, recording and live performance all beckon, yet all have their drawbacks. Film and TV offer little control; live performance offers no chance to edit. CDs? Who buys spoken-word CDs, anyway? Deciding to leave radio is not so much a career change for him as it is a divorce, and Frank's face wears the anxious anticipation of someone excited by the prospect of being single but who also remembers the nightmare that is dating. Dating, in his case, in his 50s. "I have a hard time making decisions in my life, figuring out what to do and what not to do," he says from his Santa Monica home. "Buying this house, for example, took a lot out of me. I was looking for a house for five years. I bought this one practically out of a profound sense of guilt. I had this wonderful real estate agent who worked with me for so long I felt I had to do it for her. "The one thing I'm sure about is my work. I've done everything I wanted; what's the point of repeating? I've explored the material that's interesting to me; to go on seems uninteresting and boring. I know exactly what I want and I know exactly what I don't want. And I know, from the very depths of me, that my radio career is over." Minutes later: "You know, this could really be a disaster. I mean, I have no idea what I'm going to do. What do you know about TV?"
Cherokee called him at the station and left messages, told him she thought they were kindred spirits, something she figured he hears a lot. He does. Frank is always being told that he speaks for someone, to someone, that people know exactly where he's coming from, that they "get" him. Some share life experiences. Others send him presents: pictures of Josephine Baker, decorated crosses, pretend money. What Cherokee could offer was the club she worked at. You ought to see the club, she told him over the phone, it might spark something. Her description intrigued him: a gentlemen's club where male customers pay $21 for an hour of dancing, the definition of which is open to negotiation. "I don't know, maybe I'll find something there I can use," he said, though he had no idea for what medium. His only leads since deciding to quit radio were Cherokee's club and an invitation from a New York band called Firewater, which asked him to do a live set at the Viper Room. He'd never heard of the band. But its members had gotten their hands on some of his tapes and had the usual reaction. "It produced exactly the reaction any good and effective art should," says Firewater's Todd Ashley. "'What the fuck was that?'"
Frank was intrigued by the idea of live performance, the opportunity to actually work a crowd, to feed off its energy. On the other hand, his radio shows were masterworks of editing, and there is none of that onstage. And there was the other thing. "It could be a complete and total catastrophe. I mean, I could be up there and just go down in flames. Completely humiliated. People could be disappointed, they could see me as a fraud. I mean, it could be really, really awful." So the live gig was still a question mark. The one thing he was sure of was meeting Cherokee in person for the first time.
He arrives well before their appointed time, paying his $5 cover and attempting to look at ease among the mirrored balls, time cards and 30 young women displayed like kewpie dolls against the wall. He takes a seat and glances around the room, then at the ladies in waiting, and hails a waitress. "Is Cherokee here?"
Silence, her glance screaming "Stalker."
"It's okay, she's a fan of his," says a companion. "He's on the radio." Frank winces.
"You're on the radio? What do you do?"
"I just do a show."
"What kind of show?"
"It's a radio show . . . you know . . . don't worry about it."
"Are you a DJ?"
"No."
"Do you do talk radio?"
"Uh, not really. It's just a show . . . We'll just wait."
He is not being coy. Though current media law seems to dictate that every story about him contain the words edgy or dark, Frank is actually polite to a fault. It's just that even he can't describe what he does in the confines of casual conversation. Perhaps that's the show's power. Cherokee happened onto Joe Frank one Friday night, his voice drawing her in like an undertow until she felt the requisite confusion and excitement. "I'd listen and think, 'What the hell is this?' I always found myself trying to figure out how much of this came from Joe's life and how much came from his imagination." She wondered about the woman who rents her children out to lonely men and the small-town terrorist who settles for cut-rate anarchy - arranging the deaths of cab drivers - because he can't get his hands on any decent firepower. There were the experts who analyzed pornography via Newton's theorems and who discussed the upside of cancer: "We should be embracing cancer. After all, what is cancer but the growth of cells. Isn't that what we're all after? Unlimited growth and progress?" The shows spoke to her, probably because they didn't speak at her. If there is one thing that distinguishes a Frank program, it is that there are no answers. "His shows are about life. There are no easy answers," says Cherokee, who dances for pay at night and in the daytime works in real estate, where she's learned to feign nonchalance when her boss asks her to rate the asses of other women. "I don't believe there are any answers," Frank says.
KCRW has chosen to start its Frank retrospective with "The 80-Yard Run," and that's a shame. Not that "The 80-Yard Run" isn't a deserving show and an obvious choice - Frank himself suggested it, the earliest extant recording of Joe on the air, an hourlong monologue about his experiences attending the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. Still, any retrospective of Frank's work would do well to begin with 1979's "A Call in the Night." This early show contains all the elements that would become hallmarks of Frank's work: part monologue, part ensemble cast, part panel discussion, it varies between autobiography and farce. In it, he recalls his father, Meyer Langerman, dying when Joe was 5 years old. Joe wasn't told about it until days later. Not wanting to upset her son before major surgery - Frank was born with clubfeet - his mother, Fritzi, told Joe that his father was away in Boston on business. He didn't learn the truth until he got home. When Fritzi remarried to Freddy Frank a year later, she thoroughly, meticulously removed every reminder of his father - pictures, personal effects - and Meyer's name was never mentioned again.
The Langerman home had not been a happy one. Meyer was more than double Fritzi's age when they married. They were living in Germany in the prewar years, and Fritzi and her family had hoped marriage to a wealthy shoe manufacturer would be a way out of poverty. The couple fled Germany and emigrated to America in 1939 - Frank was actually born in transit in France - but continued to drift apart. The relationship was so fractious, Frank remembers, that even as Meyer was dying of uremia, and knew he was dying, he couldn't bring himself to talk to Fritzi, communicating only through scribbled notes. By the time of his father's death, Joe had undergone scattershot therapy for his feet - excruciatingly painful braces that attempted to force his feet back into position, the cutting of his Achilles tendon. It wasn't until he was 7 that he could walk without the braces, and then he had to wear heavy therapeutic shoes. He developed slowly, getting horrible grades in school because, he says, "I couldn't learn. I couldn't process any information. I don't know why." In fact, he didn't speak for most of his early years, as he dragged himself around the family's Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park. Langerman had successfully set up business in America, but that was little solace for Fritzi, who spent much of her time watching Joe being wheeled away on a gurney, secured and screaming, to another surgery.
"My memories of childhood are of constant crisis," Frank says. "I mean, I was born as we were fleeing Hitler. People were dying. We get to this country and my father is dying. My parents aren't getting along. Meanwhile, I'm in casts up to my hips, crawling around by my hands. If I have a dark view of life, my childhood is the reason." Not surprisingly, his shows are strewn with the bodies of characters who thought they had figured out life: pseudo-intellectuals struck down in museums, ranting a with plague; overwrought bullfighters unwittingly gored by steak-knife-wielding girlfriends; sticky-sweet romantics whose boating interludes are cut short, and in half, by avenging luxury liners. "I hate pretentiousness," he says, but, moments later, adds, "I've always chosen art over having a life." It's just the kind of tripe some Eurotrash would utter on one of his shows moments before being served a mouthful of Love Boat.
Here at the taxi-dancer club, he's nervous. He has mentioned several times that he really is going to leave radio. He has mentioned a certain woman sitting across the room. And he has asked about the possibilities of cable. Finally, Cherokee shows up. There's an awkward moment for Frank every time he meets a fan. They know only the voice - which isn't even his voice but his voice electronically altered - and the shows. It's not that meeting him for the first time can be so much of a disappointment, it's just that he looks so much bigger on the radio. They regard each other for a moment, then hug as old friends. It's the kind of genuine affection that makes others in the club uneasy, most especially Cherokee's current paying dance partner. She's hugging on his dime. Cherokee and Joe talk for a few minutes, she squatting at his feet. They agree to talk later, and then she heads back out to the dance floor. Frank watches her and the other women, many of them draped over smaller men, holding their fares close, moving tightly, barely, to the sounds coming from a stereo that appears to have been assembled from a kit. They are a cute and pathetic bunch, holding on to each other because, for whatever reason, they have to. He looks back at the seated women and talks about the Firewater offer, and then he asks a woman to dance.
"She puts her arms around you and holds you in this warm, wonderful embrace," he says afterward. "It's almost like having a nurse. Very comforting, especially if you're feeling lost and lonely." He says he's decided to do the Firewater gig. He has less than a week to prepare and has no idea what he'll do, what he'll say, who will show up, how it will be received or whether it will be good, bad or disastrous for his career/life, which he is completely lacking at the moment. "So it's 'face in the toilet,' and then the music stops, right?" says the guy holding the guitar. "Right," says Frank, then, "No, wait."
Toilet isn't the word the band stops on, and suddenly it's very clear what could go wrong this Sunday night at the Viper Room. Live performance is live, after all, and though Frank's listeners may have the sensation that what is coming out of their radio is uncensored, fresh and received from on high, he is, in fact, a control freak. His monologues are tightly scripted. True, his actors work completely from improvisation, never receiving so much as a sparse written outline, but Frank strictly controls the scenarios, relationships and direction of thought. He doesn't do it by dictating what an actor says; in fact, Arthur Miller says, his direction tends to be quite vague. "He'll take a couple of actors and, you know, the first thing we want to know is, What is my profession, my name? Those details are the farthest thing from his mind," Miller says. "He'll say, 'You're best friends that have just betrayed each other,' or 'You believed the Earth was perfectly round, but now you believe it's only partially round. Now go for it,' and even that's more information than he normally gives. "Joe sits with you, and if you veer into something ordinary, he'll stop you, say, 'That's boring. Go on with something else,' and you do. It's very stream-of-consciousness. There's no grand design, but I would say it was empirical art. Joe's an empiricist, because he knows what doesn't work."
In fact, actors' sessions with Frank were mostly involved with weeding out all the things they should not say. If Frank got 15 minutes of usable tape out of a four-hour session with them, it was a great day's work. He was relentless with his actors - asking for retake after retake. He'd push them to explore fresh, sometimes personal and uncomfortable territory. He once goaded Lester Nafzger into such a rage against Miller that Miller refused to talk to Nafzger for a long time after. In perhaps the most powerful scene from any Frank production, actress Barbara Sohmers calls her ex-husband over and over again in a pitiful attempt to make some connection, beginning coyly with small talk, graduating to the pathetic offer to come and work as a maid and cook for him and his new wife, and ending with a conversation in which she is vomiting blood as the new wife curses in the background and the husband attempts to mediate. It is excruciating, and Frank remembers the session ending with him physically spent, arms stretched out before him on a table, and Sohmers completely broken down in tears. "He's able to get people to work at an unconscious level," says Miller. "I don't know if it's a skill. Maybe it comes from his inner life. I can tell you it's exhausting and not fun. He keeps asking you to go deeper, to find something else, and when you get at that level there is a certain fear that kicks in, the fear of letting go of your own protective self-image. He somehow gets you to do that, gets you to go to the bathroom in public. It's not fun. Most of the time working with Joe, I felt like I was failing utterly." "It's not the kind of acting everyone can do," Frank says. "That's why a lot of these people aren't exactly actors. Lester [Nafzger] runs a catalog business. But he's smart, and that's what you need with this kind of performance, you need smart people who can think quickly, originally, not fall into 'acting.' "I'd get calls every now and then from Hollywood actors, some pretty famous ones, and they'd ask to be on the show. But I usually turned them down because, frankly, they couldn't handle it.
I mean, the people I've worked with are so amazing. In fact, I think, at times, I get too much credit. It's the actors who are coming up with all this stuff. People like to think I'm so fucked up, but that's not me saying those things." Of course, the monologues are all Frank. And even his actors will tell you that whatever they say is culled by him. In fact, Frank's ear and editing skills are such that many actors don't recognize lines coming from their mouths over the radio. "I'll hear myself saying something, and I'll think, 'I never said that,'" Miller says. "But what Joe does is, he'll take three words you said over here and connect them with six words you said 10 minutes later. He has an extraordinary ear for editing. "People have told me that the actors should get more credit for what we do on his shows, but I tell them Joe does all the damn work. Part of it is carpentry and part of it is paperwork, and he does it all himself. Those shows are his shows. I don't care if it's a cast of thousands. You're hearing exactly what Joe Frank wants you to hear."
But what happens if you hear something he doesn't? What happens if, say, live onstage he blurts something out or gets something wrong? Two nights before the Viper Room appearance, he had done a rough rehearsal with Firewater in a Valley nightclub and, during the set, had forgotten where he was in his monologue. "I just walked back and forth like an idiot for, like, two minutes. I was hoping people thought this was part of the act, but I had no idea what I was doing." It's 8 p.m., and he's not going on until at least 10. It's not clear what he's thinking: He could be drunk with nerves, drunk with possibilities or just drunk. Earlier in the afternoon he attended KCRW's Summerday function, a chance for the station's supporters to meet its personalities and drink lots of wine. Frank is always a big draw, always has been. In fact, the reason Ruth Seymour gave his show a home at the station she manages was because "Whenever his show would come on from Washington, I noticed that the volume on the radio monitor in the office got turned up, everyone got real quiet, and not a lot of work got done," she says. "I'd come in and say, 'What's going on?' and they'd say, 'Joe Frank.'" Seymour, for one, remains unconvinced that Frank is leaving radio.
"Oh, I hear this from time to time with Joe," she says. "Radio is Joe's mistress. I think every now and then he tries to figure out how to free himself from this alluring woman who has fastened her claws into him. "But radio is intimate, and Joe craves intimacy in his shows. He loves radio because it is so revealing. He won't find anything like that in TV or movies. He'll be back." It's nearly a week after he first said he would leave radio, and now, little more than an hour before he's to go on, he leans in and says, "I made a decision today. I'm not going to do radio anymore." Did he tell Ruth that at Summerday?
"No, . . . I . . ."
He excuses himself.
The crowd builds, most of it there to see him. When he comes onstage, some of them smile, some of them stare, and some of them ask, "Is that what he looks like?" He launches into a 40-minute monologue called "The Blues Singer," about a fallen preacher who says things like "I didn't kill her. She had a heart attack while I was stabbing her." There are no glitches, he doesn't forget his lines, and the crowd is enthusiastic. When the show is over, a significant number of people follow Frank out the door and onto the street, finally trapping him against a rusting Buick. No one touches him. They form a semicircle around him, at first saying nothing, just staring at him as he stares at the ground. Congratulations finally follow. Friends reach him to slap his back. He is smiling a broad grin. The evening went well. A few days later, someone from Sony Records will call and set up a time to talk. One of the cable channels will ask for a bit of his time. Nothing certain, but leads. The Viper Room will send a thank-you note for attracting most of what was a capacity crowd. "I'm glad I did this," he says outside the club. "I think it went pretty well, considering there was almost no time to prepare. I'm thinking this might have a lot of possibilities." What the possibilities are, he says he's not sure right now. He excuses himself; he wants to go back and thank the musicians. He turns, still wearing the drab trench coat he wore during his performance, and starts up Sunset. A woman yells from a car, "Dude, you are good!"
He doesn't answer, and the words rise.