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LA Weekly - 1997
"Joe Frank is Off the Air" Los Angeles, California (contd)
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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."