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