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Salon Magazine - 2000
"Public Radio's Bad Dream" (contd)
Joe Frank conjures up the nightmares that "This American Life" and "A Prairie Home Companion" have when they go home at night.
By Susan Emerling
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Frank himself describes his show as being about "these private things that go on with people and they think nobody's going to talk about. Where your mind goes and maybe it shouldn't go." His current program, "The Other Side," relies much more heavily on what he describes as "realism," meaning a series of more or less true stories that his friends tell about their lives, rather than on his own monologues. The shows come together by a weekly process he describes as "just pure havoc and chaos." He says, "I have no idea week to week what's going to happen."
Larry Block, an actor whose life has frequently provided Frank with material, says, "It's gotten to the point with Frank where every phone call is potentially a show. He'll say, 'Hold on for a second.' He knew that I knew that he was going to turn on the recorder, and thrived on it. He would make a show out of you and me talking right now. He wants to suck out of me every bit of experience in my life."
When I meet Frank in person, I feel a little like Dorothy pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz to find that he is not the omniscient being she had imagined him to be. Frank, 61, is a tall boyish mixture of self-assured and mildly embarrassed. His home, an inviting two-story house behind a walled garden on one of Santa Monica's more elegant streets, is nothing like the dark and cluttered domicile where I would have housed his on-air persona. The living room is spotlessly austere and his dining-room cabinet is filled with hard-bound Bibles, Butler's "Lives of the Saints," histories of the world's religion and novels by Kafka, Dos Passos and Faulkner rather than dishes. His office looks like the room where the living is done.
But there's a good reason for the unexpected austerity. The house and everything in it are new, part of a life change that began when Frank abandoned the airwaves in 1998, burned out from the creative and physical demands of a weekly show. After years of living way beneath his means, he finally decided to tap into a personal inheritance that would allow him to live more comfortably than what one could normally afford on a public radio salary. His reason, in a word, is mortality. "You have a certain amount of money," he says. "What are you going to do, die with it?" Two years after his definitive goodbye to radio, he's back on the air, because nothing he did in the interim was as satisfying.
Frank tells me that he's spoken to the people I've interviewed about him and that they've told him about me. He also says that none of what David Rapkin, another longtime collaborator, said about Frank being a "sex god of radio" was true. I can feel myself slide into a world where fact and fantasy commingle in the higher pursuit of an engaging narrative.
His personal history is told through the sepia-toned photographs that line his walls, sealing his European parents and his New York childhood in a distant era. A man and a woman, elegantly dressed for a costume ball, illustrate the happier times of a wealthy Jewish couple forced to flee Nazi Germany. Frank was born in Strasbourg, in the contested provinces along the French-German border. His father came to New York, re-creating his successful shoe manufacturing business in America. He sent for his wife and infant son in 1939.
Frank remembers very little of his father, who died a few years after the family's arrival in America, but his absence hangs over him with a God-like presence, returning to him in dreams and informing the work with a very palpable sense of loss and dread. "We escaped the Holocaust," Frank says. "Although I was very young and I didn't really know what that meant, I grew up in a home where there was a lot of anxiety and misery and a father who was dying while trying to build a life here at the same time." There is a certain painful irony to the fact that Frank, the only son of a prominent shoe manufacturer, was born with club feet, which required extensive corrective surgery. His father died on the eve of the surgery, but Frank was not told until he came home from the hospital.