 |
| Photo by Jim Herrington |
|
Joe Franklin was a NYC TV treasure, an
unusual-looking little man who became a local legend by hosting a
talk show for 40 years, being a maven of nostalgia in an era
('60s/'70s) when it still mattered and another ('80s/'90s) when it
was completely negated, and for being a colorfully eccentric
Manhattan character. Check out the obits and a recent New
York Times story that centered on nothing but the insane
conglomeration of clutter in his office, and you can see the fond
feelings that Joe engendered.
But there was another side to Joe, one
which found his easy-going, eternally-nonplussed demeanor disappear:
this was when anyone attempted to spoof his eminently spoof-able TV
show or a joke was made (of any kind) about him. In some cases, he
set into motion ridiculous lawsuits claiming slander and libel –
the better to gain cheap, quick publicity in the local and even
national press. In other cases he simply threatened said
reporter/humorist with dire circumstances – equally ridiculous, but
simply odd, given that this was friendly, seemingly oblivious talk
show host Joe Franklin.
On with the tale: I was amused at
college in the mid-Eighties when people from out of state would watch
Joe's show and not know what the hell to make of it. A friend of mine
had her French boyfriend living with her in her dorm room, and he was
set even further adrift by the Joe-show weirdness – what did this
show mean, who was this man asking odd questions of the wrong people,
why was he having on seemingly random individuals who came from hundreds
of different fields, was this meant to be informative, entertaining,
funny?
To explain to the reader who never saw
the Franklin show: the utter randomness of
Joe's talk show was its strength for those seeing it in the late
evening hours. You could be stoned or sober but slightly loopy from
the late hour and the result was still the same. The Franklin show
was a mixture of randomness, fascination, tedium, utter
ridiculousness, the odd truly touching moment, and sublime, superb
insincerity.
The last-mentioned element always came
up when trying to explain Joe to newcomers – did he honestly
believe all the superlatives he would sling around? It's possible he
did, or he was just being pleasant – one of his favorite adages was
“it's nice to be nice,” certainly something to keep in mind when
reading the items below.
So I set about writing a “101”
introduction to Joe for my college newspaper (the school I attended,
Sarah Lawrence College, went through about three different names for
the paper in the four years I attended – the best was “The
Tribune,” the worst was “Fred”). The article I wrote, entitled
“Joe Franklin... my friends!” was me trying to explain the utter
lack of linearity of any sort on Joe's show for a lay-audience of
young people whom I thought could be enticed into watching the show
by emphasizing its oddball, cult aspects and how its host's unusual
appearance (tacky-looking suits, a sleepy facial expression, his
“ever-changing hair color”) made it the perfect late-night
viewing for stoners and insomniacs alike.
So proud was I of the piece that I sent
a copy of the article to Joe's office, assuming he'd discern the
affection with which the piece was written and find it a good “pitch”
to the youth audience. I never heard back from him, but I assumed
that Joe was a very busy guy.
Flash forward to the late Eighties. I'm
now out of school and am working for a firm called “TV Key” at
which I am editing the book Movies on TV
and also writing columns for the “TV Key” TV-review column,
syndicated by King Features. I figured I would write about Joe,
offering a more adult “101” to his show, which by this time had
been spoofed on Saturday Night Live in memorable
pieces enacted by Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, Martin Short, et
al.
The added layer of legitimacy here was
that the “TV Key” column was so well-established that I could
interview Joe one-on-one for the piece and question him about some of
the more entertaining aspects of his show. I got some good quotes
from him, the best centering around his unusual interview style – I
asked him how he had developed it, and why he would ask each guest about
the other's specialty.
He responded that his guests wanted to
talk about things other than their specialty. He cited a specific
example: whenever he had Dizzy Gillespie on, he never asked him about
jazz or music in general. He would get Dizzy to discuss “women's
rights, air pollution, penal reform,” the things (that Joe claimed)
Diz really wanted to talk about. This was exactly what made Joe's
shows so bizarre, so I was delighted he decided to discuss his
“method,” as it were.
As the conversation was ending, I noted
in a fanboy bow of deference that I'd of course been watching his
show for my whole life. I also added that I'd written about him once
before, in the Sarah Lawrence College newspaper. Joe's voice suddenly
got grim.
He then quickly said he remembered
the article and it wasn't funny (was it the “ever-changing hair
color” remark?). He then told me that “the men with the gravelly
voices” told him they read my piece (again, in a college newspaper
that might or might not have been named “Fred”) and they were
disturbed. Joe further informed me that “four people have written
articles like yours, and three of them are dead.”
I was flabbergasted – and, yes, oddly
amused. I told Joe that the college-paper piece was written in
affection, I was doing an introduction to his show for my
schoolmates, it was intended in a positive way. Joe then asked me if
I was writing “another piece like that one,” and I noted that,
no, I was doing a different kind of intro where I would be making him
“into a Damon Runyon sort of New Yorker” and be discussing his
blankety-blank years on the air (by that point it was over 35 years
on the air on a five-day-a-week basis).
He seemed calmed by this reassurance
but was still audibly disturbed at me for something he claimed to
remember in vivid terms. I myself had to break out the piece and
reread it back then to see what I'd said, and I found the
“ever-changing hair color” remark to be the only potentially
offensive remark – the rest was along the lines of saying how Joe
would have a nuclear physicist next to an aerobics instructor on his
panel, and proceed to interview each person about the other's
specialty. Which he did, on a nightly basis!
The final step in the interview project
was getting a picture of Joe from Joe himself (don’t ask me why we didn’t
have one on file — perhaps it’s because Joe was a local host and
had never been written about before this column). When I came to the
office, I was greeted by a grim Joe who, once again, had me swear
that I was not writing “that kind of article” again. He then told
me how “you could make big money writing about me — there’s a
young man doing a book with me now, you can make big money.”
He then asked me to swear on my
mother’s life (my mom is still with us, thankfully) that I was not
writing “that kind of article.” Joe said again that he did want
me to make fun of him — and then he handed me a picture of himself
wearing a tuxedo and carrying a cane in Astaire style. (The top hat
was off in this shot, one shouldn’t overdo it….).
I have an audio cassette of the phone
call wherein I was told that the “men with the gravelly voices”
were very dissatisfied with me and would play it for various friends
through the years. One suggested that Joe could have me hurt — that
he would recruit the Gabor sisters to chase me down Broadway hitting
me with their purses.
There are two post-scripts to this
story. The first is that I met Joe a few other times in later years
and, even though I said my name, he was quite nice to me (I guess I
didn’t use the odd trigger-phrase “Sarah Lawrence College
newspaper”). In fact the nicest and oddest of these meetings had me
asking him if there was any information available about an old singer
he kept having as a guest by phone on his WOR late-night radio show.
Joe claimed this man, Beauvais Fox (or
was it spelled Bové?), was a MASSIVELY famous singer in the early
Thirties, that he outsold Russ Columbo, Vallee, and Crosby. This was
hard to believe — and harder still when there is no mention of this
man’s name anywhere on the Net (the sole person with that name in show-biz was a theater critic who died in 1955) or in Billboard-style “greatest
selling records of all time” reference books. Joe would receive a
call from this aged Fox gentleman every week at some ungodly hour
(around 4:00 a.m. usually), and he would have this incredibly
“famous” singer sing him a song from his apartment, over the
phone, while playing piano.
Each of these segments made me wonder
where the hell Beauvais lived — unless he resided in a townhouse or a
very well-insulated apartment, it’s hard to imagine a person living
in central Manhattan who can play piano at 4:00 in the morning and
not piss off his neighbors. Thus, I asked Joe if he could play us
some of Fox’s best-selling songs on his show (see, we never heard
these best-selling records, just the old man singing over the phone),
or give us some background on Fox so we could situate him against the
crooners of his era.
Joe’s response was to tell Beauvais
that night that many people in NYC loved him a lot — “Ed Grant
from Media Funhouse loves your singing.” Thus, I never learned a
single thing about Fox and probably never will, unless some kind
Franklin associate would like to comment on this piece and offer some
context as to who this mysterious singer was.
The other post-script to my tale of Joe
and his “three out of four” dead men was that I have carried this
story around with me for years, thinking that I was oddly special,
since the only other people Joe got furious at were sued for big
money they didn’t have (all suits lost or dropped).
I then heard from my friend Rich Brown
just a few weeks back. It turns out that he called Joe up after he
sent him a copy of the NYU humor magazine “The Plague” (Joe was
featured on the cover, a standard picture of him smiling superimposed
onto a pic of the fjords in the Netherlands) in the mid-Eighties. Joe
was not pleased and adopted a low tone to warn Rich that he’d
better watch out and be “verrrry careful” about what he said
about him.
This of course made me feel not as
“special” as a potential Franklin murder-victim, but it did
reinforce that Joe’s skin wasn’t just thin, it was transparent.
*****
Now, to those who are familiar with
Joe, it is obvious that both Rich and I (and those other wise-ass
college writers who found *anything* humorous about Joe’s program)
got off easy. Joe had two very famous lawsuits against humorists whom
he felt “mocked” him, and he was intent on suing two others.
The first person was Uncle Floyd and
the show was (natch) The Uncle Floyd Show, at that
time a local program that aired on a UHF station. It had a very large
cult audience (that included, no shit, David Bowie, John Lennon, and the Ramones),
but it was still a local show.
What Floyd and his colleagues did in
their “Joe Frankfurter” sketches was to simply distill the
essence of Joe's program and make it seem even kookier than it was,
while still keeping the same straight face that Joe always maintained
about his bizarrely composed panels of guests.
So Floyd and his cast did a spot-on
satire of Joe's show, starting with a spoof of his presentation of
old movies he had in his collection, then onto showing some personal
memorabilia, and then onto the panel, comprised of people from wildly
different fields who were asked to comment on each other's
specialties and then queried for their feelings about show-biz
figures who were long dead.
Floyd did this long before the
Saturday Night Live sketches where Billy Crystal
played Joe with an “upscale” group of great comedic actors
(Christopher Guest, Martin Short, et al) as the crazy roster of
guests.
Joe did not take kindly to the spoof of
his show (perhaps it was indeed all too accurate?). He sued Floyd for
defamation of character for $35 million dollars. Floyd used to joke
about the lawsuit during his act at the long-defunct and much-missed
Bottom Line here in Manhattan; he liked to recount how he was served
with the subpoena for the lawsuit while performing at a TV telethon
for charity.
Joe lost the lawsuit because his case
was insubstantial — what Floyd and his cast were doing is called
satire (even on a no-budget UHF show in New Jersey), and the 35
million figure was insane for the kind of show Floyd was doing (and
the kind of “coverage” he had at the time — I watched him
through snow in Queens). In the process, Joe got publicity, which
seemed in the end result to be what he had desired all along. In
later years he lied and claimed he won the suit, which
became a pattern for him.
The second lawsuit is perhaps Joe’s
most famous: in Oct. 1984 he sued cartoonist Drew Friedman for a
piece he wrote and illustrated called “The Incredible Shrinking Joe Franklin.” Joe
asked for $40 million dollars for libel; Friedman was named, along
with the magazine the comic appeared in, Heavy Metal,
and National Lampoon, Inc., the owners of HM at
that time.
Another ridiculous lawsuit, intended
presumably to garner publicity and frighten away any other humorists
who chose to make fun of him. The interesting thing about this suit
is that this was the third piece Friedman had done on Joe; the other
two were the incredibly funny (and indubitably nasty) “The Joe
Franklin Story” (written by Josh Alan Friedman) and Drew’s great solo
“Joe Franklin is a Dream Walking.” The “Shrinking” piece
evidently was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Joe.
Joe lost the suit — you can read
about the verdict in a New York Times article here. He eventually became friends with both Drew (see pic on right) and Josh Alan
as the years went by. But humorists weren’t deterred from spoofing
his show. In the ’84-’85 season of Saturday Night
Live, the Billy Crystal sketches began appearing.
They were along the same lines,
although not as brutally funny as, the Uncle Floyd sketches; the
“SNL” sketches also, of course benefited from having a budget
big enough to recreate Joe’s set and the ability to get real
celebrities to play themselves, as when Liberace appeared as a Franklin guest. Joe had a running gag about the Crystal sketches (which he did
grow to love and talk about endlessly, even though there were only a
handful in that one season) — he claimed he had told Billy, “I
saw your impression, and one of us is lousy!”
It’s thus very interesting to see in
a blog entry on the Thunder Child blog about WOR executive Chris
Steinbrunner, in which the writer notes that Joe “was furious
[about the Crystal sketches], and deeply hurt. He stepped into
Steinbrunner’s WOR sanctum, wondering what actions he should take.”
Steinbrunner calmed Franklin down by noting that SNL
spoofing him “was one of the best things that could have happened
to Joe.” I'm willing to bet the combover that Crystal sported was what pissed Joe off the most.
[After I posted this piece, Drew Friedman noted to me on Facebook that Joe speculated on a lawsuit against Crystal on his show: "I clearly remember that during the year Billy Crystal was doing
his Joe Franklin segments on SNL, a guest of Joe's brought it up on the show and said how funny it was. Joe reacted (with a smile on his
face) by saying " He's very funny. Do you think I should sue him, do
you think I should sue him?" Stunning!]
So Joe didn’t sue Lorne Michaels and
Billy Crystal and co., but he again threatened to take comedians to
court when Sarah Silverman, in her segment in the documentary The
Aristocrats (2005), did a version of the titular joke in
which she was on the Franklin show with her family doing the obscene
act and Joe raped her.
Now that joke was just awful — not
because no one should make fun of Joe (read above!), but because
Silverman’s stock in trade of saying outlandish things in a deadpan
way (made more “shocking” by the fact that she’s an attractive young
woman) has gotten pretty tired over the years. It was also a rather
“in” reference, because by the time the film came out, Joe was
remembered mostly in NYC nostalgia circles.
In any case, Joe was again livid —
one of my later meetings with him was in an elevator on the way to
the most bizarre/absurd thing he ever did, a no-budget recreation of
his talk show in a very West Side loft space (I wish I had
photographed and videotaped the event, since it seems to have gone
undocumented). In the elevator I asked him about the “news” that he would sue Sarah Silverman. His answer to me was that
he was still considering it — and, he assured me, he hadn’t
touched her. (I, of course, nodded my assent.)
As he aged, it’s assumed Joe mellowed
and gave up suing people. What he did give up was the actual suing,
but he didn’t give up the publicity-seeking that went with the
earlier suits. He would announce the lawsuit in the press (as
happened with the Sarah Silverman deal), then not file the suit, and
then, according to Penn Jillette on his podcast (episode 152), claim he won
the lawsuit that he never filed. He also rewrote history and claimed
he won against Uncle Floyd, but that’s a story for another time….
*****
As for an intro to Joe that was
approved by Joe, I advise you to check out the documentary
50,000,000 Joe Franklin Fans Can’t Be Wrong. The
film was independently produced, is quite good, and represented Joe’s
only prolonged appearance on PBS (it aired on WNET in NYC).
Thanks to John W., Joe D., Anthony V., and other Facebook friends who exhumed and spotlighted materials presented here.
