‘Get Back’: The Beatles smile and make faces, while Peter Jackson suffers from 'Scorsese syndrome'

The eight-hour monolith of rock docs, Peter Jackson’s Get Back has been dissected from so many angles by Beatle super-fans that this is simply one more “opinion piece” on this all-too-weighty documentary. On the whole, I think Get Back has a bunch of golden moments and is also very much a beached whale-like creation, incredibly similar to Scorsese’s films of recent years (rock-docs and his fiction films), in that it is *way* too long and desperately needed to be edited down. It is only for fans of the Beatles, and as such, can’t be labelled “an all-time great rock doc” — because the all-time great music films draw in new fans to the musician(s) being profiled; they don’t just appeal to the diehard, as Get Back does, from its very inception back at the end of 1968 until today. 

As it sits, the experience of watching all eight hours of the film is like seeing an already-long movie (say, three to four hours) but with countless moments that are DVD supplements (at best) plunked down in the “body” of the feature. Nothing could be set aside, everything is given equal importance.

One can only imagine how extremely repetitive the other 52 hours of footage from these sessions are — although there are probably many more sour faces and verbal jousts in that footage that couldn’t/wouldn’t be included here, because this film is, at base level, Paul McCartney’s much-hoped-for rejoinder to Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s original Let It Be (1970) assemblage of the footage that did indeed show “the unhappy Beatles” and shocked many people wanting the “quirky moptops” back. Lindsay-Hogg’s film also left us wanting more at 80 minutes; Jackson’s film is an overdose. 

So, in order to move more quickly through the elements, I hereby submit the very bad and very good elements of the film. I loathe “top ten lists” (even worse, “every song/movie/book, ranked”!), but since Jackson produced a beached whale of a work, I felt I had to take an approach that was counter to that. 

The bad elements of the film:

— The ridiculously forced frivolity and giddiness. To counteract the “downbeat” mood of the original film, Jackson seems to have mined the 60 hours of footage for deliriously happy moments. Any Beatle smiling, making a silly face, doing a silly dance. It’s adorable, yes, in small doses. In very large doses — as when Jackson knows we’ve now seen them sing a particularly sub-par song (“Dig a Pony,” anyone?) upwards of five times, so he offers us a “music video” of them bein’ goofy lads — it’s sheer performance and no longer a documentary. 

It’s insane how much happy-go-lucky footage there is; some sad moments are present, but they are heavily counterbalanced by what seem like hours and hours of the Beatles being ridiculously happy. Certainly, they must’ve had some carefree moments during this project and they also did partake of some *wonderful* chemicals, but their forced giddiness seems to also be the result of seasoned on-camera performers turning on the charm for Lindsay-Hogg’s omnipresent filming. “Fly on the wall” films have occasional glances by the subjects into the camera. Get Back is four gentlemen and their crew performing directly for the camera. 

— Why exactly did George Harrison leave the band? Jackson had a mandate to clearly make a happy version of Let It Be, but he also noted he didn’t want to diminish the preceding film, so he used alternate takes of certain scenes. Thus, the most famous interpersonal moment in the original film — when a frayed George Harrison does not want to be instructed by McCartney anymore, so he tells him “I’ll play whatever you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all, if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.” — is here shown from a different, more distant angle where George is out of focus and the scene goes on longer in order to establish, “Look, look – these guys weren’t mad!”

Jackson noted in interviews that he used different takes of the material than were used by Lindsay-Hogg in order to "respect" the original film. This is admirable, but someone in the Beatles organization (with the initials PM?) pulled Let It Be many years ago. (It never was issued on DVD and is absent from the repertory circuit.) It's all over the Internet, in versions gotten from the VHS and LaserDisc releases, but has been MIA from legal distribution for a good two decades now.

Jackson's editing is smooth as silk (and the picture quality is such that we can be sure the original film elements NEVER looked that good, even when they were just back from processing at the lab; digital restoration of film makes it look as it never, ever looked before). It's disingenuous to "paint over" the George-Paul argument, though, since Harrison left the band at one point during the shooting. What was he so pissed about? 

It’s entirely possible that Lindsay-Hogg got absolutely no footage relating to this during the 60 hours he kept cameras rolling, but it's more likely that Jackson just wanted to entirely obscure it. And so he does, with George’s departure seeming to come out of a clear blue sky. Especially because the "angry George" moment was softened in this edit, and the "Silent Beatle" kept rehearsing for the rest of that day.

—Bored Yoko, in the center of things Yoko did not break up the Beatles — but John demanding she had to sit right next to him during these sessions must’ve driven the other guys nuts. (No matter how many times we have inclusions of McCartney saying she’s great... because he’s in front of a camera!) 

Yoko often noted she didn’t know anything about the Beatles, that pop/rock held no interest for her. Here she sits in the middle of the four collaborators and reads magazines, files her nails, and definitely communicates that she has no interest in what is going on around her. 

Yes, Jackson found some footage from the later days where she is actually rocking back and forth enjoying the music, but even he couldn’t disguise her evident boredom. She was born to a wealthy family and clearly disdained popular culture. Here we see her display that boredom, and we also see John making her “equal” in their relationship — by having her sit by his side and do nothing? (An odd form of feminism for the new-model couple.) 

— Third-person talk about the Beatles’ past, by the lads themselves. In the “wow, this seems awkwardly made up for the cameras” department, there are incredibly “formal” discussions by the Fabs about the death of “Mr. Epstein” and the trip to study under the Maharishi that was productive songwriting-wise, but not spiritually (well, perhaps for George, who was the only one following that form of spiritualism anyway). These sequences come off, again, as performers speaking to the audience, not each other. 

— Arguments are more compelling than old friends smiling at each other. The scenes in which actual tensions are in evidence are fascinating — when McCartney is indeed lecturing the other three (while saying he doesn’t want to lecture them); also when Harrison is indicating he doesn’t want to do a live concert or anything beyond albums (and when he notes to Lennon that he wants to do a solo album). 

Look at George's face.

Since the band did break up after the recording of Abbey Road (a far superior album to any grouping of the Let It Be/Get Back songs), there has to be some explanation for what went wrong. Jackson’s film includes some hints toward the simmering tension, but the forced-giddiness factor undercuts it entirely. Thereby making Get Back a pretty bad chronicle of a band’s break-up. (There are several books that cover this period in detail and explain beautifully what happened; Jackson conceals it with sleight-of-hand-like misdirection to the many moments when smiles or funny faces erupted.) 

— Nobody’s happy on the Apple rooftop. One of the most jarring things about the original Lindsay-Hogg doc is that no one is seen smiling on the Apple rooftop during the final concert, in which the Beatles performed nine songs (four of which were retakes). Lindsay-Hogg cut the retakes in the original film, and here they’re notable only because Lennon had big trouble remembering his own lyrics, since these were songs he didn’t seem to really care about at all. (Anytime the Beatles left “placeholder” lyrics in their songs, you could tell they were just trying to fill out an album.) 

In the happy-go-lucky Jackson assemblage of Lindsay-Hogg’s footage, the same is true. Yes, Billy Preston is smiling throughout, but he was barely on-camera. One older woman in a green sweater and a younger woman in a green dress are seen in brief shots smiling. Three girls on an adjacent roof are seen being happy. Otherwise, absolutely no one, most importantly the Beatles, is seen smiling on the Apple rooftop as they play. (I’m discounting John’s post-song jokes — those are part of a performance.) Compare this with the Rutles mock-doc All You Need Is Cash, and you’ll see that the fake version (“Get Up and Go Back Home”) is the happy rooftop concert as it exists in the imagination of Beatle fans. 

The real thing was historic indeed, but was also a stunt (to give the film something outside of the studio) in which the group were never seen by their audience, unless they worked across from Apple and had roof access. The sequence rises and falls in both the ML-H and Jackson versions on the viewer’s reaction to the on-the-street footage of Londoners hearing unfamiliar Beatle tunes without being able to see them. The lack of smiles at this key moment — which was 100% genuine — underscores the forced nature of the smiles in the studio. (Of course, Jackson trumps that by having a Beatle “listening party” back in the studio after London bobbies shut the rooftop concert down; everyone is grinning ear to ear and “larkin’ about” yet again. And yet they all broke up nonetheless….) 

— The Let It Be/Get Back set of songs are the weakest in the second half of the Beatles songbook. Sure, “Get Back” is a great rocker, “Let it Be” is a great serious number, and “Two of Us” is a quite poignant “looking back” song for two friends. (“One After 909” and “Across the Universe” are also very good, but both were older compositions and are not shown being rehearsed much at all in Jackson’s assemblage of Lindsay-Hogg’s footage.) 

“Dig a Pony,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” and “Don’t Let Me Down,” three very minor Beatles tracks (and three *truly* uninspired lyrics) are seen to distraction in Jackson’s film. They are driven into the ground — we see them rehearsed over and over and over AND OVER. George’s three songs are pleasant (including “Old Brown Shoe”), but they’re nowhere near the quality of the two he had on Abbey Road and the trove of stuff he put on All Things Must Pass. If there is any one reason one would want to fast-forward through parts of Get Back (which I didn’t do, because, again, I love these guys!), it would be the incessant repetition of a very meager group of songs. 

The good parts of the film: 

— The moments of genuine emotion. Much has been made of McCartney noting “And then there were two” when George has left the band and John is arriving late one day; that is a genuinely authentic-seeming moment. The same for Lennon’s sarcasm about the Rolling Stones (always a sore point with him, despite his palling around with Mick and Keith during this period) and his calling Glyn Johns “Glynis” repeatedly (am sure Glyn had to take that in stride, but it must’ve conjured up the schoolyard for him; even during his peace-and-love days, John could be a really acidic person, and yet (or because of that) he's my favorite Beatle!). 

The all-too-brief moments where George’s feelings about wanting to leave the band do seep through Jackson’s slap-happy montage also resound. And, of course, Ringo’s “I’ll do whatever you guys want to do” attitude is the leveler, since one assumes he rode on the very erratic waves of the other three gents’ egos. And that odd but truly genuine bit of surreptitiously recorded talk between John and Paul about how to get George to come back (after John brusquely had volunteered that they should just get Clapton). 

 —The insane jam with Yoko. George (whom they knew since he was 14) has left the band, so what better time to play a cacophonous jam with John’s omnipresent partner who clearly looked down her nose at their music and wanted to do some squalling instead? It’s an odd reaction to what has just taken place, but they do seem so taken aback by George’s leaving that IF the Beatles were going to have a jam with Yoko, that would be when it took place, and it did. 

 — Seeing George break out. Yes, we’re stuck hearing his Let it Be album contributions and “Old Brown Shoe,” but we can see that his composition of “For You Blue” had an interesting source-point, and we also see him having a silent but steady hand over “Octopus’ Garden.” And then there’s the small bit of him working out a new song called “Something.” That was the point where the future was certainly an open book for him. “Silent Beatle” no more. (And he was known to have as cutting a sense of sarcasm as Lennon.) 

— Seeing George Martin guide them through every mini-crisis. It always seemed rather weird to fans that the Beatles didn’t have George Martin produce the LIB album. The fascinating thing in Jackson’s assemblage of the footage is the constant presence of the stolid Mr. Martin, who was the only “adult” (he was 43, fourteen years older than Lennon) to guide the group after the death of the aforementioned “Mr. Epstein.” After the crisis is averted (read: Harrison returns), Martin appears to have been in the studio nearly every day of rehearsal and recording, troubleshooting tech problems and tamping down the egos of the four “boys,” as he called them. 

— Billy Preston gets his due. The only non-Beatle to be credited on one of their 45s and an invaluable contributor to the LIB sessions, it’s very good to see him come in and melt instantly with the band. His electric piano parts of these songs stand out, and in a few cases make the song re-listenable. Clearly the presence of a fifth musician (not someone reading a magazine) diffused some of the tension in the room. (You know, the tension that Jackson spent a lot of time erasing by his choice of happy smiling faces and little dance moves….) 

— The songs that are NOT part of the LIB album. The single best thing in Get Back is the footage of the Beatles playing songs that were not in that small group of songs they finally put into the LIB hopper (which were then remixed and ornamented by Phil Spector; I might be one of the only people who feels that his “messing” with McCartney’s songs was exactly in synch with McCartney’s highfalutin corniness, esp. on “Long and Winding Road”). 

If there is any “gift” that Lindsay-Hogg did give us by filming the group non-stop through the month of the LIB project, it was this aspect. If I could view any amount of the 60 hours of LIB footage, this stuff is what I’d want to see. As it stands, Jackson does include the Beatles doing various other songs, but either they close the song off in a chorus or two, or Jackson cuts it off — to get back to “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” and “Dig a Pony.” Fuck! 

The five categories of songs-you-wanna-hear that are played by the band to pass the time in the studio are: 

—Rock oldies. This is the stuff they loved. Lennon always wanted to be playing the early rock ’n’ roll tunes, and hearing the Beatles do classics by Berry, the Everlys, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Ray Charles, and, of course, Elvis (among many others) is wonderful. One of Jackson’s best editing moments is a montage contrasting the shaggy older Beatles singing Chuck Berry's “Rock ’n’ Roll Music” with them as younger moptops singing it live to a choir of screaming girls. Most unusual and welcome cover, hands down: "The Third Man Theme," played by John on guitar. 

—Early shards. Lennon/McCartney compositions from their early days. Some are truly crappy, but others probably could’ve been reworked into something memorable. Further evidence that these guys were insanely productive from the moment they became friends until they broke out into solo careers. (And of course they were all under 30 for that whole journey.) 

— Their own earlier records. To pass the time, either John or Paul would break out into often satirical versions of songs from their earlier albums. Hits like “Love Me Do” and “Help!” are spoofed, but two of my faves come up out of the blue and sadly go back there: “Every Little Thing” (an album track that is catchy as can be) and “Woman” (a McCartney song written pseudonymously for Peter and Gordon; back at the time when even the Beatles’ “gifts for friends” compositions were terrific). 

— Songs that wound up on Abbey Road. A far superior set of song to those on LIB, these songs just crackle compared to… well, “Dig a Pony.” It’s also fascinating to contemplate that all the shards on the second side of the Beatles' actual “farewell album” were initially going to be full songs, but they were put to better use as part of that complex whole. (But, really, how long could “Polythene Pam” or “Carry That Weight” have lasted?) 

— Songs that appeared on the Beatles solo albums from 1970 on. Besides the great tunes that were left over from the “White Album” (“Teddy Boy,” “Child of Nature”), we hear here different configurations of Beatles doing John’s “Gimme Some Truth” (with input from… McCartney?), Paul’s hooky “Another Day,” and “All Things Must Pass” from George’s startling debut album. (Which, like the Beatles albums, seemed like a weight George carried around over the years — could he ever put out an album as good as that one? The answer was no, but he continued to write great singles.) 

I hereby suggest that you follow my lead — if you were worn down by the giant whale titled Get Back, the best way to get it out of your head (or to simply remember the good moments) is to play the Beatles songs you like a whole lot better than the ones that made up the official LIB line-up. You’ll probably want to avoid “Dig a Pony,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” and “Don’t Let Me Down” for the next few decades….

When John and Yoko 'borrowed' an idea from Deceased Artiste Stan Freberg

Comedy fans “of a certain age” are in mourning today because the last of the great novelty record masters is gone. Stan Freberg, who died yesterday at 88, had a career that could've only existed in the Fifties. Freberg is best known for two things: a series of comedy singles that were essentially pieces of radio comedy retooled for the shorter, tighter 45 format; and a series of TV ads that were bold, brash, self-referential, silly, and yet still hyped the products in question.

There will no doubt be many encomiums thrown Stan's way, and rightly so. I just wanted to focus in on the moment at which John Lennon appropriated one of Stan's old ideas and turned it into an avant-garde “experiment.”

Firstly, Freberg talking about his interactions with John and Yoko on talk shows. When he came on Dick Cavett's ABC show, he was informed that he would be on an episode that contained the remainder of an interview with John and Yoko, and he noted that that same thing had happened when he'd been on David Frost's show in London:

The fact that Lennon knew who Freberg was and wanted to meet him makes perfect sense, as John was a Spike Milligan cultist who counted master-humorists Peter Cook and Viv Stanshall (gents he inspired and whom I would argue inspired him greatly) among his friends in mid-Sixties Swinging London.

John most certainly knew Stan's popular singles, and one in particular, called “John and Marsha,” in which two voices (Freberg as both John and Marsha) act out a full soap opera in two and a half minutes by just saying each other's names in different ways.

Yoko Ono has been accused by commentators like Camille Paglia of having taken away John's sense of humor, a notion that is patently untrue. Well, on further thought, it did occasionally seem like it was true — not in the political moments so much as the avant-garde experimental mode where the “Joko” team created music, films, and epigrammatic poetry that seemed to be ripe for satire.

Their three LPs together, the Unfinished Music duo and Wedding Album, are works executed in this mode. I am a devoted Lennon fan, but even in my most diehard period of Beatle worship, I knew I would listen one time and one time only to each of these LPs, so I stopped even trying to acquire them (after finding an inexpensively priced copy of Two Virgins, playing it once, and realizing that the old nasty “play the album cover and throw the album away” review wasn't far from wrong).

On the 1969 LP Wedding Album, which was more of a commemorative package of the Lennons' wedding (a box filled with various artifacts, including a photo of wedding cake) than any kind of actually doted-on album, John (or Yoko, or both, or some engineer they supervised) assembled an audio collage of Lennon-Ono interviews for the second side of the album.

The first side, however, contained a specially recorded item, “John and Yoko,” a 22-minute experiment in which the Lennons said each other's names over and over in different tones while a recording of their heartbeats was heard throbbin' away. The piece does start out as a joke, with John and Yoko goofing around, but at various points they do try to reign it in and pretend they're having sex or nuzzling each other, or “losing” each other. In other words, they try to be serious, while “appropriating” (let's be kind) a concept that Freberg did at one-eleventh the length as a purely comic notion.

It is mighty silly, and you will most likely never listen to it more than once, but now, thanks to the wonder that is YouTube, we can readily summon up both Stan's original and John and Yoko's “variation on a theme.” The Freberg name appears nowhere in the album's credits (then again, this is around the time that John unconsciously transformed Chuck Berry's “You Can't Catch Me” into “Come Together”), but John did say that they recorded it as “an extended, very extreme version of 'John and Marsha' that was out years ago by Stan Freberg.”

He also said, “It also really makes your hair stand on end.” The latter makes it appear that, yes, they weren't totally fooling around with this album side-long riff on a two-and-a-half-minute novelty record. Perhaps it isn't as Paglia believes, that Yoko was neutering John's sense of humor — perhaps it was just the drugs....

*****

As a bonus, I will note that I am proud to have featured Stan's Chun King-sponsored Chinese New Year special from 1962 on the Funhouse TV show (and will probably rerun that episode soon) more than once. I was unaware that he made another, somewhat similar, special in 1980.

Stan's “Federal Budget Revue” was a PBS special in which he talked, sang, and danced about government expenditures. Freberg lives up to his appearance here (he had the look of a Fifties “egghead” smart-guy), but the best part of the show, as was always the case with Stan, are his musical numbers, arranged by the great Billy May. The whole half-hour show can be seen here:

Whatta head of hair that guy had! And what a mind underneath it.

Joe Frankin’s Five Craziest Yarns

In his final years, Joe Franklin had a lot in common with the great American directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Like Howard Hawks, Edgar G. Ulmer, and especially Orson Welles, Joe wasn’t content to be saluted for his very real, very impressive, achievement in show business — the fact that he had a talk show on for 40 years in one of the biggest markets in America (his local station later becoming a “super station” on cable) and that he had been involved with the format before the concept was crystallized by Steve Allen on The Tonight Show in 1954.

No, for Joe that wasn’t enough. And so, like the aforementioned Hollywood giants (and others from their era), he began to “touch up” his legacy in nearly all of his later interviews to include new names in his roster of A-list guests (for the most part, Joe's guests were indeed nobodies — which is what made his show the odd viewing experience that it was). Some of these stars never appeared on TV on any talk show ever, others had their careers followed with eagle eyes by their fan communities, yet Joe decided that he would say he had them on his local NYC talk show. (And in most cases, he didn’t just have them on, he had them on “four or five times,” “he cohosted a week of shows”).

Thus there is a problem: who exactly did Joe have on his show? Since he stated that the first two decades of the program were wiped by the two stations he was on (WJZ/WABC and WOR), it becomes harder to track the recognizable names he did have on. As far as actual footage, the only name star for which there is a kinescope is Sessue Hayakawa:

Barring footage, the best source of verification are the on-set photos that Joe had taken of his major guests – he and his producers recognized that it was important to have shots of these guests for his archive (also, obviously, for newspaper articles), so we have some great pictures of Joe with A-listers. Many of them are contained in this opening credits sequence from 1977:

In his book Up Late with Joe Franklin (Scribner, 1995), the original source of a bunch of his “yarns,” you can also see pics of Joe with these celebs: Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Ethel Waters, Paul Whiteman, Mike Douglas, Guy Lombardo, Mitchell Parrish, Leopold Stokowski, Rodney Dangerfield, Georgie Jessel, Myrna Loy, John Houseman, Mickey Rooney, Phyllis Diller, Stiller and Meara, Dyan Cannon, Dick Shawn, Tony Curtis, Joan Rivers, Howard Stern, Tiny Tim, Shari Lewis, Joe Louis, Jerry Lewis, Bill Cosby, and Dan Aykroyd. So evidently Joe had a photographer on-set ready to document the guests on the show, except for the “many times” he had Chaplin on....

The question is: why the hell did Joe begin fabricating highly unlikely/utterly impossible guest stars as the years went on? It's a puzzle, but perhaps it's the same thing that motivated the directors I mentioned above. Director Edgar G. Ulmer's tendency to lie about his past is discussed in Michael Palm's great documentary Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen (2004).

It is posited that he simply wanted to be involved in all of the seminal moments of German cinema (as it was, he was involved in the production of a few Murnau classics and Menschen am Sonntag with Wilder, Zinneman, and Siodmak, which in itself should be enough). In this instance, one can see that his “disputed” credits (read: his tall tales and yarns) have made it into his IMDB filmography, but his Wikipedia entry notes that they are unsubstantiated.

The extremely thorough, nearly 800-page long, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood by Todd McCarthy also faces this brick wall of old-guy lying: Hawks had an astounding life, in which he hunted with Hemingway, counted Faulkner as a close friend and colleague, and gave the first significant roles to many, many iconic actors and actresses. So why did he perpetually lie to interviewers in his dotage, claiming involvement in things that he had no hand in? Perhaps it was that he had “run out” of stories – his known stories (read: the true ones) had been revealed in prior interviews, and he was trying to supply “new copy” to the latest set of interviewers. McCarthy explores this in the book's lengthy foreword.

As for Welles, making up tall tales was part of his charm, and a big part of his legend. He was aware that people knew he was fabricating some stories and inflating the triumphs in others. He in fact made a cinematic essay that is one of the most profound statements on truth and lying ever. Orson was a proud liar, a man who was able to make art from his un-checkable yarns:



Perhaps a key element in Franklin's compulsion to make stuff up was the fact that the public's memory is extremely short, and never so much as in this lazy era when — as Chris Marker posited — your memory sits inside your computer. Thus, if you're going to impress today's viewers with your having encountered 1950s celebrities, it's not that news-making to mention Mineo, Mitchum, and the others. The current public perception of the Fifties is represented by a small group of icons who adorn tchotchkes in stores everywhere: Marilyn, James Dean, Brando, Sinatra, Gleason, Lucy, and of course Elvis. If you want to get in the news, saying you interviewed Tony Curtis is nowhere near as impressive as saying you fucked Marilyn, even if you barely had contact with her.

This has become the case with Jerry Lewis as well. Jerry *was* there, he did without doubt know and work with all these people, he is the last living A-list member of the extended Rat Pack “community,” and yet his stories about them change from telling to telling (and even autobiography to autobiography). Like Tony Curtis and Joe Franklin, he also put in a claim to having slept with Marilyn many decades on.

That's also a key to the old-guy yarn-spinning business: if someone died tragically and became a legend decades ago, why is it that only *now* that you're revealing your immortal meeting or sordid tryst with them? Tony Curtis spent years saying his time with Marilyn on the set of Some Like It Hot was hell on earth but then maintained late in his life that he fucked her; when Jerry makes this claim – along with a similar story about hunting for babes with JFK – he often evokes laughter, because it's coming out of a clear blue sky.

A similar case existed with Grandpa Al Lewis. He claimed to have encountered many great historical figures in both show-biz and politics, and to have been present at a lot of important events. The New York Times ended up doing a whole article discussing his“Zelig”-like claims, and how difficult it was to substantiate any of them. 

What it comes down to is that Joe took on the role of a modern-day Munchausen. People are entertained by seniors and like to hear their stories. If their stories involve people that the public is unaware of, you will only attract the fanboys, geeks, and true believers; if suddenly you fucked Marilyn Monroe, you are part of some kind of historic chain of important men — you join the Holy Trinity of guys who “passed around dames,” namely Sinatra, Sam Giancana, and JFK.

Thus, Joe began somewhere in the Nineties (a few years before his hoarding compulsion got really, really overwhelming in his office) to lie in every single interview. Big lies, small lies, odd lies, incredibly colorful lies, lies worthy of Mark Twain or Damon Runyon, and lies that just made you think “c'mon...”

Why is this important? Well, on a certain level it isn't. Joe was just an older gent, an incredibly fun character on the scene in Manhattan, a NYC show-biz institution (that he was, there is no denying or diminishing that). But I guess for someone like myself who really loves to research things about cultural history, Joe's pervasive lies moved beyond cute stories and became things that people quoted as being actual events.

The worst instance of this when he died was a sloppy Daily News obit that lifted the list of Franklin show guests from his Wikipedia entry, which contains a bunch of Joe's yarns, repeated as if they were truth. Thus the News obit contains a list of completely unsubstantiated celebrities, including two celebs who never did talk shows (Chaplin and “Gary Grant” — nice!).

There is also the kind of lie that is injurious. As I noted in my last blog entry on Joe, he frequently lied about the legal outcomes of his “character defamation” cases, saying he won cases he lost or never even filed. He also created wildly insulting lies about performers he was angry at. His book Up Late contains two paragraphs of slanderous lies about Uncle Floyd, all of them 100% untrue (see Floyd's response to Joe's bizarre, libelous storytelling at 1:15 here).

So, while it became part of Joe's charm to assume that everything he was saying was an adorable made-up lie, there were stories of his that are somehow being turned into entertainment fact via the unreliable institution that is Wikipedia. And there are others (like the lies about Floyd) that were simply petty and mean-spirited.

With that in mind, I hereby assemble a “listicle” (I don't do 'em often, but sometimes a topic cries out for the list formula) of Joe's most outlandish show-biz-related yarns: 

Bonus yarn: Joe claimed he slept with not one but two blonde bombshells of the Fifties. The lesser of the two (but still an amazing icon) was Jayne Mansfield. Joe writes in his book Up Late that she was on his show “twenty times” (no pics, not a one!). He had a drink with her once:

(p. 121) “She and I were having a drink alone together near my office when I felt her smoldering touch, sensed her eyes filling with longing. I let the alcoholic glow silence my resistance. What happened next is a blaze of Toscanini — as I say, Jayne Mansfield was a brilliant violinist. At about seven forty-five, at eight o'clock, there were frantic calls all over town from the theater [where she was acting in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?], from the stagehands, director, the producer, until Jayne showed up, a half hour late for her curtain. If someone asks, I didn't tell you this. You heard it from someone else.”

It's hard to top that torrid bit of trash prose, but here goes. If anyone does have evidence that any of these interviews took place on Joe's show, I will be happy to update, say I was wrong in that instance, and post the stated evidence. 

5. James Dean/Al Pacino. In one of his last interviews, possibly his last ever, Joe told Gilbert Gottfried and cohost Frank Santopadre on the “Amazing Colossal Podcast” that he had many amazing combinations of guests. He announced one of these interesting pairings for the first time ever on the 'cast (hear it here at 11:10). He noted that, back in the Fifties, he had James Dean on his show along with a newcomer named Al Pacino. Gilbert and Frank were quite polite listening to this odd revelation. 

“C'mon...” factor: He has no picture, never mentioned it before, and James Dean was famous for about a year, from '54-'55; at the time Al was 14-15 and not acting professionally.

4. John Lennon. This one is a tangled mess — Joe introduced this to my knowledge for the first time on Later with Bob Costas in the Nineties. He claimed that he had a deal with John: put Yoko on a few times and then John would appear on his TV show. He thus added that he had Yoko on many times on his TV show, but John was only on a few times. The only evidence that he interacted with Yoko is a photo of her guesting on his radio show, and his only interaction with John appears to have been a letter Lennon wrote to him “explaining” Yoko's music and oddly sorta asking Joe to give it a shot. (John namechecks avant-garde jazz musicians Joe would've had no knowledge of or interest in, given his musical preferences.) 

“C'mon...” factor: Here there is no greater “you shittin' me?” element than the fact that no photos exist. John had already been a Beatle, may not have been selling records as much as he used to, but remained an A-lister who was photographed in various locations when he moved to NYC. Presumably Joe's steadfast on-set photographer called in sick each time John was on the Joe show. Curiously, Joe also never mentioned these appearances when John was killed in 1980. There's also the fact that pretty much every single day in the Beatles existence has been chronicled in detailed books, none of which mention appearances on the Franklin show. 

3. Charlie Chaplin. Joe began to tout Chaplin's name as a frequent guest on his TV show in the last decade or so. If I remember correctly, Chaplin used to rank with Garbo as one of the people on his “wish list” (he had a story about a friend of Garbo calling him about his radio show but never did quite bother to lie about Greta being on his TV program — most likely because younger folk don't know/care who she was). Suddenly, though, Charlie had been on his program “four or five times.” 

“C'mon...” factor: Again, no on-set photo of Charlie Chaplin, one of the most famous performers on the planet. The only fact that needs repeating is that Chaplin left the U.S. for good in September 1952 because of political problems. Joe went on the air in Jan. 8, 1951, so there's a very small window for Charlie to have shown up on the show. And surely, if you're the biggest star on Earth, you're certainly going to make your TV debut on a local, no-budget talk show with a nostalgia theme, right?

2. Marilyn Monroe: Joe was irresistible to blonde bombshells, we've already seen that with Jayne (did Joe dally with Mamie as well? one wonders). Joe's story, as told in Up Late, the nexus for many of the Franklin yarns, is that Marilyn's press agent set up a meeting between she and Joe because he wanted her to get on the TV show Luncheon at Sardi's. The two struck it off immediately (of course), and Joe suggested to a publisher, Rudolph Field, that he write a book with Marilyn about her life (this is when, Joe claims, she had brunette hair, which does run counter to her chronology in the early Fifties when the story is taking place — Niagara made her a saleable commodity, and she was a blonde from that point on).

Joe did say in interviews he had her on his TV show many times. But the piece de resistance is his account of their having sex. They were working on her autobiography (which, incidentally, did get written in 1956 as an item called My Story, ghosted by none other than Ben Hecht!). He remembered:

(p. 119) “One night we were working late on the manuscript. I was astonished to feel her hand on my knee. I stammered a weak protest. The rest is a fog of Chinese food and Garry Moore [the two were presumably watching TV; Garry was not in the room]. She had a very severe biological need, a strong biological urge. I would characterize her as straight-ahead, unemotional, businesslike. Not kinky. Neither dominant nor submissive — neuter. A man could get her in the sack, and he would think that he was the conqueror when actually she made the conquest....” 

“C'mon...” factor: That damned on-set photographer, he kept calling in sick! Given the frequency with which Joe says he met her, there might've been one photograph of the two together, but none has surfaced (time will only tell if there is any pertinent documentation anywhere in his cluttered office or storage space). The book did materialize, but isn't touted as an autobiography (strange, given that the other ghost written book was touted as such). It is credited to Joe and writer Laurie Palmer. As with the Beatles, there have been countless tomes about Marilyn, none of which has seen fit to include l'affaire Franklin.

1. John F. Kennedy/Richard M. Nixon. There is nothing that approaches this story for its sheer levels of comic invention and/or insanity. I never heard Joe tell it in an interview, but there it is, tucked away in that same urtext of true stories and bizarrely fabricated fakes, Up Late. He's discussing how a local restaurateur had a heart attack on the show, live, and...

(pp. 106-107) “He slipped under the table, the camera got off him, and we called for help. We did have a doctor at ABC, but he was busy reading the racing form. Nixon and Kennedy were in the next room rehearsing for their debate, and they ran in to help revive the guy. I had no choice but to keep on going, to talk to another guest, the camera in close, while they worked on the restaurant owner. It was already too late; he was dead.”

This little inclusion from Joe, the fact that Tricky Dick and Jack the Zipper were there to help him out with a dead man, creates an image that deserves to be in a deranged short story or most certainly a cartoon (perhaps a missing panel from "The Joe Franklin Story" by Drew Friedman and Josh Alan Friedman?). It's not even surreal, it's something like a stroke of lying-genius. It's reaching out to grab any two celebrity names and slapping them into your story. After Joe's death, someone posted to the Net about their friend who did camerawork for Joe's daytime ABC show. He noted that someone did die on the air and the show kept going. No mention of Jack or Dick. 

“C'mon...” factor: C'mon.
****

The single best piece of writing about Joe appeared in the Village Voice at the time that his TV show left the airwaves. Nick Tosches wrote a sublime piece on the man he called “the Lorenzo de' Medici of divine mediocrity.” It can be found in its entirety here, as reprinted in the terrific collection The Nick Tosches Reader.

Nick declares (in a piece that was lovingly illustrated by expert Franklin caricaturist Drew Friedman), “I had seen Dracula rise from his coffin, I had seen the Wolfman howl, the Invisible Man unravel, the Mummy walk. But Joe and his baby hands and his shining forehead were a weirdness unto themselves.”

He notes he left off watching Joe at one point because he was unsettled by Joe’s “shoddy carnival of nihilism.” He returned years later, though, for while under the influence of Ronsonol, he began to understand Joe, “still living, still beaming, still shrinking, still talking with zero conviction about what he called, as if alluding to some dark Zoroastrian duality, ‘the good nostalgia.’ ” Nick proceeds to outline Joe’s career, supplying real, verified dates (one of many things Tosches does brilliantly is research his topics) for the many transitional moments in Joe’s TV show.

On to the video: Perhaps the best example of Joe’s show is this representative episode from 1976, which starts off in the middle of things with Joe errantly bringing up Lee J. Cobb out of the blue to his panel.

Another example of the oddness of the Joe show offers us in the first minute alone the topics of bounty hunting, ham radio, and vaudeville. This is followed by some trivia questions from Franklin “anchor man” Richie Ornstein (when Joe couldn’t answer, he'd just snap out “I don’t know,” indicating that Richie should move on). Joe prefigured a lot of current reality shows by probing all of the details of the bounty hunter’s life (and if you don’t care, as I don’t, you’ll be bored to tears — just imagine you’re up at 1:00 a.m. watching it with bleary eyes and nothing on the other channels….)

The most interesting moments were when Joe met up with old comedians. Here, from his 40th Anniversary special, is Joe hosting a panel of old Jewish comics: Joey Adams, Henny Youngman, Freddie Roman, Mickey Freeman, and Bob Melvin.