A chance to be on the Joe Franklin Show. Well, if I didn't go through
with it then I'd know for sure that I really was crazy. I'd written a
pamphlet called "Rock and Roll Equations," whose jokes
were as insipid as they were brief. This seemed to be the perfect
vehicle to gain an audience with America's King of the Unconscious
Non-sequitur.
Like so many of his expectant guests, I was courted cautiously with at
least thirty-five separate phone calls to The Man. Joe loves the
telephone. As one of his confidantes informed me later,
"Joe is a TELEPHONE JUNKIE.' The man has a jones for phones, who can
explain it? Maybe it's the way the plastic receiver warms up between his
bulbous neck and equally fleshy shoulder. Give him a ring sometime--he's
in the book and he'd probably love to hear from you. Each call was
nearly identical: "David, m'boy, howareya? What can I do for ya where
do ya live tell you what call me back at ten o'clock tonight I'll MAKE
YOU VERY HAPPY." Click. What a nutty guy.
I finally met Joe on a rainy Thursday, eleven floors above the Forty
Second Street traffic and three card monteed-incense. I was asked to
wait in a wooden chair outside his office door by his secretary
(concubine?) who took his calls with a seventeen-year-old-gum-chewing
ferociousness that made my knees weak. His office was packed with
Nostalgia-grimy Ethel Merman lobby cards fighting for space against Baby
LeRoy cardboard puppet heads. In the corner an unshaven Fiorello
LaGuardia read the funny pages to an indifferent Fanny Brice as The Past
funneled down into a swirling sea of unkempt days gone by.
I heard that nasal Joe voice before I saw him, like so many of his fans
did back in the innocent days of Philco radios and Harry Von Zell.
Barking instructions auctioneer-like to a gaggle of hangers-on, Joe
angled around the corner, his size-five shoes propelling that tiny
frame...it was the Nabob of Nostalgia JOE FRANKLIN extending his little
webbed fingers towards the Spazz. Fingers that had licked the dust off
the Palace Theatre floorboards, fingers that had caressed every nuance of
Liza Minnelli's eight by ten glossies, fingers that had gripped moist,
nostalgic secrets in the back of his office for the past forty-odd years.
Joe pulled up another wooden chair and sat down across from me in the
hallway, his feet barely meeting the floor. "You know David they have
these computers down in Washington D.C. these
HUGE COMPUTERS and they can tell you ANYTHING about ANYONE in the world
isn't that amazing?"
I nodded sagely at this mystic from the Planet Durante like I knew what
the hell he was talking about. Then one of his several young ladies
knelt down beside him, I guess she was Mandy or Sandy or Candy or Lillian
or Dorothy and Joe asked her how everything was, the acting classes or
the dancing classes which he had appeared to be footing the bill for, and
she said "Everything's fine, Joe," and Joe was caressing the nape of her
teenage neck (my eyes were firmly bugged out by now) and Joe asked her
"Who's the greatest?" and she responded "You are, Joe," and Joe said
"Tell me again WHO'S THE GREATEST?" and she again cooed "You are, Joe,"
and then he bent down and whispered in her ear and they both disappeared
behind the fogged glass of the office door.
After what seemed like ten minutes or so, Joe emerged from The Past and
was greeted by two more seventeen year old model types. The kinda girls
who in high school wouldn't give me the time of day, yet who were
attracted to the sexual magnetism that IS Joe Franklin. Forty-one years
in the business for what? Monetary gains? Hobnobbing with down and out
Coulda-beens and Has-beens and Jolsons-to-be? Or is it the twenty-four
hour, seven day a week Babe Alert that keeps the guy ticking? The man
never lacks an escort even though his hairweave looks like a toxic spill
and his last lucid thought vanished during a station break in 1953.
Forget Lloyd Lindsey Young. Joe Franklin is the true stud of Channel
Nine.
Getting on the show was almost anti-climatic. Of course I did share
the couch with the ex-wife of Robert Goulet, her face-lift gurgling and
bulging like a vat of soup set on high boil. Joe mispronounced names and
read the cue cards like they were eye charts but the best moment of the
show was when I handed him an FMU T-shirt. As with any gift, he held it
up admiringly for the cameras and beamed proudly. Had Joe looked a
little closer, he might've noticed that the shirt was designed by Drew
Friedman, whom Joe had tried unsuccessfully to sue for a million dollars
over a comic strip a few years ago. That was fun.
After I invoked the names of Gummo and El Brendel on national
television, I knew that my fifteen minutes were up and I could join the
living once more. I left the Secaucus studios with a combined sense of
respect, awe and disgust for this pudgy talk show host; this low-fidelity
elf who counted off the years with a vixen in one hand and an Ish
Kabbible seventy-eight in the other.