Clockwise from above: Joe gets some lovin’ from Elizabeth Ashley and Sally Kirkland; Bill Cosby on the set in the 1980s; Barbra Streisand and Jack La Lanne on the set in the 1960s, Jackie Mason and Joe hawk Imperial margerine in the 1950s; and Joe and Martin Sheen on Conan O’Brien’s set
I’m still trying to unravel those two sentences, two weeks after he spoke them that afternoon, but the main point is how the numbers keep wandering around – as, again, when Joe speaks of how many people he’s had on his radio and television talk shows over the years. One on-line source puts it at 150,000. Another, 300,000. Another, 350,000. Joe himself blithely says 500,000. He says this when he’s slipping me a book, Joe Franklin’s Great Entertainment Trivia Game From America’s Longest-Running TV Talk Show Host (Square One Publishers, Garden City Park, 2003). “My first paperback after twenty-two hard covers,” he says. “The big one was Classics of the Silent Screen. Sold over one million. Published by Lyle Stuart. Another huge one was Up Late With Joe Franklin. Simon & Schuster.”
Five hundred thousand, Joe? Half a million? Half a million people on those shows?
“Oh yeah. Sure. Forty-three years on radio and TV. Easily half a million. Including five U.S. presidents.”
I do a little arithmetic later. If Joe Franklin was on the air every single day, 365 days a year, for 43 years, I think it works out to something over 30 people a day, TV and/or radio, each and every day over that whole stretch. Well, why not?
He still looks like a 9-year-old going on 78, a short, jovial, round-faced, reddish-faced, baby-faced Universal Man, rather like the Leopold Bloom of James Joyce’s Ulysses except that his (and our) Liffey is the Hudson River – the name of which, Joe at the moment somehow forgets.
“There is poor and there is poor poor,” he says. “When Irving Berlin was 7, 8, 9 years old – maybe 12 – he’s a newsboy selling papers a penny apiece. Five cents will get him into the movies. What’s that river on the West Side? Oh yeah, the Hudson.” [We’re sitting five blocks from it.] “So he has these five pennies in his hand, but it’s winter and it’s cold and it’s windy and he’s actually blown into that river. And when he’s pulled out, he still has those five pennies clutched in his fist. Now that’s poor.”
The only thing I wonder about this story is that Irving Berlin – back then, Izzy Baline – was a Lower East Side boy par excellence. How did he get over to the Hudson?
East Side roots: “My father, Martin Franklin,” says son Joe, “was born on the Lower East Side, I forget what street. I love the Lower East Side. I started going to the Lower East Side at 12 years old because I wanted to see the houses where my favorite people were born: Eddie Cantor on Hester Street, Jimmy Durante on Catherine Street, Irving Berlin on I forget what street.
“My father went to school with James Cagney at P.S. 158 and with Lou Gehrig at Commerce High. At 20 he went to work on the New York Mail on the next desk to Ed Sullivan – there were forty, fifty newspapers in New York in those days – and then he went off into the paper and twine business and did very well. He died in 1960 at age 60. As a kid he’d had rheumatic fever. He was told he’d only live to 40, and in those days, when there were no antibiotics, when they said 40, they didn’t mean 41.” Still, Martin Franklin beat the odds.
Joe’s mother, Anna Heller Franklin, was also from the Lower East Side. “Her father was a tailor who was held up many times. When I was 7 we moved from the Bronx to Yorkville. My mother was my best friend when I was a kid, and when I grew up my best friend was Tony Curtis” – or, more exactly, the Bernie Schwartz who one fine day in filmdom would be dubbed Tony Curtis.
“We belonged to the Silver Streaks Club at the 92nd Street YMHA. I was president, he was secretary-treasurer. He was so poor, this kid, he always had a torn sweater. And the girls all flocked around him. His father was a tailor too, Mano [or Manuel] Schwartz. They lived at 64th and First Avenue, over the York Theater, and every day, seven days a week, my mother would give me money to go to the movies. Where Dumont is now, East 67th, was the Rex Theater. That’s where we went. The film would always break,” Joe Franklin said, bemused in memory. “Wuthering Heights,” he said. “Jack Benny in The Medicine Man. John Boles in Back Street.
With Irene Dunne, wasn’t it?
“That’s right! You know your stuff. Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas. Claudette Colbert in Imitation of Life. And Warren William. Remember Warren William?”
Joe, didn’t you ever want to be in movies? ([He would later in life be in more than a few, notably Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, most often playing himself.)
“No, I didn’t, but he did – Tony Curtis. We were buddies until he went to Hollywood at age 21. He was walking up Broadway when he was picked up by an agent whose name was Irene Selznick” – sister of producer David O. Selznick.
It may be hard to think of in terms of the oft-parodied locution, “Yonduh is duh castle of my foddah,” but Tony Curtis’s boyhood hero was, says Joe Franklin, Cary Grant. “Worshipped him like a divinity. Was dying to be in a movie with him. Finally made it in Operation Petticoat [1959]. And is still alive and well today with a gorgeous young wife 9 feet tall.”
Joe Franklin’s high school was, as it happens, Benjamin Franklin. “Not that exciting. I was in the same class as Pat Moynihan, who was also very poor. We had to buy him shoes, but he was a brilliant debater. Everybody said: This guy’s going somewhere.” [He went into the Senate of the United States.]
So let’s get you into radio …
“All right. About 1945 or ’46, make it ’46 – I’m 15, 16, 17 years old – and I have a date for lunch with a receptionist at WNEW New York, 565 Madison at 53rd Street. While I’m sitting there, waiting, in comes Martin Block. ‘Who are you, kid?’ he says to me. I say I’m Joe. He says; ‘Want a job?’ I say I certainly do. ‘You’re going to be my record picker and librarian on Make Believe Ballroom,’ he says. Which I loved doing – and Martin Block liked me so much, he got me my own radio show, on the same station, WNEW, in 1947. ‘Joe, just don’t compete with me,’ Martin Block said, so I did a Vaudeville Isn’t Dead show using old nostalgia records that I would buy for a penny apiece at junk shops and thrift shops. Next day I’d go back with a nickel to get five more, and the dealer would say: ‘Hey, you – I heard you on the radio last night saying that these things went for $500 apiece’ …”
Joe stops and thinks about this for a bit, smiling from within more than from without. Then: “The very first one was George M. Cohan singing ‘You Won’t Do Any Business If You Haven’t Got a Band.’ ”
Thinks some more. Then: “The show became quite popular on radio, and one day I got a call from Channel 7 TV: ‘Joe, we’re considering lighting up in daytime.’ This was around 1950, when there was no daytime television yet. ‘We like your voice, Joe. If we give you an hour a day, what kind of show could you do?’
“I said: ‘How about just talking to people? Eyeball to eyeball, nose to nose?’ ”
How’d that idea come into your head?
“It just hit me. I like to talk. But they said: ‘Joe, you can’t do just talk on television. It’s visual. You have to give ’em pratfalls, baggy-pants comedy.’ I said: ‘If you can’t do just talk on television, then how about kids dancing to records?’ ‘Joe, you’re crazy’ – a crazy idea until along comes Dick Clark.
“Well, in the end I talked them into it – my original idea – and that’s how was born the world’s first organic, from-the-bones, television talk show, on WABC Channel 7, which was then, in 1951, WJZ-TV, on West 67th Street, where Channel 7 still is now.
“My first guest was [novelist] Fannie Hurst, who lived right across the street [it’s up the street] in the Hotel Des Artistes. My second guest was Eddie Cantor. I tracked him down to where he lived in the Sherry-Netherlands. My third guest was Kate Smith. Before I was through I had every guest in the world except Greta Garbo. I would meet her on the street and talk with her, the greatest lady in the world, but she would never come on the show.”
At that moment in his narrative, late in a weekday afternoon, the Joe Franklin/Charlie O’s restaurant began filling up with a great flock of young, cute, chattering New York birds, the volume of whose babble began to rise over Joe’s low, unstressed delivery. “Let’s get out of here and go to my office,” he said. “It’s only a couple of blocks.”
It was in fact only two blocks, straight down Eighth Avenue to 43rd Street, where, just before we entered the building in which he’s had offices since the Indians sold Manhattan to the Dutch, he stopped at a sidewalk fruit wagon. “Want a banana?” he asked me. Before I could answer, he had grabbed three bananas off the stand, paid for them, torn them apart, handed me one, and kept right on walking into the building. An elevator took us up to a sizable room that would have made the Collyer Brothers, those hoarders of old junk, turn purple with envy. Floor-to-ceiling walls – and I mean floor-to-ceiling – full of shelf upon shelf upon shelf of moldering, dust-collecting 33 1/3 and 78 rpm’s, hundreds of them, thousands of them, millions of them for all I know, in and among exotica, esoterica, a huge postage-stamp poster of young Jimmy Cagney, a not much smaller likeness of Marilyn Monroe, other posters, posters, posters, photos, photos, phones, phones ringing off the hook, piles of books, heaps of magazines, acres of ancient newspapers – and Joe has only been in this “office” some six months, after 14 years on another, higher floor.
And only Joe knows – or pretends to know – where everything is here. “He’s his own card catalogue,” says an aide named Jose Lara who goes on to say he’s been helping Joe for 30 years. A handful of other aides, or hangers-on, or gofers, or oddballs, come and go in the room from time to time. Joe sends one of them out for egg-salad sandwiches.
The phone rings, the phone rings, the phone rings. “Joe, it’s Al So-and-so.” “Tell him to call back tomorrow afternoon at 2.” “Joe, it’s this girl, Eunice somebody, she keeps calling.” “Tell her to call back tomorrow at 2.” “Joe, it’s that guy with the song.” “Tell him to call, 2:30 tomorrow. Tell him not to worry.” “Joe, it’s that David again.” “Tell him to call, tomorrow at 2. Tell him everything will be all right.” “Joe, it’s Gina.” “Tell her to – oh Christ” – grabs the phone – “Hello, Gina! What? What hospital? All right, I’ll take care of it.” Hands the phone back to Jose. Says to him: “Send a card. ‘Wish you a speedy recovery.’ ”
I spot a dusty trumpet hanging on high. Whose was that?
“Could be Louis Armstrong’s, I’m not sure. See that thing next to it? Tiny Tim’s ukelele.”
Joe is particularly proud of those among his 500,000 interviewees who had never gone on talk shows before and said they never would. Just for three: “Chaplin, Cary Grant, John Wayne. Isn’t that amazing?”
Anybody ever give you a hard time, Joe?
Tries to avoid an answer, but finally says: “Bing Crosby – and I idolized him. There were a few that walked away during the show. Rosemary Clooney, when I made the mistake of saying: ‘I saw Jose Ferrer [the ex-husband who ditched her and their five children] last night. She said: ‘Goodbye, Charlie’ and got up and walked away. Later she apologized for it. Jerry Lewis took a swing at me – a play swing – when I mentioned Dean Martin. An actor named Robert Strauss didn’t like me. One time Ernest Borgnine got mad at me because I didn’t know how to pronounce his name. I made it Ernest Borg-ninny.”
Did anybody ever freeze up on you on camera?
“Nah. I got the knack of making them forget they’re on TV. I look into their eyes.” Coming onto me: “I mesmerize them.”
You have a certain reputation, Joe, for blandness, neutrality, dodging controversy.
“Okay. But I can also make a big acid pain of myself, a la Joe Pine. Remember Joe Pine?” – the snarling, menacing, vindictive right-wing commentator of some years back – “but I do it in such a lovable, cute, baby-faced way.” Breaking into a laugh: “I once had Joe Pine and Al Capp [two disagreeable, disputatious one-legged gentlemen of diametrically opposed ideological orientation] on the same show. I said: ‘Gentlemen, take off your wooden legs and fight a duel.’ ”
Listening in on all this, now, is one of Joe’s visitors, a lawyer named Aaron Pichel, who has written a book about his uncle, actor/director Irving Pichel. Lawyer Pichel now throws in a question of his own: Is there anything you wish you’d done differently, Joe?
“Nah … Well, I wish I’d been a little more aggressive. There were people I was afraid to ask on the show. Fred Allen, who was so bitter, dour, grim, scowling. Bert Lahr, George S. Kaufman, Groucho Marx.”
Suppose you were starting out today, with all this new technology?
“Knowing my style, I couldn’t start out today. Any more than Jolson could, or George M. Cohan. You know, you couldn’t say ‘pregnant’ [on the air] when I started. Once I gave a gag commercial: ‘Nine out of ten doctors who tried Camels went back to women.’ Said it on TV. I was taken off for a week.
“I don’t like today’s talk shows too much. They bring on movie stars with their beautiful hair, people who start talking about Third World poverty and postpartum depression. They’re not qualified.”
Joe Franklin does have a private life of sorts, but when, where, and how it is hard to say.
“D’ja ever have a stent? No? I had a stent once. Incredible. Oh, a long time ago. I got dizzy one time, that’s all. Now? I’m fine.”
His wife, who lives in Florida, is onetime model and actress Lois Meridan “who made a lot of movies with Betty Page, and was my secretary when I was a kid of 24, just doing radio. We were married on Bride and Groom.”
Their son Bradley Franklin “is in the mail-order field” in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. “I got him his own talk show. He did it for two weeks – brilliant, sensational – and then quit. ‘Daddy, it’s not for me.’ He and his wife have two kids.”
These days Joe Franklin can be heard in the Greater New York area a half a dozen times every Saturday, six minutes a shot, at 2:36, 6:36, 10:36 a.m. and p.m., over WBBR Bloomberg Radio, 1130 kc. AM, doing interviews and reviews. The reviews are of Broadway theater. Any Off-Broadway? “Nahhh.” Does Joe know Michael Bloomberg? “Sure I know him. He comes into my restaurant.”
The telephone. “Joe, it’s Sam Sherman from California.” Joe grabs the phone. Talks into it. Turns to this writer. “Sam Sherman,” he says to me. “My best friend after Tony Curtis. Big Hollywood producer. Ask him the secret of my longevity.”
So I take the phone and ask.
Sam Sherman says: “I’m glad to tell you. His enthusiasm, his love of people, especially entertainers. That’s what kept him in the limelight all these years, and what keeps him there now.”
Joe Franklin says: “Tell him I’ll speak to him at 2 p.m. tomorrow.” The phones are still ringing off the hook as Joe waves a goodbye to me with one hand while he sorts through the breakage on the $20 bill for the egg-salad sandwiches with the other. “I’ll call you at 2 p.m. tomorrow,” he says. You should live so long, as my mother, and maybe his mother, would say.
