Public radio's bad dream

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.

Although Frank didn't grow up dreaming of a life in radio, he always knew that he could harness a certain imaginative intensity. It was not until he underwent a serious illness in his 20s that he began to read, discovering Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" and Dostoevsky's "Notes From the Underground." It was years later, after graduating from Hofstra and the famed University of Iowa Writers Workshop, when he was teaching at a private high school in Manhattan, that he began to be lured by the power of radio.

"The idea of speaking into a microphone and having your voice come out of the speakers of radios all over people's apartments and cars was somehow magical to me," Frank says. "You're hidden, and by virtue of being hidden, there's a power in that."

His first shows, in 1977, were late-night live free-form radio at New York's WBAI, part of the Pacifica network. Frank would talk, play music and direct actors in improv pieces based on stories he found in the tabloids. What would it be like to know your plane was going down in the Pacific? How would you raise a two-headed baby? The idea was to ambush his listeners with a show that sounded as real as possible despite the absurdity of the material.

Arthur Miller, a musician and songwriter whose recurring epithet is "not the playwright," has been one of Frank's most consistent collaborators since the early days. "Joe would come in with all these things he wanted to do. He'd be somewhere between anxious and hysterical," Miller remembers. "There'd be hand-written stuff, typewritten stuff, transcriptions of other people's stuff, things written on the backs of envelopes, in a three-ring binder. He'd say, 'I have scenes with a man and woman, a list of weaponry I want to read, a list of antibiotics I want to read and the music from these three records.' I would help him organize the elements, like acts in a vaudeville show."

In a memorable early collaboration, Frank invited Miller on the air to play a famous mime. After discussing his career, an upcoming date at Carnegie Hall and the pleasures of working with the great Marcel Marceau, Frank asked his guest to perform one of his most famous routines. He let the air go dead for an incredibly long radio minute. When he came back, Frank told the mime that he was wonderful and the phones lit up with callers.

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After a few years of developing an audience for absurdist late-night humor, Frank was inexplicably hired by National Public Radio as a host for the weekend "All Things Considered." Frank loved the imprimatur of a famous radio program, and was pleased to be paid for the first time in his radio career. But he admits he was "in way over my head" and that the five-minute essays he produced at the end of the hour were inappropriate for the journalistic format. "The kinds of questions I was interested in ["All Things Considered"] didn't answer," he says. "Why are we here? What is the nature of God? If nature is bred with tooth and claw, is human compassion just an anomaly?"

Humorist Harry Shearer, whose own program, "Le Show," airs on KCRW on Sunday mornings just before "The Other Side," remembers Frank's "All Things Considered " days differently. "For 51 minutes it was the regular vanilla news program, only not the usual NPR voice -- less nasal and less vocally constricted," he says. "Then the last five or six minutes of the show was an essay that was like a fist coming out of your radio. It's very rare to have people like Joe -- and I don't want to say that there are people like Joe -- who trust the audience not to freak out." After four months of feeling totally out of his depth, Joe transferred to a new job producing radio dramas, where he did some of his finest programs, including "The Decline of Spengler" and "A Call in the Night."

Next Page: Open a vein," he urges listeners, "and bleed money our way"

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