JOE FRANKLIN TRUTH IN PACKAGING
Friday, November 26th 1999, 2:11AM
IN NOVEMBER 1988, to celebrate a 37-year television career comparable to no other in the history of the medium, Joe Franklin conducted a 12-minute interview with himself, on his own show, and named Bing Crosby as his favorite guest.
Just before he died in 1977, it seems, Bing came on Joe's show "and sang all his old songs without music. He got all the words wrong. It was wonderful."
There, but for 30 million copies of "White Christmas," goes Joe Franklin.
Franklin's talk-and-variety show ran on New York television from 1951 until Aug. 6, 1993. He started weekdays on Channel 7 and in 1962 shifted to Channel 9, where he ultimately moved to late-night Saturdays.
Not here would his loyal fans find the slickness and manufactured pseudodrama of the modern talk show. As a booker, Franklin was the ultimate democrat, and that was the show's charm: Anybody might show up.
Over the years, some of his young up-and-coming guests went on to fame and fortune: Barbra Streisand, Joan Rivers, Bette Midler, Liza Minnelli, Woody Allen, Flip Wilson, the Jackson Five, Bill Cosby.
Some knew fame in the past, like Arthur Tracy the Street Singer ("Marta, Rambling Rose of the Wildwood"). Others simply lived upstairs from famous people. Franklin claimed to turn down a thousand requests for every guest he booked, but anecdotal stories do suggest that on some nights anyone who made it to the Channel 9 lobby in a standing position had a shot.
Truth is, by the smooth-talking pretty-boy standard of contemporary media, Joe Franklin should barely have been allowed to own a TV set, never mind be seen on it. He was too short. He didn't have that all-purpose baritone every on-camera host would soon be issued. Sometimes his words came spilling out in clumps.
He could also come across as, frankly, a bit of a hustler, which was really just truth in packaging, because he understood that hustling is what TV is all about. Hustling products, hustling guests, hustling the station, hustling events, hustling the host. As years passed, this process got dressed up with fancy names like "promotion" and "marketing," but it was the same game. When Joe Franklin told you Hoffman Beverages were the finest, he looked you in the eye.
Joe was on television and radio, he talked with the stars, but he never stopped being Uncle Fred at the Christmas party, Uncle Ben at the bar mitzvah, Uncle Art pulling out the cards for his magic tricks. The kind of guy who gives hustling a good name.
BORN IN THE Bronx, Franklin was 12 or 13 when he got hooked by phonograph records and the misty romance of vanishing showbiz.
The "12" story is that he was 12 when his mother bought him some secondhand records. This led him to collect more, which led him to become a showbiz historian and archivist, which led him to everything else.
The "13" story, a more oft-told and colorful tale, is that he was 13 and an aspiring journalist at Benjamin Franklin High when he was walking through Central Park and spied old George M. Cohan. He approached the great man, who was flattered that one so young recognized him, had him up for dinner and gave him one of his old recordings. He'd made seven, the kid resolved he had to find the other six, and so it went.
However things started, Joe Franklin would eventually number his collection at 60,000 records and 10,000 old movies - all reels, of course, no video. And whatever its fine points, the Cohan story was a Franklin classic because it had two of his favorite elements: names and numbers. His best lines combined both, like "I wrote a book with Marilyn Monroe. Today it'll cost you $1,500."
His best pal growing up was Bernie Schwartz, who become Tony Curtis. Otto Preminger used to come over to his place to watch those 10,000 movies. When his TV show went off the air, he was getting 15 calls a week about a new one. He'd done 309,136 interviews, over 31,015 shows. The 1997 Guinness Book of World Records says so.
His media life began after he was drafted out of Columbia into the Army in 1944 and hosted a show on Armed Forces radio called "The Young Wreck With the Old Records." When he got back to New York in 1946, he passed up his father's paper-and-twine business to rustle up music and showbiz jobs.
He wrote for Kate Smith. He was a librarian for Paul Whiteman. He hosted odd-hour radio shows like "Echoes of the Big Time" and "The Antique Radio Shop," and soon was picking records for Martin Block's "Make Believe Ballroom." This led to the "Joe Franklin's Memory Lane" radio show, which at century's end Joe and his long-time sidekick Richie Ornstein were still helming every Saturday midnight on WOR.
This durability underscored Joe's real secret: He knew his stuff. Those old records and movies weren't props. He liked them, just the way he used to like Fred Allen and Jack Benny routines so well that he sat by the radio copying them longhand into notebooks.
He still cared about Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson and Weber and Fields and Bing Crosby and Sophie Tucker and Joe E. Brown and Charlie Chaplin long after most everyone else had moved on, and he was wounded when they became trivia questions, disposable amusement instead of priceless history.
Shtik this wasn't, and off the air Franklin was really just another guy with a passion, a relatively normal family guy who lived happily in a cluttered seven-room apartment on W. 86th St., and if the wife and son found Joe a little obsessive, well, so do people in families where Dad spends weekends in his woodshop.
IF SOMEONE really wanted to criticize Joe Franklin, they would call him a small-timer, pointing to the unknown guests or the lavish praise piled on unknown projects. If he's such a legend, how come he never made it off local TV?
Franklin was unfazed. First, odd guests weren't a problem. They were part of the plan. As for networks, why, he got calls - hundreds of calls! - offering network shows. Turned them all down. Why be a small fish in a big pond?
He had a point. Would his show have lasted 43 years on a network? Besides, he did go network, in a way, when Channel 9 became a superstation, making him recognizable enough for Billy Crystal to create a Joe character on "Saturday Night Live." Joe loved it. Gave Billy tips on making it better.
Anyhow, Joe said, nothing made him angry or bitter, even the big stars who forgot that he was there when they needed him. Cosby came back, he said. Not Barbra or Bette, or most of the others. But it was all right: Preminger did Joe's show 155 times. George Jessel, 125. Rudy Vallee, 90. Sally Kirkland, 68.
Ronald Reagan came by six times, and although the last one was in 1965, Joe said in the '80s that he had it on very good authority Reagan would come back, make Joe his last talk-show stop. Around the same time, Joe revealed that he frequently would see Greta Garbo and she'd give him a look that told him that when she no longer vanted to be alone, it was Joe Franklin she would talk to.
In truth, neither Ronnie nor Greta made it. But why would Franklin doubt? The world was full of Joe Franklin fans. Richard Nixon watched. Joe DiMaggio. Columbia Records tapped into Joe's Memory Lane for a four-CD set of vintage popular tunes, keeping Cantor and Jolson alive in the '90s. World-famous auction galleries sold items from his collection. New York City named an intersection after him, right near his long-time Seventh Ave. and 42nd St. office that looked like an explosion in a paper mill.
And so, over a half-century, Joe Franklin did what all the greats had done: He carved out a persona recognizable to millions. He also made his hobby his life, turning memorabilia into treasure, meeting the entertainers he idolized.
Come century's end, he was touting the March 2000 opening of the first Joe Franklin's Memory Lane theme restaurant, Eighth Ave. and 46th St., where his treasures would be displayed and clips from his vintage TV shows would provide ambient atmosphere while he secured his place as the modern-day Jack Dempsey, unofficial ambassador from Times Square to the world.
A little hustle? Sure. For years, Joe said he was born in 1926. In the '80s, he said it was 1929. Which would have made him 15 when he was drafted. But unless this affected his G.I. benefits, what did it matter?
Joe Franklin, working the angles? What's your point?
Notes: BIG TOWN BIOGRAPHY: Lives and Times of the Century's Classic New Yorkers
