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"Xanadu"--A Remembrance of Frank By Jim "Steb" Stebinger

Once upon a time in 7th Grade FCC told me a joke. Don’t stop me even if you have heard it. I’ll let you remember his voice and style.

It seems the romance had ebbed for a married couple. Alarmed, the man went to the family doctor for advice. The doctor listened to the ribald description of the problem and then asked what the couple’s bed-time routine was.

“Well, every night at 11:30 we have a cup of tea and watch Johnny Carson. Then we go to bed,” the man told him.

“Excellent, I have just the thing,” the doctor said. He gave the man a bottle of pills and told him to put one in his wife’s tea. Frank played out the little charade in which the man insists on preparing the evening’s tea and out of her sight sneaks the pill into the woman’s drink. But on an impulse he puts a pill in his own drink, too.

Midnight comes and they go to bed. About 2 a.m. she sits bolt upright and shouts “I need a man!!” Her husband awakes and shouts “So do I!”

What a way to start this remembrance.

I have avoided writing about Frank to you and actually became quite angry about the very idea of writing this piece. In some ways 30 years hasn’t been enough. In fact, after you spoke to my mother I received a letter announcing the website. I shredded it. Some of the anger is undoubtedly rage against Death and Unfairness, some of it is due to the fact that I am not nostalgic by nature. You always find the house you grew up in was one-third the size you remember. Much of it is because so much of my experience with Frank and “The Boys” sounds pretty tawdry today. Some of it I probably don’t even understand. For quite awhile I couldn’t think of a good thing to say. Then I realized that wasn’t the issue. What happened is what happened, and if we are trying to imagine what Xanadu was like, the privy was part of the structure, too.

So, I will try to give a sense of what it was like to be a friend of Frank Chapline Constantino and William Geoffrey “Bones” Shaman, living in the hothouse world they created. Frank gained the most notoriety, partly by dying young. But Bones, too, was an arresting personality. Both had strengths and major weaknesses. The uncharitable might say even worse. Together, they created a little world that lasted a full six years and imposed a view of the world on a goodly number of their peers. Not bad, as Bones would say. It was an odd world: childish, childlike, precocious, exalted, and nasty, in a mixture. The focus here is on Frank, but please don’t forget the driven longhair, whistling and rocking in the background.

If memory serves, Zorba the Greek begins “I first met him in Piraeus…”, and I met Frank for the first time in Miss Buchanan’s 7th Grade science class at Lincoln Middle School. My parents and I had recently moved into Santa Monica after three idyllic years in Malibu, with wild gullies for a backyard, an ocean playground, and beckoning mountains. I made grunion runs at night, saw coyotes at the front door, and awakened to deer at the doorstep. Suddenly, I was a city boy. In this new class we were seated in long rows and I drew the desk next to his. A girl behind us shredded her hose rather publicly and took them off in class. Pantyhose didn’t yet exist, so these were stockings that had runs. She left them in a ball on her desk. I only mention that, as a reminder we were about 13½ years old-- not exactly ladies or gentlemen. In the few minutes before class started my first day, Frank turned to me in his most over-ripe dramatic manner and announced, “I am Frank Constantino; I don’t believe in Heaven (pointing up) and I don’t believe in Hell (pointing down). I am against the Vietnam War. I have heard of you.” He was Quixotic and he often reminded me of a sly cartoon coyote, which is why I dubbed him "Don Coyote".

Precocious and pathetic, it was a hell of a way for two 13 year-olds to meet. It established a close but combative relationship, with a built-in emotional distance. But what did we know? We hit it off, and soon I was one of “The Boys". Frank and Bones were the core; Doug “Ox” Ford, Phil “Rimba” Poremba and I were the others. Ox provided muscle and a certain pragmatic stability. Rimba was good natured and often the victim of Bones’ ill-temper. But Rimba loved the world. Larry “Boss” Friedman was a frequent co-conspirator, in the early days before he went to the Athenian School. Jeff Bell spent some time with us early on. The term stuck and many others joined and left “The Boys,” or aspired to the title. Leigh McCloskey was a prominent later arrival. Being one of The Boys was coveted for awhile as an entrée into an "in-crowd".

It was 1967 and “that decade” was in full swing. Frank, and to a lesser extent Bones, imbibed deeply of a number of popular notions floating through the culture. They were, of course, "Artists". I remember walking one day with the voluptuous Connie Jerman and she was asking me if I was an artist. Rather literally I said no. Eventually, I discovered it was a state of mind, not an exact skill. You declared yourself an artist, which meant you were sensitive and talented and somehow a superior being, separated from the rest. You might write poetry, a perfectly artistic thing to do, and poetry was beyond study, because studying poetry destroyed it, just as analyzing a painting ruined the painting. In other words, teachers and critics had nothing to teach, and artists had nothing to learn. Artists were also apart from the rest of the world, and not subject to its rules or morals. They must “live” as their art directed and suffer (and inflict suffering) . I know now that even if all artists are miserable, not all miserable people are artists. A number of now half-forgotten writers espoused views like these, writers such as Burgess and Hesse, and Kazantzkis, with his destructive view of freedom. Robert Graves may be as emblematic as any. As he grew older his mistresses, whom he dubbed his Muses, grew younger. His wife was expected to deal with dishes, diapers and financial arrangements, and not be too importunate when he cuddled his inspirations. It was heady stuff, and gave power to kids, who now could declare themselves beyond criticism in at least one field.

Of course, there was comedy, too. Pretty much anything Frank N’Bone touched turned to comedy at some point. For a number of years, I/We/They planned to make a film to be titled “The Chase.” Whether the movie ever was made, I don’t know, but “The Chase “ became a raucous entertainment. The only prop was a wall. The perfect wall was the kind common in a school corridor. It all began with Bones resting against a wall. Frank would approach him with an indecent proposal (our games were frequently faux homo); Bones would run away and Frank would chase. Both would disappear, and each time Frank would reappear, he was sans one article of clothing. It became more and more stylized, with Frank yelling dialogue such as “Wait 'til I get you home, you little slut!”. Eventually, Frank would be naked, which ended the performance. One of our frequent amusements was lying to each other. Bones was scandalized at one junior high party, when Frank promised to perform a chaste Chase but, true to form, flashed the coed crowd. He could not be trusted near a spotlight.

My lifelong lack of good judgment is proven by the fact that I eventually understudied Frank when there were demands to perform The Chase and he was absent. The last known performance of The Chase occurred at the Samohi Greek Theater, during the summer after graduation. I was fool enough to be Frank’s understudy pursuing Bones. I didn’t notice that my “friends” had hidden my clothes. For a moment, I faced the thought of having to try to sneak home, naked-- as they threatened not to return my clothes, but eventually did. None of us were particularly trustworthy when a good laugh was to be had.

Roosevelt Elementary School was a haunt. We did The Chase there for select audiences and generally carried on. One night, as we were goofing-off in the sandbox and on the bars, one of our troupe went onto the roof and began pelting us with roof gravel. We all climbed onto the roof and began the "Battle of Roosevelt Roof", which ended when the recently acquired SMPD helicopter fixed us in its gaze, and we were the subjects of field interrogation reports.

Another 60’s fetish Frank imbibed in was a dedication to First Amendment rights, and a preoccupation with an odd version of moral courage. He was not afraid of being beaten, and may have rather liked it, as he did ask for it frequently. His Free Speech was a bit like yelling "Fire!" in the proverbial theater. The world was seen as us against the “conformists” and “cruds”. Conformists were, generally speaking, people who followed rules that Frank (and Bones) didn’t. Cruds were not artists and were like Hoods and Sluts, who were lowlifes. Frank made a fetish of confronting bullies, and then running to the authorities. Bones, Ox and I had to face threats and abuse because Frank would provoke the “hoods” into attack, and they would then target us. I remember walking to school one morning, and being confronted by one Carl Wright, who materialized almost out of nowhere on a 10-speed, and said menacingly, “I have half a mind to beat the shit out of you.” I realized two things: First, that Frank would have said something about him being down to &*% of a mind, and second, that if he was going to beat me he would have just done it. Guys like Carl probably didn’t have much future, but Frank sure didn’t help them out much. Frank had little concern about the consequences of his actions. Carl was thrown out of school.

..

There was a lot of kid stuff. We had our own slang and sang silly songs. “Masturbation Can Be Fun” to the tune of Frere Jacques, and a little ditty about a Plastic Jesus were on our Hit Parade. “I see!” became a catch phrase somehow, and then got translated into dozens of languages: “Je Vois!” and finally (phonetics) "Inna a laya nee nee" (that is my memory of Bruce Brode’s Swahili.) Frank discovered women in the seventh grade and gave enthusiastic chase. He was a contrarian, and would embarrass his dance partners at parties, ad infinitum. Jenny Larson was his love interest.

He was all of fourteen and an advocate of "Free Love". “I Am Going to Bed the Larson Woman!” was a refrain – to our horror. Never letting facts get in the way of a good story, he made outrageous claims about what he had done with her (and eventually others). He began his illustrious debate career against the likes of Tom Ponsford and Derrin Watson. In this case, debate consisted of Frank’s announcing loudly that premarital sex is good (a note to parents: he was all of 14) and Derrin insisting that it was morally wrong. This, while we walked circles around the Lincoln Junior High Track. Frank would win by saying something so outre that Derrin would literally cover his ears and run away.

He could be funny. On July 5, 1967 (or ’68) Larry “The Boss” Friedman and I were hanging around the day after the holiday, and debated long and hard whether to run the risk of calling Frank. We had no clue what he would do. Looking back, I am glad that we did make the call. We were loafing around Palisades Park north of Montana picking firecrackers off the ground while we waited. There was trepidation because no one could predict what he might do. Suddenly, Frank tooled around the corner of Alta (I think) on Ann’s pink girl’s bicycle, with flowers festooned in the handlebars, shouting “Yoo Hoo! Boys!". He of course continued yelling at us in that fine stage voice. What he said then made both "Victor/Victoria" and "La Cage aux Folles" somehow familiar and old hat when they were released.

The shadows gathered early. Yes, there were performances at the 9th Street Playhouse at which uncritical audiences applauded his acting. But by the 9th grade we were drinking heavily. Frank’s mother bought the hooch, on the dubious premise that 15 year-olds should learn about alcohol by binging at home. I learned, then, what motivated the Drunken Taoists. If you remember, they sought Enlightenment in that brief moment when alcohol renders you at peace with the world, and somehow close to the understanding of Ultimate Meaning. It is a fleeting moment, and the Drunken Taoists exterminated themselves, by falling into rivers while staring drunkenly at the moon. I have memories of alcohol induced camaraderie, and a sense of belonging and oneness with Frank and Bones.

Maybe it was one of these nights, when Bones asked me a question about romancing ladies. I tried to give a sort of “loaf of bread, jug of wine and thou” kind of answer, but said something about being with a girl under a deciduous tree, which sent Bones into hysterics. I compounded it by trying to explain why I preferred a tree with broad leaves, to one with needles. I had cemented my "Mr. Brain" image.

Of course, there was the night when one of Frank’s basset hounds let out an odd sort of moan, and wiggled forward, leaving behind an enormous turd, and three hapless drunks debating who would clean the mess. Frank did, under protest. Then, there were the late-night crank calls, probably to quite a few who have written appreciations here.

Tenth Grade brought me back to my Malibu friends, Todd Garvin, Mox Moeschler, Bill Andresen, Tom Bertonneau, Dave McCann, Paul Seeman, and so many others. My college love, Megan Kelley was somewhere in the background, too.

That year the luck of the draw put Frank and I in Dr. Eugene Mitch’s English class. Together, we dismantled the class with insubordinate glee. An ordinarily tolerant Dr. Mitch cornered me one morning in a hallway, and scared me half to death, by threatening me with academic destruction, because of my screwing around. He forgot about it by that afternoon. He liked to hold panel discussions, in which groups of five tackled a weighty issue, in order to learn civil discourse and public argument. Frank, Bruce Brode, Evan Hess, Sally Trude and I were one panel, and Evan came up with the title, “Legs: A Method of Approaching Fruit Bats.” The class was in stitches, as Frank and I staged one of our usual cats-in-a-sack arguments, that was something about my fine Aryan leg hair versus his degenerate Italian leg hair. We drew legs on the backboard, argued at the top of our voices about sheer lunacy, and debated where legs began. I may have badly embarrassed Sally, but at the time that was of little concern. Bruce saved us by actually tying the piece together with a little piece of on-the-fly specious logic, in which it was “proven” that legs were the only true way to approach fruit bats.

The same cast tried to do a sequel that bombed. It has been an odd game of mine, that I have mentally rewritten that script to make it work. Over the years I have played that game often. Since it was the only time we were "onstage” together, and our improv worked brilliantly, I assume I wish there were more such moments. Dr Mitch once told us to knock of the fighting, because he said any outsider could see we really did care about each other, and the fighting was fake. We didn’t heed the advice, and we never worked a comedy routine.

One night, at Roosevelt, Holly Grace came by to give something to Bones. He had arranged for her to come by. He made sure they were out of earshot, so Holly had no idea what was afoot. He feigned anger when she left. I fell for it, and got a “reluctant” Bones to confess that every girl in school thought I was ugly, and they all laughed at me. Frank corroborated it. They told me I was ugly, but they were my friends, and would stick by me. I believed it, and this “joke” colored my world for a number of months. Bones called me Monster, Ugly Monster or Monst. The joke went on for months, until their mothers caught them on the phone, laughing about it. They were forced to confess during a tense meeting at Frank’s house. I stormed out, and didn’t speak to them for nearly a year. When remembering Frank, one must remember that he was capable of this kind of dissimulation and cruelty. The joke was pulled on several others, in varying forms.

All in all, 11th grade was a fine time. I had classes with Mr. Johnston, who introduced me to Homer, my most consistent literary love. I worked a lot, but had weekends free, and we drank and played around and carried on as if we had a golden destiny. But, the heat was rising under the teakettle, as we headed into senior year. I was certain to go to UCLA, as was Bones. Ox, always practical, started out at community colleges on his way to CSU Northridge. But Frank was refusing to go to college. I am not Nostradamus, but even at 18, I knew it was a bad idea for a talented guy to wind up with a simple high school diploma, and the dream of attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. He was bulling his way into the toughest industry I’ve ever been a part of. It was such a high risk venture-- like Amelia Earhart betting it all on finding Howland Island. One day we were arguing on our perch near Barnum Hall and Bones and I were telling Frank he ought to go to school. He rattled off a list of actors who had not gone to college, and I said, “But THEY could Act!”

Bones doubled-up, but Frank was apoplectic. Our fights were always pretty raw, so we had developed two self-policing methods. Ox issued “boom booms”, or hard shoulder punches, when he was directly offended, and could deliver a “boom boom” by special request. He could be the “boom boom” police for many insults. Frank had worked-up an elaborate system of “embarrassment points". You started the day with a number of points you could use in insults, and categories of insults, each of which had a set number of points. Criticizing Frank’s acting was off-the-chart. He informed me that I was going to "get it", and how.

That afternoon, after a day of trying to forget just how embarrassing he could be, I was walking up hill away from the gym. I imagine there were hundreds of people around; I am sure it was merely a few. Coming towards me as the Angel of Doom was Frank, skipping downhill and waving his arms, shouting, “Tonight after school Steb, you are going to suck my cock!”. If I had nine lives at the time, that was surely one.

Frank would not accept criticism or direction very well. Yet, he fully expected to win the Barnsworth Cutpurse Award, or whatever it was called, for high school career acting. Mr. Jellison pulled me aside one day, and pretty much told me that Frank was by no means a shoe-in for the award. I think it was designed as a warning to Frank, that his assumptions were merely that. I passed the news on to Bones, because I assumed, as many did, that the award was Frank's, because he said it was.

In 1972, I lived with my parents at 419-A Montana, one of six little two-bedroom bungalows facing each other in pairs. They were nice little houses, and I had a big room and a closet. I also had two French windows which opened directly onto the courtyard. At 2 a.m. that next morning, I was awakened by Frank and Bones, demanding an explanation. It is a morning that sticks in my memory, the essential rudeness of it all, made palatable by Frank’s charm. Many were shocked when Dick Moss won the award, and, as I recall, Frank was furious, and treated him badly, like he did Leigh.

Graduation came, and that was really the last "Summer of Frank". Since we were going to college, and he wasn’t, we suddenly had a whole lot less in common. There were still parties at Leigh’s fine old rural Malibu home. It was still high school-ish: I made out one weekend with Lisa (not her real name), and thought I had a girlfriend. By the very next weekend, she had visited her future campus, and was enamored of some guy named George. I tried to rekindle what we had, but all she could talk about was George... George, George, George. I took to drinking out of the bottle, damning “George, the assassin of my happiness.” I fell asleep under a table and later was very sick. Lisa apparently never realized that I had thought we were becoming a couple, and so she did not even understand. It was funny then, if not now.

September 1972 saw me at UCLA, working hard on the Bruin. Bones was a Bruin, and then a Gaucho, and Ox was in Riverside, so we got together less. I don’t think I saw Frank more than a few times after September 1972. Once was on a Blue Bus. He seemed deflated, and unable to match what we were doing. He was no longer the center of attention, and the bright luster of promise was fading. I think he was understudying in “Fortune and Men’s Eyes". He had painted himself into a corner. He was going to take the world by storm, but on his terms-- no school less than RADA. So, there was nowhere for him to go. He couldn’t go to SMC or the Morgan-- it was all beneath him, and there was nothing he would take.

In June of 1975 I was appointed Editor-In-Chief of the UCLA Daily Bruin. There is probably a ghastly irony in dates. My appointment or my first issue probably coincides neatly with Frank’s death. I think two weeks elapsed before I found out. I was home watching John Wayne in "The Cowboys", when I received a call from a distraught Bones. He said he didn’t believe it, and he wanted me to confirm it, so I called the coroner. I remember a tearful phone call with his mother, and I am ashamed to say that I asked her if Frank knew I was Bruin editor. I still wanted his approval after all those years, and all those fights. Later, I visited her for a time. She told me that she believed the driver who hit him was drunk, but no charges were ever filed. She had a long explanation, about why everyone knew the driver was drunk, but he was not arrested. She said the attending doctor felt Frank would recover, and that the key was a specific surgery. It seemed that they wanted him to stabilize before the operation. For some reason when the shifts changed, the next doctor in charge did not do the surgery. It was too late, when the error was discovered.

I don’t know whether it was an accident, suicide or if Frank was (as I was told) on LSD. It was a shock for me, and the immediate lesson was to try to be clear with everyone in my life. I didn’t want anyone else to die when we were on bad terms, and with the idea that they didn’t know how much I cared. The Boys struggled on for almost five more years. Bones and Leigh became closer. Our fights became longer, our reconciliations shorter. Ox and Phil and I stayed friends for awhile. But it was alcohol based, and increasingly that was more a burden than a solace. I last spoke to Bones the day after John Lennon died. If you have followed me this far, you have read 4,000 words, trying to encapsulate 30-year-old memories, of an eight-year stretch. I still don’t know what to make of FCC. I suppose I loved him, in a brotherly way. I think I loved Bones, and Ox, too, as brothers and buddies. I know I learned from Frank the one lesson I have already related: not to let people close to you be in any doubt about how you feel. You should also fight when necessary, but fight fair and be honest.

Beyond that, I turn to literature. I am certain Frank appears in two literary works. He is most definitely Sebastian in the novel "Brideshead Revisited", which comes as close as any work I have read to capturing the magic of the selfish, gifted, vicious, lovable and tortured man he was. The entire novel is, to my mind, an elegy to Frank and proof , if any were wanted, that other "Franks" exist, and will continue to exist. The second, and not unrelated, is an introduction W.H. Auden wrote on Shakespeare’s Sonnets for the "Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare" series. Auden wrote about The Vision of Eros – of being in love with the concept of love, and not specifically with the person with whom one is thought to be in love.

It is a complicated argument, and I can not go into it here. It has been too long since I read it. These pieces give me the sense that Frank lived, and died, within a wider, transcendental and artistic framework, that gives continuity to-- and significance for-- his meaning for me.

As I end this I am in tears. Thirty years has most definitely not been enough. As Lincoln might say, it is for us, the living, to rededicate ourselves to the power of those many formative memories, that we use to shape the decisions we will make tomorrow.

Rest In Peace, Frank.

16 February 2005

This website is dedicated to the memory of Frank Chapline Constantino, thespian, scholar, and free spirit, 7 April 1954 to 24 July 1975.