Fabulous Dead People | Frances Faye

Culture
By CHRISTOPHER PETKANAS
July 12, 2010, 3:50 pm

Collection of Tyler Alpern

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In the late 1950s, the cabaret scene on the Sunset Strip was so feverish, you could hear Christine Jorgensen and Frances Faye in different rooms on the same night without leaving the building. Jorgensen played the Interlude; Faye the Crescendo downstairs. Jorgensen’s set included “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” sung, apparently, without irony. A robust performer even on a bad day, Faye could be heard through the floorboards, violently slapping the piano keys and inquiring, “Gay, gay, gay, is there another way?”

Frances Faye was that rare thing, a white chick who could not only shout but swing. She had a dry, gruff voice she put in the service of a deadpan, declamatory style, nudging listeners to consider standards in a different way: stripped of obvious sentiment. Is Faye’s brash recording of “Am I Blue” the most knowing version on the books? People who thought Teddi King and Mildred Bailey and Felicia Sanders said it all have concluded “yes.”

Faye made more than a dozen albums, collaborating with the aristocrats of pop-jazz arrangers, Dave Cavanaugh, Marty Paich and Russ Garcia, and musicians like Maynard Ferguson and Herbie Mann. Faye was partial to a Latin beat, and Jack Costanzo, the great bongoist, often supplied it. If you own nothing of Faye’s, “Caught in the Act” is a good place to start. So is Terese Genecco, who performs songs identified with Faye at the New York club Iridium. Please don’t stop reading. Genecco is no dumb tribute act. She does not want to be Frances Faye; she does make you understand why she’s so important. With Nick Christo it’s more the other way around. Christo is an Australian singer whose entire show is devoted to Faye. His chirpy, wide-eyed approach is at odds with her material. Also, he’s not a girl.

Collection of Tyler Alpern

Faye’s music and sexual identity were inseparable. She had been married twice when, in the mid-’50s, she met Teri Shepherd, who was some 20 years her junior and became her manager. As Shepherd tells Bruce Weber in his film “The Chop Suey Club,” she and Faye were a couple for 31 years when Frances died in 1991 at age 79. (Shepherd still has the house they shared in the Hollywood Hills.) Onstage, Faye — one of Weber’s all-time heroes — mischievously changed “him” to “her” when singing love songs and peppered her sets with L.L.J. (Lite Lesbian Jokes). “That’s why I never go with girls,” she’d say when a woman hollered from ringside. “They’re so aggressive when they’re drinking.” The gays loved Fraaahncis. They still do.

For Faye’s longtime fans as well as those new to the party, all roads lead to Tyler Alpern, 45, of Boulder, Colo. Alpern began listening to Faye in 1988 but was frustrated by the lack of information about her. Ten years later he found a mention in a biography of Peter Allen. Since then, Alpern has traced Faye’s life in a rambling essay that runs to more than 18,000 words on his Web site, though if you dig deep you will also find some adamant score-settling: “I keep reading that although a top-notch entertainer, Frances Faye ‘did not have a great voice.’ I disagree!” As there is no biography of Faye, Alpern’s site will have to do.

If you knew nothing of Frances Faye, saw a clip and thought, That woman could only be from Brooklyn, like Fanny Brice could only be from Brooklyn, you’d be correct. Faye’s mother was a Russian immigrant, her father an electrician and arsonist familiar with Sing Sing. David Daniel Kaminsky — Danny Kaye — was a second cousin. Faye scored her first gig at 15, quit school and before she was 20 played the Cotton Club and speakeasies like the Calais Club. Gangsters, including Al Capone, adored her, some paying $1,000 a pop for requests. Discounts were neither demanded nor offered. Eight thousand dollars bought “Love for Sale” eight times. Faye was so at home with goons, she wed one, Abe Frosch, who did time for running a gambling syndicate. Her second marriage, to Sam Farkas, who had been a professional footballer, got off to a bad start. Faye was “broken to bits,” Alpern says, in a car accident on their honeymoon. Also, Farkas beat her.

Splitting the bill with Bing Crosby at the Paramount on Broadway in 1932 led to Faye’s first movie, “Double or Nothing,” which starred Crosby, and to her first record deal, with his Decca label. Visually it was hard to know what to do with Faye in that era. She wasn’t thin, and the camera did not love her nose, which was never small. (Faye went on to make her appearance part of her shtick, with flip deprecations like “I think when you’re pretty it doesn’t matter how you wear your hair.”) All of 24 in “Double or Nothing,” Faye doesn’t look a minute under 50. She wasn’t so much costumed as slipcovered. Playing a nightclub performer, she has one delirious scene in the film. For nearly five minutes, she and Martha Raye engage in a barkfest, scatting their brains out, two aliens from planet Zazz Zu Zazz.

Collection of Tyler Alpern

The ’30s were also Faye’s big years on West 52nd Street, where she shuttled between the Hickory House, Club 18 and Leon and Eddie’s. Back on Broadway in 1943 in “Artists and Models,” she was joined for one big number by four female jazz harpists. (Not the novelty it sounds: Daphne Hellman made her debut at Town Hall around the same time.) In about 1950, fed up with orchid corsages and portrait necklines, she scalped her hair and dyed it blond, earning an attack from Leonard Feather in Downbeat when Capitol Records signed her. “After studying the physical characteristics of typical recording stars,” he wrote, “… you wouldn’t be likely to pick … a matronly looking woman with a Brooklyn birth certificate, arthritis, a tough vocabulary, a quarter of a century in show business and hardly any records at all. …” Feather later tried to make it up to her by crowning Faye “the consummate nightclub performer.” Which she was.

In 1958, Faye tripped on the carpet in a Las Vegas hotel room, broke her hip and walked with crutches or a cane for eight years. Still, she worked. She’d be carried to the piano with the lights down and discovered by the audience when they went up. She was out of hope when a third hip operation proved successful. In 1977, parts of her act were filmed for “Alexander: The Other Side of Dawn,” a TV movie about gay runaways, and before retiring in 1981, she was cast as the madam in Louis Malle’s “Pretty Baby.” A series of strokes that silenced Faye seemed especially cruel.

For Nick Christo, Frances was “like a sequined piece of driftwood.” But to quote the lady herself, “Does that sound too camp?” Having floated a fragment of music ripe with innuendo, it was the question she often asked just before leaving the stage. The way she framed it, it sounded aspirational.



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