Francks for the memories

Canadian actor, vocalist, musician and activist Don Francks. (CBC Still Photo Collection)

Veteran Toronto actor and jazz singer Don Francks was glad to meet a host of Bob Dylan facsimiles when he traveled to Montreal last year for a part in I’m Not There, filmmaker Todd Haynes’ kaleidoscopic meditation on the famous singer-songwriter. The experience, Francks says, almost made up for the time he passed up a double date with the real Bob.

“In the early ‘60s, I was living in New York with Carla Rotolo,” the 75-year-old Francks chuckles during a recent interview. “She was always talking about this great folksinger her sister… Geez, what was her—”

“Suze?” I interject. “The girl on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album?”

“Right. Now, her and Dylan, Carla and me were supposed to go out one night, except I went to see the Chambers Brothers.” Here, Francks breaks into song, using his grainy baritone to do a soulful rendition of The Chambers Brothers’ People Get Ready: “People get ready / There’s a train-a-coming…”

It comes as no surprise that Francks spent time at the edge of Dylan’s early inner circle. Like Woody Allen’s Zelig, Francks found his way into the corners of much of 20th century folklore. He was Ian Tyson’s first singing partner, and Fred Astaire’s last. He worked in vaudeville and acted in Kelly, one of the biggest-ever Broadway flops. He had his career sidetracked by the TV series Batman and played with a native rock band called the Broken Treaties.

In I’m Not There, Francks plays Hobo Joe, a vagabond pal of Haynes’s first version of Bob Dylan, an 11-year-old black kid (Carl Mark Franklin) who thinks he’s Woody Guthrie. “I once narrated a documentary for the CBC on Joe Hill, Woody’s spiritual godfather,” Francks says. The memory prompts another song, delivered in a flat-as-a-ruler Midwestern twang: “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night / Alive as you and me …”

Francks, left, and Austin Willis peform on the CBC Television program Cross Canada Hit Parade in 1958. (CBC Still Photo Collection)

Crooning like a southern sharecropper one minute and a dustbowl troubadour the next is old hat for Francks, who broke into Vancouver vaudeville imitating vocalists. “Music was my life,” he explains. “As a kid in the Depression, I set pins in a bowling alley — two cents a string — to buy records in second-hand shops. Heavy shellac 78s for pennies. I’d look for good labels: Jelly Roll Morton on Paramount, Louis Armstrong on Okeh Records. You could walk out of a store with more than you could carry for less than a dollar.

“I memorized what I liked. At 10, I appeared on a show, Saturday afternoons on CKMO in Vancouver, where I sang. Stage name was Don Francksinatra.” Francksinatra was soon doing five shows daily at the State Theatre on Main and Hastings. His big break came in 1954, when television arrived in the Canadian west and CBC hired him for the variety show Burns Chuckwagon from the Stampede Coral, where he pretended to be a crooning cowboy.

Three years later, Francks lit out for the big time, pointing his 1931 Packard Super 8 toward New York City. Driving through a small town in Montana, the singer was stopped by an excited car enthusiast who offered Francks anything — including a train ticket to anywhere he wanted — in exchange for his vintage automobile. Francks accepted the offer. When asked at the train station where he wanted to go, Francks surprised himself by saying “Toronto.”

For a while, Francks couldn’t decide between Toronto and New York. “Toronto was a great place for a musician back then,” he says, naming a dozen TV variety shows and Toronto jazz clubs like the Town Tavern, the House of Hamburg, the First Floor Club and George’s Spaghetti House.

Francks, left, performs with folk singer Ian Tyson in 1960. (Dale Barnes/CBC Still Photo Collection)

Francks rhymes off those nightclubs like they were the names of old friends. Indeed, the mimic found his own voice on these stages. Between partnering with illustrator-turned-singer Ian Tyson in Yorkville and forming “three,” a jazz trio with legendary guitarist Lenny Breau, Francks developed an intimate, unmistakably personal singing style. On a trip to New York, he appeared on The Jackie Gleason Show. Gleason was so enthusiastic about Francks’ voice that Kapp Records decided to produce an album for him. Recorded at the Village Vanguard, the album was titled Jackie Gleason Says No One in the World is Like Don Francks. Soon, Francks was trading quips with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.

Francks is surprisingly cheerful about what happened next: “In 1965, I got the lead in Kelly, a Broadway musical about a guy who jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge,” he laughs. “In rehearsal, I jumped off a bridge with my feet tied to a rope backstage — always came a foot away from cracking my head open. We got great previews, but the three unwise men, our producers, changed the whole play at the last moment. We opened and closed in one night, lost a million bucks.

“I went to Hollywood and got the lead in a TV war series, Jericho, in ‘66. All we had was a kid show playing against us.” That “kid show,” unfortunately, was Batman. Biff! Pow! — Jericho was cancelled. Francks had one last shot at stardom, playing Fred Astaire’s son in Francis Ford Coppola’s misjudged 1968 musical Finian’s Rainbow.

“When Fred Astaire was doing his last scene in the movie, dancing into the sunset, Coppola said, ‘That’s the last time we’re going to see him dance,’” Francks sighs. “We were all in tears.” Francks breaks into song again, replicating Astaire’s feathery tenor on Isn’t It a Lovely Day: “The weather is frightening / The thunder and lightning seem to be having their day / But as far as I’m concerned it’s a lovely day.”

That weather report sums up Francks’ condition in the late ‘60s. The performer hated living through the Vietnam war in America. At the same time, he had also fallen in love with a dancer he met on Finian’s Rainbow. One day, he surprised his manager by quitting a gig as an evil villain on the Mission: Impossible television series and moving with his new wife, Lili, and newborn daughter, Cree Summer, “back to civilization” — namely, the Red Pheasant Indian Reserve outside North Battleford, Saskatchewan.

Francks portrays Grey Owl on This Land in 1983. (CBC Still Photo Collection)

Francks spent the ‘70s on the reservation, although he maintained his Zelig-like knack for showing up in interesting places — he took part in a Greenpeace anti-whaling expedition and bookended the decade with satisfying acting roles in Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller in 1970 and David Cronenberg’s film Fast Company in 1979. Between those jobs, Francks lived as an adopted Cree named Iron Buffalo. He calls his experience on the reservation “my education,” but won’t elaborate, except to say, “The short answer is I learned how to see and understand; if you want the long answer, you have to sit still and listen for six weeks.”

Francks returned to Toronto in the late ‘70s for his daughter, Cree, who wanted to finish her education in the city. That she did. She went on to play in the Cosby Show spin-off A Different World (1987-93) and now does voice work for TV and movies. Francks’ son, Rainbow Sun, was born in 1979. He is a former VJ for MuchMusic who appears in the upcoming film Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem.

As for Francks himself, he says he found the return to the biz occasionally difficult. “A lot of people thought I was crazy, going off to live on a reservation like that,” he laughs. Still, the man with a thousand voices gets by. He sings occasionally at jazz venues and does voice work in cartoons (Inspector Gadget, X-Men). Some might recognize him from the five seasons he spent on the spy drama Nikita (1997-2001). Asked how he has managed to handle the manic highs and lows of a 65-year performing career, Francks says simply, “You laugh, you keep laughing.”

But surely some things just aren’t funny.

“Oh, I know,” he says. “I have a book I’m writing called ‘It’s a Nice Place to Visit, But I Wouldn’t Want to Live Here; or, The Desperation I Can Stand, It’s the Hope That’s Killing Me.’ Sometimes, you can’t laugh. That’s when you sing.” Here, Francks breaks into his last song of the afternoon, easing his voice into a familiar John Lennon anthem: “Imagine all the people, living for today-eh-eh.” Francks calls it “a natural anthem sung by an Earthling.”

Jackie Gleason was right. No one in the world is like Don Francks.

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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