THE NAKED CITY: FROM LITTLE LUCIFER TO PONTIUS PILATE

Frank Thring was an actor, television critic, raconteur and larger than life celebrity, renowned for his appearances in a number of Hollywood biblical blockbusters and his notorious acerbic wit. The one-time King Of Moomba, who died in 1994, was better known and better loved in his home town of Melbourne than he was in Sydney, but is universally remembered as a unique Australian character.

Amongst his many television appearances were a series of decidedly offbeat commercials flogging everything from cigarettes to toilet cleanser. It was just one of these ultra-quirky adverts that originally captured the attention of Sydney writer, cartoonist and musician Mark Cornwall. Mark has just published ‘To Be Frank – A Fictional Memoir’ and makes no secret that it was Frank’s portrayal of the devil for Little Lucifer barbeque starters that ‘sparked’ his original interest. He recalls:

“Growing up a Catholic school kid in Oz in the ’60s, the sight of a big fella in a full devil suit on the telly going the full high camp was arresting and mind-blowing. A much-needed antidote to the relentlessness of the mediaeval fun police personified in the Marist Brothers and the local parish priest. Frank’s TV ads were always funny, but this one also highly subversive. ‘Take it from me,’ he says to camera of the fire-starters he’s flogging, ‘ I’ve had a million years in the business.’”

Rather than write a traditional biography Mark has chosen to adopt the persona of Frank himself and address the reader in the first person, making for a far more intimate engagement. He had originally chosen to write a straight bio, the book’s original draft, but soon realised he had “managed to take this most fascinating of Australians and turn him into a bit of a bore, a fairly unengaging individual”. He then recalled ‘I, Claudius’ by Robert Graves and notes, “the conversion process was some of the best fun I’ve had in years.”

Mark was also conscious of another biography of Frank and his dad Frank Senior, published as ‘The Two Frank Thrings,’ by Peter Fitzpatrick, whilst his own book was in pre-production. He explains:

“I figured that my book would be either disregarded as a poor imitation of Peter Fitzpatrick’s, a pale impostor, or worse, I might be accused of plagiarism. Was on a hiding to nothing if I continued down that track.”  

Luckily, Mark, who incidentally does a remarkably accurate impersonation of Frank’s highly theatrical voice, plunged deep into his inner psyche, backed up by years of fastidious research. Juggling his bread-and-butter day gigs, he made numerous trips to Melbourne tracking down old colleagues of Frank and spending hours in various State libraries, thumbing through old copies of publications like TV Week, many that had yet to be digitised.

Whilst fictional liberties have certainly been taken, the wealth of factual content makes for a fascinating and highly convincing first person narrative. Witten in a rapid fire, at times diary style, Mark explains that by looking at the facts and planting himself in Frank’s shoes, or “whatever costume wardrobe he had whipped up for the circumstances”, he was able to speculate how he would have responded. He adds:

I was lucky to get some terrific advice from Meredith Rose, a former editor at Penguin, who schooled me in the basics of how to capture the storyteller’s ‘voice,’ creating a narrator who enables  the reader to form a sonic and visual impression of what this person is like, indeed why they are the way they are, just from how they say things.  And, yeah, a lot of what’s in the book came directly from the horse’s mouth – Frank’s habit of calling everyone ‘pixie, ‘butch,’ ‘baby’ and his description of moviemaking as ‘hatcheries of disasters’…”

Frank Thring led a flamboyant, outspoken and at times controversial lifestyle, one that could easily have been consumed by the sensationalising, tell all, tacky biography. Mark’s first person approach eschews the typical Hollywood beat up with a sympathetic but at times brutally honest account. He points out:

“I often imagined myself not so much as Frank himself but as an actual biographer, commissioned by Frank to ghost write his life story, sitting down with him at his Addams Family mansion in Toorak and asking the tough questions- then imagining his probable responses.”

The result is not only a valuable record of Australian cultural history but a highly engaging  fun read.

You’ll find ‘To Be Frank’ online at the usual outlets or grab a copy at The Bookshop in Darlinghurst, Better Read Than Dead in Newtown, Urchin Books in Marrickville or Hill Of Content in Balmain.