Susan Emerling

Oppenheimer inherited control of De Beers from his father, Sir Ernest, who seized the reins of the diamond empire of Cecil Rhodes — eponymous founder of Rhodesia and the prestigious Rhodes Scholarships — in 1929, mere months before the U.S. stock market crash. Although it was Sir Ernest who built De Beers into a worldwide cartel, it was Harry Oppenheimer who strengthened his father’s legacy through his ingenious sculpting of the public’s demand for the rock. Since inheriting the chairmanship two years ago, Harry’s son, Nicky, has been charged with maintaining the cartel’s market domination while appearing to offer the transparency a modern business demands.

But Nicky has a rough road ahead. The growing outcry against the marketing of so-called conflict diamonds or blood diamonds — defined by one human rights organization as “diamonds that originate from areas under control of forces that are in opposition to elected and internationally recognized governments” — expanding antitrust legislation in both the United States and Europe, and the rise of new diamond suppliers outside De Beers’ realm of control are combining to undermine the company’s hitherto unchallenged domination of the world diamond market. But never fear — following his father’s example, Nicky Oppenheimer hopes to market De Beers out of its current troubles.

Despite its elite status, the diamond, which can be found in abundance from southern Africa to Australia to northern Canada, is not the rarest of gems. With no intrinsic value, all a gem-quality diamond has to offer is the perception of its preciousness. As a symbol of eternal love, the tradition of the diamond engagement ring has become so pervasive that it’s hard to believe that this is a fairly recent phenomenon. And an extremely calculated one — the result of a marketing campaign developed at a time when the demand for diamonds had sunk to an all-time low and an increasing supply threatened the precious (as opposed to semiprecious) nature of the stones.

In 1938, nine years after seizing control of De Beers, in the wake of the Depression and with Europe bracing for another world war, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer found himself with no place to market his wares. Rather than risk a plunge in the status and price of diamonds, he sent 29-year-old Harry from Johannesburg, South Africa, to New York to meet with the N.W. Ayer advertising agency. The plan was to transform America’s taste for small, low-quality stones into a true luxury market that would absorb the excess production of higher-quality gems no longer selling in Europe.

As Edward Jay Epstein outlined in his 1982 book “The Rise and Fall of Diamonds,” N.W. Ayer saw the challenge as one rooted in mass psychology, meticulously researching the attitudes of American men and women about romance and gift giving. From this research, the slogan “A Diamond Is Forever” was born, launching one of the most brilliant, sophisticated and enduring marketing campaigns of all time. Without ever mentioning the name De Beers, the campaign set out to seduce every man, woman and child in America with the notion that no romance is complete without a rock — and the bigger the rock, the better the romance. That men also now had a way to show the world how much money they made was an added bonus.

With the help of gossip sheets packed with stories of diamond rings and romance, De Beers transformed the United States into the premier market for the world’s gem-quality diamonds. Once it conquered the hearts and wallets of America, it set out to conquer Japan and Brazil, and when World War II was over, it began the reconquest of Europe.

The slogan “A Diamond Is Forever” was also designed to convince the purchaser that although a diamond is a good investment, for sentimental reasons no rock should ever be resold. Given the continuous mining of new stones — not to mention the half-billion or so carats that will never rust, break or wear out walking around on the hands, necks, ears and lapels of hundreds of millions of women — the last thing De Beers wants is to have previously sold stones coming back onto the market.

De Beers has enough problems dealing with the oversupply of new diamonds. In the mid-1950s De Beers was overwhelmed by a flood of small diamonds pouring out of recently discovered mines in the Soviet Union. After nearly a decade and a half of convincing America of the importance of larger stones, suddenly the company needed to create a virtue out of the previously disparaged small diamonds. To accomplish this, De Beers invented the “eternity ring,” a single, unbroken band of up to 25 evenly matched small stones. The ring was introduced in the early ’60s as the best way to renew vows in the home stretch of a long marriage and the best way to wear diamonds without the ostentation of big stones. Today, the United States absorbs 50 percent of the world’s diamonds, with an estimated 70 percent of American women owning at least one rock.

As it turns out, this ideal of perpetual ownership is a healthy delusion for the owners of all but the rarest and most expensive diamonds. Despite the illusion that it retains its value, a diamond can only be sold for less than its wholesale price, not what one would consider a good return on investment.

Nonetheless, the rock is alive and well as a status symbol in America, and the current cachet of colored diamonds has added an extra degree of elitism to the raging luxury marketplace. Despite what the industry refers to as “competing luxuries” (four-figure handbags, five-figure watches and six-figure cars), this fall’s marketing blitz for the rarer-than-rare black diamond will ratchet up the stakes even further.

But manipulating perception isn’t the only way De Beers has maintained its control. As has been extensively reported in a number of publications, including the Economist, the Atlantic Monthly and Stefan Kanfer’s 1993 book “The Last Empire,” De Beers has also manipulated an artificial sense of the diamond’s scarcity by buying up new mines, freezing out challengers and mopping up excess supply. Through a web of intricately intertwined businesses, De Beers successfully created a cartel in the strictest sense of the word, staving off dreaded price fluctuations by controlling everything from the stones’ removal from the ground to their delivery into the hands of jewelers.

The Central Selling Organization in Europe handles the purchasing and sorting of stones from its far-flung field offices, then sorts and values the stones in preparation for sale. The Diamond Trading Company in London channels first-tier sales through an arcane ritual of “sights,” where 125 handpicked buyers, or “sightholders,” meet in London 10 times a year for the privilege of purchasing a nonnegotiable, preselected box of assorted unpolished stones on an all-or-nothing basis. The Syndicate in Israel, as well as cutters and polishers in India, Belgium and New York, process the stones for the next tier of buyers.

But now there are new pressures on the horizon for De Beers that are forcing it to back away from abundant supplies of some of the world’s finest raw diamonds in order to preserve its image on the battlefield of public perception. Using the phrase “conflict diamonds” or “blood diamonds,” Global Witness and the United Nations, among others, are drawing attention to the cost of human suffering associated with diamonds, forcing a level of accountability into an industry that has been notoriously low on disclosure.

By focusing on the carnage associated with conflict diamonds these groups have forced De Beers to distinguish between diamonds mined in peaceful countries controlled by legitimate governments and diamonds harvested at gunpoint by rebel forces in places like the Congo, Sierra Leone and Angola, where endless battles have turned some of the world’s most minerally rich countries into what the United Nations Children’s Fund has called the worst places on Earth to be a child. The money generated from the sale of conflict diamonds goes to buy more guns, which perpetuate the battles over control of the diamond mines. Until this recent pressure, De Beers admitted in its public statements and annual reports that it was the purchaser of a large portion of Angolan stones.

In an ironic twist on De Beers’ longstanding ability to control perceptions, the company is now attempting to transform its discomfort into a marketing virtue, seizing this moment to develop a consumer brand identity out of its previous anonymity. De Beers announced earlier this year that it intends to embargo all conflict diamonds and provide a certificate of each stone’s origin with each sale. To ensure compliance, the company announced its intention to hold its sightholders to the same standard. In doing this, De Beers is hoping to establish itself in the public’s mind as the dividing line between the forces of good and the forces of evil, a self-appointed clearinghouse that will prevent buyers from bloodying their hands in the simple pursuit of luxury. From now on, you’ll know if that big rock your fianci just put on your finger was dug out of the ground by brutalized children or waddled out of a war zone in a smuggler’s rectum.

Human rights groups have praised De Beers’ promise to embargo the conflict diamonds as the only ray of hope on a very bleak landscape, but the embargo still fails to address the simple truth that one of the diamond’s historic virtues and liabilities is that it packs a lot of value into a very small package. This is highly transportable wealth. Millions of dollars can be walked across a border to a nonconflict zone in a sock and multimillions can be carried in a small suitcase. Because of the extremely high quality and large size of the diamonds being mined in Angola and Sierra Leone, allowing such a profitable and abundant supply onto the open market would undermine De Beers’ control of its cartel.

Unfortunately for the world’s policing agencies, the good stones and the bad have been mixed together for so long that it is virtually impossible for all but highly skilled gemologists to tell them apart. Global Witness holds that it is not as difficult as generally believed to distinguish the origin of the raw stones, but even it concedes that once the diamonds are polished, the traces of their geographic origins are erased. Conflict diamonds account for 15 percent of the world’s supply, an estimated 50 percent of which ends up in the United States.

De Beers’ use of the branding process to guarantee access to guilt-free diamonds comes at a time when the European Union and the U.K. are trying to implement antitrust regulations modeled on those in the U.S. — where De Beers has already been repeatedly investigated and indicted for its trade in industrial diamonds. In part due to the Department of Justice’s inability to win a conviction against De Beers because of the inaccessibility of evidence, Congress passed the 1994 International Antitrust Enforcement Assistance Act — aimed at opening doors for the sharing of information on antitrust cases with foreign governments. Citing De Beers’ anti-competitive practices, the Department of Justice continues to block the company from directly conducting business in the U.S.

De Beers appears to have realized that the writing is on the wall for its cartel, in any case. This July, with the help of American management agency Bain & Company, De Beers announced a radical new business plan that attempts to deal with all of De Beers’ problems at once. In addition to the certificates of origin, De Beers announced that the company intends to end the system of stockpiling diamond supplies to control prices. By reducing the assets it has tied up in the stockpile from $3.9 billion to $2.5 billion, it hopes to increase profitability and free up extra cash to spend on the advertising of diamonds as a branded luxury item.

De Beers will use the innocuous sounding Diamond Trading Company as its brand name, identified by its “forevermark” logo. Evidenced by its recent request to meet in Europe with Assistant Attorney General Joel I. Klein of the antitrust division, De Beers may realize the desirability of resolving the antitrust impediments to becoming the Coca-Cola of diamonds, despite the cost. Klein has so far turned down the invitation.

De Beers’ competitors have been emboldened by this weakness in De Beers’ fagade. In 1999 Tiffany & Co., a sightholder and one of the world’s largest buyers of diamonds, made a side deal with Canadian miners for an independent supply of diamonds, betting that the Tiffany & Co. brand name, with its signature pale blue boxes and white ribbons, would be just as sparkling as a De Beers logo. To make matters worse, Australia, which has discovered enormous diamond reserves in its Argyle mines, has begun to sell its stones directly on the world market, bypassing De Beers entirely. Certain Russian mines have also allowed their distribution contracts with De Beers to lapse in an attempt to take their goods straight to market.

In the meantime, De Beers is carrying on the Harry Oppenheimer tradition of mentoring the diamond buyer through major life decisions. Using its Web site, it answers all the objective questions about cut, clarity, color and carats, while paternalistically educating the consumer about the symbolic meaning of diamonds, an appropriate salary-to-expenditure ratio and how to glean the maximum psychological impact from the presentation of the gift. It offers 12 original “Ways to Surprise Her,” ranging from having “a cake on display in the window of her favorite bakery with your personal message and topped with the diamond” to the unimaginably ironic: making “the diamond a game piece during a game of Monopoly.”

Try it. It worked for Harry Oppenheimer.

The fact is, being wealthy doesn’t come cheap, and sooner or later just about everyone needs a little help to make ends meet. Whether you need $100 to pay a phone bill, mad money for the cash-only Httel du Cap, a quick bailout without a credit check or friendly terms with which to upgrade last year’s Cartier Pasha chronograph to this year’s Patek Philippe, you can stop by South Beverly Wilshire Jewelry and Loan in Beverly Hills and ask for Yossi Dina.

You’ll instantly know who he is. An intense, dark-skinned man in his mid-40s who could double for Yul Brynner, Dina is an impatient charmer. In a fast-forward combination of Hebrew and heavily accented English, he cuts through pleasantries with a rapid-fire “How much you want for it?” or “How much you give me for it?” before asking, “You want to come to yoga with me?” or “When are you and your boyfriend getting married?”

Despite the fancy name, there is one word missing from the marquee of South Beverly Wilshire Jewelry and Loan: pawn. But if you’re thinking old cameras, electric guitars and Timex watches, think again. This is the pawn of classic, fully restored E Type Jaguars, 1929 Georges Braque oil paintings, czarist Russian tiaras, 14th century Chinese jade, vintage Jaeger-LeCoultre watches and the contents of an aging movie star’s wine cellar.

“I don’t take electricity or garbage,” says Dina. “I take good collateral. Usually I take jewelry.” He’ll also take an original Tiffany lamp, a first-edition book or a letter from Greta Garbo — anything that’s highly collectible or has a quantifiable resale value. At the moment he’s even holding an Oscar for best picture — but won’t reveal its owner. That sort of boasting could ruin a business that, at least in part, is based on discreetly helping people when they need discreet help the most.

Clients stream into Jewelry and Loan all day long, loaded with valuable merchandise and a need for fast cash. They bring their grandmother’s silver, paintings they’ve owned for 30 years, rugs from the old country, jewelry from their exes and $18,000 watches they bought last week. At the moment, says Dina, he’s seeing a lot of Russian immigrants with “great stuff, but no cash and no credit.” He even has a client (who will remain nameless), a famous actor who makes $8 million to $10 million a picture, who pawned his motorcycle for $10,000.

“I don’t know why. He needed money immediately. He got cash no questions asked. He picked up [the motorcycle] the next day. I am like a cash machine. I’m sure he has the money. He probably could not get home. It’s not logical. I can never understand people. But you don’t have to — it’s nice, it’s more magical.”

Dealing with people at their highs and lows has given Dina a certain expertise on human nature. “I sell a lot of engagement rings. I can tell immediately if I am going to buy the ring back or not.” His customers are often people in some sort of trouble. “Usually a pawnshop in America will take advantage of that,” says Dina. “Somebody come with a piece worth $100,000, they give them $1,000. They want them to lose it. I am not like that.”

Dina says he tries to offer top dollar and hold on to a piece even after he has been forced by law to foreclose on it (if the interest is not paid in four months). Dina knows that people pawn things they want to try to keep, and if a customer pawns something and then loses it, he will not remain a customer. “I take a big risk. I love that. I work with a feeling in my stomach. Usually I don’t make mistakes. Sometimes, I give more money than something is worth because the watch belonged to [a customer's] father, and I am sure he will come back.”

Sometimes, though, Dina finds himself in the role of harbinger of bad news. He was once forced to tell a woman who came in to appraise a five-carat diamond ring — the one thing of value she’d gotten during her 30-year marriage — that her rock was a fake.

Still, this is not a charity, it’s a business — and an extremely profitable one. Usually, loans equal 80 percent of the wholesale value of a piece. For a loan of $2,500, the law demands that the pawnbroker charge 2.3 percent interest per month, or $57.50. If you pick up pawned collateral after four months, you owe the pawnbroker $2,500 plus $230 in interest. (There is usually a three-month minimum on a “ticket” or a loan of this size.)

If you can’t come up with the principal, you can renew your loan for an additional four months and so on — for as long as it takes you to come up with the money. After a year, when the interest has risen to $690, or 27.6 percent of the total loan amount, you’ll need $3,190 to redeem your collateral. If the loan is greater than $2,500, the pawnbroker can charge whatever interest he wants, typically 3 to 4 percent per month (depending on the quality and liquidity of the collateral) with a one-month minimum.

Dina insists that his interest is low compared with that of other pawnshops, but even the typical interest rate of 4 percent a month adds up to an annual rate of 48 percent, or $1,440 on a $3,000 loan, making the 23 percent APR on a credit card look cheap.

Despite the exorbitant rates, the advantage of a pawn loan is its immediacy. With the right collateral, you can be out the door in less than five minutes with $1 million in your pocket — having only filled out a ticket. The gamble a customer takes is whether he will be able to make the interest payments and redeem his collateral within four months. The pawnbroker does not risk anything, as the principal is already paid in full (with the collateral) even if the customer never comes back.

Dina’s Beverly Hills location gives him access to an extraordinary array of high-quality merchandise. In the process of helping the rich quickly liquefy their assets, Dina has gained a reputation as perhaps the best pawnbroker in America. “I deal with stuff that’s worth millions of dollars, and usually I do something that other people don’t do: I pawn art. A lot of pawnshops don’t take art. People are afraid because there are a lot of fakes; they don’t take chances.”

Often his investment in the merchandise is so low that he is able to offer his retail customers fabulous deals. And it is thrilling to turn it over. “It’s exciting to sell a 22-carat D flawless [diamond]. It’s not a lot of money you make; you make a little bit of money because it is an expensive piece. Jewelry is a luxury. Jewelry is not something you have to buy. To take from somebody so much money for a stone, I think it’s genius.”

Dina is a street-smart survivor who knows and loves his business. “At first it makes you feel good to work with people, but I love the excitement, I love the good pieces coming. You know, if you come to the store, it’s like a movie. I like all this. You make decision to give $100,000 or $500,000 in like two seconds.”

Dina is the middle son in a family of nine. His parents were Iraqi Jews who immigrated to Old Jaffa, Israel, where he was given the middle name Haim, which means life, because of his many close brushes with death. His father, a baker, who Dina says had the power to heal with his hands, died at 41, just weeks before Dina’s bar mitzvah. To ease the family’s burden, Dina left home to live in a kibbutz before joining the Israeli army. There he was placed in an elite squad of commando parachutists in time for the 1973 war. That he stays in touch with his squadron almost 30 years later speaks to the intensity of that experience.

After the war, the government sent him to work in Paris for two years, but he refuses to specify what the work entailed. After Paris, he returned to Israel and discovered that there was a six-month wait to get into law school. He decided to visit his brother in New York, and wound up working in Harlem handing out fliers for couch cleaning. “There was no fear because I didn’t know what America was all about. I saw one time some people put a car on fire and I was cheering for that because I didn’t know that was a bad thing to do, you know?”

Later, Dina, his brother and a handful of friends signed up to drive a car to Los Angeles, taking turns sleeping in the vehicle as they made their way across America. After he arrived in California, speaking very little English, a group of Scientologists got Dina a job selling $5 and $10 pieces of jewelry door-to-door in office buildings and beauty parlors. He says that Lana Turner was one of his early customers.

Soon, he had saved $2,000, bought his own company and hired three people to do the legwork for him. After being held up at gunpoint, however, he moved into the pawn business — he’d found his calling. That was 15 years ago. Today, Dina lives in a beach house in Malibu that at various times belonged to Al Jolson, Bobby Vinton and Roy Orbison’s widow.

He bought the house with the monumental profits from a $4,000 loan secured with a good-looking painting by an artist he’d never heard of. That’s all he’ll say about it, except that he had no idea the painting was worth so much money and he was not the first person the owner tried to sell it to. In his exuberance, he’d love to tell the entire story, but he knows he can’t. “I bought some good pieces, but I never know the value. You get some letter or some clothes from a very famous actor, you get it for yourself, you own the piece and you find out it’s worth 100 times more than what you gave.” But he can’t be an expert in everything and the risk is that it could be worth 100 times less than what he paid for it.

Despite his gift for deal making, Dina’s aware that there are some things whose value defies reason. “My older brother has a watch that belonged to my father. The watch is not worth 10 bucks. It’s plated, it’s a nothing watch. I gave my brother $25,000 for my father’s watch.” Ask him if he still has the watch, and he says no. He gave his older brother the money because he needed help and then gave the watch to his younger brother because he was only 7 years old when their father died and he didn’t get a chance to know him.

“For some people money is God. For other people money means nothing, just survival,” says Dina. “I don’t care for money. Money means nothing to me. I feel sorry for people who work for money. They’ll never be happy. When you work for something you love, it’s like food, it’s like drugs. You sleep good at night, you do the right thing. I’m at peace with myself.” He adds, “Money is like woman: You love it, you hate it and you cannot live without.”

In fact, the restaurants are so successful that when the doors to the 6-year-old Nobu Restaurant in New York open at 5:45 p.m., there is already a line of 30 people, with and without reservations, who have been waiting on the sidewalk for 45 minutes. Even then, anyone who is seated is “signed” to a verbal contract guaranteeing they will relinquish the table in time for the almighty 8 and 8:30 p.m. reservations.

It is what Richie Notar, former |ber-busboy of Studio 54 cum director of operations of five international Nobu restaurants and partner in Nobu Malibu, calls “a powerful reservation.” Nobu London, Nobu Tokyo and the original Matsuhisa Restaurant in Beverly Hills are also powerful reservations. The soon-to-open Nobus in Miami’s South Beach; Milan, Italy; and Sydney, Australia; are expected to share in the success.

But for all the frenzy and despair surrounding getting a table, once you’re seated what lies ahead is an exquisite meal. Matsuhisa has invented a variation on traditional Japanese cuisine, blending the finest quality fish with nontraditional Peruvian and European ingredients like chilies, truffles, fois gras, garlic, olive oil and caviar, to come up with exquisite signature dishes such as yellow tail sashimi with jalapeqos, squid pasta in light garlic sauce and new-style sashimi.

Born and raised in Japan, Matsuhisa has earned his right to innovate honestly by undergoing a rigorous classical Japanese sushi chef training, which began at the age of 18 and included sleeping on the floor of his mentor’s restaurant. His duties included carrying the bucket on 6 a.m. trips to Tokyo’s vast Tsukiji fish market and working until 1 a.m., 28 days a month for a tiny salary. Three years passed before he was allowed to touch the rice to make his first piece of sushi.

Despite the rigors of his training, this was something he had dreamed of since he was 12 years old when his older brother took him to a sushi restaurant for the first time. “Sushi is something very exclusive. It is not like a McDonald’s, not like a hot dog, not like a French fry. It’s very high-class cooking in Japan. It was different world, very powerful, with all the different types of fish and the old men working at the counter.”

As soon as he graduated from high school where he was preparing to study architecture, he asked his family’s permission to train to be a sushi chef.

Seven years later, in 1972, when Matsuhisa was 24 years old, a Japanese-Peruvian businessman who came into the restaurant twice a year invited him to Lima to open a traditional Japanese restaurant to cater to the executives at the big Japanese companies who had offices in Peru. Matsuhisa was instantly captivated by the local cuisine.

“Peru was the Incas, it has 3,000 to 4,000 years of history. Lima is close to the Pacific Ocean, so there is a lot of seafood. I’m very interested in different types of food — ceviches, arroz con pollo, cilantro, garlic, chili, soups like chupe de mariscos. A different spice is the most interesting thing to me.”

But after three years, when the Peruvian economy was suffering the effects of a failed agrarian reform, Matsuhisa had an argument with his partners who wanted him to economize. Frustrated by their demands, he decided to dissolve the partnership. “OK, I was young. I’m a chef, chef means like an artist; artist means doesn’t care about food cost. They tell me you must buy low-cost fish, labor’s too high, cut people. It’s not my way. I like to have the best quality fish, the best service. This is still my philosophy. That’s why Matsuhisa, New York, all the restaurants are a success.”

After Peru, Matsuhisa tried Argentina, but despite the fact that there was a lot of fresh fish and three or four Japanese restaurants in Buenos Aires, in 1975 not a lot of Argentines were eating sushi. So he packed up his wife and two children and returned to Japan. But the country was then undergoing its own economic woes in the wake of the collapse of the “high growth age.” Matsuhisa, however, had been spoiled by a lifestyle in South America that included a large house, a maid and gardeners. Life in a small Japanese apartment seemed less appealing. When he was offered a partnership in a new restaurant in Anchorage, Alaska, he asked his wife if he could try one more time to make a go of it outside of Japan.

Funds were limited so he spent six months doing the construction himself before finally opening Ki Oi (meaning Private Members Club) in 1977. Working 50 days straight after the opening, Matsuhisa took his first day off to celebrate Thanksgiving. “I was at a friend’s house drinking wine, eating turkey. My partners call me: ‘Nobu, hurry to the restaurant. There’s a fire.’” He thought it was a joke, except that he heard the sirens over the phone and saw flames as he drove to the restaurant.

“Anchorage is a very small town and I can see the fire from far away. I was suicidal. I lost everything. It was loan money, no insurance. All I cared about was, ‘How can I die? Was I going to jump in the ocean? Jump in front of the train?’”

Asked how he recovered, he says, “My babies were happy because usually I’m not home.” Matsuhisa then packed up his family and returned to Japan. He stayed a week, just long enough to settle his wife and children with her family and then returned to Los Angeles like a runaway, with one small suitcase and $24 in cash. Once back in L.A., he found work as a sushi chef. When the restaurant was sold he moved to another restaurant. When that restaurant was put up for sale, he went to a friend for advice. “I don’t want to go back and be like Anchorage and I still owe a lot of money, I have responsibilities to my wife and my family. This guy takes $70,000 and says ‘Nobu, use this money. Anytime you get money you send it back.’ He gave it to me like free money.”

That’s when he opened Matsuhisa Restaurant in 1987, marking the beginning of what he refers to as “the Nobu Matsuhisa style.” Although the 18-seat sushi restaurant was not initially a success, slowly the Hollywood crowd discovered it.

In a now famous, Schwab’s Soda Fountain style-story, Robert De Niro came into the restaurant with Roland Joffe (who directed him in “The Mission”) and became entranced by Matsuhisa’s food. Matsuhisa had no idea who his famous client was.

De Niro invited him to New York, where the actor had just bought a coffee warehouse in lower Manhattan. They walked around the empty space talking about De Niro’s plans and his hope that Matsuhisa would open the future TriBeCa Grill. But he wasn’t ready.

Even though Matsuhisa turned down De Niro’s offer, De Niro kept eating at Matsuhisa Restaurant whenever he was shooting a movie in Los Angeles. “Bob doesn’t say anything after I say no. Then finally after four years he calls me at my house. Is Nobu ready to come to New York? Do you know what it means? It means he is waiting, waiting, waiting, four years for me. He was watching me. The first time he called me nobody knew Matsuhisa, because I was not a success yet. Then after four years a lot of people knew my name, the restaurant was a success. That’s why I came. I so appreciate him. He says ‘Don’t worry … I am here.’”

Nobu, as the restaurant was named, opened in midsummer, when Manhattan’s who’s who has fled to the Hamptons. Other Japanese chefs in New York told Matsuhisa he’d be out of business within six months, but the restaurant was an instant success, drawing everyone from former Secretary of State George Shultz to members of the glitterati. Once Nobu New York had opened, Matsuhisa and his partners, De Niro, restaurateur Drew Neiporent and movie producer Meir Teper (“What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?”), opened Nobu restaurants in London and then Tokyo.

If New York was risky, Tokyo was a downright intimidating return for this prodigal son who was very familiar with the restrictive environment of traditional Japanese cooking. “I was worried about it before opening because I’m afraid they didn’t respect my food in Japan, because the Japanese are always very traditional about Japanese food. This is different from the United States, Japanese food has a long history.”

Despite his concerns, Matsuhisa was confident about his food and his understanding of what people would enjoy eating. He also understood the fashion component of the restaurant business and the fact that the Japanese, like the denizens of his other cities, were looking for a new flavor, not to mention that his reputation and his celebrity clientele would make the restaurant a success.

Then came the backlash. When the Los Angeles Times did a story about the Japanese delicacy of “ikezukuri,” live-fish sashimi, where the fish is carved live and reassembled on the plate, head and all. A local news crew picked up the story and showed up with cameras asking Matsuhisa to demonstrate ikezukuri. He pulled a live fish out of the tank, sliced it and served it. After the piece was broadcast, Matsuhisa had 50 calls in 10 minutes accusing him of cruelty, including calls from Greenpeace and animal-rights activists. He was incredulous. “People eat the chicken, people eat the beef, they still say, ‘Don’t kill the fish.’ This is a 2,000-year-old, very traditional Japanese way to prepare fish. It has a history.”

He called the station asking them not to air the piece again, but they told him that all the calls they’d gotten were from people looking for reservations. “The TV station lied to me. The next Sunday they showed it again twice. Again a lot of phone calls, a lot of complaints. You know what they say? ‘You going to kill the fish, I’m going to put a bomb in front of the restaurant.’ I think, are you crazy? Fish! I just show the ikezukuri! I was so scared of a bomb that I never do ikezukuri anymore. But,” he adds, “we still do the live lobster.”

Flying on the Concorde, Matsuhisa visits as many as three different restaurants in three different cities in a single day. At this point he only cooks about three to four days a month, spending the rest of the time supervising the kitchens, communicating new recipes to his various chefs and combing Tsukiji for new ingredients.

Strolling around this year’s James Beard Awards (the culinary equivalent of the Oscars, where Matsuhisa was nominated for his third consecutive “Outstanding Chef of the Year” award), dressed in an elegant Armani tux, he is friendly with many of the other top chefs. But one, Wolfgang Puck, who is also based in Los Angeles, has a special place in Matsuhisa’s heart.

“They are all my friends, but Wolfgang Puck is my hero. He has a good business, plus he is Austrian. He came here and is a success.” Matsuhisa has even opened the first of his simpler noodle and tempura restaurants, Ubon, in the Beverly Center mall, which is clearly inspired by Puck’s chain of cafes.

Like Puck, Matsuhisa is becoming a celebrity in his own right. Herb Ritts photographed him for a Gap ad a couple of years ago. This made his face so recognizable that on a trip to Japan with De Niro to promote “Casino” (in which Matsuhisa made his acting debut in the role of a Japanese gambler), people in a department store recognized him, but not the dark-haired white guy he was with.

With fame has come fortune: Last year Forbes magazine put Matsuhisa on its list of top five money earners in his profession, (Puck made number one on the list). He’s even up for another movie role in the big-budget feature “Pearl Harbor.”

But Matsuhisa’s got other things on his mind. He is spending three days a month in Japan working on his first cookbook. “I’m 51 years old. What I do takes time, but in meantime it’s on the table, people use chopsticks, my art is gone. Every dish is being photographed. It’s like all my souvenirs, a chef’s life. Fifty-one is the best age, I know the food, I know the fish, everything is a lifetime. I’m not doing this for the money, it’s my life.”

Forget about Madonna’s chameleonic transformations, Mae West figured out
her magic formula and then packaged and preserved it the way Procter &
Gamble might have, forever. She even turned down the Norma Desmond role
in “Sunset Boulevard” to keep the legend intact. West also knew her
audience: In 1971, the 78-year-old legend told Playboy magazine that
“camp” could be defined as “the kinda comedy where they imitate me.”

Shear plays both Mae West and Jo, an out-of-work actress, who meets
Charlie, a movie archives librarian (played with comic sweetness by Kevin
Chamberlin), while laying flowers at West’s crypt in a Queens, N.Y., cemetery.
The two tentative soulmates bond over a shared obsession with the actress
and find happiness by unleashing their “inner Mae Wests” in all her
taboo-busting sexuality and self-invented glory.

Shear, who also wrote “Dirty Blonde,” already demonstrated her comedic
talents in “Blown Sideways Through Life,” a one-woman show about holding
and losing 64 different jobs — from law firm temp to whorehouse receptionist
– before inventing steady work for herself in the theater.

Shear, like West, has made an asset out of setting herself apart from the
“clean blondes” of her era. From her “Dirty Girl” bubble bath in Brooklyn, N.Y.,
Claudia Shear demonstrates that she has more in common with Mae West
than just their Brooklyn roots.

Why Mae West?

James Lapine, who
is a very famous theater director and writer, called me on the phone and
said, “Would you like to work on a project with me?” And then he said the
words “Mae West,” and I really did feel a thrill go through my body and I
thought, my God! Why didn’t I ever think of that?

It really is a perfect fit for you. You seem to have inhabited her.

They would laugh in rehearsal, I will say. Kevin turned to me one day and
said, “It’s like you’re channeling her.” One of my favorite lines in the play –
not that you should quote yourself, it’s so irky — is “Obsession grants the
patience to really fine-tune the details.”

Dirty Blonde seems to celebrate celebrity worship …

That’s what people say, but I never analyzed it to that point. I think what it
celebrates is not celebrity worship, it’s really the obsession with anything. It
just happens to be celebrity worship. To me obsession is a grand thing, and I
don’t mean where you get into madness, but obsession in its most wonderful
way is very pure, because it is something that does not involve you and your
ego. If you are obsessed by Buster Keaton, it’s not about you, who you are,
how much money you have, what your thighs look like, what you got, what
somebody else didn’t get — it’s about Buster Keaton. There’s nothing I can’t
become obsessed with; it’s just that the obsession happens to be Mae
West.

Is there something particular about Mae West’s persona that frees
Charlie and Jo from their earnestness and their self-imposed exile from
society?

When I was writing the play, if I wrote something that James thought was
really spelled out, he would tap his nose. I spent two and a half years
writing the play so it wouldn’t be too on the nose, so I’m not going to now sit
in interviews and explain the whole goddamned thing away.

In fact, the only time the Mae West character talks about her inner self in
the play — she talks about her colonics!

Mae was very obsessed with colonics. That’s totally true. Once, she was at
some Hollywood mogul’s house with the Hollywood mogul’s wife and she told
her that colonics would make it smell like hot soup when she went. She even
said it in her book, “Sex, Health & ESP,” which must be read to be believed.
It has things in it about how to massage a man’s prostate with a condom on
your finger. I didn’t even put that in the play. Okay? Okay.

It was great to see the history of how Mae West invented the “Mae
West” persona for herself as well.

Absolutely, absolutely. She tried everything. She was the nut case, the “it”
girl, the Eva Tanguay type. She would do everything in vaudeville — and it
just didn’t work.

Why do you think this persona stuck?

I think because her sexuality was very predatory, very masculine and when
she put on her mother’s clothing, so to speak, when she put on the Gay ’90s
thing, it gave it a nostalgic tint. What is it that John Fowles said? “The past is
a different country, they think differently there.” It was a different country
that she was living in, so they could accept what she was like more. And on a
purely pedestrian level, she just looked better in the dress. I mean, you
couldn’t really find anything that I’d look worse in than a flapper-style 1920′s
dress.

One of the things that you always hear people say
about Mae West is that she is a female female impersonator.

People always say that, but I don’t quite get it. I think it’s because she walks
like a truck driver with hips, God bless her, I love that. And she does hit
people, which I find incredibly fabulous. And of course my favorite thing about
Mae West is that she actually spits on someone. She does it in “I’m No
Angel.” I tried to work that into the play until James said, “Claudia, would
you let it go please, let it go, because it isn’t going in, we can’t fit it in.” I
can’t tell you how much I loved that. I don’t think you can find another
Hollywood icon who takes a mouthful of water and spits it down someone’s
back.

She just broke all boundaries.

I don’t think there were boundaries. You had to remember that this was a
woman who by the age of God-knows-what, was in vaudeville. And like
Keaton and Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, when you came up through
vaudeville you had one tenet of existence: Does it work? Did you hit it right?
Did you get the laugh?

Speaking of hitting it, one moment in the play that definitely worked,
despite how jaded we’ve become to nudity …

The booby! The booby! Thank you, thank you! When I was writing the play, I
did a lot of primary research, and many of the reviews in Variety at the time
talked about how “she was fiddling with her dress strap” and how “the
dcolletage [was] too much” and how she drove the Yale boys wild and they
tore the theater apart screaming, “Boola, boola!” And I’m thinking, what in
the hell did she do? By our standards today, it was probably tame. I didn’t
want to do a “mother wore tights” sort of thing of like, “Here’s my ankle,
oooh! It’s shocking!” So how could I actually show that she shocked people?
Well, I thought, “You gotta show some pink.” And they don’t expect me to do
it because I’m not some 20-year-old dancer.

Living in Los Angeles, you get so accustomed to nudity having to look a
certain way, you see so many pairs of false breasts … it begins to seem like
it’s more about chattel than it is about sex.

You know, that’s why you have to go to Paris or London. It’s just about
being female. You’re at a party, they’re there to have as much drink and sex
as possible. And they’re not looking for the girl who has the most toned
upper arm. Which I find much healthier frankly, not that you should be drunk
and have casual sex, I’m not propounding that, but I think New York and L.A.
to some extent are all about “Are you beautiful?” “Who are you?” “Do you
make a lot of money?” Oh fuck off! Are you gonna have fun? Are you gonna
get tipsy at a party and dance, or what? You know, I’m a party girl. I go
where the parties are. And I’m a horrible sofa whore.

Does that mean there isn’t a sofa you haven’t slept on?

You know, I really haven’t traveled much. I haven’t been able to. I go to
London, Paris and Rome. Those are the three places in my life where I have
lived and where I have friends. I have whole other lives, you might say.

Do you speak other languages?

I speak Italian and French. But badly, not so that people aren’t wincing as I
do it at them. They sort of flinch as I speak French. Ouch. Some people will
say to me if they hear me speak Italian, “Oh, you speak beautiful Italian.” I’ll
say, “Do you speak Italian?” They’ll say, “no,” and then I’ll say, “I’m
murdering it.” But I get my point across and people are listening to the
sound of my voice, which just drove me to learn other languages.

Your voice is certainly being heard. The theater was packed the other
night.

Packed! Packed! We’re packed! We had a cancellation line last night. I think
that Lapine would probably hate for me to say this, but then again he
doesn’t like much. And I feel very arrogant saying this, because he is a great
man and I am but an egg, but Lapine and I were in many ways a great
match, because we are the most opposite people imaginable. We’re a
perfect mix of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, you might say.

That’s an interesting description.

Well the head and the heart, just more pretentious.

You’re Dionysus, I presume?

Ohhhhhh. I’m totally Dionysus, terribly. Well, as much as anybody is totally
anything, because if I were that Dionysian, then I would have no brain at all.
And if he were that Apollonian, then he’d have no feeling, which sometimes, I
suspect. No, I’m just teasing.

Well he wouldn’t appreciate the Dionysian, if he were entirely Apollonian.

That’s right, why would he pick me if he knew that I was going to drive him
crazy?

Are you loving your life in the theater?

Oh I love my life, I love being in the theater. Doing it is one thing. It’s being
backstage that is the most fun. They make me just wet myself. Nobody talks
about that because it’s not the glamour part, but your dresser, the guys
back stage, the stage manager, your assistant stage manager, the jokes
that everybody has. It’s a little heightened, it’s a little pumped up. It’s just
so much fun.

Do you have a favorite Mae-ism?

[A man says to her,] “Oh baby, you’re giving me the time of my life,” [and
Mae says] “Don’t say ‘givin,’ I don’t like that word givin’.”

With five Tony nominations for “Dirty Blonde,” Claudia Shear is definitely
getting some.

In the 10 minutes between his first “I love you as much as day we were married” to the end of the story, the man is confronted by an elderly woman having a seizure, his wife’s infidelity, a near-fatal collision with an ambulance, a diagnosis of a rare form of cancer and his profound loathing for his own son.

Then Frank will shift the scene and you’ll find yourself listening in on a private conversation caught midstream between lovers or strangers, parents and children, patient and shrink, pastor and supplicant. It has no obvious connection to the preceding story, but is so disarmingly intimate — and, at times, so patently absurd — that you are left wondering if you can believe what you’re hearing. Frank coaxes along a confessional flow of sexual encounters or childhood humiliations that serve as unlikely springboards for the most profound questions of human existence: the need for love, the longing for family or the nature of suffering.

Although commonly categorized as radio drama, Frank’s work bears very little resemblance to the stagy artifice of plays performed over air. It is instead a dense collage of scripted monologue and staged improvs that are edited down from hours of raw material to 60 minutes of seemingly spontaneous storytelling. Loops of background music as diverse as James Brown and Steve Reich carry you from one scene to the next, bridging the gaps between Frank’s associative leaps.

Even Frank’s monologues, which seem to come from a completely unified perspective, result from lengthy recorded telephone conversations with a core group of collaborators who have been with him since his earliest days of radio. These are transcribed, edited and then rerecorded by Frank, who races from his home in Santa Monica, Calif., to the studios of KCRW, his home station, early in the morning, without softening his deep seductive voice with extraneous conversation.

As the titles of his public-radio series — “Work-in-Progress,” “Somewhere Out There,” “In the Dark” and “The Other Side” — attest, Frank wanders deeply into the unconscious, producing Dionysian stories with a fairy-tale intensity whose effect is often funny, disturbing and deeply memorable. You could say that “Joe Frank: The Other Side” presents the nightmares that sunnier, more accessible shows like “This American Life” or “Prairie Home Companion” have when they go to sleep at night.

Ira Glass, the producer of “This American Life,” got his first paid job in radio working on Frank’s program “Summer Notes” in the early 1980s. “I still have vivid memories of Joe Frank programs that I listened to when I was a teenager and first learning about radio,” he says. “I can repeat section for section a program I haven’t heard for 18 years. It gets into you and stays with you.”

Even today, when Glass travels to promote his own nationally syndicated show, he has a recurring Frank experience. “A listener will start to tell me excitedly about this amazing show they’ve heard,” he says. “There is a car accident and the guy in the accident makes friend with the guy who saves him. I haven’t even heard the show but I know it’s Joe Frank.”

Frank himself describes his show as being about “these private things that go on with people and they think nobody’s going to talk about. Where your mind goes and maybe it shouldn’t go.” His current program, “The Other Side,” relies much more heavily on what he describes as “realism,” meaning a series of more or less true stories that his friends tell about their lives, rather than on his own monologues. The shows come together by a weekly process he describes as “just pure havoc and chaos.” He says, “I have no idea week to week what’s going to happen.”

Larry Block, an actor whose life has frequently provided Frank with material, says, “It’s gotten to the point with Frank where every phone call is potentially a show. He’ll say, ‘Hold on for a second.’ He knew that I knew that he was going to turn on the recorder, and thrived on it. He would make a show out of you and me talking right now. He wants to suck out of me every bit of experience in my life.”

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When I meet Frank in person, I feel a little like Dorothy pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz to find that he is not the omniscient being she had imagined him to be. Frank, 61, is a tall boyish mixture of self-assured and mildly embarrassed. His home, an inviting two-story house behind a walled garden on one of Santa Monica’s more elegant streets, is nothing like the dark and cluttered domicile where I would have housed his on-air persona. The living room is spotlessly austere and his dining-room cabinet is filled with hard-bound Bibles, Butler’s “Lives of the Saints,” histories of the world’s religion and novels by Kafka, Dos Passos and Faulkner rather than dishes. His office looks like the room where the living is done.

But there’s a good reason for the unexpected austerity. The house and everything in it are new, part of a life change that began when Frank abandoned the airwaves in 1998, burned out from the creative and physical demands of a weekly show. After years of living way beneath his means, he finally decided to tap into a personal inheritance that would allow him to live more comfortably than what one could normally afford on a public radio salary. His reason, in a word, is mortality. “You have a certain amount of money,” he says. “What are you going to do, die with it?” Two years after his definitive goodbye to radio, he’s back on the air, because nothing he did in the interim was as satisfying.

Frank tells me that he’s spoken to the people I’ve interviewed about him and that they’ve told him about me. He also says that none of what David Rapkin, another longtime collaborator, said about Frank being a “sex god of radio” was true. I can feel myself slide into a world where fact and fantasy commingle in the higher pursuit of an engaging narrative.

His personal history is told through the sepia-toned photographs that line his walls, sealing his European parents and his New York childhood in a distant era. A man and a woman, elegantly dressed for a costume ball, illustrate the happier times of a wealthy Jewish couple forced to flee Nazi Germany. Frank was born in Strasbourg, in the contested provinces along the French-German border. His father came to New York, re-creating his successful shoe manufacturing business in America. He sent for his wife and infant son in 1939.

Frank remembers very little of his father, who died a few years after the family’s arrival in America, but his absence hangs over him with a God-like presence, returning to him in dreams and informing the work with a very palpable sense of loss and dread. “We escaped the Holocaust,” Frank says. “Although I was very young and I didn’t really know what that meant, I grew up in a home where there was a lot of anxiety and misery and a father who was dying while trying to build a life here at the same time.” There is a certain painful irony to the fact that Frank, the only son of a prominent shoe manufacturer, was born with club feet, which required extensive corrective surgery. His father died on the eve of the surgery, but Frank was not told until he came home from the hospital.

Although Frank didn’t grow up dreaming of a life in radio, he always knew that he could harness a certain imaginative intensity. It was not until he underwent a serious illness in his 20s that he began to read, discovering Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” and Dostoevsky’s “Notes From the Underground.” It was years later, after graduating from Hofstra and the famed University of Iowa Writers Workshop, when he was teaching at a private high school in Manhattan, that he began to be lured by the power of radio.

“The idea of speaking into a microphone and having your voice come out of the speakers of radios all over people’s apartments and cars was somehow magical to me,” Frank says. “You’re hidden, and by virtue of being hidden, there’s a power in that.”

His first shows, in 1977, were late-night live free-form radio at New York’s WBAI, part of the Pacifica network. Frank would talk, play music and direct actors in improv pieces based on stories he found in the tabloids. What would it be like to know your plane was going down in the Pacific? How would you raise a two-headed baby? The idea was to ambush his listeners with a show that sounded as real as possible despite the absurdity of the material.

Arthur Miller, a musician and songwriter whose recurring epithet is “not the playwright,” has been one of Frank’s most consistent collaborators since the early days. “Joe would come in with all these things he wanted to do. He’d be somewhere between anxious and hysterical,” Miller remembers. “There’d be hand-written stuff, typewritten stuff, transcriptions of other people’s stuff, things written on the backs of envelopes, in a three-ring binder. He’d say, ‘I have scenes with a man and woman, a list of weaponry I want to read, a list of antibiotics I want to read and the music from these three records.’ I would help him organize the elements, like acts in a vaudeville show.”

In a memorable early collaboration, Frank invited Miller on the air to play a famous mime. After discussing his career, an upcoming date at Carnegie Hall and the pleasures of working with the great Marcel Marceau, Frank asked his guest to perform one of his most famous routines. He let the air go dead for an incredibly long radio minute. When he came back, Frank told the mime that he was wonderful and the phones lit up with callers.

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After a few years of developing an audience for absurdist late-night humor, Frank was inexplicably hired by National Public Radio as a host for the weekend “All Things Considered.” Frank loved the imprimatur of a famous radio program, and was pleased to be paid for the first time in his radio career. But he admits he was “in way over my head” and that the five-minute essays he produced at the end of the hour were inappropriate for the journalistic format. “The kinds of questions I was interested in ["All Things Considered"] didn’t answer,” he says. “Why are we here? What is the nature of God? If nature is bred with tooth and claw, is human compassion just an anomaly?”

Humorist Harry Shearer, whose own program, “Le Show,” airs on KCRW on Sunday mornings just before “The Other Side,” remembers Frank’s “All Things Considered ” days differently. “For 51 minutes it was the regular vanilla news program, only not the usual NPR voice — less nasal and less vocally constricted,” he says. “Then the last five or six minutes of the show was an essay that was like a fist coming out of your radio. It’s very rare to have people like Joe — and I don’t want to say that there are people like Joe — who trust the audience not to freak out.” After four months of feeling totally out of his depth, Joe transferred to a new job producing radio dramas, where he did some of his finest programs, including “The Decline of Spengler” and “A Call in the Night.”

Ruth Seymour became station manager of KCRW in the early ’80s. (The station has since become a celebrated and influential venue of new music and smart talk about politics and culture amid the commercial conformity of Southern California airwaves.) She remembers that every Thursday at 3 p.m., her entire staff would turn up their radios and listen to a program coming in from the network. “I could never get my phone calls done. I’d constantly be yelling for them to turn it down,” she says. “Finally, I asked what was happening. They told me Joe Frank was on. Who was Joe Frank?” Seymour went to Washington to investigate. “Joe was sneaking into NPR in the middle of the night to do these programs,” she says. “I’d say to him, ‘Why don’t you come to L.A.? You won’t have to sneak into the studio at night. The rest of them are philistines.’”

Frank accepted Seymour’s offer, but lived in a hotel room for two years before deciding he was going to stay. In the 14 years he has been at KCRW, through four different incarnations of his weekly program, he has received carte blanche. “No other station manager in the public-radio world would have permitted me on the air,” he admits. Seymour says she views the angry letters she gets about Frank’s show as a healthy sign of life from audience members who almost never bothers to write when they are happy with the programming.

But Seymour is not foolishly serving the cause of Art. In his first KCRW fund drive since returning to the air, Frank raised more money in one hour than anyone else on the station. During the drive, he exhorts his audience with virulent hate mail and accounts of the humiliations he will suffer if his audience doesn’t validate his return to the air by pledging. He pleads with listeners to “open a vein and bleed money our way,” inventing such donor categories as “bodhisattva” and “enlightened being” and offering, as a premium, a “Vietnamese monk’s self-immolation kit, which comes with a can of gasoline and a pack of matches.” An hour later, he has raised $16,635 from a record-breaking 247 callers.

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Over the years Frank has won most of radio’s highest accolades, including the prestigious Peabody Award for his overall body of work. The “Rent-a-Family” trilogy of programs is a good example of why. The story features an imaginary entrepreneurial business that rents single parents and their children to paying clients much the way they would rent a ski chalet for a getaway weekend. “I’d go out to a restaurant and see unhappy families, or on the other hand, happy families. Either way it was very compelling,” explains Frank. “If it was unhappy, I was thinking, Thank God I’m not trapped in that. Or if they were happy I’d think that there was a profound human experience that I’m not going to enjoy.” He laughs ruefully, adding, “As a bachelor, you could find the ideal family and then rent it repeatedly. But you wouldn’t have to live with it and take the responsibility and time required in having a real family.”

Interwoven into the “Rent-a-Family” narrative and running as a dark current against its rosy promise are a series of disturbing phone calls made by a woman named Eleanor to her ex-husband, Arthur, who is married to somebody else. She harasses him in the middle of the night with accusations of having stolen her children, which he adamantly denies, largely on the grounds that they never had any to begin with. Years later, when Eleanor’s psychotic episode has passed and Arthur’s second marriage has ended in divorce, the original couple settles back into a friendship of respectfully complementary psychopathologies — which suffices for a Frank happy ending.

When I ask Frank about Eleanor from “Rent-a-Family,” or the woman in “Soulmate” who leaves an hour’s worth of increasingly hostile messages on a lover’s answering machine, he smiles and asks, “Is this the misogynist question?” He contends these are the only two women like this in his entire oeuvre, and cites other examples of female characters who are deeply caring and desirable. Most of these, of course, vanish like an apparition moments after they appear, leaving the male character to run through a fast-forward mental scenario of perfect union, reproduction and betrayal.

Over the course of the afternoon, Frank makes frequent references to former lovers and girlfriends, even an ex-wife from his life before radio who called him “poetry in motion.” These women, as he tells it, have graced him with their intimacy but have also wrought painful havoc as they’ve inevitably rebelled against the compartmentalized role they’re asked to play in his life.

The level of eroticism runs so high in his programs that recently personal ads have appeared in the Los Angeles papers: “Looking for logic in the irrational, green eyes, 5′ 3″ slender 31, seeks Joe Frank listener for romantic interlude,” or “Somewhere out there is a maverick who is thrilled Joe Frank is back, SWF, 42, 5’5″ 125 lbs. playful, sensuous, adventuresome, let’s explore the frontiers within.” During the years he was off the air, Frank’s fiercely loyal listeners found each other in fan-run Web sites and organized electronic swap meets of bootleg cassettes. (KCRW’s own Web site archives dozens of programs.)

Frank has also garnered a broad Hollywood following. Filmmakers Michael Mann, David Fincher and Ivan Reitman have all optioned or bought stories from the Frank apocrypha. Francis Ford Coppola, who listens to the show in San Francisco, was signed on to produce a series of Frank stories for HBO, with the appropriately dark Fincher (“Seven,” “Fight Club”) directing, a project that never came to fruition. Frank was ultimately paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won’t name) that plagiarized his dialogue, but there has never been a real Frank feature film. The four shorts made for the Playboy Channel in the mid-’80s don’t even approximate the power of his radio shows. He is currently writing a screenplay for William Friedkin, which he laments is taking him away from his obligations to his radio audience.

Most Frank fans are not famous. One of these, a man named Jerry, listened to Frank’s dark tales while locked in his New York apartment. After Jerry’s death, his brother sent Frank 15 years of tape-recorded telephone conversations — Jerry arguing with his father, flirting with an ex-girlfriend and reminiscing with his brother, who tries to cajole a cousin out of money for the electric bill. Frank edited the tapes into a trilogy of programs called “Jerry’s World,” a eulogy of life imitating art and art, in turn, imitating life.

“I don’t try to offend anybody, but I do,” Frank reflects. “The station gets complaints about me being in the 11 a.m. time slot on Sunday. I like it. There’s a large audience. It may seem strange, but I consider my programs religious. It’s all about faith, God, meaninglessness.”

Frank’s version of religion is dominated by anger and questioning rather than acceptance and love. In a program called “Holy Land,” he tells Biblical stories — Adam and Eve’s exile from the Garden of Eden, or the Immaculate Conception from Joseph’s point of view — that end up sounding like bad modern marriages. Eve doesn’t want to be “just some nature girl” and tells Adam, “Frankly, I resent that God made you first.” Joseph says he always knew that Mary “was kind of a social-climber.” He’s used to watching her work the room at parties, but he “had no idea that she would actually get involved with God.” Joseph feels betrayed by a God who would force him to live in infamy as the world’s most famous cuckold.

Frank’s return to radio is his own mixed blessing. “I’ve built a body of work on the radio and this is the art form that I understand so I like the idea of just keeping on building,” he says. “But it’s exhausting and sometimes I feel that my life is rendered empty by the fact that I have to work so hard to create it. It creates a lot of pressure and unhappiness because I feel that I’m not enjoying my life enough. I can’t do the things that I want to do because I don’t have the time to do them. But then if I do a good program, a program that I’m proud of, it’s really complete. Because you can always look back. You can always put that program on and listen to it and it’s there. And if you’d gone to the country, you can’t put that day in the country on anytime you want. That’s not there. This is something that’s solid and real and lasting. Even a relationship isn’t necessarily that.”

For an artist obsessed with mortality and the meaning of life, Frank has chosen the most ephemeral of media. It is fortunate for him that the Web came along, providing a sense of longevity to radio. But as important as his show’s digital afterlife may be, nothing compares to the live broadcast, while the audience has temporarily suspended their lives to listen together. Frank tells me he used to sit in his car with a former girlfriend, parked overlooking the ocean, listening to the program as it aired. He sat there imagining his audience in their own cars and living rooms, somewhere out there, in the dark, on the other side of the radio, listening to his life’s work-in-progress.