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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.

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