Travel On, Frankie Avalon

Annette Funicello got her own post here a couple of years ago, and well it just feels lopsided not to give equal time to her screen partner. And also, Frankie Avalon (Francis Avallone, b. 1940) absolutely had a strong career of his own prior to their AIP films together, and continued to have thereafter.

And thirdly, the vaudevillian in me loves when I learn a screen actor and/or singer has yet another skill. Often it’s the one they started out on. In Avalon’s case, it’s the trumpet. His father taught him the instrument and he was already performing publicly as a child in his native Philly, winning local talent competitions and so forth. His dream was to have a big band like Harry James. He was only 12 when a private performance for Al Martino landed him a guest shot playing in a Honeymooners sketch on The Jackie Gleason Show. He was only 14 when RCA Victor released a couple of singles spotlighting his trumpet playing. For a time as a teen he was in a band with Bobby Rydell called Rocco and the Saints.

Avalon was also good looking and could sing so these began to eclipse his horn playing, though he would continue to sneak some onto his own records. Bob Marcucci became his manager and producer, leading to a half dozen top ten singles between 1957 and 1959, included two #1s: “Venus” and “Why”. During this early teen idol phase he appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show,The Milton Berle Show, American Bandstand and The Dick Clark Show, Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall,The Arthur Murray Party, etc. He continued to have Hot 100 singles into the early ’60s (nearly three dozen of them) but his vogue began to wane, and Marcucci moved on to his next Italian Philly teen heart throb, Fabian.

Ya, Ya, Ya

Taking his cue from Ricky Nelson, who’d appeared in Rio Bravo (1959), Avalon expanded into film acting, taking a role in the western Guns of the Timberland (1960) with Alan Ladd.John Wayne was impressed and cast him in The Alamo (1960), fifth-billed in the ahistorical role of “Smitty”. Avalon met his wife Kathryn Diebel as a result of this shoot; she was a sister of Wayne’s daughter-in-law. Other early pictures included Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961 — in which he plays his trumpet!), Irving Brecher’s all-star Sail a Crooked Ship (1961), and Ray Milland’s amazing Panic in the Year Zero! (1962).

The latter film was an American Internation Pictures release. Beach Party (1963), for the same studio, was the first in a long series of youth musicals in which Frankie co-starred with Annette Funicello, a kind of dumbed down, teenage rock and roll version of the meet-cute vehicles of Fred and Ginger, Tracy and Hepburn, etc. Much more on thise movies here. There were other films as well, such as I’ll Take Sweden (1965) with Bob Hope and Tuesday Weld, and AIP-British co-productions like The Million Eyes of Sumuru (1967) and The Haunted House of Horror (1969). Best of all for the Marx Brothers fan, he has a supporting role inSkidoo (1968) alongside Groucho Marx, Gleason, and Carol Channing, not worlds away from seeing him opposite Buster Keaton,Morey Amsterdam, and Don Rickles in the surf musicals, or Vincent Prince in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine(1965).

His movie career flatlined in the new decade, but Avalon continued to be a frequent sight on television throughout the ’60s and ’70s. A 1971 episode of Love American Style reunited him with Funicello, and this was foreshadowing as to where his career was headed. When the ’50s nostalgia craze hit, he was booked on shows likeHappy Days and Sha Na Na and the movie Grease (1978). He teamed with Funicello again on the TV show Easy Does It (1976) and in the movies Frankie and Annette: The Second Time Around (1978) and Back to the Beach (1987). In 1988 they appeared together on Peewee Herman’s Christmas special. The following year they had a joint cameo in Troop Beverly Hills (1989). A notable later film in which Avalon appeared as himself was Martin Scorsese’sCasino (1995).

To my knowledge, Avalon has not retired. He has performed in live concerts for decades, and still pops up as a talking head on television and in documentaries. He was on Dancing With the Stars just a couple of years ago!

For more on show biz historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.