Connie Francis, the actress and beloved pop vocalist who had hits with “Who’s Sorry Now?,” “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” “Stupid Cupid” and “Where the Boys Are” before her life took several turbulent turns, has died. She was 87.
Ron Roberts, her friend and the president of the musician’s label Concetta Records, shared the news on Facebook on Thursday. “It is with a heavy heart and extreme sadness that i inform you of the passing of my dear friend Connie Francis last night,” he wrote in a note that was reposted by the official Francis account on Facebook. “I know that Connie would approve that her fans are among the first to learn of this sad news.”
A New Jersey native, Francis set the tone for the likes of Madonna and Lady Gaga and “had a powerful voice that could sound like a sob while staying on key,” San Francisco critic Neva Chonin once noted. One of the most commercially successful female singers of all time, she sold 42 million records by the time she was 26 and, according to her website, 200 million-plus records around the world during her career.
On the heels of her newfound celebrity, famed MGM producer Joe Pasternak tapped Francis to portray the romantically challenged Angie, one of four co-eds on spring break in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and sing the title song for Where the Boys Are (1960).
The coming-of-age film, also starring Paula Prentiss, Dolores Hart and Yvette Mimieux, was a box office hit, and her tune reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961. Francis also sang it in Italian, Spanish, French, German and Japanese during the same New York City recording session in November 1960, and it would soar to No. 1 in 19 countries.
As Francis churned out one top 10 hit after another, she starred in three more MGM movies, all musicals: Follow the Boys (1963), shot on location on the French and Italian Riviera and also featuring Prentiss; Looking for Love (1964), with Jim Hutton and Johnny Carson; and When the Boys Meet the Girls (1965), featuring Herman’s Hermits.
Francis never wanted to be an actress, she told Nick Thomas in 2017. “I asked the studio why they couldn’t come up with a title without the word ‘boys’ in it!” she said. “People knew [When the Boys Meet the Girls] was another lame Connie Francis movie and they stayed home. I was so pleased it was my last one.” (In 1984, she declined an offer from producer Allan Carr to appear in his remake of Where the Boys Are.)
In 1958, Francis shot to stardom with her rendition of “Who’s Sorry Now?,” a 1923 tune written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby that had been recorded by Bing Crosby and performed in French by Lisette Verea in the Marx Brothers’ A Night in Casablanca (1946).
With “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” in June 1960, Francis became the first woman to have a No. 1 song on the Hot 100 (the chart was almost two years old at the time). She reached the pinnacle again three months later with “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own” and had a third chart-topper with “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You” in March 1962.
Francis accumulated many other top 10 hits, including “My Happiness,” “Lipstick on Your Collar,” “Frankie” and “Among My Souvenirs,” all released in 1959; “Mama” — she said that was her personal favorite — and “Many Tears Ago” from 1960; “Together” and “Breakin’ in a Brand New Broken Heart” from 1961; and “When the Boy in Your Arms (Is the Boy In Your Heart),” “Second Hand Love” and “Vacation” from 1962.
Her personal life, however, was filled with tragedy. Her self-described one true love, singer Bobby Darin, was chased away by her strict father before they could elope, and she had four unhappy marriages, two miscarriages and a son that lived for only 10 days; was raped at knifepoint in a Long Island motel; her brother was murdered, gangland style; botched nasal surgery took away her singing voice for years; and she was diagnosed with manic depression and involuntarily institutionalized 17 times.
”I would like to be remembered, not so much for the heights I have reached, but for the depths from which I have come,” she often said.
Concetta Maria Franconero was born on Dec. 12, 1937, in Newark, the daughter of Ida and George, a roofer who would become the dominating architect of her career. She began taking accordion lessons when she was 3, but her talents as a singer quickly became obvious.
At 14, she was making demonstration records for publishers to pitch unreleased songs to popular singers — they’d say, “C’mon Connie, give it a Rosemary Clooney sound. Give it that great Patti Page or Jo Stafford sound” — when she appeared on the CBS program Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. During rehearsals, the host had trouble pronouncing her name and suggested she go by Connie Francis.
While getting stellar grades at Arts High School and Belleville High School, she appeared from 1953-55 on NBC’s Startime Kids. George Scheck, a producer on that variety show, became her manager and shopped her around to record companies; after being turned down by Mitch Miller at Columbia Records and many others, she got a 20-side, two-year deal from Harry Meyerson at MGM Records.
She sang for Tuesday Weld in Rock, Rock, Rock (1956) and for Freda Holloway in Jamboree (1957), but her singles were not doing well, with “The Majesty of Love,” at No. 93, her only one to chart.
With her MGM contract about to expire, she was going to accept a scholarship to study medicine at NYU when, hounded by her father, she reluctantly recorded “Who’s Sorry Now?” with 16 minutes left on her final studio session. She thought the song was “square.”
Championed by American Bandstand‘s Dick Clark — “without Dick Clark, there would be no Connie Francis,” she said — “Who’s Sorry Now?” sold more than 1 million copies and spent 22 weeks on the Hot 100 in 1958. Suddenly, she was headlining the Copacabana in New York City and the Sahara in Las Vegas, starring on her own ABC special and getting 5,000 fan letters a week.
Francis had further success in 1958 with the rock ‘n’ roll hit “Stupid Cupid,” written by Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield. And when Pasternak advised her that he had commissioned the Oscar-winning songwriting team of Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen to pen “Where the Boys Are,” she pushed for Sedaka and Greenfield to be considered, and it was their song that she performed.
In 1960, Francis was named Miss Coca-Cola and made four appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. She would be showcased on the program more than two dozen times.
Her 1963 song “In the Summer of His Years,” written as a tribute to John F. Kennedy, was an early charity record, with proceeds going to dependents of the policemen injured during the assassination. In 1964, she was given a special Golden Globe for her “international contribution to the recording world.”
Later, she performed for the U.S. troops in Vietnam.
For all her success, she said she passed on opportunities to record such songs as “Strangers in the Night,” “Somewhere My Love,” “Danke Shoen,” “Angel in the Morning” and tunes written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach. “I think more songs I turned down than songs I recorded were hits,” she told Ira David Sternberg in a 2018 interview.
Her father also rejected a lucrative offer from Frank Sinatra that would have had her record and make movies and TV specials for his Reprise Records. Her last song to chart came in 1969.
After three years of inactivity that resulted in part from her miscarriage, Francis began a nationwide tour in November 1974 at the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island. On the fourth night of her engagement, she was raped in her room at a Howard Johnson Motel Lodge. She didn’t appreciate that the news generated headlines around the world. “I didn’t want to be thought of as a ‘professional victim,’” she said in 1984.
Francis was depressed and couldn’t get out of bed for months, and in July 1976, a jury awarded her $2.6 million, finding the Howard Johnson chain responsible for her unsafe room.
Surgery to widen her nasal passages in 1977 left her unable to sing for four years, and it would take three subsequent operations to restore her singing ability. “When I lost my voice, I lost myself. It’s as simple as that,” she said on her website. “My voice was the thing that had always defined me — it was who I was. Singing was the one and only thing I was born to do. I felt like a surgeon whose hands had been amputated.”
In March 1981, her younger brother, Georgie, 40, who had pleaded guilty to bank fraud charges and had given law enforcement officials information concerning alleged organized-crime activities, was shot to death in front of his New Jersey home.
Her eight-year run of stays in psychiatric hospitals ended in 1991 when she said she was properly diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
In 2018, the first of her planned three-part memoir, Among My Souvenirs (The Real Story), was published.
After “dating the swingers of the world but never doing the horizontal cha-cha-cha with any of them,” Francis married publicist Dick Kanellis in August 1964 but filed for divorce five months later, citing mental cruelty. She wed beauty salon owner Izzy Marion, owner of beauty salons in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe, in January 1971; they divorced 10 months later.
She also was married to restaurateur and travel agent Joseph Garzilli from 1973-77 and to TV producer Bob Parkinson in 1985. Both of those unions ended in divorce, too.
Survivors include her adopted son, Joey.
“There are a lot of people who have had my success in this business,” she told Gary James in an interview conducted in the late ’90s. “There were exhilarating highs and abysmal lows. But, it was fighting to get out of those lows that I feel most proud of.
“It was a struggle to reconcile all of the tragedies that had occurred in my life, and I’d like to be known for my music. I’m always honored and privileged when people remember, and it brings back happy memories for a lot of people, and that makes me happy.”