Connie Francis, a top-selling singer of the 1950s and '60s, dies at 87

NZ Herald

17-07-2025

Francis came of age when popular music was changing from jazz-flavoured swing music to the teen-driven energy of rock-and-roll. She was a reliable hitmaker during that interlude, reportedly selling more than 100 million records.
Starting with her revival of the 1920s Tin Pan Alley hit Who's Sorry Now in 1958, Francis charted 35 Billboard Top 40 hits over the next six years, including 15 in the Top 10. She became a pop star at a level rivalling Elvis Presley and her onetime boyfriend, Bobby Darin.
Managed by her father, George Franconero, a former New Jersey dockworker, Francis released more than 30 albums between 1958 and 1964, and her songs were constantly on the radio. She received 5000 letters a week, appeared on countless TV variety shows and earned more than US$1 million a year ($1.6m).
She sold more records than any other female performer in the 1950s and had the third-highest sales in the 1960s, after the Supremes and Brenda Lee. Music critics often cited Francis as one of the most deserving performers not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
On-screen, Francis starred with Paula Prentiss, Dolores Hart and George Hamilton in Where the Boys Are (1960), a film depicting college students on spring break in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Francis' recording of the buoyant title song reached No 4 on the Billboard pop chart and sold more than 1 million copies.
'I hated 'Where the Boys Are,'' she told People magazine in 1992. 'I didn't like the way I looked. I didn't like the way I acted.' She skipped the film's premiere but, to please her fans, she performed the song at nearly all of her concerts for decades to come.
Not quite a rock or R&B belter and not widely regarded as a song stylist, the 1.5m tall Francis had a big voice with a clear tone and could inject a quavery, almost tearful touch at the end of a note for emotional emphasis. She sometimes ventured into country music, including all three of her No 1 singles: Everybody's Somebody's Fool, My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own (both from 1960) and Don't Break the Heart That Loves You (1961).
In a few of her albums, such as Songs to a Swinging Band (1960) and A New Kind of Connie (1964), she demonstrated a flair for jazzy standards by the Gershwin brothers, Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein and showed a dimension of her talent that she never fully explored. But those weren't the albums that sold.
She updated older songs such as Who's Sorry Now with guitars and a rock-and-roll beat to appeal to younger listeners, and recorded many tunes about teen angst, such as Stupid Cupid (1958), Lipstick on Your Collar and Frankie (both 1959).
'They were the least artistic endeavour of my career,' Francis said of her early hits in a 2006 interview with the Arizona Republic. 'They were bubblegum songs. They were teenybopper songs. But I enjoy seeing the reaction of people when I do them.'
Francis, who spoke Italian and some Spanish, began recording in other languages early in her career. Using phonetically spelled lyrics, she released albums in 15 languages, including German, Hebrew, Japanese and Romanian, adding to her worldwide popularity as she toured internationally.
She was a mainstay at nightclubs and hotels in New York, Hollywood, Las Vegas and Miami Beach, usually accompanied by her parents, with whom she lived until she married for the first time at 25.
She appeared in three more films, all knockoffs of Where the Boys Are. But with the arrival of the British Invasion bands of the mid-1960s, including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the relatively innocent songs and public persona of Francis seemed out of step during an era of a rising counterculture.
Nevertheless, she maintained a devoted following and performed for US service members during the Vietnam War. During one stop, she recalled to CNN host Larry King, a general warned her not to sing her closing tune, God Bless America, because the embittered soldiers 'hated their country'.
'And without a single word, no introduction of any kind, no music of any kind,' Francis said, 'I just walked up to the microphone. I sang the first four lines of 'God Bless America' before one lone soldier stood up, put his hand over his heart and with tears streaming down his face began singing along with me. Then there was 100, then 1000.
'People through the years have always asked me, what was the greatest, ultimate - the greatest moment of your life in show business?' she added. 'And I never fail to mention it, because it was.'
Father's control
Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero, the older of two children, was born December 12, 1937, in Newark, and grew up in a heavily Italian section of the city.
'There was music in the streets,' Francis recalled to the Newark Star-Ledger in 1997, 'and vendors selling sweet potatoes and chestnuts, and people would sit on their porches at night, singing, and my father would play the concertina.'
Young Concetta absorbed her father's love of music, played the accordion for years and made her singing debut at 4, belting out Anchors Aweigh at an amusement park.
In 1950, after she won first place on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, the host suggested she change her name to Connie Francis. She spent four years on a weekly children's variety show, Startime, while attending high school in Belleville, New Jersey.
Francis began making records at 14 but found little success at first. She was a student at New York University in 1957, when she recorded Who's Sorry Now? On January 1, 1958, Dick Clark played the song on his American Bandstand show, and it immediately caught on. She left college to focus on music.
'If there wasn't a Dick Clark,' Francis said, 'there would be no career.'
In later years, Francis spoke about her father's controlling manner – over her career and personal life – as a form of 'emotional abuse'.
She had one date in high school, and her father wouldn't let her go to her senior prom. When she and Darin became close in her late teens, her father entered the studio where a rehearsal of The Jackie Gleason Show was taking place.
'Bobby and I were sitting in the audience holding hands at rehearsal,' Francis said on Larry King Live in 2002, 'and he came in brandishing a gun, intent on shooting Bobby. It took four men to restrain him.'
Darin later married and divorced actress Sandra Dee before dying of a heart condition in 1973 at age 37. 'It was the most significant relationship of my life,' Francis later told the Toronto Star, 'and I still regret that it didn't work out.'
All four of her marriages, to publicist Dick Kanellis, businessman Izzy Marion, restaurant owner Joseph Garzilli and TV producer Bob Parkinson, ended in divorce. Survivors include a son, Joseph Garzilli jnr.
Tragedy and struggle
On November 8, 1974, after Francis appeared at the Westbury Music Fair on New York's Long Island, she went to her room in a nearby Howard Johnson motel. In the overnight hours, a man broke into her room, held a knife to her throat and raped and beat her for two hours. She was tied to a chair and pushed to the floor, with two mattresses piled on top of her. Her assailant was never caught.
'You don't ever really get over a thing like that,' she told an interviewer in 2005, 'no matter how hard you try.'
Francis filed a negligence suit against the Howard Johnson chain, a jury ruled in her favour and she was awarded US$2.5 million ($4.2m). Francis went into seclusion and did not sing before a live audience for seven years, in part because of a botched plastic surgery procedure on her nose that affected her voice.
In 1981, Francis was left shaken by the gangland-style fatal shooting of her younger brother, George A. Franconero jnr, at his New Jersey home. A lawyer, he had reportedly given information to federal authorities investigating mob-related involvement in banking.
Francis' fragile emotional state worsened. In interviews and in two autobiographies, she revealed that she became addicted to prescription medicines and attempted suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. She was arrested for striking her hairdresser, for refusing to put out a cigarette on a commercial flight and for threatening a police officer with broken glass. She went on spending sprees, once buying three stretch limousines in a single day. The next day, she spent US$178,000 ($300,472.90) on clothing.
Courts twice declared her incompetent to handle her own affairs. Her father once had her involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility – one of 11 times she was institutionalised for mental illness. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with shock therapy and lithium.
After her father's death in 1996, Francis moved to Florida and said she slowly began to put her life and career back together. When she was on the road, she always had a female assistant stay with her and refused to sleep alone in a hotel room.
She continued to appear in occasional concerts until shortly before her death.
'I relax only when I'm in front of an audience,' she once told Ladies' Home Journal. 'It's the only time I really know who Connie Francis is.'