17-07-2025
The tragic truth behind Pretty Little Baby's Connie Francis
On her most famous song, Pretty Little Baby, the singer and actress Connie Francis – who has died aged 87 – sang 'Don't you know it's much more fun to love when the heart is young and gay?' She would come to know the truth of this all too well.
During the nearly nine decades that she spent on the planet, Francis knew the most egregious extremes of fortune imaginable. She went from heady fame and hundreds of millions of record sales to personal tragedy so horrible that its accumulation seems almost unbelievable.
Her life began well enough. She was born Concetta Franconero into an Italian-American family in Newark, New Jersey, and, from an early age, she had a natural aptitude for performing and singing, entering various local pageants and talent contests. Her first big break came in 1953 when she appeared on the NBC show Startime Kids under the stage name Connie Franconero. Although it took a considerable while for her to achieve success (now under the name Connie Francis), her great success came in 1957 when she recorded the single Who's Sorry Now, which would go on to top the UK singles charts, sell more than a million copies and propel her to worldwide fame.
Francis was fortunate in that her perky, upbeat songs chimed perfectly with the optimistic mood of the Eisenhower-era country, and her versatility at singing them in other languages – she learnt fluent Yiddish in school to speak to her classmates – meant that they had a reach far beyond English-language audiences. Her best-known hit, Pretty Little Baby, was released in 1962, and became her signature tune, with its chirpy optimism appearing to chime with the offscreen persona of its performer.
But the first suggestion that her previously charmed life might be rife with complications came when she met Beyond the Sea singer Bobby Darin, who offered to create songs for her. She was 19, he was 20, and the two started making another kind of music together. This outraged her staunchly Catholic father, who ran Darin out of the studio at gunpoint. Darin later sought solace in the arms of Sandra Dee, and Francis described not marrying him as the greatest regret of her life.
She had a remarkable heyday, but it was also a brief one. By 1964, tastes in music had changed, thanks to the emergence of bands like The Beatles. In the early Seventies, she recorded the single (Should I) Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree, which she released to modest success – but then something horrific and traumatic occurred. While attending the Westbury Music Festival in New York in 1974, Francis was raped by a stranger at a motel, being held under a heavy mattress that nearly suffocated her. The perpetrator was never found.
Although she was awarded £2 million in compensation from the motel chain for their inadequate security – and the only positive result of her hideous experience was that it strengthened previously lax motel security forever – it was a contributing factor, along with her declining popularity, in a mental breakdown that saw her become a pill-popping recluse for years. She made a tentative return to the recording studio in 1978, but after she underwent nasal surgery, she found herself unable to sing until 1981, a year that saw another seismic tragedy befall her.
Francis's brother George Franconero Jr, who had been a confidante to her, was murdered by Mafia hitmen for having passed information about the workings of organised crime syndicates to the FBI. The event threatened to send her completely into a spiral of depression. Yet she then reconsidered matters and decided instead to have another go at reviving her career, saying that she felt 'angry, and angry is often a good catalyst'.
She recorded two more singles, of which one, I'm Me Again, was a minor hit, but the trauma that she had suffered from a combination of her rape and her brother's death soon shifted into PTSD, and then a diagnosis of manic depression. She later told the Village Voice in 2011 that 'in the Eighties, I was involuntarily committed to mental institutions 17 times in nine years in five years. I was misdiagnosed as bipolar, ADD, ADHD and a few other letters the scientific community had never heard of.' She took lithium for it, but by her own admission, 'it made me a zombie because I didn't have bipolar [tendencies]'. By 1984, believing that she had nothing left to live for, she attempted suicide.
She survived, and the same year published a bestselling, revelatory autobiography, Who's Sorry Now, that candidly dealt with the various horrors that she had endured throughout her life. By that point, she had been married three times – the first two marriages, to press agent Dick Kanellis and hair salon owner Izzy Marion, had both lasted less than a year – and her fourth union, to the television producer Bob Parkinson, would splutter to an end in 1985.
It was unsurprising that her eventful life story nearly became the subject of a film, to be written, produced by and to star the pop singer Gloria Estefan. It would have been entitled Who's Sorry Now, and Estefan observed of her subject that 'She isn't even in the Rock and Roll Hame of Fame and yet she was the first female pop star worldwide, and has recorded in nine languages. She has done a lot of things for victims' rights since her rape in the 1970s.... There's a major story there.'
Unfortunately, 'creative differences' led to the project falling apart, like so many other biopics. Francis commented sourly in 2009 that 'They chose to use amateur writers to write the screenplay… I'm sorry I wasted ten years with those people.' A particular blow was that Dolly Parton had also expressed interest in making a film of Francis's life, but her commitments to the Estefan project rendered such a thing impossible; both she and Parton had wanted to cast the actress Valeria Bertinelli as her.
Francis had a deeply prudish streak and disliked the idea of any of her songs being used in sex or sexually themed scenes in films. She unsuccessfully sued the producers of the 1999 picture Jawbreaker for using her song Lollipop Lips in a sex scene, and complained that films such as The Craft made inappropriate use of her music, but her objections were overruled, not least because she did not own the publishing rights to the songs. Politically, she defined herself as a 'die-hard liberal', although this did not stop her accepting a position heading up a taskforce of Ronald Reagan's tackling violent crime, or recording a campaign song for Richard Nixon in 1968. It was entitled Nixon's the One and contained the lyrics 'Remember Dick Nixon/The man who is fixin'/To lead us to win in '68.' Nixon did indeed win the presidency, which fell into chaos upon his re-election and subsequent Watergate scandal; whether any credit, or blame, might be ascribed to Francis's campaign anthem is impossible to say.
Towards the end of her life, Francis, who retired in 2018 shortly after publishing another memoir, Among My Souvenirs, found an unexpected surge of popularity when Pretty Little Baby became a big hit on TikTok. When asked for comment, the ailing Francis told People that 'To tell you the truth, I didn't even remember the song… [but] to think that a song I recorded 63 years ago is touching the hearts of millions of people is truly awesome. It is an amazing feeling.'
Although she will inevitably be remembered as a tragic figure, her often undervalued achievements should be extolled after her death, and the miserable, unhappy events of her life placed in context with the music that gave – and continues to give – great pleasure to millions.
