Connie: Daddy’s little girl
Her father’s decision that she should learn to play the accordion led to 50 years of sometimes frantic ups and downs for singer Connie Francis
Connie Francis isn’t sorry now. In fact, she’s never been, although she’s had plenty of reasons. Her show business career has spanned 50 years, but for every moment of triumph there’s been a matching one of tragedy. The early days of non-stop No. 1 records, hit movies and worldwide concert tours were replaced in the 1970s by a 20year downhill toboggan ride made up of rape, murder, addiction and mental illness. Now the 66- year- old vocalist who first achieved stardom in 1958 by singing “ Who’s Sorry Now?” will be appearing Wednesday night at the Toronto Centre for the Arts.
“ Yeah, I’ve been through a lot,” she admits over the phone in that voice that once made teenage boys swoon. “ I’m a little older, a little sadder, a little wiser. But I’ve got my friends, my music and my sense of humour. Honey, that’s what kept me going all those years.” When she speaks, you can still hear her native New Jersey. She was born Concetta Rosemary Franconero in Newark on Dec. 12, 1938. Her father, George, a roofing contractor, was the one who would wind up pointing her toward a musical career. “ But, not as a singer,” she laughs. “ Oh, no. He thought I was going to make my fortune as an accordion teacher. He had me playing one from the time I was 3. Like all Italian girls who had music- loving fathers, I had to hide behind an accordion, which is probably the world’s unsexiest instrument, next to the bassoon.” What little Concetta wanted to do was sing. “ I loved it from the first time I stepped in front of an audience. I was only 4, but I can still remember it. I sang ‘ Anchors Aweigh’ at an amusement park in Irvington, wearing a lit-
tle sailor hat.”
After that, she followed the route of all child showbiz wannabes in those days, on to a series of TV programs. “ Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, I did ’ em all,” recalls Francis.
It was Godfrey, in fact, who suggested “ Americanizing” her name to Connie Francis during her four- year stint on his Startime Kids
show.
“ Every week, I’d have to sing in adifferent style — a blues song, a foreign- language number — everything imaginable. My voice was very flexible.” So flexible that, when MGM put her under a recording contract at the age of 16, they shoved her in the studio and asked her to imitate other vocalists.
“ Connie, give us some of that great Patti Page sound,” she imitates them coaching her. “ Some of those great Rose Clooney licks.” She sighs. “ I sounded like everybody else but myself.”
All of the records sank without a trace. But she had one more chance when her father found an old 1923 weeper called “ Who’s Sorry Now?” that he insisted she record.
“ I hated that song,” she says with a shudder, “ in fact I hated it so much that I went in there in one take and just sang it in my own angry voice.” Everyone agreed it sounded different, but it still didn’t go anywhere until Dick Clark played it one day on his popular American Bandstand
TV show.
“I owe everything I have to Dick Clark,” she insists. “Not only did he start my career back then, but he stuck with me through all the bad times and gave me the strength to try again.”
“ Who’s Sorry Now?” shot to No. 1 on the charts and Francis followed it with similar hits, including “Stupid Cupid” and “ Lipstick on Your Collar.”
Francis found herself in the public eye and was drawn to the man she calls “ absolutely the love of my life,” Bobby Darin, but her father’s jealous interference killed the relationship. Then Hollywood summoned her and she starred in a quartet of interchangeable films between 1960 and 1965. The first one, Where the Boys Are, is probably remembered the best, but Francis loathed all of them.
“ I didn’t like working in the movies and I thought all the pictures were crap. Sure, maybe if I had taken them a little more seriously they might have been better, but I doubt it.” She chuckles ruefully. “ I remember being driven to the set of Looking For Love
for the first day of shooting and finally opening the script, thinking I better read it.” But if Francis hated films, she loved live performing. As her audiences grew up, they followed her to nightclubs in New York and Las Vegas.
“ I loved the immediacy of it all. You and the audience are sharing the same experience. It’s why I still keep performing today.” Her career came to a halt in November 1974. After a concert on Long Island, her motel room was broken into and she was savagely beaten and raped. “ You don’t ever really get over a thing like that,” she says simply, “ no matter how hard you try.”
For seven years, she didn’t perform, but then in 1981, just as she was starting to revive her career, her brother George was gunned down in a Mafia- style execution, “because he knew too much and said too much to the authorities.” The combined pressure of these events sent Francis off the deep end. In a 2002 interview with Larry King she admitted that she was institutionalized 11 times, attempted suicide and developed an addictive dependence on prescription drugs. She was finally diagnosed as manic- depressive, treated with lithium and began her comeback. “Although I hate that word,” she demurs, “ because it’s not like I ever really wanted to be away.” To this day, she continues touring and performing “because, quite simply, I love it more than anything else.” And when asked to look over her entire career and pick out the most important moment to her, she has no hesitation.
“ It was in 1968, and I was going to Vietnam to sing for the troops. In those days, I always ended my shows with ‘ God Bless America,’ but the commanding officer ordered me not to sing it. ‘You don’t know these boys, they’re depressed, they’re cynical, they hate their country.’
“ I said to him, ‘ They may hate what their country is doing, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped loving it.’
“ So I went out there and began singing ‘ God Bless America.’ After four lines, one soldier stood up and joined me. Then another and another. By the end, 20,000 men were on their feet singing with me. No, I’ll never forget that.
“ I wish I could go sing to the troops in Iraq, because what’s going on there right now isn’t all that different, is it?”
“ You had your way, now you must pay,” said the lyrics of the song that made her a star in 1958, but Connie Francis has paid more than enough.
Isn’t it time for her to have her way again?