At the age of 87, Connie Francis, who was once the best-selling female artist in the world, passed away. After her 1962 song Pretty Little Baby went viral on TikTok, the musician, whose hits included Stupid Cupid and Who’s Sorry Now, had recently experienced a comeback.
Francis had just received treatment for fracture-related pelvic pain. Ron Roberts, the president of her record label, was the first to report her death, and Universal Music later confirmed it to the BBC.
“It is with a heavy heart and extreme sadness that I inform you of the passing of my dear friend Connie Francis last night”.
“I know that Connie would approve that her fans are among the first to learn of this sad news,” Roberts posted on Facebook.
Only a few months after Pretty Little Baby became a popular song on TikTok, the celebrity passed away. Millions of people, including Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian, lip-synced to the catchy song while displaying their affection or flaunting their kids and pets.
Social media influencers Brooke Monk and Sam Dezz posted a video that received over 158 million views.
The song was also shared by ABBA singer Agnetha Fältskog, who stated that Francis had always been her favorite vocalist.
Additionally, Gracie Lawrence, an actress who is currently playing Francis in the Broadway production of Just in Time, posted a video of herself singing the song while wearing character attire. Last month, Francis said she was taken aback by the unexpected popularity of a track that had been a B-side.
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t even remember the song!”
“I had to listen to it to remember. 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,” said People magazine.
Born Concetta Rosemarie Franconero, Francis was raised in Brooklyn, New York, in an Italian American working-class household.
At the age of three, she began playing the accordion with encouragement from her father. She had changed her name to Connie Francis by the time she was a teenager and was frequently featured on the American television variety show Startime Kids. Early attempts to pursue a career in singing failed.
Because her demo song was called Freddy, which also happened to be the name of the president’s son, she was rejected by nearly every record label before landing a deal with MGM Records.
After her first recordings were not well received, Francis accepted a position at a university to study medicine.
However, her final recording under contract with MGM, a cover of the 1923 song Who’s Sorry Now, which she only did at her father’s insistence, became a breakthrough hit.
“I had 18 bomb records,” Francis told UPI in 1996. “He wanted me to record a song written in 1923. I said ‘Forget about it – the kids on American Bandstand would laugh me right off the show.’
“He said, ‘If you don’t record this song, dummy, the only way you’ll get on American Bandstand is to sit on the TV’.”
It had the air of prophecy. Dick Clark promoted the song in 1958 on American Bandstand, telling the audience: “There’s no doubt about it, she is headed straight for the number one spot.”
Francis was watching from home and was unaware that the song would be featured on the show. That evening, she wrote in her diary, “Well, the feeling was cosmic – just cosmic!”
“Right there in my living room, it became Mardi Gras-time and New Year’s Eve at the turn of the century!”
A Pop Star Who Now Advocated for Victims
Francis rose to fame as a pop icon during the ensuing years. Her teen hits, such as Lipstick on Your Collar and Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool, were among the millions of records she sold.
The bluesy ballad “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” made her the first female number one on the Billboard Top 100 in 1960. Francis also had a talent for languages and was among the first celebrities to record in several different dialects.
For instance, the title track from her 1961 film Where the Boys Are was made available in seven different languages: English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Neopolitan, and Spanish.
In the Summer of His Years, a 1963 tribute to the assassinated US president John F. Kennedy, she also recorded one of the earliest known charity singles.
Due to nasal surgery, she lost her voice for a short time, and her popularity declined in the mid-1960s as acts like The Beatles and Bob Dylan dominated the pop charts.
Francis made a dramatic return in 1974 at the Westbury Music Fair in New York, but she was raped and beaten at knifepoint in her motel after the show.
As a result of her trauma, she isolated herself and spent time in mental hospitals, where she later claimed her father had taken her against her will. The celebrity used sleeping pills to attempt suicide when she was at her lowest.
“I just felt that there was nothing for me to live for,” she said in 1989 when she appeared on Terry Wogan’s BBC One chat show.
“I had this free-floating fear of life in general after the rape, and I just said, ‘Well, that’s it, I’m going to check out’.”
Francis claimed that her life was saved by Joey, her adopted son.
“I was looking at this bottle of sleeping pills… and my son knocked at the door of the bathroom, and he said, ‘Mommy, you’re the best mommy I ever had’,”
“And that was it. I took the pills and threw them right down the toilet.”
After suing Howard Johnson’s motel chain for not installing secure locks on the glass door that her assailant used to enter, the singer eventually won $1.5 million (£1.1 million).
