Connie Francis and the Flag
Blessed with one of the most gorgeous voices of the twentieth
century, Connie Francis was emblematic of the optimism and ostensible health of
the Eisenhower-Kennedy era and personified the immigrant family success story. Funny
and personable, saucy without being salacious, the sultriness of her delivery
never diminished the essential innocence of her America’s sweetheart persona,
and hits like “Who’s Sorry Now?”, “Stupid Cupid”, and “Where the Boys Are” made
her the best-selling female vocalist in the history of the recording industry
during the period of her greatest popularity [1].
Connie abandoned her real name, Concetta Franconero,
at the suggestion of Arthur Godfrey, whose Talent Scouts show boosted
her profile when she was still an adolescent [2], but the singer’s Italian-Americanness
was hardly a secret. Her musical roots reach back to the toe of Italy’s boot
and Reggio di Calabria, from which her paternal grandfather emigrated in 1905,
bringing “an old broken down concertina with him” to America: “Connie’s father
inherited the concertina, and every night she would sit on the floor and listen
to him playing the small accordion-like instrument” [3]. In the spring and
summer of 1943, when she was five years old, the United States Army Air Forces bombed
Reggio di Calabria extensively in preparation for the amphibious landing of
Operation Baytown in September [4]. One report from May notes that “American
aircraft […] dropped 150 tons of bombs” in the area [5]. The bombardment,
invasion, and occupation of the land of her forebears failed to weaken Connie’s
embrace of American patriotism, however.
“When I was fourteen years old […] my father said to me, ‘We read the newspapers every day, right? And you’d have to know how much the United States is hated and envied all over the world,’” Connie recalled:
And I said, “Sure, they
hate us, we won, hooray for our side!” And my father said, “No, no. You have to
stop thinking that way, you have to think bigger. Someday, if you ever make it
on records – and that’s a long shot, honey – you have to think about using
music to make friends for our country all over the world.” He said, “Especially
with the two countries that are gonna be our two biggest allies, and that’s
Germany and Japan.” And at the time I thought that was absurd. But when I did
finally start making hit records that was my goal. It was to make friends for
our country through music all over the world. [6]
Connie catered to the former Axis powers, in particular, recording several songs in German, Italian, and Japanese. “Music is America’s greatest cultural export,” begins a propagandistic 1962 guest newspaper column credited to her:
It is winning us friends
in the ideological war with Communism for man’s mind. […]
In East Berlin, just
before the Communists closed the border to American tourists, I went in on a
bus tour. The guide told us to stay within one block of the bus when it stopped
on East Berlin’s main street. I was walking around looking at the ruins and noting
the lost look on the people’s faces, when I spotted a record shop two blocks
away. Two teenage boys were looking in the window. The display was on the
classic music of the German and Russian masters. The music coming out of the
loudspeaker was Russian.
I walked up to the boys
and asked if the store sold American records. They said “No, of course not.” I
asked if they liked American music. They said no. Suddenly I heard the strains
of an American tune. One of the boys grabbed his wrist and the music stopped.
Before I could say
anything, my manager George Scheck came upon us. He hadn’t known what happened.
He boldly told the boys I was Connie Francis. They just looked at him. Like a
good personal manager, George happened to have some of my fan club pictures
with him. He took them out and gave them to the boys. They suddenly smiled and
spoke freely. They knew of me and my records.
Their story went like
this:
They aren’t allowed to
listen to American music. The only way they get it is from the West German and
Voice of America broadcasts, the Reds try to jam the programs, but they can’t
get them all. Many teenagers behind the Iron Curtain love American music and
take chances just to hear it. An American record is very valuable. The music I
heard was from a very small transistor radio that one of the boys had taped to
his wrist. It’s a chance that many of the teenagers take just to hear American
music.
When George and I walked
back to the bus the boys stood on the corner and just watched until the bus
went out of sight. The look on their faces made me want to race back and
smuggle them out from under the yoke of Communism.
They made me realize that
music is truly an international language and how important a weapon it is in
the fight for freedom. [7]
The project of marketing global freedom also entailed selling Zionism and cosmopolitanism to her American audience. “Connie Francis could fill a singing date in the United Nations assembly and need few interpreters,” Herb Kelly kidded in a 1965 column [8]. In 1960, between Connie Francis Sings Spanish and Latin American Favorites and More Italian Favorites, she released Connie Francis Sings Jewish Favorites, an album of songs like “My Yiddishe Momme” and “Havah Negilah”. “Francis’s facility with Yiddish has been variously attributed to her time spent in the Catskills and her upbringing in a heavily Italian-Jewish neighborhood,” writes Seth Rogovoy for The Forward. “She once told an interviewer, ‘I was brought up in Newark…. If you weren’t Jewish, you needed a password to get in” [9]. An account of her 1968 Latin Casino show testified to “tears in the eyes of many” as Connie performed the “Theme of Exodus”. The same article quotes her claim to be “100 per cent Italian and 10 per cent Jewish on my manager’s side” [10].
Connie was always eager to demonstrate her support for America’s military, as well. On October 8, 1961, she performed “Where the Boys Are” on a “special US Army edition” of The Ed Sullivan Show, serenading servicemen of the 40th Armored Berlin Command at West Berlin’s Sportspalast [11]. In 1963 she sang the title tune and starred in Follow the Boys, a comedy about a group of women and the Navy men they love, and 1966 saw her release “A Letter from a Soldier (Dear Mama)”, a poignant single from the perspective of a “brave soldier boy” in Vietnam, and “A Nurse in the US Army”, a promotional record for an Army Nurse Corps recruitment drive. The following year she toured in Vietnam to entertain the troops, later telling interviewer Chauncey Howell:
It's very dirty and dusty
there. […] Did you know that people go to the toilet right on the streets in
Saigon? The boys lose touch so quickly over there […]
My two most popular songs
in Vietnam were “White Christmas” and “God Bless America”. The whole audience
always stood up when I sang “God Bless America”. It was very thrilling, I’m
telling you. By the way, you should hear all the Southern accents those boys
have! […]
Now, I read a lot. I’m a
serious person. I’m not fooled by what’s going on, if you know what I mean. A
lot of the men I met in Vietnam think they are being harnessed, held back. They
feel that we should go in and destroy all of North Vietnam. I’d go even further
than that. I think we should go all the way to Peking and destroy China! Right
now we’re giving aspirin for cancer. We must go to the source of the problem,
Chinese communism. Those people over there have no regard for life, whatever. You
know that they go to the toilet in the streets over there? Oh. I told you that,
didn’t I? [12]
Connie’s right-wing patriotism led her to support Richard Nixon for the presidency [13], and her conservative orientation also induced her to want to start a family as her youth faded along with her career. A November 1964 article related that Connie was “flinging aside her movie star opportunities […] preferring to have a baby”, but indicated that her manager, George Scheck, resisted the idea, with Connie saying, “George wouldn’t O.K. it till 1990!” [14]. Her marriage to Dick Kanellis lasted only a few months in any case, and no baby was forthcoming. A second marriage to Izzy Marion in 1971 was similarly short-lived, and it was not until 1973, when she was thirty-five and married Joe Garzilli, that Connie would undertake a serious effort at family formation. “She speaks of quitting show business forever,” a profile from October of that year related, “because: ‘I want to have Joe’s baby. I’m looking forward to an early pregnancy,’ she says” [15]. “It’s virtually impossible to adopt a baby today,” Connie told columnist Earl Wilson in November 1974, at the time of her participation in the Westbury Music Fair in Westbury, New York, shortly after a miscarriage: “Babies just are not being born. Because of the pill and abortions.” “If I could become pregnant next week, I’d forget it [i.e., the music business],” she told Wilson [16].
America’s strange new norm of aggressive “defense” abroad and anarchy on the home front would impact Connie cataclysmically that week. Cruelly, Wilson’s article “Connie Would Rather Be a Mother” ran side-by-side in Wilmington’s Morning News on November 9 with UPI’s report about her rape at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge where she was staying while performing in Westbury. “A young man burst into singer Connie Francis’ motel room in Jericho, L.I., yesterday, ripped off her nightgown at knifepoint, and raped her, Miss Francis told Nassau County police,” New York’s Daily News reported, adding that the assailant had “a towel around the lower part of his face” at the time of the attack [17]. “After the assault, the assailant tied her to a chair, with her hands behind her back, and knocked the chair over,” added The New York Times: “Miss Francis was then covered with a mattress and a suitcase. The assailant left after taking some jewelry and a mink coat” [18]. According to the Daily News, a “suspect was taken into custody a few hours later” and “Miss Francis had identified him as the assailant” who “was said to be a guest at the motel” but no charges were filed and the police released him after questioning [19].
According to the Times, the suspect was “a 19-year-old youth” [20]. The rapist, incidentally, did not resemble the Aryan college boy who violates one of Connie’s fellow spring breakers in the 1960 movie Where the Boys Are. Connie related that her assailant “in a vulgar way asked me if I ever had had relations with a black man before” [21]. The Reagan Library has made available for online viewing a 1982 letter Connie sent to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in which she discusses the case, relating that she identified her attacker out of a lineup of several black men when she heard his unusual voice: “Slightly New England, incongruous, not black.” Curiously, page 12 of the letter – which would have continued the line at the bottom of page 11, which ends, “I flung myself at him, mindlessly screaming words I have never said before in public or in private. I pounded […]” – is missing from the copy scanned by the Reagan Library [22].
The crime wrecked Connie’s marriage and she would
struggle with her mental health for two more decades. “She spends most of her
time in her New Jersey home, afraid to go out,” the Daily News reported
in 1976:
She will not walk in New
York City by herself and will not even go into a department store alone. […]
Francis was raped by a
black man, and became fearful of black men to the extent that she fired her
black conductor. “That’s very unlike me,” she says now. [23]
Her lawsuit against the Howard Johnson chain for the
management’s negligence in failing to fix a faulty lock that allowed the
attacker access to her room ended with her being awarded $2.5 million in
damages [24], establishing an important precedent for crime victims’ civil
suits against third parties. The money can hardly have been much of a
consolation to an already wealthy woman and such a psychologically destroyed
person, however. She later wrote that “for one year after the rape, my mother
would have to put the clothes on the bed for me that I would be wearing that
particular day, because I couldn’t attend to even the simplest details of daily
living. One month after the rape,” she added, “I was unable to diaper my own
newly adopted baby son, because […] I was as helpless as a baby myself” [25].
In 1981 Connie’s brother, attorney George Franconero, was killed in a gangland assassination [26], further traumatizing her. Connie “began referring to herself as ‘America’s most famous crime victim’,” was appointed figurehead of the Reagan administration’s Task Force on Violent Crime [27], and “was even responsible for numerous laws being changed” [28], but her erratic behavior made her a less-than-impressive advocate, with “a long string of weird Connie Francis stories” reducing her “to little more than some scandal-sheet wacko,” writes Sharon Rosenthal: “phoning a gossip columnist with the news that she’d discovered a cure for AIDS; drawing up a hit list that included everyone from her father to mentor Dick Clark” [29]. In 1983, on the occasion of her father having her committed to a psychiatric hospital, Connie declared, “The communists run the newspapers in this country. The communists are taking over the White House” [30]. She would be involuntarily committed seventeen more times over the course of the next nine years [31].
Whereas Connie, despite her flaws, had attempted to do her part to help other crime victims in America find justice, the Schecks took a somewhat different trajectory: “George Scheck’s professional relationships with African Americans drew him to the Civil Rights Movement, and like his parents, [Scheck’s son] Barry took an interest in questions of social justice” [32]. Barry Scheck, presumably using the money his father made from managing Connie Francis, pursued Economics and American Studies at Yale and studied law at the University of California, Berkeley, later hustling as a defense attorney in New York and representing such worthies as Linnette Jenkins, a black woman who botched her own abortion in 1984 when she “locked herself in the bathroom of a White Plains dentist’s office where she works as an assistant, numbed herself with Novocaine, and cut a six-inch incision in her stomach with a scalpel,” then changed her mind, stitched herself up, and went to a hospital, later giving birth to a baby that lived for one day [33]. It was as a member of the “Dream Team” representing O.J. Simpson in 1995, however, that Scheck would achieve his greatest notoriety, his special contribution to the defense being his “factually false claims about the physical evidence” [34]. A member of the faculty of Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School, Scheck is also a co-founder of the Innocence Project, a legal nonprofit organization dedicated to “exonerations” of black convicts [35]. The Innocence Project’s board includes Yusef Salaam, one of the “exonerated” Central Park Five identified as participants in the savagery that took place in Central Park on April 19, 1989 [36]. Demonstrating that he is not entirely without scruples, however, “Cardozo Law School Professor Barry Scheck says he could never represent a Nazi” [37]. Scheck, one assumes, would find himself in sympathy with the politics of the young Connie Francis: “Sure, they hate us, we won, hooray for our side!”
Rainer Chlodwig von K.
Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.
Endnotes
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221130063219/https://www.conniefrancis.com/biography
[2] Posnak, Sandy. “Francis Brings Her Golden Sound to
the Shore”. The [Vineland] Daily Journal (October 3, 1996), p. B
4.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Carter, Kit C.; and Robert Mueller. Combat
Chronology: 1941-1945. Washington, DC: Center for Air Force History, 1991: https://www.afhra.af.mil/Portals/16/documents/Studies/101-150/AFD-090529-036.pdf
[5] “‘Softening’ Defenses of Italy”. The Birmingham
Post (May 26, 1943), p. 3.
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG_xskQZ_yI
[7] Francis, Connie. “Connie Francis Says Music Is
US’s Great Cultural Export”. Vineland Times Journal (June 28, 1962), p.
16.
[8] Kelly, Herb. “Connie Francis Could Be a Hit in
United Nations”. The Miami News (February 19, 1965), p. 16A.
[9] Rogovoy, Seth. “The Secret Jewish History of
Connie Francis”. Forward (December 12, 2018): https://archive.ph/98ra4
[10] Petzold, Charles. “Connie Francis Wows ‘Em”.
[Camden] Courier-Post (December 7, 1968), p. 13.
[12] Howell, Chauncey. “Connie Francis: Vietnam Vet”.
[Florida Today’s] Today’s Sunrise (March 10, 1968), p. 5.
[13] Mead, Derek. “Connie Francis – Living the
American Dream”. The Beat (July 12, 2019): https://www.beat-magazine.co.uk/2019/connie-francis-living-the-american-dream/
[14] Wilson, Earl. “Connie’ll Skip Film Stardom”. Winona
Daily News (November 24, 1964), p. 4.
[15] Christy, Marian. “The New Look of Connie
Francis”. Boston Globe (October 28, 1973), p. 60.
[16] Wilson, Earl. “Connie Would Rather Be a Mother”.
[Wilmington] Morning News (November 9, 1974), p. 26.
[17] Kanter, Nat; and David Oestreicher. “He’s Held in
Rape of Connie Francis”. [New York] Daily News (November 9, 1974), p.
4C.
[18] Silver, Roy R. “Connie Francis Raped at Motel
after Singing at Westbury Fair”. The New York Times (November 9, 1974): https://www.nytimes.com/1974/11/09/archives/connie-francis-raped-at-motel-after-singing-at-westbury-fair-mink.html
[19] Kanter, Nat; and David Oestreicher. “He’s Held in
Rape of Connie Francis”. [New York] Daily News (November 9, 1974), p.
4C.
[20] Silver, Roy R. “Connie Francis Raped at Motel
after Singing at Westbury Fair”. The New York Times (November 9, 1974): https://www.nytimes.com/1974/11/09/archives/connie-francis-raped-at-motel-after-singing-at-westbury-fair-mink.html
[21] “Press, Public Locked out of Rape Trial”. The
Miami News (June 11, 1976), p. 3.
[23] McMillan, Penelope. “Rape”. [New York] Daily
News (December 5, 1976) [New York News Magazine section], p. 10.
[24] “Connie Francis Wins $2.5 Million in Suit”. The
Miami Herald (July 3, 1976), p. 4-B.
[26] Hilferty, John. “Byrne’s Ex-Law Partner Shot to
Death”. The Philadelphia Inquirer (March 7, 1981), p. 2-B.
[27] “Seven Years After Rape, Francis Back on Stage”. The
Pensacola Journal (November 10, 1981), p. 3D.
[28] Greenblatt, Mike. “The Tragic, Violent, Shocking
Story of Connie Francis”. The Jersey Sound (March 23, 2023): https://thejerseysound.com/history/connie-francis
[29] Rosenthal, Sharon. “The Sad Saga of Singer Connie
Francis”. The Tampa Tribune (August 21, 1986), p. 1-D.
[30] Hoffman, Lisa. “Francis’ Case Bounced to
Broward”. The Miami Herald (November 5, 1983), p. 2BR.
[31] Greenblatt, Mike. “The Tragic, Violent, Shocking
Story of Connie Francis”. The Jersey Sound (March 23, 2023): https://thejerseysound.com/history/connie-francis
[33] Hoffman, Bill. “Manslaughter Case Dropped in
Self-Abortion Try”. The Citizen Register (November 6, 1984), p. 1.
[34] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Scheck#O._J._Simpson_murder_case
[36] https://centralpark5joggerattackers.com/videos/
[37] Hirschfeld, Neal. “The Defense Rests”. New
York Daily News (July 8, 1984) [magazine section], p. 12.
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