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https://people.com/connie-francis-dead-age-87-8599290

Connie Francis, 'Who's Sorry Now?' and 'Pretty Little Baby' Singer, Dies
at 87
The pop star of the '50s and '60s was the first woman to have a No. 1
hit on the Billboard Hot 100 as a solo artist.

Connie Francis has died at the age of 87, two weeks after it was
revealed that she'd been hospitalized due to "extreme pain."

Francis' close friend, Ron Roberts, who is the president of the
musician's label Concetta Records, confirmed the news on Facebook early
on Thursday, July 17.

Roberts wrote, "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. More details will follow later," the message,
which was also shared on Francis' official Facebook profile, concluded.

The news comes after Francis confirmed in a Fourth of July Facebook post
that she was "feeling much better after a good night," two days after it
was confirmed that she had been hospitalized.

The musician revealed that she was "back in hospital" on July 2, telling
fans she'd been "undergoing tests and checks to determine the cause(s)
of the extreme pain I have been experiencing."

Francis had recently been making headlines due to her 1962 song "Pretty
Little Baby" becoming a huge hit on TikTok, 63 years after she recorded
the B-side.

A contemporary of Elvis Presley and Brenda Lee, Francis was one of the
most popular singers of the 1950s and early 1960s, with Top 10 singles
like "Who's Sorry Now?,” “My Heart Has A Mind Of Its Own," "Where the
Boys Are" and “Don't Break The Heart That Loves You.” Francis was the
first woman to have a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 with her 1960
track “Everybody's Somebody's Fool.”

The singer was born Concetta Franconero in Newark, New Jersey, in 1937.
As early as age 4, she began taking part in talent contests and
pageants, at her father's encouragement, singing and playing accordion.
Later, she began appearing on TV shows and was a featured performer on
NBC’s Startime Kids. She chose Connie Francis as her stage name.

She signed a recording contract with MGM Records in 1955, but most of
her early singles were unsuccessful. The label was going to drop her,
but her father convinced her to record a version of "Who's Sorry Now?"
as a last attempt at a hit in 1957.

“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.''

The track also performed poorly — until it debuted on Dick Clark's
American Bandstand in 1958. It then became a hit in both the U.S. and
the U.K., and Francis and Clark would form a lifelong friendship.

Francis’s career grew from there, with follow-up hits like "My
Happiness,” "Lipstick on Your Collar” and “Among My Souvenirs.” Her 1959
album Connie Francis Sings Italian Favorites became her most successful,
and 1960’s  “Everybody's Somebody's Fool” became her first No. 1 in the
United States — and the first ever by a solo female artist on the
Billboard Hot 100, which had launched in 1958.

Francis also found international success, thanks, in part, to her
re-recording of her songs in different languages. She had two more No. 1
hits, with “My Heart Has A Mind Of Its Own” (which hit the top spot just
three months after "Everybody's Somebody's Fool") and “Don't Break The
Heart That Loves You.”

“'I was sitting on top of the world and didn't know what problems were
yet,” she told PEOPLE in 1992 of her early career. Francis also appeared
in a handful of films in the 1960s, including the 1960 hit Where the
Boys Are, a teen rom-com costarring a young George Hamilton.

Francis became less successful as the music industry changed in the late
1960s, and then suffered a series of personal tragedies. In 1974, she
was the victim of a rape in a Long Island motel room. She had nasal
surgery in 1977 that caused her to temporarily lose her voice. And in
1981, her brother George was murdered by the mafia.

That same year, she launched a career comeback, but it was hindered by
her struggles with her mental health. Her father had her committed to
multiple psychiatric hospitals, and she survived a 1984 suicide attempt.
That same year, she published her first memoir, Who's Sorry Now?.

“To make a short story long, in the ’80s, I was involuntarily committed
to mental institutions 17 times in nine years in five different states,”
she told the Village Voice in 2011. “I was misdiagnosed as bipolar, ADD,
ADHD, and a few other letters the scientific community had never heard
of. A few years later, I was discovered to have had post-traumatic
stress disorder following a horrendous string of events in my life.”

She partnered with Ronald Reagan's presidential administration on a task
force on violent crime and was an advocate for rape victims. In 2010,
she partnered with Mental Health America to help raise awareness of the
effects of trauma and treatments for it.

“I tried to see humor in everything, even when I was in a mental
institution,” she told The Oklahoman in 2018. “But I have to say the
support of the public has also been incredibly uplifting. They saw me
through the best and worst of times and never stopped writing from
around the world to encourage me.” Francis released another memoir,
Among My Souvenirs, in 2017.

Francis had a relationship with singer Bobby Darin early in her career,
but her father kept them apart. She considered Darin, who died in 1973
at age 37, the love of her life. "My personal life is a regret from A to
Z," Francis told PEOPLE in 1984. "I realized I had allowed my father to
exert too much influence over me."

She was married four times. Her first husband was Dick Kanellis; they
married in 1964 and divorced after five months. She married Izzy Marion
in 1971, divorcing 10 months later. She married Joseph Garzilli in 1973.
They adopted a son, Joseph Garzilli Jr., in 1974. The couple split in
1977. She married for a fourth time to Bob Parkinson in 1985, but once
again the marriage only lasted a few months.

Francis told PEOPLE in 2017 that she wanted to be remembered “not so
much for the heights I have reached, but for the depths from which I
have come. . . . I hope I did okay.”

Francis is survived by her son.

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