The star-crossed love of Bobby Darin and Connie Francis is coming to Broadway this spring. Just in Time, a new musical which opens April 23, tells the story of the “Mack the Knife” singer’s meteoric rise and untimely death at age 37. It stars Tony-winner Jonathan Groff as Bobby and Gracie Lawrence, a star of The Sex Lives of College Girls, as Connie.
In 1956, Bobby met Connie as a young songwriter. The pair quickly recognized a similar fire to succeed in each other. “Bobby was determined to make it before he was 25,” Connie, 87, tells Closer. “He was the smartest man I ever met. He could talk about anything — poetry, philosophy, politics, history.”
Multiple infections with rheumatic fever as a child left Bobby with a weakened heart — and an urgency to live his life to the fullest. Not long after he and Connie, who became a star in 1958 with “ Who’s Sorry Now?” fell in love, he began talking marriage. “Bobby wanted to elope, but I knew my father would kill us both,” Connie says.
Bobby Darin and Connie Francis Were Dream Lovers
That hardly deterred her ardent lover. “One night, I got home and there was Bobby with packed suitcases. He got down on one knee and said, ‘OK, let’s go get ourselves married,’” she recalls. “I couldn’t out of fear of my dad.”
Connie also had practical reasons for not leaping into matrimony. Bobby would become a two-time Grammy winner and sell more than a million records, but at that time both of them were penniless. “The thought of Bobby getting a job like a regular civilian was foreign to me,” Connie admits. “I kept asking, ‘Where will we live? What will we eat?’ We used to share an egg salad sandwich from a drugstore because we didn’t have any money.”
When Connie’s father learned that Bobby had shown up at The Jackie Gleason Show, where she was scheduled to perform, he decided to end the romance. “[My father] had a pistol in his back pocket,” Connie recalls. “My manager saw it and screamed, ‘Run, Bobby, Run.’ Bobby dashed through all of the seats and escaped through the men’s bathroom window.”
In the coming days, Bobby tried to contact Connie through her manager’s office, but she refused his phone calls. “He had a delicate heart,” she explains. “I was scared something might happen to him because of the stress and my dad’s hatred toward him. My dad was obsessed when it came to me and who I could be with.”
Both Connie and Bobby would go on to other loves — but she never forgot him. “I think of him every single day and still play his music all the time,” she says. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him.”
