Where the Boys Are: Remembering Connie Francis

`The passing of plaintive songstress Connie Francis brought me back to my teen years. Francis—whose early pop hits included “Stupid Cupid,” “Lipstick on Your Collar,” and a swoony rendition of the old “Who’s Sorry Now?—played featured roles in movies and then segued into belting out standards for adult audiences. Hers was an eventful life: her father chased away an early suitor, the pre-fame Bobby Darin, and none of her four subsequent marriages ended well. In 1974, while staying post-concert at a Howard Johnson’s motel in upstate New York, she was raped at knifepoint, left naked and tied to a chair by an assailant who was never found. Other family tragedies and health challenges followed, but she eventually resumed her singing career, became a victims’ rights advocate, and survived until the ripe old age of 87.

 I will always associate Connie Francis with Where the Boys Are, a 1960 film seen (sometimes more than once) by every junior high school girl I knew. The film was in many ways a template for the beach party movies that followed (as well as for aspects of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures nurse flicks). We girls appreciated Where the Boys Are for zeroing in on the hopes and fears with which we regarded our own futures. Our impending college years—still far off but looming large in our imaginations—seemed to promise so much in the way of freedom, self-fulfillment, romantic love. Still, we could sense that there were dangers to be skirted, and the film makes these quite clear.

 It starts with a group of diverse (but, of course, all white) college co-eds heading down from the snowy Midwest to enjoy spring break in Fort Lauderdale, where vacationing collegians abound. Boys, of course, are very much on the minds of the four. The sensible Merritt (Dolores Hart) is quickly attracted to Ivy Leaguer Ryder (George Hamilton). Madcap Tuggle (Paula Prentiss) is delighted to find that TV Thompson (Jim Hutton) is even taller than she is, and shares her wry sense of humor. Pretty blonde Melanie (Yvette Mimieux) falls hard for a Yalie named Franklin. Angie (Connie Francis) has a few laughs with the goofy Basil (Frank Gorshin), but is mostly alone, wistfully warbling, “Where the boys are . . .  someone waits for me.”  

 All these plotlines play out in ways we can predict. The fun and games that are part of this giant courtship dance give way to a more somber tone when Melanie, who has naively agreed to meet Franklin at a local motel, finds herself a rape victim. Dazed and disheveled, she wanders down the highway and is sideswiped by a passing car. Her hospitalization quickly leads her friends to step back from their own romantic adventures. Maturity, they realize, is something to be prized. At the film’s end they’re returning to college, sadder but wiser.

 As they recuperate from their spring fling, lessons have been learned. (I’m sure our parents appreciated the film sending a cautionary message regarding pre-marital sex.) The light-hearted romance of Tuggle and her guy is quickly over (though Prentiss—making her first film—and Hutton had such strong on-screen chemistry that MGM quickly starred them in three romantic comedies). It’s only Hart and Hamilton’s characters who seem to have a solid connection that can make for future happiness.

 The irony, of course, is that Dolores Hart was not destined for marriage. In 1963 she ended her engagement to an L.A. architect to enter a Connecticut convent as a Benedictine nun. Clearly, she was not heading where the boys are. 

 

By Way of Obit; Yvette Mimieux and Some Others

The recent death of Yvette Mimieux, once the radiant young blonde star of Sixties movies, has sent me back into my own past. I  remember her as beautiful and vulnerable in such hit teen movies as Where the Boys Are. I forgive her for kinky tripe like Three in the Attic, and acknowledge that she somehow kept her dignity in a low-budget Roger Corman crime thriller, Jackson County Jail. Her passing led me to watch her screen performance in perhaps her most ambitious role, in 1962’s Light in the Piazza.

 I’ve wondered about Light in the Piazza since I saw the Los Angeles production of the award-winning 2005 Broadway musical version. Though critics cheered, I found the play’s plot logic deeply troubling. The central characters are a mother and her young adult daughter, wealthy Americans leisurely enjoying Italy. To the mother’s dismay, the daughter quickly falls for a handsome young Italian, and he for her. As a wedding is being discussed, we discover a melodramatic complication: Clara once sustained a serious head injury, and she’s mentally and emotionally stunted. Her mother faces a serious dilemma: stop the wedding, or allow her daughter to find a happiness that may be temporary. It all seemed like hooey to me, and I was never convinced that the Clara I saw on stage had the emotional age of a ten-year-old.

 That’s why, in homage to Mimieux, I watched the film, which stars Olivia  de Havilland as a deeply troubled mother. It’s a bit sappy, though Florence and Rome look lovely. The time given to the strain of the relationship between de Havilland’s Meg and her no-nonsense husband (Barry Sullivan) helps explain the puzzling turnabout in Meg’s attitude toward the young lovers. And I saw something in Mimieux’s performance that confirms who Clara is—someone who, for all her charm, will never progress beyond being innocent and girlish. A belated brava to Mimieux.

 Somehow I’ve never had a moment to salute Betty White upon her passing at the age of almost-but-not-quite 100. It’s sad to lose her, but how wonderful that she enjoyed a long, long career, and a life that was happy and productive right up to the end. Some of those we’ve lost recently started out in showbiz at a much younger age than Betty White, but discovered what a mixed blessing child stardom can be. I grew up watching Tommy Kirk in a whole string of Disney hits, like Old Yeller and The Shaggy Dog. He later was a perennial in a series of teen beach movies in the Sixties. Who knew then that his parting from Disney had been abrupt and painful, caused at least in part by the homosexuality he couldn’t hide? Along the way he picked up a drug habit, and at one point (despite his substantial childhood earnings) was nearly broke. Somehow he got through all that, living out his days quietly, far from Hollywood.

 It was just last month that we lost Peter Robbins, not a household name but a voice to be reckoned with. From 9 to 16, he was the original voice of  Peanuts’ Charlie Brown on a number of major TV specials. Eventually mental illness kicked in; at age 65 he  died by suicide.

 Jane Powell, star of Golden Age musicals like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers started in the business at age 14. Unable to go to college because she was her alcoholic mother’s sole support, she continued performing, and married 5 times. Her last and most successful marriage was to Dickie Moore, who like her understood what child stardom was all about.