Frankie Valli's Life Behind The Scenes Was More Tragic Than We Knew

Valli — born Francesco Castelluccio — has always been a man who loved to sing. In fact, as recently as 2016 he told British newspaper The Daily Telegraph that singing is still pretty much all he does! With great sincerity, he admitted, “I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs. I don’t play golf, I don’t play tennis, I don’t hike, I don’t ski. I like to sing. I’ve been doing it my whole life. What else am I going to do?”

In truth, Valli wasn’t born a musical prodigy: he had to work at it. As he told the newspaper, “No one starts out terrific. It’s like anything else, it takes a lot of practice.” His family couldn’t afford to send him to music school, but as he put it, “Who taught the first guy how to sing? Who taught the first artist how to paint… or the first dancer how to dance? Where did it come from? And so, I taught myself.”

Valli had to overcome plenty of obstacles to his dream as a kid growing up in Newark, New Jersey. Poverty was ever-present: his family lived from paycheck to paycheck in the projects. In 2008 he reminisced to People magazine about boiling water on the stove simply to have a bath. And all while he watched the criminal element in the neighborhood make a better living than his mom and dad, who worked regular jobs.

“There were no opportunities to go to college, so you didn’t have many options,” remembered Valli. “You got a job on an assembly line, or you got Mobbed up.” Valli wound up taking neither of those paths, though he did have one small brush with the law as a youth when he was caught breaking and entering. He admitted, “It had a terrible effect on my parents. I loved them very much and didn’t want to hurt them.”

Thankfully, Valli discovered music as a young boy and instantly knew that was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. In fact, it was a Frank Sinatra performance he witnessed at the age of six that rewired his brain. He marveled, “The stage felt like it was 100 feet above my head. Sinatra comes out to all the lights, the audience, the roar — everything. After that I sang around the house a lot.”

Valli saw singing as his ticket out of the projects. He was terrified of becoming stuck in his home town like many of his elders and peers. He admitted, “I’d seen so many people become stagnant in New Jersey; I had this fear I’d just stay there. They’d come out of high school, get a job, get married, have kids, and die in Jersey. I wanted more.”

As he tried to find a way into the music business, Valli still had to pay the bills, so he worked any job he could. In 2013 he told Billboard, “I did everything in my power. I worked construction. I went to school to learn to be a hairdresser. I worked at a wholesale florist, where I delivered to florists all over New Jersey. I’d come home and go out to work down at the Shore. The early jobs, I remember, were $5, $6 a night.”

Though he did eventually find success, it wasn’t overnight. After securing his first record contract in 1953 he must have thought he had it made. Yet he and friend Tommy DeVito simply wound up in several groups that never amounted to anything. It was only when teenage pal Joe Pesci — yes, the future Academy-Award-winning star of Goodfellas — introduced them to Bob Gaudio, that things began to click.

Valli and Gaudio clicked as songwriters, and after adding Nick Massi to the group, they became The Four Seasons. Their first hit single came in 1962 when “Sherry” rose to the top of the charts. At the time, Valli admitted that he had seen this as his last chance to truly force his way into the business and was considering quitting music entirely if “Sherry” hadn’t made an impact.

The singer told Billboard, “I lived in the projects right until the time I became successful. It wasn’t easy, but I was really determined. Just before ‘Sherry,’ I thought that was it. I said to myself, ‘If this doesn’t happen, I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ I was at that crossroads of life.” Thankfully, fate had something much greater in store for Valli and the band!

In the end, these early experiences shaped Valli’s outlook on pursuing his dream. He said, “You have to really be in something 100 percent. Because if you’re not, the day you’re not there may be the day it was important for you to be there, so that it could happen. Becoming successful is a relentless pursuit.” He added, “When it does come, you learn to know how to appreciate it.”

Now, remember Valli’s earlier comment about working in a factory or being Mobbed up? He wasn’t blowing smoke: as he grew up and made his way into music, the Mafia was an ever-present. In 2016 he told The San Diego Union-Tribune, “That’s the atmosphere I grew up in when I was a kid. If you were in the music business, in most cases, all the places you worked for were owned by those guys. Organized crime… owned the bars and nightclubs.”

“I came from a very Italian neighborhood and there was a lot of organized crime presence,” admitted Valli. To him, it wasn’t unusual or frightening, simply a way of life. He said, “I knew guys who dressed in suits every day and drove Cadillacs and didn’t go to work. I don’t know what they did. Then, grew up, and realized some were numbers-runners and gamblers.”

That same year Valli told The Daily Telegraph, “I had friends who were bookmakers and runners, people were in and out of jail. All the bars and nightclubs where we played were owned by organised crime. But when we started to get some success we never talked about it. We were afraid it would be exposed, and it would be the end of our career.”

Interestingly, it’s often been claimed that The Four Seasons ran afoul of the Mob while their star was rising. In fact, Gaudio stated as much when he spoke to NPR show Fresh Air in 2014. He claimed, “We were being leaned on by a Mob faction from Brooklyn, claiming they owned us for no real good reason except that they had a connection with a manager we had very early on.” He claimed the band had not suspected the manager had Mob affiliations.

Gaudio continued, “When we decided we were going to leave the manager, that's when things started to get interesting. That's when Gyp came into the picture to try and settle the disagreement.” “Gyp” was Angelo DeCarlo, a member of the Genovese crime family: they were big players in New Jersey loan-sharking in the ‘60s. DeCarlo would later be convicted of conspiracy to commit murder after a wiretapping operation that also exposed Sinatra’s Mob ties to the world!

Fascinatingly, DeCarlo was actually the voice of reason back when he dealt with the Four Seasons’ Mob problem. As Gaudio revealed, “One thing I found out early on about the Mob and those guys: they have a code, but if the source of income is threatening to leave, there could be big trouble. That was the beef. And that eventually worked itself out, and Gyp was certainly instrumental in pulling that off.”

Valli didn’t share Gaudio’s recollection of events, though. He disagreed that the Mob tried to attach themselves to the band and extract an unearned cut of their hard earned money. In 2016 he told the Tribune, “I can tell you that it got blown out of proportion. I don’t know of any organized crime situation where they took advantage of ordinary citizens.”

Instead, Valli’s view was that Mob elements would fight amongst themselves, all while keeping their territories free from crime that could otherwise affect regular citizens! Valli claimed, “There were fights with families over territories, and they killed each other, and the neighborhoods were a lot safer. I came from a very poor neighborhood, but you could keep your doors and windows open at night.”

Valli was adamant that DeCarlo, in particular, never tried to take advantage of him or the band. In 2021 he told the Talking Sopranos podcast, “’Gyp’ De Carlo was a very, very unusual guy. In a lot of cases, we know wiseguys try to take from you or own you. He was not like that. He was like an uncle or a father to me.”

In truth, Valli has actually made this claim multiple times. In 2018 he told The Daily Telegraph that DeCarlo was “like an uncle” to him. He added, “You could say the Godfather. He was very well respected in the neighborhood.” Here he backed up Gaudio’s claim that DeCarlo was a problem-solver, saying the mobster would often shield him from issues, and if any problems did reach him or the band, DeCarlo had a knack of making them go away.

As a matter of fact, DeCarlo was so important to Valli that the singer paid him an incredible tribute, even once he was behind bars! Valli told Taking Sopranos, “When he was in Atlanta federal prison dying of cancer, I went there and did two shows for him.” Yes, that’s right: one of America’s most famous singers performed for his dying gangster friend from within the walls of his penitentiary.

All in all, though, Valli has always maintained he simply knew Mob guys because of where he grew up and his chosen profession; he was never affiliated in any way. He told Talking Sopranos, “I knew everybody because I worked all in the little saloons. Through the years, people thought I was with this family or that family, and I was with no family.” He added, “I had [gangsters] that liked me, but I always kept a distance.”

Getting into Valli’s personal life, over the years he has married four times, with his most recent wedding taking place in 2023! In 1957 he married first wife Mary Mandel, five years before the band’s reputation headed for the stratosphere. Mandel already had a daughter named Celia, who Valli adopted, and they welcomed two biological children as well: Francine and Antonia. The couple then went their separate ways in 1971.

Three years later, Valli walked down the aisle with MaryAnn Hannigan. They’d first met in 1970, but Valli was in no place to get into another relationship at that point, given his first marriage was breaking down. In 1975 he told People, “She was a pal when I needed one, but because I’d been hurt before, I resisted what I was feeling about her.” They wound up divorcing in 1982.

Valli’s longest marriage would be to third wife Randy Clohessy, whom he wed in 1984. They lasted 20 years and had three children together: twins Emilio and Brando, plus Frankie Valli Jr. This break-up hit Valli hard; as he told People, “I really don’t know why it didn’t work out. People don’t get married to get divorced. Maybe people weren’t meant to be together forever.”

Stewie Stone, a close friend of Valli’s, elaborated a little when he told People, “This was a tough breakup because of the boys. He doesn’t get them as often as he’d like. It’s tough when you have kids and they’re not in the house anymore. You don’t hear that noise.” For a family man like Valli, whose motto is, “It’s unconditional love with your kids,” this one cut deep.

Yet Valli did find love again, marrying for the fourth time in June 2023 at the ripe old age of 89! His new bride was 60-year-old Jackie Jacobs, who used to be a CBS executive. She told People, “We met at a restaurant in Los Angeles where he joined my friends and I for dinner. We kept in touch by phone until he called me and asked for a date in late 2015, and we’ve been together ever since.”

During a 2013 interview with Billboard, Valli opened up about a scary time in his life when it looked like his singing career could go away. He revealed, “In 1967 I found out I was losing my hearing. I went ten years without any help. I had otosclerosis: hardening of the bone in the middle of the ear.” During this period, the hearing loss got so bad that Valli reportedly couldn’t even hear himself singing while on stage.

Naturally, this would be a frightening experience for anyone to go through, but it must have been especially terrifying for a man who made his livelihood in music. In the ‘70s, he found himself being forced to sing from memory and simply hope for the best. Amazingly, he must have sounded okay, because fans of The Four Seasons and music critics were none the wiser about what he had been going through.

Valli and Gaudio wound up going to specialist after specialist all over the U.S., only to be told time and time again that they could do nothing to help. Put yourself in Valli’s shoes here: if nothing could be done about the affliction, how long would it be before he was rendered completely deaf? What would the consequences of that be for his private and professional lives?

Thankfully, Valli eventually found himself talking to a renowned ear doctor in Los Angeles, who believed he could bring back Valli’s hearing! A relieved Valli told Billboard, “Dr. Victor Goodhill did the surgery, and it saved my life.” First things first, though. “He went to the bone bank at UCLA and made me a new stapes bone for each ear.”

Dr. Goodhill then scheduled two surgeries on Valli: one on each ear, spaced a year apart. Valli enthused, “He brought my hearing from about 35 percent in one ear to about 98 percent, and a year later operated on the other ear and brought it up to 87 percent.” Valli went from fearing he’d go completely deaf, to having almost perfect hearing in just two procedures. The relieved legend noted, “That was a moment of truth for me.”

Valli’s hearing had been restored by 1980. But that very year he would pass through a crucible the likes of which he’d never faced before. He suffered two family tragedies within months of each other, which were so devastating that writer Rick Elice chose to omit one from Jersey Boys, the hit 2005 musical about the band. He told Vegas Seven magazine, “If you put that in the show, no one would believe it. It would be too horrible and seem like it was fiction.”

The first tragedy occurred when Celia — Valli’s beloved stepdaughter — died after falling from the fire escape outside her New York City apartment. Then, only six months later, Francine passed away at the age of 20 after an accidental overdose. Valli had lost two daughters in one year, and it took everything he had to keep going. In 2013 he told Billboard, “It’s not something you ever, ever get over. It’s just not supposed to be that way.”

When Valli was asked by The Daily Telegraph in 2018 how he managed to find his way through such grief and pain, he replied, “ To be very honest with you, sometimes I don’t know. It was a very tough period for me. You would think that as time went by it would get easier. But it doesn’t. You should never lose a child.”

Though Celia’s death was left out of Jersey Boys, Francine’s was included by way of a scene in which Valli is told about it over the phone. Naturally, this was an incredibly tough watch for Valli, who told People, “The first time I saw that, it was incredibly difficult, and for many times after that. That lives with you forever. She died a long time ago, but I often imagine what it would be like if she were alive.”

Valli reportedly didn’t watch Jersey Boys until it held preview performances at California’s La Jolla Playhouse. When he and Gaudio attended one of these previews, Elice was terrified about what they would think of their lives — and Valli’s tragedy — being depicted on stage. He admitted to the Chicago Tribune that he’d witnessed first-hand Valli having an incredibly emotional reaction to the scene about Francine’s death.

Elice revealed, “That night at La Jolla, all I did was watch them watch the show. What most affected me was watching a man watching the death of his own child on stage. I saw him cry. I saw Bob cry. I saw Bob’s wife cry. When the show was over, they were wiped out. It took hours and several drinks before they came down from their emotion.”