Fact #157627
When:
Short story:
Frankie Lymon, leader of The Teenagers, is found dead of a heroin overdose at the age of 25 on the floor of his grandmother's bathroom in Harlem, New York City, USA.
Full article:
"I was merely a pawn in a big chess game" said Frankie Lymon, just months before he died of a heroin overdose on 27 February 1968.
Most of Lymon's brief, spectacular and tragic career, peaking with the 1956 smash Why Do Fools Fall In Love, had been conducted under the aegis of Gee Records, owned and operated by the notorious Morris Levy. A ruthless but outwardly respectable music industry mogul, Levy's long-standing links with the Mafia were not made public until shortly before his death in May of 1991.
And Frankie himself was certainly no angel. He had been operating as a thirteen year old dope-smoking pimp for Harlem hookers for some while before he turned his precocious talents to singing a capella in his high piping choirboy tenor on the corner of 164th Street and Edgecombe Avenue with The Teenagers. When he was drawn into the music industry, by talent-spotting producer George Goldner, Frankie simply augmented one set of vices with another.
Ironically, Goldner was a relatively honest operator and a genuinely gifted producer/arranger, but re-cycling his record label profits at the local race track left him perpetually in debt. Levy bought up the lucrative Gee Records, and demanded that his name should replace Lymon's as writer of Why Do Fools Fall In Love and other Teenagers' hits. While Levy raked in the big publishing bucks from subsequent smashes like and the ABCs Of Love, I Promise To Remember and the heavily ironic I'm Not A Juvenile Delinquent, Lymon and The Teenagers were kept at bay with regular hand-outs, just enough in Frankie's case to allow the kid to indulge himself in narcotics.
One glamourous publicity photograph of the period captured the moment when a well-scrubbed and grinning Frankie stepped out in Hollywood with Marilyn Monroe on one arm and Jane Russell on the other, but in truth Lymon was already trapped in a seedy lowlife scene from which escape was never on the cards.
"Frankie was influenced," says his brother Lewis, "but he was influenced by friends, not by strangers. My brother, if he liked you, would try to buy your friendship. He was that type. He just wanted to be liked. I'm not going to name names but I knew the people. If Frankie wanted to hang out, he'd have to do what they were doing."
And what they were doing was heroin, so the fresh-faced urchin became a junkie by the age of seventeen. Encouraged by Levy, who felt he could be profiting from two successful acts instead of one, Frankie went solo in 1957 but neither he nor The Teenagers ever replicated the success they enjoyed together.
At the height of his success he had been pulling in $8000 a week, but he told Downbeat magazine, "I don't know where the money went. All my transactions were handled by someone else who hired someone else. They were careful to keep the kid happy, of course. They bought me whatever I wanted, or thought I wanted. What would any kid of thirteen want? It certainly wasn't bank accounts and taxes and getting receipts. They'd pat me on the head and tell me how great I was."
Barely eighteen years old in 1961, he was literally picked out of a New York gutter and made to kick his habit via a detox program at Manhattan General Hospital. Under the watchful eyes of new managers, Bob Redcross and Sammy Bray, Lymon took dancing lessons and learned to sing in six languages. Jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie took Frankie under his wing and encouraged him to play the drums. Within a year, though, he was back on the junk.
In 1964, financially drained by further bad business deals, three broken marriages, and a mainlining habit that cost him $75 a day, he was convicted of narcotics possession. Jimmy Merchant of The Teenagers views Lymon's descent as almost inevitable. "He just got involved with the wrong people in his own neighbourhood. He took to the drugs because it appeased him and helped him escape the rigours of show business."
After a spell in the army, it looked as if his luck might be turning when he was offered a new contract in February 1968 and flew to New York to begin recording. "I'm interested in broader areas of show business," he declared. "Sinatra is where it's at and I'd rather do a fine ballad or a swinging jazz tune. I've grown up at last."
It was never to be. Within hours of arriving home, though, he was in touch with his old cronies. The next morning, with a syringe at his side, he was found dead in the bathroom of his grandmother's apartment at 470 West 165th Street.
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Antonia Figueroa del Sol (former girlfriend) : I was living in New Jersey. I was in the kitchen. It was morning. I picked up the paper and I see that Frankie Lymon was found dead in his grandmother's bathroom. I got very quiet. I held everything in. It hurt terrible, but I held it in. I cried for myself.
Frankie broke my heart, but I forgive him. I was his first love and his first inspiration. It's in the past now, but it still sticks to me. It was a very happy time in my life, and I live with it today. I told Frankie I would never forget him. And I won't.
(Source : not known)
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Most of Lymon's brief, spectacular and tragic career, peaking with the 1956 smash Why Do Fools Fall In Love, had been conducted under the aegis of Gee Records, owned and operated by the notorious Morris Levy. A ruthless but outwardly respectable music industry mogul, Levy's long-standing links with the Mafia were not made public until shortly before his death in May of 1991.
And Frankie himself was certainly no angel. He had been operating as a thirteen year old dope-smoking pimp for Harlem hookers for some while before he turned his precocious talents to singing a capella in his high piping choirboy tenor on the corner of 164th Street and Edgecombe Avenue with The Teenagers. When he was drawn into the music industry, by talent-spotting producer George Goldner, Frankie simply augmented one set of vices with another.
Ironically, Goldner was a relatively honest operator and a genuinely gifted producer/arranger, but re-cycling his record label profits at the local race track left him perpetually in debt. Levy bought up the lucrative Gee Records, and demanded that his name should replace Lymon's as writer of Why Do Fools Fall In Love and other Teenagers' hits. While Levy raked in the big publishing bucks from subsequent smashes like and the ABCs Of Love, I Promise To Remember and the heavily ironic I'm Not A Juvenile Delinquent, Lymon and The Teenagers were kept at bay with regular hand-outs, just enough in Frankie's case to allow the kid to indulge himself in narcotics.
One glamourous publicity photograph of the period captured the moment when a well-scrubbed and grinning Frankie stepped out in Hollywood with Marilyn Monroe on one arm and Jane Russell on the other, but in truth Lymon was already trapped in a seedy lowlife scene from which escape was never on the cards.
"Frankie was influenced," says his brother Lewis, "but he was influenced by friends, not by strangers. My brother, if he liked you, would try to buy your friendship. He was that type. He just wanted to be liked. I'm not going to name names but I knew the people. If Frankie wanted to hang out, he'd have to do what they were doing."
And what they were doing was heroin, so the fresh-faced urchin became a junkie by the age of seventeen. Encouraged by Levy, who felt he could be profiting from two successful acts instead of one, Frankie went solo in 1957 but neither he nor The Teenagers ever replicated the success they enjoyed together.
At the height of his success he had been pulling in $8000 a week, but he told Downbeat magazine, "I don't know where the money went. All my transactions were handled by someone else who hired someone else. They were careful to keep the kid happy, of course. They bought me whatever I wanted, or thought I wanted. What would any kid of thirteen want? It certainly wasn't bank accounts and taxes and getting receipts. They'd pat me on the head and tell me how great I was."
Barely eighteen years old in 1961, he was literally picked out of a New York gutter and made to kick his habit via a detox program at Manhattan General Hospital. Under the watchful eyes of new managers, Bob Redcross and Sammy Bray, Lymon took dancing lessons and learned to sing in six languages. Jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie took Frankie under his wing and encouraged him to play the drums. Within a year, though, he was back on the junk.
In 1964, financially drained by further bad business deals, three broken marriages, and a mainlining habit that cost him $75 a day, he was convicted of narcotics possession. Jimmy Merchant of The Teenagers views Lymon's descent as almost inevitable. "He just got involved with the wrong people in his own neighbourhood. He took to the drugs because it appeased him and helped him escape the rigours of show business."
After a spell in the army, it looked as if his luck might be turning when he was offered a new contract in February 1968 and flew to New York to begin recording. "I'm interested in broader areas of show business," he declared. "Sinatra is where it's at and I'd rather do a fine ballad or a swinging jazz tune. I've grown up at last."
It was never to be. Within hours of arriving home, though, he was in touch with his old cronies. The next morning, with a syringe at his side, he was found dead in the bathroom of his grandmother's apartment at 470 West 165th Street.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Antonia Figueroa del Sol (former girlfriend) : I was living in New Jersey. I was in the kitchen. It was morning. I picked up the paper and I see that Frankie Lymon was found dead in his grandmother's bathroom. I got very quiet. I held everything in. It hurt terrible, but I held it in. I cried for myself.
Frankie broke my heart, but I forgive him. I was his first love and his first inspiration. It's in the past now, but it still sticks to me. It was a very happy time in my life, and I live with it today. I told Frankie I would never forget him. And I won't.
(Source : not known)