Connie Francis’ Shocking Secrets

Connie Francis is blowing the lid off some of her most shocking secrets — including the iconic songbird's taboo romance with crooner Bobby Darin, the day he broke her heart and the horrific details of her brutal rape!

Now 80, the singer of ’50s and ’60s classics like 'Who’s Sorry Now' and 'Stupid Cupid' reveals her most intimate memories in her new memoir — "Among My Souvenirs" — including the heartbreak when her strict Italian dad, George, forbid the teen from seeing up-and-coming Bobby, then 20.

To this day, the Jersey-born beauty, who would marry four times, calls the "Splish-Splash" singer the “love of her life” and her “soulmate.” But after the young lovebirds talked of eloping, furious George chased Bobby away with a gun and just like that, the romance was over.

“If it hadn’t been for my overprotective father, I would have married him,” she writes in an advance copy of the book obtained by The National ENQUIRER. However, she continued to love the "Mack the Knife" hunk, even during his seven-year marriage to actress Sandra Dee, which ended in 1967.

At one point, a furious Darin — who died at age 37 from heart problems — sent Sandra home from Las Vegas after she’d blown $35,000 at the tables. A pal called Connie and told her an upset Bobby was needed comforting. “I was never more eager to reach a destination than I was to get to Bobby’s room that night,” she recalls.

A stunned Connie found the singer “in the buff while two hookers were actively writhing on the floor,” she writes. “So glad to see your mojo is still working,” said a furious Connie. Bobby sheepishly replied: “Bad timing, baby. The friggin’ worst.”

Connie bolted from the room with Bobby shouting after her to stay. Still, she never stopped loving him, even after he died in 1973. The following year, on Nov. 7, 1974, after performing at New York’s Westbury Music Theater, a fiend broke into her motel room, demanded money and raped her at knife-point.

“I was yanked by my hair and thrown down on my back,” she recalls. “It took me a moment to realize, ‘My God, this is no dream.’” After the rape, the thug tied a naked, brutalized Connie to a chair, nearly smothered her with two mattresses, and warned her to keep quiet for at least 30 minutes after he’d left.

“‘Scream and I’ll kill you,’” he said. Incredibly, Connie’s father shamed her afterward, and later had her locked her in a psych ward after she was wrongly diagnosed as bipolar. Still, despite driving off Bobby and rejecting her, Connie calls her dad “the architect of my brilliant career, and for that I love him.”