Beauty and talent combined in Fran Jeffries, a complete entertainer with a warm, sultry distinctive style and with complete command of each lyric and melody she performed. She believed… thought… lived the songs. As a singer and performer she oozed sexual allure —and more besides— with a persuasiveness that would melt the stoniest of hearts, all the while sounding like no one else.

She was born Frances Ann Makris —May 18, 1937— the youngest of the four children Esther A. Gauthier had with Steven G. Makris —a Greek-immigrant with his own barber shop. She grew up in Palo Alto, California. After singing her way to first place in an amateur-night show in San Jose, California, at the age of 12, she was headed for acclaim. She made her nightclub debut at Bimbo’s 365 Club, a leading nightspot in the San Francisco Bay area. Successful engagements at New York’s Copacabana and other top night clubs in Las Vegas, Chicago, Seattle and Hollywood followed. She returned to San Francisco to appear on the same bill as Dick Haymes, her husband from 1958 to 1961 —they separated in 1961, but wouldn’t divorce until 1965. Later, the two teamed up to score a series of successes on all the spots on the posh supper club circuit, kicking off with a record-breaking engagement at the Empire Room of the Waldorf Astoria. Some time later, Fran struck out on her own as a single.

In 1963 she was cast in a leading role on Blake Edwards’ celebrated and delightful comedy “The Pink Panther,” which introduced bumbling inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) to the world (as well as the cartoon character featured in the opening titles). The memorable score was written by one of the most talented film composers of all times, Henry Mancini. Fran sang the charming Meglio Stasera (It Had Better Be Tonight) dancing provocatively around a fireplace, on a memorable music scene. As the song was partly sung in Italian and partly in English, Franco Migliacci and Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics.

A year later, Fran’s figure was highlighted, albeit briefly, on Richard Quine’s amusing “Sex and the Single Girl,” a film based on Helen Gurley’s book. The man responsible for the motion picture score was the renowned jazz arranger and composer Neal Hefti, famed for his swinging works for the Count Basie Orchestra between 1951 and 1962. Basie’s band is heard backing Fran Jeffries in the suggestive title track, (which was written by the versatile film director, Richard Quine), and in the two songs not written for the movie soundtrack: a jumping version of Saul Chaplin and Al Jolson’s Anniversary Song, perfectly suited for dancing (with Basie’s band really shining and seen in the film), and a driving arrangement of Cole Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Love which unfortunately was left on the cutting floor. The result was a startlingly different kind of movie score... one that rocks along with a modern, jazz-based sound. Richard Quine would become Fran’s second husband shortly after the premiere.

In 1964, Fran recorded two more versions of Sex and the Single Girl and Anniversary Song. The first time it was for the soundtrack album by Neal Hefti, with the arranger using the customary giant studio orchestra. But that same year both songs were also included in Fran’s own album for MGM “Fran Jeffries Sings of Sex and the Single Girl”, with the singer backed by an orchestra arranged and conducted by Marty Manning.

Moviegoers took notice of her singing and dancing talents in “The Pink Panther” and “Sex and the Single Girl.” One of the highlights of Fran’s newly started career was her exciting return to Copacabana as headliner in August 1964. For decades, she became a steady fixture in the Las Vegas circuit, 12 rewarding weeks a year, mainly at the Flamingo Room and the Riviera. In 1965 she appeared on the forgettable MGM movie “Harum Scarum” starring Elvis Presley.

She was in constant demand in supper clubs and recording studios. In 1966 she signed with Monument Records to record her third album, “This is Fran Jeffries,” as well as a series of singles that saw the light between then and 1968.

In May 1967 she traveled to Europe, to appear at the Olympia in Paris on June 1st. Before opening, however, she played in Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Milan, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Brussels. When the engagement was over, she began a 26-day tour of the Far East, opening in Tokyo on June 9, before moving on to Manila.

She also filled guest spots on some TV variety shows (Ed Sullivan, Tom Jones), and her career held some new twists ahead of it. First, there was a non-musical role in Paramount’s “A Talent for Loving” (1969), with Richard Widmark, Cesar Romero and Topol, the Israeli star of “Fiddler on the Roof.”

She was also featured in the Playboymagazine in 1971 at the age of 33 in a pictorial entitled “Frantastic!,” the same year that she married her third husband Steven Schaeffer. They only stayed together a couple of years. In 1982 she posed a second time for Playboy at the age of 45. This second pictorial was titled “Still Frantastic!”

In 1977 Leonard Feather wrote about her: “In her movies, on records, in guest shots with Count Basie and on tour with Sammy Davis Jr., Fran Jeffries has displayed a voice of distinction with a keen sense of phrasing and an inclination toward jazz that’s usually accented by her accompaniment.” Although musical fashions had changed, she remained one of the most popular cabaret and casino-hotel lounge acts from the mid ‘70s all the way to the ‘80s, appearing all over the country, singing material that ranged from standard ballads to more current hits, usually accompanied at different times by the trios of pianists Frank Collett, Joanne Grauer, Eddie Higgins, and Ron Feuer.

In the early 90’s she toured with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra, under the direction of clarinetist Henry Cuesta. Their show provided a panorama of the different Big Band styles. Then in 1998, Fran made a series of new recordings for a self-produced CD she titled “It’s Time,” (reissued two years later by Varèse Sarabande with the new title “All the Love”) with the string arrangements of Jimmy Haskell and the tasteful piano of David Benoit. Fran described it as “a completely different thing for me —more of a bubble-gum sound than the ballads I used to do.” It would be her last work on record, but Fran showed off once again the potential talent she could still command as a singer.

In the following years she continued to sing for her fans, and appeared from time to time in Los Angeles venues and private parties, usually accompanied by groups arranged and conduced by her longtime friend and musical director Ron Feuer. She was already semiretired when her health began to deteriorate.

In the fall of 2016 Fran was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that kept her confined in a Los Angeles home for two long months, until the disease caused her death on December 15, 2016, at the age of 79.

Fran Jeffries was a one-off of the most unforgettable kind. These recordings speak for themselves. They will reach out and grab you… Here are —for your listening pleasure— the provocative sounds of Fran Jeffries.

—Jordi Pujol (Taken from the inside liner notes of FSRV 133)