Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hi, it's Phoebe. We're heading back out on tour this fall, bringing our 10th anniversary show to even more cities. Austin, Tucson, Boulder, Portland, Oregon, Detroit, Madison, Northampton, and Atlanta, we're coming your way. Come and hear seven brand new stories told live on stage by me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr. We think it's the best live show we've ever done. Tickets are on sale now at thisiscriminal.com slash live. See you very soon.
Where were you when you first heard Connie's music? I was at a holiday party minding my own business and a song came up on the house mix that sounded like something I'd known all my life and also like something I knew I was hearing for the first time. As the melodies and lyrics were unfolding it just started to remind me of some of my favorite art song and I was so struck by her.
I just couldn't quite place it, you know, like what is this? It just was completely original, you know, and sort of from another, I don't want to say another planet, but just sort of not placeable. And the voice, of course. It's an unusual voice. It doesn't sound like anybody else.
She had a tremendously direct way of delivering songs, and there's a simplicity to her language. She was just being herself, you know, and you can really hear that in her music. I could shine, I could shine like the morning sun, like the sun.
I asked the host of the party who we were listening to, and he said, oh, this is Connie Converse. She made these recordings in the 1950s in her apartment in Greenwich Village. As he told me that, I realized, okay, well, I don't know who Connie Converse is. This is Howard Fishman. He's a writer and musician. Given the quality of the music, I absolutely should know who Connie Converse is. At the party that night, his friend told him the story he'd heard about her.
That one day in 1974, Connie Converse drove away and disappeared. Her friends and family never heard from her again. No body was ever found. My first thought was that it was a hoax and that there could be no such person as Connie Converse. The name seemed too fantastic. The story seemed too fantastic.
So I thought it was a hoax. I thought it was somebody who had created a fictional character, but who was making this music today. That was my first thought. But then I soon realized this is actually a true story, and this woman actually existed. And I quickly realized that there was very little in the way of information about her life available anywhere. But people haven't stopped thinking about her. In 2009, musician Robert Forster, called Connie Converse Life...
A drama so sprawling with the denouement so unexpected that Hollywood can only gaze and wonder. And in 2022, writer Hanif Abdurraqib wrote that he was fascinated by Connie Converse because, quote, "...I have found myself newly sensitive to the art of disappearance and how it is not, or at least not always, aligned with death. Sometimes a desire to be gone is simply a desire to be gone."
This year is the 50th anniversary of Connie Converse's disappearance. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. After Howard Fishman heard Connie Converse's music, he tried to find out everything he could about her. He's been researching her for more than 10 years. And he became friends with her brother, Phil Converse, a political science professor at the University of Michigan. Her brother invited Howard to come visit him in Ann Arbor and look at the papers Connie had left behind.
And when Howard got there, he realized it wasn't just a handful of letters. It was a little bit of an out-of-body experience just because of the quantity and depth of what she'd left behind and the intentionality of the way that she left it. Very well organized with a nine-page table of contents, including where everything was in every folder in every drawer.
And it seemed clear to me that this archive had been assembled for the intention of being found one day. There were diaries, hundreds of letters organized by recipient, tape recordings, and poetry she'd written throughout her life. Some of the earliest writings included her correspondence with her best friend, Frannie Flint. They grew up together in New Hampshire. When Frannie was 16, she was sent away to boarding school.
She told Connie, I only wish you could be in my place, for you could go out and show the world something wonderful, which is you. Howard Fishman says that even before her friend moved away, Connie was an overachiever. And after Franny left, he writes, she became even more so. In his words, almost pathologically so. She was editor of the yearbook. She worked on the school newspaper, was a member of the debate club, sang in the choir, and played violin in the orchestra.
She was also the valedictorian of her high school class. She and Franny wrote often. Franny sent Connie a mysterious telegram right before graduation. All it said was, may there be no weeds between your mansion and antiquity tonight. The letters are really quite beautiful and quite unusual in their precociousness and their sort of forward thinking and introspection and
It seems pretty clear that they were thinking about some pretty deep things. Franny called Connie prof in her letters, and she once wrote, What is life? I see there is less in it all the time. I am grown and done. Anything after now is just repetition. The summer after she graduated from high school, Connie worked as a waitress at a local hotel. She was going to Mount Holyoke for college that fall, just like her mother and grandmother. Franny would be going to Vassar.
By all accounts, Connie did well at Mount Holyoke. She wrote in one of the school's magazines, Am I disloyal to high New Hampshire peaks when I love a Massachusetts mountain? She took classes in French and philosophy and wrote for the school's literary magazines. She was one of eight college students in the country nominated for a prize in poetry. One of the poems she submitted was called Reduction to Absurdity. It reads, I think that I shall just regress from middle youth to childishness.
From cover fields of infancy to restless prenatality. And then arrive where good souls go, a cold and tired embryo. And then, one day in 1944, after finishing her sophomore year, she abruptly told the college that she wasn't coming back. Connie's brother Phil said their parents were devastated. Phil never knew why Connie left school. Phil told me that they'd never had a conversation about it.
And that he just assumed that if Connie thought it was what was best, then it must be what was best. And he left it at that. Phil says Connie didn't move home after she dropped out. Howard couldn't find any letters or diary entries from the time. I mean, I spent, you know, about a dozen years researching this woman's story. I could never pin her to any location in the nine months following her death.
dropping out of Mount Holyoke and then popping up in New York for the first time in February of 1945. So she seems to have pulled her first disappearing act at that time, at age 20. In 1945, Connie got a job in New York City at a think tank called the American Council of the Institute for Pacific Relations, first as an editorial assistant, but soon she was writing articles about American policies in Asia.
Connie Converse, without an undergraduate degree, somehow found her way not only into this organization, but within a couple of years, writing for them, writing very scholarly articles about these topics and being published, and also editing other people's writings about these topics. So that was the milieu that she was in for the first five years or so that she was in New York. She was unbelievably intelligent.
and always trying to figure things out. I think that was sort of a prevailing theme of her life. How can I figure this thing out? How can I make this thing better? Connie started making friends in New York. Howard describes them as a crowd of artists and musicians who often had late-night parties. He interviewed some of Connie's friends from that time. One remembered that Connie would often be at the typewriter, as though oblivious to what the group was doing. In her diary, Connie wrote...
I suppose that if I were a more ardent and competent conversationalist, I should not feel impelled to type up my arguments, metaphors, insights, and analogies. Many of the people I talked with said, you know, I really didn't know her that well. She was hard to know. She seemed reserved, complete within herself, but not easy to get to know.
At another party, in an apartment on the third or fourth floor, one of her friends remembered Connie suddenly stood up, opened the window, and climbed outside. And there was nothing out there but a very thin ledge. No fire escape, no landing, and she would be out there for hours. A little while later, she reappeared, coming out of another room in the apartment. She seemed to have climbed back in through a different window.
Connie's best friend from high school, Frannie Flint, moved to New York after she graduated from Vassar. And for a very brief window of time, the two best friends were living in New York at the same time, getting their start on life. And it's an image that is poignant and fun to think about. But within just a few months, Frannie Flint's father had a series of heart attacks and
She was called back home to Concord, New Hampshire, and after her father died, rather than returning to New York, Frannie Flint then went with her mother to Boston to enroll in graduate school at Radcliffe. And her mother got a job at Radcliffe as well. Frannie Flint's brother was studying at Harvard and...
Within a year or so, Franny Flint sank into a pretty bad depression and was found dead in the woods in Wayland, Massachusetts around Thanksgiving of 1947. How did Connie react?
All we know is what Phil remembered. He said to me on many occasions, because he would bring up Frannie Flint a lot, Connie was upset about the community's reaction to Frannie Flint's death, which was ruled a suicide. And the community felt that having had her father recently die, how could she do this to her brother and mother? How could she take this kind of selfish action?
Phil Converse said that he remembers his sister saying that everyone has a right to do away with themselves if they want. And she was incredibly angry at the community and at their response, according to him. Connie Converse was 23 years old. Two years later, she started to record her own music. We'll be right back. Hi, it's Phoebe.
If you're someone who enjoys listening to the stories we tell on Criminal, I want to tell you about another show you might like, My Favorite Murder, hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark on the Exactly Right Network. In each episode, they tell each other stories, some that are well-known from true crime history, like the Golden State Killer and the Heaven's Gate Cult, and others that you might not have even heard about before.
They're very funny, and Karen does a very good impression of me. I've been on the show a couple of times, talking about stories that I've come across that I think are really interesting, like the disappearance of the Sauter children on Christmas Eve in 1945 and the plane that crashed on Rikers Island in 1957. Look out for brand new episodes on the show every Thursday. Listen and follow My Favorite Murder wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Start Ritual or add Essential for Women 18 Plus to your subscription today. That's ritual.com slash criminal for 25% off. In 1949, Connie Converse was 25 years old, and the think tank where she worked was being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The committee's goal was to investigate anyone suspected of having communist ties.
Senator Joseph McCarthy had accused Connie's editor of being the top Soviet agent in North America. Connie lost her job. And that begins the next period of her life where she is really focused on trying to make it as a musician and a songwriter.
In 1949, the best-selling songs in the country were by artists like the Andrews Sisters, Perry Como, and Bing Crosby. At that time, the pop music of America was pretty bland stuff. Benny Goodman and jazz and swing and big band music and Tin Pan Alley.
There was no such thing really as singer-songwriters at that time. And there was a folk scene for sure. But folk music in 1949, 1950, 1954, these years that Connie Converse is writing music, folk music at that time was music that was traditional music. It wasn't written by anybody. It was handed down and passed around orally.
So I think people sometimes inaccurately today describe Connie Converse as a folk singer, which is, it's just entirely inaccurate. Because at the time that she was writing these songs, if you were a folk singer, you were singing traditional songs that had no known composer, no known lyricist. I knew a man once very long ago
♪ They say that he was born in Buffalo, but I don't believe it ♪ ♪ Buffalo was never sufficiently gilded and pruned ♪ Connie taught herself to play guitar. She wrote, "I used to think a guitar was a vulgar and unpleasing instrument, but if treated properly, it rises above the realm of the musical cliché, and with a good song, even clichés sound good." For the next few years, she wrote a lot of songs.
Connie wrote in her diary, a good song must imply its own harmony. To test, whistle it a cappella. Here she is, recording herself. Hello, hello. Now I have the microphone on, I have the volume on five, and I have the microphone in input one, and I'm getting a reading up as far as... She sent copies of her music to her brother Phil and his wife Jean. They called it her Song of the Month Club.
And then as she finished a song, she would pack it up in an envelope and mail it to Phil and Jean in Ann Arbor so that they could hear it. And also said that Phil and Jean could play the songs themselves. Phil played guitar and Jean sang. And I think they did a lot of playing Connie Converse's songs at home. For money, Connie worked at a temp agency and did some freelance writing. She eventually found a permanent job at a print shop and publisher.
But she wrote to her brother, I am furtively exploring the concrete commercial alleys of the songwriting racket, just in case there might be a buck in it for me. One Thanksgiving, Connie's parents visited her in New York, and she played them some of her music for the first time. She recorded the performance. On the tape, you can hear her mother say, Oh, I really like that one. One of the songs Connie played for her family was called Talking Like You.
This is a version recorded later, at the home of a man named Gene Deitch. Gene Deitch was an illustrator and animator.
He directed Popeye and Tom and Jerry cartoons. But he was also an audio enthusiast and a lover of jazz and blues and folk music. Gene often hosted parties with his friend Bill Bernal at his home. They would invite some singer, usually a folk artist or a blues artist, and they would give a house concert, and Gene Deitch would record them, and that was a hobby of his. Connie played at one of these parties in 1954.
Bill's wife remembered feeling confused by Connie and said she was, quote, boring to look at. She described her as strange. She said, incredibly talented, obviously, a genius, and yet so baffling in the way she presented herself. She described her as dowdy, looking like she'd just come in from milking the cows, and seemed aloof and arrogant.
Later, Gene Deitch's son, Kim, wrote about that night. He said, no one paid any particular attention to her at first, but at some point, whoever had brought Connie along urged her to sing something, and with seeming reluctance, she did. Well, it was one of those moments you often hear about, but seldom witness. From that point on, the party was all about Connie. People say you're old
She played more than a dozen songs that night. In the middle of one, Gene Deitch's cat started screaming. Connie said, that makes the perfect background.
Are people telling her, Connie, you're really good? This stuff is great. I mean, did she have any sort of a following? She had a following of people who heard her at these house concerts and thought she was absolutely out of this world. Like, unlike anything they had ever heard before. So those people, yes, were telling her, you've got what it takes, you're going to be huge. Gene Deitch made copies of his recordings from the party for his friends.
who would then play them for their friends. And then, Connie got an invitation to play on the morning show on CBS. Gene tried to help her prepare to be on TV. He asked her practice questions. There isn't any surviving footage of her performance on CBS. In photos, she isn't wearing her glasses. She's wearing makeup. Gene's son remembers watching her on TV and thinking, we'll all be bragging. We knew her when, pretty soon.
After her television appearance, nothing happened. No record deal, no invitations to perform on other shows. The feedback that she was getting from the music industry was, we don't know what to do with your music. In any of her papers, did she write ever about feeling disillusioned about the fact that, yes, she was getting some recognition, but it wasn't enough, or she really did want to make it big, but she feared she wouldn't?
I think unlike somebody like Bob Dylan, Connie Converse didn't play the game. She wanted to be discovered. She didn't want to go to them. She wanted them to come to her. And so I think that her main focus was composing, songwriting, performing, and then showing up for whatever opportunities presented themselves, but not going after them per se. Sometimes musicians and singers reached out to Connie, asking to play her music, but
She gave one singer the exclusive right to sing one of her songs for a year in exchange for $50. Connie wrote to her brother, "Every few months my guitar stuff hits some new periphery of the entertainment world." She was still writing music. She started working on an opera. In 1960, a friend of Connie's in advertising asked if she wanted to record any of her music in the studio where his company did jingles. She recorded for just a few hours, a total of 11 songs.
Connie's friend told Howard that they did just a few takes of each song because she had her way of doing them, pretty set. Not long after, Connie started talking about leaving New York. She told her friends in New York that she was going on sabbatical and that she would be back. Whether or not that was true or whether that was subterfuge is unknown. The year she left, Bob Dylan came to New York and started playing in coffee houses in Connie's old neighborhood, Greenwich Village.
Howard Fishman says the two effectively swapped places. Bob Dylan would become famous a few years later. Before she left New York, she wrote to a friend, I am still a printer, an aunt, and a struggling middle-aged artist. No news on those fronts. We'll be right back. In 1961, Connie Converse moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her brother Phil lived. She saw him often. She gave music lessons to one of her nephews,
Friends of hers told Howard that if they went by Connie's house at night, they would find her playing the guitar and smoking. Her friends said they were worried about her. She was depressed. She moved into her brother's attic for a while. She protested against the Vietnam War, and she became an editor for the Journal of Conflict Resolution until 1972, when the journal shut down. Connie Converse was turning 50 in August of 1974.
On August 10th, 1974, she dropped notes and letters into the mailbox to family and friends, each of which said different things. But several of them said, I'm going back to New York. I'm hoping to get my old job back, get in my old union, and get started again. She told her nephew, just like Bilbo Baggins, I have to go away. She wrote to her mother,
It may be some time before I can get settled somewhere and get back in touch. In any event, it would be pointless for you to worry. And there was a long letter to no one in particular. In all caps, it's addressed, quote, to anyone who ever asks if I'm long unheard from. Her brother found it in her papers later. Near the end of the letter, she writes, human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy. I just can't find my place to plug into it.
So let me go, please. And please accept my thanks for those happy times that each of you has given me over the years. And please know that I would have preferred to give you more than I ever did or could. I am in everyone's debt. Connie Converse was never seen or heard from again. Her car, a Volkswagen, was never found. Did her family and friends, did they try to find her? What did they do? They did nothing. They did not report her missing anywhere.
They did at one point talk to a private detective to see what would be involved in engaging a detective services to go looking for her. And we're told that every person has the legal right to disappear. So that even if the detective found his sister, if his sister didn't want to be found...
then the detective wouldn't be able to tell her where she is. And so for that reason, Phil said they didn't hire a detective. In the United States, it's not a crime to disappear. There are no federal laws that require investigation into missing adults. If a person chooses to disappear and they're reported missing, privacy laws don't allow police to tell the missing person's family where they are, only that they're alive. As the New York Times reported in 2001,
The authorities know from experience that a large majority of adults who disappear do so because they want to leave. A few weeks after Connie left, Phil wrote to a medical examiner in New York City. He said, "I have lost contact with my sister, whom I believe to be somewhere in the New York City area. At the moment, I am not completely alarmed. Her dropping out of sight was intentional and announced to me in advance."
On the other hand, I know her to be despondent over several problems, so I felt I should file some identifying information with you. There were many theories in the family. Connie's cousin heard that after Connie disappeared, the back door was open and breakfast was on the stove. The son of one of Connie's friends heard that Connie had gone off to find an old boyfriend from the Navy. Another cousin heard that Connie was on a secret assignment.
One of Connie's nephews told Howard that the Michigan State Police contacted him when they had found remains in Tennessee that they thought might be Connie. The detective told him he would be in touch if they could identify them, but the nephew never heard back. For a long time, Connie's recordings sat in storage. In 2004, Gene Deitch went on a radio show called Spinning on Air. He brought one of his recordings of Connie to play. It was the first time one of her songs had been on the radio.
A music producer named Dan DeZula was listening to Spinning On Air in the car with his brother when he heard Connie's music. He said he was dumbfounded. He tried to find out more about her, but found very little. He remembered it was very frustrating. Eventually, he wrote to Gene Deitch and Phil Converse, who shared the recordings of Connie with him. Dan founded a record label and put out the first commercial release of Connie's music, called How Sad, How Lovely.
in 2009. Her songs have been played around 16 million times on Spotify. Today, Connie Converse is recognized as a pioneer of the singer-songwriter genre. A tribute album came out in 2017. When you start to sing her songs, you sort of connect right away to her kind of mysterious existence. This is Martha Wainwright.
She did a cover of Connie's song, One by One, for the tribute album. It's funny, I'm usually asked to cover the songs that are the more kind of weirder or more difficult ones sometimes, because I don't know why. But in the case of Connie Converse, they're all like that. So it's kind of fine. Hearing the song, hearing the voice, did you get a sense that this was a woman who was
not trying to be anyone else. Absolutely. A complete individual. Um, and almost sort of speaking, um, not so much about, she was speaking about herself, I suppose, in a way, but more about, uh,
a sense of feeling out of place or not quite knowing where to be and a kind of mysticism and one foot in this world and another foot in another world maybe that I think really spoke to me. I sort of felt not so alone in many ways.
Honestly, it's very moving, and I guess I do find it really personal. This is Julia Bullock. She's an opera singer. A few years ago, she started performing her own version of One by One at the end of her performances. One by One is about seeking connection in life.
times when maybe you're feeling isolated and acknowledging that you are in communion with other people, I think even in times of great despair. And sometimes I'm struck with searing emotion while singing her songs, which I guess in some ways is sort of surprising because it's not like the
melodies are really demanding but I think she found this extraordinary way to release emotion if she were around today and you could talk to her what would you want to talk to her about I would just want to listen you know and see what and just sort of watch her and sort of let it let it happen I'd be more curious to just hear what she had to say um
I wouldn't know what to ask her, you know, because I wouldn't want to upset her or disturb her, you know, or, you know, why this, why that, why, you know, but I think it would just be watching and listening and learning. I think I just want to hang out, honestly, cook a meal and drink some, whatever she wanted to drink as well. What a just,
extraordinarily deep and open person. And one of my favorite things about listening to that initial recording of her and some of the other recordings that I've been sent that also haven't been released is also just listening to her talk about her music or just these little side comments. She just seemed totally conscious and with it. And I think it just would have been very cool to be in her presence for a
It would be very cool to be in her presence for a little while. If Connie Converse is alive, she'll turn 100 years old this year. When she was still living in New York, she wrote in a letter to her brother, For the best communication, the most satisfactory human relationship, it seems now to me that knowing and being known are prerequisites. I have always found it difficult to make myself known.
I have the microphone about eight inches away, and it's going way up. I'm getting a very good response. I'm going to pause a minute and try the microphone. I put the microphone down. Well, no, I can't do that. So that seems to be a good response. Howard Fishman's book is called, to anyone who ever asks, The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.
Special thanks to Zodic Records, None Such Records, and The Music Group. You can hear Martha Wainwright's cover of One by One on Vanity of Vanities, a tribute to Connie Converse. Julia Bullock's version is on her debut album, Walking in the Dark. Dan Zula has released three albums of Connie Converse's music. You can find them at ConnieConverse.com.
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