Homeless Woman Dies at LA County Hospital, Was Not in Fact "Bobby's Girl" singer Marcie Blane

File this one under Life in LA, #WeGoofed.

An elderly homeless woman named Mildred Goldman aka Mildred Maxwell died at USC--LA County Hospital on October 9th, 2017. During the last 30 or so years, she succeeded in convincing people including her longtime boyfriend, that she was Marcie Blane, singer of the 1962 hit "Bobby's Girl."

The truth is, Mildred Maxwell was someone else. (BTW, she also told people that her dead husband, Arthur Maxwell, had been the heir to the Maxwell House Coffee fortune. We should've known right then).

2 days after posting the story, we received the following e mail:

To whom it may concern,

I worked for Casey Kasem for 15 years as the East Coast researcher for "American Top 40" (1972 through 1987).

I read the article by The Santa Monica Observer, claiming that singer Marcie Blane (who recorded the hit "Bobby's Girl") passed away this month.

I have reasons to believe that the information may not be correct.

A few years ago I read an article that songwriter Paul Vance had died (he wrote "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini" and "Catch A Falling Star." The article, written by a lady named Nancy Hutson, was totally incorrect. Someone claiming to be Paul Vance and claimed to have written the "Bikini" song had died but it turned out that he was NOT the Paul Vance who wrote those hits. I called up the reporter who wrote story and convinced her that it was NOT true. A couple of years later I interviewed the REAL Paul Vance.

Back to Marcie Blane .....

In the late 70s (or it may have been early 80s) I did a phone interview with Marcie.

Marcie told me that her real name was Marcia Blank (not Mildred Goldman), as stated in your article. Please check out this fairly recent Wordpress paragraph about Marcie (included on this linked page):

https://promptlings.wordpress.com/2016/01/02/saturday-sing-a-long-oh-those-golden-voiced-women/

Marcie Blane (born Marcia Blank, May 21, 1944 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American singer who recorded pop music. The Seville record label issued a demo performed by the high school student as a favor for a friend. The song was "Bobby's Girl", which was followed by "What Does a Girl Do".Released in the fall of 1962, "Bobby's Girl" made #2 on the Cash Box chart and #3 on the Billboard Hot 100, and was later recorded for the German market in their language. It sold over one million copies by 1963, and was awarded a gold disc. Around 1965 Marcie retired from the music business and, as of the early 1990s, was a music and arts educator in New York. Marcia has two kids, four grandchildren. Soon after she left her husband, CFO Xerox, Retired controller IBM, Larry Zimmerman.

Note: It includes a portion about Marcie Blane (the real one) and states that she was married and divorced from a person with the last name of Zimmerman and had two children and four grandchildren.

Your article claims that Marcie never had children.

Please check out this article:

https://mentalitch.com/marcie-blane-bobbys-girl/

It claims that she graduated from Queens College and had two children. There is nothing about her being a gemologist. Had that been the truth, I am reasonably certain that she would have mentioned that to me during our interview. Marcie DID mention to me that she became a music and arts teacher, which is accurately stated in the above article.

(You're writer) is the only person that I know that has posted information that Marcie died.

I would be very interested in talking to him to find out the source of his information. I know quite a bit more about Marcie,none of which is mentioned in his article.

Thanks so very much.

Ronnie Allen