Tony and Frances Toto are getting ready to celebrate 60 years of marriage, which is something no one would have predicted four decades ago when Frances grew frightfully weary of her pizza-maker husband’s Lothario ways and tried in vain to have him killed.
You may know the story of the Allentown couple — if not the real one, then the film version from 1990. It featured Kevin Kline and Tracey Ullman as the Toto-inspired leads, with Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix and William Hurt as hapless hitmen who can’t even get an A for effort as they shoot, poison and drug their unkillable target.
“I Love You to Death” was played for laughs — dark laughs — but it wasn’t far from the truth. Frances, with the help of some bargain-basement hitmen, tried to kill Tony because of his years of cheating and verbal abuse.
Tony — who escaped an attempted bludgeoning and survived a dose of rat poison, a meal full of sleeping pills, a gunshot to the head and another to the chest, all in the course of five days — refused to die.
Frances and the hitmen were arrested after an informant’s tip. Tony, chastened that his behavior had driven his wife to such drastic action, bailed her out of jail, dramatically pleaded with a judge to show her mercy and resolved to reinvent himself as a good husband and father to the couple’s four children.
Frances received four to 10 years in state prison. She served the minimum and the Totos, reconciled, reassembled the shards of their marriage in the same Walnut Street house where the plot unfolded and where they still live.
Since then, the Totos have led comparatively unremarkable lives. Their children are doing well and they have 11 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren to dote on. They wouldn’t stand out from any other couple pushing a cart in the supermarket or sitting in the next pew at church.
“We had a lot of problems,” Frances said the other day, when she and her husband welcomed a couple of visitors to their home to talk about the strange old times.
“Well, everybody has problems,” Tony said. “Life is like a rollercoaster.”
“Up and down,” his wife agreed.
Memories on display
The Totos haven’t talked much to the media since the excitement over the movie died out, though they granted a few interviews on their 57th wedding anniversary.
They’ll mark their 60th on Feb. 26. Not many marriages make it that far, especially ones where the spouses reconcile over attempted murder times five, but they are in fine shape for their age — she’s 81, he’s 79 — and see no reason they can’t mark many more anniversaries.
“I ran a 5K last year,” Tony said cheerfully, which is how he says most things. A picture of him at the finish line, and a medal on a ribbon, commemorate this feat, which he plans to do again this year. Frances said she will join him this time, but only to walk.
“What I care about is staying healthy,” Tony said — a sentiment that would have landed quite differently in 1983, when all of this began. He also has a black belt in taekwondo, a Korean martial art.
He’s a charismatic man, a grayer version of the lean, roving-eyed Italian immigrant who worked the ovens at the defunct Tony’s Pizza on South Eighth Street for many years. The building was demolished for a parking lot, which you might imagine is for the best because it’s one less reminder of the plot that thrust the couple into the spotlight.
Tony, however, recalls the place fondly, and the basement where he has memorialized the Totos’ extraordinary relationship has a few signs, shirts and other mementos from the pizza shop.
They are easy to miss because the walls are covered to the last inch by newspaper clippings, magazine covers, movie posters and candid snapshots with celebrities. Some of the stories and posters are in different languages, underscoring the hold the Totos’ story had on the public imagination around the world.
Among the most cherished items is a framed thank-you note from Kline for the Totos’ hospitality as he studied for the role. It is set like a nostalgic jewel among pictures of the Totos with the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Joan Rivers.
They were taken around the world on press junkets, flying first class and staying in top hotels — except for one trip when they were put up in a lower-end chain.
“When you got on the elevator you could smell the bug spray,” Frances remembered.
“Let it go,” Tony said. “You eat the steak all the time, sometimes you get the burger.”
A murder plot and then, rebuilding a relationship
On Jan. 26, 1983, Tony was shot in the back of the head while he slept by Anthony Bruno, 20, an acquaintance who said he was “emotionally involved” with Frances.
When Tony survived, Frances tried to finish the job by dosing him with barbiturates in chicken soup. She told her dazed and groggy husband he had the flu. Doctors said the drugs probably saved him, slowing his metabolism and preventing deadly blood loss.
Two days later, Bruno — unwilling to shoot Tony a second time — hired teens Ronald and Donald Barlip to finish the job. Ronald fired a bullet into Tony’s chest as he lay in bed. The bullet missed his heart and passed through his body.
On Jan. 30, police acting on a tip rescued Toto from his bloody bed. He spent two weeks in the hospital. The story became international news.
The Totos have no idea what happened to Bruno, who pleaded guilty alongside Frances and was sentenced to six to 12 years, serving just under five, or the Barlips, who also pleaded guilty.
Ronald Barlip received four to 10 years in state prison and was arrested on drug charges in Allentown 10 hours after his release in 1991. Donald served his 2½-5-year sentence in Lehigh County Jail.
None of the men could be located for comment. Bruno, who spoke to The Morning Call in 1990 when the movie came out, objected to the comedic take, as did relatives of the Barlips.
“The problem I have with it is I have to live every day of my life knowing I tried to hurt someone. To me, that is no joke,” Bruno said.
It must have been easy at the time to imagine Frances as a would-be black widow, but by her account, and her husband’s, she was simply a wife exhausted and driven to despair by Tony’s affairs and the verbal abuse he unleashed on her.
Today, at 81, she is a sweet-faced woman with an easy laugh who, with her remnant New York accent, sounds a bit like the mother of Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas.
She was almost 17 when she met Tony at Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx. He was only 15 and not long out of Italy. Though his English was poor, he had swagger. Frances was outside a classroom talking with her sister one day when Tony winked at her.
He asked her out. She said no.
“My mother said you never say yes the first time,” Frances recalled. “So I said I was busy.”
The second time he asked, she said yes. They went to the movies.
“It was a foreign movie,” she said. “It was at the Globe Theater. We didn’t understand a word.”
They married in 1966, which gave Tony a deferment in the Vietnam draft. Frances said she became pregnant on their honeymoon. Tony worked as a printer, but eventually moved into the pizza business and real estate management, buying an apartment building that he would eventually sell to raise money for his wife’s bail.
Because the movie treated the events with a lighter touch, it’s easy to lose sight of the darkness in the true story. The Barlip cousins, for example, were drug addicts, drawn into the plot because they were desperate for money. Tony was a cruel husband who drove his wife to the point of murder.
In the years after the crime, people would point at the Totos and whisper, or show up outside the house to take pictures. Tony lost job opportunities because of the notoriety, though he was able eventually to return to his first vocation as a printer.
When the movie came out, they turned from murder-plot couple into local celebrities — the love-conquers-all spouses of Walnut Street. Tony, as promised, reinvented himself. Frances allowed herself to trust him again.
“I believe in God and I believe he gave me a second chance and I kept my family together,” Tony said.
It’s one of nearly two dozen statements he committed to paper, as if he wanted to preserve the recipe of his redemption in writing so future scoundrels can make use of it. “Without respect there is no love,” one says. “Without communication there is no relationship … Follow your heart but take your brain with you.”
In the manner of couples married for a long time, the Totos are fun to talk to. They tease and bicker good-naturedly. They smile at one another and laugh. One starts telling a story and asks the other to finish it.
Reminiscing about high school, Frances mentioned the teenage Tony’s struggles with English.
“Even today your English isn’t so good,” she said.
Tony looked flabbergasted.
“After 60 years of marriage, today you make this confession?”
Morning Call reporter Daniel Patrick Sheehan can be reached at 610-820-6598 or dsheehan@mcall.com.