Francis was born on October 20, 1907, in Boston, Massachusetts,[2] the daughter of Leah (née Davis) and Aram Kazanjian.

Later in life, Kazanjian painted canvases of dogwoods, "rabbits in flight", and other nature scenes, selling them at auction in New York.

[5] When Francis was seven years old, her father decided that opportunities were greater in New York and moved the family to a flat in Washington Heights, Manhattan.

[10] Although several men appeared as co-hosts over the years, Francis was the sole female host throughout the program's long run (on ABC, NBC, and Mutual networks) until it ended in 1949.

She was a regular contributor to NBC Radio's Monitor in the 1950s and 1960s and hosted a long-running midday chat show on WOR-AM that ran from 1960 to 1984.

[1] She appeared on other game shows, including Match Game, Password, To Tell the Truth, and other programs produced by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, including a short-lived hosting stint on the Goodson-Todman show By Popular Demand, replacing original host Robert Alda.

By contrast, the second-highest-paid panelists on TV, Dorothy Kilgallen and Faye Emerson, received $500 (equivalent to $4,500 in 2023) per appearance.

She acted in a few Hollywood films, debuting in the role of a streetwalker who falls prey to mad scientist Bela Lugosi in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932).

In her memoir, Francis said she was cast for the movie even though her only acting experience at the time was in a small Shakespearean production in a convent school she had attended.

She wrote of this experience in her 1978 autobiography: Having made the actual physical break, it was easier for me than I had thought to explain to Neil some of what I felt, what I had been feeling for so long a time.

I saw him fairly often, and he courted me as though we had just met, but I was building up strengths which enabled me to resist not only his blandishments (including a lovely little house which he bought in New York as an enticement to get me to change my mind) but those of my parents, who also would have given anything to see me go back to the status which had been quo.

The couple, who often exchanged endearments on the show, had a son, Peter Gabel,[1] born January 28, 1947, a legal scholar associated with New College of California in San Francisco.

[22] Francis and her husband settled a lawsuit for $185,000 in June 1962 that had been filed by the widow of a Detroit man who was killed when a dumbbell fell from the Gabel family's eighth-floor Ritz Tower apartment and struck him on the head while he was visiting New York to celebrate his birthday.

On May 26, 1963, Francis was involved in a serious car accident while driving alone from a theater on Long Island to the Manhattan studio where she was expected for a live telecast of What's My Line?.