"Big Girls Don't Cry" is a song written by Bob Crewe and Bob
Gaudio and originally recorded by The Four Seasons. It hit
number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 17, 1962, and,
like its predecessor "Sherry", spent five weeks in the top
position. The song also made it to number one, for three weeks,
on Billboard's Rhythm and Blues survey.
According to Gaudio, he was dozing off while watching the
John Payne/Rhonda Fleming/Ronald Reagan movie
Tennessee's Partner(1955) when he heard Payne's
character slap Fleming in the face. After the slap, Fleming's
character replied, "Big girls don't cry." Gaudio wrote the line
on a scrap of paper, fell asleep, and wrote the song the next
morning.
However, the now-famous line does not appear in the Ronald
Reagan film. According to Bob Crewe, he himself was dozing off
in his Manhattan home with the television on when he awoke to
see John Payne manhandling Rhonda Fleming in a 1956 film noir
Slightly Scarlet. The line is heard in that film based on a
James M. Cain story.
Like "Sherry", "Big Girls Don't Cry" is sung mostly in
falsetto. The similarity in style was not a coincidence: the
two songs were recorded in the same recording session. With
"Big Girls Don't Cry", the Four Seasons became the first
rock-era act to hit the top spot on the Hot 100 with their
first two chart entries (their first single, "Bermuda"/"Spanish
Lace", did not appear on any
Billboardchart in 1961).