Management finally called a meeting with Karen, Richard, and their parents, during which Sherwin and Ed explained the desperate need for sophisticated and scrupulous supervision as far as their finances were concerned. “When you start earning millions of dollars you need professional guidance,” they were told.
Enter attorney and financial advisor Werner Wolfen of the Law Offices of Irell and Manella. Wolfen had been in charge of Herb Alpert’s investments for years and came highly recommended. “He made himself known as the boss,” recalls Wallace. “He assured everyone he was going to make the kids rich, and the rest of us were told to do whatever we were told to do to make it happen.” Agnes left the table during that first meeting with Wolfen. She refused to talk to him and communicated through handwritten notes. “It took some doing,” Bash recalled, “because Agnes felt it was a personal attack and didn’t realize it was for everybody’s good. Eventually she allowed professional attorneys and accountants to prevail.”
The accounting firm of Gelfand, Rennert, and Feldman had the arduous task of cleaning up the financial mess they inherited. Luckily Evelyn had documented everything in her well-intentioned but amateur bookkeeping practices. She was relieved of her accounting duties but continued to work for the Carpenter family in the capacity of secretary, assisting Harold Carpenter in sifting through and replying to what quickly became a barrage of fan mail. By the end of 1971, the Carpenters Fan Club consisted of more than ten thousand members.
Werner Wolfen went on to make other financial recommendations and helped the Carpenters manage their newfound wealth by investing in real estate. Newville Realty Company, a joint partnership for Karen and Richard, was formed, and with the help of Beverly Nogawski they set out to purchase two apartment houses located at 8353 and 8356 East Fifth Street in Downey, site of the old Downey Hospital. Tex McAlister, the owner and builder, named the apartments the Geneva in honor of his mother, Geneva, who’d died in the hospital some time earlier. “The Carpenters asked if I would mind if they changed the name to ‘Close to You’ and ‘Only Just Begun,’” he recalls. “I said ‘No, not at all. They’re yours. You can do what you want with them now.’” Tex and his wife, Charlene, became close friends of the Carpenter family after this first business transaction. Shortly thereafter, the McAlisters built their own house on Newville Avenue across from the Carpenter home.
IN NOVEMBER 1970, the search was on for what would become the Carpenters’ next single. In Toronto, where the Carpenters were set to open three weeks of shows for Engelbert Humperdinck, Sherwin Bash suggested that the group go out and enjoy their last free evening. “Why don’t you just get your minds off your business?” he said. “Go see this movie I saw called Lovers and Other Strangers.”
While watching the film, a melody in the underscore caught Richard’s attention. The song was “For All We Know,” written for the movie’s wedding scene. Richard immediately called the office at A&M and asked that a lead sheet be waiting for him upon his return to Los Angeles. Although credited to Fred Karlin, Robb Wilson, and Arthur James, Wilson and James were actually pen names for Robb Royer and James Griffen, members of the pop group Bread.
The Carpenters were also offered “(Where Do I Begin) Love Story” from Love Story but were hesitant to record two successive movie themes. They passed on “Love Story” and chose to record and release “For All We Know,” which went on to win the Oscar for Best Original Song that year. Though the chart performance of the Carpenters’ single was responsible for most of the song’s popularity, Academy rules prevented the Carpenters from performing on the telecast since they had never appeared in a film, and the song was assigned to Petula Clark.
The offer of yet another movie theme came in March 1971 during a recording session at A&M when engineer Ray Gerhardt pressed the talkback button and said, “Richard, Stanley Kramer’s on the phone for you.”
“Sure!” Richard looked at Karen with a sarcastic expression. He went into the booth, picked up the phone, and realized it truly was the legendary filmmaker (Judgment at Nuremburg, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) calling to offer the Carpenters the opportunity to record the title song on the soundtrack of his upcoming film Bless the Beasts and Children. Kramer agreed to meet Karen and Richard in Las Vegas where they were set to open for comedian Don Adams at the Sands in what became their final stint as an opening act. Richard dreaded the idea of meeting with Stanley Kramer because chances were slim the song would be a fit with the Carpenters and their style. Pleasantly surprised by the work of the film’s composers, Barry De Vorzon and Perry Botkin Jr., he and Karen accepted the offer and recorded “Bless the Beasts and Children” in a matter of days to meet Kramer’s deadline.
The Carpenters’ first major recognition within the music industry came on the evening of March 16, 1971, at the Thirteenth Annual Grammy Awards. Filmed at the Hollywood Palladium, the show was the first Grammy ceremony to be broadcast live via television. Karen and Richard won for Best New Artist and were especially thrilled to take home a second Grammy for Best Contemporary Performance by a Duo, Group, or Chorus, a category in which they were nominated alongside the Jackson Five, Simon and Garfunkel, Chicago, and the Beatles.
THE SEARCH for hit songs continued in early 1971 as Richard sat down with a stack of demos from A&M’s publishing houses, Almo and Irving. His attention was captured by another Roger Nichols–Paul Williams tune. In spite of the demo’s sparse instrumentation, Richard was taken with the song’s lyrical hook.
Hangin’ around
Nothin’ to do but frown
Rainy days and Mondays always get me down
By second listen Richard was certain it was a perfect song for Karen, especially with its melancholy and plaintive melody. The opening line—“Talking to myself and feeling old”—was inspired by Williams’s mother. “She used to talk to herself,” he says. “She was a sweet little old lady who smoked cigarettes and had a little drink every night. She used to walk through the room mumbling and would swear under her breath. I would ask, ‘What the hell’s wrong, Mom?’ She’d say, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t understand. You’re too young. I’m just old. I’m feeling old.’ That’s how far away from the Carpenters that the lyric began. It was something from out of my own past.”
Along with Roger Nichols, Williams went into the studio as the Carpenters’ recording of “Rainy Days and Mondays” was taking shape. There they listened as Bob Messenger tracked his saxophone solo. “I think my face just fell off my skull,” Williams says. “That’s the greatest record I’ve heard of one of my songs. From the harmonica intro to the last notes it just made me crazy. When Karen sang it you heard the sadness and the loneliness. For me, listening to her sing that song is almost like a bridge from what was contemporary to the roots of the emotion, back to a Billie Holiday kind of thing. It’s just a classic.”
As good as “Rainy Days and Mondays” was, Nichols says Karen preferred another of his and Paul’s songs she had recorded. She wanted “Let Me Be the One” to be the next Carpenters single. After hearing their arrangement of “Rainy Days,” Nichols pleaded, “‘Rainy Days and Mondays,’ please!” He hoped they would hold off on “Let Me Be the One,” at least temporarily.
In the summer of 1971 Paul Williams treated his mother to a European vacation. He remembers she was not impressed with the desolation she saw in Germany and was pleasantly surprised to see beautiful flowers in all the window boxes as they crossed into France. Just then, “Rainy Days and Mondays” played over the car radio. “It was the first time we’d ever heard it on the radio, and my mother started crying,” he says. “I was hearing Karen singing ‘talking to myself and feeling old,’ and the woman who gave me the line—the woman who raised me—was sitting behind me, and she didn’t even know. Once I told her she laughed and said, ‘Oh, I don’t talk to myself. You’re crazy!’”
“Rainy Days and Mondays” was held out of the #1 spot by Carole King’s double A-side single featuring “It’s Too Late” and “I Feel the Earth Move.” Per
haps a double A-side featuring both “Rainy Days” and “Let Me Be the One” would have pushed the Carpenters to the top of the chart. Instead, the latter never saw release as a single. According to Williams, “Let Me Be the One” has never been a hit, despite its popularity. “It’s one of those songs that everybody’s recorded, but it’s never been a single. It was used very briefly by ABC-TV in 1976. ‘Let us be the one you turn to / Let us be the one you turn to / When you need someone to turn to / Let us be the one.’ It evolved through the years to a whole ad campaign.”
In hopes of getting another potential hit song recorded by the Carpenters, Williams set out on his own to write a song specifically for Karen and Richard. What resulted was a Top 10 hit, not for the Carpenters but for Three Dog Night. “I wrote ‘Old Fashioned Love Song’ for the Carpenters,” he says. “I’d heard that one of my songs had gotten on the charts again and just went gold, so I said to this girl I was dating, ‘The kid did it again with another old-fashioned love song.’ I sat down at her piano and in about twenty minutes wrote ‘Old Fashioned Love Song.’ It’s real simple. I ran in and did a demo of it and sent it over to Richard, and I don’t think he even listened to it all the way through at the time. They didn’t love it as I had figured they would so I sent it to Three Dog Night.” Later rethinking their dismissal of the song, Karen and Richard performed it in a medley with Carol Burnett on her television series in 1972.
ARRIVING HOME relatively early after a recording session at A&M Records, Karen went to bed while Richard sat down to watch The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The musical guest was newcomer Bette Midler, performing a song about a groupie who longs for one more tryst with her rock star. Originally titled “Groupie,” its roots go back to Rita Coolidge, who gave songwriter Leon Russell the basic idea for its theme. Coolidge joined Russell and the song’s cowriter, Bonnie Bramlett (of Delaney and Bonnie), on Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour where she performed it. By tour’s end it had been renamed with the simple yet dramatic one-word title: “Superstar.”
Although Karen had heard “Superstar” on a promo copy of the Mad Dogs and Englishmen live album, Midler’s performance was Richard’s first exposure, and he immediately heard its potential. It was understated and backed only by piano, a contemporary twist to the classic torch song style. He was especially taken with the song’s hook, perhaps even catchier than that of “Rainy Days and Mondays.”
Don’t you remember you told me you loved me baby
You said you’d be coming back this way again baby
Baby, baby, baby, baby, oh, baby
I love you, I really do
As Midler’s “Superstar” came to an end, Richard ran through the house and bounded up the stairs. “I’ve found the tune,” he told Karen.
“That’s nice,” she said after hearing the song.
“Nice?”
This was one of only a few times Karen was known to have objected to a song selected for her by Richard. But even in this case, she eventually agreed to record “Superstar,” although she did so begrudgingly. It was only after hearing the finished product that she heard what Richard had in mind all along. According to Frank Pooler, “Richard was the brains behind the Carpenters. Karen did what she was told.”
Karen’s vocal track on “Superstar” was her work lead, the first “take” to familiarize the other musicians with the song. Not only that, she read the words from a paper napkin on which Richard had scribbled the lyric as the session began. Knowing the song would never find a place on Top 40 radio stations with the lyric “I can hardly wait to sleep with you again,” the Carpenters opted for the more radio friendly “be with you again.” The song’s publishers were delighted with the word change and told Richard how that singular line had kept numerous artists from recording the song.
The intensity and emotion in Karen’s voice led many to assume she was an “old soul” and wise beyond her years. In a 1972 interview she explained how she delivered such a convincing performance on a song like “Superstar” though it dealt with subject matter she had never experienced. “I’ve seen enough groupies hanging around to sense their loneliness, even though they usually don’t show it,” she explained. “I can’t really understand them, but I just tried to feel empathy, and I guess that’s what came across in the song.”
According to Frank Pooler, “When Karen sang, it sounded like she had experienced all this stuff. She couldn’t possibly have experienced all that; she was too young. There’s a difference between being a singer and having a fine voice. Good singers can have average voices, but there’s something about the word communication. That she had. You felt like she was singing it for the first time and only for you.”
It was Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May / Reason to Believe” single that held “Superstar” a spot shy of #1 this time. It remained at #2 for two weeks, a frustrating location for Karen and Richard and one they had grown accustomed to. The flip side, “Bless the Beasts and Children,” also charted at a respectable #67 and was nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar at the Academy Awards.
It seemed as though Bette Midler might have been miffed by the Carpenters’ success with “Superstar,” the song she introduced to the duo, as she began to poke fun at Karen’s goody-two-shoes image during her live act. “She’s so white she’s invisible!” she would say, but Karen took it all in stride, claiming that it was a tribute. Besides, as she pointed out, the gold record for “Superstar” was on the Carpenters’ wall, not Bette’s.
Midler curtsied sarcastically to Karen when the Carpenters presented her with a Grammy for Best New Artist in 1974. “Me and Miss Karen!” she exclaimed. “What a hoot. I’m surprised she didn’t hit me over the head with it!”
The two visited with each other at a Grammy after-party. “We got along fine,” Karen recalled in an interview later that year. “Bette said, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna do now that we’re friends.’ She’s funny as heck. . . . She likes to pick on me, but I think that’s just a good showbiz bit for her.”
Returning to the Grammys as presenter the following year, Bette recalled the event in her monologue. “It was only a year ago that Karen Carpenter crowned me the Best New Artist of the year,” she told the audience. “If that ain’t the kiss of death, honey, I don’t know what is.”
THE DAYS of the Carpenters performing as an opening act were over. On May 14, 1971, they headlined a sold-out concert at New York City’s legendary Carnegie Hall, where Karen and the group performed an already impressive set of their hits in succession. “Rainy Days and Mondays” and “For All We Know” received immediate and enthusiastic response from the audience, who knew their songs word-for-word. “Karen Carpenter has one of those magical voices,” wrote Nancy Erlich for Billboard in her review from Carnegie Hall. “There are maybe three of them among all the ladies in pop music that create a direct line of communication with their very tone. Words and music are secondary; there is always that quality that comes through.”
The concert was a homecoming of sorts, with family and friends from nearby New Haven in attendance. For most, this was their first reunion with the duo in eight years. Karen and Richard were honored with a party thrown at the home of their cousin Joanie and her husband, Hank Will. Though the guest list was small, the gathering became more of an event as word spread that the Carpenters were in town. Festivities were moved outdoors to accommodate a crowd of more than a hundred attendees. “I never really saw Karen as a celebrity,” says Frank Bonito, who visited with her that day. “Even when I attended her concerts, I enjoyed them, but it was the time backstage before the concert or at a party afterwards that I enjoyed most. We would just sit and talk and catch up on each other’s lives. Karen never flaunted her wealth and position. She actually downplayed it and was always sincerely interested in what was happening in my life. She wanted to know about old school friends and teachers, and she maintained a wonderful childlike quality about herself.”
The Carpenters’ eponymous album, often referre
d to as the Tan Album (perhaps a nod to the Beatles’ White Album), was released the same day as the Carnegie Hall concert. It was the first of a string of Carpenters albums to “ship gold,” which at the time indicated presales of more than a million copies. But just as Carole King held “Rainy Days and Mondays” out of the #1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100, her epic Tapestry LP shut out Carpenters on the album charts, too, where it peaked at #2.
Upon returning to Los Angeles, Karen and Richard began taping a summer replacement series for NBC Television the last week of May 1971. “Make Your Own Kind of Music” was a popular recording by Mama Cass and became the theme for this television variety hour that aired Tuesday nights in the eight o’clock time slot usually occupied by The Don Knotts Show. “Karen was a mic singer,” recalls Allyn Ferguson, who served as a musical supervisor on the series. He remembers her to be quite shy and says she sang very close to the microphone with a “tiny” voice. “She would have never been OK on a musical stage,” he says. “You would not be able to hear her at all if you were thirty or forty feet away because she didn’t project at all. She understood how to sing on a microphone, and that brought a sort of intimacy to everything she did.”
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