Little Girl Blue

by Randy L. Schmidt

  Surprisingly, no one in the Carpenters’ entourage ever complained to management about the grueling touring schedule the group was subjected to. Richard felt they were not so much overworked but overbooked. “I don’t think he was ever truly happy on the road,” Sherwin Bash recalled. But Bash continued to book them, filling each and every open date in their already bulging itineraries. “They were always huffing and puffing about having such a grueling schedule,” Maria Galeazzi recalls. “These managers don’t have any mind for the long run. They want to get the most of them—get it and get it now. . . . Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and you don’t know where you are. The schedule was usually six weeks in a row, which takes its toll, not so much on the other people but on Karen.”

  Signs of Karen’s stress would surface from time to time, as A&M Records’ UK press officer Brian Southall remembers. He received a warning from others at the label in advance of the Carpenters’ arrival in London that year. “Karen’s the one you don’t cross,” he was told. “Karen was on an edge,” Southall later recalled. “You crossed her at your peril. That was sort of the warning we were given before we started.” One evening during a sold-out charity show at the Talk of the Town nightclub, the band was having fun and enjoying some spontaneity in their performance during the last night of the show. “But that was not allowed to happen,” Southall observed. “[Karen] was on them like a ton of bricks. The show had to be exactly the same as every other show they had done. It was the first time that I had realized that the ad-libs were actually not ad-libs, they were the same ad-libs from the night before. . . . The guys in the band weren’t drunk, they weren’t falling about. They just wanted to have a little bit of spontaneity. It was frightening to watch when these guys got torn apart.”

  Maria Galeazzi witnessed the reprimands during her time on the road with the group, too. “Richard was very intense and very dedicated,” she says. “He was more methodical and would explain, ‘We have to do this the next show or that the next show.’ Karen would be more like, ‘You screwed up!’”

  By 1974 everyone needed a break. Richard and Sherwin have both claimed they never saw the Carpenters as a trendy act that would come and go, but their career appears to have been handled in such a way that someone felt exploitation was the necessary means to success, even if it only proved to be in the form of short-term financial success. But even the financial successes were not of great substance. Their attorney, Werner Wolfen, put pen to paper and later informed the Carpenters they would not see a cent of profit until they had performed a minimum of 150 shows in any given year.

  Concert reviews from this period agreed that the Carpenters needed time to relax and regroup. One such review for a show at the Sahara Tahoe appeared in Variety: “Not much showmanship . . . they sorely need advice on stage presentation and pace. . . . Attending a show is no more than listening to an album.” It was true. A Carpenters concert was almost more of a recital of hit songs. From Karen and Richard came rigid directives to their band that every note must sound exactly as it did on the LP. “They were consummate musicians,” says Denny Brooks. “There wasn’t a lot of patter between songs, they just kept knocking out hit after hit after hit.”

  Although little time remained for recording, Karen and Richard managed to release three singles in 1974: “I Won’t Last a Day Without You” (by then two years old and the fifth single culled from their mammoth hit album A Song for You), “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” (a track they put to tape in 1972), and one new recording, “Please Mr. Postman.” Following closely on the heels of the success of their Now and Then album and its side of oldies, the Carpenters decided to record “Postman” as a stand-alone oldie. When the Carpenters’ version became their third #1 single, it also marked the second time the song reached the top position on the Hot 100. In 1961 the original recording by the Marvelettes was the first #1 record to come out of Motown Records. It was also a popular album track on the Beatles’ 1963 With the Beatles album.

  “EV, WOULD you do me a favor?”

  As she would often do, Karen came to Evelyn Wallace asking for assistance, but she usually prefaced her requests with this polite inquiry. “It kind of tickled me,” Wallace recalls.

  “Karen, you’re my boss,” she would respond. “All you have to do is say, ‘Ev, do this,’ or ‘Ev, do that.’ I’d be happy to. You don’t have to ask me, just tell me what you want done, and I’ll do it.’” Both women laughed at these exchanges.

  It was Halloween 1974. Although Karen had moved back in with Agnes and Harold, it was only to be a short-term stay and a temporary solution. She asked Werner Wolfen to start searching for real estate, preferably a nice condominium and one situated away from Downey. “She wanted me to tell her mother that she wanted to look around for an apartment,” Wallace explains. “Karen really wanted to move out of the house. I think her mother was getting her down to the point where she wanted out.”

  “Will you ask her for me?” Karen pleaded.

  “Karen, I’d do anything you asked me, and I will ask her. It would be best for everybody if you can, but I don’t think you’re going to have much luck.”

  “OK,” Karen said. “Just wait until I am gone.”

  After Karen left the house, Evelyn approached Agnes as she sat at the kitchen table. “The kids are at that age now, you know,” she began cautiously. “They’ve kind of, well, really got it made. You know?” Agnes’s brow raised in anticipation of the next words. “Karen would kind of like to find a place and move into a little apartment by herself. A lot of the kids her age have been doing it for a while now.”

  Agnes jumped from the table, leaving Evelyn midsentence. “Well, you’d think that I had hit her over the head with a brick,” Wallace says. “She jumped out of her chair and she ran to that phone and she called Karen, and she was screaming at her and calling her a traitor and asking how she could think such a thing.” Evelyn quietly picked up her purse, slipped out the door, and headed home. “I didn’t want to slam the door and let her know I was going because I thought she’d come running after me,” she says. “She’d think that I gave that idea to Karen to move out, but I didn’t. It was a surprise when Karen asked me to do that. That was the worst thing she ever asked me to do, but I would have died for that girl. She was such a lovely person.”

  9

  THE COLLAPSE

  IN 1996, Rob Hoerburger concisely and powerfully summed up Karen Carpenter’s tribulations in a New York Times Magazine feature: “If anorexia has classically been defined as a young woman’s struggle for control, then Karen was a prime candidate, for the two things she valued most in the world—her voice and her mother’s love—were exclusively the property of Richard. At least she would control the size of her own body.” And control it she did. By September 1975 her weight dropped to ninety-one pounds.

  Karen’s quest to be thin seems to have begun innocently enough just after high school graduation when she started the Stillman water diet. Although she was never obese, she was what most would consider a chubby seventeen-year-old at 145 pounds. She leveled off around 120 pounds and maintained her weight by eating sensibly but not starving herself. Even so, eating while on tour was problematic for Karen, as she described in 1973: “When you’re on the road it’s kind of hard to eat. Period. On top of that, it’s really rough to eat well. We don’t like to eat before a show because I can’t stand singing with a full stomach. . . . You never get to dinner until like midnight or one o’clock, and at that time if you eat heavy you’re not going to sleep, and if you eat heavy you’re going to be a balloon.”

  Maria Galeazzi never witnessed any eating habits she considered to be compulsive or irrational during her years on tour with Karen. “When I was with her she didn’t have an eating problem,” Galeazzi says. “She always watched her weight because she had a problem with her hips. She was a little bit heavier around there, but she wasn’t fat. She never made any comments but always watched what she ate. For instance, she would hav
e two strips of bacon instead of four, or one egg instead of two, but not anything obsessive. I never saw her look in the mirror and say, ‘Oh, I’m so fat.’ Not ever. I have no idea what triggered it.”

  Karen was shocked when she saw photos taken during an August 1973 Lake Tahoe concert where an unflattering outfit accentuated her paunch. This prompted her to seek the assistance of a personal trainer, who made visits to her home and recommended a diet low in calories but high in carbohydrates. Instead of slimming down as she had hoped, Karen started to put on muscle and bulk up following this new regimen. Watching the Carpenters’ appearance on a Bob Hope television special that fall, she remarked that she had put on some extra weight. Richard agreed she looked a bit heavier. She was quite discouraged and vowed she was going to “do something about it.”

  Karen’s first order of business was to fire her trainer, and she immediately set out on a mission to shed the unwanted pounds on her own. She purchased a hip cycle, which she used each morning on her bed, and because it was portable the equipment was packed and taken with her on tour. “She was working on it,” remembers Denny Brooks, who was along for several Carpenters tours during the mid-1970s. “She was a little thick through the hips and thighs and middle. I know that concerned her,” he says.

  “She lost around twenty pounds and she looked fabulous,” recalls Carole Curb. “She weighed about 110 or so, and she looked amazing. . . . If she’d just been able to stop there then life would have been beautiful. A lot of us girls in that era went through moments of that. Everybody wanted to be Twiggy. Just about everybody in the world has some sort of eating disorder—they eat too much or they eat too little. Karen’s just got carried away. She just couldn’t stop.”

  Having witnessed Karen’s meticulous routine of counting calories and planning food intake for every meal, Richard complimented her initial weight loss during a break from recording as the two dined at the Au Petit Café, a favorite French bistro on Vine Street near the A&M studios. “You look great,” he told her.

  “Well, I’m just going to get down to around 105.”

  “A hundred and five? You look great now.”

  Karen’s response worried Richard. In fact, this was the first time he paused to consider that she might be taking the diet too far.

  “With their success and being up on stage, she attempted to slim down and look a little better in a feminine sort of way,” said Sherwin Bash, recalling her as a stocky tomboy prior to 1974. “Karen lost probably twenty pounds and looked terrific. . . . This didn’t satisfy her because she needed more. She needed attention, love, care, and all the things that go with the success of losing that weight. Failing to get it, she continued to lose weight and became painfully thin. . . . Obviously she was looking at herself and seeing somebody that no one else saw; someone who was unattractive and overweight.”

  As Mike Curb had witnessed a year earlier, friends and family began to notice extreme changes in Karen’s eating habits, despite her attempts at subtlety. She rearranged and pushed her food around the plate with a fork as she talked, which gave the appearance of eating. Another of her strategies involved offering samples of her food to others around the table. She would rave on and on about her delicious meal and then insist that everyone at the table try it for themselves. “Here, you have some,” she would say as she enthusiastically scooped heaps of her own meal onto others’ plates. “Would you like to taste this?” By the time dinner was over, Karen’s plate was clean, but she had dispersed her entire meal to everyone else. Agnes caught on to this ploy and began to do the same in return. “Well, this is good, too,” she would say as she put more food onto her daughter’s plate. This infuriated Karen, who realized she would have to find other ways to successfully avoid eating.

  THUMBING THROUGH a copy of Reader’s Digest, Evelyn Wallace discovered an article detailing a teen girl’s obsession with dieting. “She was doing the same things that Karen was doing, like playing with her food or leaving it,” Wallace says. “She was somehow always getting away with not eating.” The following is excerpted from the January 1975 issue of the Digest.

  The young high school sophomore weighed 135 pounds—about five pounds more than average for her height—and decided to diet. But when she reached her proper weight, she went right on depriving herself of food. Eight months later she entered a hospital weighing seventy-four pounds, the victim of self-inflicted starvation. Her bizarre affliction is known as anorexia nervosa.

  An emotional disorder that affects thousands of young women during high school and college years, the disturbance appears to be increasing rapidly. Dr. Hilde Bruch, professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, believes that the national preoccupation with slimness plays a part in anorexia nervosa but that the condition is too complex to be defined simply as diet consciousness. The patient’s refusal to eat, followed by grotesque emaciation, is the physical symptom of a deep-seated psychological disturbance. Most psychiatrists agree that the cure is twofold: putting back the weight to get the patient out of immediate danger and reaching the underlying emotional problems through psychotherapy.

  Although she usually tried to steer clear of personal matters involving her employers, Wallace immediately recognized the parallels between this girl’s story and Karen’s, and she was alarmed. She went to Agnes with the magazine and read the article aloud. “I think Karen has what this little girl did,” she told her. “Really, someone should be doing something about it or she’ll end up the same way.”

  Evelyn did not feel it was her place to confront Karen on the matter but suggested to Agnes that Karen might need to see a doctor before the matter worsened. “I didn’t want [Karen] to be angry with me and get the idea that I was trying to play doctor, and so I never mentioned the article to her. I showed it to Agnes and told her it was up to her.” The magazine remained on the parents’ bedside table for several weeks. “I don’t think she ever showed it to Karen.”

  Cherry Boone O’Neill, oldest daughter of entertainer Pat Boone and member of the singing Boone Family, was suffering in a manner very similar to Karen. “I had never heard the term ‘anorexia’ or even the phrase ‘eating disorder’ until I was twenty years old in 1974,” she says. “When I was seventeen, our pediatrician said he had seen people with my condition before and would have to hospitalize me if I didn’t gain weight, but he never mentioned the name of the condition at that point. Finally, after struggling with both anorexia and bulimia for years and thinking that I was an isolated freak, I read an article in a news magazine that described anorexia and bulimia, and it made me realize I was not the only one struggling with these problems. The article didn’t really tell me how to overcome my challenges, but it made me feel less alone, and it gave my condition a name. It identified the enemy.”

  By the time Karen’s weight dropped to near ninety pounds, she looked for ways to disguise the weight loss, especially around those she knew would make comments or pester her to eat more. She began to layer her clothing, a strategy Sherwin Bash noticed in the early part of 1975. “She would start with a long-sleeved shirt and then put a blouse over that,” he explained, “and a sweater over that and a jacket over that. . . . With all of it you had no idea of what she had become.” But Evelyn Wallace was shocked when she caught a glimpse of Karen’s gaunt figure as she sunbathed topless in back of the Newville house one afternoon. “They put this screen around her so nobody else could see her,” Wallace explains. “She loved to go lay out in the sunshine. I don’t know whether it was to get a tan or get away from her mother. Anyhow, I happened to go out to the kitchen for something and I saw her out there. She just had on her little bathing suit shorts. You couldn’t tell whether it was a girl or a boy. She had absolutely no breasts.”

  IN FEBRUARY 1975 Karen met Terry Ellis, a friend of Ed and Frenda Leffler. Ellis had formed the British record label Chrysalis in 1969. Although he was based in London, where he helped guide the careers of Jethro Tull, Leo Sayer, and others, Ellis had recently b
ought a home in Los Angeles and was working to expand his label’s presence in America. With the intent of matchmaking, Frenda introduced the two over dinner. As Ellis recalls, “I was a single guy, she was a single girl. Frenda said, ‘You two lovely people should meet!’ I liked Karen a lot on that first meeting. It was very difficult not to like Karen.”

  Karen was equally enthralled. Thirty-two-year-old Ellis was tall, with long, sandy blond hair to his shoulders and striking facial features. “He was very handsome,” recalls Frenda. “He was a bon vivant. He drove a Bentley and was a man about town. He was just private jets all the way.”

  The dinner date with the Lefflers became the first of many, and a new relationship soon blossomed. According to Ellis, “We liked each other, made contact later, and started to see each other.” Ellis observed that, unlike the rest of the Carpenter family, Karen was quite demonstrative and seemed to thrive on physical touch. “She was very loving and tactile, and she loved to be hugged.” Those close to the couple sensed a strong chemistry between the two. Most important to Karen was that Richard approve of the man in her life, and he did. He and Terry Ellis quickly became friends.

  Early in their relationship, Ellis encouraged Karen to take some time off to rest and relax with him on vacation in the south of France and on Tortola in the Virgin Islands. Arriving at Ellis’s island home, Karen was horrified by a lack of creature comforts. With Terry out of earshot she phoned Frenda to rant about her surroundings. “Frenny, it’s hard to believe they’ve even got phones over here,” she said. “There’s not even a television set!”