Little Girl Blue

by Randy L. Schmidt

  Frenda worried Karen would board the next plane back to Los Angeles. “You could never put Karen anywhere where there wasn’t television,” she explains. “She was regimented. Most people would adapt. Not Karen.”

  With Ellis’s experience and expertise in the field of entertainment management and the record industry in general, it was only a matter of time before he became a part of Karen’s professional as well as personal life. “I was an outsider, and it really wasn’t my business,” he says, but when he attended his first Carpenters concert he was flabbergasted by the lack of professionalism he witnessed in their stage show. “I watched them perform, and my mouth dropped because she was a terrible performer,” he says. “She hadn’t the slightest idea about how to use a stage. She did everything wrong. She wasn’t using her vivacious personality or her wonderful smile. She wasn’t using the fact that the audiences absolutely worshiped her. She’d sing a song, and when the guitar player or drummer played a little solo she’d turn her back on the audience and sort of click her fingers and had no interrelation with the audience. Anybody who goes near stage when they’re six years old learns that you never, ever, ever turn your back on an audience. I just simply couldn’t believe they had so-called top-class management and nobody had taken her by the hand and said, ‘Karen, let’s work on your stage show.’ They could have hired somebody to produce their show.”

  Terry could not hold back. He was an expert in concert construction and was accustomed to evaluating his artists after every show in an effort to continuously better their performances. Back at the hotel, Karen was shocked by his blunt analysis. “Karen, I’m sorry to say this, but you were terrible,” he said. “Now, that’s the bad news. But the good news is that you’re never going to be that terrible again! Tomorrow I’m taking you onto the stage, and I am going to teach you some fundamentals.”

  The two walked the stage as Ellis explained that Karen should never stand in front of Cubby O’Brien or Tony Peluso with her back to the audience during their solos. She should face the audience, walk toward them, and interact.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Go to the front of the stage and reach your hand out,” he instructed.

  “Well, why should I do that?”

  “Well, the audience will like it!”

  “Well, what will they do?”

  “Well, they’ll jump up and they’ll hold your hand.”

  “No they won’t!”

  “Yes, Karen, they will. And they will absolutely love it!”

  Ellis continued, explaining to Karen that she had ignored the audience members seated in the balcony the night before. “Walk out to the edge of the stage and look up to the people in the balcony and wave at them,” he said.

  “Oh, I can’t do that!”

  “Well, yes you can, Karen. They’ll love it.”

  “And what will they do?”

  “They’ll wave back, Karen!”

  “No they won’t,” she said. “They won’t!”

  She argued, but Karen took the stage that night and took command in a way she had never done before. The interaction with the audience was a natural for her, but for some reason she had avoided such communication in the past. “She was like a kid in a candy store,” recalls Ellis. “She discovered something that made life more exciting and more fulfilling.”

  As Evelyn Wallace recalls, “All of a sudden, here she was moving her arms and walking from one side of the stage to the other so that everybody could see her. It didn’t take her long to realize she had to move around and interact more.”

  Karen’s sudden on-stage blossoming took Richard by surprise. According to Terry Ellis, he reacted badly to the change in the dynamic, which was curious since it was at his urging that Karen left the drums for the forefront in the first place. “Richard had been so used to being the focus of everybody’s attention that it came as something of a shock to him and something he found difficult to handle. It upset him. He couldn’t understand why she was getting attention and he wasn’t. At one point in Las Vegas, he was having a bit of a rant about how unappreciated he was and that nobody knew what he did—and he wasn’t wrong about that. He was the musical genius behind the Carpenters, but nobody was taking any trouble to ensure that he got the credit he deserved. Karen was the focus of attention. She was the girl with the golden voice; the voice of an angel.”

  When Ellis arrived in Las Vegas for a series of shows, he discovered Richard was furious after having been introduced as ‘the piano player with the Carpenters’ during a panel discussion for Billboard magazine. “Have you discussed this with your managers?” Ellis asked. “Are they doing anything about it?”

  “Well,” Richard said, “no.”

  In Las Vegas the Carpenters were augmented by a large orchestra backing their own group. At the beginning of every show the conductor would lead the orchestra in playing an overture just prior to Karen and Richard’s entrance. Ellis made one suggestion to Richard. “Rather than you just shambling onto the stage playing the piano, let’s let the audiences know who and what you are. Let’s have you come out at the first on the stage and you conduct the overture!” In Ellis’s opinion, an orchestral conductor was a position of command, responsibility, and authority. “That immediately establishes you as someone who is a bit special and not just the piano player.” Ellis was happy to help but felt he might have overstepped some boundaries in coaching Karen and Richard. He blamed management—particularly Sherwin Bash—for not having addressed these issues much earlier. “Basically, you’re both being held back by your manager,” he told them.

  “Karen and Richard were kids from Downey, and the show business world was a bit overpowering to them,” Ellis explains. “They were excited and felt very lucky that they seemed to have had some breaks. They had a fairly well-known manager, and they felt they were very fortunate to have him, but he did a terrible, terrible job. There was no career plan. There was no one thinking about the long term prospects for the Carpenters or for Richard or for Karen. I don’t think anybody was sitting down with them and saying, ‘Let’s talk about your career and work out how we’re going to make this last until you’re fifty, sixty, or seventy years old.’”

  BY THE time Horizon saw release in June 1975, two years had passed since the Carpenters’ previous studio album. Disappointing to some was its brevity, clocking in at just under thirty-five minutes in duration, but the tremendous advances in sound quality due to new and improved recording techniques prevailed. The debut Offering album was completed using only eight tracks, while the Carpenters’ next four LPs were recorded on sixteen. Horizon was the first to take advantage of A&M’s graduation to twenty-four-track recording, and it did not go unnoticed. Stephen Holden of Rolling Stone called it their “most musically sophisticated album to date,” saying it “smoothly adapts the spirit of mainstream Fifties pop to contemporary taste. . . . Karen Carpenter has developed into a fine vocal technician, whose mellow interpretation of the Eagles’ ‘Desperado’ and Neil Sedaka’s ‘Solitaire’ evidence professionalism on a par with such Fifties stars as Jo Stafford and Rosemary Clooney. . . . Richard Carpenter has imposed more elaborately orchestrated textures than before and wisely mixed them at a level that doesn’t distract attention from Karen’s intimately mixed singing.”

  Within two weeks of its release, Horizon was certified gold. Although it reached the top of the charts in the United Kingdom and Japan, the album missed the U.S. Top 10 when it peaked at #13. According to Richard, the single “Only Yesterday” was one of their better technical achievements, in which he employed a Phil Spector “wall of sound” approach. Even so, the song’s success cost him and John Bettis the thousand dollars they bet a studio engineer that it would not be a hit. According to Bettis, sitting down to write “Only Yesterday” he thought to himself, “Oh boy, here we go again—another yesterday song.” He was able to avoid the sad and somewhat melancholy approach taken in “Goodbye to Love” and “Yesterday Once More,” turning this
song into an upbeat, optimistic love song and one about “being in love now,” he explained. “And yesterday was not so good because you weren’t here.”

  In 1991, while remixing various tracks for a Japanese karaoke compilation, Richard discovered an unmarked, forgotten Horizon outtake on a multitrack tape for “Only Yesterday.” It was Karen’s work lead with piano, bass, and drums for the David Pomeranz tune, “Trying to Get the Feeling Again,” recorded in 1975. It became the title track for a Barry Manilow album released four months after Horizon and a hit single for him in 1976. The Carpenters’ version was abandoned when Richard decided the album had plenty of strong ballads. It remained unfinished and was somehow never cataloged into A&M’s tape library. Adding a twenty-four-piece string section, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and synthesizer, Richard completed their version of “Trying to Get the Feeling Again” for Interpretations: A 25th Anniversary Celebration released in 1994.

  Legendary arranger Billy May’s lush treatment of the Andrews Sisters’ “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” was one of several big band ballads Karen recorded during her career, and according to Holden of Rolling Stone, “such a gem of updated schmaltz, it makes me wish that veteran masters of the studio like Gordon Jenkins, Ray Ellis, Nelson Riddle and Percy Faith would be encouraged to collaborate with other best selling middle of the road acts of the Seventies.”

  Jazz critic Dave Gelly agreed and took notice of Karen’s careful attention to microphone technique. “She sings very close to the microphone, starting at around Julie London or Peggy Lee volume, that’s to say, not much more than a whisper. Then, she gradually opens up to about Jo Stafford level. No tears, no dramatics—just plain, unfussy and beautifully done.”

  Ken Barnes’s review for Phonograph Record called Horizon “soft-rock Nirvana,” going on to say, “It’s certainly less than revolutionary to admit you like the Carpenters these days (in rock circles, if you recall, it formerly bordered on heresy). Everybody must be won over by now. . . . If all MOR were this good, one might not resent its all-out appropriation of the airwaves. . . . As for the Carpenters, they’ve transcended the genre and stand in a class by themselves.”

  KAREN’S NEW slim figure required that she purchase a new stage wardrobe, and she opted for a number of low-cut silky gowns, some strapless or even backless. Sherwin Bash was horrified to see her bony shoulders and ribs. Even her hip bones were visible through the thin layers of fabric. He asked Karen to rethink the wardrobe choices before going on stage. “I talked her into putting a jacket on over the bare back and bare arms,” he said, “but the audience saw it.”

  There was often a collective gasp from the audience when Karen would take the stage. In fact, after a few shows, Bash was approached by concerned fans who knew something was terribly wrong but assumed she had cancer or some other disease. Even critics took note of her gaunt appearance. A review for Variety praised Karen’s exit from the drums but commented on her deteriorating appearance. “She is terribly thin, almost a wraith, and should be gowned more becomingly.”

  It became increasingly obvious to Terry Ellis that his girlfriend’s dieting was far more complex than a simple attempt to shed a few pounds. Even in the few months since the two had met, Karen had withered before Terry’s eyes. “When she went onstage she usually had some backless outfit on,” he recalls. “You could see her shoulder blades and ribs sticking out. You could tell that she was much thinner than she ought to be.”

  Five days of shows at Connecticut’s Oakdale Theater in Wallingford were attended by many of the duo’s childhood friends. Agnes and Harold flew in for the week and were met at their hotel by Carl and Teresa Vaiuso, who drove them to the show. The Oakdale was just fifteen miles north of New Haven’s Hall Street, where the couples had first met and raised their families nearly twenty years earlier. “[Harold] was beside himself,” Teresa recalled. “As soon as we picked them up, that was the first thing he said. He said, ‘She’s not fooling me, I know what’s wrong with Karen. She has anorexia nervosa.’ That was the first time I ever really heard that. I thought, ‘What is he saying? Could this be true?’ And sure enough, when we went to see her, that’s exactly what she had. The father was right.”

  According to John Bettis, no one really understood why Karen wasn’t eating. To those around her the solution seemed simple: eat. “Anorexia nervosa was so new to me that I didn’t even know how to pronounce it until 1980,” he said. “From the outside the solution looks so simple. All a person has to do is eat. So we were constantly trying to shove food at Karen. . . . My opinion about anorexia is it’s an attempt to have control; something in your life that you can do something about, that you can regiment. I think that just got out of control with her.”

  Cherry O’Neill confirms that control was most definitely a factor in her own struggles. “When you start denying yourself food and begin feeling you have control over a life that has been pretty much controlled for you, it’s exhilarating. The anorexic feels that while she may not be able to control anything else, she will, by God, control every morsel that goes in her mouth.”

  In contrast with Karen’s dieting rituals, Terry Ellis was a connoisseur of both wine and fine dining. He enjoyed participating in long, leisurely dinners at many of the top restaurants across Europe. Karen would order her usual salad and push the greens around the plate while drinking water with dozens of lemons.

  It was not long before Ellis witnessed the habits the rest of Karen’s friends and family had observed for many months. She pretended to eat a lot, when in reality she was allocating the food to those around her. On one particular instance, out to dinner with the band, Karen ordered a huge slice of cake at the end of meal. “She made a big deal out of telling everybody how she’d ordered this cake, how it looked amazing, and how she was really looking forward to it,” Ellis recalls. “It was like, ‘Look at me, I’m eating this big piece of cake!’ When it arrived, she nibbled a corner of it and said, ‘Wow, this is fantastic,’ and started working her way around the room, going to the band saying, ‘Boy, this cake is delicious! You’ve got to try a piece.’ By the time she’d finished there was very little left on the plate.”

  Band members and others made aware of her condition agreed that Karen fit the description of anorexia to a T. Backstage they witnessed her exhaustion. She was lying down between shows, something she had rarely, if ever, done before. They were shocked to see how she could be flat on her back one minute and on stage singing the next. Even when doing back-to-back shows, Karen displayed “a tremendous amount of nervous energy,” said Sherwin Bash. He was a no-nonsense kind of man who freely spoke his mind and had no qualms confronting Karen on the issue of anorexia, even calling it by name, and he did not back down. “The fact that she was anorexic was discussed innumerable times. . . . There was every attempt to get her to seek professional help, but I believe her family was the kind of family that the mother would say, ‘We can take care of ourselves. We don’t need to have someone. This is a family matter.’”

  According to Ellis, at times Karen seemed to seek the attention of her family and did not mind it coming at the expense of their frustrations with her disorder. When she dieted, or “overdieted” as he explains, there was a rush of attention from the family, especially Agnes. “Karen had never had attention before, so she liked it. The experts say that one of the things that seems to drive young girls to diet and overdiet is that they were oftentimes the kids that never got attention. It’s a way of getting the love from their family that they never got before.”

  FOR THE summer tour of 1975, manager Sherwin Bash paired Karen and Richard with veteran pop singer Neil Sedaka, who was also managed by BNB Associates. Sedaka, experiencing a comeback and the success of his new single “Laughter in the Rain,” would be their opening act. His unbridled energy and onstage antics made him popular with audiences but also made the Carpenters’ portion of the show seem a bit dull and disappointing to some. They were pros at presenting their impeccable musicianship in concerts, bu
t there was very little focus on theatrics.

  During their first shows together at the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, it was already apparent to the Carpenters that Sedaka’s portion of the show was better received by the audiences than their own. “In contrast to my thirty-five minutes, their act was quiet and subdued,” Sedaka wrote in his 1982 autobiography Laughter in the Rain: My Own Story. “While I was obviously thrilled to be on stage, the Carpenters seemed to walk through the act.”

  As the tour continued on to New England, the press seemed to agree. “Sedaka Steals Show from Carpenters,” read a New York Daily News headline. Management began hiding the reviews from Karen and Richard, but Sedaka immediately felt resentment coming from the duo. “I don’t know what happened,” said Bash. “From the very beginning there wasn’t a good feeling between Karen, Richard, and Neil. He was doing things or saying things which they were not comfortable with. . . . I could not soothe all the ruffled feathers.”

  By summer’s end the Carpenters’ latest single—their version of Sedaka’s own “Solitaire”—was climbing the charts, and the tour returned to the Riviera for another two-week run. On the second night, Richard announced to the band that, due to time constraints, he was pulling the finale, in which Sedaka joined Karen and Richard onstage. All hell broke loose the following night during Sedaka’s opening act when he took a moment to nonchalantly introduce and welcome guests Tom Jones and Dick Clark, who were seated in the audience. It was an unwritten rule that this sort of introduction was to be left to the headliner. For Richard, this was the last straw. He was already upset to have learned Sedaka was using the Carpenters’ orchestra. And several keys had been broken on Richard’s piano during Sedaka’s act. Now he was breaking protocol by introducing celebrities in the audience. “When I left the stage,” Sedaka recalled, “I heard Richard Carpenter screaming, ‘Get that son of a bitch out!’”