Little Girl Blue

by Randy L. Schmidt

  Karen was crying, “Neil, I’m so sorry about this.”

  Sherwin Bash was in Germany making arrangements with promoters for the upcoming European tour when the call came in from the Riviera. “I got a phone call one night from Richard absolutely hysterical.” Bash agreed it was a huge blunder and asked Richard if he wanted to fire Sedaka. “You bet I want to fire him,” Richard retorted.

  “I was in Berlin, not exactly around the corner from the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas,” recalled Bash. “I called and had half of the people in my office in Los Angeles fly up there to no avail. Richard would not agree that this was not the end of the world. He just totally lost it over this.” The next day Sedaka was informed that Richard wanted him to leave the tour immediately. His remaining days would be paid off.

  By the time Terry Ellis reached Richard by phone it was too late. “We fired Neil Sedaka,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” Ellis roared. He was certain the backlash would be terribly damaging for the Carpenters.

  “Neil Sedaka was and is a very talented guy and a very seasoned veteran in show business,” Ellis says. “He’d been writing hit songs for twenty years at that point; he’d been around show business for a long time, and he knew what he was doing. The poor guy was just doing his job! He was going onstage and doing his absolute best. He had a real show he’d put together, and they didn’t. He brought the house down every night because he knew how to do it—and they didn’t. This upset Richard, and he decided that Sedaka was getting out of place—he wasn’t supposed to do that—he was supposed to support, not upstage. The guy was doing his job! He was being paid to be the very best that he could.”

  Following the advice of several fellow entertainers, Sedaka held a press conference telling those present he was “in a state of shock. It was Richard who first suggested I tour with them. It was a wonderful trip. Every performance was filled with ovations. . . . They felt I was too strong. I guess I was going over better than they had expected.” He justified the introduction of Tom Jones and Dick Clark saying, “They are both close friends of mine, and I’ve written songs for Tom. It’s the first time I’ve ever been asked to leave because of good performances. I feel badly that such talented people would have such insecurity. Ironically, they have a current hit record, ‘Solitaire,’ which is my composition.”

  Sedaka stressed there was no resentment or bitterness, only sorrow. “I don’t want to bad-mouth the Carpenters,” he said, refusing the invitation of fellow performers Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme to tell their Caesar’s Palace audience exactly what happened. Before leaving Las Vegas, Elliott Abbott rebooked Sedaka at the Riviera as a headliner, making it obvious which side he took in this battle. Sedaka parted ways with Sherwin Bash and BNB Associates, forming his own management agency with Abbott. Werner Wolfen flew to Las Vegas in an attempt to pacify Richard, who was by then upset with the manner in which Bash had handled the situation. He blamed Sherwin for planting the seed to fire Sedaka during their phone conversation. Richard’s solution was to fire Sherwin and hire Terry Ellis as the Carpenters’ new manager, but Wolfen was hesitant to do so. He felt there was a possible conflict of interest since Karen was dating Ellis. Even so, Richard insisted Bash be terminated immediately. “It wasn’t Karen, it was Richard,” Bash recalled. “He arranged with an attorney to have me discharged. And Neil Sedaka, feeling that nobody was representing him in all of this, arranged with his attorney and had me discharged as well. So over introducing Tom Jones and Dick Clark, I was fired by both artists.”

  Upon returning to home base in Downey, an overwhelmed Richard Carpenter was caught off guard when Terry Ellis refused his offer to manage the Carpenters. He explained he would do so only on a temporary basis, agreeing to stay until a replacement was found. As Ellis predicted, the story of the firing spread like wildfire through newspaper and radio reports. “The Carpenters ‘Nail’ Neil Sedaka!” “Sedaka Fired for Being Too Strong.” Music critics and deejays began to poke fun at the Carpenters when playing or reviewing their music. Joel McNally wrote in the Milwaukee Journal that the Sedaka incident was “the first time in recorded history that the Carpenters have been heard to utter a curse—even if it was only ‘Grimy Gumdrops.’”

  The Carpenters Fan Club worked to respond to hundreds of letters following the Sedaka episode. Evelyn Wallace kept quiet but was embarrassed to learn Richard had lost his temper and caused such a scene. “I didn’t think much of him at the time for doing what he did,” she says. “I’m sure Richard wanted to introduce those guys, but he could have said something like, ‘I’d like to thank Neil for introducing so-and-so,’ and that would have shown he was the bigger man.”

  In a statement to fan club members, Richard offered the following explanation:

  It often happens in our business, not only with the Carpenters, but also with other headliners, that the choice of the opening act proves to be unsuitable for personal or other reasons. Under those circumstances, the headliner has no option but to terminate the engagement of the opener. This was the situation with Neil. Please be assured that we did not fire Neil Sedaka for doing too well. In fact we were delighted that he was receiving a nice response from the audience. It was a result of other circumstances of which he is totally aware that made it necessary for us to terminate his engagement. . . . It is a disappointment to us that he found it necessary to make statements concerning same to the press. Personally, the Las Vegas/Sedaka issue is an old matter, and right now I am much more concerned with Karen’s health and writing new songs.

  Reviews for the Riviera shows continued to come in, most written before the pandemonium ensued. According to Variety, “Current fortnight with Neil Sedaka is the best combination for them so far. . . . Audience reaction is overwhelming at times.” It went on to praise Sedaka’s performance, saying it “generates enough excitement in his opening forty minutes to indicate future headline status . . . prompting a standing ovation opening show.” Another reviewer referred to opening night at the Riviera as “Sedaka’s night.”

  COMPOUNDED BY the stress of the Riviera engagement, Karen’s failing health could no longer be ignored. In addition to her skeletal appearance, she was mentally and physically exhausted. Fall tours set for Europe and Japan only promised further deterioration for her weakened body and spirit. “I kept telling myself, ‘I’m not really sick. I’ll be better tomorrow,’” she explained to Ray Coleman in an article for Melody Maker entitled “Karen: Why I Collapsed.” “When you have a show to do you just bear on through it. But it kept getting worse, and the last two days [in Vegas], I don’t know how I got through. . . . It’s annoying to feel that I couldn’t withstand what I was doing to myself. You tend to say, ‘Hey, no sweat. I can handle it,’ but this time I couldn’t.”

  Although she made it through the Vegas shows without a major incident, upon returning to Los Angeles Karen checked into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she spent five days while doctors ran tests and worked to strengthen her severely weakened immune system. Upon discharge she was ordered to eat, rest, and refrain from working until the end of October. This would be the first of several hospital stays. Most were concealed, some even from her family. “There were so many hospitalizations,” Frenda Franklin recalls. “There were so many near misses.”

  In this case the doctors declared Karen was in no shape to tour overseas as planned. The concerts would have to be rescheduled to allow her additional time to rest at home where she could attempt to recover and put on some weight. “She is suffering a severe case of physical and nervous exhaustion,” said Dr. Robert Koblin in a statement to the press. “She had a hectic four-week schedule lined up in Europe, but I could not allow her to go through with it. In my opinion it would have been highly dangerous to her long term health.”

  Melody Maker reported that the Carpenters’ tour would have been the highest-grossing tour in Britain and that approximately 150,000 people were set to see them during the planned twenty-eight day European trek. Ticket sales for the fifty
shows, which sold out in a matter of hours, were refunded. It was reported that the Carpenters may have easily lost upward of $250,000 due to the cancelled concerts. In Japan, promoter Tats Nagashima said the tour would have grossed upward of $1.2 million and set numerous records in that country. On behalf of A&M Records, a concerned Jerry Moss phoned overseas tour promoters and guaranteed whatever losses such concert cancellations would incur.

  Karen took the losses quite personally, apologizing profusely to management, those at A&M, and especially Richard. “I felt bad for Richard because my illness held him back,” she said the following year. “And he felt bad for me, too, because he considered that it was his fault in driving me so hard. Then we both got mad because we had not put on the brakes earlier and stopped all the pressures that eventually led to my exhaustion.”

  Terry Ellis accompanied Richard to London and Tokyo where the two held press conferences explaining the cancellations. Richard addressed the UK media with the following statement.

  Karen is really in a state of exhaustion, both mental and physical, but mostly physical. We had a tour in April and a tour in May, a five-week summer tour, two two-week engagements in Las Vegas, and it really left us no time to get much rest. The last week in Vegas she was down to eighty-six pounds. . . . The whole European tour in all was fifty concerts in twenty-eight days and I wouldn’t have wanted her to do it even if through a miracle she got through it. . . . Karen’s really upset at not being able to do this, and I am too, of course. I just wanted to come over in person and apologize. . . . We will be back as soon as is possible.

  “Girls just can’t take that life without something going wrong,” Terry Ellis added.

  Reflecting on this remark, Ellis says he never noticed that women find the touring life physically more demanding than men. “It sounds as though I was complicit in the ‘anorexia cover-up’ for Karen.”

  Gossip and rumors greeted the men when they arrived in Europe and Japan, with some reports saying Karen was battling cancer, others hinting she was suicidal. “When Richard returned he didn’t want to tell me of the whispers that were circulating,” Karen recalled. “It was all so much crap. Not once had suicide entered my head. I was depressed, yes, but my God, not enough to commit suicide. I value life too much for that. No, the real alarm was over my frightening loss of weight. At first I lost the weight I intended to lose, but it went on even though I began eating like mad to counteract it.”

  Under Agnes Carpenter’s close watch, Karen slept fourteen to sixteen hours a day. “My mother thought I was dead,” she told Ray Coleman. “I normally manage on four to six hours. It was obvious that for the past two years I’d been running on nervous energy.” Her weight eventually climbed to 104 pounds.

  Hearing of Karen’s illness and ordered bed rest, Frank Pooler went to Newville and spent the afternoon with her. “She was very sick and said it was something with her colon,” he says. Per Karen, the diagnosis was spastic colitis, sometimes referred to as irritable bowel syndrome. “I had no idea that she was having eating problems,” says Pooler.

  Karen confessed to Pooler during his visit that she was depressed because of the situation with Neil Sedaka. “I just think that kind of made her heart sick,” he remembers. “She just didn’t want to do anything else.”

  Karen was surprised when letters from worried fans poured in to Carpenters headquarters. “People never think of entertainers as being human,” Karen observed. “When you walk out on stage the audience thinks nothing can go wrong with them. They see you as idols, not as ordinary human beings. We get sick and we have headaches just like they do. When we are cut, we bleed. My breakdown was caused by a combination of troubles that came as thick as the layers of a sandwich cake. Everything happened at once.”

  The fan club commented on Karen’s condition in their December 1975 newsletter.

  Please be assured there is no truth in the rumor that Karen is a victim of cancer. Coupled with severe physical and mental exhaustion, due to overwork, dieting and lack of rest, she developed Colitis (i.e. inflammation of the colon.) Her collapse was inevitable after the rigorous schedule of the past summer months, and her willing spirit was eventually dominated by Mother Nature who compelled her to take a well deserved rest. Thank God she exudes her vivacious, happy personality once again.

  10

  I NEED TO BE IN LOVE

  “TERRY AND I, we’re in love,” Karen told Evelyn Wallace as the two stepped into the office at Newville one afternoon.

  “That’s great, Karen!” Ev exclaimed. “I’m glad to hear that you’ve found somebody.”

  Karen surprised everyone in late 1975 when she moved into Terry’s Beverly Hills home. “Her moving out of Newville nearly knocked me over,” Wallace recalls. “Mainly because I didn’t think Agnes would let her out the front door.”

  Richard claimed to have no qualms with Karen’s decision to move in with Terry. Even so, it was Karen’s wish to remain discreet. “I didn’t even know they lived together,” says Carole Curb. “In those times, if girls did it they didn’t talk about it.” But Karen’s mother was indeed upset. “Agnes was furious,” says Frenda Franklin. “Furious!” Not only was her daughter living with a man out of wedlock, which went against her strong, traditional belief system, she was leaving Downey for the first time. “I suggested that she should come and live with me,” Ellis says, “which I suppose was a big mistake on my part. Her mother just freaked out. It wasn’t part of her plan.”

  It was soon obvious to Ellis that Agnes considered him to be a threat to the family’s authority over Karen. In fact, the biggest threat was the possibility that he might persuade Karen to go solo and perhaps even move to England, disbanding the duo and leaving Richard on his own. According to Frenda, Terry did want to make Karen a solo artist and had the capability to do so. “Since he owned Chrysalis Records he could have made that happen. They all just freaked so they started their hatchet job on him.” Ellis disagrees with the idea that he would have encouraged Karen to go solo but agrees that Agnes was on guard. “The family—and by ‘the family’ I mean her mother—saw me as a threat to her relationship with Karen and her control over Karen,” he says. “My reading of the situation was that her mother saw me as such a threat that she more or less made Karen choose between me and her.”

  Whether or not Agnes sabotaged the love affair was of little relevance. Within no time it became apparent that the social gap between the couple was far too wide. Karen was “in love with being in love,” Frenda claims, “but then when there were demands, like ‘I want you to come live in England,’ it just freaked her out. Terry was very continental, and he would have taken her away. That would have been good in the end, but it was too soon for her to jump ship like that. She couldn’t have lived in England on his level. It was a world of private jets and islands of Tortola. . . . It was the world she wanted but was not even close to being ready for.”

  As much as Karen wanted to be “uptown” she was still very much a middle-class American girl who liked to relax at home in the evening and watch television with her snack on a TV tray. “There were no televisions in that house,” Frenda explains. “You laugh? It was not funny with her.” Within a matter of only a few weeks, Karen became restless in Ellis’s palatial Beverly Hills home. “I can’t go on like this,” she told Frenda. “I have to get out of here!”

  As they would do periodically, the Lefflers came to Karen’s rescue, bailing her out in times of great despair. With Ellis out of town, Karen packed her things and left without warning. “She didn’t even have the maturity to end that the right way,” Frenda says. “She wanted to have it, but she just didn’t have it in her. She just left. She was afraid. We had to go get her. She was pretty broken when she left.” The relationship with Terry Ellis ended as quickly as it had begun, but Karen was too ashamed to face him. Instead, she phoned him shortly after moving out. “This just can’t work,” she told him. “We aren’t right for each other, and it’s too difficult. We just have to st
op seeing each other.”

  Ellis sensed this was the work of Agnes and the hypnotic hold she seemed to have over her daughter. “Her mother gave her such hell that she just moved straight back,” he says. “It’s difficult to know if that’s what Karen wanted or if that’s what Karen had to have or what was forced on her by her mother and her family.” He disagrees that Karen was ill prepared for or ill suited to his lifestyle. “When Karen was with me, we traveled somewhat and went to France, and she really enjoyed it,” he says. “When I was with her away from her family she would come alive! There was a lot of depth to Karen that you could see privately, but as soon as she got back into the family situation she would change.

  “Very early on Harold and Agnes found that Richard had this extraordinary talent. He was a musical genius—no question about that—he was and is, but from the point they realized he had this talent, the whole family’s energy was devoted to Richard’s career. They moved coasts in order to give him more opportunities, and everybody in the family was told, ‘We have this unique talent in the family,’ ‘Richard is a genius,’ and ‘We all have to sacrifice in order to insure that he gets the best opportunities to expose his talents.’ So at a very early age Karen was told that her job in life was to support Richard. That continued all the way up through their careers until they became huge stars and beyond. If you were to go into the family environment, where I was a lot, there was that same dynamic of ‘Everybody’s here for Richard’ and ‘It’s really Richard who’s the star.’ Even when Karen had become the star, that dynamic still existed, and she would fall in line.”

  Frenda feels certain that Karen was content not being the star of the family. “That wasn’t what made her ill, I am positive of that,” she says. “It was just being ignored. That’s different. You don’t have to be the star, but you can’t just be pushed to the side and have no value.”