Little Girl Blue

by Randy L. Schmidt

  Karen spoke briefly of her relationship with Terry Ellis in an interview for the Daily Mirror. “We had a thing going for a while, but we weren’t exactly matched. We are still good friends,” she said, but confessed, “I don’t think I have ever really been in love,” a comment she would later regret. “Everyone keeps saying that I’ll know when it happens. Well, I’m waiting. Love is something I want very badly to feel. There is nothing more I want out of life right now than to be married and have children. That would be wonderful. But it must happen naturally and, I hope, in the next couple of years.”

  As Evelyn Wallace recalls, Agnes relished in welcoming Karen back to Newville with a bit of an “I told you so” attitude. “It’s a good thing you came back home,” she told her. But Karen was unhappy. The breakup with Ellis was terribly painful; it was the closest thing to a long-term relationship she had experienced. Not only was it the end of romance, it was the end of the Carpenters’ professional relationship with Ellis, and—perhaps most crushing—it was another botched attempt by Karen at breaking free and leaving home. She was twenty-five years old and returning home to live with her parents in Downey, but Karen vowed that this return to Newville would be short-lived. “She really wanted to move out of that house,” Wallace recalls. “I think her mother was getting her down to the point where she wanted out. She wanted to get her own apartment.”

  KAREN SOON announced plans to move to Century City, where she had purchased her own condominium back in July 1975. The twin twenty-eight-story Century Towers at 2222 Avenue of the Stars overlooked the Hillcrest Country Club and the golf course at Rancho Park. Designed by world-renowned architect I.M. Pei, the gated Century Towers complex was built in 1964 as Century City was being developed out of the backlot of Twentieth Century Fox Studios. Karen bought two adjacent corner units, numbers 2202 and 2203, on the twenty-second floor of the east tower. The first six notes of “We’ve Only Just Begun” chimed to welcome guests to the luxurious three-thousand-square-foot residence. “It was amazing,” says Carole Curb. “She had one of the top decorators redo it. It was beautiful and reflected the new Karen once she’d made the transition and had the successes and everything.”

  “Well, what do you like?” decorator John Cottrell had asked Karen.

  “You better sit down,” she cautioned. Karen’s decorating tastes were eclectic and a fusion of contemporary, country, and French styles. “I want it to look classy, in a funky kind of way,” she told him. “I want it to be top-notch, top class, yet I want people to feel like they can put their feet up on anything. I don’t want it to look [stuffy], yet I want it to be beautiful.”

  “Oh dear,” Cottrell said.

  In the end, the Lucite- and chrome-accented living room was offset by a country style kitchen. Personalizing Karen’s new uptown residence were the many stuffed animals she positioned neatly across the huge bed. The bedroom was designed around an Advent VideoBeam home theater system with a seven-foot-wide screen, just like the one Richard had installed at Lubec Street. Carole Curb recalls that Karen’s bedroom closet was a fine example of her friend’s quest for perfectionism. “Karen was very, very meticulous,” she says. “The clothes hangers were all the same and a quarter-inch apart. The pants were all together, the blouses all together. It was like an amazing boutique with everything arranged in order.”

  Another frequent visitor was fellow singer Olivia Newton-John. She and Karen first met in 1971 at Annabel’s, a nightclub in London’s Berkeley Square, and over the succeeding years developed a close friendship. “Karen was a very friendly, outgoing girl,” Olivia says. “We hit it off since we are both down-to-earth people. We connected on that level, and we both liked the other’s voice. We talked about doing a duet for fun, but it never eventuated because we were both so busy with our own things. We both had such crazy lives that we understood each other. Usually our schedules were so crazy that we just managed to meet for lunch, or I’d go to her place in Century City. Her place was immaculate. It was really a very beautiful apartment with the most amazing view. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, she’s so lucky. She’s got this amazing pad all to herself.’ She was very clean, very tidy. Obviously she had issues and probably could have had obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

  Interspersed among the chic and stylish decor was Karen’s collection of Mickey Mouse and Disney memorabilia. “She had a lot of child in her,” Olivia recalls. “She loved childhood things, she was funny and she was quirky.” As Karen would often do, she invented several nicknames for each of her closest friends. Olivia was affectionately referred to as Livvy or ONJ (which Karen pronounced Ahhnj). According to Frenda, Karen had nicknames for everything. “The whole world was a nickname,” she says. “It was like she actually had her own language. She’d say, ‘Did you talk to the ’rents?’ Those were my parents. If you didn’t know what she was thinking about, you’d think she was from another country. She’d be fantastic at text messaging!”

  Karen’s new residence was only a few miles from the Leffler home on Tower Road, and Frenda welcomed her to the neighborhood and helped her establish a new sense of community. At Century Towers there were doormen who took a liking to Karen and made her feel at home. Just around the corner on Pico Boulevard was Owen’s, her favorite market. “She made it a little neighborhood,” Frenda says, “like her own little Downey. She loved to go on little errands with me or wherever I went, and she wanted to learn all the nice places for the locals and things that were native to Beverly Hills and Los Angeles.”

  When the two entered Edelweiss Candy on Canon Drive, Karen was thrilled to see the candy being hand dipped and made on the premises. She rarely enjoyed such confectionery delights but was fascinated with the preparation and presentation of all types of food. “Oh my God,” she told Frenda. “Now this is a candy store!”

  JANUARY 1, 1976, brought a new contract with A&M Records and the naming of Jerry Weintraub of Management III as the Carpenters’ new manager. Weintraub was an entertainment powerhouse whose career began as a talent agent for MCA Records in the 1950s. By the time he came to manage Karen and Richard he had worked with such clients as Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland, in addition to having helped guide John Denver to the enormous success he was seeing by the mid-1970s.

  Weintraub’s first order of Carpenters business was to map out a plan for the duo with longevity as the foundation. They were primarily a recording group, but prior to 1976 their schedule had left them with very little time to spend in the studio. Five years of incessant touring had left Karen and Richard burned out, exhausted, and without personal lives. When not on endless tours of one-nighters across the United States they could be found in Europe or Japan for even more concerts, television appearances, and interviews. “It was sickening,” Karen told People Weekly in a cover story for the magazine. “Suddenly it wasn’t fun anymore.”

  As the Carpenters’ new manager, Weintraub vowed to change the group’s direction by limiting the number of concerts they would perform each year and making certain there was plenty of time in the recording studio. Despite these attempts, their next studio album, A Kind of Hush, did little to mask the poor health and fatigue that had plagued the duo the year prior. Failing to break into the Top 30 in the United States, it marked the beginning of a descent in their popularity. The title track and debut single was an insubstantial cover of the Herman’s Hermits hit and one of two castanet-heavy oldies, the other being Neil Sedaka’s “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” Giving a new meaning to the word “oldie” was “Goofus,” written in 1931 and previously recorded by Les Paul, the Dinning Sisters, and Chet Atkins. Calling the album “an overdose of pretty,” music critic Joel McNally felt Hush was an appropriate title for an album that displayed such little dynamic contrast. “At this point it is the odds-on favorite to win the Grammy,” he joked, “the Nobel Peace Prize and the Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes.”

  The album’s savior came in the form of a Carpenter-Bettis original and what John Bettis considered to be “
Goodbye to Love: Part Two.” “I Need to Be in Love” began as only a song title and a few bars of melody by Albert Hammond, who was writing songs with Bettis in England. Although their version of the song was never completed, the title was presented to Richard Carpenter, and it came to life in a way Bettis likened to “a little ball of twine” the duo “unrolled and knitted into a sweater.”

  Karen declared “I Need to Be in Love” to be her autobiographical anthem from first listen. “When he wrote the lyrics to that thing I was just flabbergasted,” she said. “The first verse of that says, ‘The hardest thing I’ve ever done is keep believing / there’s someone in this crazy world for me / the way that people come and go through temporary lives / my chance could come and I might never know.’ I said, ‘Oh my God, it’s so true.’” Bettis felt the lyric told not only Karen’s story but his own and Richard’s as well. It was penned during a phase when all three were looking for love with no success. “‘I Need to Be in Love’ is probably the most autobiographical and my favorite lyric ever written for Karen,” he explained. “If there was ever anything that came out of my heart straight to Karen’s I would say that was it. I was very proud of it for that.”

  Karen enjoyed making lists: to-do lists, shopping lists, and even lists of lists. She would often lie awake in bed with a notepad and pencil, planning every detail of the coming day, as she explained to Ray Coleman in 1975. “My mind starts going, ‘This has gotta be done, that’s gotta be done, you’ve gotta call this.’ Then I find myself with a flashlight in bed writing down about fifty things that have to be done by 10:00 the next morning. It’s not the best way to be. It’s better to hang loose, but I’m just not that type of person.” According to friends, she also made tangible lists of attributes she was looking for in a prospective husband and was not willing to settle for anything less than her own preconceived ideal. “It’s really hard to meet people in this business,” she told People magazine. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll marry somebody just to be married.”

  “What are the requirements you’re looking for today, Karen?” she was asked during a 1976 interview.

  “Well, I have my list here,” she joked, “but I’ll have to stand just in case it hits the floor!” Little did the interviewer know she had actually put pen to paper to list her requirements in a man. She valued independence and desired a relationship with someone who would understand and appreciate the challenges of her career. “Obviously I would want to cut down on the work,” she said, “but you don’t have to get married and sit in the house. I couldn’t. There’s no way I would ever stop singing or performing or doing whatever I want to do. But I want to do it with somebody and share it. I want somebody to share my joy with.”

  She answered the same question for another journalist later that year: “I want a husband who can accept my success, because I could not give it up and stay at home all day. He must also be pretty well off. I don’t want to fight the fear of a man having to live with my money. I’ve seen that ruin too many marriages. And it’s got to be somebody dominant because I am far too domineering myself. I’m a bulldozer. . . . So far nine out of ten of them haven’t lasted. I know instantly whether it’s going to work out. Most of the men I go out with panic on sight. They become scared to death of me. They’re envious of my car or they get upset if we go into a restaurant where I might be recognized. . . . So where is the right guy? Still, I’ll say one thing: When I marry it will be for good.”

  From 1976 on, Karen named “I Need to Be in Love” as her favorite Carpenters song. “It really hits me right at home,” she said. “Certain nights on the stage it really upsets me. I sing it and I’m almost putting myself into tears.” Despite its beauty, the single fell short of the Top 20, coming in at #25. An obvious choice for its follow-up was “Can’t Smile Without You,” which went on to become a smash hit for Barry Manilow in 1978. Instead it was overlooked in favor of “Goofus,” the final single culled from A Kind of Hush. Peaking at #56, it was the Carpenters’ lowest-charting single of their career to that point.

  BUILDING ON changes established by Terry Ellis during his brief stint as interim manager, Jerry Weintraub set out to completely revamp the Carpenters’ stage show, which had followed roughly the same format since 1974. “When we first went on the road, all we really cared about was reproducing our record sound,” Karen said. “We got that; it sounded just like the record. We didn’t care or we didn’t know it was also important to perform or be in this showbiz thing.”

  In addition to the writing and directing team of Ken and Mitzi Welch, Weintraub brought in famed Broadway choreographer Joe Layton, who felt that the Carpenters had played the role of good musicians for too long. There was no need to replicate the recordings in concert for the same fans that had their records at home. “Layton was a genius,” explains Michael Lansing, who joined the Carpenters as a roadie in 1976. “With Ken and Mitzi, Joe produced a new show under Weintraub’s creative hand, and they threw everything out the door.”

  Karen’s drumming became more of a novelty than ever before with the addition of a lengthy drum spectacular. “She would run from one drum to the other without missing a beat,” recalls Evelyn Wallace. “The people would just scream!” The addition of a portable raked stage allowed the entire setup to be angled toward the audience. “It is just drums,” Karen explained. “I don’t sing a note. We end up with twenty-three drums on the stage. I love to play and I love to sing, but I wouldn’t want to give either one of them up.” For this percussion feature Karen often donned a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt with the words LEAD SISTER across the front. She’d earned this nickname in 1974, after a Japanese journalist mistakenly referred to her as the “lead sister” rather than “lead singer.”

  Despite her love of drumming, Karen had without a doubt emerged as the voice and face of the Carpenters. Most who witnessed the professional relationship between her and Richard recall it as more of an artist-producer relationship than a duo. This might have been the appropriate juncture in their careers for Karen to have received solo billing with Richard maintaining his behind-the-scenes role as producer. Instead, the campaign to establish an equality of importance between the two continued, most notably on stage. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the emcee, “Mr. Richard Carpenter.” As Terry Ellis had suggested a year before, Richard opened the show alone, entering to a roll of timpani and an orchestral overture in which he took the baton at center stage as conductor. In addition, a large mirror was hung just above his piano and angled so that the audience could watch as his hands move up and down the keys. “You want to make sure you watch that mirror,” Agnes instructed Evelyn Wallace as the family awaited the start of a show in Las Vegas.

  “What mirror?” Evelyn asked.

  Wallace would never admit it to Agnes, but she saw absolutely no need for the mirror and, in fact, found it to be narcissistic. “People went to see Karen,” she says. “The audience went to hear Karen’s voice, not to watch Richard play some song he had written.”

  But even Karen strongly disagreed. Second only to her mother, she was Richard’s biggest fan. “He’s so talented that it makes me weep that everybody just walks right by him,” she told Ray Coleman in 1975, by which time she was part of the latest effort to establish Richard as the genius behind the Carpenters’ sound. “They never give him any credit, but he does everything. He’s the brain behind it and yet I get cracks like ‘What does the brother do?’ Or I get the impression that it’s really nice that I’ve brought my brother on the road. . . . I really get upset for him because he’s so good and he never opens his mouth. He just sits back and because I’m the lead singer I get all the credit. They think I did it, and all I do is sing. He’s the one that does all the work. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for him to give him the perfection that we both want.”

  Regardless of the overwhelming love and mutual respect between the siblings, Richard could not help but become jealous of the fuss the record-buying public and concertgoers made over his s
ister. “Karen is the star,” he had explained in 1973. “She’s the one who gets the letters and requests for autographs. I don’t get much attention. Everyone’s mostly interested in Karen. She’s the lead singer and the featured part of the act. My end is selecting material, arranging, orchestrating, production, names of the albums, selecting personnel for the group, the order of the show, and how to improve the show. The audience doesn’t realize what I do. They don’t know I’ve written several hit songs. It’s always Karen, which is fine. It’s the same way with Donny and the Osmonds. But to me, I know what I’ve done. Even though a lot of people and critics don’t like it, the fact is it’s very commercial. It’s well produced and it feels nice to me that I selected an unknown song and made it a hit. That makes me feel good, and sure, it feeds my ego.”

  The habitual tribute to the oldies remained a part of the new stage show, although it was sometimes exchanged in favor of a medley of songs from the popular Broadway musical Grease. In this sequence, Richard tore onto the stage on a motorcycle, and Karen entered wearing pink spandex, a bouffant wig, and an overstated fake bust. New to the show was a grandiloquent Spike Jones–inspired parody of “Close to You,” complete with kazoos and pot and pans. Karen loved the dramatics added to their new show. “We’re hams,” she told Ray Coleman while in Germany in 1976. “We enjoy dressing up and the production. Have we gone over the top? Well, the answer’s in the audience; it’s been well received so far. Ask me next year.”

  Most shocking was the finale of “We’ve Only Just Begun,” in which Richard left his fixed stance behind the piano to join Karen at center stage, an effort on the part of the writers to, again, balance his importance with hers. “They pretend for a split second to be lovers, looking straight into each other’s eyes,” explained Ray Coleman in his review of one of their German concerts. “A rarely seen moment of near passion from a brother-sister act not noted for warmth, in spite of the romantic beauty of their songs. . . . I felt the flesh creep uncomfortably at the sight of grownup brother and sister acting out this slightly incestuous scene as just ‘part of the act.’” The positive side to their “mindboggling” performance, according to Coleman, was that the duo finally seemed to have “planted the kiss of life on a two year old corpse and that their audacity has won. Their 1974 show was boring. The 1976 show is over-ambitious. . . . The new show forces a reaction. Nobody sleeps during this concert. The Carpenters are alive and well—and working hard, as always. They know no other way.”